Description of the video:

>> Hi, everyone. Welcome to the second session of the spring environmental resilience speaker series. Julian presented by the Indiana University's integrated program on the environment and the environmental resilience Institute. lingshi Chen Yang environmental law fellow and I'm so pleased you're able to join us today. Both IP and ri are founded on understanding that interdisciplinary learning and research are essential to teach today scholars and to solve today's problems.

Not to mention tomorrow's The Natural Sciences, the social sciences, the humanities and the arts are all critical and in play as we tackle climate change, and environmental challenges that are affecting our health, our communities and our economy here in Bloomington and around the world. So IT was founded in 2012 by the provost and the leadership of the Hill School, the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Public Health, to bring together all the environmental and sustainability scholarship across various schools and departments on a Bloomington campus.

You're I was founded in 2017 as part of the IU prepared for environmental challenge grant challenge grant challenge. Its mission is to enhance resilience environmental change in Indiana and beyond by accurately predicting impacts and effectively partnering with communities to implement feasible, equitable and research informed solutions. So IPE and ERI faculty, staff, and students have worked together to bring us a full semester worth of speakers.

Over the course of the semester our speakers will address a wide range of topics from what we were doing in agriculture, which we'll do today. In the face of climate change to advocacy and energy transition to the development of an anti racist science of ecology and more. We meet by weekly for the series on Fridays at noon, and the next installment will be occurring on Friday, March fifth at noon with Maryann hip from the Sierra Club.

So mark your calendars. So you can find information about each talk on the UI and IP webpages and in the regular newsletters and upcoming events, notices that our organizations regularly send out. And we encourage you to sign up for our newsletter. So you'll get reminders about these upcoming talks, as well as other news and events that we publicize.

If you have ideas for people, we should consider for future talks please tell us that too. And finally, logistics on how you can engage our speaker today. You can put questions into the chat box if you think of them. We will monitor them through our speakers talk And there'll be an opportunity for questions at the end.

So I'll ask, please let me introduce today's speaker Lixin Wang. Lixin Wang is an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at IUPUI. His research areas include biogeochemistry, eco hydrology and isotope hydrology. So before joining UPI, Leishan worked as a researcher at Princeton University and the University of New South Wales.

He has published more than 140 research articles and international journals. He served as an associate editor of Geophysical Research Letters from 2011 to 2015. As an editor of hydrology or science, system sciences, and is an associate editor of the Journal of air environment and journal hydrology. He's also a recipient of the prestigious NSF Career Award.

So without further ado, I'll turn it over to Professor Wang.
>> Let me share my screen. Thank you Lindsey for the nice introduction and for the invitation and thank you all for coming. Before I start I just want to acknowledge the intellectual contributions from Doctor Stefani Daryanto and Doctor Pierre Andre Jacinthe from earth sciences department at IUPUI.

Pierre is a colleague in my department and Mr. Dartanto is a former in my group. And also research funded I present today will based on her work. So the research interest in my group is mainly ecohydrology. Essentially I'm looking at the three way interaction between vegetation dynamics, so biogeochemical cycle and the water cycle.

So I interest in this. I'm interested in this sort of interaction ranging from individual plant scale to ecosystem scale to global scale. And it's really survey interaction is influenced by climate change from various angles. So we Particular pay attention to the climate change impact on the 3D interaction.

Prior to Indiana my main research interest is in the natural system. So for our we're really Reasons after coming to Indiana I start my interest shifting to the agriculture ecosystem. But quickly I realized the natural plants and agricultural plants are quite different in many ways. So wild Interesting part is how last words of the agricultural plants are.

So as we all know, there are about 200,000 species of flowering species on Earth and we only use a very small proportion of that for our food. So basically is only less than point 0.1% of the species has been used for food sources. And out of the 300 species we use for food, 17 species actually account for 90% of our food supply.

So, and also if you think about the May. The men to exhaust the cereal species like the wheat rice we eat. That's actually only four major species they can come up to 70% of our food supply. So As is definitely a very interesting statistic to me in terms of how they work and lifestyle worse of the agricultural plants we use for our food supply.

As we all know, our agricultural system is very sensitive to climate variations. So we know John will heimer agricultural yield, and also creates stress will also will reduce the yield of agriculture production. And also recent studies will show value actually could have similar magnitude of impact on job.

Agriculture production as well. So this is the impact of climate on agriculture. At the same time we know agriculture itself actually has a strong feedback to climate and to the environment. So if we only think about the physical aspect So, we know if you cut down on the forest and convert that to agriculture field and because the land will have a higher libido, so higher reflectance, so that means it will actually cooling down the surface.

But if you if the biological component if you'll cut down the trees, you actually remove out the transpiration from the From the plants, because transpiration is actually cooling force of the land surface. That means you potentially will increase the surface temperature. But more importantly, the agricultural impact on the environment is actually the vital chemical part.

So we know agriculture is actually a big player in terms of greenhouse emission. So it's a major player for CO2 emission. But actually is the largest producer for into N2O emission as a global scale. Because N2O is number three greenhouse gas in terms of their radiative forcing, in terms of their capacity to warming the climate.

So that means agriculture is actually a very important player. To add five to the global climate, so not only agriculture change the climate is actually also have a big impact for environment. So we know agriculture is a major source of pollutants into the local water bodies and also the coastal area.

So both in terms of both phosphorus pollution and nitrogen pollution, they actually has an important role to actually impact the environment. So today's topic, essentially I will talk about the Interaction between agriculture and the environment. So I will talk about, so climate impact on agriculture essentially, I'm focusing on the chart impart on agriculture, and also I will talk about the feedback of agriculture to the environment.

So drought is about natural occurring a meteorology condition so is happening in any climate zone is hard to predict. And jobs tend to be calm as a gradual as a pretty gradual phenomenon and then suddenly it can cascade into a very devastating disaster. So that's kind of characteristic of of a job.

And also we know based on the mythology riker people think it's the job of frequency the various overall driving trend as a global scale and as a proportion of land that actually suffer from extreme droughthas been Increasing. So almost 30 surgeon habs, I know we also know in end in recent history we have several major drought as actually has a significant impact on agriculture.

So that's why we need to better understand the chart impact on agriculture and in this talk, all the most of the research results, I mean, I will talk about is using a statistical technique called meta analysis. So, I just want to quickly mention about this, this technique, so, essentially for meta analysis, what we do is we go to the primary literature, we actually digitized the data from the published literature.

And then we synthesise the data using statistical method. So the advantage of one such method is you're actually working with a very large amount of data that's actually covered different species, different climate, different soil conditions. So you can actually quantitatively synthesize of certain things you interest so that's because of a large amount of data size is actually increased in the power of the sentences, and also because a certain impact could have a different result in different literature.

And you can actually synthesize and make sense why they are different by using a large amount of data. So that is a central method about using for today's talk. FAO, Food Agriculture Organization actually classify our food into three major groups. The bigger group is a cereal group, the second largest is the legume group, then we have a tuber group.

So in this talk I will look at chart impact on this group separately so first we'll look at the legume group so that include soybean and like a peanut. So since a crop like that, so there are two major group of legume passes and an unprocessed and we'll look at them all together.

So because of your similar figures, I will just quickly go through what is like was the layout of this figure. So basically the x axis is observed yield reduction, in response to chart. And each bar here represented by a singles crop species and as a slice of the bar indicated 95% confidence interval of the response of that species two job.

And if the two bars overlap each other so that means their jobs response are similar, they are not statistically different from each other. And if they don't overlap with each other, that means their response are significantly different. And under way under read part is a similar figure but is observed water reduction.

So basically the water treatment part so this part really just tell us how severe what a reduction is so because the most of them are overlap with each other they are similar range. So that is great so, most of the results I will talk about is on the left hand so basically we're looking at this looking at the species specific response.

So, the key message here you can see, cross also legume species, there is a wide range of charge response some species like a black grab, so it's very sensitive to job. So it's actually the job, the yield reduction up to 80% and for some species, like grandma says, peanut and soybean, so they have a much less charge response.

So their yield reduction is only about 30% and the sum is even 20% So basically there is a huge range of drought response across different species. So while the reason we're seeing that happens is related to their root nodule, now do so as we all know about the unique feature of legume species is you would now do so essentially this is a symbiotic relationship between plants and the bacteria, so bacteria, so, and those are two major groups of root model.

One is indetermined, one is determined, for indetermined basically, for the plant roots they have maristella magmatic cells so that means that root nodule can keep growing. So that's why most of the root nodule in this group actually are elongated why because the roots actually keep growing. And further, further another group further determined why the basically a cell can grow anymore so really they can just become bigger they can grow more.

So that's why the shape is a more like a round and but more importantly the major difference between these two is positive determined group they are very sensitive to chart. So when water stress calm, the nitrogen fixation rate will actually traumatic reduce, so that's actually will translate to the yield reduction.

So that's why for green gram, black gram like with what we saw here, they actually show very sensitive, they are very sensitive to job. So the only exception is soybean, so because this one has goes through a lot of hybridization and a lot of genetic modification, so they actually we can actually improve their jobs resistance but naturally, I think this is a major reason for the wild.

Spread out drought response so, besides species we can look at the phonology or response. Essentially we are looking at the drought timing so, the drought can come from the vegetative stage and come, Come from the later reproductive stage, and we want to take a look at how John timing will impact your response.

So, what we saw here is, when John calm as a vegetative stage is actually the damage is actually not very severe, but the menu in the job come from the reproductive stage actually is devastating. So, that range actually is very large this is actually the same python we saw for three major food groups.

So, the vegetative stage is okay and the for delayed reproductive stage the impact is actually quite severe. So, that is a phenology impact and also then we will look at the silo factor. So, basically if the same job come if the crops grow on different soil texture, how that will actually impact the job in crop production.

So, what we saw here is a photo course and then find soil the comparable range or the medium, so texture we actually saw John's impact is actually much larger than the other two group. So, we know medium and texture soil essentially is good soil for plant growth. They can grow that's because of the water and oxygen and the nutrient transport is pretty good in medium textures size also that means when a job come, they actually have a pretty big impact on the yield reduction.

So, this is basically the lagging group, and then we'll look at, a cereal group, Cereal group is the largest food group that includes maize, rice, so the common food we eat. So, the major difference you saw here is, different from Maggie group, actually the cereal group their range is much narrower, and also the number is actually much lower.

So, reason is, cereal group, most of the species come from the grass family, and naturally they have much deeper roots, so, they tend to be more Johnson resistance because you can actually access deeper soil moisture. So, that's one of the reasons, but they do also show some specific response, so, one of the reasons that we know different crop here has a different photo syncing pathway.

For example, a weed has a c three pathway and for maize as a c four pathway and also the two have a different flower arrangement for weed example. So, female and male organ actually is in the same flower and the male is actually a different flower.. So, that's actually also contribute their species a specific response to choc, So under right basically is a water treatment again we don't need to worry about that is basically showing the water treatment part is similar.

So, for because cereal has a Large move and we have a large data point from this. So, we can actually then look at not only the charge response, but also look at the species charge sensitivity, so I'm in Java sensitivity here. Basically, is per unit yield reduction divided by per unit water reduction so, basically here x axis is water reduction, y axis is yield reduction.

So you can get a ratio based on the slope so, if we put out slope altogether, we can say actually there is a range of job sensitivity about different cereal species. And the interesting one is actually the one as a bottom, wheat and maize so, the other basically top two crop species we actually use our food system.

And also the another interesting thing is you can say actually, maize here showed very much higher sensitivity compared to wheat. So that is interesting because maize is actually see for plants, so say for plants, because of their photosynthesis pathway, they can use water very efficiently. So, but here what we see is even the use of water efficiently doesn't mean they are job resistant, they actually more sensitive compared to read so this is actually surprising in terms of job sensitivity.

So lastly, we look at the toolbar group so, toolbar basically means seems a group below ground potato sweet potatoes seems that Arkansas last. So, we know geographically not a major food source here in us, but it actually is a pretty major staple in many parts of the world such as Africa.

So, it's actually pretty major food sauce in different parts of the world, so, here we what we saw here is for the tubers b tuber species, they actually also has a pretty wild range of their charge response. So, some actually has a pretty high reduction for responding to drought and the sound potato is actually much less response to job.

So, for the post vicious potato and the sweet potato, because we have a bigger number, we can also quantify their job sensitivity. So again, yeah, essentially we have to observe what the reduction so we have the observed yield reduction. We can make the slope of their jobs too, l calculate their job sensitivity so what we saw here is actually sweet potato tend to have a higher job sensitivity compared to potato.

So this also a surprising result because if you talk with farmers, most people will tell you sweet potato is a hardy plant is actually pretty good in terms of responding to job. So, the results showing here that tell us basically when we talk about certain species are hardy, charge resistant or very likely, we're talking about their survival, not really their productivity.

So, basically means even sweet potato have the higher chance to survive water stress, but actually they will reduce their productivity or yield dramatically in responding to job. So, you can actually equivalent survival to productivity to you, let me put all three together. All three major group together cereal, legume and tuber, let me put them into the same scale.

So, first of all, we can also see for cereal, they have a narrow range and they have a smaller read, yield reduction and for tuber and thank you they have a much wider spread. So, I mentioned the Bob's a major reason for the observed changes is due to their plan characteristics.

So, root structure, so I can seriously have a deeper roots compared to other groups, but also is actually related to the how much research we actually has been conducted for s different group. So we know for example when we do the charge related to searching for serial and the tuber group, we know.

Serial group is actually four times larger than wagyu and then almost 10 times larger than the tumour group. So that's actually tell you how much study in the literature, how our study has been done to actually improve their job response job resistance. And also the another thing related to that is because for cereal and for legume they are mainly from my family for this group and for about tubers they actually come from several families and that's also contribute their supply in their job sensitivity.

So, this is basically just a kind of summary of the crop response for different crop species and show you the species specific response and also how phonology and also sort of texture will impact it's crop response. So we saw basically, cereal is more resistant to chart a compared to other group.

So it has contribute not only to the cloud species, It's a cloud characteristic but also contributed by its number of studies contributed to charge resistance. And also what we show here is all the species when child come into the late reproductive stage is actually the impact is actually very severe.

So this basically to us from the management point of view timing does matter. So, if you have a job coming as a later stage you should pay more attention to the earlier stage, but also we also showed some texture to the player as well as as well. So based on the results, especially from maize and wheat results, we what we saw is sometimes water use efficient house like like maize doesn't mean they are job resistant.

And also based on the comparison between the sweet potato and potato, we can say sometime when we talk about a certain species are child resistant in daily life. Doesn't really mean that will translate into productivity as more means that they can survive water stress, but they actually their productivity out there you will certainly will be significantly impacted.

So, to basically minimize the job impact on productivity so we can focus on plant breeding. So basically, improve their trade in terms of job resistance, but also we can actually focus on the agricultural practice to basically minimize the jobs response. So some examples could be you schedules irrigation timing, so for example, you've come in the late stage, you'll make sure you will come set for that.

And also some practice like a mulching like no to cook I also reduced job impact on agricultural yield. So, I gave you two examples, why is emotion Why is actually the neutral response? So the emotion practice is one actually how many years many part absorbed many in China.

So what people does is, they have a plastic covering a rich and then the two adjacent are in rage we'll create a follow up arrow. So you can plough plants here, so the rage actually will collect water we actually call the winter real cloud with water we'll put water here.

So in the final part you can easily with fire or you can put on a straw as moche or you can actually has a continuous plastic as much so only make a hole to do the county. So, we basically compared to the response water use efficiency response for different treatment.

So, we use rainfall agriculture as a control and then we compare the response from plastic mulching and the straw module and also the basically the barrel part to bear. Favorite part, so here is a quick results, we basically look at the forcings, why is the soil moisture change?

Why is it yield change? Why is water use efficiency change? And why is that transformation change? So, many are just focusing on the irrigation part and the plastic mulching part. So, basically, we can say compared to the rainfall to control both irrigation and the plastic margin actually can increase soil moisture significantly.

And also this to actually almost comparable, so and the same same for the yield. So basically both of them has a higher yield compared to the roof our agriculture but also irrigation and plastic mulch almost have the same yield. As in can we look at water use efficiency, you can see plastic mulching actually has a much higher water use efficiency compared to irrigation.

And that is caused by a higher level transpiration through the irrigation treatment Because margin essentially, you'll reduce the evaporation dramatically almost eliminate evaporation. So that's responsible for the increase water use efficiency. So the key message here is essentially it's the margin the past big margin almost can function as the same row as a revision.

So you actually have the same yield and also you'll actually save water. So you'll have much higher water use efficiency under this treatment, so that will be very good for the job response. So that is one practice so it's another practice is a no till so we all know no till ias a wilds conservation practice across the globe, especially in US.

So we saw no-till field in Indiana commonly, so essentially you don't cut down, you don't take away the plant residue after you harvest you leave them on the underground. So that we actually, have the ground to, prevent soil erosion and so that's actually has a big impact into the carbon sequestration and soil erosion and also based on another work collaborative work.

What we show is for no to you can actually increase the yield or drier environment. So we know a lot of people talk about love the downside of note here is the yield change, basically reduce the yield as a as a global scale. When you look at all every single Kaiser admin, you separate them into different economy region, you can say actually no to.

Has a positive impact on yield and in the dry region, we also show in the dryers, they actually do improve yield as well. So that's actually the reason is because the residue we actually protect soil moisture loss. So that's actually helped the plants through the water stress conditions.

So that's a good thing, so there's another practice we could do to improve plant water relationship. But at the same time, what we saw is no to actually Increase and will emission. So that's actually not necessarily a good thing right because info is a powerful greenhouse gas. So this is a one feedback note you could have for the environment, but also what we want to know is a second part of my talk is really it's a local impact on the water quality.

Aspect. So basically these are mixed results in literature about the notable impact on water quality. So as I'm sure the no impact assumption you actually know to kind of reduce. The nutrient loss from the agricultural field, but also there are many studies showing that no to actually increase both phosphorus and nitrogen loss.

So we want to take a look, if we actually sample large amount of data from a diverse environment, what's the overall trend you actually can see based on the large scale data synthesis. Here is a reminder of the notable impact on agriculture in terms of both above ground and below ground.

So we know your impact as Marty has multiple impact in terms of because we left the plant residue underground, so they can serve as a physical obstruction to flow. So that means they can reduce surface surface runoff. So, to conclude consider the video surface runoff volume and also because of snow too has a impact especially down from low to fake, it makes it more compact.

So that actually means they could potentially increase volume and because no to has the actual contribution to sorry organic matter, so that means they can basically increase the concentration of certain nutrients either through RAF to the vertical parts through lychee. And also know to allow tremolo to create a microphone so that means they will actually increase the volume of a water flow vertically.

So because sometimes you'll have a opposite effect so basically, then you may look at the natural impact on nutrient leaching and you have to consider all of them together and look at the net effect. So here is our result for phosphorus and the fall for nitrogen or nitrate.

So we have a concentration and the load here and in this particular case they are very similar. So concentration is really just the unit unit or volume of water and law that you actually use the concentrations in multiplied by the volume of water and absolute amount. So in the case we saw overall note you didn't have a significant effect on nitrate may consider most surface like a horizontal direction and the vertical direction.

So there's no effect and but it does increase this zero lag. So is that increased dissolved phosphorus leaching from agriculture field. So this is overall results where we break out different nutrient species for example, when we break down the nitrate into two directions to buy the horizontal surface route Why is vertical ichi so what we saw here is an interval concentration.

Note you actually increase the concentration of a surface route. So this makes sense because you have a more prolonged residue to actually decompose and contribute the to nitrate. Under Felicia, we actually didn't say it's a difference in terms of a concentration but when we look at the load, actually we saw our load wasn't different between NO2 and conventional.

That means even know to increase the concentration of nitrate because of the physical structure of the plant residue reduced volume of water. So that means the total load was indifferent between the conventional and no to practice and on the other hand we can say the leaching load is actually increasing under the no to condition.

So that means, even no to didn't change the concentration of the nitrate in the water, because of the increased the micro pores increase the flow of water, so they will actually increase the overall load from agricultural field. So when we look at the phosphorus this time, we break down phosphorus into three major groups total phosphorus, particulate phosphorus and the dissolved phosphorus.

So, the constitution and laws are similar in this case. So basically we saw both in terms of the total phosphorus and the particular phosphorus. So NO2 doesn't really change it is actually reduced. So phosphorus last from agriculture fueled the boat itself the phosphorus is actually significant, increasing the dissolved phosphorus loss from the agricultural field.

Because we know dissolved phosphorus is actually more important in the environmental contact because they can use biology other scenes and the cars algae bloom and other environmental issues. So, that's why no to introduce higher dissolved phosphorus loss from the from agricultural field is actually not good see. So also we didn't break down agriculture the loss for both phosphorus and the nitrogen into different climate region and into different climate condition.

So first we look at the climate region. So we basically Separate the region into travel in the region and the mandrel at the major humid region. So what we saw here is for both passwords on the nitrate or both load on the concentration, essentially, and there's a dry line you actually saw there is a significant increase of nutrient loss from the trailer park.

And also when you look at the different from the same location from different years, you actually can say if we separate the years into wet years, normal years and the dry years. So you can actually say it's a nutrient loss from the dry years is actually significantly higher than the white year, our normal year.

So, what that means is basically is a potential nutrient loss from node to is greater under water stress environment either in dry year or in dry region. So this is important because that's as important the climate change implication that means if in the future if you have a more variable rainfall like a you know habits basically like a dry period and didn't come from the whiter period.

You tend to have a higher nutrient loss from agricultural field because based on the microbial response biogeochemical rate if you have a dryer stage and dthe dryer stage, they tend to have a lower rate or the menu habits waiting. Indeed waiting after the dryer apart, their petrochemical rate is even higher than the normal rate.

So that's actually increased nutrient leaching following dry on the web cycles So that just means if more. So the increasing frequency of a job will impact the nutrient problem even higher in the future. So, the quick summary for this part is a better way to talk about agriculture.

Pollution, nutrient impact, we have to separate the impact from competition alone, they are not necessarily telling you the same story all the time. So and also we show that nutrients is very important in term of preserving the soil, reduce soil erosion, and stop screeting soil carbon. But in term of runs out of a nutrient expert by it is actually has a limited impact.

Is that helpful for the particular part because of physical abstraction of plant residue. But in terms of the dissolved part like nitrate and dissolved phosphate is actually a kind of increase that nutrient loss from agriculture field. And also we what we saw is with more frequent drying in the future.

So the impact of Agriculture around water pollution could become even more severe. So then, if not as about a foundational conservation practice, if not very effective in terms of water pollution, what we do Max. So what we propose is basically you have to combine with with other conservation practice.

So that's the major practice, candidate is a cover crop. So essentially if you have a commercial system conventional, no to system, you have the high fallow period without crop. And that's why our land has large nutrient leaching to the environment. And also because nutrient leaching you tend to have a higher dielectric vacation to the atmosphere.

