7.9.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I, and today I
will be reading National Geographic magazine dated June twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher. As a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of
the article I began last time, entitled Owases on the

(00:25):
Brink by Tristan mc connell near Mahmad. The palms survive
largely because farmers use ground water extracted with individual solar
pumps to irrigate their plots. They are cheap to run
and make extracting water easy, but they are a short
term fix. The brackish ground water increases the salinity of

(00:48):
the soil, making growing crops even more difficult, and pulling
straight from the aquifer can put it out of reach
of even the deepest palm tree roots. As long as
people keep pumping ground water with solar they think there's
no problem, says spy. But when you see solar you
can very quickly kill the oasis. Abdul Kharim Banucci, a

(01:10):
forty eight year old with a thick mustache, and dressed
in a white tunic and turban. Has farmed in Mahmid
all his life. When he was growing up, there were
periods of drought that would decimate crops, he says, but
the palms stayed strong. Now even they whither and date
yields are falling. The palm cover on his acre plot
is scant, and the fruit trees are gone. Unable to

(01:32):
rely on the river or rain for irrigation, uses ground
water pumped from his own well at the far end
of his land, and every three years he must dig
it deeper. In nineteen ninety six, a twenty three foot
well was enough. Now it reaches to fifty two feet.
It is in God's hands, BENAUI says, But as I
see it, there is no future for farming here because

(01:52):
of the water. In agriculture you always lose. He expects
that eventually his three young sons, all of whom are
under ten, will abandon farmining, abandoned farming and the oasis
in a destructive feedback loop, migration pastins the oases surrender
to the desert. The local population has fallen by a

(02:13):
fifth in the past twenty years, and as mostly young
people leave, it's harder for the aging population that remains
to maintain the palm trees and irrigation channels. There's nothing
to do here because there's no rain, so people emigrate,
says sixty one year old farmer ab De Lai Lachbo,
whose three sons have left. There is nobody around, just

(02:34):
us old people. In his long white jalava and purple scarf,
Laboch takes meat to the sand filled irrigation channels and
sand covered fields nearby. There's nobody here to help us work,
he says, shrugging. Neglected and abandoned plots. Let the desert in,
and a few days of strong wind is all it
takes to coat the earth with sand, starting the process

(02:56):
of soiled degradation. As we walk around to Banao, one
of Mohammad's satellite villages, Sabah tells me that of the
two hundred families that used to live here, only five remain.
The rest, he says, have seen their homes taken by
the desert. They are no longer enough residence to clear
the sand clogged alleys and passages, nor to maintain and

(03:18):
repair the rammed earth walls of the Kassar, which are
crumbling and collapsing like a sand castle in a rising tide.
One of the few still living here is sixty eight
year old the Ala'id Ilaghnoi, a thick set farmer who
once who long ago seated the ground floor of his
mud walled house to the desert. From his perch up stairs,

(03:39):
he used the flashlight on his phone to peer at
the sand filled hall below. If there is any chance
of rescuing Mohammed and charting a path towards saving other
oases across the world, it might come from a small
two acre plot on the edge of town, where Sabai
has constructed a laboratory of pilot projects aimed at holding

(04:01):
back the desert and holding on to water. Acacia and
tamarisk trees sprout from shallow, circular planters called water boxes
that were designed by a Dutch horticulturist named Peter Hoff.
These planters reduce the amount of water young saplings need
and act as a barrier against the desert. For years,

(04:21):
Spy has worked with a Dutch foundation called Sahara Roots,
planting hundreds of trees around Mahid to strengthen what he
calls the natural system. To stop the sand. He has
also introduced pipes for drip fed irrigation, which snake across
vegetable beds and use far less water than the traditional
method of flood irrigation that ceased to make sense when

(04:43):
the river stopped flowing. These solutions, though modest in scope,
are all aimed at restoring and recalibrating the balance between
the people of the oasis and the changing landscape in
which they live. Take the solar pumps. Climate change has
made them necessary, but when their private lyad owned, as
most currently are, people take what they want regardless of

(05:04):
the needs of others. Spy has been pushing local farmers
and government agencies to reconsider how the pumps are used
in nomadic culture. He says, you need to share everything.
Thanks in part to Spy's lobbying, Morocco's National Agency for
the Development of Oasis Zones and Argonne Trees is working

(05:25):
to install communities solar pumps and wells to replace private
ones in Mahmied and elsewhere, so that water can once
again be managed communally and shared equitably. Of course, none
of that will matter if the entire population of Mahmed
leaves for better opportunities elsewhere, So in twenty sixteen, Spy

