The Graduates

Keywords: self-transcendence, self-love, positive emotions, therapy, intervention, depression

Andrew Saintsing: Hi, you’re tuned into 90.7 FM KALX Berkeley. I'm Andrew Saintsing, and this is The Graduates, the interview talk show where we speak to UC Berkeley graduate students about their work here on campus and around the world. Today I'm joined by Kelly Ziemer from the School of Social Welfare. Welcome to the show, Kelly.

Kelly Ziemer: Oh, thanks for having me, Andrew.

Saintsing: It's so great to have you here.

Ziemer: Thank you. Fun to geek out about research always.

Saintsing: Nice, that's what we're all about on this show.

Ziemer: Yes.

Saintsing: So, you study positive emotions, right? 

Ziemer: Yes, I think specifically positive emotions that really intrigued me – there are subsets of positive emotions, and they are called self-transcendent emotions, and it's this idea that when you - I'll give you an example in a second – but the idea that when you experience a particular emotion it actually like takes you out of yourself with the ability to connect you to other people. 

Saintsing: Okay, yeah.

Ziemer: So, you transcend yourself essentially, right? With the purpose of connecting you with others, so like creating social connections.

Saintsing: So, like what kind of emotion would that be?

Ziemer: Yeah, so ones that are talked about frequently are emotion of like gratitude for example. Awe is one of my favorite emotions and actually what really started my interest in positive emotions. So, Dacher Keltner here in Psychology studies awe. The research has been I think maybe 10 years now, 10 to 15 years on, and so, rather in its infancy still. But, awe is really this experience of when you are presented with this like mind-blowing stimulus that you can’t really even comprehend, and a lot of people, they realize they're in awe when they're like, wow. Like wow is like this vocal reaction, right? So, a lot of our research comes out of nature, so like the Grand Canyon for example, or like beauty, music, and so, it's this idea that you then feel relatively small in this like greater vastness, but there's something kind of bigger than you out there, right?

Saintsing: Yes.

Ziemer: And, awe could be negative, too, right? It could be, it could be like a tornado. It could be a person, that you're like, how did that happen? How did they get into power? I’m in Berkeley, so I think I'm safe to say that here.

Saintsing: Yeah, I think you’re safe to say that anywhere. Well, maybe not. So, so there's this like speechlessness about awe that's like really yeah. Is that kind of fundamental to the self-transcendence, or…

Ziemer: No, not specifically more self-transcendence is like you are really kind of taken out of yourself so you're focusing on yourself less. It's kind of like this – sometime, I mean oftentimes self-transcendence is spoken around like a spiritual religious context, but it really is this idea that we're connecting with someone else so in like in cooperation or caretaking. Like compassion for example is a self-transcendent emotion. Some emotion researchers would say that these are. 

Saintsing: So, it's self-transcendent because you're – 

Ziemer: Go ahead 

Saintsing: With awe, you're connecting with someone else because you both have this like awestruck reaction with something, and you can relate more because it seems like you're reacting to some – I mean aside from maybe when you're in awe of a person in particular – but it seems like you're in awe of some spectacular vision, or…

Ziemer: Yes, and you could be by yourself, right?

Saintsing: Yeah.

Ziemer: You could be by yourself in the Grand Canyon, but because you kind of recognize that you're the smaller sense of self, that you, that there's something greater than then you out there, that it then leads you – and I think perhaps and maybe I'm even overstating here, but I don't know if they fully understand the mechanisms of why it leads to social connection, but just they call it in research literature they call it pro-social, so the ability to like be in awe allows you to be more altruistic, more generous, to want to help out other people because you realize that you're not alone essentially. But, there is a bigger thing out there than you, this like collective value.

Saintsing: Oh, yeah. That's really interesting is that that kind of, you know, thinking about religion, right? Where you have – I think all religions but I guess I'm not sure – it would have this belief in God would generally inspire awe in someone believed in that. And so, is that kind of the basis of religion having this community like tapping into this community building sense of awe?

Ziemer: Yeah, yeah, definitely. The origins of awe – I couldn't – when scholars write about awe they oftentimes reference, like, reverence to God. It's kind of mind-blowing concept, and you feel like there's something greater than you out there, so to speak. But, then you're coming together as a community, yeah, but around this belief, 

Saintsing: Right. So, there's more emotions than just awe that would through self-transcendence allow this community-building?

Ziemer: Yeah, yeah, so oftentimes folks also speak about gratitude that way. They speak about self-compassion. Now mind you there's a lot of disagreement amongst the emotional world, so I don't even want to get into like the semantics. What I think is important to share, though, most specifically to my interests is, I think, some would say that love is also this self-transcendent trait. So, my own research interests over the past few years have really evolved into this idea of self-love and it's been an interesting journey for sure. As I started talking about self-love with folks over the past, I don't know, eight months or so from a research perspective because there's such a gradient, a spectrum so to speak of how people see self-love. So, if I go back to the self-transcendent nature, how I see self-love is self-love really has this ability to take us out of ourselves to then connect to others so we're focusing on ourselves like filling up our own love tank so to speak with the ability to then show up for others more and to connect more because if I'm feeling really good in myself and I'm taking care of myself that means I have more bandwidth to show up for other people as opposed to if my love tank is empty if my self-love is low then I'm doing things perhaps with expectations of receiving in return. When that's not happening, I'm feeling resentful and all that is very like negative low vibration feeling within ourselves, and ultimately, it's not the type of connection that we're searching for, right? To me self-love – and I'll say that if I can to give you a definition of self-love – one of the folks I've seen written about it the most, who wrote about the most is a psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm, and he wrote a book called The Art of Loving, I believe. It was like in the five different types of love, I believe. It's like it's a hundred-page book, and it's really easy to read, and it talks about like five different types of love, like a love for God, a love from your parents. It talks about like a brotherly love – and that’s more like a friendship kind of feeling – but he also talks about this love for self, and it's this idea of caring for, respecting of yourself and your actions in the way that you're going about your life, and it's this stagnant – for me, I think it really is a stagnant way of being, so when there are adversities and when we have to be resilient, right, self-love is so important, but even when things are going great, right, like self-love is still a constant thing, and it's, I think, it's actually tied to other emotions that when we are in a state of self-love we actually experience calm and joy, and we're able to be more aware for these other opportunities to opt in to connection, right?

Saintsing: Yeah.

Ziemer: But I think – if I can just say – I think there's a myth I'd really like to bust actually about self-love, which is I think oftentimes there is this, there's this idea that emerged I think in the 80s maybe, or the 90s – I'm blanking on my timeframe right now – came out of the self-help movement which is, which was to say that like before, before you can love anyone else or anyone can really love you that you have to love yourself first, right? So, which for me I find problematic in a lot of ways. I feel like it doesn't really encapsulate the full story. I think that when we are really loving ourselves, sure I think perhaps we're choosing better partners or choosing better relationships that are healing and wonderful for us, right? But, I think – and I see this in this self-love movement right now – that kind of happens in pop culture that puts such an onus or a burden on people to really like, there's almost a perfectionism tendency of, like, I need to get to self-love. Otherwise I'm not good enough, and yeah, and this idea of like not being good enough, that's truly not self-love anyway, right? It really is a self-accepting piece, and so, I think the second part of this, also this myth I want to bust, is that, you know, we are wired for social connection, right? There are researchers, and Brené Brown has talked about this. Matthew Lieberman talks about this, and like an actual brain part of our brain literally is like wired to connect, and so, if I go back to this idea of self-love that, when we are opting into relationships and connection with people, that it can the reciprocal nature can be so healing within ourselves that we don't have to first achieve this like unachievable self-love before we can get into relationships with other people, okay? So, did I explain myself okay there?

Saintsing: Yeah, you, so you're saying that self-love has this requirement that you accept yourself as you are, right? Which I guess is true of any sort of love, right?

Ziemer: Yeah.

Saintsing: Whether it’s directed inward or outward, right, there's this acceptance to it.

Ziemer: Lovely, yeah.

Saintsing: And so, you're saying that people tend to view self-love as something that they earn from themselves.

Ziemer: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great. Right. There's this like earning quality, and I think that's really well said. That it's like, to earn implies I have to do, to do, to obtain, obtain, obtain as opposed to like self-love just is because I exist, because you exist right here right now, right? And, that's my like mindfulness piece kind of tapping in there a little bit, but it just is.

Saintsing: Yeah.

Ziemer: It's, it's been interesting when I talk to – so my own research interest about like what am I actually studying for my PhD, because I'm a social worker, I'm also very much interested in like interventions like what can we do alongside our clients, alongside our community. What can we do in tandem with them to kind of get them this outcome that they're looking for. So, perhaps it's like feeling better about themselves if they're experiencing depression for example, right?

Saintsing: Right.

Ziemer: And, with self-love I started thinking about, is there a self-love intervention that would be really interesting to try out and study in some way from this like scientifically rigorous procedure for a scientific research method, right? And, when I started talking to people about, there's a common one that is spoken about in self-help, and I've also found it prevalent in addiction communities in like rehab, for example, where you look at yourself in the mirror you make, you literally make eye contact with yourself in the mirror, and you say something positive about yourself. So, I prefer that it's not statements related to like your physical appearance because I do think that it could take like a narcissistic trend, but we're really thinking about like a self-affirming statement, like I'm a good friend or even – I think and really I'm such a fan of this is – really just telling yourself that you love yourself. So, saying like I love you in the mirror while you're making eye contact with yourself. To me, to love, to love somebody else is to say like, I see you, and so self-love, you're really like, okay I see you, you know? Like, you're not that bad. Like, you're actually pretty great, and I will tell you that when I've talked to so many people about this, adolescents, I've spoken to clients of mine who are coming to see me wanting to feel better from depression, I've spoken to scholars about this, and so many people, I get two reactions. One is like absolute repulsion about absolutely not. I will not look at myself in the mirror. Like, this is, why would I ever do that, and two, I think going back to this idea that you were talking about. It's almost like confusion about well like why would I even think about myself. Why would I love myself as like this other entity, but I'm so focused on, you know, loving everybody else. That really to love is to love others, right? Like in scholarly research, we talk about one of the definitions of love is like being a trusted caregiver to others. I mean that's a very amended definition, but love is always this other-oriented emotion, and so, self-love, it's like, like why would I, why would I even do that. 

Saintsing: It's kind of like awe in some senses. In awe you sort of see something spectacular that makes you see how small you are or how much more there is.

Ziemer: Yeah.

Saintsing: And, in this self-love you have to see yourself as just another person instead of like where love is flowing from, right? But, self-love kind of like makes you realize you're not like the center of the universe or something. That you're, that you're just another person, and that like, that, that makes you more able, as you said in the self-transcendence, to connect with other people, I guess.

Ziemer: I think this is actually why I feel so strongly about self-love is because I think this exact idea that you're talking about is folks who are experiencing depression or addiction, for example right? So, I'm actually, I'm funded. My dissertation is funded through the NIAAA, which is alcohol abuse and I work specifically with the funder here in the Bay Area that alcohol research group. So, oftentimes when we're experiencing addiction or depression we become so tunnel vision in our own mind about what's wrong with ourselves, how things aren't working for me and when we're in depression and addiction, often social isolation is happening it's very difficult to connect to others. And so, I'm such a believer that self-love could have the potential, and this is where I'm curious, right? Like, so from, you know, I'm hearing like my mentors and my advisors’ thoughts in my head right now about, you know, sometimes in the scientific world it can almost be a negative to be a believer, right? That, I think like self-love is a super power. But, I really need to employ my like scientifically rigorous, you know, unbiased view so to speak. Let's be curious about this. Could self-love actually be a superpower? As opposed to like approaching this self-love as a superpower, right? So, I should – let me reel it back for a second to say that, however, yes I do feel like, coming back to this point of awe, that, that self-love definitely, I would hypothesize, leads to feelings of awe because of this ability to connect us to other people, and that it gets us out of our own head. I think my greater vision for my research is to think like how can we employ self-love. It's free. It’s accessible, which I like, right, because a lot of these other therapies, cognitive behavioral therapy. Although I'm a believer, you see there's an access issue. If you go to a private practitioner in New York City, it's $200. I think San Francisco, it's 150, 200. So, my greater vision really would be for people to be able to really continue to cultivate this self-love within themselves.

Saintsing: More specifically, what, what would you say your research for your PhD actually entails?

Ziemer: Yeah, so yeah, thanks to that questions. I think self-love first. I was just kind of thinking of self-love, I think of, is this like umbrella term, this idea that if self-love is an umbrella and the prongs. There are many different prongs. So, to me it's this idea of like self-compassion, which is like when we're judging ourselves, criticizing ourselves, we’re able to accept ourselves, you know, amidst that. Self-care, which is like the respecting, doing things, really acting caring towards ourselves. This self-esteem idea, right, that we feel competent about ourselves. So, so the reason that I say this kind of umbrella term is because there's little research out there right now that that actually includes self-love, certainly how I know it to be true in these in therapeutic communities, for example. So, I'm so fascinated by, I'll say, phenomena of self-love in popular science in like the Psychology Today blogs, on social media. Like, if you go to Instagram and you type in #selflove, you get 32 million posts on Instagram. Google, you Google self-love, you get three billion returns. So, something is happening out there. What is it? So, I think what the, to me, the intriguing pieces. So, before I can go ahead and develop an intervention, right, even though I really want to jump to that phase, we know that a PhD that you have to take little bits by bits, right? That is actually talking about a career-long pursuit. So, it really, my own research really is conceptualizing this idea of self-love in these lay theory views. So, when I say lay theory I don't mean like scholars who have already written about self-love. I mean people who are on Instagram, and they're posting about self-love, so right now I'm in the process of thinking about perhaps analyzing Instagram posts to see how people, what sort of images people are posting when they're doing #selflove, and specifically within the context of like addiction and sobriety and recovery and that, so where these two worlds of like self-love and addiction intersects and how are people and these lay communities, you know, these therapists, everyday people, how are they talking about self-love? I'm really curious to kind of dig through that because I see, I do see some posts that could be it seen as narcissism, right? Right? I see posts that are very much moving away from this like self-care realm. So, so self-care really is rooted in this like black feminist queer theory, Audrey Lorde. This idea that like you're taking care of yourself so that you can show up for the collective, and this really activist mentality to now this transition of like #selfcareday Starbucks ad with your Frappuccino, whatever. On the beach, #selfcare, right? This is like commoditization, right, of self-care, and people there's you know, so there's, there's like #selfcare, #selflove, but what are we really talking about here? And, I'm so curious to kind of capture some of that, to also include therapists’ voices, people in recovery to kind of see like, what, what is this idea of, of self-love to them?

