How Deserted Places Find a Second Life  ## Metadata - Author: [[TED Radio Hour]] - Full Title: How Deserted Places Find a Second Life - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/b58430d2-52b9-4eee-8aea-05835c2b4788 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Field Observations From Chernobyl** - Kara Love observed wolves in Chernobyl living amid heavy radiation exposure while the area hosted diverse wildlife like bison and lynx. - She noted pups receive constant environmental and dietary radiation that could affect health across lifetimes. Transcript: Katrina Watkins But there are other inhabitants. You keep going. And then in this one house that is very vivid to me, I remember a nest of a family of boar that had made residence in the front porch of one of these houses. And it was very obvious that while humans at one time decades ago lived in this place, now the boar were living in this same structure, creating this place for their family and to safely Bed at night. This is Kara Love. Manoush Zomorodi She's an integrative biologist and was visiting Chernobyl regularly to study the animals that are flourishing there. Katrina Watkins You'll probably see Eurasian bison, Eurasian moose, all sorts of bird life. And, you know, we got really lucky one year and actually saw two Eurasian lynx just driving around to our wolf sites. Manoush Zomorodi Wolf sites. Kara and her colleagues are specifically researching the area's apex predator, the gray wolf. These wolves have been thriving here, despite constant and intense exposure to radiation. Katrina Watkins To upwards of like three chest x-rays a day worth of radiation per individual. On the most extreme, but still pretty significant for the long-term chronic exposure over an entire lifetime. ([Time 0:02:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/50aabd5b-2e10-4ebb-b0a6-4060a50a0e96)) - **Rapid Evolution In Chernobyl Wolves** - Wolves in Chernobyl show rapid genomic changes after only a few generations exposed to chronic radiation. - Those fastest-changing regions map to genes tied to cancer biology and immune response. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi How have these wolves genetically adapted to survive all this radiation? Shane Campbell-Staton Because we know that the wolves in Chernobyl have been there at this point for about seven or eight generations. So they've been exposed their entire lives to this novel pressure. And by understanding how natural selection has gone about molding organisms to still be able to survive and reproduce, by studying that process, it may lead us to new insights. Manoush Zomorodi Shane has spent his entire career studying how species evolve to adapt to human behavior, including in Chernobyl, which is unlike anything he's ever seen before. Shane Campbell-Staton A pup that's born in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, from day one, it's being exposed to radiation from the environment. And that pup will live half a decade or more, you know, and each day be continually exposed to that radiation. On top of that, these wolves, they're getting another dose of radiation from each meal that they eat and a concentrated dose because they're apex predators. So they're eating European bison that then ate grass and other vegetation that was infused with radiation. And we know that radiation causes lots of damage to the mammalian body. Manoush Zomorodi Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but are some of these wolves living with cancer? Shane Campbell-Staton So that is one thing that we're exploring right now. What we do know is that when you look at their blood and you look at the immune profiles of their blood, they show patterns that you would expect from a person with cancer. So now all of a sudden, if you're interested in that specific question, how would a mammalian genome change in order to become more resistant or resilient to cancer? ([Time 0:04:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3253846a-8985-4e19-b196-4547de26e72c)) - **Translate Evolutionary Hits Into Medicine** - Work with biomedical researchers to test whether evolved mutations have therapeutic potential. - Translate evolutionary findings into physiological studies to seek novel cancer treatments. Transcript: Shane Campbell-Staton And one of the things that our data are showing us is that the fastest-changing regions of the Chernobyl wolf genome occur in and around genes that we know are involved in cancer or in The mammalian antitumor immune response. We're now working with biomedical companies and cancer biologists to understand the physiological impacts of these mutations with the hope that at least some of these changes may Lead us to novel therapeutics that might result in new treatments for cancer in humans. ([Time 0:10:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2e1f9b12-ec34-4c28-9453-7d2dfa86a744)) - **Human Actions Drive Fast Evolution** - Human pressures can force very fast evolutionary shifts such as tuskless elephants after intense poaching. - Rapid selection reshapes species traits within a few generations when humans target specific features. Transcript: Shane Campbell-Staton In Mozambique, there was a civil war from 1977 to 1992. During this time in Gorongosa National Park, elephants in particular were reduced by 90 percent of the ivory trade being targeted for their trademark, tusks. Now, under most circumstances, African elephants have tusks. But there is a small number of females that carry a gene that prevents them from growing their tusks. But after the Mozambican Civil War, one half of the surviving females were completely tuskless. Now, during a time where individuals are being hunted specifically for a trait, not having that trait puts you at a decided advantage in your ability to survive. Those surviving females then went on and passed that gene on to many of their daughters. That turnover of genes across generations, that is rapid evolution. In our short time on this planet, we