(05:45):
co founded the Judour Sahira Music School with Thomas Duncan
of the Playing for Change Foundation, a California nonprofit that
uses music to bring communities together. We asked, what can
you offer young people to make them stay so duncan.
Their answer is to celebrate, share and preserve knowledge of
the cultural traditions of the desert and the oasis. Children

(06:08):
attend weekly music classes in the traditional Ahidos, Guana, rockba Akalal,
and Chamra styles. The school has since given rise to
the Zaman Festival, which features hundreds of musical artists from
across the Sahara and attracts thousands of visitors. The school's
new home, the Jodur Sahira Cultural Center, was completed last

(06:31):
year and consists of two modern rammed earth buildings designed
by Baraccan architect A Ziza Chahuni. One is a sunken
amphitheater for musical performances, the other a classroom with a
subterranean cistern. The two structures are connected by underground water pipes.
Rainwater is collected and stored in the reservoir. Real resilience

(06:53):
is saving every drop of rainwater, says by. A riad
style building for visiting musicians is under construction near by.
The idea was to revive traditional materials that completely make
sense in the area, says Chooni, to build pride in
traditional architecture, not to just copy the past, but be innovative.

(07:14):
Sabai often talks about the importance of nomadic culture, the
need to live within the constraints of nature and the
desert's tough environment, to share resources as a community, to
not waste anything. He says these old ways are key
to the restoration and survival of the oasis in the
face of climate change. Saba started as a tour operator

(07:34):
before expanding into environmental and cultural activism. He still believes
in the value of tourism to the oasis economy, but
he wonders what kind of tourism the kind that builds
with concrete, fills swimming pools with precious water, and tears
up the dunes for gasoline fueled kicks, or something slower
and simpler that treads more lightly on the land, exists

(07:56):
in harmony with the landscape and draws on the rich
culture and history of the oasis. One cold clear evening,
he reclines against a thick poof on a hand woven
carpet laid out by a fire. One of his guests
is a taureg desert blues guitarists visiting the music school
from Mauritania, who carefully serves tea poured from a small

(08:17):
painted teapot. Teapot heated in the fire's embers. A waxing
moon shines bright above, and a thick stand of date
palms is silhouetted against the indigo sky. We have the stars,
and a fire's spy says we are the luckiest people
on earth. The oasis is fragile, it's future uncertain, but
it is where Saby comes from and where he belongs,

(08:39):
and he is determined to save it, the extraordinary oasis.
For centuries, oases have been important cultural and ecological landmarks
in Morocco, despite the fact that they receive fewer than
ten inches of rain each year. They've persisted thanks to
clever human engineering that takes advantage of a delicate ecological balance,

(09:00):
opportune geography in the rain shadow of the Atlas Mountains,
water flows in intermittent streams and collects, and low lying aquifers,
protective palms, date palm trees, a keystone species, are planted
to provide fruit and protect smaller plants from harsh sun,
winds and sands. A fragile equilibrium under threat. Rising temperatures

(09:22):
and changing rain patters due to climate change have exacerbated
existing threats, which can have a ripple effect across the
delicate oasis ecosystems. Drought less rainfall and increase drilling, lower
water tables and rays, fire risks. Bayoude disease of fungal
pathogen has killed significant portions of critical palm groves. Soil

(09:46):
salinity salt from pumped ground water accumulates in the soil.
Migration ecological stress causes community caretakers to flee desertification. Vacated
land returns to desert, sand pollutes water fields and towns. Next,
are we sure Pluto isn't a planet? Nearly twenty years

(10:07):
since it was downgraded to a dwarf planet, Pluto's bona
fides still spark debate by Eric Ault. After its discovery
in nineteen thirty, Pluto was declared the ninth planet in
our Solar system and quickly garnered attention not typically afforded
to its galactic peers. This was thanks in part to
the power of celebrity. The small, multi colored icy rock

(10:31):
has long been associated with Bickey Mouse's pet dog, which
which originally named Rover but most likely renamed after the
planet in nineteen thirty one. Then in two thousand and five,
Mike Brown, a professor of astronomy at Caltech, crashed the
party upon discovering Eiras similar in size to Pluto and
also in the Queper Belt, calling into question Pluto's classification.