Saintsing: Okay, so you draw on psychology, sociology, lots of different research techniques.

Ziemer: Yeah, behavioral health.

Saintsing: Yeah, so would you say that's generally true? People who are getting PhDs in the School of Social Welfare, that this is really interdisciplinary?

Ziemer: Yeah, what a lovely question. Yes, thank you for saying that. This is why I love social work so much by the way. I really love the social work profession because I do feel like you know in this applied profession we really are always working in these interdisciplinary environments, right? If you're like a clinician working in a hospital you're working with doctors and nurses and psychiatrists for example, right?

Saintsing: Right.

Ziemer: And so, I think the beauty of this PhD at Berkeley in the Social Welfare Department has so much been about the freedom to connect with other professors and other departments. It's, so in public health for example I've connected with some professors there or some psychology whether it's emotions research or like adolescent development psychopathology for example. So, and I have, yeah, I have you know lovely people in my cohort who are bridging the gap with like anthropology, criminology, for example, so yeah, education. It's really, it's cool.

Saintsing: And, you knew that you wanted to be a social worker right out of college? 

Ziemer: I took a very interesting path. I think I always knew, like in high school, I always was intrigued by the psychology profession, and yeah, I was, I was thought, you know, I'm so drawn to like authenticity and people's lives. Like, what's really happening, you know? I always was drawn to that, but when I was in college, I went to the University of Wisconsin, and they had a great business school, and so, I got a business degree, and I actually, my family, I come from, you know, a long line of people who are in the business world. My dad had been in sales for so long. My brother’s in sales now. My mom was, you know, this is like badass. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. Badass in the corporate world. So, it was always kind of an influence for me, and I did, I was a consultant, an IT consultant, but I realized, like, yeah, I need to, I felt like there was something, my soul was dying. I really wanted to pursue something that I was so excited and curious about, so yeah, about eight years ago I got my Masters in Social Work. I started my MSW program in New York City. That coincided too with some things that were happening in my family, and it just felt like the right time to like leave the corporate world and dive into the Social Work arena. 

Saintsing: And then, you, you got your masters, and then you worked a little while as a social worker, right?

Ziemer: Yeah, so I I did my MSW. It’s a two-year program, and then I was working in New York City for three years at an after school, like a high school Support Program. It was an after-school program, and it was, I mean, I learned so much. It was incredible. I have such love. It's, the program is to reach youth and it's a working at a public high school in Brooklyn, and I think there, maybe, I don't know, our team was maybe ten people or something, and I have such love to this day for these people that I worked with. I mean the environment was so fun. Like, you – we were, we were working with teenagers, teenagers who didn't have a lot of resources at their disposal. I mean this is like a New York City public-funded high school. It's what, the school's we were working with were like C grades, so the way that New York City rates their schools like ABC, so we were a C school, and that means people that I worked with, the strategies they were using were so creative to get these young people what they needed while also providing such a safe space for these young people to learn about themselves. And so, I was actually, I was doing therapy with kids who are high-risk, so who were at risk for suicide, who were just really having a hard time academically or at home and whatnot, but it was such a fun environment. I mean people were so authentic, and I mean, I don't know your experience with young people, but young people, they can sense when you BS. And so, you really have no other choice but to show up authentically, right? And it was such a gift really to work there.

Saintsing: So, that was a great experience, and what I guess drove you… I – most people in social work, or if you're a professional, I guess, you mostly just need the masters, and then, you could do the work. What drove you onward to the doctorate?

Ziemer: Yeah, yeah, so, so I think there were two things. So, one was I would run, every Monday afternoon, I'd run a girl's group. So, like 16-, 17-year-olds. They would come, and we would talk about all the things. Whatever they wanted to talk about, and I was finding a lot of the girls were expressing such anger, and this anger of just like what was just happening in life but then you know the microcosm of like the school environment and Facebook and people calling each other out and you know subliminal subs that were being thrown on Facebook for example, that would then transfer to the school day the next day. And, there would be fights, and girls would get suspended, and so, when I started talking to them about anger and what anger did for them and getting to fight, it really, getting into a fight is a release, right? Like, your adrenaline’s so high and you punch someone out or you do something like, you feel better but it's instantaneous because any of these long-term consequences of getting suspended, your parents finding out, what not, right? Right, so I'd say to them like, yeah what are strategies? How can I – literally I was like what are some strategies that we can use in order to kind of sort through all the different feelings that anger brings? Because ultimately anger is powerlessness, like we get angry when we feel powerless, and so, I started investigating mindfulness. Mindfulness was really just becoming a thing. This was like 2014. At least that was when I first started hearing about it, and so, I would try to understand like, what is this mindfulness? How do I use it? So, mindfulness really is, a definition from Jon Kabat-Zinn in the simplest form that I like, is this idea of non-judgmentally noticing, so like noticing that I got really pissed when someone posted something on Facebook about me that may not be true and like then taking the breath in the pause before I respond, before I respond something nasty to someone on Facebook or want to punch them out the next day for example, right? When you're talking to adolescents, this pause is very difficult because you're also talking about like an age in development where you have impulsivity, and like they're trying to figure out who they are? So, I started diving into this mindfulness. I thought like this could really work, but I was so, mindfulness research was so new at the time. I think it really hit its peak around like 2016 in terms of like the amount of journals are published on it like exponentially increased. So, I knew that, how mindfulness is being talked about in terms of the population, I was working with, so people who were coming from primarily like black and brown communities, lower socioeconomic having toxic stress, mindfulness felt very like white, waspy, affluent. Part one. Part two was I couldn't figure out what are these mindfulness techniques and how can we actually apply them to adolescence. So, I am getting interested in that and started reading all that I could and figured I really wanted to work on interventions for adolescents that were geared around mindfulness to these specific populations I talked about where I felt like there was such a lack of evidence at that point for these groups, so that was part one. Part two: around the same time, I read an op-ed piece in The New York Times written by Dr. Keltner here in psychology, and it was, what is – something like, What is the Emotion of Awe, and I thought that sounds like, what is awe? And, how should I get to know this person? Who is this person? Which then started, for me, like a flurry of googling UC Berkeley, and I knew I wasn't going to be do PhD in Psych, but I found a professor here, Valerie Shapiro, who's my advisor and has been so lovely navigating this PhD world with me. She's a prevention and implementation science researcher here in School of Social Welfare, and she had a study examining social emotional learning programs here in elementary schools in California, so like teaching little kids about empathy for example. So, I thought, oh that's like emotion, and it has to do with like kids and in schools. Like, even though my interests aren't completely aligned, let me reach out to her and see if I could work with her. So, that's kind of how I came to study. My two main areas really have been mindfulness and then positive emotions, specifically now self-love but in this greater context of you know these social problems, like social isolation, depression, addiction and yeah.

Saintsing: So, unfortunately, it's been a lot of fun, but we're coming up towards our time limit. Usually at the end of the interview we'll take a minute to offer guests a chance to address the audience about anything that they'd like to talk about. Oftentimes, people talk about like social issues or some things specific to their research.

Ziemer: I think, well one thing I want to say for sure is that I think I just want to do a shout out of gratitude as I've been really developing this idea of self-love, I have been working with an undergrad in the Social Welfare Department, Joyce, who's really has helped me kind of start thinking about all this like self-care and self-compassion and where all these terms kind of intersect and cataloging these different Instagram posts to figure out like, yeah, what, what really is self-love and how people are talking about it. So, I wanted to do a shout out to her, and then, I think, you know, lastly, I guess I would say that I think for me I think it's such an important point to hit home is that for me self-love really isn't a selfishness, but it really is, and it's not this like me-focused thing, but it really is in this idea of continuing to like connect and show up as our authentic selves with others, so I think it has some serious healing power behind it. So, we'll see. Yeah, more will be revealed.

Saintsing: We all look forward to the results of your research. Thank you so much. Today I've been speaking with Kelly Ziemer from the School of Social Welfare. We've been speaking about her research on positive emotions and the potential therapeutic benefits of self-love. Thank you so much for being on the show, Kelly.

Ziemer: Oh, thank you for having me. This is lovely.

Saintsing: Tune in in two weeks for the next episode of The Graduates.

Keywords: climate change, global change biology, reptiles, science communication, narrative

Andrew Saintsing: Hi, you're tuned into 90.7 FM KALX Berkeley. I'm Andrew Saintsing, and this is The Graduates, the interview talk show where we speak to UC Berkeley graduate students about their work here on campus and around the world. Today I'm joined by Sara ElShafie from the Department of Integrative Biology. Welcome to the show, Sara.

Sara ElShafie: Thanks for having me.

Saintsing: It's so great to have you here. So, Sarah, you're a paleontologist. Is that correct?

ElShafie: Yes, I'm a paleontologist. I always introduce myself as a global change biologist, which just means that I study how climate change and environmental change impact life over time, and paleontology is part of it.

Saintsing: Right. So, would you say you're first and foremost a global change biologist?

ElShafie: Yeah, just because I don't only work on fossils. I also look at stuff that's around today in order to understand how climate change and stuff impacted life in the past and also what that tells us about where we're headed now and in the future.

Saintsing: Okay, cool. So, you're looking at like our current climate change?

ElShafie: Yes.

Saintsing: Yeah, but also, so the climate has changed a lot in the past, you'd say.

ElShafie: Yes, and, and there have been really dramatic events of climate change before, some of which kind of mirror what's going on today, so I look at how those past climate change events impacted life that lived millions of years ago in order to try to better understand what we might expect from climate change today and how it will impact animals that are currently around and also people.

Saintsing: What were kind of the outcomes of past climate changes? Is it looking bad for us?

ElShafie: Well, in terms of like how climate change now is going to affect society, yeah there are a lot of concerning ramifications that we're already seeing. In terms of how it's affected life in the past, it has all kinds of effects. It can affect where things can live. It can affect what they eat or what's available for them to eat. It can affect how big they get. So, I kind of look at all of those factors in a big picture.

Saintsing: You look at all animals, all plants, all organisms? Or, are you looking at specific things?

ElShafie: Specifically, I focus on reptiles because reptiles are especially susceptible to changes in climate and changes in their environment because they can't generate their own body heat metabolically the way you and I can

Saintsing: Right.

ElShafie: Most of them can't and I look at lizards and, and crocodiles and their relatives specifically because they're really abundant in the fossil record, and they have a lot in common with lizards and crocodiles that are around today, so I can use the lizards and crocodiles that are around today to understand the ones that are in the fossil record.

Saintsing: Okay, and so, you are looking at how their bodies change over time basically? You're looking at how big the fossils are at certain periods compared to other periods, before and after climate change and how big they are compared to today?

ElShafie: Yeah, pretty much body size is the main metric that I use, the main kind of factor that is influenced by climate change because I can use the partial skeletons that I find of lizards and crocodiles in the fossil record to figure out how big they were in the past at any given point before, during, or after a major climate change event. And, I can use lizards and crocodiles that are around today to try to estimate how big they were in the past using only a piece of a skull or a piece of a limb, for example, because it's actually very rare to find whole skeletons in the fossil record of these things.

Saintsing: Right. That must be really frustrating.

ElShafie: Yeah, well, it also means that I get to I have an excuse to study lots of stuff that's around today in order to understand the fossils, so it gives me a more holistic research experience which I enjoy.

Saintsing: So, do you actually get to study living animals? Or, do you mostly look at the bones of the living animals?

ElShafie: I do. I study living animals, the living lizards and crocodilians, to understand their body proportions and how I can estimate like the whole length of the animal from just one element, like one piece of the skull or the jaw or the arm bone or something and also to understand how the animals live today and is there any relationship between their morphology, how they look, how their bones look, and what part of a habitat they might live in or what they might be eating or what their physiology might be like.

Saintsing: Okay.

ElShafie: So yeah studying the living animals is really important for understanding the fossil animals.

Saintsing: Right, and so you study specifically reptiles and crocodiles? So you say you studying global change across time, but is there specific period you're interested in, or are you just comparing all the different periods?

ElShafie: Yeah, so specifically I look at a period of time, geologic time called the Paleogene which was from about 66 million years ago to about 23-ish million years ago. So, this is right after dinosaurs went extinct up until about 23 million years ago, at which point we had ice at the poles again. We actually didn't have ice at the poles earlier right after the dinosaurs went extinct, and so, during that whole timespan, climate change was happening. The world started off pretty warm, and then it got super-hot relatively quickly right around fifty-six million years ago when there is this incident called the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum. So, within a relatively short span of time, a few hundred thousand years or so, the world got really, really hot really fast. Like it increased five degrees Celsius or so, and that's actually even hotter than the warming that we've experienced just in the last century or two, but the rate was actually not even quite as fast as what we're experiencing now, so it is a really powerful analogous event to look at and to better understand what we can expect with the rapid climate change that we're experiencing today. So, it got super, super-hot and around that time the world looked very, very different. Like, there was no ice at the poles at all and the interior of North America actually looked like a jungle if you can picture Utah which is now a desert looking like the Amazon. That's how different it was, which is really crazy to think about. So, to find fossils of crocodiles and these huge lizards and like the first primates and crazy horses and all kinds of stuff in the deserts of Utah and Wyoming and Colorado, and, and it seems it's all from a jungle that looked more like what South America looks like today, which is really awesome, and then over time it kind of dried out and got more arid and more grassy after that.