So contribute to the intro and if you actually then choose different type of cover crop especially, you can compensate different cover crop traits. You can actually then effectively remove majority of actual nutrients, as actually reduce the, I'd also reduce the input emission. So that's why we have that as a kind of the foundation of a new USDA grant we received to actually looking at the long term impact of cover crop in terms of greenhouse emission.

In terms of nutrient leaching in terms of the yield resilience. So we will have a foliar observation period looking at the climate variability out all these parameters and also make future predictions of the impact of new to our agriculture. So to quick summarize what I have today essentially, talking about climate variability is actually charged significantly in these right and agricultural yields.

So that's not surprising, but we also show that different species different soil and different stage of the job during the phenology stage could significantly change the job impact. So we have to keep that into consideration. And also we're talking about agricultural practice even some conservation agriculture group practice still has a large environmental impact.

So that's why we have to think about multiple agricultural practice and integrate them together. To be able to not only increase the agricultural resilience to the climate of our ability, but also to minimise their environmental impact. So I guess with that, I just want to thank our funding source from USDA for to grant on this and the Schlumberger Foundation to support my Postdoc.

And also, I want to thank members for their contributions intellectual or various part of the research. So with that, thank you all again for for being here and I'll be happy to answer some questions and hear your feedback and comments about the research. Thank you.
>> Thank you, Professor Wang.

That was really fascinating presentation of your very interesting research on military agriculture. I know that's been a hot topic and regenerative agricultural policy and no circles. So we have one question from Sawyer Hitchcock. And he asked, I recently came across a statistic from the city of Bloomington that less than 1% of food purchased in Bloomington is farmed locally.

How important is agricultural localization and cultivating community resilience to climate change?
>> Yeah, that's a great question. I guess agriculture was always locally and only like an industrial organization. Yeah only against using decades we become more like, commercialized like large scale operation. So, I think for the resilience point of view is always to have I guess, local food to be, that reduce transportation costs and reduce test have higher like a freshness of paradox is a more healthier.

So but I guess from the larger scale from the think about economical point of view like using both the cost and the benefits and doing the local agriculture and versus larger scale agriculture. Probably the large scale agriculture has a reason and it's just more efficient to produce things like that.

But I think local food could be a very good supplement to the large scale probably won't be able to replace large scale agriculture.
>> Yeah, I think that's especially true in the Midwest where we have a lot of large scale commercial agriculture. So I had a question about actually, there's another question from Henrique a.

There's a bill in the Indiana State Senate that could help establish a carbon market infrastructure in the State and it could also happen at the federal level. Would you recommend the strategy for managing overall climate friendly farming? What would that look like? Where should it focus on?
>> So that's, yeah, that's a great question.

So I to me, I think wild, Miss important, loud, I guess a missing incentive is actually for cover crop. So, from the farmers point of view especially a lot of progressive farmers, they know the impact of cover crop, nonchemical, some of them actually has been practicing them for many decades now.

But the adaptation rate is very slow. So while the reason is essentially a lot of people, they will have the miss conception they will think because the cover crop will grow something else on the ground. They will compete with a cash crop and you actually reduce the yield reduce their income and that could be true for some cases.

But some cases also you can see actually, a cover crop can increase the current crop yield, but more importantly cover crop has a pretty good environmental impact on the positive environmental impact. And that part is hard to put $1 sign on that. But at the same time, I think, is very important to actually incentivize people to actually doing that.

So essentially. I guess if you do something good for the greater good, and you should be basically, you're rewarded for that. So I think for the policy side, yeah, there's definitely should have some incentive to, I guess help people to do the adaptation because they are true. They'll whenever you adapt a new practice, you need actual cost, different property machinery given the seals.

And yeah, anything can be helpful to have people make that decision will be useful.
>> Right I have a follow up question on on that. And so it seems cover crops in Norton offer a more environmentally friendly alternative to just Norton and in some places in the US.

Do you know of any places in the US where that combination yield, net negative environmental results
>> Yeah, I guess for example for the combination I am not sure but for Norton itself because if you go to some places like very cold like Minnesota. So some places the plant residues don't really decompose fast enough.

So, if you do say no to the plant residue combination will be true. Yeah, there'll be a lot of accumulation. And that's not necessarily for the plant grows. Not good for plant grows. So, I guess yeah, definitely I'm sure it's our places commission is not good but I guess for place it like this sure if not good for material countries combination.

But I mean from the theory part is hard to say here are odd where's Java because note your arms. Thousand is actually the nutrient leaching part and the cover crop can actually compensate that pretty effectively. So something I didn't talk about is herbicide and other things. We do disarmer analysis meta analysis.

Note your impact on the herbicide. So, for some of the herbicides you definitely can increase the leaching, loss as well. And a cover crop potential you can also compensate for that can actually reduce their the leaching of the herbicide to the environment. So I would say yeah, I'm sure it is possible based on the common condition, but overwhelmingly I would say the benefits will definitely be much larger than their.

Yeah, I guess outside.
>> Yeah as a follow up to that question, Megan asks, what are some of the best cover crops to use? Does it depend on the cash crop you're trying to grow or are there generalist cover crops that are good for, no matter what cash crops you're growing?

Not a part of the season.
>> Right so yeah based on what we saw is the legume cover crop actually pretty good. So I guess yeah, that is definitely case by case situation. Case by case could be, I mean large scale that literally, but still yeah, it's based on the situation and the based on the climate region based on the soil texture.

So yeah, so but based on the analysis we have, yeah, a legume cover crop is working pretty well with cerial species, like with maize. So they actually can, yeah, effectively reduce environmental impact, and yeah and doesn't really impact you much. So I guess but yeah, this is a pretty region by region type of question.

So if you somehow have to try it out, yeah.
>> Right. All right, so this is a question from the crowd, which is a little bit different direction. So the question is there are only two main crops in Indiana corn and soybean, why not increase crop diversity? Also corn is one of the worst plants for soil erosion and water retention.

And add on to that question I was really curious about the drought resilience of crops that were not part of the legume cereal tubers, categories. They're tree based crops like fruit, and nuts, and fungi crops like mushrooms. I was wondering what the drought resilience of those crops might be.


>> So you're talking about comparing a tuber to, yeah. Okay, so I guess if we go back to the results The cereal are actually say they are actually compared all three major groups. The cereal group actually they are tend to beat more drought resilient, more drought resistant group as a whole.

So for example is a, maize is okay. But yes, if you go to weed that's even better in terms of against the drought resilience. So that's true, but I guess yeah, agriculture is definitely commodity right and people need to make profit out of it. So whenever you change species change operation, there will be a lot of costs involved.

So I can imagine and also you have to have people to buy attend to grow a certain crowd and build a relationship to sell them. And, suddenly if you change that that may not be easy to do, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't do that, especially when we think about climate change impact for some species, actually.

There are more frequent drought and the flooding combination for me twice as predicted for future climate, we do need to think about some of the adaptation in that sense. For example, some plants like a sorghum, right so they are pretty drought resistant as well. So, they have low market value.

So I guess from the autonomy part agriculture, practice part that's what I'm seeing but also another important side is economy. So how farmers do it, I guess both sides. So for my point of view it's only from the environmental side, you can't the most important part of our farmers that is the economy.

So I guess whenever a new situation a new decision you have, you may have to consider books. So, yeah, I guess it's definitely a great question complex. But yeah, there will be a very complex answer how to really do that.
>> Yeah, that's right. And yeah, it seems like no till and cover crops might be the most economically feasible option for especially Midwest agriculture, given what's already in production.

But there's a lot of freebase and mushroom based agriculture on both sides of The coast, Oregon, on the west coast and on the east coast. So maybe in the long term, we can transition to more diversified types of agriculture. So this is another question comes from a crowd, how does the research get relayed to the farmers who are actually making the decisions and is that connection currently pretty strong, or is there improvement needed in how to communicate that information so that the best practices are actually being implemented?


>> That's yeah, that's definitely a great question. I guess, that's always Good question for me any research, especially for agricultural research, so I would say yeah so the fall you know because right now the funding we have is based on the. Essentially a statistical analysis based on the literature data, but we do actually have the summer field base observation and we are actually working with actual production system.

So because I OPR is not an underground University, we don't have our own experimental farms, things like that. So actually all the experiments, we do Is actually working with a real farmer. And we actually got there they basically generously gave us a piece of land we can get, like a to some observation.

So I guess in that sense we do have some connection with the actual community. And yeah we also do work with a center called And the Center for Earth and the Environment is this so they do a lot of outreach activities. So we work with them on some materials for exams and that Is a new activity in the in the fairground.

You know they actually do some presentation but also they have a booth for that and also they work with them to develop a summer module agri education module. They actually presented to the grade school students try to have them to understand the link. Between climate variability and agriculture and what practice we can do to.

Yeah, so have the environment, so we try to sabotage the outrage but it's never enough for sure I guess. Yeah, that's something we well with Hoping we can find new ways to improve the conversation because sometimes it's not a straight, you can't assume what you will find is actually always dry.

You know, you actually have learned a lot from the farmers, like I mentioned in the cover crop idea is not something New round is actually people have been practicing that for some time. So yeah, I guess it is a two way street you can actually learn from the farmers quite a lot of knowledge right?


>> Yeah, that's really important because farmers are really at the forefront a lot of these climate changes and they're having to adapt first and foremost. So this is our last question before we close and it's a really interesting one comes from Sawyer, do you anticipate shifts and typical middle class diet?

As events such as droughts and big rainfall events increase this century? Might we be forced to shift food habits to more drought resilient crops for example, on a large scale. And is it feasible and just looking at the site that you have up I'm familiar with corn based products here in the Midwest as well as wheat based products.

But not sure what I can make with millet or ground not are guilty, you think that we need to transition to these more drought resilient crops, maybe in the future. Yeah, I think like I mentioned like in the in the first slide, the most striking things to me is really the less than words in general how agriculture like plants are.

I guess there is a reason because you want things to be efficient and yeah I guess I think there should be but they're only got a certain limit I guess. Yeah, slowly we should, especially for the, I guess yeah the frontier of, because even when you think about Indiana as a climate change impact is not even.

So there will be a hotspot Compared to others so I think especially if the ones we predict that will suffer the most, should actually start experimenting some of the transition. So it's not easy, but, I think that will be beneficial.
>> And I'm looking forward to all the new suits that we can try it with a variety of these crops and say, Yeah, just corn or just wheat so that, yeah.

So thank you, Professor Wang for that wonderful presentation and we will see you all in two weeks for the next meeting. Thank you so much, thank you for your time.
>> Yeah, Tank you for being here and those are wonderful questions all right, we'll see you.
>> Bye-bye.

Description of the video:

>> Hi everybody, and welcome to the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Speaker Series. This is our first meeting of spring 2021 semester, and we're thrilled to have you here at the speaker series jointly presented by IU Integrated Program on the Environment and the Environmental Resilience Institute. I'm Janet McCabe, I'm director of the Environmental Resilience Institute, so pleased that you're able to join us today.

Both IP and ERI are founded on the understanding that interdisciplinary learning and research are absolutely Essential to teach today's scholars and to solve today's problems, not to mention tomorrows. The natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts are all critical, and in play as we tackle climate change, and the environmental challenges that are affecting our health, our communities, and our economy here in Bloomington, in Indianapolis, and around the world.

IPE was founded in 2012 by the Provost and the leadership of the O'Neal School, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Public Health to bring together all of the environmental and sustainabilitie scholarship across the various schools and departments on the Bloomington campus, and provide a way for students to have a truly integrative learning approach.

Students who are interested in environmental policy, environmental management, and all the issues that go into those types of careers. ERI was founded in 2017 as part of the IU Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge. And our mission is to enhance resilience to environmental change in Indiana and beyond by accurately predicting impacts effectively partnering with communities to implement feasible, equitable, and research informed solutions.

IP and ERI faculty, staff, and students have worked together to bring us a full semester worth of speakers. I wanna thank Sarah Mitzi and Lixin Chen Yang for leading, really pulling this together. Over the course of the semester, our speakers will address a wide variety of topics ranging from resilient agriculture in the face of climate change to advocacy and energy transition to the development of entire racist scientific ecology, and more interesting topics.

Importantly, while we meet biweekly for the series on Fridays at noon, the next installment will be an exception. It will be on February 4th at 11 AM, that's a Thursday in coordination with O'Neill schools Environmental Policy Seminar with Dr. Shalanda Baker on the topic of energy transition. So please mark your calendars for that talk and for upcoming talks.

You'll be able to find information about each talk on the ERI and IPE webpages and in our regular newsletters, and upcoming events notices that our organizations send out on a regular basis, but not so frequent that it gets annoying. So here's the information for ERI, we'd love to have you join us.

And here is the information for IPE, we would love to have you join that as well. If you have ideas for people we should consider for a future talk, please tell us that too. And as you will see from our upcoming roster, we have folks from inside the IU schools, and family, and we have outside speakers as well.

So a few logistics on how you can engage with our speaker today. I've heard Phil speak, he's very engaging, but he wants questions, he wants to be challenged. If you're so moved and tested on his ideas, that's what makes life interesting. You can put questions in the chat as you think of them, and we will monitor them as we go along.

There will be an opportunity for questions at the end, and then I'm saying this to remind myself as much as to let you know. We'll save a couple of minutes at the end for Phil to wrap up with some concluding comments and an inspiration. So, now I am going to introduce our speaker.

I am not gonna read to you that small print that's on there, I'm sure you can probably make that out yourself. I wanna hit a couple of highlights about Phil's background that I think are interesting. First of all, he is a product of Indiana. He grew up in Elwood, Indiana, which is a pretty small town northeast of Indianapolis.

I have actually been there more than once, it's a lovely town grew up there. He taught at Ball State University. He was elected to Congress in 1975 with the Watergate Class as he refers to it, served 10 terms in Congress, and he may talk about this today. But it was a very different time to be in Congress, and it just operated very differently.

And we should know about that history, because if we don't know about our history, we can't imagine things other than the way things are today. He spent time at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, part of that time, he was a director of the Institute of Politics. He has worked for many years with the Resources for the Future.

Really tremendous Washington Think Tank the focus is on environmental, energy and natural resources issues. He was the director of resources for the future, he has been on many other boards and commissions as spoken many, many times. And so with that, I am going to stop sharing my screen, and turn the program over to former Congressman Phil Sharp.

Thank you for joining us today, Phil. And so you need to unmute yourself though.
>> A lot of my constituency would have liked that feature to mute some of us in politics. I'm just delighted to be with you, and I appreciate you using the picture that actually helps keep me younger than is the reality.

But I wanted to say how impressed I am with what's going on at Indiana University that have only become more recently reconnected. And I must say, working on climate issues especially is extremely important in the fact that your institute reaches out to communities and the state government. These are entities that are gonna have major roles to play on this issue as we go forward.

And I'm particularly, I wanna congratulate Janet as I hope people know now, she has been nominated by the new president to be the number two person at the Environmental Protection Agency. She comes with enormous experience from the agency about the issues, but I wanna highlight something that she has a lot of, and a lot of the new appointees have.

And that is she has worked with so many different groups, so that she's familiar with the enormous regional differences in this country. And with the breadth of stakeholders that are gonna be involved in this issue from the oil and gas Industry on one side to the advocates of environmental justice on the other, Iitt is just amazing what what she has done in this regard.

Let me also say that, today what I'm gonna focus on is obviously the challenge of climate change policy. But my focus is gonna be on cutting emissions, which we're gonna be out for quite some time in this country, and not so much on the critical issues of adapting.

Because the World is global, is warming, and it's having impacts, and we're going to simply be dealing with that. For the entire source of our lives and my approach is gonna be a flyover at 50,000 feet level and therefore some clearly general we might get to specifics depending on your questions.

And I know many of you are actually doing deep dives real mining of these issues and that's critical hard work, which frankly I'm not very competent to undertake. The key points I wanna make are just very broad things of what's been happening in this country over the last four years that that pretend for the likelihood that we're gonna see very strong climate action.

In the next coming years. And then what's happening now, because so much is happening now with the Biden administration in their approach to Congress. And then I wanna spend just a little time on given the fact that this is a long distance run, given the fact that it's very deep in our society, how can we think about it without getting totally depressed or intellectually overwhelmed?

So let me just start with the first there. And that is this issue that despite Trump's Hostility to the issue and to any policies that were in place at the federal level on climate change. The fact is we had major developments, very positive events going on throughout the country.

I just wanna quickly touch on a few you always wanna start with science. Clearly our scientists and around the world have been documenting, of what's been happening, what is happening in the atmosphere and in the water and everywhere else. And what's more significant politically perhaps is the fact that those of us that are non scientists are suddenly been able to see in virtually every region of America.

Some of the impacts that are already starting to show up, and they're not very friendly, and they seem to be very costly. In addition to that something that many of you may be involved in, we've had considerable social science, along with the natural sciences analysis reports, on policy on ways to do this and ways to communicate.

So there is a flood of information in so much today compared to about 10 years ago, that no one person could read it all. Well, let me look then secondly, the fact that our state governments and some cities have been acting over the last four years very significantly.

And indeed, a number of red states which appeared to be repealing some of the not particularly dramatic policies, but they had clean energy policies in place, actually kept them and did not follow Trump on this. And indeed other states of course in more aggressively especially California, New York, even the state of Virginia have been very active.

If we turn to the economy and the marketplace and then since the hard goods of our society, it's very clear that there have been dramatic changes there as well. We all know that the costs of solar and wind have come down, they're now among the biggest, new generations of power in the country.

We also, and we know that the coal has drop down to five years, just plummeted in the electric sector of what it does. We know that there are all kinds of new businesses and new big investments in everything from electric cars to battery storage, all kinds of things.

And we almost hear daily announcement from businesses and from the banking and investment community on policies and strategies that are favorable to climate. If we turn to the international market, what we discover is that in fact, those markets become, have a element of them that are very oriented to the clean energy.

And efficiency and these kinds of technologies. And where we sail and those are influencing how American manufacturers of automobiles and other things are influenced to move forward in a progressive way. We also see that policies of these foreign governments are having a big impact on these markets and on us.

The fact that we have this huge decline in solar costs is very much related to policies that were adopted in Germany and Spain and then a massive investments in China. On a whole new solar industry that has cut the costs somewhat competitive to some of our elements, but anyway, it's had a very positive impact in that way.

And China and Europe, and others have come out with commitments to how they plan to shift to electrifying their transportation, their automobiles and everything else. So our producers are gonna do that even if the US government fails to do that, although I think our government's gonna continue acting on that.

And as you may know, China's actually indicated their committee to build a whole new industry of green heating and cooling systems that for all the buildings that have to be refitted in America and elsewhere. Well also one of the more interesting developments is really over the last two years, is how many people and organizations have stepped forward.

Are making huge public pledges that over in some of them are deep cuts in what in their carbon footprints in the products. The footprint of the products, these differ and everywhere, but state governments are doing it, City governments are doing it, Universities are doing it. And very significantly major corporations in almost every sector, are doing that, including even oil and gas, sector.

Now they're not all alike, and we certainly can't count on these pledges to be met. But they do have a positive impact, very much so on our politics they signal to the markets. They signal to innovators, they signal to investors, they send them to employees and consumers, that we're headed in a new direction.

It builds public support and political support for action and any number of these corporate pledges have come with a statement. We need government policy to help us achieve this and of course, it's changing the competitive nature of this issue. Frankly, for about 15 years on the issue, competition in the economy almost became a negative on trying to get anything accomplished because it was always viewed.

If you step forward, you'll get hurt economically, that is beginning to reverse itself this is a very powerful move. So we have a spreading consensus in this country that we are underway on transforming this economy to low carbon status. Well now if we turn to the second thing that I wanted to focus on, which is the what's happening now with Biden.

And it is happening literally, right now, just to recognize which many of you probably know, first of all, this presidential campaign is the first ever in which a climate issue was one of the top issues that did the candidate and the party. Were driving for people kind of forget that in 2008, both political parties in their platforms and both candidates, McCain and Obama Committed themselves to take strong action on climate change.

But frankly, there was not a lot of discussion of it during the campaigns. Now I think people probably recognize that they laid out a number of broad general things they were planning to do. Sort of the key goals which are very tough to meet is that by 2050 we would have a net zero carbon economy and in the electric sector, we would even drive quicker than that and try to get there by 2035.

So let's look at them governing which we saw them seize control of the reins of the executive branch just two days ago I guess it was And by the way, I'm here in Washington, where they're just now taking down all the fences and the flags and everything else, but it's a glorious sight.

But they were ready to go. In fact, I would argue probably on multiple issues, this administration was more ready to go because of the experience of the people, because of the transition team that they put in, than we probably have seen in recent history. Clearly, their appointments represent a very strong commitment to climate change.

Whether it's John Kerry on the international front, Gina McCarthy at the White House, or Janet McCabe at the Environmental Protection Agency, but it's across the board. And the Secretary of Treasury, as well. And they have plans and issues because people have been preparing for this especially to counter the effects of the rollback of policy that we saw over the last four years.

And so we saw, day one, the very famous moves on the some of the executive orders. And I just wanna say a little bit about them. Obviously, rejoining the Paris Agreement is something the president had sole power to do. And so, in 30 days, it takes effect, but it's a very significant move on the international front.

But it also has a lot of impact back here in the domestic front. I think one of the things that, of among the many distortions in the rhetoric of this past administration, was a total misunderstanding about the Paris Agreement. Because it doesn't legally obligate us to do much at all except to submit a nationally-determined commitment.

What will we try to achieve? And there's no legal way of enforcing that. So it wasn't very strong in that regard. They acted as if it transform the economy, which is pure baloney. But it's very important, because right now, we're supposed to, by November, at the Glasgow Conference of Parties, that's the next big negotiating event, we're supposed to come forth with our new plan for the next five years projected ahead as to what we'll do and how we will achieve it.

And so this is a lot pressure on the administration to get its act together and get as much accomplished as possible. There were several other, I'm just gonna mention one of the other, there was a very broad directive, executive order, to all the agencies that are involved on these issues, where they might be related to the climate.

And they were told to review every rule that has been put in place over the last four years. They were told to come up with, in 30 days, submit to the Office of Management and Budget, that's the right arm of the White House, their plan for what they're planning to get started on new rules.

And they particularly highlighted a few of the key ones they wanted to focus on, which was the power plant rule, on the car efficiency rules, the appliance efficiency rules, the methane, the fugitive emission rules, kind of thing. And they also established a working group that is expected to act, that's across the government working group, to re-establish a strong and more accurate social cost of carbon.

Now, for those of you that are involved in the regulatory process, as you will recognize, this is one of the elements of the regulatory analysis that is utilized to determine the costs and the benefits of these rules. And it's part of the defense in the courts. So these are very significant moves, they're going to take a lot of time to engage you.