(10:55):
As a result, in two thousand and six, the International
Astronomical Union AU voted to adopt new requirements for planetary status,
kicking Pluto out of the club and into the newly
defined category of dwarf planet. Brown expanded on his reasoning
in his aptly titled memoir How I Killed Pluto and

(11:16):
Why It Had It coming. In the years since, the
worlds of science and pop culture have hotly debated Pluto's fate.
Among Brown's good natured adversaries is Philip Metzger, a retired
planetary physicist at Nassaus Kennedy Space Center, current associate scientist
at the University of Central Florida, and avowed Pluto is

(11:37):
a planet believer. To celebrate the ninety fifth anniversary of
Pluto's discovery, we sat down with Brown and Metzger to
get some clarity. Are Brown and his cohorts correct in
reducing Pluto's significance and instead focusing on new discoveries like
the still unconfirmed planet nine or dou Metzger and others

(11:57):
have a solid argument for the triumphant return of everyone's
favorite little planet. Mike, how did you arrive at your
conclusion that Pluto isn't a planet? And Philip, how did
you wind up on the other side of the fence?
Mike Brown? Since I've been at Caltech, one of my
main areas of interest has been the objects in the
outer part of the Solar System and queeper belt, objects

(12:20):
like Pluto. And one of the largest projects that I
did back in the early two thousands was the first
really wide scale search for other objects as large as Pluto,
other dwarf planets before we called them dwarf planets, which
by the way, is a stupid term. How so mb
because it's unnecessarily confusing. Before the IAU made up that term,

(12:43):
we use the word planetoid to describe these things that
are small but round, and it's a much better word
because it's not as confusing. The only reason that Pluto
was called a dwarf planet after its planet status was
revoked is because that was snuck in there by the
pro Pluto people in hopes they could get then get

(13:05):
a vote that dwarf planets are planets. The vote was
then overwhelmingly rejected, but we are left with that stupid phrase.
I blame the Pluto people for that, Philip Metzger. We
would say that there are a lot of dwarf planets
and that these dwarf planets are actually planets in the
Queper Belt. But the thing is, we're not really arguing

(13:25):
for Pluto to be reinstated because we think that the
vote to downgrade it was irrelevant. The IAU didn't have
a right to do that vote. They violated their own
by laws when they did it. Our claim is that
it never stopped being a planet because taxonomy is part
of science, and the taxonomy that matters is the one
that the scientists are using and finding useful, whereas the

(13:48):
public's astrological based taxonomy is not useful for science. It
doesn't align with any theories, and that's unfortunately the one
that the i a U adopted well, let's start there.
What other criteria for planet status p M. In two
thousand and six, the IAU decided number one that a

(14:08):
planet must orbit a star. Directly based on that, the
Moon would not be a planet. It's what we call
a secondary planet, whereas the Earth is a primary planet.
The second thing they said is that a planet has
to be large enough to pull itself into a round
shape by its own gravity, what we call gravitational rounding.
And then the third condition was, and this is the

(14:30):
one designed to eliminate bodies like Pluto, it has to
gravitationally dominate its orbit in order to clear the neighborhood
of its own orbit from other bodies. They didn't define
what that they meant by that, they disfigured people would
make it more concrete. Later. You can argue that Earth
is not a planet because the Earth doesn't clear out
its own neighborhood. What they really meant was a planet

(14:53):
has to be gravitationally dominant, according to some unknown metric
that they hadn't created yet. Mike Brown. In nearly two thousands,
digital cameras started to get much much better, and we
could finally take pictures of the whole sky at once.
We used that to discover these biggest, brightest dwarfest planets
that are out there, including the one that really forced

(15:15):
a discussion about Pluto. We discovered Eris, which is more
massive than Pluto. And so suddenly something was going to
have to give. You were either going to have to
add new planets or subtract things that are no longer planets.
If Pluto were discovered to day, nobody would say it
was a planet. Are we too hung up on the

(15:35):
number nine? Have we just all grown up with nine
planets and the thought of either eight or infinite numbers
of planets makes us uneasy? Mike Brown, No, there's no
magic number. It's not that Pluto had to be subtracted.
It's that astronomers were forced to acknowledge the reality that
it didn't fit with what we know about planets now.

(15:56):
The pro Pluto side tried to change the definition of
a planet to be something. It's not because they were
so desperate to keep Pluto a planet, but their definition
would add two hundred more planets to our Solar system.
The pro Pluto faction, by the way, is dominated by
people who were involved in the nass omission to Pluto
when they launched, Pluto was a planet. By the time

(16:18):
they got there, it wasn't. Philip Metzger. It's cultural, it's
not scientific. What else in nature is like that. I mean,
we don't say there have to be only nine mountains,
nine rivers, nine types of beetles. In elementary school, we
were told that there are nine planets. That's it. Should
it be taught as more of an evolving concept, Philip Metzger. Yeah, Unfortunately,

(16:43):
when we're taught that there are only eight planets and
these planets rain in their orbits, we're harkening back to
the old geocentric concept. This outdated idea is just the simple,
orderly monocentric and these planets are like gods. They rain
in their orbit. We're arguing, need to teach that it's
a dynamic cosmos. Things change, things evolve, planets can change