Saintsing: Thinking about what I've grown up thinking about, you know, the extinction of dinosaurs, right? You get this picture in your head that the asteroid hits and then things get really cold.

ElShafie: Mm-hmm.

Saintsing: There was this drop in temperature that led to the dinosaur extinction still?

ElShafie: Yeah, I think it got cold for a while. Right after the asteroid hit event it like, you know, blocked out a lot of sunlight and stuff, but then after that, you know, about 10 million years or so or not even that long. Then the world had largely recovered, but it also looked very different.

Saintsing: So, it was an overall pretty warm climate?

ElShafie: Yeah, it's – the earth has gone through a lot of changes over millions of years, and it's cool to look at those changes on a timescale of millions of years rather than just, you know, a few hundred years or even thousand years because, since climate is changing so rapidly today, and it's, it's different than anything that humans have experienced in human history. We really have no analog for it in our own history, so looking at much older events in the past and the rate that that happened and the changes that happened and at what pace they happened helps us try to anticipate what we can expect in the future.

Saintsing: Right, so what brought about – why did the ice appear again at the poles?

ElShafie: At that point Antarctica became isolated, and it was isolated by a current that still flows now around Antarctica. I think it's called the circumpolar current or something, but it keeps, it basically keeps Antarctica refrigerated and that's part of what contributed to it.

Saintsing: Just having Antarctica in the place that it's in was enough to give us the climate we have today?

ElShafie: Well, yeah. Cuz it's almost like having two giant freezers at each pole of the globe so to speak, and, that you know, they don't exist in isolation either. The ocean currents travel all over the world. They pass by the Arctic or the Antarctic and they bring cold water and that affects the like nutrients and upwelling in other parts of the world including the California coast, and it, you know, it affects how climate and temperature play out over the entire Earth. So, yeah, it's all connected.

Saintsing: Yeah, I guess we're dealing with how connected we are right now, right? 

ElShafie: Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Saintsing: So as a climate change scientist – or a global change scientist but you, you know, you're really interested in climate change, I guess. A lot of your work is focused on informing the public on climate change and about science in general. I know you've done a lot of work on improving science communication as a student here, right? Or, at least studying it to understand how it can be improved. So, yeah, can you tell us a little bit more about the work you're doing on that front?

ElShafie: Absolutely, yeah, science communication and outreach has always been a big passion of mine and that really started in college, and by the time I got into my master's degree, I realized that I not only wanted that to be a big focus of my career, I actually wanted it to be my primary career direction, in fact. So, I actually came to Berkeley with the intention of pursuing a career in science outreach leadership and science communication, and I knew that I wanted that to be a big part of my activity while pursuing my dissertation here in integrative biology because I also wanted to get the highest scientific training. So, while I've been here working on my dissertation I've also been doing a lot of work in science communication which started as just an attempt to improve my own skills because I realized a couple years into my program here that I myself was really struggling to explain my research to my own family members…

Saintsing: Right.

ElShafie: In a way that was at all meaningful to them. It really bothered me that I was struggling with that, so I decided to work on it, and I realized that I wasn't the only one that seemed to be having that challenge, and probably a lot of my peers could benefit from it as well, so I got really interested in storytelling, in story development because I figured, well everybody likes stories, so if I can talk about my science in that context, you know, and using storytelling, good storytelling then maybe I would get somewhere. And, I've always been a huge film buff and especially a huge fan of Pixar movies, and I knew that Pixar Animation Studios was actually only a couple miles from our campus. Pixar is in Emeryville, which was just south of Berkley, and so, I just decided to email them one day and actually got a response from a couple story artists who were really interested, and I invited them to come chat with grad students at our UC Museum of Paleontology. We’re based in integrative biology. And, it was going to be just a kind of pilot seminar conversation, let's just see where this goes with some grads, and it's turned into everyone from undergrads to emeritus faculty crammed into our little seminar room to hear from this story artist who was just talking about bread-and-butter stuff of the kind of strategies that they use to develop stories for their films at Pixar. And then, we had a conversation about how some of those strategies might apply to how we can talk to the public about science in a more effective and engaging way, and that was about three and a half years ago now, and since then, you know, that one seminar totally changed how I was thinking about science communication, and everybody else who was in the room responded really positively to it and remarked how useful it was, so that sparked an ongoing conversation and more and more artists at Pixar got involved volunteering their time, and now it's become this whole workshop series called Science through Story that I've been running for about three and a half years now. It started here at Berkeley on campus and has since, we've gone to other campuses, conferences, museums, organizations. So, yeah it's been a really, really fun experience and very helpful.

Saintsing: Yeah, that sounds really incredible. So, you, you've taken this on the road. Is it still mostly Pixar is the main partner involved, or do you have like other studios, other artists involved?

ElShafie: I've worked with other artists at this point, and the workshops, it's not a formal program of Pixar. Pixar doesn't sponsor it or anything financially. They've just been very generous in allowing their, some of the artists that work at the studio, anybody who wants to be involved to volunteer their time. So, several artists have come and run workshops with me here at Berkeley and at a few other campuses and conferences, and I meet with artists there periodically to learn from them about the creative process they use and how they approach story development, and then I adapt that into strategies that scientists and science educators can use to talk about science and an engaging way, using storytelling techniques, so Pixar people from Pixar have been involved. I've also worked with an artist who works at Industrial Light and Magic and a couple artists from DreamWorks Animation as well as an artist who was working at Double Fine productions and a guy who's a gentleman who started his own graphic design firm. Improv people, all kinds of artists through these workshops, and also we ran actually a full-day symposium called Science through Narrative: Engaging Broad Audiences, and that took place at a major biology conference, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology last year in 2018, when the meeting was here in San Francisco. We had a full day symposium on this topic, on science storytelling with speakers from both the scientific community and from different artistic disciplines all weighing in from their different perspectives and experiences on how to engage the audiences with science through storytelling and in different avenues, different media, different disciplines. It was really, really awesome because, to my knowledge, I think that's the first time that scientists and artists have spoken together on the same platform at a major biology conference, and we also had a lot of early career presenters involved as part of that, and out of that symposium we not only had the event itself but we also ended up publishing a whole volume of papers in a peer-reviewed biology journal, Integrative and Comparative Biology, which are now available online, and these are all peer-reviewed papers in a biology journal, but they are all written to be accessible to any reader even a high school student. Actually, we had some high school students in the past read it for some workshops that I've done at high schools in the area. We use papers from that symposium with REU, research experiences for undergraduates, program just this past summer. So, anybody can read them and get something out of it, and I, my own paper that I contributed to that volume is just called Making Science Engaging for Broad Audiences through Stories, something like that, and I wrote that paper for myself three years ago for any grad student or any student who wants to start doing more science communication or wants to get involved with science outreach and doesn't know where to start. If you're looking for a place to start, if that, if that sounds like you, then I encourage you to check out these papers because it's not just, you know, it's grad students, its scientists, its animators, it's video game developers, it's people who work in Hollywood, it’s people who work with data visualization. All kinds of voices weighing in on this, and, and they're really a fun read.

Saintsing: That sounds like a really great resource.

ElShafie: Yeah.

Saintsing: I hope everyone takes the time to check that out. You started by talking to people at Pixar, and that was like obviously, Pixar's really close to Berkeley, and so that's sort of a matter of like convenience, right? But also, I just noticed that a lot of the people that you mentioned kind of are involved in special effects or animation or things like that? Is there a reason why that's more relatable to science, or is that just a matter of, like, you went down this avenue of talking to animators or people who are involved in animation and then that snowballed into more and more people who were involved in that side of the story developing process?

ElShafie: It's a good question. Honestly, I think that scientists can learn something valuable from any type of artist, no matter what discipline because artists and scientists actually have a lot in common in terms of how we approach problems and, and what we're all trying to produce might seem very different, but ultimately the approach that we take is very similar. Both scientists and artists have to use their observation skills. That's very, very important for both conducting science and for doing art. It's all about observation. Both of us are trying to distill complexity out of a whole bunch of material that we could use, and we're trying to distill the most cogent, most cohesive, most compelling version of that story, of that study as we're presenting it, of that thing that we're trying to capture in some, some visual form or a musical form. So, it's distilling complexity. It's using the power of observation, and in terms of the artists that I ended up working with, that was just, it kind of was a combination of who I happen to meet through my networking, people that were introduced to me by colleagues that expressed interest, and we were really wonderfully fortunate that we got such a great variety of people involved. And, that was also part of it that we, you know, if we already had someone who is an animator, then we tried to get other disciplines that we didn't yet have represented for that symposium in particular. So, that was kind of how we went about it, but I would encourage scientists to talk to any and all kinds of artists because you can learn something valuable from anybody and any and all kinds of scientists.

Saintsing: This is just a reminder that you’re tuned into The Graduates. Today I'm speaking with Sara ElShafie from the Department of Integrative Biology. So, you mentioned that you came to Berkeley with the intent of being a science communicator?

ElShafie: Yeah. 

Saintsing: Of pursuing some kind of leadership position in science outreach?

ElShafie: When I came to Berkeley my, my long-term goal was to become like the director of a major science museum or science outreach nonprofit, something along those lines, and I knew that to do that I would, it would be really helpful if I had a PhD in science. People in those positions tend to be either previous professors or curators at museums or past CEOs or university presidents and I wasn't interested in the latter two so much, but I really wanted I wanted to learn more science. I wanted to get the highest scientific training, so that's why I came here to do my PhD because I was very upfront about my career aspirations in my interviews for PhD programs and when I came to Berkeley, they were just totally supportive of that. My advisor was very supportive, the people at the UC Museum of Paleontology that I spoke with were very supportive. So, I, that's why I came here and also because being in the Department of Integrative Biology, which has this wonderful resource, the Berkeley Natural History Museums. We have a paleontology museum; a zoology museum, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology; plus an herbarium, the Jepson Herbarium; and the Essig Museum of Entomology with all the insects. We have all of those in-house, right in our own department, and, and all those museums, especially UCMP, is very, very active with science outreach. So, I realized that by coming to Integrative Biology at Berkeley, I could not only be doing my dissertation, which, Integrative Biology was perfect because I wanted to do research that integrated several different fields together, but also, I could be learning from these museum educators and people who do a lot of science outreach and community outreach. So, it was kind of like getting training in both areas at the same time.

Saintsing: Right, so you graduated from undergrad knowing that you wanted to do science communication then, or was that more of a kind of developing process?

ElShafie: I would say it was an ongoing process. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Chicago. I'm from Chicago originally, and, and I had a great experience at U Chicago. I was working in, at the UC, a new Chicago fossil lab there for years as an undergrad, and I did some research for a thesis and everything, but through that fossil lab, I also had the opportunity to participate in a lot of science outreach with Chicago Public Schools after school and summer science programs, and I really enjoyed that and I loved seeing the transformation that the students would go through just coming in not really sure if science is for them and then leaving much more empowered in general. Not just in seeing themselves as scientists. So, I knew that I wanted that type of work to be a big part of my career as I was graduating undergrad, and then when I went into my master's program which was at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, coming in I knew that I wanted to pursue more scientific research and get my graduate degree, but one semester in I realized I think I actually want the outreach to be my main focus. I was really jazzed about the research I was doing. I was really enjoying it, but I was starting to realize that my primary passion was not just doing the science but actually sharing the science with other people who might not have access to it yet or might not be familiar with it or see themselves as, as scientists or understand the role that science plays in their lives. That was really my, my main focus that I wanted to take, but I also know I wanted the scientific training so I finished my masters in Nebraska, and fortunately my, my master's advisor in Nebraska was very supportive of that realization in that aspiration, and he basically said, hey if you want to be the bridge between science and the public, awesome. We need more people like that. Get your masters in science first because that'll open more doors to you down the road, but while you're here start exploring and figure out what that career path might look like for you. And, I was doing a lot of my data collection for my master's thesis in collections at natural history museums around the country, and through that, I was kind of reminded how much I love working with museums and loved being in museums and because that was a big part of my childhood growing up in Chicago which has great museums and zoos and aquaria and such. So, I knew that I wanted to work with museums and an informal education in some capacity and kind of by the time I finished my Master's, I had realized, yeah, I think I want to pursue a leadership position with a museum or some science outreach program because there seems to be a really big demand for people who can fill those positions, people who can wear the science hat but also have a lot of outreach, education, communication experience and also who understand how to manage a team and manage a budget.

Saintsing: So, you would say that as a child it was probably your experiences going to museums that sparked this whole career interest in science and in science communication?

ElShafie: Definitely, I would always be begging my parents to take me to the Field Museum or the Shedd Aquarium or the Brookfield Zoo or the Museum of Science and Industry. Growing up in Chicago those were like my favorite places to hang out, and, and in addition, I would visit my parents or my grandparents down in the Florida Keys every winter. They would spend the winters down there, and my grandfather was a fisherman, and he used to take me out on his fishing boat, and I would snorkel off of his boat and we would see dolphins jumping around, and I just, I think that's, that's the earliest memory that I have as a child, when I was like six and he took us out on Christmas Day and all these, this whole pod of dolphins came and jumped all around us and it was just the most magical thing I've ever had in my six-year-old memory. That's when I really fell in love with nature and animals, and I've been hooked ever since, and, and the specific focus has kind of changed over the course of my life from marine biology for a long time to paleontology to herpetology now, working with reptiles and, and kind of global change more broadly. And then, science communication and science outreach I think has always been part of my interest because I love to share my passion for nature with other people, and so, now it's kind of it's all come together now, working on my PhD and even tying in my interest in film, working with film artists and different kinds of artists as part of the science communication work. So, it's been a lot of fun.

Saintsing: All right, I was gonna ask, so as a kid you really liked talking about science?