And it's very important to recognize that while the president has the authority to make this directive, all these agencies have to follow the regulatory processes. The president hasn't been able to dictate the outcome, that has to go through a serious process kind of thing. There's something I think we can read into this, read from it.

And that is that clearly, a major part of the strategy of the administration is going to be what we call a regulatory strategy. To use regulation as a way to move mandates and what not to move the economy. It's not a pricing policy that a lot of economists would prefer.

You may remember that that's what the Waxman-Markey Bill was in 2009. That was a cap and trade, which sets a price in the marketplace for carbon dioxide. And by the way, that was President Obama's preference, was to go with the pricing thing, but when Congress bombed out, failed, flamed out, he resorted to utilization of the regulatory processes.

And one of the, obviously, political advantages for going through this route for the administration is it doesn't require congressional approval. And so you're building on existing law, and you don't have to have a Congress that's ready to sit up and do what many of us think it should.

But, as I think many people know, every rule is subject to lawsuits. And the most common kind of lawsuit is to say, wait a minute, they have used more authority than Congress granted them. And this is going to be a serious question, it always is, a serious question.

But it's a more serious question, because if we started to begin speculating, we have a more conservative Supreme Court that probably will take a more narrow view as to what discretion the agency has to do this, a more restrictive view. But now, if we turn quickly to things that Congress requires, or where, You require congressional action, obviously, any new authorities, any new taxes or new tax breaks, any new expenditures, and the administration would like to make some significant increases in public expenditures, those require action by the Congress.

And obviously, the congressional power of the purse is one of the most critical one here. So the Biden administration will be seeking a lot of things out of Congress. Now, we also need to remember there are reasons sometimes it's very desirable to get congressional approval even if you can do things under the regulatory system.

One is the regulatory authorities may not allow you to make your best choice of policy. So to design it better, you want new authority. Another is, of course, that it reduces the risk that you'll lose when you get to the court system on the rule that you think.

And a third is, and something you've heard voices, I'm sure, arguing this, it reduces the political risk that we might have a throwback of the regulations with a new administration. The kind of experience we had under Trump. Though I would argue we'll never go back that far, but we simply cannot know where it will be.

Let me just use one example of one area, in which I'm gonna do some speculation here on which Janet McKay either now or later would be far more better to address this. But she's not going to, nobody that's nominate is now going to express their opinions about these things.

That's just the way Washington works, so she's being very wise. Let me suggest in the electric sector. One thing to understand about the strategy here of the bytom ministration, and it's a strategy that a number of major reports have undertaken to recommend is that going after the electric sector and really pushing it down on emissions faster than you do in the other critical sectors of the economy is a major strategic choice.

The electric sector is in fact, no longer the main they don't do more emitting than Other sectors like transportation, it has made some significant progress. But the the theory for doing this is the we want to use electricity to help decarbonize for example, transportation buildings, and some industrial process.

That means we're going to be actually using more electricity over the next 30 years despite efforts to conserve. So in other words, part of your strategy is clean up the electric system so you can help clean up other aspects of the economy that are in some ways more difficult to do.

Well, one of the things that I was talking about in the campaign and one the things that a number of academics and others have been recommending is, well, why don't you adopt something called a clean energy standard as your way to regulate this industry. And I'm not gonna go into It's involved in it.

Some of you may be doing research on it. But the question then is, do you need new legislation from Congress to really do this and to do it effectively, or can you squeeze it into the Clean Air Act and use that as your basis for regulating. And at some point, the administration might come soon, we'll have to make a choice as to whether to pursue this on the regulatory front or whether they might even do both, start on the regulatory front, and then seek Congress to act.

This is thought to be a more efficient way to do things but all this remains to be seen kind of thing so stay tuned, especially those of you that follow the law. Now I wanna make some comments about Congress and about what we might expect from the Republicans as well because they are changing and they've already done some positive things I will say, but I'm gonna save that and move forward a little bit and perhaps come back to your question.

The final thing I would say about the politics of all this is just a final reminder which I sure this sophisticated audience understands. But it's a really hard one for a lot of Americans to swallow. And that is expect political bargaining to get anything done. Political bargaining is very much a part of a democratic way that we operate, especially in an economy that is so big, so complex, and people are affected so differently across America, and many Americans, and some academics have great disdain for this process of bargain.

Now, let's be clear, not all compromises, not all compromises are acceptable. But rejecting all compromise is also not acceptable. That is a way to stalemate this way. So there are going to be lots of good people who are going to make some tough choices as to whether they're willing to support compromise when they know it's not doing all that they believe is important.

Well, let me turn to this sort of last bucket very quickly and say that, for me, one of the things over the years has been my gosh, how do we think about both psychologically and intellectually. This is a long term thing decades ahead that we're working on it filters to our entire society and everything about it really speaks to dynamism with lots of uncertainty.

So how do we get our heads around this and think about it. Well, I had the educational experience of being part of the National Academy of Sciences, five volume report on making climate, climate choices for America that's not accurate title, but about climate choices. And they emphasize that a framework for thinking about this I think it's just useful.

To be aware of and I find very helpful because we are talking about proposals that are way out. We are talking about a situation where it's highly improbable that any of the things that we're doing now reach the goals that we think. We're talking about. Really not having once and for all we've adopted a grand policy and that was some adjustments over the years will get us there.

That's a desirable thing. Many advocates focus on that kind of way of thinking. Well, and so there are going to be in many cases, a lot of disappointment and a lot of depression. But let me suggest to you that a more realistic way to think about our expectations for something I believe is absolutely compelling that we do all we can and and that is is to understand.

I'll come to this process in a moment, the framework to understand that there is no human exists in human experience. Nobody has shown us any example where we've been able to see clearly the future of three decades out. We've been able to actually adopt that policy or plan to get there.

It's just beyond our experience. And as people over and over say there are all kinds of uncertainties on that path and certainties in the way technology is developed and adopted. Uncertainties on how the economy of moves, uncertainties in politics and invariably will make mistakes will need to shift course.

So this is the framework that Americans climate choices, that's what the title suggests it's called Iterative risk Management. Now that will inspire any class, just the title and of course. But it's basically the idea that that you simply with very intellectual. I'm going to give you a quick overview of the intellectually sophisticated way and then turn to the common sense that helps me We do a serious analysis of the risk and many of you are involved in the methodologies that help assess what are those outside long term risks on climate change.

Then you adopt policies, obviously to try to mitigate those risks. But the key here that I think is important is, you recognize you need to periodically reassess probably every four or five years. You need to reassess where we are in the science. Is it a bigger problem or less of a problem than we thought?

Where are we on all these claims about technology? And tell you the advocacy out there say if you've just stopped this technology, man, that's it. And everybody knows that's not the case. Where are we in the economy? And very importantly in something some of you may participate in your research is, which of these policies are really effective?

And is there a more cost effective way we ought to do because then what we do is we correct course and we readjust. Either the urgency is greater or combined even be less, I think it's going to be greater frankly. Now the common sense version of this that people are familiar with in business and in life usually is we do what we can with what we know.

And then we assume that we're gonna learn more and prepare more and we're gonna do more later. So we don't have to swallow the whole enchilada at first and be right about it. In fact, it's almost certain we won't be right about it. Well, let me do this.

Let me get you involved in this kind of thing and take some of your questions. I'm sorry, we don't have a more open audience where you could really engage with your comments. Because I'm certain that some of you would have some great things to add to this proposition.

So Janet, take it away.
>> Thank you, Phil. That was great and you really teed up a lot of things here. We've gotten a number of really interesting questions come in so I don't think we're gonna have any problem. The problem might be getting to everybody's questions. So we'll do our best here.

So here's the first question that came in. What from your perspective at this point prospects for the implementation of an actual carbon tax during the next four years?
>> Well, first of all, that's one of my preferred policies. I put resources to the future and the economists there would string me up if I didn't make that clear.

But at the moment, it doesn't have high prospects. Let me suggest to you how it might emerge. It's not going to emerge at first, but you may have noticed that we cannot fund everything we wanna do in this country. And so we're going to be clearly dealing with the tax code both in terms of monies that need to be raised and in terms of fairness.

And in that process might be a great opportunity to adopt a carbon tax, probably not a high end strong tax. That would be the thing to do if you really wanna reduce on the regulatory side what you're doing. But I think it is a possibility and I think it's very important to do.

But that will emerge only after we have a couple years of getting things started, kind of proposition. Let me suggest to you, this option was available to President Trump when he came to office. Some of the senior Republicans, the grand old men, and they were men of the Republican Party came to him like George Schultz.

And they said, adopt a carbon tax that is revenue neutral. In other words you don't just pile a lot of money, you give it back in one way or another kind of proposition. And they urge that as a conservative way to avoid, one, to deal with the issue and two, to avoid that.

Of course, that all got dismissed. By the way, it would've helped them in their tax bill actually pay for some of the tax cutting that they did. So it's out there, nobody should give up on it. But I think to expect it early on is It's out of the question.


>> Great, yeah, we had several questions that related to that topic. So thank you for that answer. Here's one that question a bunch of times. I'm interested in your response. The question is, my understanding is that nuclear power plants are currently a substantial source of non-carbon emissions in the US.

But many power plants are scheduled to go out of commission in the next few decades. What are your thoughts on nuclear power as a sustainable energy source? And what is your perception of the politics surrounding nuclear power? Is it an important part of America's energy future?
>> Well, I'm gonna spend a few more minutes on this.

It is something I'm very much interested in. And I need to tell you that, I was, I'm no longer anymore on the board of directors of Duke Energy, where I was on their oversight committee of the 12 nuclear power plants that they had. So I've been deeply involved in this.

And when I was in Congress, my subcommittee had regulatory authority over the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So you can take that as, I know what I'm talking about, or you can take that as, my God, he sold out, however you want to approach that. But let me suggest to you a couple things.

First of all, the existing power plants, I've forgotten the number, I think it's down to about 99 or something like that. Those are producing half of all our carbon free emissions in the country. Water power, hydro power is the second big chunk and you get way down much lower on the newer solar and wind.

So it's really important and what we're finding is certain of the power plants, they're usually single plants run by a company as opposed to dual plants. And things are just harder to make economically work in today's world with natural gas prices, which are cheaper. And also we have a lot of subsidies that work on adopting wind power into the system.

So the point is that I think we ought to be doing more to help not lose those plants unless there's a critical safety issue. That's a whole other reason to close anything down. But what we already have in place is the state of New York, the state of Illinois, the state of New Jersey, each of them in their regulatory pricing of electricity in their areas have actually generated a special benefit for low carbon nuclear power plants to try to prevent that from happening.

And I think you'll see some more action out of the Congress to it. And by the way, I was also on the president's commission trying to figure out what to do about nuclear waste. We won't talk about that unless you want to at this moment. But let's talk about additional power.

The Congress already on a bipartisan basis has adopted some authority to push the development of what we call advanced nuclear power systems. Now these are expensive. They'll be added to our plant, the major laboratory in Idaho. They're going to be developed out there, they're gonna take years to do.

And I think, we should do it only because we don't know how for sure we're going to get to a 2050 goal of carbon-free economy. So we need to keep these options alive. Now, there is one possibility and that's the small nuclear reactor which is actually getting licensed now.

But whether that will get developed and economically in the marketplace remains to be seen. Let me also say that there is fusion development. And this was almost used to be laughable. Those of us that dealt with issues in the 1970s, this was always held out as a promise.

But now because of advanced materials and all kinds of other scientific improvements, we actually have private investors on two or three companies that are talking about trying to get a fusion power plants going. Again, this is long term, these are 20, 30 years out. But again, it's trying to develop more options for us in the future.

So I'll stop here.
>> Yeah, well, great answer. And for students who are on the phone, it's an illustration of areas in which there's a great future for people to learn about these issues, to help develop some of these technologies and the policies that you need in order to implement them.


>> Actually, I'll say that it may be happening at IU. But at schools like MIT, where they always have done a lot of nuclear work, the number of students getting into these programs has really increased in the last few years. Interesting, so here's a question on the other side of the carbon spectrum.

What are the legislative prospects for land-based decarbonization actions such as reforestation and greener agriculture practices? This is an issue of great interest to the state of Indiana, of course.
>> Well, first of all, this is already one of the things about the the Biden approach, but it's not just him, it's others, was what they call all government approach.

And what they're gonna do is, in agricultural policy, in land management policies, you're going to see a number of green proposals. A number of these had been developed maybe five or ten years ago actually. And in the House of Representatives, they've done a lot of hearings on these kind of questions in the last couple of years.

And if you want to, you could look up the select committee on climate crisis that the House of Representative had operating over the last two years. They put out a 500 page report with all kinds of proposals, a number of them dealing with exactly what you're talking about.

Now, I don't tend to follow those as closely, but a lot of it's based on incentives to re enrich the soil. Which by the way, absorbs more carbon dioxide when it's a good, healthy soil, which also would be healthy for planting and other farming practices. So they're going to be a part of it.

And by the way, some of these policy systems can be developed that actually have what we call offsets, where a utility that can't quite make the grade this year on what it does, could pay farmers to take some actions. Those are the way that these policies are getting integrated together.


>> Yeah, and I think that-
>> Very important though, we have to be working on all levels of this. And by the way, some of you may wanna change your diet. A recommendation on that, although I haven't tried it, eat less, but that's another thing.
>> Right, yeah, it comes from all directions.

These questions that you guys are sending in are just awesome, keep them coming, please. Here's a couple of pretty challenging ones, Phil. It's increasingly clear that unstable earth systems present us with several large scale discontinuities in the form of tipping points and rapid, irreversible change. These challenge the use of assumptions regarding the possibility of risk assessment and risk management.

And the person would love your comments on those statements.
>> Well, first of all, I have to be honest with you, I'm not intellectually skilled with all the methodologies that are involved in doing risk management that I indicated was recommended by this big study. But the one thing that I think that does tell us very strongly is, we have to stay on top of this.

We have to keep advancing the science to adjust it, and it builds a case for why this is compelling. I think these are called fat tail events. But you're talking about the currents in the air, the currents in the ocean, you're talking about a number of those, the possible melting of the permafrost around the Arctic.

And all these kind of things that will just shoot up much more emissions into the air, both methane and carbon dioxide. So we just have to stay at this and we have to continue to invest in the science. The reason I say that is, I've been at conferences where I've even heard some scientists say, okay, we know what's a problem.

Stop investing in the science, put the money over in technology. I think we don't want to do that kind of proposition. But what you raise are very important questions, but there are, as always written to me, there are uncertainties about whether these will result, but they sure tell us, get smart, get action.


>> Yeah, well, this one is, I think, flows very nicely from that question, which is, do you have the sense that our energy future, say in 100 years, will hold overall less total available energy for our use? Would we need to adapt our lifestyles to a smaller scale, lower energy future?

And I would append to that. And how do we talk about that publicly as a way to effectively inspire good policy development?
>> Well, first of all, behavior change is both necessary and I think inevitable. The issue is though, it's a little hard to just preach, do the right thing.

A lot of people go to church on Sunday and pledge to do better, and by Wednesday, they may not be as good a person as we thought we were gonna be. That does not to say we don't need preaching for doing this. At the moment, I think the way we're gonna proceed is primarily by trying to recognize technologies that can help us do things we think we want to do now, more efficiently or more cleanly.

That's a certain something we know we can do. But you've touched on the right thing, which is, policies that are worth their name always change somebody's behavior. Whether it's changing an investor where they put their money, changing a consumer the way they eat or what they do. And I do think there's wide room in the public discussion, and should be for how we need to begin to move different lifestyles.

By the way, we all gotten a massive test of that this year, of changing our lifestyles in ways that people thought wouldn't work. Now, a lot of what we don't like, but the fact is we can, and I think we will, we already see it new generations. I come from a generation where it was manly and sophisticated to smoke when you were a teenager.

Any teenager that smokes now is brilliant, you'd have to watch him, I think, among their people. So things will change, but pressing that. Now, I think it's important to recognize, there is a whole advocacy, and maybe the questioner is a part of it. There's a whole advocacy on this kind of thing about, no, we have to really give up economic progress.

But what has happened over the last decade, on the international scene with the IPCC and others, is they really have come to the view. No, we have to think in terms of, we can't expect to sell prosperity short, especially to people who have very little of it around the world.

We can't expect them to just give all that up, which by the way helps us and the developed west, so we have to find ways to develop in a green and rapid fashion.
>> Yeah, for sure, moving right from that point, here's a question. How do the other major societal challenges, you've mentioned one, which is the pandemic.

But others including racial injustice, economic troubles facing the new administration, impact the strategies in and for major climate legislation or other governmental policies, I would add?
>> Well, one of the more interesting things, at least about the rhetoric of the new administration is they are speaking and recognizing this and they had to in the campaign and this is a welcome change in America.

And I dare say, Janet, when you were at EPA, you had a section on environmental justice and it was talked about, but it is now front and center. And by environmental justice, that has a lot of meanings. But we're really talking about trying to recognize it. Some people live in very polluted areas and have health risks.

Some people are going to take the are taking the brunt of the transition like coal miners. And their various things. There's going to be a lot more attention to insensitivity for now, this is not going to be easy in many cases. So what you're going to do is if you recognize this problem.

Well, let me give you one example where the conflict exists. You asked about the carbon tax. Or if you asked about cap and trade or you've talked about trading within the the clean energy standard. Some of the environmental justice community are very much opposed because their theory. Which they haven't always been wrong about in the past, I think they're they're missing the fundamental point though.

But their theory is. That, well, what this does is allows a power plant that spewing up emissions in here in Lower Mississippi or wherever it is in our backyard can. Cuz they can buy their way out with offsets out of the requirement. So, you don't stop that. Now, one of the changes when, it's already in the.

The rules is changing the what's called the next standard on ozone. This is gonna have a big can have it depends on what the EPA chooses to do big impact on those kind of situations. So that's in a sense what I would call a compensatory thing. It probably helps us get, less carbon dioxide.

But it's not the funnel, way in which you're going after carbon dioxide. So you're gonna see a lot of compensation. Things like that. So it's a very important series of thing. But also what you're going to see in Congress and one of the reasons we have some hope of getting things out of Congress.

And because, you've got to do infrastructure. Well, there are a lot of good green things that can be done. Infrastructure. You're gonna deal with the transportation system and from American here in Indiana is gonna be turned stationary. They're gonna be focused on that. So there are lots of ways that this issue is going to arise.

In fact, what's gonna shock a lot of people in the traditional energy industries is this issue is gonna arise on everything doesn't mean it always wins in the Congress, but there's gonna be no more silence. I can promise you that.
>> You read my mind Phil because I had identified a question about Mayor Pete from south bank Spain sector partner transportation.

And what might you see that department doing in the next administration that will touch on climate?
>> Well, Janet, it's not an area that I generally focus on. To the extent I have any expertise, it's really on energy policy, and what goes on in the energy sector. However, I think one of the things there as well as in a number of areas is.

That there may be changes in NEPA, NEPA as the environmental assessment that has to be made before a big project. And in that, there will be a requirement that you consult with. And that you take into account. What are the impacts on these? I don't know what language is getting used marginal communities are the communities that struggle with these issues.

That would be brand new, doesn't guarantee the decisions I'll get made. But I just heard about an interview with him last night and he was already saying all these projects that big projects that people want to do in transportation. We're going to be looking at what are those?

There's those propositions. So that's one way. That you're going to see.
>> Yeah. So here's a question. What might our government learn from indigenous voices and worldview? Is there any indication that this administration or Congress may be listening more closely to these voices?
>> Well, again, one of the important developments in our democracy is the fact that we now actually have those voices far more prominent.

Both the public discussion and even in Congress. And her name is escapes me at the moment who's just become the new secretary of interior.
>> To Holland.
>> Yes. And by the way, when I was doing an orientation program at Harvard for the new members two years ago.

She gave one of the most powerful moving speeches. But you're right, we've all, didn't any of us paid any attention, I can't say I paid a lot. But, much of the culture in many of the tribes has to do with recognizing the importance of Mother Nature. And actually recognizing the benefits that flow from that not just spiritually but also.

As a very practical matter, and that philosophy is becoming much more prominent I think in America. Some of us that are older can actually remember some advertising years ago where they had you saw this look like an Indian lawyer. Who's Has a tear running down his face as they show us.

The landscape being destroyed and it was very moving at the time that was back. I think the environmental movement was just getting started. Excuse me. You get one of us old guys involved and we just can't stop.
>> Okay, well, here's a question that goes to your experience in Congress.

What talking points or angles do you think will be most influential to get Republicans to act urgently and in Congress on climate?
>> Well, here's what I think the issue is gonna come up under other banners. Just like I said, it's gonna come up on all kinds of issues.

So that it'll be talked about it. How are we gonna stay internationally competitive. I mentioned the fact that if you wanna be in this in the modern marketplace, You better be on the cutting edge of this stuff instead of ten years behind. So competition and innovation and they're already talking in these terms considerably.

So we had a major agreement last fall shockingly. So in the big funding bill, which was bipartisan. And put a lot more money into new technologies that many of which are going to be very important on climate kind of Proposition. So innovation and there and and if we get to a stimulus.

Some of them are going to probably support more economic stimulus assuming the economy just doesn't take off. Which l don't think anybody expects it to, and so there you may get a lot of investment again. So l think it's gonna come up under other ways. And by the way there's going to be lots of bargaining.

Just give you an example, so one of the things that's happening. Well it's gonna come up under the word resilience. Resilience is a new modern bipartisan word everybody's free resilience of our infrastructure. Because the hurricanes and the floods and fires are taking out and costing a lot of money to private sector, governments, federal government.

And so we shell out a lot more money on just what just in disaster relief. So okay, so does if Georgia and, Louisiana and other places want more money? I can bet you that there's gonna be bargaining in the Congress in which they say, fine, we'll give you more disaster relief.

But you've also gotta take these actions or support these things. That's where it gets to the bargaining that I I don't elevate it to a high, praise, but it's a critical part. So many people that are not on in both parties are not on board as much are going to find themselves having to make choices to support bargains.


>> Well, thank you to everybody for all the questions. Phil asked if he could have the last couple of minutes to sort of wrap things up and especially speak to our students that are listening today. I know there are students On the line, I recognize one of my students at least, thank you for joining.

So Phil, I'll turn it back to you to close us out and then we'll just say goodbye on the end.
>> Well, thank you, Jen. First of all, I'm just honored and pleased to be invited and so glad to see the energy and activity, through the Indiana University system that's going on, I haven't kept up in in recent years but so delighted.

But let me just say a couple obvious things one is, we are going to be grappling with this issue of how to cut Carbon Dioxide in our economy. And how to just to the warming that's going to continue and increase throughout the lives of everybody online here, every student in America.