(17:06):
their orbit. Scientists have hypothesized that there might be a
replacement for Pluto, so called planet nine, but that's not
just because they want a replacement for Pluto, right Mike Brown,
Right now, the existence of planet nine is a very
good hypothesis to explain a lot of things we're seeing
out there that we have no other explanation for but

(17:28):
until the day that we point a telescope at it
and see it and say, ah, there it is. It
is just the best hypothesis to explain these phenomena. In
the end, Why do you think people have such an
attachment to Pluto and a resistance to Planet nine or
other possible replacements, Philip Metzger. All I can say is

(17:49):
when the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, it was amazing.
I was at Johns Hopkins University where they had the
control center when they put up the pictures for the
first time. It was just so bread taking and geologically diverse.
I mean, there are mountains as tall as the Rocky Mountains,
and there are glaciers flowing, and there's a layered atmosphere,
and there's probably an underground ocean, and there's organic material

(18:13):
the building blocks of life all over the surface of
the planet. Not only is Pluto a planet, but it's
also more of another Earth than any other. It's the
most planet like planet. Mike Brown, I have an attachment
to Pluto. When I was growing up. It was this weird,
mysterious thing at the edge of the Solar System. Who
would not think it's kind of weird and small and cute,

(18:35):
and now we've seen pictures of it. It is kind
of a cool looking thing. It's a cool place. Next,
what can we learn from the genius of beavers? By
Ben Goldfarb. First there were peals, then pests, but now
they are emerging as something else, climate heroes. The East

(18:56):
Troublesome Fire erupt it on October twenty u Wine twenty twenty.
Whipped by strong winds and fueled by drought parched forests,
the fire roared through northern Colorado's spruce and fir woods.
It leaped roads and rivers and the Continental Divide, scaling
mountain passes above tree line. It incinerated historic buildings in

(19:17):
Rocky Mountain National Park and homes in Grand County, killing
two people. Ultimately, it torched nearly two hundred thousand acres,
making it the second largest fire in Colorado's history. In
the end, just about the only thing the East Troublesome
didn't consume was beaver ponds. This was not entirely surprising. Beavers,

(19:37):
of course built dams that store water, and water, as
you may know, doesn't burn. But the benefit the semi
aquatic rodents provide goes further than that. In a study
published weeks before the East Troublesome blew up, Emily Fairfax
and eco hydrologists now at the University of Minnesota, found
that beaver ponds and canals irrigate the landscape so thoroughly

(19:59):
that they turned crisp of flammable plants into lush, fireproof ones,
forming green refuges in which wildlife and livestock can retreat.
In a nod to another firefighting icon, Fairfax and her
co author titled their paper Smokey the Beaver. Fairfax studied
five fires between two thousand twenty eighteen to reach her conclusions,

(20:22):
but the East Troublesome was far bigger than most of
those places, and a harbinger of the kind of conflagration
worth seeing more and more. Although fire has long been
a natural force of regeneration on North American landscapes, the
so called megafires that plague the ever drier West are
a different matter, stoked by climate change into exclusive infernos

(20:44):
that burn so big and hot that ecosystems don't always
readily recover. Fairfax doubted whether beavers could still fireproof large
tracts of the landscape under those conditions, But when she
visited the charred forests left behind by the Ear Troublesome
and one other megafire, she discovered that the oases beavers

(21:05):
created with their ponds had endured. There are entire rivers
that are basically unaffected by the fire because it's just
beaver dams the whole way, she said. Everything is full
of life. The reeds are growing, the pine needles are
still on the trees. The ponds aren't merely helpful before
a fire. They can also protect ecosystems from the effects

(21:26):
that come right after a blaze, capturing the ash and
debris that run off hill slopes and shielding downstream fish
and drinking water. In a twenty twenty four paper describing
their findings, Fairfax and her collaborators concluded that beavers can
be part of a comprehensive fire mitigation strategy. Once hunted
to near extinction for their pelts and later villainized as

(21:49):
a nuisance, beavers have rebounded. There are now ten to
fifteen million swimming and waddling across most of North America,
and they're ready for their third act us in an
improbable roll. Ecological saviors to a climate change ravaged world,
and fire mitigation is just the start. By building dams

(22:09):
that slow stream flow, they create reservoirs that help combat drought.
By sculpting wetlands, they furnish habitat for other animals. Nowhere
is their return more necessary than in the climate stressed
American West, where beaver restoration is unfolding to some extent
in every state. But beaver's tireless meddlers with a penchant