ElShafie: Yeah.

Saintsing: So, you're probably just telling everybody non-stop about all the cool scientific things you were learning?

ElShafie: Oh, sure. Anybody who wanted or didn't want to know about dolphins and sharks and lizards and whatever I was reading about at the time. Yeah, I love that stuff.

Saintsing: But then, you mentioned earlier, part of the reason why you started getting more interested in, at least the, what you wrote the article that you published with the symposium, that was partially to help you understand how to communicate science in some ways.

ElShafie: Yeah, absolutely.

Saintsing: So, would you say that maybe it's harder to communicate the science that you're actually doing than just to share scientific facts you're learning?

ElShafie: Definitely. You've hit the nail on the head. I think it's, it's really fun and easy to just like share cool facts about animals because animals are very cool and there's lots of cool facts that you can share about them just you know in, in conversation, but when you're doing scientific research, especially, you know, long term in-depth scientific research, the specific questions of which might be a little bit more removed from people's everyday experience, it is a lot harder to figure out how to share that in an engaging way with other people you know. When I started my program here, if you asked me what's your research about, I would have jumped immediately into a detailed, jargon-laden explanation of how I study these lizards that lived 45 million years ago, and, and their body size got much bigger as the mean annual paleo temperature got a lot hotter in the Eocene and, and etc. And, you know, when I used to give that explanation to my family members, who are like farmers in rural Maryland, or my family members in Egypt on my dad's side, they would nod politely and, and be excited for me because I was clearly excited about it, but they couldn't relate to it at all because I wasn't connecting it to anything that they could relate to. So, now when people ask me what do you study I just start with, I study how climate change impacts animals over time. That's it.

Saintsing: Right.

ElShafie: And then, if they're really that interested, then maybe I would get into that I also use fossils, and if they're more interested, then maybe we get to the point of: I study reptiles and some of the details that we discussed earlier. But, it's, you know, it's, you almost have to unlearn a little bit of how you're trained to talk about your science as a graduate student. I think that's why it's really important for science communication training to be part of any graduate training program, no matter what your field is, especially if you're, if you're in a STEM field, if you're training to be some kind of scientist because it's when we write our, you know, technical papers we have to talk about science in a particular way, but even there having some story structure can really help the paper flow, but when you're talking about science with broader audiences, especially non-specialist audiences or even scientists outside of your own field, it really helps if you can start at a more general level where everybody can, can clue in and, and relate to what you're saying and then you get into more detail from there as, as needed. But, you don't even need to go to that level of detail in most cases. People just want the general sense of what you're doing. I think the most important thing to keep in mind is who is your audience, who are you talking to, and what is your goal for that audience, what do you want them to take away from your interaction with them, and that might be something specific like, I want them to understand what's really cool about this method I'm using. It might be more general like I simply want this person to understand that I'm a human being who cares about the same things that they do.

Saintsing: Right, we're coming up at the end of our interview. Typically at the end of the interview we just offer our guests a moment to speak on any issue they'd like to speak about, about social issues or about their topic, their research area in science, or really anything you'd like to address to the listeners.

ElShafie: Sure. Appreciate it. I would love to say to anybody listening who is not currently in a science graduate degree program but if you're interested in science in any capacity then I hope that you pursue that interest in some form, whether it's pursuing a degree in science or even just learning about whatever scientific field you're interested in, and, and I encourage you to bring your other interests into that as well. I think the, the best scientists I know who are the most creative about how they approach their science are those who are interested in lots of different things, and, and, and vice versa. So, I think combining interests in lots of different fields is actually a really, it's, it's a great way to enrich your work no matter what you do, and, and scientists want to meet you, and scientists want to talk to you no matter what it is you do. We love, we love talking about science, but we also love learning about other things other than science because that just enriches our perspective about how we approach science. So, if you're an artist, if you're an educator, if you're a farmer, if you are whoever you are no matter what you do, please come chat with us because we'd love to meet you, and if you're a scientist listening, I really encourage you to step outside of academia as often as you can, especially if you're a graduate student or postdoc, you know. Don't wait until you finish your degree or until you get your career up and running. It already is running, and I think the more you meet and interact with people outside of science, the better scientist you will be because it will, you learn how other people think and that's really important for science communication, but it also just enriches your perspective and enhances your appreciation for what you do, and it's also a lot of fun, and especially if you have interests outside of science whether it's a hobby or another field or whatever it is, don't wait to dabble in that. Get involved with it. Take a class. Read a book. Join a group. Whatever it is, get involved with that now because being involved in lots of different things and expanding your horizons while you're in grad school is really great for your mental and emotional health, and, and it also just gives you a broader sense of how you can use your scientific training in the world, whether you want to pursue academia or potentially something else.

Saintsing: Right, open dialogue with people who don't study the same thing as you, who are coming from different backgrounds, that would be good not just for scientists but for everyone, right?

ElShafie: Mm-hmm.

Saintsing: Yeah, but yeah especially for scientists. That's a great message, Sara. Thank you so much for being on the show. It was really great.

ElShafie: It was a lot of fun talking to you today. Thank you so much for having me.

Saintsing: I've been speaking with Sara ElShafie from the Department of Integrative Biology. We were speaking about her interest in global climate change and how she communicates her science to the public. Tune in and two weeks for the next episode of The Graduates.

Keywords: paleontology, anthropology, fossils, Ethiopia, Awash

Andrew Saintsing: Hi, you're tuned into 90.7 FM KALX Berkeley. I'm Andrew Saintsing, and this is The Graduates, the interview talk show where we speak to UC Berkeley graduate students about their work here on campus and around the world. Today, I'm joined by Marianne Brasil from the Department of Integrative Biology. Welcome to the show, Marianne.

Marianne Brasil: Thanks for having me, Andrew.

Saintsing: You're an evolutionary anthropologist. Is that correct?

Brasil: Yeah, that's, that's about right. I'd call myself a biological anthropologist with an evolutionary bio twist.

Saintsing: Interesting. So, why the distinction?

Brasil: Um, so evolutionary anthropology is a field that encompasses a lot of different things that extend just beyond thinking about, kind of, anatomy in the fossil record, so a lot of people who fit in evolutionary anthropology are also focused on – pretty, pretty closely on behavior and psychology, and those are things that I find fascinating but haven't really honed in on. And, I'm more on the fossil evolution side of things, so I call myself a biological anthropologist because I fall broadly into that field. But, that's why I'm kind of within evolutionary biology, because I'm focused on evolution of anatomy more so than behavior or psychology.

Saintsing: Okay, so you're studying bones. You're looking at bones and how they change over time? 

Brasil: Yeah, yeah, really old bones mostly. Some recent bones. So, my research is kind of, I think of it as twofold. So, on one side, I work on kind of recent modern humans. So, a lot of humans that have lived over the last, I would say, 5000 years and some of those very recent, like a collection in Portugal that I visited where the individuals in that collection have actually all died since the year 2000. So, very, very recent people. Yeah, so that's kind of one, one fold of my work is working on really recent humans, recent people trying to figure out how the anatomy varies.

Saintsing: Quick question about the recent human?

Brasil: Yeah.

Saintsing: So, these were all people that were buried, and…

Brasil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Most of it is on people who were in cemeteries or like some of the collections I've worked in, in, that are actually held at the Smithsonian Museum, the Natural History Museum at the Smithsonian, are from Egypt and Jordan. Those are from archaeological deposits, so like the collection from Jordan was actually, those, those people were excavated from tombs, these secondary tombs, which were really, really cool to look at and see all the kind of archaeological material that was included with those was really fascinating. And then, there's also some, some amount of the collections that I work on are what we call cadaver-derived. So, they usually come from medical schools where medical students are dissecting cadavers to learn about anatomy as part of their medical studies. It's like there's a huge, really exceptional collection down in South Africa that I went and visited last summer. That's one of my comparative populations of modern humans to try to figure out, you know, how anatomy varies within a population and then how that differs across people who span geography for the more modern humans.

Saintsing; You're kind of confined to skeletons that have been donated to science?

Brasil: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, so I have on, on the recent side, there's obviously kind of the curse, which is that we are confined to what's available to us and that becomes even more true when you start to look at the fossil record where you know you have all of the contingencies from what you actually recover, what gets preserved, where the deposits are located. So, there are kind of a lot of factors that affect what we're actually able to recover, so we get this really incomplete glimpse of what was happening in the past and that's both really exciting, it's really frustrating as a paleontologist.

Saintsing: Is that just like the whole experience of being an anthropologist? Like it's – you never have all the things you want in whatever research you're doing?

Brasil: Yeah, I mean I think I feel like that's true of science, right? Like, even if you're like in an experimental setting, even if you're working on a wet lab, you know? You never necessarily have all the resources you need or you don't get the results you want, you know? There's – science is definitely not for the faint of heart. The challenge is part of what makes it fun.

Saintsing: I see. I interrupted. You were talking about how you study more recent findings, and then you also look at more distant past.

Brasil: Yeah, yeah, so part of that work focused on recent modern humans is like I said kind of trying to get a sense of ranges of variation and what you expect within and across populations, and part of that is to kind of to inform how we interpret variation that we see in the fossil record where our samples are much less complete, and my dissertation work actually focuses on some early modern humans that are from deposits dated to about a hundred thousand years old in the northern part of Ethiopia from what's called the Afar Depression, and I'm working on a partial skeleton and some other isolated post-crania, which just means bones that are below the head and neck, trying to kind of characterize what, what these people looked like and how they relate to modern humans and other closely related groups like Neanderthals and Homo erectus, that are quite a little bit older in most parts of the world, so trying to characterize that anatomy and figure out what it can tell us about the evolution of our species and closely related ones.

Saintsing: Okay, so you look at these bones, and you have the capacity to know that it's a human as opposed to a Neanderthal and what part of the – how small are the fragments?

Brasil: Sometimes, sometimes you just get a tiny scrap of, you know, long bone shaft, and in that case, you really can't say very much about it, you know? You can say, “This is likely something that is human or closely related to human based on things like the bone thickness and the shape of the cross-section.” You can basically, by process of elimination, say, “It's none of these other things. Therefore, it kind of has to be, it fits this human anatomy.” But, I'm, I'm very fortunate that my dissertation is focused on a pretty complete partial skeleton, so I have almost all, all of the bones in the skeleton represented in this one individual, and they're definitely not complete. They're really kind of broken up, and especially when they were found, there was a lot of really careful work and cleaning them and putting them back together that other project members and museum scientists worked on, and I'm very grateful that I kind of came in at a point where it was mostly ready for me to start working on, but they've, they are complete enough that I can take measurements to compare them to moderns, which is great and that's definitely not always the case. Sometimes, you're kind of, like I said, cursed by these really fragmentary pieces that you want to do more with but you just are limited by what you've found.

Saintsing: That's really cool that you got this skeleton. I mean, is that just like, does that happen often?

Brasil: No, I was, I was very fortunate in that I was kind of at the right place at the right time. I took an undergraduate course here at UC Berkeley. I was also an undergrad before I was a grad student here. Berkeley just caught me and held on, so I've been here almost nine years now, which is kind of crazy to think about, but yeah, I took an undergrad course called Human Paleontology that was taught by Professor Tim White here at UC Berkeley, and then I took Human Osteology the following year, and then I graduated, and I decided to stay on for graduate study, and I had made my interest in human evolution really clear and was very fortunate to be in a position where I was invited to come and work on these fossil remains that had been recovered by the Middle Awash Research Project, which is the established project that I work on, and it's co-directed by three Ethiopian scholars: Dr. Berhane Asfaw, Dr. Yonas Beyene, and Dr. Giday WoldeGabriel, along with Professor Tim White here UC Berkeley. And, this is a project that's been running for over three decades in the Afar region, which is in, in northern Ethiopia, and they have just established incredible infrastructure both in the field and also in the museum, and so, I was really lucky to be brought on to work on, on this skeleton. So again, it was kind of a right place, right time situation.

Saintsing: Is that kind of – I feel like that's kind of anthropology, right?

Brasil: Yeah, again, kind of just science in general.

Saintsing: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, you spend a lot of time in Ethiopia?

Brasil: Yeah, yeah, I do. I've spent probably somewhere between six and eight months there total over the course of my five years of graduate study, and I've done two full field seasons, so two 6-week field seasons out in the Afar region of Ethiopia, and then during our summer I usually will go back for anywhere between three weeks to two months to actually do the curatorial and then the, the research work that happens in the museum in the lab there and Addis Ababa, in the, in the capital of Ethiopia.

Saintsing: What kind of things do you actually do in the museum?

Brasil: Yeah, so it depends what I'm there to work on. So, actually kind of in parallel to the humans, to the human work that I do, I've also got started in the field of paleontology and biological anthropology working on monkeys. So, I'm actually also involved in working on just enormous and amazing monkey samples that have been recovered recently by the Middle Awash Project, and a lot of the work that you, you don't really hear about or you don't see because it's not really flashy or sexy science is all of the ground work that needs to happen to get the fossils to the place where you can actually take measurements and scan them and actually do the science that most people, you know, you hear about in the New York Times. “Oh, you know, this, this human that we found or this new species.” So, you hear about this kind of end result, but what you don't see is all of the planning that went into getting out into the field, figuring out where to look for the fossils, all of the logistics and the finances behind that, that I've been very fortunate to mostly not have to think about because I've been working with an established project. But then, once you've actually found those fossils, which is no small task, getting them back into the museum and then all of the work that follows, which includes cleaning them. It means sorting them so some of the monkeys in particular, you know, you're in the field, and you're collecting things as quickly as you can, and you get back into the museum, and you figure out, “Oh my gosh! They're actually three partial skeletons kind of mixed in.” And so, you have to sort these things apart, clean them, put them back together, label them, organize them. All of that stuff needs to happen before you can actually work on them in terms of like measurements and research and, and taking notes and things like that. So, I've, I've spent a lot of time in the museum there working on the monkeys in particular on kind of that curational side, and I'm actually leaving on Monday to go back for three weeks where I'll do a little bit more curation and then start to do some of the, the measuring and the taking notes and figuring out what we can learn from these monkeys. And then, the other part of that is actually doing some of the data collection. So, a lot of that looks like taking photos, taking laser scans, taking measurements, so basically all of the data that I can collect that allows me to compare those fossils to recent and other fossils as part of a broader kind of comparative analysis in my dissertation.