But I think one of the things is, we often cast that in very negative ways as and are clearly our negative hurdles and costs. But there are incredible opportunities being opened up for careers in all kinds of ways that either directly or indirectly are related to taking on these challenges.

Whether it's in science, in teaching, in being an innovator, in being an entrepreneur and investment opportunities, to where to put your 401k for example. There are enormous positive things that are gonna go on and so, if you wanna get with the future, this is part of the way to do that.

But let me also say something about what ritually applies to all of us, not just to students but, when I was a graduate student, or at least at the tail end of my dissertation America would be one of his great technological and organizational achievements by going to the moon.

The moonshot, and oftentimes you hear people saying that's what we need now is a moonshot, well, one of the very significant things about the moon shot was, most of us could only be kibitzers. We could only watch, we couldn't participate in and maybe they took a little bit more taxes.

But, there were thousands of Americans that were technically competent and very well organized, but most of us, we just can observe, that's not the case here. All of us helped contribute to the problem, some people a lot more than others, all of us contribute and all of us can take either small or larger actions to help.

And adding up small options by millions of citizens do make a difference. Just let me quickly remind us, which somebody already, a couple of questions already remind us, we're all consumers, what we eat, what we drive, how we transport ourselves, all of these kinds of questions, we can reduce our Carbon footprint that way.

We're all old citizens who I assume all of you people in here have the right to vote, so you can exercise it at the ballot box. Or, you can exercise your first amendment right to petition the government, people forget about that, right? And petitioning government means hound Janet McCabe to move as aggressively on this as you can, hound your congressmen, hounding may not be direct way yes, it's the right thing to do, don't be shy, ask them what they're doing, kind of thing.

But also, we can all, either individually or collectively join in efforts to cut Carbon footprints whether it's at Indiana University, which is happening at universities all across the country, whether it's in your place of work. To raise the question, to join employees and asking the manager, what are you doing?

Or okay, are there other things that we can do, to do this? At a church or synagogue, the same thing, you can incorporate it in your teaching kind of thing, so there are many, many ways, that you can help change the picture and the trajectory we're on and make a difference.

And basically, this is no time for hand wringing and depression, this is a time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
>> Well here, here and thank you again Phil for joining us today, thanks to everybody for joining to listen. We have been recording this session, so, especially if you're a teacher at IU and you want to have your students listen to this conversation, you'll be able to do that.

Thank you again, please join us for our upcoming events, which you'll find on the IPE and ERI websites, and we'll love to have you in the future. Thanks again Phil, everybody have a great and safe weekend, be well, wear a mask and take care of yourselves.
>> Thanks.

Description of the video:

>> All right, hello, everybody. Welcome to another installment of the fall Environmental Resilience Speaker Series, jointly presented by Indiana University's Integrated Program on the Environment and the Environmental Resilience Institute. I'm Janet McCabe. I'm director of the Environmental Resilience Institute, and I'm really pleased that you're able to join us today.

Before we start, I'd like to acknowledge and honor the indigenous communities native to this region, and recognize that Indiana University Bloomington is built on indigenous homelands and resources. We recognize the Miami, Delaware, Pottawatomie, and Shawnee people as past, present, and future caretakers of this land. Both IPE and ERI are founded on the understanding that interdisciplinary learning and research are essential to teach today's scholars, and to solve today's problems, not to mention tomorrow's.

The natural and social sciences, the humanities, and the arts are all critical, and in play as we tackle climate change. And the environmental challenges that are affecting our health, our communities, and our economy here in Bloomington, and around the world. IPE was founded in 2012 by the provost and the leadership of the O'Neill School, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Public Health to bring together all of the environmental and sustainability scholarship across the various schools and departments on the Bloomington campus.

The ERI was founded in 2017, as part of the IU Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge. Its mission is to enhance resilience to environmental change in Indiana and beyond by accurately predicting impacts, and effectively partnering with communities to implement feasible, equitable, and research informed solutions. IPE and ERI faculty, staff, and students have worked together to bring us a full semester of speakers.

We'll round out the fall series on December 4th with a talk by President of Keep Indianapolis Beautiful, Jeremy Kranowitz. Next semester, we'll continue our series, beginning January 22nd with former Indiana Congressman Phil Sharp, who's been the CEO for Resources for the Future that will be a great talk.

You'll be able to find information about each talk on the ERI and IPE webpages, and in our regular newsletters and upcoming events notices that our organizations regularly send out. And we encourage you to sign up for our newsletter, so you'll get reminders about these upcoming talks, as well as other news and events we publicize.

If you have ideas for people we should consider for a future talk, please tell us that too. So a few obligatory logistical details, whoops. I don't wanna spoil the surprise here. Please mute yourself. We can do it for you, but we'd rather not have to. Please put questions into the chat box as you think of them, and we'll monitor them throughout the speakers talk.

And there will be an opportunity for questions at the end. We suggest that you watch this on speaker view, so you can see the slides and Cynthia most clearly. So now at long last, what you've been waiting for, I wanna introduce you to Cynthia Giles. You can see information about her on the screen here, so I am not gonna read that to you.

How tedious would that be? But I will say that I had the utmost pleasure of working with Cynthia for seven and a half years when, during the Obama administration, she was one of my absolute favorite people that I got to know at EPA. She was the head of the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

And for those of you that have been in government, maybe there aren't any on on this call, other than me, but enforcement people are a particular breed of people. And Cynthia is just one of the most thoughtful and engaging people that I know who has worked in the enforcement world.

But man, you do not wanna be on the wrong side of her. And I often speculate to myself, I imagined Cynthia having conversations with her grandchildren-
>> Telling them what they can and can't do. And I think you will get a sense of that very quickly when she starts her talk.

The work that she's been doing since leaving the Obama administration is, I think groundbreaking, and really important if we are to design regulatory programs that actually achieve the goals that they're supposed to achieve, and she will lay all that out for you. She's been having some technical difficulties, so I'm going to be sharing her slides.

So please forgive as we manage that together. And with that, I will turn it over to Cynthia to start talking, and I will switch the slide back.
>> Thank you so much, Janet. It's really fun to be able to join you on this. And I just wanna tell folks that working with Janet was one of the highlights of my time in the Obama administration.

Never have and enforcement worked so closely together I think before. And you are just incredibly fortunate to have someone so smart and dedicated. And she's mean in the gym, I just wanna say too. So it's really fun for me to be able to be back with you, Janet, and I'm sure we're gonna have no problem navigating this slides.

Just as we've had no difficulties navigating the many challenges we had together for many, many years, and I wanna thank Janet for being so patient with me. I've been yammering in Janet's ear about this topic for a long time, but she's been very patient listening to it. So next generation compliance, this talk could also be called why do we have so many environmental violations?

And what can we do about it? So the next slide, just to to give you a little bit of background about where I'm coming from when I'm talking about this. So as Janet mentioned, I was the head of enforcement in the Obama administration. But prior to that, in my career, I've been a civil environmental prosecutor.

I ran an enforcement program for an EPA region as a career person. I ran a state water protection program, and I've worked in the NGO world. And the reason I'm mentioning that is to say that my background is broad, and I have been in the trenches with individual violators.

And I've been at the top levels of policy, and I'm gonna talk to you about, next slide, what I have observed during that, unfortunately, 30 years now, time working in environmental policy. There are two commonly held beliefs. The first is that most companies comply. You hear this everywhere.

Lots of people say it, NGOs, government, everybody, they say this, most companies comply. There may be a few bad apples there, maybe some companies, especially smaller companies, maybe not all complying, but most companies comply. The other widely held belief is that compliance is the job of enforcement, that the program offices set standards, and they write the rules.

And then they hand it over to the enforcement folks, whose job it is to find the violators and take enforcement. That view that compliance is the job of enforcement is so deeply ingrained, that most people don't even know it is a belief. They think it's just the way things are.

It's like gravity, they assume that without discussion. So next slide. Unfortunately Probably won't surprise you to hear that I've mentioned that because in fact both of those beliefs are wrong. In fact, serious violations are widespread. They are widespread for all sizes of companies, all business sectors, all different types of rules.

Serious violations are common in programs to limit the amount of pollution that is allowed. They are common in prevention programs, which are designed to prevent there ever being pollution like hazardous waste transportation rules, for example. And they are common in monitoring and reporting obligations, which is how government even knows what's going on in the world.

So over the course of my career, I have asked a lot of people, including people who spent their entire profession doing environmental protection. What's their guess, about how common it is to have serious violations of environmental rules? The most common response I get is people guess serious violation there may be 5 to 10% of the companies.

You wish, okay? It is nowhere, nowhere near that low. Serious non-compliance, 25% is the norm across all programs and many are much, much, much higher than that. The other belief that isn't correct is that compliance is really the job of enforcers. In fact, it's how the rules are written that determines the compliance outcome.

If the rule has lots of opportunities to evade or obfuscate or avoid, you're gonna have serious non-compliance. The design of the rule makes all the difference. So next slide, so why do we care about this? So what that there's so much widespread, serious violations. One is that there's a lot of pollution out in the world that people are being exposed to.

So this is a map of nonattainment areas the United States. I think the most recent numbers it's about 130 million Americans are living in areas, they don't attain air quality standards. About 50% of our surface waters are in listed as in poor condition. So there's a lot of pollution problems that these violations are contributing to.

The other is that there's lots of programs that don't fall in the bucket of traditional air and water pollution, where people are exposed and their serious health threat. So lead paint is this photograph is showing is one great illustration of that. That's not a conventional that's not what most people think of when they think of environmental protection, but those kinds of programs make a huge difference to people's lives.

And environmental justice is very central to this non-compliance problem because it's the overburden communities that get hit the hardest with these violations. So next slide. So what can we do? So, what I've been writing about and working on since I left during the Obama administration, but more aggressively since I left is what is the answer to that?

How can we do better job and rules to prevent these kinds of violations and what I call rules with compliance built in. So next slide. So, the way this resonates for people the most, I think, is to see specific examples. Like what's an illustration of a rule that works well because of next gen type things, and what's an illustration of some rules that don't.

So I'm gonna go through very quickly, very superficial high level view on four programs, two with good outcomes and two with bad, to show you what we're talking about here. So starting with the ones with good outcomes are two examples, acid rain and pesticide and herbicide called paraquat.

So next slide, starting with acid rain. So acid rain is the literally acidic rain that was falling on big part of United States. You can see in that map there in the red area, huge, huge problem. And the principal contributor to it was sulfur emissions from coal-fired power plants.

And so Congress said, hey, we gotta do something about this. We got to cut that sulfur dioxide emissions from those coal-fired power plants, so how are we gonna do that? Next slide. So what came out of that was the acid rain program, which is for anyone who's at all an environmental rule afficionado, you've heard of acid rain.

Because the main thing it's well known for is its market feature, capping the emissions, and allowing the utilities to trade to reduce the costs, that's its most famous feature but that's not its most important feature. That has nothing to do with why the rules succeeded, you can see on the map there.

This program really did make a huge difference in the sulfur dioxide emissions and acid rain and really is a master class and in good compliance design for a rule. So we're not gonna talk about cap and trade because it's not relevant to compliance question. So next slide. Here's the features that were in this programme that made it so amazingly successful.

The first is continuous emission monitors. So these are just monitors that you put in the back of the power plant that measure how much sulphur dioxide is coming out of there. And they do a pretty good job at it. So actually monitoring, not guessing, not estimating, actually monitoring.

Next slide. So how do you get the companies to actually maintain those emission monitors? So they're working and they're working properly. Here's a brilliant idea that was included in this. Substitute data requirements which says, say if your sales are down for not working right or they don't pass quality assurance, you gotta assume you had a lot more pollution than you probably really did.

So the company is very motivated to keep those working. Next slide. And then adding to that you require electronic reporting of all this data. So it allows all the data to be centralized, available in real-time. And that allows data checks and data analytics and tools to verify the information that companies are submitting.

The next slide. And then here's a very important and underappreciated next gen driver provisioning rule simplicity, okay? So the underlying problem is very complex is running and maintaining these monitors is complex, hundreds of pages of guidance are needed to figure it out. But the rule design itself is very simple.

It says, do you have one allowance, which is worth a ton of emissions, you have one allowance for every ton you emitted. Yes or no, compare column A to column B. It's very hard to miss, if you had a violation, the design is elegant to make compliance very easy to determine.

Next slide. So the outcome of all this was 99% compliance, those are numbers we can only dream of in other programs that almost never happens, 99% compliance. And the last feature that was there were many others too, but the last feature on dimension here that was cool about this is automatic penalties.

So you compare column A to column B, if you're short, you're in violation. You're short on your allowances, guess what? You have an automatic penalty to pay for that shortage. And the amount you have to pay per ton you're short is way more than it would cost you to go out and buy in the allowance.

So, Why wait and pay more, it's cheaper just to comply, so all these features together led to this 99% compliance in the coal fired utility sector. Okay, so that's the acid rain example and remember that point I'm going to circle around. The second to coming back to the coal fired power sector for a programme that was, in the bad examples category.

But first, a quick word on a completely different type of problem, Paraquat. So, Paraquat is a herbicide that is used as a weed killer, very commonly used. But it is also incredibly toxic, one sip can kill you and for that reason, it's restricted use pesticides. You have to be a certified applicator to use it and part of the rules about this herbicides are, that you are not allowed to pour it into.

Wouldn't think you'd have to tell people this, but you're not allowed to import into say a beverage container. To apply it or store it, nevertheless, even though it's unlawful to do that, people do it, they do it routinely. And 17 people died from accidental ingestion of Paraquat that had been poured into beverage containers.

Including one eight year old boy who found a Dr. Pepper bottle in his garage. That his brother had put their, who had obtained that paraquat by the way from a certified applicator, and the 8 year old drank the paraquat and died. So, what is EPA going to do, so next slide, so, warnings aren't working.

There's these big skull and crossbones, there's all this, don't do that, the rules are very clear but people are still doing it, and children were paying the price. So, EPA adopted a different strategy for paraquat that said, okay, we're not going to depend on you using good judgment.

The rule now says, it's impossible, you have to design your packaging. For this herbicide such that it is impossible to transfer it to a container. Like a beverage container, without completely destroying the whole packaging, so, don't rely on good judgment, just make it impossible. So that's another next gen type of an idea that thinks a little bit outside the box.

Of how you're gonna prevent these problems and not rely on some of the comment behind and try to enforce them. So, those are the two good examples, next slide, and here's now a couple with pervasive violations. And look at what was it about the design of those programs that led to such significant problems.

And the first one is lead in drinking water, which we as a country are unfortunately way too aware of these days. And the second one is coal fired power program called new source review. Which you're gonna be happy to know you don't need to know anything about new service or you to understand this example.

Okay, so the first one next slide, lead in drinking water, so what's the problem? So, lead is not usually, practically never, is lead actually in the drinking water. That gets shipped out of the water treatment plant, where you get your water, the lead isn't there. How the lead gets into the water is, it leaches into the water from lead that's in pipes or in fixtures in your home.

So, that's a very complicated problem, so the way the drinking water standards address that is. They say you have to treat the drinking water with materials that make it less likely to leach. Lead out of the pipes as called corrosion control and that's the principal strategy for dealing with lead waters corrosion control.

The next slide, so what actually has happened with the implementation of this rule? The rule contains a requirement, it's an obligation, a legal obligation enforceable. That the drinking water systems are supposed to sample, to check if they're corrosion controls working. They're supposed to sample at the places they are most likely to find high levels of lead and they're supposed to report in, that's what they're doing.

One study that looked at all the drinking water systems in the state found that. 50% of the drinking water systems were not, in fact, sampling at the places most likely to find high lead. Although they claim they were, so there's a big hole, is that how is the lead drinking water being implemented.

The other one is that the standard is not set, it's not a fixed number of parts per billion type of thing. It's what percentage of the samples are over a certain level, so, those of you who have taken math in grade school. Will know that you can change your percentage by just changing the denominator.

So, let's say you found five bad samples out of 100, now you've got 5% that are bad, okay? That's no good, take a few more samples that are gonna be clean and now your five same number of bad samples is no longer 5%. And this is such a well established practice that it has a name in the Drinking Water Program, it's called sampling out.

Lots and lots of systems a user, one study that was done in one state said at least 30% of the serious violations were masked by this sampling out. So, there's lots of ways to avoid finding a violation by the system and then the program sets up a lot of motivation to use.

Because the cost of compliance are very high and the drinking water systems know that it is very tough. For the state, which is the principal regulatory authority, very tough for the state to find a problem with the drinking water systems, not giving them the correct data. So, the systems are very reluctant to raise their hands, next slide, so what's the net effect of all of this?

Well, I'm sorry to tell you, we don't really know what the net effect is cause one of the problems. Of all these regulatory design challenges is that the government doesn't really know how bad that non compliance is. But here's one data point, remember is in the last slide, I was talking about how.

States aren't even gonna know that there's a lot more violations that are happening to the states even know about. But EPA has done some audits of the state's data to say all right, how are you doing the ones you do know about. So, okay, there may be a lot you don't know but the ones you do know about.

Are you telling EPA about them in the way that the rules require, okay, the answer is no, they are not. The most recent audit that was done state data said 92% of the lead in drinking water violations were not reported to EPA, 92%. So, when you look at the National Data that EPA posts on its website about how we doing with lead drinking water.

Yes, that's the data EPA's got, so they're providing what they have, but it's not nowhere near, not close to what the real violations are. And the reason is all these regulatory loophole problems that make it very, very easy for systems to avoid and for states to avoid. Owning up to the violations.

Okay, so that's one of the tough, the next one, one of the not so good examples and moving on to the second and last example, is a new search review. So new search review was, Congress basically looked around and said, jeez, we got a lot of really bad air pollution as a lot of it.

And we've got, we know how to address a lot of this violations. There's some modern pollution controls that could make a huge difference, in many cases, they can reduce the pollution by like 95%. I mean, huge difference for the types of pollutants that have some of the biggest impacts on public health of anything that EPA regulates.

So Congress said, all right, here's what we're gonna do, anytime you update and modernize your plant, you're gonna install the modern pollution controls. So over time, it was envisioned over time, we would clean up the existing fleet, talking here about coal fired power plants but applied to a lot of other industries too.

But here focusing on coal fired power, over time as you modernize and update your plants are gonna install modern pollution controls. And that way we'll have gradually improving air quality as you do that. So, if you were gonna design a program to say, how could I have worse possible compliance outcome in this program?

It would look a lot like new source review, so what are the features? Next slide, so what are the features of this program that lead to such catastrophically bad compliance? One is, it was very difficult to determine what rules apply to which plant. It was very fact specific, it was individual, there was a lot of details, there was a lot of huge amounts of data necessary.

So very complicated to determine, when did you modernize sufficient that be obligated to put on the modern pollution controls? Every decision was plan specific, so there wasn't a standard way to determine that, you had to dig into the facts of any individual situation. And there was almost no report, so all the day that government would need to figure out if a particular point was supposed to be modernizing was held by the company.

And they weren't gonna turn it over without a fight. And then on top of that, Hearken back again to the drinking water situation. The controls were very expensive, worth it because the public health benefits were gigantic, but they were expensive. So the companies were very motivated to find a way not to have to comply.

The net effect of all these many pathways around through and under, was huge, the serious violations of this became the norm. Over 70% of the top 25 coal fired power companies were in serious violation. I just wanna remind everyone, this is the same sector as the acid rain program with the 99% compliance, the same company, same sector.

The problem is not the sector, the problem is and whether it gives them a way out or it doesn't. So the next slide. So what EPA decided to do looking around and looking at all the violations on the gigantic public health impact of all these violations. EPA decided, okay, we're gonna go after them one at a time.

So we're gonna use the enforcement tool, and we are gonna just go after them one at a time and it was totally worth it. Because the pollution reductions were gigantic, public health benefits were huge. But it massively labor intensive and expensive undertaking to bring all these cases 20 years and counting, that EPA has been at the job of trying to enforce this standard.

It was some one of the former enforcement officials described a new source review for coal fired power is, the tobacco litigation of environmental protection. People were just avoiding their obligations, they weren't knowingly avoiding their obligations. And they waited to be caught and forced to do it, which EPA did do, but it's the exception that proves the rule.

It is almost never possible for EPA to obtain compliance in a sector by going after facilities one at a time. That it's just there's millions of facilities in the country that are governed by EPA rules. The one at a time strategy is a one off, it's almost never possible to do it through that kind of brute force method.

Okay, so next slide. So, there's the examples I just explained and many others are posted on the Harvard environmental energy law program website. And that's in the first paper, in the second paper that's posted there. In case you thought those examples were outliers and actually compliance is a lot better new.

Unfortunately no, there's serious non compliance is widespread, and the second paper, non compliance with environmental rules is worse than you think goes into all the data. As I said before, serious lack of not just any violation is not talking about minor things, serious violation 25% is the norm.

And many have serious violation rates in the 75 to 80% range, and unfortunately, lots and lots of them we don't really know. How bad a noncompliance is and the lead drinking water is one illustration of that. That's so next slide. So, what have we learned? How can we test whether a rule is going to be compliance resilient and it's gonna be able to obtain good compliance rates?

And here's one way to do that, is for the people designing and writing rules, ask themselves this question. If the regulated parties want to avoid complying, are there many ways to do that? So I am not suggesting that they want to violate, I think that's very rarely the case.

They don't wanna violate, but they're not making compliance a priority. They wanna be in violation but they're also not doing what's necessary to comply. So what we have learned is, if there are many ways to avoid complying, there's lots of ways around creative other wall you can count on it.

There are gonna be a lot of violations, so next slide, so what can we do? There are lots, many scores of ways to build compliance into rules, many ways just gonna give you two or one high tech and one very low tech idea. And it's gonna be included in my writing to go through a lot more of these in more depth.

So on the left there, one of the key ideas, central ideas, we saw this with continuous emission monitors in the SRM program, is measurement. Measure the pollution that would say happening, don't guess don't estimate actually measure. And on the left there, those two birchers and what you see is.

This was an attempt to actually measure the OCS from refinery failures and on the left, then the blue, the small blue is the amount that they were estimating. There were VOC is being emitted from those flares. And then the red is the actual amount of VOCs coming off the flares.

That's a pretty big difference between what they were asked of estimating and what really was happening and in that different in that delta, is a giant amount of public health concern. Okay, so that's a more high tech monitoring thing and on the right hand side is that they're not all high tech.

So in the state of Ohio, they imposed a requirement for sewage treatment systems that they had to go to all the outfalls, those are those pipes that come out of the sewage treatment plant that discharge into surface water. They had to post a sign that says see this pipe, see this pollution coming out of here?

We own this, here's who we are, here's our phone number. And that's posted at every outfall. And it turns out that the sewage treatment companies really don't want to get a lot of phone calls. From people complaining about the brown for me, John coming out of the pipe and they cleaned up their act, the imposition of the requirement to post these signs improved compliance.