have trimmed, trained, and reshuffled the tree of life at breakneck speed. Now, I've dedicated my life to trying to understand the lasting biological impacts of our human footprint. ([Time 0:17:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bddce844-7389-4de9-81b2-d2fc0459eaa0)) - **Inventory To Unlock Circular Value** - Catalog and connect unused assets across organizations to prevent waste and needless purchases. - Use digital platforms to match surplus equipment to new users and track items for reuse. Transcript: Garry Cooper Yeah, so something like 45 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions is because of what we call a linear economy. So that's an economy where we take things out of the ground, we make something with them, and then when we're done with them, we throw them away. If we did all the things that have to do with energy and gridding and food, there's still a 45% hole in closing the gap to net zero. And the only way we can get there is by structuring this thing called a circular economy, where the item that you're using doesn't start from new products. When you make products, you design them with the end of life and reuse in mind. Manoush Zomorodi And so this is when you take a big leap, Gary, you decide to leave neuroscience and start a company. Garry Cooper That's right. I knew exactly the pain points that someone would say if you said them to reuse. On the other hand, I knew the benefits. And so in some ways, I was our customer and user number one. I knew exactly how the system should work in the working world and for it to have global importance scale. And so that's kind of how we started Reaply. Reaply, the company I founded and run, helps organizations identify and catalog the things they own, reuse them internally when they can, and distribute them to other organizations When they cannot. ([Time 0:23:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f9a2b22d-7533-4c7d-8f55-56b6ec57cf61)) - **2,000 Chairs Rehomed, Waste Avoided** - Garry Cooper recounts rescuing 2,000 premium office chairs from landfill by redistributing them to local institutions. - The effort diverted tens of thousands of pounds of waste and recaptured about $100,000 in value. Transcript: Garry Cooper Whether they be a nonprofit next to you, whether it be your colleague on the floor beside you, I see that door. I see that couch. I see those chairs. I want them when they're available. Let's take a look at how it works for furniture. An investment bank in New York City had about 2,000 premium office chairs that they no longer could use. When they hired us, we sent in a team to inventory that furniture on that floor. When it was determined that these items could no longer be useful internally, a notification was sent out through our platform to all of our partners, hundreds of them. I'm happy to report that all of these chairs found new homes in a local university, a community housing organization, and a local refurbishment company. In total, about 68,000 pounds of potential waste was diverted from landfill, and about $100,000 of value was recaptured and shared with these organizations. Not to mention the carbon savings. ([Time 0:25:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/285ecd9f-d211-4253-8458-180e7ce1e59a)) - **Circularity Cuts Manufacturing Emissions** - Reducing new manufacturing is the largest lever to cut carbon from product lifecycles. - Circular systems focus on reuse, remanufacturing, and designing for end-of-life to lower emissions. Transcript: Garry Cooper That's where the largest share of carbon emissions happens in the world is through manufacturing. And so when you think on both the manufacturing side and on the disposition side, circularity or usage is such a better answer, even at the level of chairs. So we know how to create a circular economy with a microscope on a pushcart like me at Northwestern. And we know how to do so inside and outside of a building with either its building materials or things like IT infrastructure on a digital platform like Replay. But how do we get to the scale of a city? And why? Well, cities occupy about 3% of global land mass, but house over 50% the global population, which commands over 75% of all global resources. Cities are perfect tractable fronts for us to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and create a lot of jobs by building local circular economies. Now, to transition any city's linear economy to a circular one, we're going to, at the very least, have to do three things. ([Time 0:28:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f6c64cd9-9bf1-4852-9b52-2a62cca73e84)) - **Three Steps To Circular Cities** - Build city-scale circularity by creating digital inventories, operational reuse infrastructure, and participation incentives. - Align municipal policy and platforms to make reuse easy and mandatory where possible. Transcript: Garry Cooper First, we have to build a digital infrastructure to connect every citizen and every company to everything in their city. Next, we're going to have to build the operational infrastructure to make reuse and recycling and remanufacturing easy and universally acceptable. Next, we're going to have to incentivize every person in business to participate in their local circular economy. Manoush Zomorodi So you are actually working with the city of San Francisco right now on a pilot project. Garry Cooper Absolutely. Absolutely. So in San Francisco, we have launched and it's exactly all these things are operating in San Francisco. So we have the digital infrastructure. We have operational capacity and infrastructure that's provided by the city and a few partners. We have about 200 different businesses on the platform. And San Francisco has passed a set of ordinances that either require or strongly encourage people to participate in their local reuse platform. ([Time 0:29:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e1066299-a86c-4baf-9db6-68eb2550103f)) - **Vacant Lots Became Community