Saintsing: Dang, a lot of stuff.

Brasil: Yeah.

Saintsing: Do you enjoy like the parts of it that are, you know, the logistics, the cleaning, the measurements?

Brasil: Yeah, yeah, I absolutely do. I, I love the, the museum work. I love it all, but I especially love the fieldwork even though it's really hard. It's really hot. It's really dusty, really tired for most of it, but something about actually being out in the field and walking around an outcrop and seeing these fossils eroding out of these deposits and actually being able to look back in time – like, that's the closest thing we get to time travel, you know, as humans living today, I think. So, there's just something that's really, really incredible about that experience and that's what I think will keep me going back out into the field and collecting a bunch of amazing fossils.

Saintsing: Sure, did you get to do any sort of fieldwork in undergrad?

Brasil: Um, let me think. I think that the only field work that I had done in undergrad actually was kind of more archaeological and focused here in California. So, as an undergrad, I was an anthropology and integrative biology major here at Berkeley, and as some, as part of some of my anthropology classes, the fields and methods, methods courses, I got to go out and work on a couple of sites in the northern Bay Area, like Sonoma area, some shale mountains that were being excavated by one of Professor Lightfoot's students, who's here in the anthropology department. And, as part of like an archaeological field methods course, we actually also excavated the Old Student Observatory up on campus which is close to Northgate.

Saintsing: Interesting. Sounds cool.

Brasil: Yeah, yeah it was really fun. So, yeah, I mean I guess I did have a little bit of field experience, but nothing like going into the Middle Awash for the first time. That was definitely, that was a new one.

Saintsing: How is that the first time?

Brasil: Oh, man. I was hot and dehydrated, but it was, I, I mean, it was incredible. It was like nowhere that I'd ever been before. There was definitely a lot of kind of anxiety about going out there because of scorpions and snakes and all of these critters that could kill me that I'd never had to deal with, but going out and working with the project, so that includes, you know, the directors and then all of the project members who live in Addis. And, some of them work in the museum during the year, work on kind of prepping and putting the fossils back together and curating them and all of that. And then, getting out into the field where we work with the local people in the area. So, the Afar people who are one of the ethnic groups who live in this region, and they, the project has had a long-standing relationship with a lot of the leaders of this group, and so, when we get out there we usually will – I say we, but the project – will hire some of the, the local people and train them to do this work with us. And, it was part of what was so interesting and one of the things that I think was so exciting and so fun was – I mean, I got into anthropology because I was interested in human cultures and different, different people and ways that people interact with their world differently – and it was, it was really interesting to see this group of nomadic pastoralists who are completely living off of the land and meet them for the first time, and, you know, I have no Afar and they have no English, and so, we're trying to communicate through gestures, but they were just some of, some of the kindest people, and they, I know they thought that I was hilarious because I was usually like completely covered up, you know, to protect from the sun. And then, they thought it was totally unnecessary.

Saintsing: Alright.

Brasil: Yeah, yeah, but yeah. It was, it was just like nothing else that I've experienced before.

Saintsing: It sounds really cool, sounds like a lot of fun. 

Brasil: Yeah.

Saintsing: And uh, do you ever take undergrads on this?

Brasil: I don't think that undergrads have ever been taken on this particular project. It's, it's not super common that graduate students go out even just because it is kind of, there's, there's a lot that can go wrong, and fortunately things haven't gone wrong, but we're in a really remote part of Ethiopia, and there are kind of a lot of potential health risks, so it's, you have to be really, really careful when you're out there. I mean, we're, we're two days driving, usually, at least outside of Addis, and a lot of that is kind of off-road getting out to the fields, so it's pretty remote area.

Saintsing: Do you – have you ever actually like encountered any of the, like the dangerous things, like the scorpions and stuff?

Brasil: Oh yeah, oh yeah definitely. I've not had any encounter encounters with snakes fortunately.

Saintsing: Nice, um, is that like your biggest fear?

Brasil: No, no, I mean, snakes don't actually really bother me. They probably should more given how venomous the ones out there are, but yeah, definitely lots of scorpions out and about. Fortunately, the ones – I'm not sure if this is true of all scorpions or just the ones that we have out in the Middle Awash, but they fluoresce under UV light. Yeah, so at least you can shine a UV light and make sure they're not, like, under the dinner table before you sit down, gonna crawl into your boots. But yeah, there have definitely been some run-ins with scorpions. I've never been stung or anything, but they're definitely around, and there are some very large spiders which I was not excited about the first time I went out. I've made my peace with them now, but…

Saintsing: Are those, the, the things that aren't spiders: solifuges? Those are terrifying. Listeners should look up a picture of solifuges. 

Brasil: They should. I warn you: they are terrifying. They are the stuff of nightmares, but yeah, those are out there. I've never actually seen one in real life fortunately, but yeah, I know that they exist, which is enough to keep me up a little bit at night.

Saintsing: This is just a reminder that you’re listening to The Graduates. I'm Andrew Saintsing, and I'm speaking with Marianne Brasil. So, what kinds of comparisons are you actually making between the ancient fossils and the modern fossils?

Brasil: Yeah, so…

Saintsing: Modern skeletons. I guess, they're not fossils at this point.

Brasil: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of arguments, a lot of that in general. Kind of depends on what you've recovered in the field, so the comparisons that you can make are necessarily constrained by, you know, what you have available to you, but fortunately for me, like the, the partial skeleton that I'm working on, like I said there's quite a lot of it preserved, so I have taken 400 measurements on each individual for the recent modern humans as comparative data for those, those fossils that I'm working on describing for my dissertation, and that spans most things. That spans long bone lengths, where I can get them, that spans, you know, the breadth of the articular joints, what we call articular facets where the bones are actually in contact with each other, spans the long bone end. So, it's kind of all aspects of morphology that can be reliably measured using, you know, standard metric equipment and then those comparisons allow me to get a sense of, you know, how body size compares across, between these fossils and moderns, how things like body proportions compare, and what that might tell us about how that's changed over the course of the last hundred thousand years and, again, how it relates to these other fossil groups. So, it's a lot of measurements, and then, there are also laser and CT data that allow us to get at some of the 3D aspects of morphology and things like long bone, like, thickness, what we call cortical thickness, how thick the bone in the long bones actually is, like, the mid, mid-shaft, the mid-section. 

Saintsing: And so, why would we want to know how body proportions are changing? I mean, so what exactly, what kinds of questions are you trying to answer?

Brasil: Yeah, so on a first pass of what the descriptive work is, it's basically, to put it very, very generally, what does this look like and how does it relate to other closely related groups? So, that's kind of just how paleontology proceeds on a first pass of how you do that descriptive work to get the, basically get those data out there so then other researchers who are focusing on, on specific questions and specific parts of the anatomy can also work on those more specific questions. So, what I'm doing is kind of big picture right now, but one of the, one of the things that I think is really interesting, and I can't say too much about this because the analyses are still in progress, but this, this, this partial skeleton is really similar to a lot of the other fossil material that's been recovered from this time period, and that it's very large, it's a very what we call robust skeleton. And so, what's interesting about that is that it looks quite different from the people who currently live in eastern Africa, and so that raises some questions about, “okay, well what's going on with these populations? Is it the same group of people that's existing in eastern Africa and they've just changed significantly over the course of a hundred thousand years, or is this picking up on some population movement?” And, that's where the interface between what we're working on with the fossils and the anatomy gets really interesting with these really burgeoning, this really burgeoning field of genetic studies and trying to figure out what modern genetic data tell us about these past population histories and how populations are moving, so it'll be really interesting to see how that interface plays out in the, in the next few years.

Saintsing: Yeah, so that's another point about science, right? How long it takes.

Brasil: Right. Yeah, yeah. 

Saintsing: So much time between, I guess, the – when did the first parts of these fossils start getting found?

Brasil: I think they were first starting to be recovered in 2003 I want to say. Yeah, and so, it's been a long time, and, like I said, I mean when they were, when they were first found, unfortunately none of it was found in situ, as we call it (basically like in the sediment in which it was originally encased). So, it had all eroded out and been sitting on the surface for a while where you know the local Afar people are moving their goats and camels from one place to the next, and so, they're getting trampled over and over, and they're getting rained on, so this skeleton was just smashed to pieces and a lot of the initial work that had to happen was just putting this back together, which was quite the undertaking. And fortunately, like I said, a lot of that was done by other project members and I basically just had to kind of finish up that part of the, the curation of the skeleton and then get to work on it.

Saintsing: Do the Afar people like call with tips, like, “Oh, we see this skeleton.” Or, are they just – do they not get in touch about the skeletons?

Brasil: Yeah, so most of the, most of the Afar people, it's just kind of part of life, which is so fascinating, that they probably just walk around and they see these fossils and they don't think anything of it the same way we walk around and see like native Californian plants and it's just a normal part of life.

Saintsing: They'd be so weird.

Brasil: Yeah, but it's funny because there are a few, a few of the local Afar people who we work with now that they have been trained and it's, it's kind of funny, it becomes a little bit of a competition in the field. Everyone, you know, wants to find the humans. Everyone's, you know, kind of running around trying to find the best fossil – not running. There's no running in the field, but…

Saintsing: To keep from trampling?

Brasil: Yes, there's very careful surveying in the field, but yeah, it's a little bit of a competition. And so, sometimes, you know, one of the project directors will get a call from someone, one of the finders out in the field who has come across, you know, some, some fossil that they think might be human, and then, and then, it's kind of a patient waiting game of, you know, having, having to wait to get back out there to check it out and trying to preserve it as best as possible until then. Yeah, but one of the things that is really interesting to watch is how quickly a lot of the local Afar guys are just amazing fossil finders. They're the ones who are finding so much of the best stuff, and they just pick it up so quickly, and so, it's kind of funny that most, most of the Afar that I know – which is very, very little – is constrained to body parts and animal types because that's kind of the most useful vocabulary for when I'm out in the field.

Saintsing: Sure. So, somebody gets a tip, like maybe an Afar person or whoever's out in the field sees like a skull, and so, how'd it, who gets to be the one, “I'm gonna publish on this skeleton,” you know? What, I mean…

Brasil: Yeah, yeah, so that, that comes down to permitting really. So, the Afar region is, is very, very large and in, in terms of field sites and field coverage. So, probably you’ve heard of Lucy as have most of the listeners. That comes from a site called Hadar. That's actually kind of just to the north of the Middle Awash region, so where we're working is really close to where Lucy was recovered, and Hadar is a separate project that has separate project leadership and a separate project permit, and so, basically anything that's found within the Hadar field area falls under the purview of that project and the same is true of the other projects working in the area like the Middle Awash, Gona, Woranso Mille. So, there are a lot of different projects that have, kind of have purview over different regions of the farm.

Saintsing: But then, with ownership, it – anything that's found in the nation of Ethiopia would just be Ethiopian?

Brasil: Yeah, yeah. They're all, they're all Ethiopian antiquities, and even anything that's collected by the projects they all get accessioned back into the National Museum of Ethiopia and held there as Ethiopian antiquities. 

Saintsing: So, I know there, historically that was like a problematic issue, right? That…

 Brasil: Yeah.

Saintsing: All these governments got to keep their own antiquities. So, has that been a recent development that, or like how, how long has Ethiopia been able to maintain ownership over its antiquities?

Brasil: Yeah, I can't, I can't really speak so much to that history, but I do know that it's, it's quite different than what's happened in a lot of other African nations, like Kenya for example. Because Ethiopia was never actually formally colonized in the same way that like Kenya was by Britain. Ethiopia, other than a run in in the 40s with the Italians, has been an independent nation and, so, more so, I think, in control of its antiquities than a lot of other nations where there was this colonial power that felt that they had some right to these antiquities and often unfortunately exported them and a lot of that is kind of still in progress of getting those antiquities back to the countries in which they were originally recovered.

Saintsing: Does the exporting – it must have made… I assume like not everything was exported, you know, by scientists who were keeping careful notes, right? Has that made it really hard to, like, follow all these fossils?

Brasil: Yeah, so I could actually give an example that's kind of near and dear to my heart and especially to the heart of my adviser, who's Professor Leslea Hlusko here in the integrative biology department. She undertook this very large ambitious project called the Comprehensive Old Divide Database Initiative. So, you might have heard of Olduvai Gorge. It's a field site in Tanzania that was worked on by the Leakey family for decades, and it's yielded some really important, really influential fossils closely related to humans but quite a bit older mostly, and these, these fossils were kind of exported and sent everywhere, all over the world. Some of them are in Tanzania, a lot of them ended up in London. I actually got to go to the Natural History Museum there as an undergrad to work on some of the kind of inventory of what was there, but these are kind of just spilled all over the world at this point, these fossils from Olduvai of all different kinds of animals. And so, my adviser, Professor Leslea Hlusko, basically formed this initiative to figure out where all of these fossils were and try to get them into one database online so that researchers working on, you know, birds could figure out where all of the birds that have come from Olduvai, “Where do I have to go to work on these?” And, trying wherever possible to take photos of the fossils and museums so that researchers have that information available and can see actually what's there for them to work on, which is really useful if you're trying to plan research trips, trying to figure out kind of what exists and what's worth making a trip to go see. So, that's been a many-year-long project that's still in progress and just gives you a sense of an example of kind of the mess that came out of some of these early practices in the field of just sending fossils everywhere and then today trying to figure out where they, where they ended up and get them into one central place.