So the next slide, so there's a lot of strategies that can work, okay, but some things never will. And Chief among those is a strategy that counts on inputs the entire burden on government, finding all the serious violations that's ever gonna happen. That strategy is doomed. You will never get good compliance with that strategy, the honor system at just saying here's what you're obligated to do and hope for cross your fingers.

Hope for the best also doomed, Okay. The evidence just doesn't support that assumption is warranted. Widespread violations are the norm. The assumption of compliance is not worth it and the last thing that will never work is assuming that enforcement is gonna come in behind and fix these problems.

That's we're seen that work yet with the single exception of new source review and it took 25 years to do it. So that's not a good plan, so next time. So I just want to say here, so that there is no chance of my being misunderstood, because when I talk about next gen, sometimes people say to me, so you're saying enforcement's not important.

No, I am not saying that, enforcement is essential. So much to add, you cannot have an effective compliance program without it. But what I'm saying is, enforcement alone will never be sufficient to make up for the gap that is created by a rule with bed, compliance design. So next slide.

So there's one other articles already posted, which is the ideologues performance standards and market strategies, which is about the policy orthodoxy that has swept through the environmental policy world that, market strategies are the next thing since sliced bread and everybody should do market strategies for every problem. And it takes on that point of view and explains why that's not a good all purpose solution for from a compliance perspective.

Next slide. Then the next article that is coming Is advised next-gen to the challenge of our time climate change. Its we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the past when the opportunity is now upon us to do something about climate change. We can't afford to repeat those mistakes in the rules that are coming up.

Next Gen is agnostic an ideology, and it just as one question, is it gonna work? Will you get the emission reductions that you're aiming to get out of this rule? And the climate article comes to the conclusion of yes. Some of them can work quite well with a few additional provisions, I can work quite well.

But it also says some of the most popular climate ideas cannot work. So watch for that, this coming next slide on the other things that are coming, I'm working on a book, next Gen. back to University Press. Other things are gonna be covered in the book one is so if this is such a great idea, why isn't APA doing it already?

And one of the reasons is guidance. That's EPA requires EPA rule writers to assume 100% compliance just assume it. So has encouraged EPA to live in the fantasy world where 100% compliance is free. So that's been part of the barrier. Next slide. One of the things that we have to do to implement some of these next gen ideas is update federalism.

We are still living with the federalism model from the 1970s, when EPA started and it's time to modernize that. And next slide, the last part of it is environmental enforcement. Environmental enforcement, must have, essential. What does environmental enforcement look like in the next gen era? So last lesson, so why is this important now?

A few reasons, one is as we all have just lived through so visceral in the last few weeks, we are a in many ways, divided nation around some of the topics that are most central for protection of public health. One of the advantages of many of the next gen ideas is that, they're not easily classified as regulatory or anti regulatory.

And that is, a huge benefit in today's political climate. And my personal experience has been, that states of all political stripes. I can get behind many of the next-gen ideas because they wanna be effective and they can they can't be labeled as regulatory or anti-regulatory. So there's no political blow back.

So it these ideas have potential even in a time of division in our and country. The second reason is we are now at the moment. This is the moment when it's possible to make a change and do something different. It is vitally important that we not think we're not going back.

We're not going back to how things used to be before the last four years that that would be a giant mistake. We need to go forward and adopt and modernize the Environmental Protection enterprise large, and nowhere is that more important than climate change. Our time is up this he got this one's got to be right.

There's no time for mistakes we this has to work and i think that some of these ideas will help us get there. So if your left side is if you're interested in any of this stuff and find it intriguing, if you wanna go and take a look at the papers that have been posted so far on the Harvard website, the address is there.

All right, well, thanks, Cynthia. That was great. It really took me back for those of you that might be interested in reading Cynthia's papers, she writes the way she talks. So they're really very enjoyable to read and not your typical academic journal type of writing. So I'm now going to check out the chat bar and see what questions we have.

So, one question we have is, for those of us working outside of government and policy, what can we do to encourage compliance? The societal norms or consumer pressure play a role.
>> They do, provided that the people who are writing the standards, build those in, and I think one of the principal ways that citizens can help is by raising their voices and an expectation that government's gonna do something to protect them from pollution on these other risks problems.

And so if a rules design, for a consumer facing product, which is not all of the PA's rules, by the way, a lot of the companies that APR regulates they're not consumer facing like coal-fired power plants, don't interact with you on a regular basis, but some of them are.

And if government does its job to design the rule to make the most use of that consumer pressure, then you as a consumer can really make a difference by paying attention to that information that you get and making your buying choices based on it. But I would say equally important to the consumer side of things, is your voice as a citizen.

Not, that you expect and that your government to have your back and to take care of these problems. That's government's job and they should be doing it. And if you raise your voice and tell me you're expecting them to. That helps.
>> What about local governments? We know that the National Environmental Laws are implemented mostly by the states and by EPA.

What's the role for local governments?
>> Local governments have gigantic power because at the local level, the people who run local governments are, geographically very close to it. The people who operate these different facilities, whether that's small facilities to even the largest ones the people who work in those facilities are members of the community in most cases, so local governments have a lot more Clout to put pressure on facilities to do the right thing.

Then they necessarily exercise even though sometimes yes their federal standards. Still, companies are very susceptible to local pressure plus I would say the other thing that can happen locally is individual tools to apply that pressure are very possible. They're not regulatory tools, but not all problems are solved through regulatory tools.

Sometimes public pressure is more effective than a regulatory tool. So What's stopping any local government from saying here's our worst ten polluters in the town of X, post that up on your website that'll get people's attention. Those kinds of things, if you think creatively about what can be done, there's lots of ways to intersect with these facilities to get better performance.


>> Yeah, I think that's right. I think transparency and shining a light on performance in a way that the public has access to, which is so much easier now that there's electronic reporting and there's websites and people are used to finding information on websites. There's really lots of opportunities there and programs that EPA has run for years like the Toxics Release Inventory and others where companies have to report and they get ranked.

And they really don't wanna be the
>> Right
>> The company in the country that and it's the most toxic pollution of everybody.
>> It is certainly interesting, contrary to maybe what some people may think the power of being on one of these top lists actually does drive company behavior to a surprising degree.

They really don't want to be on those lists. Yeah.
>> I want to remind people if you have a question, please put them in the chat. Here's another one you mentioned federalism and that our notions of federalism are sort of antiquated. Now what does modern federalism look like?

And I'll just mention to that during the Trump administration, especially when Scott Pruett was administrator, we heard a lot about cooperative federalism and how EPA under Obama was not respecting the state's role. So I throw that into the question as well.
>> So I am a huge fan of cooperative federalism.

That's the model that almost all EPA programs are built upon. And the basic construct is you need federal standards because people everywhere got to be protected the same and you need State involvement because every place is not identical and things need to be adapted to local circumstance. The interplay between the federal standards and the state implementation has, resulted in what I would consider to be creative tension.

Okay, there's creative tension in there and has ever been thus, and so will ever be. And the federal and the state governments don't always CII on what should happen. That's fine. That's not a problem State suite in some cases badly in some places and they both learn from each other.

So where things need to be updated, I think, is the model that we first adopted for federalism in the 70s really was that all these facilities were gonna report to the state and then the states were gonna know what massage do whatever they are going to do and they will tell the EPA about whatever they designed to tell EPA about the information I mean, we're supposed to pay every view because then they really do that.

Okay. They haven't been doing that program after program, then it doesn't happen, that doesn't work that way. There might have been one could debate, but that could have been maybe a reasonable model when everything was on paper and the forms are all going to be mailed into local state office.

Okay. That's not the world we live in anymore. It is not insane to have a system where all the facilities in the country report to the States and then the States are hesitant and reluctant to share any of that information with EPA and limit what EPA can share with the public that is crazy.

So we need to be moving to a model that says the facilities are going to all report electronically into a central system to which EPA and the States and the public will all have access. That's just a different model. It's not the state as controlling access to information, why would we have that?

We are a joint system of governments to protect the public. The public's entitled to know about this information. It only makes sense that we share, because why wouldn't we? It's easy to do, there is no paper involved. Everyone should know the same thing and we're gonna have more accountable and more transparent governance and better pollution control not incidentally if we do that.

So I think it's a shift that has started to happen. It started happening in the water arena. EPA adopted a rule that basically shifted to that model for water programs about five years ago. And we need to do this I mean drinking water, the lead in drinking water is a great illustration.

why Why should it ever be possible that States know about, you know, 10 times the violations on as being shared with EPA and the public that should never be possible today. We can't have that. So we need to change the model and, and open the thing up in the way that electronic information makes possible.

Yeah, well here's another great one. I've thought about this myself a lot.
>> How does enforcement deal with accidental emissions related to natural disasters? And there will be more with climate change. Do you strive for a balance between strict enforcement and forgiveness? Or because time's up with climate change do we hold the line?

Can next gen solutions help?
>> I'm answering the first question. The last question first. Yes. Next Gen solutions can help and it's so great to get a question about this, because this is a really important part of EPA mission to deal with these kinds of problems. And it's outside of the box of your standard, water out of a pipe in air out of a stack.

But still, but far more of EPA's work is involving these types of issues than in just the standard types of air and water pollution. What we discover, when we see horrible accidents or when we see really bad things happen as a result of a natural disaster, coupled with, Facilities stored chemicals or for example.

What we typically see is those companies are not complying. Okay, that was not just some act of God who could have ever predicted. No, lots of times the reason that those horrible things happened is that the companies who were supposed to be checking for corrosion. In their pipes, or checking to make sure the valves weren't open or doing a host of other things that are preventive in nature, they weren't doing them.

And it's the nature of preventive programs that some of the time you don't do the preventive thing and there's no price to pay. Because the horrible thing that you're trying to protect against didn't happen so you're, okay? But there's going to be the time when that horrible thing does happen.

And the fact that you are caught up Then you were not doing what you were supposed to be doing combined with this external force and pressure is what created this bad problem. Most of the preventive rules are designed with the exactly. That kind of thing in mind, it's not like no one's ever thought about what will happen if we have a flood what's going to happen.

If there's no, I mean, There's plays in the country, they get those things all the time. So the rules say you have to be anticipating that you got to do this whole variety of things that are designed to make people allow people still to be safe from the chemicals or process or whatever you do, even though This bad thing is happening because it's not unpredictable or unforeseeable.

exactly when and how it's gonna happen. Yes. But not that there will be things like that. No. So what EPA typically finds is that there was a violation. Under there, underneath a violation of prevention obligations that led to this. So so this is right up the alley for next gen is to say, well, how are you gonna make that.

How are you gonna change the dynamic there so that we aren't in this pattern of no one knows if you're violating these prevention things until the catastrophe strikes, and then, the chemicals are all released and the people are all exposed. And now we're going to come after you enforcement I mean, yes, do we have to do that we do.

But that's not sufficient. That's not okay. The people who are exposed don't find that acceptable outcome. We have to do a better job of making sure those things don't happen. And that's what next gen is for is how to how to use the right tools and levers of government.

To create the situation where you have far, far fewer of those kinds of horrible problems.
>> Well let me ask you one more question that I think springs from that which is the examples that you share are great both pro and con and I've been involved in some rules that Were really creative ideas came forward that I think we're right in the in the space of Next Gen. But it but it's hard.

It is not the traditional way that regulators at the state or the federal level think about writing rules. So how do you insert the creativity? How do you bring the creativity in a different perspective? And I'm wondering if you know some of our academic colleagues who sit around and think outside the box maybe more than government Regulators.

Maybe should be sitting at the table have having these brilliant ideas. Hey, maybe we should just do it this way. Well, I would say two main things to that. One is sort of the inside the room. Strategy is we need a way to work into the rewriting process that, Question that I mentioned earlier on in the presentation of, are there ways for people to get around this stop and think for a second, are there?

And my experience has been and I talked to folks who were in the room writing rules and that you ask them that question. They think, yeah, okay, but that's not gonna happen. And it's no. You're wrong about that. If there's a way around, that is gonna happen. So it's getting people to understand that they need to think about their job in a different way.

And the other thing this is sort of my my next gen mission writ large, I guess I would say is To change those foundational assumptions that just about everyone involved in the Environmental Protection web of people who are focused on this. Just about everyone believes and have people stop saying most companies comply.

That's wrong, that is wrong. So we should just stop with that as an assumption. And we should stop with the, we know when there's these big catastrophes, or there's some horrendous criminal Well act, and everybody turns, you know, all the eyes pivot to enforcement and say, what are you gonna do?

I'd really like if that time, if all eyes would pivot to the people, wrote the rule and said, what is your problem? Okay.Why did you promote this? to happen.Now I think a different attitude maybe among the folks who write the rules that the assumption that compliances the job of enforcement is wrong,yes there's an important role for horsemen but the reason e have al these violations is we didn't do good enough job Designing the regulatory standard.


>> Well, this has been great. Cynthia, thanks so much for sharing your thinking with us. It's great and I think new and different for a lot of the people who are listening so keep it up. People, check out her papers and. come back and join us in December to hear Jeremy Crandall


>> Yeah,
>> that was beautiful. All right.
>> Thanks so much for asking. Bye everybody.

Description of the video:

>> Hello everyone, welcome to the ERI, or the fall Environmental Resilience Series, jointly presented by IUs integrated program on the environment, and the Environmental Resilience Institute. Before we start, I'd like to make the following statement. Indiana University wishes to acknowledge and honor the Miami, Delaware, Pottawatomie and Shawnee people on whose ancestral homelands and resources Indiana University was built.

So both IPE and ERI are founded on the understanding that interdisciplinary learning and research are essential to teach today's scholars, and to solve today's problems. IPE is dedicated to bringing together all the environmental and sustainability scholarship across the various schools and departments on the Bloomington campus. IPE is made up of over 120 faculty and nearly 1000 students studying the environment from all angles, the sciences, arts and humanities across more than 25 degree programs.

ERI was founded in 2017 as part of the IU Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge. Its mission is to enhance resilience to environmental change in Indiana and beyond by accurately predicting impacts, and effectively partnering with communities to implement feasible, equitable, and research informed solutions. So first I'd like to thank Sarah Mincey from IPE, and Marianna Canes from the O'Neill School, who helped organize a seminar speaker series.

We've had a wide variety of speakers over the course of the semester, and we have more to come. And our speakers are sharing their experiences, research, and insights with us. In particular, our speakers will focus on topics relevant to the issues, systemic racial inequality, environmental injustice. And the need for a just transition to a future that's healthy, and safe for all people, not just those you have been privileged by centuries of inequitable systems in societies.

You'll be able to find more information about each talk on the ERI and IPE websites, and you can also sign up for regular newsletters. So we encourage you to sign up for our newsletters, so that you can get reminders about these upcoming events. So please be sure to keep your audio muted.

And whenever you have questions as you think of them, type them in the chat box, and we'll monitor the chat box throughout the talk. And there will be an opportunity at the end for questions to be answered, and those will be directed to the speaker from our moderator, Heather Reynolds, who is now gonna introduce our speaker today.


>> Hi, everybody. It's great to be here with you today. I am delighted to introduce Dana Habib. She is an assistant professor currently in the Department of Informatics here at IUs Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, otherwise known as SICE. Dana was trained as an architect and urban designer.

I love that. She has master's degrees in City and Regional Planning, and in architecture, as well as a PhD in City and Regional Planning. These all come from the Georgia Institute of Technology. And her research explores climate responsive design interventions can help to mitigate climate change, and improve the health of individuals and communities.

And we have been really fortunate to have her as a member of the Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge working group in urban green infrastructure. Where she has been mapping local climate zones to better understand people's heat exposure in Bloomington and Indianapolis, as well as mapping green stormwater infrastructure, and developing an edible tree map for Bloomington.

So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Dana.
>> Thank you, Heather, so much for that introduction, and welcome everyone. Thank you for being here today. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen with you all. Great, can everyone see that? Wonderful, so thank you all for being here today.

Today I'm gonna be talking about extreme heat vulnerability, and what we can do to protect and empower communities. In this talk, I'm gonna go over three main topics. I'm gonna first talk about work that we've done with heatwave trends. Then I'm gonna talk about different types of mitigation strategies that we can use at the local level.

And then I'm gonna talk about some more recent work that I'm doing with sensing technology. I'd like to start with the discussion on extreme heat and public health. We see that in the United States, more people die to extreme heat than any other form of natural disasters. On average, we can see upwards of 1300 people who will die to extreme heat per year in the United States on average.

And we can look at historical heatwaves, such as the European heatwave of 2003, and the Russian heatwave of 2010to see some of these examples of extreme heatwaves. Where in each of these events, over tens of thousands of individuals lost their lives during these individual events. These two heatwaves rank among two of the deadliest natural disasters in the past century.

And it really illustrates the importance of extreme heat to public health. We see that cities are more vulnerable to extreme heat because of what is known as the urban heat island effect. And the urban heat island effect occurs when we see temperatures in cities are higher than in their surrounding rural area.

This temperature differential is due to basically how we are designing cities. We are displacing the natural vegetation in cities, and replacing them with impervious surfaces, such as roads, parking lots, and buildings. And all that impervious surface goes to raise temperatures in urban environments. But one thing that we don't just see a distinction between urban and rural and temperatures, but we actually see that temperatures vary dramatically within a city, and that we see a lot of different microclimates.

And as Heather brought up some of the work that we're doing with the urban green infrastructure is mapping local climate zones. What urban climatologist have found is that there are different types of microclimate zones that really impact temperatures. And so we can expect that temperatures are higher in downtown areas, and they would be in a more residential area.

And so for example, we can see this variation. This is some work that I did last year, looking at temperatures on campus. And we can say a day of September that between Luddy parking lot on an unused campus and Dunn Woods, we see an 8.5 degrees difference in these two areas, which are pretty close together.

So not only do we see that cities are consistently higher than their rural areas, but we also see that temperatures and cities are actually increasing at a faster rate in rural areas. And some of the work that we've done has found that urban temperatures are rising at double the rate.

Cities are even more vulnerable to extreme heat because of this increase in trends. And then cities are more vulnerable because of what we're seeing with climate change. In the past five years, we have the hottest years on record with 2016 still the hottest year from start to end.

And as you all know This has been definitely a trying year for climate change where we really have it on the forefront of our mind. So I'd like to transition into some of the work that we did with heat wave trends. And so with looking at extreme heat in cities, I really want to investigate how are heat waves changing specifically in cities?

And so to do this work, I looked at the five largest US cities across the United States and I tracked heat wave changes over 50 years. When tracking these heat wave changes, I defined extreme heat events based on Gaffen and Ross definition that a heat extreme heat event is any day in which the apparent temperature exceeds the 85th percentile, the long term temperature average, of a particular location.

The phrase particular location is really important here because we are using the local climate trends for each MSA to base on these EHEs. And that's really important when looking at health effects in determining what is an EHE. We used apparent temperature, was combination of temperature and humidity because we know that humidity really impacts our body's ability to cool itself and is a better measure, apparent temperature is a better measure of heat stress.

We used the National Climate Data Center Heat Stress Index for the temperature. And we specifically were looking at daily minimum apparent temperatures, minimum referring to high nighttime temperatures. And we define heat waves as any two consecutive events, EHEs that lasted two days. We're really interested in looking at specific heat wave characteristics.

And so, what we would see is that we expect that heat waves that lasted longer would have a stronger impact to health effects because it doesn't allow for people adequate recovery periods. Also we see that heat waves that occur early in the year also impacts public health and mortality effects, because it doesn't give a person's body's ability to acclimatize to these higher temperatures.

So we actually see a huge impact to mortality at the beginning of heat wave seasons. So we wanted to track how heat waves were changing with regard to temperatures. And we're also defining them with minimum temperatures, these high nighttime temperatures. Because minimum temperatures have been shown to be a better association with negative health effects due to extreme heat.

And this is also important for cities because we see that minimum temperatures are amplified in cities because of the urban heat island effect. So what we find from this analysis that we see that all four heat wave characteristics, a frequency duration season intensity are increasing across the United States over the five decades.

We see that heat wave frequency, for example, is increasing by 20% each decade on average across large cities in the US. We didn't just look at this on average across the US. We actually looked at the individual trends for each of the cities. And one thing that we did was we grouped our cities into what we called vulnerable cities.

And a vulnerable city was any city that had a heat wave characteristic that was increasing at a faster rate than the average United States. And you had to have an increasing rate above the US standards in at least two heat wave categories. So these are a list of our vulnerable cities that we identified.

And so we can see that the cities are pretty distributed throughout the United States. Really showing that no matter where large cities are located, cities really need to be planning for extreme heat. Also one thing that we noticed is that cities on this map and especially when we did this analysis that weren't considered hot cities were popping up as vulnerable cities, like San Francisco and Portland.

Los Angeles, which this year is had record heat waves which were unprecedented. And so even during the study we're already picking up these vulnerable cities. San Francisco was ranked as a vulnerable city with regard to three heat wave characteristics, timing, frequency and duration. And San Francisco had the fastest growing heat wave season of all cities in our study.

So for example, heat waves in San Francisco were starting in 1960 by the middle of July. And by the end of our study, we're seeing them start by the beginning of June, the end of May, a month and a half increase in heat wave season. And so this work that I did looking at heat wave trends, I worked with the EPA to actually recreate this methodology, and extend it to present day, and to keep this work being updated to turn this into a Climate Change Indicator.

And so we worked on the data I'm gonna be presenting data are specifically ones who were extended out to 2018. And we didn't just do minimum temperatures, but we added maximum temperatures to look at the different definitions of heat waves. And we did a subset of the analysis as well to look at 1988 to 2018.

Because in a future work that we're working on now is that we wanna look at urban growth, and understand the correlation between urban growth and urban heat islands with regard to the change in heat wave trends. Some cities change in the analysis due to data availability. Let's see, this our data that we had before.

And that we see when we add our next decade, approximately the next decade, we can see this continued increase in our trends with the biggest difference within heat wave frequency and heat wave season. That's what season we see, on average a 16 day increase on average across all cities in our study for heat wave season.

And so we see how what's considered hot in our urban areas, the time of day is really starting to change. This is a map showing this different cities in the study that we're looking at with the graduate symbol representing decadal change rate for each of the heat wave characteristics, the frequency and season.

And so we also looked at this with regard to minimum and maximum. So here's a slide where we put the two next to each other. So we see the minimum in blue, the maximum in red. And we can see there's not as clear of a pattern as we saw with minimum with regard to maximum.

But when looking at specifically the frequency and season, we see a much clearer relationship between minimum. And we're looking at the last two decades and especially that we're really seeing that minimum temperatures may be starting to outpace maximum temperatures or heat waves when defined as maximum temperatures. And so this is important for two reasons is that we see this difference one thing that we want to tease out as I noticed is this difference between minimum maximum and how we're defining temperatures.