Forests** - Detroit Future City converted dozens of vacant lots into urban forests, gardens, and community spaces. - They invested in neighborhood-led designs to restore green canopy and manage stormwater locally. Transcript: Anika Goss Yeah. We began to see at Detroit Future City that we have to do something in those neighborhoods right away. And that's what we really call a resilient neighborhood model. This idea of planting urban tree canopy, so an urban forest, planting intentional food gardens, but also sustainable gardens. When you think of gardens, you're thinking of kale and carrots, but sustainable gardens is what brings bees back. It's what brings butterflies back. It attracts birds. It cleans the air and the soil, and which actually supports clean water. Renting sustainable gardens alongside food gardens in neighborhoods that are also vulnerable for economic inequity is critically important. Manoush Zomorodi Anika took me to visit several abandoned lots that have been given radical makeovers. Anika Goss This is so beautiful. It's gorgeous. Manoush Zomorodi We strolled through a wooded area. What was once six vacant lots is now covered with trees, gardens, a fire pit, and a stage. Anika Goss So we've done about 55 vacant lots in Detroit. We've spent well over a million dollars throughout the city. ([Time 0:41:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4174dbc8-3dc0-44ba-90f0-a2c9c6bd30bc)) - **Mobilize Neighbors With Education** - Engage residents with education on trees, native plants, and stormwater benefits to gain participation. - Use community events and visible improvements to recruit neighbors into maintenance and stewardship. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi I was particularly partial to the friendly fence design, which helps neighbors turn an empty lot between them into a rain garden that looks pretty and manages storm runoff with an optional Pond. Look at your fish. Yeah, there's a lot of fish in here. So nice. If you come from a city that has a lot of green spaces, maybe creating community gardens doesn't seem like a big deal to you. But for these neighborhoods, it is transformative and reminiscent of better times. Katrina Watkins My relation to this neighborhood goes way back. Manoush Zomorodi This is Katrina Watkins. She grew up in the historically Black area called Black Bottom. Katrina Watkins My family has been in this neighborhood since 1946. I grew up hearing the stories about Black Bottom and Paradise Valley from my dad. And he was like, Blacks had businesses and people looked out for each other. And it was those type of stories that made me say, wow, we just really need to bring, you know, that back. Manoush Zomorodi Just a few years ago, Katrina and her dad took it upon themselves to mow all the vacant lots around them and try and spruce up the neighborhood. Katrina Watkins We just would go and start cutting down the overgrowth. Manoush Zomorodi But then Katrina realized that more grants were becoming available. And with help from places like Detroit Future City, she could begin to strategically revitalize the neighborhood. Katrina Watkins And it just grew from there. Manoush Zomorodi Katrina founded the Bailey Park Neighborhood Development Corporation, where she is now the CEO. The neighborhood's new centerpiece includes a playground and concert area. Katrina Watkins It's just a really green, chill environment where people feel safe to bring their children and families. We do live music events on the weekend where they can come and just enjoy it and feel the neighborhood. Manoush Zomorodi There are now some 250 more trees in the park and all around, native plants at the edges. Katrina Watkins When you see the park and the greenery makes such a difference in the trees, and I had someone just tell me yesterday, you know, wow, that's in this neighborhood. People often feel that way. Manoush Zomorodi And it's about more than beauty. Katrina recruits her neighbors to work on these projects by explaining how tree roots anchor the soil, helping to protect their homes from climate events like the massive floods that Hit a couple years ago. Katrina Watkins It's about educating residents on the importance of trees and native plants and how it makes the air cleaner. ([Time 0:43:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/11e98492-3d90-41cd-a150-62477193d6e8)) - **Sea Ice Loss Forces Human–Bear Coexistence** - Polar bears depend on sea ice for high-calorie seal prey and are forced to land as ice declines. - Coexistence requires waste management, deterrents, tracking, and rapid global emissions cuts. Transcript: Alysa McCall So what happens when ice bears start losing their eyes? They get stuck on land and they get hungry. Polar bears use the frozen ocean for traveling, mating, and hunting their main prey, seals. Specifically, high-calorie seal blubber. Polar bears can't out-swim seals, so they use the sea ice to sneak up on unsuspecting prey. Polar bears need sea ice for sustenance and survival. Period. Polar bears want and need blubber, but they're still bears, so they will follow their noses to fill their tummies, whatever that takes, but it takes a lot. Just one polar bear needs a lot of seals, and just one seal is equal to about 74 snow geese, or 216 snow goose eggs. It's a big omelet. Or 3 million crowberries. This amount of food doesn't exist on the tundra in quantities great enough to sustain a population of blubber hunting ice bears. So when polar bears can't find good food to eat, just like people, they'll fill up on junk food. And for polar bears, junk food is human food. And for a hungry bear, the best late-night fast food takeout can be their northern neighborhood's trash. But we have a saying in conservation, a fed bear is a dead bear. And this has major implications for coexistence. This is a rising safety concern for humans, who are always the number one priority. It's also a concern for the bears, because when a polar bear has a negative encounter with a human, it