Saintsing: All right, so I guess the real message from everything you said is science: it's very hard.

Brasil: It's not for everybody, but I do love it.

Saintsing: Yeah, there's like the, the natural processes obscure things. People obscure things.

Brasil: Yeah.

Saintsing: It takes so much time. You're kind of working with all of these layers that you have to peel back.

Brasil: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Saintsing: Well, so you do a lot in the field. Do you have time to enjoy life back here in Berkeley?

Brasil: Yeah, yeah, I do. Um, yeah, I, I just got a puppy which I'm very excited about. That was, that's kind of a big move in the work/life balance category, which I've not been so good at through most of grad school, but one of the things that has, I think, kept me sane and kept me grounded in grad school is that I run trail. So, I run and preferably very slowly and long distances. So, I actually did my first 50k last year on a trail up close to Redding, and it was, it was beautiful, and I, I think it's been, like I said, really important for my mental health in grad school, and I think it's, it's really important to have those outlets. And for me, trail running has a lot of parallels to grad school actually. There's a lot of endurance. There's a lot of kind of just put it in low gear and grind and get over the next climb, and then, there's a little bit of a relief from there, which, you know, there are a lot of milestones in academia that kind of fit that profile. But, it's also for me the closest thing that I can get to meditation, so it's kind of the, the best way for me to turn my brain off, other than sleep. And so, I'll find that if I go out for a run especially, if something's kind of nagging me or I can't make sense of some result that I just got, I go out for a run, and it's almost like my brain is just working on it in the background, and it just provides this kind of clarity and this grounding that then I can usually get back to my work in a much more focused way.

Saintsing: So, you said you took those two classes as an undergrad. Is that kind of when you knew? How long ago did you know that you wanted to be a scientist? Was it before undergrad or here?

Brasil: Yeah, that's a great question. It's hard to point to kind of one specific thing. There are a couple of things that I think were pretty formative in that sense. One is that I always was kind of the kid who just liked being outside. So, I grew up in the Central Valley of California, kind of out in the country next to a walnut orchard, and I remember loving to just spend afternoons out there whenever I could, and there would be coyotes running around out there, and I actually remember coming across this coyote den that had a fully skeletonized coyote in it and digging up parts of it and taking it home, which my mom was less than thrilled about. She should have known that I was going to be a paleontologist. Yeah, so there was always kind of this, this innate fascination with just being outside and being animals. I have really loved animals, but I think in terms of kind of realizing that, that was science and that I wanted to do science, my first exposure to that was taking an AP biology course when I was fifteen. And, that was really the first science course that I had ever taken, and I should preface this with that I grew up in a pretty socially and politically conservative household and area of California and a very kind of old-school Catholic upbringing. My parents are, they immigrated from Portugal, and they're very traditionally Catholic, and so they had never heard of the theory of biological evolution, which meant that I had never heard of the theory of biological evolution, and the first time that I was exposed to that was when I was fifteen in this AP biology class and there was something about that that clicked for me. It was really, it was, it was, it just, it made sense. It was a really satisfying answer, and so, it was also the first time that I remember walking out of a class and wanting to learn more about something not because of the grade or, you know, doing well in the class but just being so fascinated by it. And, I think that was kind of the first inkling of this is, this is the thing that you're really into and this is the thing that you're, you're gonna do, and so, ever since then it's been some flavor of evolutionary biology and the focus on humans kind of happened later in undergrad when I happen to find the anthropology department here on campus and kind of bring those interests in humans and human cultures and how humans are different and alike and marry that with evolutionary biology and studying that from an evolutionary framework.

Saintsing: Well, as we come to the end of the interview, we usually have a segment where the guests can say anything they like about their field or any issue. So, are there any like final thoughts you'd like to leave listeners with?

Brasil: Yeah, there's, there is one thing, kind of in terms of the broader impacts of what I do and some of the things that I've been thinking about. There obviously is a lot of cause for concern with the current political and social climate and thinking about a lot of the rhetoric around race that has kind of come to the surface, and a lot of it is really ugly, and I think that a lot of the science has the potential to be misused and it's important to be careful about interpreting results and, especially as a scientist, how you communicate your science. And, I just want to kind of underline or underscore both something that has become apparent to me and in my work working on these fossils that you know are from a hundred thousand years old and they’re ancestral or closely, closely related to the ancestor of all modern humans living today. So, when we put it in that context, all of the differences that we perceive across modern humans are pretty recent, so we're all really, really similar, and there's a lot of fuss being made about differences in drawing lines between groups of people and what we overwhelmingly see not so much in my work but especially in people who are working on modern humans living today is that there are, there's no ability to draw clean lines between groups of people, so you don't see these discrete racial units, and so, when you see these claims about there being fundamental biological differences between different groups of people, I would just urge your listeners and people out there to be really critical of those and to be kind of careful to follow sources that are putting out good, good science, and so, they are kind of looking for outlets that will regularly correspond with scientists who are leading in the field and getting their input and getting, you know, their, their perspective on things is really important and just to remember that you know we're making a big fuss about these differences that are really, really small in the grand scheme of things and that we're all quite similar.

Saintsing: Great message. It's a good point about always making sure to check about maybe political or any other reason why somebody might publish something and not just take it in.

Brasil: Yeah, and there are a couple of sources, like, I can point your listeners to. Like Sapiens.org, which is an outlet that is, it's an independent news outlet through I think with the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which is a foundation that funds a lot of anthropological research, and they have contributions from scientists on different topics. There's also The Conversation, which is another outlet that will often take kind of public facing pieces from the scientists who are actually publishing the work, so that's a really good outlet as well, just to point people in a couple of places that don't, hopefully don't have any political spin on them.

Saintsing: Right. Nice. Okay, great resources to check out. So, today I've been speaking with Marianne Brasil from the Department of Integrative Biology. She's been telling us about her work as a biological anthropologist describing fossils from Ethiopia. It's been so much fun talking to you.

Brasil: Likewise.

Saintsing: Thanks for being on the show.

Brasil: Thanks so much for having me. It was really fun.

Saintsing: Tune in in two weeks for the next episode of The Graduates.

Keywords: history of science, botany, Philippines, colonial, textiles

Andrew Saintsing: Hi, you’re tuned into 90.7 FM KALX Berkeley. I'm Andrew Saintsing, and this is The Graduates. Today I'm joined by Kat Gutierrez from the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. Welcome to the show, Kat.

Kat Gutierrez: Hi, good morning.

Saintsing: It's so great to have you here. So, I hear that you study the history of science, and we typically talk about science, so I thought it would be really interesting to explore science from a historical perspective.

Gutierrez: Yes, I do I look at the history of Philippine botany.

Saintsing: You study like how people understand this science?

Gutierrez: Yeah, I think that's a really easy and good way of putting it. I look at botany, specifically at the end of the Spanish colonial period. That's around the late 19th century up through the US colonial period, which is about through the mid 20th century. And so, as we probably know, the Philippines was colonized by Spain and the United States for quite a lot long time, and I'm interested in how colonial scientists especially understood plant life.

Saintsing: You're interested, in some capacity, in like how colonial people in particular were studying these sciences? Like as colonists? Was that coloring how they were explaining or understanding the flora of the area?

Gutierrez: Absolutely, and I think actually that starts to speak to about two levels of the project that I'm currently working on for my dissertation. The first is how colonial scientists arrived in the Philippines and what they made sense of when they were coming across new and obscure plant life that they had never seen before either in North America or in Europe. But, I'm also looking at how the varied actors were contributing to the science at the time. So, these weren't just colonial botanists. These were illustrators. These were collectors. These were field hands. Sometimes they were spouses. And so, by expanding the breadth of the people that we understand to be contributors to the science at the time, I think we have a fuller narrative of how people made sense of the Philippine plant world.

Saintsing: Yeah, that's so interesting. You know, we, I guess, always just think about the scientists who do things but there's always these people around. That's really interesting about the spouses. So, I guess scientists often brought their spouses along, and these people were also just collecting things? 

Gutierrez: Yeah, you know that's actually been one of the most exciting elements of my research so far. So, I was doing some research in Madrid one of the major archives that houses a lot of the institutional documents for Spanish botanists of the late 19th century, and I would find these records of widows who usually wrote to the state requesting pensions for their deceased husbands, and a lot of these husbands were collectors or land surveyors that were sent to the Philippines. Some of these women joined their husbands, and what we have record of is not only – you know, there's travel documents from Spain to the colony. Some of them painted. We actually have some surviving illustrations of plant life. Some of them establish life in the Philippines, and so, there are records of children who were born in the Philippines because these spouses had joined their partners, essentially in the field. And, I think that's been part of the exciting work because, even if you go into the American period, we have women who were the most avid collectors for Manila during the early 20th centuries, some collecting over 20,000 plant species for herbarium collections.

Saintsing: So, it was mostly men, I guess, who were the scientists, and the spouses were, tended to be their wives. Was it ever the other way around?

Gutierrez: Yeah, I would say that that tends to be what the record shows. Right. So, we see a lot of men who traveled with their wives. I would say that one of the more exciting case studies has been this collector named Mary Clemens. I'm not sure if you're familiar with her. She's from the United States, and she trained in botany in the US in the late 19th century, and she and her husband traveled to the Philippines together. He was an Episcopalian pastor for the US military, and they had this amazing and illustrious career in Philippine plant collecting that not only included the Philippines but other countries. And, what we now know is that he died in Southeast Asia, and, after he passed away, she still continued the work. And again, so it's Mary Clemens really who's known more for that collecting effort.

Saintsing: Right.

Gutierrez: And, I think she spent her final days in Australia still continuing to collect, and she was the one who I was referring to who has at least been estimated to have contributed 20,000 plant specimens to herbaria worldwide.

Saintsing: Wow. Wait. So, he was a pastor?

Gutierrez: Yeah.

Saintsing: Interesting. And, he was also really interested in the botany. How much does religion and science intersect in colonial collections?

Gutierrez: I think, through their case study, quite a bit. So, her husband, who was the pastor, actually assisted her in mounting and shipping materials. So, Mary was the one who's kind of going out in the field initiating the collections, identifying them in the field. He helped her sort of as a field hand, and if you look at the correspondence – and I've only touched some of it so far – religion is incredibly important to how both of them are seeing the world and making sense of plant life and what I think you know they would really term as God's creation. And, some biographers have noted that Mary especially had quite a love and an appreciation for a lot of the field hands that who had supported her in her work, and so, if you read the letters, there's quite an infusion of both spirituality, connection with the environment, and then of course connection with other people who are contributing to their collecting and worldwide.

Saintsing: That's really cool. So, you're studying a lot about how colonial scientists analyzed the plants when they first got there, but obviously there were people there who had been looking at the plants for a long time before. How much did pre-colonial science factor into what the colonial scientists were understanding about the Philippine environment?

Gutierrez: I would say quite a bit. I would say quite a bit, but it sort of depends on what angle that you're looking at. So far in Philippine history and history of science in the Philippines we know that medical botany, for instance in Materia medica were very well studied both by the United States and by Spain. This also sort of branched out into economic plans, right? Plans that had particular utility in the home or in fieldwork. But, what I'm interested in is not only that but a couple of things. The first is knowledge of plants that's being communicated in Tagalog which is one of the native languages in the Philippines. And so, currently we've sort of studied the history of science through English language, Spanish language sources. I'm interested in what's being communicated in what I think is really the colloquial language of Manila at the time. And, we have discovered, you know, newspaper articles that talk about plant life, you know, from gardening to the importance of a rose and sort of how its traveled from its provenance into the Philippines. And the second for me, and this is sort of been a side project that I've worked on with historian Pamela Smith at Columbia, is textiles. So, textiles at the turn of the century, we have to understand, were almost always built from plants, right? So, the technologies of textile production, certainly the colors that produced, that were produced from flora, and the fibers all came from local plant material. I actually think that this source material has been untapped typically in studies of botany in the Philippines for a lot of intellectual reasons, you know. I think that there's a particular idea of what textiles and weaving is and that's usually subsumed in anthropology and material culture, but if we start to take a step back and look at it for its science I think we start to learn a little bit more about local understandings of plant life that we hadn't before.

Saintsing: Interesting. So, what, what's the difference between studying textiles as a science versus studying it in anthropological context in terms of your work?

Gutierrez: Mm-hmm. I would also – you know, I'll definitely have to credit pamela for a lot of this sort of new thinking about textiles and craft. A few things: for instance, if we were to look at the kinetics right of how one produces a textile, I would say that we understand that it's a very embodied process, right? So, if you've ever sort of seen textile production, whether it's for the backstrap loom that goes around person who's producing cloth or at a foot loom for someone sort of arched over this contraption that's really producing threads that sort of interlock, we understand that this is a very embodied process that's working with natural materials to kind of rebuild something of utility, something of cultural import for me. I'm really interested of course in the plant life that goes into it, and so, I'm interested in how people are cultivating the plant material, transforming the plant material into dye and then using that on natural fibers that they're also creating. And so, for me that's also kind of a mirror way of understanding classification and how a dyer or a weaver might view plant life based on those classifications that might look different from you or me trained in perhaps plant systematics, okay, so what sorts of other classifications are people using and I guess this context.

Saintsing: Cool.

Gutierrez: Yeah, well, so I participated luckily in a great field study and research project in the northern Philippines in 2018, and we were being actually led by an anthropologist, and we were able to integrate with a community in the northern province known as Umbra. And what I discovered when I was working with some of the weavers was how they classified bamboos. So, there are species of bamboo all throughout the northern Philippines and, depending on the circumference, its density, and its length or how it was cut, particular tools could be constructed from the bamboo. The same thing was for particular types of wood, so they would call certain fabrics the names of the woods that they were using because that wood would help produce a particular pattern different from the wood of a different tree for instance. And, the same would be applied to woods used for looms, right? So, they were able to differentiate between the mahogany-built looms versus the ones with other more local trees, and I found that very fascinating. And, I found that weavers had an incredible knowledge of the plant life around them, and not only based on sort of how they would tactically construct looms and the textiles themselves, but again they would be able to understand how growing patterns would eventually affect what they could create.