Whether we see that this difference might be caused by urban heat islands. So we see the synergistic effect between urban heat islands and heat waves. And that this is increasing the vulnerability of cities to heat waves and to climate change. One other thing is to note is that there's no consistent heat wave definition.

One of the studies that did a large literature review on different heat wave definitions and metrics used in research has shown that studies use different threshold values, different temperature metrics, different meteorological variables. And so there's no consistent heat wave definition at any level. And so as we can see, depending on how we define find a heat wave whether by minimum or maximum, we can actually see different trends.

And some research is also showing that depending on how you define them, you see different impacts to mortality as well. And so one thing that I noticed when doing the literature review for this paper that we're writing is that we see that of the 16 heat indices exam and only two of them use minimum temperatures.

And so minimum temperatures is being overlooked as An important metric to be used. Minimum temperatures are important for defining extreme heat events because they've been shown to be a better association with negative health effects. When looking and examining the heat wave of 2003 in Europe, researchers found that minimum temperature is one of the biggest drivers for extreme heat related mortality in Paris during that 2003 heat wave.

Also researchers looking at the difference between Europe had a heat wave in 2003, and then another large heat wave in 2006. Comparing these two heat wave events and comparing the mortality between them as well as meteorological conditions. A lot less people died in that 2006 heat wave, even though maximum temperatures were very similar and sustained in the same way.

People argued that this could be because the community was better prepared, because Europe definitely was not prepared in 2003, and so they were better prepared. But also a big difference meteorologically was that the minimum temperature was different, and one of the main climate differences between these two heat waves.

And so this is a discussion we want to bring up, is the importance of knowing how to define our extreme heat events. And also to try to make a standard that can be used for people consistently across the United States. And so the EPA has taken this heat wave trends and they have released it with the US Global Change Research Program.

And now it is one of 16 climate change indicators used for the United States. And so you can see it down here in the bottom. And so this is important because we want our cities to be able to plan for Climate change in cities. Not all cities have the resources to do climate projections or trends analysis, or to run big modeling programs.

But what the EPA is doing is releasing the methodology, the process of releasing the methodology and the access to publicly available data. And so now 189 cities across the United States have access to this data as well as methodology so that they can plan for climate change trends in their specific city.

And so that's one thing that I think is really important for us when thinking about how we can prepare is to understand our risk to climate change and to extreme heat. And the climate change indicator is one way that cities can start doing that. And so what else can we do to plan for events and heat waves.

And so what we're seeing that cities can do is that they can prepare emergency response plans. And so they can look at staffing and make sure that we have appropriate staffing during what really is the heat wave season. And look at infrastructure resilience and public education. And include infrastructure for extreme heat such as cooling centers, especially for vulnerable populations.

But cities can also manage their ambient heat. So one of the research studies that we did, we examine all climate action plans for the largest 50 cities. And when we did this review, we noticed that nine in ten US cities were pursuing policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But only one in eight were pursuing policies designed to manage ambient heat. And this is an opportunity for cities. And so what it means to manage ambient heat is to manage the urban heat island effect. And we have specific strategies that we can use. We can do albedo strategies.

And albedo strategies are where we are changing the reflectivity of surfaces. Example of their cool roof programs. Or also the work being done in Los Angeles right now with their cool streets where they're really looking at the practicality of actually changing streets, and the albedo of streets, and the cost and the benefit to that.

Albedo strategies are really useful especially for places that don't have a lot of rainfall like Los Angeles. We can look at waste heat strategies and specifically bring an energy efficiency. We see a lot of waste heat from all the machines that are being used in our urban environment, a huge part from transportation sector.

But also from everyone using all their air conditioning and as our main adaptation device during these extreme heat. But we can also look at vegetative strategies. And so vegetative strategies have shown to be one of the most effective strategies at reducing the urban heat island effect in places with sufficient rainfall.

And they've been shown to reduce urban heat island effect by as much as 50%. And so we vegetative strategies can include Green roofs and we can look at Chicago's aggressive, green roof policies that's linked to their FAR policies. And we can also look through urban forestation and programs that big cities like New York and Los Angeles are doing to plant millions of trees within their urban environment.

As well as all the great work that's being done the state agencies to actually support their urban forests by tracking them and managing them and, maintenancing them. And so all of this is great work that can go to making us more resilient to extreme heat. And so we see this is example of Paris.

I was in Paris last year when they had their big heat wave at the end of June and it was an experience to be there. I was there actually giving a talk similar to this on extreme heat. And Paris since it was so impacted by the heat waves and the European heat waves 2003 and 2006 are really pushing really great policies to try to adapt and mitigate heat.

And so Paris is bringing in huge, mature trees into their urban environments in a way that they've never done before. And actually it's interesting for me as an architect and urban designer to see that they're putting them in front of The Opera and the Hotel Deauville, of these iconic buildings that were designed to be open and have a beautiful vistas.

So it's really interesting to see Paris begin to remake itself more as a green city. But they're also, having access, it's important that the public has access to green spaces to cool. But also to spraying and misting systems to cool people in these environments. But also just the presence of water actually cools the near surface air temperatures because of the process of evaporation.

And so with the different strategies, I was really interested to look at the role that urban agriculture can play in lowering temperatures. And so this was some work that I did was I looked at the role that urban agriculture can play as a heat mitigation strategy. Specifically looking in the city of Atlanta.

And so for this work, I looked at both the MSA level for Atlanta and then the city level. I included land cover data and I use temperature data, satellite data that was specifically nighttime data. It was really important that I use nighttime data because number one, as we talked about the minimum temperatures have the stronger effect to heat mortality.

But because I was interested in urban agriculture, I was apotheosizing that agriculture would have a greater potential than other green infrastructure strategies such as tree canopy at actually lowering nighttime temperatures. And so I really want to look at that as well as look at the timing of how well do these green infrastructures perform during times of extreme heat.

For the city level I brought in urban form variables, and so like Heather brought up earlier, we're working on doing local climate zone mapping for Bloomington, Indianapolis right now. And this is one of the reasons why, is so we can see and have a better understanding of how temperatures are changing.

And so this was some of the local climate zone work and the urban form parameters I put into the analysis at the city level. At the MSA level, I found that agricultural lands actually outperform forested lands in reducing nighttime temperatures. And so there are different reasons why we would expect this.

And one of the main reasons is that trees Actually contract temperatures at night because of their wonderful canopy that we use and rely on the daytime that cools in the day. So in no way is this work trying to say that trees are not good for for helping us with extreme heat and heat waves, because they are.

But it's a larger discussion to understand that maybe we have different strategies that we should look at when we're designing these type of green infrastructure strategies. Also, we found that if we increase 10 acres of agriculture within a one kilometer grid cell, that we saw that we could reduce approximately 10% of Atlanta's urban heat island.

And so this is going to this understanding that we can start seeing some impact at this local level. Looking at it at the urban scale, I was really interested to see, number one, if we saw an interaction effect between where we placed agriculture. So for example, if we place agriculture in a dense downtown area, do we see that it decreases temperatures more than if we place it in a residential area?

And what I found in my initial analysis was that I didn't see an interaction effect, that the temperatures decreased, but there was no significant difference in the way they decreased unless I looked at the difference whether a heat wave was occurring. And if a heat wave was occurring, we actually saw a difference in the reduction in temperature, and greater temperature reductions in urban areas.

And so heat wave was acting as an effect modifier, and I think this is a really important thing to bring up. Because when we're designing for communities and green infrastructure, we need to make sure we understand how these strategies work during times of extreme heat, and because these are the times when we need them the most.

I was really interested to see if we see the same amount of decrease in temperatures from agriculture during heat waves. And what I saw was that urban agriculture decreased temperatures less during heat wave as compared during non-heat wave, but retaining approximately 25% of its cooling potential. So it decreased temperatures less, but it still cooled temperatures.

Whereas forests actually started having a slightly positive effect on trees at night. And so this is, again, important with regarding this understanding of timing and the importance of heat waves. I was also interested to see how big of a land do we need. So we're gonna put urban agriculture in to reduce temperatures.

Where do we actually, can we just put a small parcel, is that enough? Or do we need to see a sizable area? And so the work was teasing out that. What we were seeing was approximately 7.5 acres were needed. We start seeing this almost threshold effect happening around the 7.5, where we see decreases of temperatures happening at this one kilometer grid cell.

And so this goes to this understanding that for policies, and this is one thing I want to bring up with how do we make our communities resilient and prepare for extreme heat, is that we really need to design targeted policies, and so targeted policies to actually address these conditions.

So one thing is that we see with agriculture, one of the biggest cooling benefits is that it's often irrigated. And that is that presence of water that helps. But it also has to do with different parameters to model resistance that impacts our cooling potential. And so it's really important that during heat waves, that we're actively managing our green infrastructure, and specifically our urban agriculture.

And this is a hard question during extreme heat, because usually this is hand in hand with droughts. And so communities are going to have to make these tough decisions of how do we decide to use our water. And water is a scarce commodity, and so I don't have a clear answer there.

But this is one of those discussions I want to help contribute to, that if we do want our green infrastructure to help cool us during these times, there needs to be some active management for them. Also, the location of agriculture matters. So urban, we should keep urban agriculture urban.

And so we see a bigger effect during heat waves if we put agriculture into downtown areas, as compared to residential areas. And those were the two, actually, the local climate zones we compared those two. And so this might be going in the face of some policies in some cities who are really pushing to support urban agriculture.

But Philadelphia zoning ordinance, for example, doesn't allow commercial agriculture, or market or community supported farms, in the downtown area. And so there might be good reasons for that. But again, this might be losing the opportunity for agriculture to be able to cool these places. And then, size matters.

And so like we saw that 7.5 acres are needed to start seeing a decrease in temperatures at this one kilometer scale, but the largest farms in the US are around 5 to 6 acres. And there's not a ton of them that are that large. And so we really need to be thinking about how we can leverage public land.

And so Park Pride in Atlanta is a good example of how they're leveraging park space in order to turn that into agriculture space, or Philadelphia has an interesting vacant toolkit. So this brings me to another study that we did, which was a climate modeling that we're looking at specifically.

And so what we were interested in seeing is can we say, if we project client data out to 2050, then can our climate responsive designs cool temperatures up to? And so what we did was we were really interested to see, for example, with these climate adaptation strategies, was that say, for example, if you paint all the roofs in a city white, how would that impact climate?

Or if you put trees in all the variable space, how would that impact climate? And so we looked at this at three different cities. We looked at Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. We looked at their population change and used that for projections up to 2050. We did the climate modeling through WRF, so we used the regional climate model of WRF to do our climate models.

We actually also looked at land cover and looked at how land cover has been changing, and projecting that out to 2050 as well, as an input into our model. And so we developed these different climate scenarios. And the climate scenarios were pretty much based on a greening scenario, an albedo scenario, and then a combination of the two.

And for the greening and the albedo scenario, we designed the policies so that they would target either public land or private land. Cuz we were really looking at policies that would be implemented and enacted for parcel level development, and so policies that cities could use through zoning ordinances or different policy approaches.

And so we put this into a health effects model called BenMAP to also model the effect of the prediction of mortality that would result from different climate factors. And so we see from the analysis that this is showing a difference between business as usual conditions, and so these are grouped by the different policies and the different cities.

And so we can see that these are decreasing in different ways in the different cities, but for the most part, decreasing. And then we can look at this with regard to mortality, and this is looking at the differences in death. And we can look at, how many lives can we save with these type of climate adaptation policies?

And so with the policies, what we found was that places like Phoenix, it was the albedo strategies that worked better in Phoenix than say, the vegetative or the combined. And that makes sense because Phoenix is a very dry and arid place, and so the albedo enhancement policies are gonna be Better suited for a place like that.

Whereas in Atlanta we see that, the combination of the two of the greening, and the albedo have the biggest impact. And that with the all click, when bringing everything together in Atlanta, we could almost reverse the impact, from climate change. And we could save a large, almost 80 to 85% of lives that, would have been lost.

And so, this really gets that understanding or location. So when designing policies, we need to really understand, which policies work for our region or location. But one thing that we also did in this study, which I want to discuss here was that, we looked at the distribution of environmental health benefits, from these different climate adaptations scenarios.

And we looked at this, with regard to the distribution, with regard to the age of the residents and the cities. The medium income and then the race, and we want to see if, we saw differences between these variables. That, if we put these climate adaptation scenarios and very poor areas, do we save more lives?

And if we put them in areas that are wealthier, or if we put them in places that are more predominantly white, versus areas are not white, and so we actually see that, we can save more lives. If we target our policies, to areas especially for Atlanta, Atlanta was the clear one here.

Where we actually see that, we can save more lives if we target our strategies, in areas of low income as well as in, with regard to race. And this is, I think on everyone's mind right now is, I feel we're having this larger discussion of, looking at systemic racism in our communities, in our cities.

And I want to bring up this wonderful New York times article that, I'm sure most of you, had seen that release in August of this year. That really was, illustrating the great series of works that, have been released recently on tying redlining historical, redlining of communities of the past.

To the fact that, we're still seeing the effects of that systemic racism, and that within these red light communities, we see less green infrastructure. And we also see that, these are areas that have the highest temperature. So I want to play another image that, comes from the New York Times article Atlanta here, and so we see areas that were aided areas as bluer than areas that, were degraded If we try much harder.

And so, I think that this again, brings up this importance with regard to policy. And that, not only should we be targeting policies, with regard to how can things reduce temperatures the most, or how large should green infrastructure be. But also, where we can actually save lives the most, and where our most vulnerable populations are located in our communities.

And I think that's an important discussion, for cities and communities, to be able to protect them in the most vulnerable. And so, what we see with vulnerable populations is that, we see that age has a huge impact to vulnerability, to extreme heat. The very old, very young are very vulnerable to extreme heat.

We're actually seeing more focus on extreme athletes, and how they're becoming more vulnerable to heat, by performing their high performance, in these extreme heat conditions. And that, we're even seeing this down to high school football players in college football, an increase of deaths from heat strokes, to these athletes.

To the point that, it got brought up for Congress, something to be discussed, and dealt with. And so for communities, when preparing for extreme heat, we should know, where our vulnerable populations are. So, we should be looking at this, with regard to age and income. But also isolation, isolation is a huge variable with regard to vulnerability, to extreme heat, especially the elderly living alone.

Access to air conditioning is really important, because we see that, air conditioning is our main source adaptation during these times of extreme heat, as well as income. Which those two can go hand in hand, pre existing health conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease. And respiratory diseases, all show that increases a person's risk to extreme heat events.

And so, these are vulnerable population characteristics that, community should understand and really be targeted in their communities, as well as understanding exposures. So not only who's more vulnerable, but who's being exposed to higher temperatures. Very similar, to what the New York time article is showing, the researchers looking at redlining, and the correlation of temperatures and infrastructure.

But areas with high impervious surfaces, and lack of green space, housing conditions, and lack of transportation, these are all things that can increase our exposures to extreme heat. I love this quote by a researcher Arnab Chakraborty. Says, we need to better understand where the most vulnerable people are, in order to get to them quickly, and to reduce their vulnerability over time through planning.

And so I suppose, the immediate reaction that we need to be thinking about, extreme heat, as well as how can we increase the resilience over time? I wanna bring up some work that I did on sea level rise, in the Georgia coast, with specifically talking about a vulnerable population.

So we looked at the impact of sea level rise, with regard to physical geographies, and social geographies, and on the Georgia coast. But with social geographies really, we're looking at social vulnerable, and social vulnerable populations. And we work directly with the Gullah Geechee, and the Gullah Geechee is one of the most intact African cultures that, we have in the United States.

With direct ties to West Africa, and their community lives, and is distributed from the Carolinas down to Georgia, and North Florida. And these communities are often located on islands, on the Georgia coast for example, we were working with ones off of Sapelo Island, communities of Sapelo Island. And with sea level rise, we're gonna see a huge impact to these communities, because of them having to retreat on land.

And if they are retreating on land, what is going to happen to this very important, and very rich culture that might be lost? And so when we're thinking about vulnerable population, I want us to think about, the demographics and exposures. But also the importance for heritage, and culture that could be displaced, and last due to these changing climate.

So I'm gonna wrap up by talking about, some work that I'm doing in smart cities, and environmental sensing. And so, when I talk about environmental sensing, and smart cities always bring up the question of why sensors? Why do we need sensors, to really look at extreme heat? And so, one reason as we had talked about, in the lectures, we see that temperatures vary dramatically within a city, due to urban heat on effect.

But most cities are only quantified, by one meteorological station for their location, for their region. Which is normally located in airport, and one meteorological station just is not sufficient, to be able to depict the temperature variation in an urban area. And so, researchers use satellite data a lot, which is very useful and, but satellite data also has this limitation, due to a spatial scale as well as to temporal resolutions.

And so that is one reason, as well as the fact that, satellite data is capturing surface temperature, and not capturing near surface air temperature. And as the near surface air temperature, specifically two meters, which is the direct that's the best, to associate with negative health effects. So for us to really tie this to health effects, we really need that two meter, and that distributed into the environment.

So this is why, we're seeing this push towards low cost ubiquitous sensing and our Urban environments is for these different ways as a way to improve our understanding of exposures to high temperatures. As well as to better quantify these different climate responsive designs. And so Chicago array, we've seen sensor networks pop up in different areas in the United States.

And Chicago array I think is the most prominent one where we're seeing around 40 to 80, or 100 sensors, I think now at this point, but plans of installing up to 500. So the most I think, well established one, sensor network or they're using where they're calling these modules are capturing way more than just temperature data.

But a series of environmental data as well as sound and video data. And this person is some of the work that I'm doing here on Bloomington IU campus is where I'm putting sensors onto IU campus to start monitoring how temperatures are changing in the urban environment. And I've also put sensors into different locations of urban agriculture in Bloomington to look at temperature and relative humidity.

But also to monitor solar moistures and to really start trying to investigate the impact of solar moistures on temperatures as well in looking at agriculture. And so these are some of our sensor systems that we have deployed on campus and in Bloomington. And so a simple visualization that I can show is that when looking at just three of these sensors and looking at them, let's say in a parking lot and a forest area, and in a community garden.

We see that the orange is the parking lot and as the hottest one that we see in day and night. And so we can see that the temperatures increase here in the daytime, and it come down at night. And so we're seeing these diurnal temperature trends here with this graph.

But we can see that the temperatures in the parking lots are the hottest. And then actually the coolest in the daytime by a significant amount are those located specifically, this is a done with sensors, it was located on woods. And that the community garden is in the middle.

But we see this flip-flop here which is what my research previously were showing, that it's actually, agriculture actually cools temperatures better at night than forest. And so we see this flip-flop between forest and agriculture. So it's nice to be able to really tease out these impacts of temperature and not just at one point but really thinking about the diurnal temperatures and changes in an urban environment.

And the importance that minimum temperatures plays for our communities. And so what this is I've got ongoing a new project. And so this work is being funded by the National Science Foundations to cry program. And so where I am putting both these institute sensors like I explained earlier as well on body sensors to look at heat exposure.

And so with the on-body sensors for monitoring individual's heat exposure, we want to monitor individual's heat exposures. And we're really looking at this for validating wearable sensors, we're really interested to see can sensors, if we wear them our bodies really be able to capture heat exposure. Because that would be fabulous if we could get that data.

And we're starting to see a lot of research that is starting to use that because these are really important for putting on vulnerable populations, and seeing their exposures throughout the day. And then we'll be moving into really thinking about personal heat response, which is really thinking about how our body responds to heat, that actually how exposure.

And so we ended up having four different sensors that we use. And we put them all over our body based on the literature to see how they perform in different environments, specifically looking at it on woods and lotty parking lot, and see how well they perform. And what we found from this research is that the sensors actually are not performing very well.

That they're actually over heating, especially in areas of high impervious service, as well as indirect sunlight. And so this is really a push that this is an important technology that we could really use this for vulnerable populations and for communities. Urban communities with changing climate, and this could be an important area for intervention in order to capture heat exposure.

And so with my sensor network, I've been working on a series of different projects, and really thinking of how can we use sensor networks to help stakeholders and communities. We can definitely use sensor networks to improve our methodology, to understand urban climatology better, and heat wave trends, which is very important.

But we can also look at it through looking at and quantifying green infrastructure performance or in times of extreme heat, maybe tying that into smart irrigation and water harvesting. So that we are harvesting, protecting our green infrastructure. We could use it for building energy and the role of looking at building energy modeling, as well as the potential for emergency response.

And so that's one of the things that we're wanting to be working on in the near future is how can we really depict how temperatures are changing our urban environments. And how can we give this information to people in their built environment so that people have a better understanding of their hyper local heat exposure when they're moving through an urban environment.

And then another project that we're working on now is actually looking at building energy with regard to green infrastructure. And trying to see specifically on campus if we see that buildings use less energy if their surrounding with different types of green infrastructure. And so that's work that we're just really starting to really delve into.

And the role of sensor deployments could really enhance this work to really understanding the correlation of the near surface air temperature outside of buildings. And then one that I'm very interested is really this emergency response. And how can we tailor emergency response to vulnerable population mapping with sensor networks.

So that as the researcher said in Chicago, how can we get people in emergency response to people when they need it at that time. So that wraps me up for my talking as we really want to talk through how we can empower and protect our communities. And so I went through talking about heat wave trends, and it's important for communities to be able to really assess their heat wave trends and their vulnerability to extreme heat.

Looking at different climate adaptation strategies and the role of that. And that when we're designing policies that we should be designing targeted policies to make sure that we're getting the best bang for our buck. But also that we're actually putting policies in places where vulnerable population and disadvantaged communities.

And those who are most vulnerable in our communities are located. And then the discussion on sensing technology, and how sensing technology can help us to better be prepared. So thank you very much.
>> Thank you. Adam, I don't know, are we supposed to unmute everybody or do you want me to-


>> No, you'll ask the questions.
>> Okay, great. Well, Dana, thank you. I'm clapping vigorously on behalf of the whole crowd, I'm sure, because that was fantastic.
>> Let me mention real quick that if folks have questions that they haven't asked yet, they can type them into the chat now.


>> Thanks, Adam. And yes, Dana, that was a fantastic talk. A really wide ranging but cohesive talk that really gives us an excellent view of so many of the different complexities, policy issues involved in thinking about how to keep our cities cool. So, that was really enjoyable. We do have a first question that came in early on in the talk, when you were talking about, excuse me, your comparison of cities with respect to their vulnerability, so the vulnerable cities analysis.

And the question is have you compared vulnerable versus non vulnerable cities from the vulnerability analysis to see if there are any trends with local zoning ordinances or other policies that contributed to whether a city was vulnerable or not? Or do you think that cities being vulnerable or not is totally a consequence of geography and natural features?


>> So that's a great question. So I didn't talk about this enough, but that's where our future work for this study is gonna go is really look at the difference between minimum and maximum temperatures. And I worked with on the urban climate lab back at Georgia have done trends analysis for urban heat island trends.