risks being taken out of the population in a defense kill, which is the legal killing Of an animal to defend life or property. Luckily, non-lethal tools are available and more are being developed, particularly in Canada, which is home to two-thirds of the world's polar bears. And one of the best testing grounds for tools is in the self-proclaimed polar bear capital of the world, Churchill, Manitoba. Churchill is home to the western Hudson Bay population, some of the best-studied and most southern polar bears in the world. In this region, the ice-free season is lengthening, meaning these bears are on land longer and have less access to calories compared to their grandparents. This does not mean all the bears are starving to death. It means the females are having a harder time having cubs, the cubs are having a harder time becoming adults, and some bears have just moved elsewhere in search of better conditions. As a result, this population has declined from about 1,200 bears in the 1980s to just over 600 today, almost 50%. Churchill is also home to about 900 people, but grows by thousands during tourist season. Polar bears are an economic keystone in Churchill, driving tourism and creating jobs. It's important Churchill protects them and their people, which they do through a wide variety of efforts. But one of the most interesting and effective is their waste management. Unsurprisingly, Churchill's garbage dump used to be outdoors, which was fine until it became a popular polar bear buffet. So this is a problem for the bear's health, but also because when they're on their way to the snack bar, they risk bumping into people. Polar bears are no more likely to actively hunt and kill people than black bears, but they are more likely to attack near towns, especially when food is nearby. So Churchill did the smart thing and they've just moved their garbage dump indoors. Now the bears can't even get to it. They also installed residential bear-resistant bins, so no polar bear with late-night munchies in this town gets any rotten food rewards. Churchill continues to evolve their waste management because it's key in coexistence, but not everywhere can do what Churchill's done, so we need more options. Just one example, GPS tracking. It can tell us where, when, and why polar bears move. It's critical data, but we've only successfully collared adult females. Adult males have these, like, pylon heads with necks thicker than their skulls, and they just pull collars right off. And then the subadults are still growing. And this is really too bad because the subadults or the teenagers often cause the most trouble. Big surprise. So we've started working with 3M, the sticky stuff company that makes post-it notes, and they're helping us figure out how to stick a tracker to any bear's fur. These burr on fur tags could be a conservation game changer, letting us temporarily tag any bear that comes too close to a community, and upon relocation, we can track that bear and intercept It before it gets too close. This could help reduce dumpster diving and reduce negative human bear encounters, keeping both species safer. So there's different coexistence tools being worked on for different needs across the North, but we can't talk about conservation without mentioning one of the most important tools Of all, education. If you are going into bear country, polar or otherwise, please get bear aware. Stay together, secure your snacks, and carry a deterrent like flares or bangers or bear spray. Bear spray works even in the cold and the wind. But finally, the number one most important coexistence tool we have is our willingness to cut carbon emissions and stop trapping so much heat in our atmosphere. But on that note, I have some optimism. Sea ice is very responsive to atmospheric temperatures. We can keep this habitat in the Arctic, but it will mean drastically our emissions and eventually getting them to zero. Polar bears are fat, white, hairy canaries in the coal mine, warning us to act now. The faster we switch to clean our energies, the better we can protect future generations of polar bears and people. ([Time 0:47:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a221e56a-38b7-4585-bca9-f95e05be52f3)) - **Secure Waste To Protect Bears And People** - Keep garbage inaccessible to polar bears by moving dumps indoors and using bear-resistant bins. - Combine improved waste systems with tracking and deterrents to reduce dangerous encounters. Transcript: Alysa McCall Unsurprisingly, Churchill's garbage dump used to be outdoors, which was fine until it became a popular polar bear buffet. So this is a problem for the bear's health, but also because when they're on their way to the snack bar, they risk bumping into people. Polar bears are no more likely to actively hunt and kill people than black bears, but they are more likely to attack near towns, especially when food is nearby. So Churchill did the smart thing and they've just moved their garbage dump indoors. Now the bears can't even get to it. They also installed residential bear-resistant bins, so no polar bear with late-night munchies in this town gets any rotten food rewards. Churchill continues to evolve their waste management because it's key in coexistence, but not everywhere can do what Churchill's done, so we need more options. Just one example, GPS tracking. It can tell us where, when, and why polar bears move. It's critical data, but we've only successfully collared adult females. Adult males have these, like, pylon heads with necks thicker than their skulls, and they just pull collars right off. And then the subadults are still growing. And this is really too bad because the subadults or the teenagers often cause the most trouble. Big surprise. So we've started working with 3M, the sticky stuff company that makes post-it notes, and they're helping us figure out how to stick a tracker to any bear's fur. ([Time 0:50:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9852a36b-2e54-4226-b3df-a23ca8a7ce07))