Saintsing: Yeah. That's so interesting.

Gutierrez: Right?

Saintsing: I always, I'm always like so interested looking back in the history of science, right, at both how far we've come and like how much new knowledge we've acquired so quickly lately, but also when you really look back on it, how much people really knew back in the day before like even modern science started coming up. And, I guess that just speaks to, that's just a testament to human ingenuity that we were able to rapidly accumulate knowledge just without necessarily like sophisticated modern tools but just you know by observing the differences between materials.

Gutierrez: Absolutely, and you know I think – well I haven't approached a definitive answer around this, but – I think by observing modern textile weaving and dyeing I'm able to understand a little bit more about what's happening at the turn-of-the-century and why for instance disciplinary constraints sort of lump textile weaving and dyeing into the realms of ethnology or anthropology, and they never really find their way into science, right? They're kind of there maybe for agricultural purposes or for economic development in terms of local industry, but we don't really understand, or there is very little record in the colonial archives about why this could be considered something of a technological advancement or something that really reflects scientific engagement with plant life, and I think that's good, you know? I think it's key because it's starting to really show me a little bit more of the intellectual constraints that we, even we might have, right, when comes to something like craft.

Saintsing: Just a reminder that you’re tuned into The Graduates. I'm speaking with Kat Gutierrez from the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, and we were talking about her research on the history of botany in the Philippines. Okay so, as a historian you mostly look at written sources, right? Does it pretty much start and stop with you at the written word in terms of what you study?

Gutierrez: I hope not. How limiting the history will be, you know, if I don’t actually include other sources that aren't necessarily constrained by text. And so, I was mentioning that you know I look at Tagalog-written sources and your Spanish and English sources as well, but there is a trove of visual material on Philippine botany at the turn of the century that I can't not look at because these give insight into a lot of the local illustrators who were hired by colonial botanists to draw plant life. And so, there have been historians, Daniela Bleichmar is one of them who's looked at how, you know, visual sources, visual material could travel from the colony to other colonies, from the colony back to the metropole, from the metropole to other centers and sites of botanical study. And, without these visual sources I actually think that not a lot of Philippine material would have really been known of and so it gives us a little bit more credit in my reading to those illustrators who were very much so advancing Philippine botany in ways that perhaps wasn't as acknowledged at the end of the 19th century or in the early 20th century, but nowadays, when I think about how if I turn to a book on Philippine plans I'm probably looking for pictures first, right? A lot of us are and I think, you know, to not look at that would be a great mistake.

Saintsing: I guess I was thinking of illustrations as part of a, you know, text, right? That you would include illustrations with written words, and so, that would be part of some overall document that you would have though the illustrations and the text, right?

Gutierrez: For most. For most. At the same time there are a lot of illustrations that are sort of loose-leaf in people's archives that possibly went into final productions possibly or not. You know, they could have been practice sketches and I actually think these practice sketches are also important to look at because they kind of give to the process of how these illustrators, are thinking about, you know, plants that they're studying. And so, one particular illustrator that I look at, he has, you know, leaves and leaves of sketches, and if you compare those to the final form to what eventually gets published by him and various Spanish botanists, there's a great difference and I think that's gonna require a lot more intensive analysis because it might give me a better sense of again, like I said, how the process is working for them at this time.

Saintsing: Oh, that's really cool to think about. You can actually see like editor notes on his illustrations or something like that?

Gutierrez: It's pretty great. I think there's some notes where you can see he drew something and then it'll say underneath like, actually I don't know what this is. This can't really be identified. This is sort of a scrap, right? Or, you know, what I've probably observed more frequently are, you know, plants that then get changed in angle perhaps to ease viewing or understanding of that plant material, whether it's, you know, kind of in its growth process. And so, that's been really just exciting to see as well because I think that's also required, that requires a certain amount of artistic skill yeah that is reflective of what's happening in Manila especially at the end of the 19th century.

Saintsing: Is there a lot of difference between artistic skill in these drawings? Can you see like, oh this guy is pretty good, and this guy is not so bad, not so good? Or is everybody pretty good because it's what they're – 

Gutierrez: What can I say about that? What we do know is that at the end of the 19th century there was a primary arts school that had been established by the Spanish, and most of the well decorated artists were coming out of the school. And so, stylistically there is a similarity across all of them. One artist in particular – and he's the one I look at – his name is Regino Garcia. He becomes the lead illustrator for many publications, but you can sort of see that, among his peer group, they all kind of approach light and shadow and plants in a similar way. The more exciting ones for me though are, like I said, the ones that are produced by spouses, and I'm not too sure yet where their training was. My guess is in the peninsula, and their approach is again slightly different, right?

Saintsing: Do you find that the different artists always focus on different parts of plants, or is there, is everyone kind of understanding the important parts of the plant in the same way?

Gutierrez: Mm-hmm. I think that's a really good question because that speaks to what we're valuing, right? At the time in terms of what structures of the plant are most important to communicate not only to local audiences but certainly to an international audience I would say it's all about the same, and we're seeing kind of a lot of the same things. So, seeds, right? Leaves, leaf structures, the flower, the fruit, possibly stems. And, for the more kind of illustrious publications, we'll see these in a kind of a very organized manner, right? I'm thinking back to like the Garcia laminates that, you know, label each particular part of a specimen. It's a meticulous detail. Again, these are very different from the sketches that are much more rough, but this is pretty consistent across the Spanish publications. By the time we hit the US colonial period, things get a little bit different. It becomes a little bit more text heavy so far in my reading and the emphasis on illustration isn't quite as intense. However, what we do have, see, are more photographs in the archive, and so, these photographs of trees especially become part and parcel of how the United States is communicating the richness of Philippine plant life.

Saintsing: It's interesting. When was – so, when was the transition between Spanish and US colonial power?

Gutierrez: In the Philippines, 1898.

Saintsing: Okay, and so, the Spanish just – well, photography was around during Spanish colonial rule, right?

Gutierrez: It was. 

Saintsing: It just wasn't used as much?

Gutierrez: I would say not. Yeah. It's been something that I've really been searching for pretty aggressively, and even with you know a lot of the newspaper publications, there's real reliance on lithographs, sketches, but I have yet to find – and someone please contact me if you do find this – any Spanish era photographs of plant life. A lot of it is hand-based.

Saintsing: Do you know at the same time as Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines were there botanical photographs taken elsewhere in the world?

Gutierrez: That's a great question. In the Philippines?

Saintsing: Oh, just in general. Like were people taking pictures of plant life at the time, or was that sort of a development that occurred toward closer to the turn of the century?

Gutierrez: You know, I haven't noticed anything from any other archive that sort of looked at it in the same way. Something's happening at the beginning of the 20th century that sort of points to a bigger reliance on photographic technology, and I think that's a really good question because it's something that I should be looking into a little bit more especially if I'm thinking about the standards of international botany and how those might be changing at the turn of the century.

Saintsing: There was no color. So, people are coloring in on top of the photographs?

Gutierrez: Yes, okay so some of the photographs that are coming out of the United States at the time definitely look they're being colored by hand. The ones that I've come across specifically from the New York Botanical Garden and their rich archives on the Philippines have been black and white prints.

Saintsing: Okay, so I'm really interested to know how you came to want to study the history of botany in the Philippines.

Gutierrez: That’s a great question, Andrew. I only laugh, you know, not because of, you know, anything kind of silly about the story, but it really does feel like it's been a lifelong process, you know? I can't tell you that any kind of step has ever been away from this particular trajectory. I actually think that it's made plenty of sense in my life, and so, I used to work in public health, and so, I come out of Los Angeles. I was born and raised, and I was working in public health for a very long time. And, I first got started in a community that's in a community clinic that serves Southeast Asian immigrants, and so, I came to Berkeley as an undergrad, and I was interested in studying public health and Southeast Asian Studies.

Saintsing: So, you were working in public health before you were an undergrad?

Gutierrez: I did, yes. I started in high school, and Berkeley seemed like the best place to combine two fields that I really loved, and as soon as I graduated, I aggressively pursued a career in public health. I was working in adolescent health for some time, but I always knew that I loved Southeast Asian Studies. I had always had an affinity for the region, and I really think a lot of it was because I was working with immigrant populations at such a young age, and at some point, you know, a career in public health I wanted to approach a lot of the problems that I was observing through historical lens, and I wanted to develop a project on the history of public health in the Philippines during the US colonial period. And so, it made sense for me to reapply to the institution that, you know, had really raised that level of curiosity, so I came back to the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies to see. From there it was in my first semester of my program that I took a class with Laura Nader, and she's in anthropology, and she encouraged me to look at medicinal plants. And, in the Philippines medicinal plants play a very big role in public health. In the Philippines oftentimes medicinal plants are the most affordable and accessible form of palliative care that people can access, and you know, I started uncovering more information about medicinal plant research and it brought me to my dad.

Saintsing: Cool.

Gutierrez: And so, my dad was – is a botanist on Philippine plants. he's a specialist of the Dipterocarpaceae. Now, what we know is the Philippine mahogany, but in the 1970s and 80s he published on the medica. And so, the seminar paper that I was writing for Laura's class turned into a bit of a study of what my dad was doing in the 1970s during the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. And, it was only through all of that kind of intensive research into his work, old newspaper clippings, oral history with him that I realized that there was this lengthier more vibrant history to botany in the Philippines that I wanted to track and that hadn't been written, and it pushed me kind of into the colonial period to understand sort of the intellectual beginnings of modern botany as we know it in the Philippines and how its practiced, and so, in many ways I actually think this project has been a life in the making. Not only for mine, but for my dad as well.

Saintsing: So, have you uh been working closely with your dad?

Gutierrez: I have, and I only laugh because I'm – gosh, we've had such a colorful time. So, my father moved back to the Philippines at the end of 2014. He also is a PhD holder. He wrote his dissertation on the Philippine Dipterocarpaceae and he decided at the ripe age of 83, 82 to go back to the Philippines to publish his dissertation.

Saintsing: Wait, so he didn't get his PhD in the Philippines?

Gutierrez: So, he got his PhD in the Philippines, but he left because of the dictatorship, or in part because of the dictatorship. And so, he left the project behind or the unpublished manuscript of his dissertation there, and he was inspired to clean it up and to push it out and publish, and so, I think in part we're both inspiring one another as we finish our projects. And so, when I went to the Philippines in 2017-2018 to conduct my archival research he was with me for 90% of it.

[Laughter]

Gutierrez: I remember giving a conference presentation on the island of Samar in the central Philippines. It was a history conference, and my dad joined me for the presentation, and I said something like, you know, this is a word to all of you young history students. Please, you know, bring your parent with you for all of your research. It is both beautiful and exhausting, and, you know, if I think back and I'm sort of just even ruffling through the memories of what we've had together, I really wouldn't change it or exchange any of it you know for that time, and a lot of it was taxing. you know? I'm, I was the sole caregiver for an aging parent. At the same time, there are, you know, intellectual insights that he's provided me that I know I wouldn't have gotten without his presence in the field, 

Saintsing: Right. That's really – he, he's turning 86 this year in August, and he was out in the field?

Gutierrez: Oh, he joined me for that textile research. That was in the North. He came to every conference presentation that I had, both with Philippine systematists and Philippine historians. I think there was only one time where we were walking through a botanical garden on the South in the province of Laguna in the Philippines where I think maybe like 500 feet in, he just said, you know what child I'm just gonna stay here. I just – like pulls out a cigar, bit of a character, you know? I'm thankful. I'm thankful that he's ambulatory. I'm thankful that he's, you know, just got all the faculties in place to still have all of this curiosity about the world, and I think that really serves as an inspiration not only for me in life but how I approach this work. You know, to see a man who's carried such passion and to have left it behind for so long and pick it back up again once more shows me that, you know, the dissertation ain't no big thing. It's soup.

Saintsing: It's really cool that you get to spend so much time like on-site, right where you're studying. Is that common mostly for South and Southeast Asian Studies departments that you like actually go out into the field and get to collect written sources from wherever, whatever country you're studying?

Gutierrez: Absolutely, I definitely can speak for our department, South and Southeast Asian Studies, where we're encouraged. You know, it's actually required that we go to the country that we're studying or the field sites that we're studying. I have a colleague who studies old reliquaries from Indonesia, and she would spend weeks at archaeological digs, you know, across Indonesia. I personally commit to doing, you know, field studies and collecting plants and learning how to collect herbarium-grade specimens because I think it inspires a different approach to the work. And so, if I am also you know sweating beads, you know, to find a particular material and, you know, getting rashes from maybe stepping into a thorny bush, I'm recognizing not only kind of the manual labor that's going into what was maybe happening at the turn-of-the-century, but also appreciating kind of the sensorial that comes along with them. I think there's a lot to be gained even as we write these narratives of the past from participating in what could have been you know these collectors or these illustrators actions. Then it's certainly, I would say, a taste for, you know, textile. I participated in a field school where we actually did it ourselves, and we were trained by master weavers and dyers. Once again because I think we were able to gain a different kind of insight into the work.

Saintsing: What's the process like, trying to track down documents? I mean, you know, are you, do you just like know kind of where to go? Or, do you actually have to, I don't know, like think about where this missing document might be, you know?