And so we really want to correlate how quickly cities are increasing their urban heat islands, with heat wave trends. And if we see that places that have large growing urban heat islands are correlating in places with increasing heatwave trends, then we're wanting to try to start teasing that out with regard to development policies.

And with regard to lack of green infrastructure and increasing re-purpose surface and increase the population growth and sprawling of communities because we see a direct relationship between sprawl in urban heating as well. So that's a great discussion, that's where we really kind of want to tease that out more to see, you know how our cities becoming more resilient because they have better strategies for design and development.


>> Thank you. Okay, another question, how do you determine heat wave season for a particular location.
>> So we don't define the heat wave season so we let the data tell it to us. So we define it when the heat wave starts and where the heat wave ends, and so then we look at the start of the first heat wave, and then we calculate the time to the last heat wave.

And then we look at how heat waves are increasing earlier in the year as well as how they're lasting longer in the year and that's that, we're looking at. So we don't say heat wave season is may 1. Instead we're saying no, the heat wave season is actually expanding and changing and this area is based on the fact of it's not just when the first extreme heat event is but when the first heat wave is.


>> Okay, thank you. Another question on COVID and heat waves you mentioned that those most vulnerable to heat waves are the elderly, the isolated etc. This is similar to who is most vulnerable to COVID. What can we learn through this pandemic on helping those vulnerable to heat?
>> That's why Such a great question I actually spoke with media outlet about this summer.

There's a lot of correlations between extreme heat, extreme heat mortality, extreme heat vulnerability and COVID. And so looking at pre existing conditions the elderly or to make people more vulnerable and so things that we can expect things that become problematic during times of extreme heat is the fact that if we have power outages, and people need to get to cooling centers, just like we see with what's happening with the hurricanes, how we shelter in place together can become more problematic.

People can't just go as easily to the library and cold themselves down because it's a hot day because the library's closed and not allowing people in. And so these normal public infrastructure that are cooling centers for people. Especially people that don't have air conditioning, become really important. But also one thing that I thought was really interesting between the link between COVID and extreme heat is his understanding of how people started really reaching out to their elders during times of COVID.

Let me go shopping for you do need something? And what we see is that this type of check in is really very effective for the elderly and for saving lives, and so the two historical heat waves that people talk about in the US are the heat waves in 1995 and 99.

And these heat waves are very similar characteristic. Semiological characteristics. But in 99, they saved a lot more lives. And one reason is, again the communities more prepared and one way they're more prepared was because they did knocking on door campaigns of going to check and elderly who were isolated.

I think that was something really beautiful to see in COVID communities. Not someone asking for help, but instead asking people how can I help you? I think this is the mentality that we need to maintain a support of how we can continue this type of check in support for most vulnerable during these times where going outside is the exposure.

Great question, I feel like I could talk about that all day.
>> Another question that came in another interesting characteristic, looking across cities is that some like San Francisco, don't have a robust network of centralized air conditioning due historically not needing this, while others like Austin already have more widespread access to residential air conditioning.

Do you think that there will be positive feedback in those cities without current air conditioning networks as they're installed this will accelerate their heat wave extremes faster than other cities with this already built in.
>> So we definitely see this problem with housing condition. And so when we're thinking about housing condition, we can think about insulation you can people who live in and trailer homes are going to be way more vulnerable as well.

So housing conditions really important. That area around the housing is really important for increased exposure, but access to air conditioning is extremely important. And so what we're seeing, it's not just access. So access is really important for places like San Francisco and Paris. So you go to Paris and those buildings did not have AC.

And so it is very difficult to be inside of a building in Paris during a heat wave is very dangerous. And so that's a really important question of how do we transition these communities that because for the most part, San Francisco, people that live in San Francisco was like, I'm not going to pay all that money for an AC when I only need it like a week of the summer.

And so there is this built in vulnerability that they're not prepared for this. And so hopefully this leads to that discussion these housing conditions do need to be upgraded and we do need to access air conditioning. And it is this wonderful question as that again just like watering agriculture, there is always a double edged sword here that use an air conditioner is gonna be using more energy that's going to be increasing waste heat that's going to be increasing climate change.

So there's not just a simple solution here. But we can think about energy efficiency, we can think about where that energy is being sourced. We can think about the fact that as well not just access but the ability to pay for AC and for air conditioning, a lot of low income communities go without AC because they can't afford those high bills.

So that's an important aspect of what as well or if their conditioning breaks in the middle of the summer, being able to just have that money to fix it. And I was literally writing an NSF grant this summer, all about this work, and my air conditioning broke. And it took so long to fix it in the middle of the heatwave, and we couldn't go anywhere because of COVID.

And I was sitting there writing about vulnerable populations. It was like my method, I felt was my method way of actually Writing a grant. But it really illustrates to me at that moment as well. But it's expensive to even fix our air conditioning unit. So there is this importance that we think about with housing, housing stocks, the healthiness of our housing stocks, but as well as income and the ability to be able to afford and have access to air conditioning.

Do we see a measurable heat island effect at a town as small as Bloomington?
>> Yes, we would see one. I haven't actually calculated it here in Bloomington that should be something I do the next little bit because I do get asked that a lot. But we are already seeing that these differences in microclimates, but what we might not be seeing is that they're not gonna be as intense as we see if we were studying this in Indianapolis or in Chicago.

We might not see this increase in the trends that we're seeing as clearly as we see in these larger cities. But we still see this distinction between this urban in the world here. And so that's a great question of knowing at what level do we see that impact.

But the work that we were showing before the trends was really looking at large cities and saying no matter where they're located, they should, and I think that can, we could do another analysis looking at smaller cities as well. We'll look at their trends across United States to see yes, these cities have made that argument that these cities are as vulnerable as well.

And I think that would be an interesting thing to dissect.
>> Okay, and this is gonna be your last question because I actually have to go to another Zoom at 1 o'clock. The question is for cities with heat monitoring networks, what's the recommended geographic distribution?. How far apart should sensors be?

So that's a good question. That's something we're trying to figure out right now. So right now the density that we have in our network on campus is I can't remember what it is off the top of my head. It's definitely less than a kilometer, a sensor and it's at least double that.

And that was around the recommendation. I still think that is something we're trying to figure out as we were gonna be testing how we can effectively map temperatures in urban environments by using these sensors. And so, one of those questions are gonna be how closely do they need to be located to each other to be able to get these valid temperature readings, as well as what's the density of them?

So that work is starting to come out. And I think that's a interesting one to, a great question to ask of what's not just how far but what's the density of the sensors as well? That's something that we're currently investigating.
>> All right, well, thank you on behalf of, you know what I'm trying to say.

I thank you the whole crowd, this was a fantastic seminar and really enjoyed it.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you, Dana.
>> You're welcome.

Description of the video:

>> Hello everyone, welcome to the fall Environmental Resilience Speaker Series jointly presented by Indiana university's integrated program on the environment, and the Environmental Resilience Institute at IU. I'm Adam Fudickar, I'm a research fellow at the Environmental Resilience Institute. So we're pleased you're able to join us, we have a great lineup of speakers throughout the fall who will speak on a range of interesting topics in a format that will allow for interaction with the speakers and an opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue.

Both IPE and ERI are founded on the understanding, that interdisciplinary learning and research are essential to teach today's scholars, and to solve today's problems. The Natural and Social Sciences, the humanities and the arts are all critical and in play as we tackle climate change, and the environmental challenges that are affecting our health, our communities and our economy, here in Bloomington and around the world.

The IPE was founded in 2012 by the provost and the leadership of the O'Neill school, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Public Health. To bring together all of the environmental and sustainability scholarship across the various schools and departments on the Bloomington campus. IPE is made up of over 120 faculty and nearly 1,000 students studying the environment from all angles, the sciences, arts and humanities across 27 degree programs.

The ERI was founded in 2017 as part of the IE prepared for environmental grant challenge. Its mission is to enhance resilience to environmental change in Indiana and beyond by accurately predicting impacts and effectively partnering with communities to implement feasible, equitable, and research informed solutions. I'd like to start by thanking Sarah Mency from IPE and Mariana Cains from the O'Neill School, who organized the speaker series.

We have a wide variety of speakers who can share their experiences, research, and insights with us. In particular, our speakers this semester will focus on topics relevant to the issues of systemic racial inequality, environmental injustice and the need for a just transition to a future that is healthy and safe for all people.

So here's a list of just a few of the talks we have coming up this semester. If you go to our individual web pages you'll find a complete list, and you can sign up for our regular newsletters so that you can receive information about coming in advance and notices about our upcoming talks in the speaker series.

So you can also see the information for our social media for the ERI, here's the IPE webpage address and the IPE social media information, so we encourage you to sign up for our newsletters. Before we start, I'd like to ask everyone to mute yourself and if you come up with questions during the talk, please enter into the chat box.

At the end of the talk, we should have time for questions, so we'll address the speak with your questions at the end. And I'd now like to turn it over to Jim Shanahan, Dean of the Media School at IU and Associate Director of the ERI.
>> Thank you Adam, great to be here with all of you.

And thank you so much for coming to our talk and it's my pleasure to have the duty to introduce today's speaker who I know very well because she is an assistant professor here, in our own media school. I'm talking about Suzannah Comfort, Suzannah has her PhD from the University of North Carolina and her work focuses on a variety of issues in relation to environmental communication.

Quite a variety as a matter of fact, including such topics as how environmental issues are covered in news and journalism. How communication is done performed and how effective it is by environmental NGOs, and many related topics. Very worthwhile diving into her CV later if you get a chance.

Prior to coming to IU and also prior to her PhD work Suzannah has also worked in the environmental communication field, as the editorial director of a magazine called Oceana. And a lot of really great research on topics as varied as, working with the archives of environmental groups, to look for communication issues and patterns, there are.

Topics like who gets covered in international climate change coverage. She's looked at the environmental messaging of Pope Francis and has also developed a lot of expertise in the overall field of environmental communication, with a systematic review of our environmental comm literature. So I'm really pleased to have her as a colleague, I'm pretty sure she's a native Hoosier as well right Susannah?

Giving me the thumbs up there, and so, thank you so much for coming to hear from Susannah Comfort. So this is Susannah I'll turn it over to you.
>> All right thank you, Jim. Please let me know if there's any issues hearing me or anything cuz I said earlier, I'm still skeptical about zoom and making sure I have the technological expertise.

All right, so I'm gonna share my screen, so give me one second. All right, does that look good? Everyone can see it Jim, you can see it? Great, all right so topic of my talk today is Journalists as activists and activists as journalists. How the American environmental movement has used journalism as an advocacy tool.

So essentially here what I'm interested in is the relationship between journalism and advocacy. And basically, a fundamental question in my research is what is journalism, and who gets to count as a journalist? So, today I'm gonna dive into a historical project that I did, but I do think it's relevant to our current media landscape, and I'll try and make some of those connections, as I go through the talk.

My goal is to have time for questions and discussion at the end, so hopefully I'll be able to get through this quickly, I'll do my best, cuz I do want to have a conversation. So, when we think about news, we think about, big news organizations like I've got NBC News, NPR, Fox News, Wall Street Journal.

And these large mainstream news organizations all operate in pretty much a similar fashion. And I know what you're thinking, NPR and Fox News have nothing in common, how dare you suggest that they operate similarly? And it's true that in terms of their story selection, and how they present stories and the fact that NPR is a radio station and Fox News is a cable TV channel, there are differences between these news organizations.

However, when we look big picture about how all these mainstream news organizations operate, they have more in common, than they don't have in common. So for example, they are professional, they are produced by people who are paid to produce journalistic information. They are operating under the, a similar series of norms and practices in the sense that they go out with a mission of being factual, of presenting events as they happen of presenting a plurality of voices.

So, and an important characteristic they have in common, although NPR is a bit of an exception to this, but most of these mainstream news organizations are also commercial. Meaning that they operate under market conditions, they need to appeal to a wide audience their subscription or, Are advertising supported.

So all of these characteristics result in sort of constraints on how they operate. And even if you disagree with some of the coverage you see from different news organizations, they are going out with a mission to be factual, and to present multiple points of view. They may not execute in a way that's always satisfying, but they're all operating under the same basic assumptions about what is journalism.

However, when we sort of step back to think about other definitions of journalism, we can start to include other forms of doing journalism. So I've posted a couple of historic examples here. So the North Star to the upper left there, that is Frederick Douglass abolitionist newspaper. Below that I've got a socialist newspaper, and we've got here an example from the LGBT Press.

So in addition to these large mainstream kind of general interest news organizations that operate sort of in commercial market based orientation. We also have a whole universe of smaller niche or alternative presses that are presenting alternative points of view. So today, abolition would be a mainstream perspective, but it was not a mainstream perspective when Frederick Douglass was writing about it.

Others sort of outside of mainstream thought like socialist thought, or LGBT rights, etc. We're historically excluded from our national news organizations because national news are so big picture commercial, general interest news aims towards the middle in terms of American values. And when a group presents an alternative worldview or perspective, it's often excluded from those mainstream news organizations.

They just don't receive coverage or when they do, the coverage is extremely diminishing towards towards the movement or towards alternative points of view. So this type of journalism has been around for, in the history of the United States as long as we've been around. And it goes by a number of different names, alternative journalism, dissident, advocacy, or social movement journalism.

And it has some characteristics that are fundamentally different from our traditional mainstream journalism. One is that it's often non commercial, meaning it's produced by amateurs. It's funded in some alternative way, may get some advertising funding, may get some subscription funding, but they're often seeking other formats to fund these these publications.

They're written by people who's primary identity may not be journalist, it may be activist with journalist kind of as a secondary identity. And they're not as interested in presenting a plurality of points of view because their point of view is excluded from the mainstream. They don't really feel the need to quote unquote balance their point of view with a mainstream point of view that has historically suppressed their point of view.

So the orientation and the way these alternative presses function has been really different from the mainstream press. And there's been a lot of good scholarship on the African American press in American history, LGBT press, and these other social movement presses. So, this quote just kind of summarizes what these alternative presses are doing.

The capacity of a society to learn and respond to change conditions is less dependent on the generation of alternative worldviews, open communication of these realities into the general stock of common knowledge and the use of this knowledge in the development of social institutions. So there's two ways that niche perspectives and social movements can do these things, generate alternative worldview and one of those is through traditional journalism.

So these commercial mainstream news organizations are a route for the generation and adoption of alternative worldviews because they provide this public forum and they have a really broad reach. However, mainstream journalism has more often function as an agent of social control rather than social change. Meaning that if you were an abolitionist, you were unlikely to get your perspective represented in mainstream, well, what would have been to the mainstream commercial press back then.

In more recent years, you can even see today in the way that the news generally covers has been covering the protest/riots depending on who's covering it. That usually even today, news coverage of protests tends to diminish the political aspirations of the protesters, and instead focuses on the destruction and disruption to the social order.

So, journalists like to think of themselves as really progressive and pushing for social change, but usually the reality is not so progressive. So the basic questions that I am interested in and I'm going to attempt to answer or address a little bit today include why do social movements choose journalism as a tool for furthering their goals?

When traditional journalism hasn't really done a great job of representing social movements. What are the potential pitfalls for journalists operating in this uneasy space between journalism and advocacy? If you know anything about journalism, you know that one of the bedrock rules is that your traditional journalist is not supposed to be an advocate, they're supposed to be a dispassionate observer.

And the social movement or alternative press violates that assumption because participants in social movement journalism are also participants in the movement. So, there's a gatekeeping action that goes on where traditional journalists don't wanna acknowledge that social media movement journalism or advocacy journalism also performs journalistic functions. How to advocacy organizations balance the requirements of the journalism field with the requirements of the advocacy field when they're operating under two very different sets of norms and assumptions?

And to bring it to our current media climate, what does it mean for journalism and society as we see more and more advocacy, nonprofit, and/or partisan news organizations entering the field? So I'll kind of address it at the end. I'm not gonna answer all these questions, of course, because this is a lot, but these are the sort of the general guiding ideas.

So in my particular area of expertise, what I'm interested in is the environmental movement. As a social movement, the environmental movement has been an interesting one because it is one of the most mainstream of social movements which is a bit of an oxymoron. Because usually social movements exist, sort of opposite the mainstream because they want to change mainstream thinking.

But at the same time, the environmental movement has had to push for social change and has dealt with conflict throughout its entire existence. So I won't go into a long detailed history of American environmentalism in the interest of time. But let me just briefly sketch that there really wasn't much of an organized environmental movement until about the turn of the 20th century.

And that's when groups like the Audubon Society, and the Sierra Club were founded, Wilderness Society it was a little bit later in the 1930s. But these groups operated primarily as niche special interest groups that were interested in narrow topics. Sierra Club was very focused on Western mountains, Yosemite area, California specifically and preserving those areas.

Audubon was very specifically focused on bird conservation. So it wasn't until the 1960s that we saw kind of a shift from a niche special interest group that had small memberships in the low thousands, to a mass social movement. And the difference between being a niche interest group and mass social movement is the ability to capture the attention of a wide swath of Americans, average everyday Americans rather than people who only care about mountains or birds.

And that's what happened in the 1960s along with that whole protest generation, civil rights movements, women's rights and so on. The environmental movement followed up on those other movements and captured a really broad coalition of interest. So we saw a lot of movement in the environmental movement interest in 1960s into the 70s, and it was quite bipartisan, quite widely supported.

It wasn't until the 80s that it started to become more partisan and now we see more of a split between conservatives and liberals on environmentalism. However, it did enjoy quite a long period of broad bipartisan support in the middle of the 20th century. So, one of my interest is in how these organizations, many of which have now been around for over 100 years or close to it, use journalism and media as an advocacy tool.

Meaning that when they were going out saying look, we want to get better policy for bird protection, we want to set aside more acreage for wilderness protection. They weren't just doing, behind the scenes lobbying, although they were doing that, they were also taking these claims to the public sphere.

And we know one of the basic assumptions of alternative media and social movements media is that you have to take your perspective just from the niche, the interest group of people who are already engaged and bring it to the broader public sphere. And that's one leverage one lever of social change.

So what these organizations did is they produce their own media. And one reason why they produce their own media is as I referred to earlier, the national news media or sort of typical state level media as well, newspapers, they didn't cover this very much. Environmental journalism as a beat, meaning organizational sort of section or resource, a place where news organizations would spend resources.

Environmental journalism as we know it now really didn't exist until the late 1960s, so well after the public had gotten really engaged with environmentalism. So you couldn't really take these claims just to the press because the press was not very interested, it was not viewed as news, someone has to make it news.

So what these organizations did instead was produce their own news, they performed a journalistic function, and they produced these membership magazines. I have some examples up here, Audubon and Sierra magazines are still existing today and have circulations of over half a million each. Wilderness no longer existed it folded in, I think the early 2000s, but it did exist from the 1930s until then.

And all of these went from being very small membership oriented magazines that had circulation of a few thousand to, more general interest going beyond just the niche group that already cared about their issues trying to take it to a broader public. And so even today, this is from Ottawa magazine from two years ago, they're using the language of journalism to convey their legitimacy.

So this is an editorial by the then editor and chief of Ottawa magazine. He's drawing a really interesting distinction here, he says odd as this may sound, Audobon italics is not Audobon, not in italics. The magazine is function as an independent journalistic entity, published by the National Audubon Society and covering topics of interest to the organization members.

For the entirety of its hundred plus years and counting, it's not a house organ, its value derived entirely from its integrity. You can trust what you read here is factually accurate and fair, blah, blah, blah. So you see that he's making a claim that look, we're doing journalism, this is our line in the sand, don't tell us that we're not, we're really doing this.

So one thing I went and I looked at, in the archival research that I did was I went and I wanted to understand what these organizations were thinking. When they redevelop these magazines from being quite niche oriented, to general interests, conservation, or environmental publications that would push forward the environmental cause.

And especially in the case of Audubon, it became a nationally awarded magazine at one it was the first advocacy produced publication to win a national magazine award for reporting excellence in the 1970s. So it was kind of the the flagbearer for this genre of publication. So what did they do for this project?

Actually, let me go back to this is a more pleasant slide. I went to the organizational archives of each of these organizations, Sierra Club archives are located at the University of California in Berkeley. Audubon organizational archives are located at New York Public Library, and Wilderness societies or archives are at the Denver Public Library.

So I last year, with a little bit of funding from IU as well, I was able to go to these archives and look into what were the conversations inside the organizations about adopting journalism to try to further their social movement goals. So actually, the first organization to broach this idea within the environmental realm that I could find, was the wilderness society, and I apologize for the quality of this slide, that's gonna be a theme.

But this is a letter from Howard Zahniser, who was a founder of the Wilderness Society, to the president of the Wilderness Society, Harvey Broome in the 1950s. And he says a matter that's been in my mind is the need for more forceful interpretive journalism in our field of conservation.

For a periodical that would be independent of inhibitions arising from off the record cooperation and confidences with officials, and other organizations that would come up promptly and currently with news and editorial interpretation. And then skip to the next paragraph, if you look to our recent winter magazine, you will see something like an illustration of what I mean.

With a magazine of color, regularity and frequency of appearance maybe by monthly instead of quarterly. And the appeals of editorial time and attention can give it I believe we could achieve a strong influence for wilderness preservation. So he's saying that, journalism is a tool to get us to our goal, which in the Wilderness society's case is increased wilderness preservation.

And one interesting thing that you see in this field, is the influence of a lot of former journalists. Howard Zahniser was a former journalist a newspaperman before he became involved with environmental advocacy. And he actually went on to become the main architect of the the Wilderness Act in the 1960s, which was a major piece of legislation.

But he wasn't alone, many of these organizations had former journalists as directors or presidents, or other high level positions in these organizations. So you see they're bringing that logic from the journalism field into the advocacy field and thinking, how can I use this tool to further our goals?

So Howard Zahniser was on the forefront, but it wasn't the Wilderness Society that really set the stage for journalism from environmental advocacy organizations. It was actually the Audubon Society, they really took the lead. So here's an example of an issue of Audubon Magazine from 1960. You can see on the left, we've got some pictures from their annual black tie gala.

Everyone looks quite grim, but I think they're having a good time. But you see, there's the photos, it's very promotional. It's not especially interesting if you're not a member of this particular group wanting to see your picture in the magazine. The other genre of article you would see in Audubon in the early 60s and before was ornithological essays about bird species.

So here's one about the purple capped fairy hummingbird. The author of this piece, Alexander Scutchess, an ornithologist. So this was the sort of pre-journalistic Audubon Magazine. Promotional in nature, highly niche, not especially compelling from an art perspective, or a narrative perspective. So they realized this was a missed opportunity here.

And they actually engaged a consultant firm, Cresap McCormick and Paget in New York, Ottawa's also based in New York, to do analysis and come up with recommendations for the magazine's redevelopment. And they came up with these four ideas. Immediate action should be taken to strengthen editorial impact. It should be made more attractive.