(22:30):
for running a foul of human infrastructure aren't yet universally welcome.
The San Pedro River snakes across Arizona's border with Mexico
through the sun blasted Sonoran Desert, though the arid land
seems better suited for rattlesnakes than for semi aquatic rodents.
Frontiersmen once knew the San Pedro as the Beaver River,

(22:52):
before nineteenth century trappers stripped it clean anywhere there were
perennial waters there, or probably beaver's lisas by Spypeck, the
director of a non prophet called the Watershed Management Group,
told me one fall day along the San Pedro's cobble
strewn banks in nineteen ninety nine, in hopes of enhancing

(23:12):
the area's Wildlife habitat the Federal Bureau of Land Management
restocked the San Pedro with sixteen beavers, whose offspring dispersed
throughout the river, including into Mexico. Since twenty twenty twenty, Spypeck,
along with Mexican biologists and legions of volunteers, has been
scouring the river to estimate their population. I joined her

(23:34):
team for a day of surveying the San Pedro's shady
cottonwood galleries for beavers. Shue marks, treks and lodges. Along
the trunk of one downed cottonwood, beavers had chiseled away
the bark to expose cream colored heartwood and whittled limbs
to blunt points. Pale chips littered the bank. They were
probably here within the last few weeks. Spypeck half whispered

(23:57):
cezy to emphaths empathize with beaver. Like many of us,
they live in nuclear families. A typical colony consists of
a breeding pear and their offspring, which stick around until
the age of two. On land, beavers are clumsy morsels
for cougars, wolves, and bears, but their balletic swimmers endowed
with transparent eyelids and webbed hind feet, Their keratins, scaled

(24:22):
tails serve as fat storage units, and rudders. Their iron
reinforced teeth scrape away the inner bark that provides the
bulk of their herbivorous diet. By building dams and filling
ponds around their woody lodges, beavers expand and defend their
aquatic domains like feudal lords with moats around castles. Like humans, too,

(24:42):
beavers are survivors, just as Homo sapiens are the last
and a long line of hominins. The world's two beaver species,
Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, and Castor fiber its
Eurasian cousin, are vestiges of a diverse family. They are
now extend Relatives include castory Days ohioensis, which grew nearly

(25:05):
as large as black bears. Although it's tempting to imagine
the custory Days constructing hoover dam side walls, these species
likely didn't dam at all and died out during drier conditions.
Modern beavers may have endured precisely because they could modify
nature on a warming climate. As beavers proliferated, they shaped

(25:27):
the land. At one time, as many as four hundred
million of them roamed North America and constructed up to
two hundred fifty million ponds. Those beaver built bodies of water,
bolstered amphibian and salmon populations, supported mammals from muskrat to moose,
and aided songbirds, which perch in coppiced willows and eat

(25:48):
aquatic insects. Indigenous peoples have long understood beaver's importance. The
Blackfeet environmental historian Rosalind Lapierre notes that the tribe believes
beavers are divine animals that can talk with humans and
venerates them for the ecological oases they create. But colonists
didn't share that respect, and the fifteen hundreds beaver pelts

(26:10):
came into vogue in Europe. They were used for elegant hats,
which milliners felted from beavers velcrow like underfur. To meet
the demand, fur, trappers and traders purged beavers from practically
every waterway on the continent. As the animal vanished, wetlands

(26:31):
dried up, and streams eroded, a cataclysm akin to an
aquatic dust bowl. Yet beavers weren't finished. In the early
nineteen hundreds, many states enacted trapping restrictions and reintroduced beavers
from places like Canada and Yellowstone National Park. Some land
managers got creative. In nineteen forty eight, the Idaho Department
of Fish and Game packed beavers into crates and dropped

(26:55):
them by parachute into the wilderness. Two years later, the
Journal of Wildlife man Management reported that beavers had built dams,
constructed houses, stored up food, and were well on their
way to producing colonies. As beavers have slowly returned to
the West over the past several decades, their helpfulness has
grown more appreciated. Just as our climate woes have multiplied,

(27:18):
their ponds store and gradually release rainfall in snow melt,
compensating for dwindling snowpack by allowing water to seep into floodplains.
They also hydrate soils and recharge aquifers. Two study that
tracked relocated beavers in Washington State found that the average
pond stored more than a quarter million gallons of surface

(27:40):
water and over six hundred thousand gallons of groundwater. Beavers
are slowing the flow, holding on to water longer and
mimicking the function of the depleted snowpack, says Joe Wheaton.
A geomorphologist at Utah State University. This concludes readings from
National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has been Marsha.

(28:01):
Thank you for listening, Keep on listening, and have a
great day.