We should continue to invest in editorial quality as we go up in circulation. And we should reduce the cost of producing the magazine. So classic, you should do more with less kind of attitude. But what ended up happening is Audubon was successful beyond its wildest imagination. This consulting firm estimated that their circulation could go from about 30,000 to 50,000.

They actually went up to more 350,000 within five to seven years, so it was really a successful redesign. So what did they do? Almost immediately, this issue is 19, I wanna say 66, they hired a new editor in 1966, early 66, named Les a former newspaper man from Michigan.

And he decided this was no longer a magazine about birds, this was a magazine about the environmental movements and the ongoing destruction of the American environment. So the type of journalism you'd see in the magazine in those years was articles like this one, that used very dramatic language.

An offense against America, a mountain is ravaged, a valley shattered. So we've traveled a long way from those pictures of the men and women in black tie at the gala. Now we're going into in-depth and lengthy, I mean, these articles were just thousands and thousands of words long.

Lengthy in-depth investigations into broad environmental issues that were not limited to birds. So to give another example, a couple other examples from those years, the 1970 on the right there. On the left we have an article about pollution, which was a major concern in the 1960s and 70s.

Of course, it still is today. And on the right people pollution. Perhaps a term we might not use today. This article is written by Paul Ehrlich. If you don't know that name, he was a biologist who wrote a famous book in the late 1960s called The Population Bomb.

There was a very prominent theory about environmentalism at a time that was basically Malthusian, saying that we were producing more and more people and the earth's resources couldn't keep up. And Ehrlich was one of the primary proponents of this perspective. So you see here we're doing journalistic work but also drawing on some non-journalists to produce it, such as Paul Ehrlich being a scientist.

But in using narrative, using drama, using a lot of the same concepts that are in sort of traditional mainstream journalism. And I give this example as well, this is from the 1971. So at this point the magazine's circulation was well over, I think 3 or 400,000. A far cry from where it had been ten years earlier.

And here we have an example of a bird-related article. But if you read the article, it's about the moral dilemma facing falconers. Within the bird community, there was, I suppose there probably still is, a variety of perspectives about the morality of owning falcons and training them in falconry.

So this article gives those multiple perspectives. So it's, again, drawing on this traditional journalistic practices of presenting a plurality of points of view. Where in the past, Audubon might have only published the anti-falconry point of view, now they're presenting both points of view. So a balanced vision of this type of issue.

So we're, again, drawing on these traditional journalistic norms and practices. And George Laycock is a professional writer. Previously, the magazine, the only authors in it were amateurs. They were unpaid, so they submitted their own essays, essentially. So we've got to move towards professionalism, a move towards more actual journalists contributing to the magazine.

And the actual work they're producing resembles mainstream journalism. And at this time in the 1960s and 70s, it was a real heyday of narrative long form journalism. And there was a broader conversation ongoing about, how should journalism be produced, and is it possible to be a dispassionate observer?

At that same time we saw the rise of what was then called new journalism, which you may be familiar with when you think of Joan Didion's work. And there are numerous, what's his name, I'm gonna blank on all the people whose names I've read. Hunter Thompson's work, of course.

Where the writer embeds himself or herself in this issue and becomes an actor, so to speak. Not an actor like they're making it up, but an agent within the story, that they're acknowledging their presence within the story. So there is this broader questioning of, what does it mean to be a journalist?

And I think it kind of cracked open the possibility that an advocacy press like Audubon Magazine could be one of those journalistic outlets, be considered journalism, if we're questioning, what are the fundamentals of journalism at this time? So did it work for Audubon Magazine? It absolutely did from a circulation point of view.

They went from, let's see, 1965, less than 40,000 in circulation to over 300,000. And that was just within about one decade of redeveloping the magazine. So they were able to sell ads, which raised a whole other bevy of questions because they sold ads to timber and oil companies, which raised some controversy within the organization.

And really broadened the reach. And helped the claims of the environmental movement reach a more mainstream audience. What ended up happening was the magazine was so popular, it was actually read by both environmentalists and groups you might consider non-environmentalists. Because you might have it at the dentist's office, for example.

So if they ran an article about oil companies They would often follow it up with a letter to the editor from the oil company, disputing claims made in the article. And in that way, it served as a forum between multiple points of view. So what did it mean from an internal point of view?

So you have an advocacy organization, its goal is to increase bird protections. It doesn't identify fundamentally as a journalistic organization. So here is the example of a memo from the president of Audubon Society, Carl Buchheister. I can't remember the exact year, this was about 1966, I believe. And he's referring to an article that was about to get published.

And he says, I disapprove 100% of our publishing this article or even aiding in having it published elsewhere. It's no good, the article could expose us to libel suits. This is the kinda article that involves policy decision of the board level. So here he's saying, you don't have full autonomy, editor Les Line, to do whatever you want.

We have to be cautious, we can't just publish anything, because we could get in trouble. Here's another example where an internal conversation revealed some of the dynamics at play here. So this is a memo from the vice president of science, he was one of the science directors for the Audubon Society, to the editor of Audubon Magazine.

And he offers, he says, I offered to personally review, if time permits, articles 1 and 2, and volunteer Gene's services, if time and logistics permit, to review 3 for general scientific content and accuracy. So he's just saying, let us take a quick look, a little fact check on your work.

And this was Les's response, you don't have to read the whole thing, but it basically says no thank you. And when we want your services, you will be asked, and don't hold your breath. So here he says, we will not routinely submit our articles for review by you and your staff.

And that it is our historic procedure to submit galley proofs of all articles to the Society president, as publisher of Audubon. Beyond that, the responsibility for the content of Audubon lies with the editors and authors. So from the editor's perspective, Les Line, he's saying, look, we're journalists, we take responsibility for our material.

And we are not going to allow you or our co-colleagues here at Audubon Society to get involved. We make the decisions, we're operating as a journalistic entity. And so Les Line and these other editors would often draw this line in the sand. But the reality was actually a bit more nuanced in terms of whether non-editors within the organization could influence the content of these magazines.

And one reason why this was an issue was because readers could not distinguish between Audubon in italics and Audubon Society, which I think is reasonable. So this is from a letter to the editor. No matter how you may say that the reader of Audubon Magazine should know that the Society is not endorsing every view expressed in the articles.

Nevertheless, the readers of that magazine are gonna feel that it's being used as a forum for the expression of views of the writers. And they're gonna translate that into a feeling that we endorse those views. Actually, I believe this is not a letter to the editor. This is from one of the board members of Audubon Society.

So he's saying, look, how can we expect our readers and audience to read articles and say, that's not the Audubon Society view, when it's in Audubon Magazine, which is a fairly reasonable question. Here's a memo from the chief scientist at Audubon Society, who had a long-running campaign against Les Line and the magazine.

Everywhere I go in the nation, Texas, Florida, California, I run into objections about the Society's stance that's represented by Audubon and editor Line. If you have been at all inclined to view my feud with Les as a personal problem, I urge you to inquire more carefully because I think the Society has a serious problem on its hands.

So here, again, he's saying that look, people think the organization is the magazine. And this presents a real problem for us when we don't endorse all the views in the magazine but it says Audubon on it. So this conversation, I had found a million examples of it not just within the Audubon Society but also the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society records.

That doing quasi-journalistic or journalism work within the confines of this type of organization is really fraught because of these confusions about what editorial independence means, if you can have that. And how other people are going to perceive you, the organization, or the journalistic entity as social movement actors, as journalists, etc.

So to summarize those points, the problems with doing journalism within the boundaries of a non-journalistic entity with its own social change goals. Editorial independence will always be negotiated. So I actually gave a version of this talk to the National Audubon Society in January in New York. And after I concluded the talk, and I went into a bunch more examples of conflicts between the editorial team and the board of directors and other staffers at the Society.

And the first thing someone said was you could swap out all the years for 2020 and it would be the same. So even today these conversations are the same, like what does it mean to produce editorial content? How can we reflect the organization but also confer the legitimacy of independence, of factuality, etc.?

Another thing that will always happen is that traditional journalists will continue to seek to exclude advocacy presses from the, quote, unquote, club. So to give an example, the Society for Environmental Journalists is the main trade organization that represents environmental journalism in the US. And they have membership rules where if you receive most of your income from, quote, unquote, advocacy press, you can't be a full member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Which is really challenging for freelance journalists, which most environmental journalists are, because there aren't that many full-time environmental journalism positions. Freelance journalists, their income varies year to year, their clients and outlets that they publish in vary year to year. And so they're being told, well, you don't count as a full journalist if you are writing for Sierra, if you're writing for Audubon, etc.

So there's a gatekeeping action going on that I think is ultimately a bit fruitless and undermining to the Society of Environmental Journalists, but it's happening. And then lastly, the other thing I want to touch on is that even in a social media reality, so the examples I just gave are from the 60s and 70s.

You think, the media landscape has changed so much now. I would say, yes, but, yes. But traditional journalism in the form of these big mainstream news outlets still continue to be an important pathway to legitimacy, scope enlargement, and mobilization. By which I mean that there are examples of social movements that we can name just even in the last few years.

Where social media was the primary format where people communicated and created an imagined community. And that has kind of replaced, in many ways, what these magazines did 30, 40-plus years ago. Cuz they also served to create a forum and an imagined community of supporters of people who are geographically dispersed.

So now we have social media performing that role. However, when the traditional large news organizations notice it and if they do choose to cover it, it does confer. I would argue, it still confers legitimacy to the social movement by saying, this is a big enough deal that now it's on NBC Nightly News.

And it also allows activists to Enlarge the scope of their claims and their issues and increase mobilization, you can mobilize through social media. Absolutely. But I think that boost you get from especially television news, which is still such an important purveyor of information today, that there's still going to be this relationship between traditional news and advocacy presses even if the advocacy Media is in the form of digital social media.

All right, so I wanna end with just touching on the current landscape for environmental journalism. So, I think there is a, as I stated before, environmental journalism as we know it today really didn't exist until the 1960s. News organizations didn't start applying resources to it until the late 1960s.

And since then, the resources that news organizations give to environment journalism has varied a lot. It goes up for a little while. It goes down for a little while. And then, it kind of just cycles through. But I do think that we are seeing more awareness environmental issues are pervasive.

They're kind of like the master problem that underlies a lot of other problems in our society. This is the front page the New York Times from just a couple or last week, talking about what's going on in California. And calling them climate events, like this is related to climate change.

And it's having a major impact on our society today. Beyond that, what I'm seeing is an explosion in nonprofits, environmental journalism. So, one I would recommend is inside climate news. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning news organization that has a lot of what you might call traditional journalists working for it.

It's not attached to any advocacy organization. It's funded by Pew and a variety of other sources. So, they can attempt to, avoid those pitfalls of working from an advocacy perspective. There's also right here at IU, tlhe Indiana Environmental Reporter, which is fulfilling a really important news needs since there's very few dedicated environmental journalists in the state of Indiana.

Now, the IER is funded by IU and the media school. They do make a, try to make a distinction that they don't work for the media school, they don't work for IU, so they should be independent. But with these organizations, any of them inside climate news or IER, the question of how ownership might influence their news production is always an open one.

And you really can't know till you start looking at what kind of news they produce. And lastly, I wanna touch on Heated which is a climate newsletter, email newsletter. Newsletters are having a moment. I'm also has a podcast. And this is a weekly newsletter produced by Emily Atkinson, who is a journalist, and it's quite good.

If you are interested in viral news, I'd recommend signing up for it. And she posted this on twitter not too long ago. And I think it's really relevant to our discussion about environmental journalism in general. And she says, as a journalist, I've often been being partisan for supporting issues like equal rights and climate justice.

But I believe that making your values known makes you more trustworthy, not less. I believe such lack of transparency is why many Americans don't trust reporters. So, what she's getting at here is, it is a trend in journalism more broadly away from the dispassionate observer, and toward the idea that we can't avoid bias.

We can only acknowledge it and be transparent about it. So, we're seeing transparency as a news norm ascendant. And environmental journalists in particular have been tarnished with the brush of lack of objectivity for the last 50 plus years. I interviewed some environment journalists for another project a couple years ago, and I asked them about this.

I said, what do you do when people say that you're biased, cuz you're environmental journalist, and you must be anti business, for example? And one of them, well, he got so angry, journalists can be really, really righteous. And he said, it's stupid to say that cuz I'm an environmental journalist.

I must be anti business. You don't tell, don't say health reporter is like, Pro heart attack or, Anti healthy vegetables or healthy lifestyle. And I thought that was a really good analogy, but for some reason, environmental journals in particular, have been having searched onto the side within the broader journalist field, is being somehow compromised or not objective.

And what Emily Atkin is expressing here is that it's not about pretending to be totally dispassionate and unbiased, and without any kind of opinion or perspective, it's about transparency. And I think that is a broader trend within journalism, more widely. So with that, I think I'm gonna end it, because I would like to have a conversation for a few minutes before we end.

So, thank you so much for your time. And perhaps, we can talk for a little bit how.
>> Thank you Susanna. Susanna, can you hear me okay?.
>> Yes.
>> Okay, thank you so much. So, let me first remind folks that if you have questions, you can submit those to the chat, and I will ask them, up Suzanna.

And so, just type away and then those will get in there really quickly. So, while I'm waiting for those, let me start with, you give a sense of what you perceive the overall frequency of coverage of environmental issues to be in all the forms of journalism that you mentioned.

When we compare it to all the other issues that compete for our attention.
>> I would say on the whole, it's very low news priority. I think you see spikes in attention when there's a major sort of driving events. If there's a hurricane, for example, that as historic in some wayz because it's stronger, bigger storm surge, etc.

Then you might see a spike in sort of climate change related reporting. But usually, it fades off. I'd say it's not a stable beat at most news organizations. Usually, it's the kind of beat where a journalist might pick up because they especially want to do it, and are interested.

But there's very little institutional resources for environmental journalism. We just saw in the last few years, the New York Times and CNN both dismantled their climate desks that they had. They had both built a pod of 5 to 10 reporters who worked specifically on the climate beat, and then, after a few years, got rid of it.

So, you saw there's kind of a movement towards, we're gonna really, dedicate resources to this. And then, a fading away of those resources. And I've seen that pattern when I've looked at it from a historic perspective. It's been pretty much that pattern since the 1960s. There's a big wave.

There's from 1968 editor and publisher reported, I think two environmental journalists in the United States that labeled themselves as environmental journalists. By 1970 there are over 100, but Newspapers. But today, I have a number of newspapers that have an environmental journalists are very few. I think Indianapolis Star only has them because they're grants supported.

So, people are looking for alternative routes to support environmental journalism, because for whatever reason, there's less of an appetite for maybe, because people perceive it as a bummer. Or it's not as, it just doesn't attract as much attention as sports coverage or political scandal coverage. But I think it is.

In the United States as a whole, it goes like this. It's never really very stable.
>> So now, the questions are pouring. And let me just thank you very briefly for mentioning Indiana environmental reporter and with the reporters at the star. And also, the reporter who's at it.

In the public media that's funded by us, those are three out of really the only five reporters in the whole state of Indiana, that are covering environmental issues on a statewide, levels. So that makes your point pretty well. So let me just start lining up these questions now that are coming in from somebody really interested in birds.

What happened to the Audubon editor who was controversial.
>> He was editor for 30 years, and then he was fired in 1991.
>> So basically what happened was, there was a change in leadership at the top of the Audubon Society. And while Audubon magazine was very quote unquote successful in terms of attaining cultural capital, for the organization and spreading its message, it also became extremely bloated and very expensive.

And I think another trend that happened as we saw in the 60s and 70s arises in specialized magazines, there's a downfall of the general interest magazines like Life and Look and Saturday Evening Post. And then the rise of special interest magazines like Sports Illustrated, Playboy, etc. And Audubon was in that trend, but that trend, as all trends do, there's a big rise in special interest magazines and it kind of dipped off.

So the timing for less is not great. And I think after 30 years at the helm, he refused to change his ways, so he was fired in 1981. And I actually had a great quote from him, that I showed to the National Audubon Society because all their employees are so young no one remembers any of this.

And it was when he was fired, he talked about how he was gonna become this PC namby pamby not afraid of controversy publication, so good luck, suckers. That was basically his goodbye message.
>> I can imagine it was great fun being able to go through all these archives and looking at that stuff.

Another question too, what degree has research shown, if you're aware that advocacy journalism organisations have had an effect on, shaping mainstream media agendas.
>> I think that my understanding of that literature is that it has shown to have an effect. But what has happened was, particularly with the rise of digital media, allowing pretty much anyone to be a publisher.

So producing a magazine like Audubon is quite expensive and resource intensive, but with the rise of digital media around the turn of the 20th century, that changed the landscape. If you all remember, political blogs were a really big deal. And they were a alternative venue for different political perspectives that weren't really necessarily being represented in the big mainstream news organizations.

And from my observation, and I think other scholars have seen this as well. What's happened is the institutionalizing of those blogs. So they've been purchased by the big mainstream news organisations. So they still function as kind of a alternative voice, but they don't operate totally independent of the mainstream anymore.

It's kind of the mainstream is just sort of absorbed and claimed, the alternative voices. And now some scholars argue that there really is no meaningful difference between alternative and mainstream media. Because of the increased partisanship of mainstream media and because of the increased technological capacity for anyone to be a mainstream media producer.

It used to be that, it was more like citizen journalists just posted on social media but now citizen journalists are sharing with the New York Times. So like when there was the big hurricane that came through the Caribbean, a couple years ago, where there are no journalists there.

Because we'd have hardly any foreign bureaus anymore. All the photos were from Facebook, that citizens had posted that were now published in the New York Times. So some have argued and I think there's some legitimacy to this that, that distinction between alternative and mainstream is no longer meaningful.


>> Next question, you showed a picture earlier of the folks at the black tie ball. I agree looking rather grim and this question is about, do you have an opinion on the rejection that we hear nowadays of early environmental organizations as examples of, white privilege?
>> Yeah, so there is a the history of the environmental movement is very white.

There's three main threads in American Environmental history. One is the conservation movement which was focused on conservation natural resources like timber, water and etc. And now it's kind of a technocratic scientific approach to environmental use. There's the preservation movement, which was about preserving wild spaces, national parks, etc.

And then there was urban environmental reform, which was you think about early 20th century Sinclair, Lewis the Jungle, we're dealing with the environmental problems of the city. Those three strands, operated quite separately, especially the urban environmentalists were sort of excluded from, the conservation and preservation arms of the movement.

And it wasn't really till the 1960s that these three arms came together and had more of an ecosystem approach that acknowledged environmental issues, came from the city as well from rural or wilderness areas. So the violent movement right now is grappling with that, it's well documented that John Muir was a racist.

He's the founder of the Sierra Club, the history of our national parks has a history of relocation of indigenous people. Audubon, John James Audubon, who's not the founder of the Audubon Society, but he was named for them, also had some problematic features to his life. And Audubon Society itself was the most lily white and elite of all of the American environmental organizations.

So they're all grappling with that today. I think there's a much greater understanding of the concept of environmental justice, which has been around now for decades. But I think it's only just recently started to, become adopted into the mainstream environmental thinking. So they're still grappling with these histories.

I was just contacted by, Audubon actually last week. They're asking me if in the archives I'd found any more racist stuff, cuz they want to get ahead of it. Truly like my research didn't show that because I wasn't looking early enough, I was looking at the 60s and 70s.

And frankly, they just didn't see race as one of the mediating factors. So they never discussed it, it was just invisible to them.
>> Yeah. Next question is would you say a word about advocacy journalists willingness or not, to specifically engage in articles or editorials on political candidates.

Particularly with those organizations that consider themselves to be nonpartisan?
>> So this means an advocacy journalist writing a column, endorsing a political candidate?
>> Yeah, or perhaps not even just specifically endorsing but, anything on political candidates.
>> I don't write specifically on political communication and initiatives, but I do think that If you're an advocacy journalist, you're already comfortable, with expressing opinion.

In fact, Emily Akon the woman who writes the heated newsletter, she calls herself an opinion journalist. So she's giving herself a name that allows her to acknowledge that her perspective is injected into everything that she writes. And I think that kinda labeling might be actually really helpful for audiences to understand what they're actually looking at.

So from my perspective I don't see any issue with opinion or advocacy journalists getting engaged with electoral politics, as long as it's transparent.
>> Yeah, just some more questions coming in. Here's one. From a listener who's saying, I love to use the archives, really interesting research. I'm curious about the evolution of environmental journalism genres.

So how would you characterize, for instance, the give and take between nature writing and science writing in the early history of American Environmental Journalism?
>> Great question, so, of course, we have a long tradition of nature writing that goes back, longer than environmental journalism existed. I think that when you look at these early advocacy groups publications.

A lot of what they published was more in the genre of nature writing, than what you might consider journalism oriented. Nature writing, I mean, a more personal narrative and personal perspective than sort of drawing on external sources. I think you don't see the trend and the switch towards science journalism until the 1960s, 50s, 60s.

And I think that's because science journalism at that point was also ascending, and people were interested in that. I think nature writing itself has been excluded from news organizations. It's usually viewed as a separate genre of writing, but I did see examples of it in the advocacy publications for sure.

In fact, I'd say that was the dominant genre, until they started switching to the more journalistic mode of the 1960s.
>> A lot of the early writing in magazine form, and you looked a lot of magazine format was done in magazines that were oriented at people. Who specifically liked hunting, fishing, that type of sportsmen activity, if you will.

Did you look at that at all in relation to these other environment, or cuz, some of those had also pretty large circulations?
>> Yeah, so there's a genre of sort of sporting magazines, for us in Field and Stream. I think American Sportsmen is the title of another one, where you did actually see a lot of early conservation and sport.

Where they start to realize that, you can't just go shoot all of the buffalo. Eventually, there will be zero buffalo or zero elk, etc. So there are great examples of early conservation and sport in those magazines. And in fact some of their editors, George Grinnell, was the editor of Forest and Stream.

And he went on to become an early member, or founder of the Audubon Society. So you see, again, there's connections between editorial roles and advocacy roles. And I don't think that's exclusive to environmentalism, that's just my area of expertise. But I think it's not a coincidence that people who recognize the public sphere's the space where power is decided.

Are people who are already working in that kind of space, and they can see the reverse at work, when we get that issue out. And they can influence policy or social change.
>> Well, Susanna, we've run out of time, well, I do have some other great questions here for you.

So I will save those in the chat and make sure you get those, and so thank you so much. That was a really fascinating talk, of course I knew your work, but this is my first chance to hear how deeply you dived into the archives, that was really cool.

So thanks so much for being on.
>> Thank you, and I appreciate everyone attending.
>> Yeah, and I wanna thank Adam for his role here, Adam surely you're great, thanks. Thanks to IPE and ERI for sponsoring this, so come back and see us all again very soon, bye, everyone.