Gutierrez: Right. Oh, it's just like reminded me of just how long that process really takes. I mean you're really just hunting, you know? You're really looking for things, and that's I think my process has been like prior to leaving for Manila and Madrid, which are my main research sites for the last two years. I had conducted some preliminary research to know that, okay well, maybe in this library in Manila and maybe in this library in Madrid there are documents that are going to be pertinent to what I need to find. And, those are very important for, you know, applying for the funding to get me to these places to begin with, but once in place, you know, and I've been told this by my late adviser, Jeffrey Hadler. He just said you have to be really flexible because you'll be surprised by what you end up wanting to find, what, what, what pulls you, you know, and what you discover actually. Maybe it wasn't there to begin with, and so, first and foremost – and I still carry that advice with me today – is just you recognize the flexibility because, I think, if you come in with a plan and you only stick to the plan, you become constrained by it and what you discover. Even in archival research the data can be in various places and places that you wouldn't suspect to begin with.

Saintsing: Well it looks like we're running out of time on this interview. Typically at the end of the interview we have a minute for the guests to make any other larger point they'd like to make about their field or social issues, so if you'd like to take a minute to address the audience on any particular issue of relevance…

Gutierrez: Gosh, you know, I guess, I guess the first thing that's coming to mind, and as I'm thinking about my dad or thinking about my research when I was in the Philippines, I could see that no history is too small, and so, when I always in the Philippines I would really encourage scientists to keep their archives. And so, Manila in particular has seen a lot of war and destruction, and voluminous archives were destroyed pretty much from the end of the 19th century up through World War II. It's been really a work of not only repatriating material but rebuilding archives that were lost. And so, when I see scientists now I say, please just keep your letters, keep, keep whatever messages you have, keep your books, keep your libraries. Give them away because you never know, you know, what interested and curious soul might come around and want to write that story. We have, you know, troves of information on the history of science coming out of Europe and North America. We're only now building I think better histories of science in the, you know, former colonies in Southeast Asia, in Latin America, in Africa. And so, part of the work, I think, now I've been talking to you, Andrew, about sort of encouraging people to remember that those stories, you know, the very human element behind STEM. You have a very human element behind research. It can make for one hell of a history.

Saintsing: It's a great message. Yeah. Thanks so much for being on the show, Kat. I've been speaking today with Kat Gutierrez from the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. She's been talking about the history of botany in the Philippines and her path to her current PhD program. Again, thanks so much.

Gutierrez: Thank you, thanks for having me.

Saintsing: Tune in in two weeks for the next episode of The Graduates.

Keywords: fire management, California, history

Andrew Saintsing: Hi, you're tuned into 90.7 FM KALX Berkeley. I'm Andrew Saintsing, and this is The Graduates, the interview talk show where we speak to UC Berkeley graduate students about their work here on campus and around the world. Today I'm joined by Jameson Karns of the Department of History. Welcome to the show, Jameson.

Jameson Karns: Thank you so much for having me, Andrew.

Saintsing: It's great to have you here. We're having a little bit of technical difficulties but we're finally on air.

Karns: We'll make it work.

Saintsing: All right, so, Jameson, you study fires and fire management, correct?

Karns: Absolutely.

Saintsing: So, why don't you tell us a little bit more about the research you actually do. You're in the Department of History, so you're studying historically how people have approached fires and fire management?

Karns: Yeah, so I try to always keep a dual lens when I'm doing my research and writing: that is, one the history of the people, society and also the history that the landscape, various ecosystems and whatnot are telling me, and I tried to combine the two and I came to this subject largely through my background and prior career before academia.

Saintsing: What was your background and prior career?

Karns: So, I was actually a firefighter primarily in Southern California for quite some time. 

Saintsing: What's quite some time?

Karns: So, a little under 10 years. I started at a fairly young age. I come from one of those families where it seems everybody is involved in the fire service one way or another, and so, I think before I was born it was kind of written in the stars that I would be in the fire service and be a fire fighter for some time.

Saintsing: So, how long – how young did you get involved in firefighting?

Karns: I started fairly young. I started at the age of 15.

Saintsing: And, uh, how does a 15-year-old get involved in firefighting? 

Karns: Well, there's various volunteer programs that you can enroll with and start at a very young age.

Saintsing: Okay.

Karns: Kind of a bit similar to what you see with ROTC programs, things like that. You’re operating in very much a volunteer capacity, and, and that's very much the norm even to this day. Most fire departments are volunteer-based.

Saintsing: But, I mean, at 15 they're not going to send you to actually fight a raging fire, right? I mean, what kind of things do people younger than 18 do to fight fires?

Karns: Well, you can enroll in various academies where you kind of get your credentials, things like that, and then slowly you can start taking volunteer shifts. Generally, they're about 24 hours. In some cases, they're 48 hours, and you – you kind of approach it sort of like an apprenticeship, if you will. We're kind of learning the ropes, and, you know, once you turn 18 that's generally when many fire departments will allow a “professional fire fighter” to start and join their ranks.

Saintsing: Okay, so you were in high school, and you were volunteering, and then did you go straight to college, or did you start as a professional firefighter once you graduated high school?

Karns: That's a great question. I started working in wildland firefighting. That's the term we use to apply to those folks that go out and fight forest fires, brush fires, things like that. I started in that field. I then went and did some medical training where I went out and got my paramedic license, and then I became a “professional firefighter,” and then I wound up here at UC Berkeley getting my undergraduate in history, and I just kind of stuck around and here I am getting my graduate degree in the same place.

Saintsing: Okay, so there was a gap between high school and college, or?

Karns: There was not.

Saintsing: Okay, so you – during the summer, I guess, you got some training, and then, I guess, all throughout college you were working in a firefighting capacity?

Karns: My first few years of undergraduate I did volunteer a bit. However, once I got to graduate school that came to a quick and abrupt stop.

Saintsing: I see. Okay, so going back to how you study this, you said you look not only at historical documents but also the history of landscapes. So, does that mean you're kind of like studying geology in some ways? You're studying like core samples or things like that?

Karns: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, one of the whole reasons I went down this path was actually kind of out of frustration. I found the fire service, my vocation, to actually be kind of ahistorical. I found that firefighters weren't that great at conveying what had happened in the past. They used one term and really only one term only to convey the past and memory, and that is “fire season.” You'll hear lots of firefighters talking about like, “Oh hey, you remember that fire season in, you know, 2010?” And, that - that’s how they kind of talk about the past. And, when you want to dig a little bit deeper, it's really tough to do. I remember asking questions like, “Well, you know, why are we using Blackhawk helicopters? Why are we positioning fire engines in this way?” And, often the response I got was: “Well, you know, this is the way it's always been done.” And, I wasn't an academic at the time, but I knew a bit about history, and you didn't have to go back that far to know that, you know, say the Spaniards weren't driving around fire engines around California, so this really wasn't the way things had always been done.

Saintsing: Right.

Karns: And so, out of that frustration, when I came here to UC Berkeley, I found this to be a great, great campus to investigate this kind of unusual historical subject. Not only do we have a great history department, but we also have a great forestry department as well as a fire ecology lab. So, to get back to your question, one of the things I like to do is not only understand the agencies and the people involved in fire management, but I also like to analyze forestry surveys, land surveys, and, even as you're mentioning, more contemporary surveys, you know, where people study tree cores, things like that, to understand what existed in the past through kind of, if you will, natural historical analysis.

Saintsing: Oh, cool. So, you're looking at documents? You're not doing the core sampling yourself, right?

Karns: Yes, exactly.

Saintsing: Okay, so you work closely with scientists in your historical work, or you just collect their documents that they produce, or…? 

Karns: Absolutely. I often find myself as kind of a diplomat in between these two communities because amongst foresters and fire ecologists, they want a record of kind of what existed on the land, what the landscape looked like, and often to get a depiction of that you need to reach out to historical archives, and that tends to be a place where scientists can function, but, you know, it's not where they have the most comfort.

Saintsing: Right.

Karns: And so, I find myself kind of acting as intermediary in between those, those two arenas, but it also, to be fair, it's, it's difficult to decipher a lot of California's various fire chapters, if you will. You know that they're so, so wide-ranging. Myself, I tend to think of it in terms of three different chapters when these chapters are largely predicated on the governing people at that time. So, the first I usually consider that belonging to the indigenous people, the first nations, the various tribes that were here first.

Saintsing: Right.

Karns: And, they used fire in many, many different ways. I do believe they were practicing a science in their own right. They used burning techniques for a variety of agrarian methods. It was common for many tribes to burn large swaths of land and then distribute the seeds of a wanted crop in that area and grow it from those ashes of the burnt area. Other tribes used fire as kind of a supplemental hunting technique, you know? If you have like a bold valley or something like that, you could light it a flame, and it would flush out a lot of the game and you could have various hunters around the perimeter that could then take out the game fairly easily. And, that chapter pretty much went until the sixteenth century, and of course, that's when we have the arrival of the Spaniards here in California, which, of course, was followed by the Mexicans. When you look at the Spanish, they're really developing their own kind of industry. It was called the hide and tallow industry where they managed lots and lots of cattle, and they really kind of came to a conundrum. When you read a lot of their memoirs and diaries, it's really, really interesting how they describe California. It, it doesn't really resemble our current surroundings. Many of them, when they were on horseback they would frequently complain that the skies around California were raining ash because there were fires occurring all over the place, most of them being created by the native peoples. Like I mentioned, they were always frustrated that they could taste ash on their tongue because, you know, fire and ash and soot was always in the air.

Saintsing: So, the, the fire was always in the air, but that was a man-made situation.

Karns: Absolutely, absolutely.

Saintsing: But, I mean, these landscapes are generally thought to have evolved to adapt to fire, right?

Karns: Absolutely. You know, here in California we have a really unique situation. We have many, many ecosystems, but within that we also have some of the most flammable, and because of that, we have a number of plants that not only can cope with fire but are actually dependent on fire, and they've grown and they've evolved to have this dependency. It's a way that they can reproduce, for some of them. It's a way that they can cleanse themselves of disease and pests. It's a way they can help eliminate competition and you know that has been in place for a long, long time.

Saintsing: Oh, and so fire is something that naturally would thought to be occurring in this habitat before people even came here? 

Karns: Absolutely. When it comes to California, fire is as natural as rain.

Saintsing: Right, but so I guess would Native Americans using fire as part of their daily life kind of suppress natural fire. It's almost like today, now that we have our ideas of controlled burns. Is that kind of like a contribution Native Americans were having to the landscape? 

Karns: That's a great question. You know, we don't have many records of Native people actively suppressing fire. We have many records of them igniting fire, starting fire. However, suppression, as we'd find out in the later years, it's extremely labor-intensive, and, actually in their case, it could have been very counterintuitive to what they were trying to do with the landscape and food production.

Saintsing: Right, so uh, is a typical – I mean, do you have – are there historical records of what, kind of, Native Americans were doing? Would they just start a fire and let it go? Say, “All right, everybody, clear out. We got a fire going.”

Karns: Yeah, you know, it's really tough because, you know, we, we don't have many written records. The Native people, they relied completely on oral tradition from oral sciences, if you will, so a lot of the records we have either come from anthropologists or they come from the records of the Spanish. So, it is a bit tough to decipher, but generally, what would take place is, it would be a seasonal action in a designated area where they would go ahead and ignite a fire and various tribespeople, generally women, would go and distribute seeds of the crop that they wanted to grow, and they would allow them to take root in the soil that is now fertilized by tons and tons of ash, which is a wonderful thing for many species, and later on, as the rains would come and these plants would develop they would come back and harvest them.

Saintsing: So, the Spanish got here, and they said, “We don't like this at all.”

Karns: Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah. Going back to that point, you know, they, they developed what's called the hide and tallow industry. Basically, they're managing tons and tons of cows and California at that time it really looked like a paradise for it, you know? We had tons of meadows, lots of grassy fields, and, for them, it was ideal for that industry, but as you can imagine, fire and cows, they don't mix too well.

Saintsing: Right. 

Karns: I mean, they can, I think if you cook them well. Like in terms of the hide and tallow industry not too well. And so, it's actually from our Spanish governor's here in California that we have the first laws against burning, and these laws that were on the books and were considered extremely justifiable at the time allow Spanish citizens to punish Native peoples as they as they saw fit if and when they saw them using fire in any method whatsoever way.

Saintsing: Like how punitive, and how – I'm just, you know – if a Native American just had a campfire was that a thing they’re getting a Spaniard’s punishment for?

Karns: Yeah, it's, it's, it's tough to find out how this law worked on the ground, but there doesn't seem to be too much mercy in these laws. I mean, you know much of Spanish governance in relation to the native people isn't really known for its, its mercy, if you will.

Saintsing: Right, yeah.

Karns: And, you see this system expanded a bit when the government is then passed on to the Mexican government, and later when California becomes a federal area and then a state in the 1850s, then, it's then you see another drastic shift, and that's what I consider the third chapter, which we’re probably in right now. And as you could imagine after California received statehood, with it comes Western institutions, and amongst these Western institutions is a science called forestry, something that really developed in Germany and France and then was imported to the east and slowly made its way to California. In forestry at that time, to boil it down in, in relation to fire, it's best to think of the forest like a crop.

Saintsing: Right.

Karns: You would like to maximize the amount of trees on your land so that you could maximize profit, and also, within that, you want to eliminate any externalities, any threats to your crop, and obviously fire is a threat to your crop of trees. So then, we see the first inklings of fire management and I, I think as you know or anybody who’s watched a wildfire on the news, fighting wildfires, forest fires is extremely labor-intensive, so for many years after the state founded a CDF, or what was then called the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, they allowed fire wardens to actually conscript people if and when a fire took place. So, if you and I happen to be out by a forest and a fire took off and we happen to run into a warden, he could actually conscript us in there to fight the fire, or we could face jail time if we said no. And so, it was, 

Saintsing: I guess, nobody was liable if you got hurt.

Karns: Yeah, no. It was pretty much on you. Yeah, it was on you. There's actually some great narratives out there: fire wardens teaming up with police buggies and what they would do is they would sweep these areas and they would ask you, you know, “Would you like to, say, go fight this fire out here in Sacramento?” And, you would say, yes, you'd go out with the fire warden. If you said no, you would take a ride in the police buggy and in the paddy wagon and go down to the jail.

Saintsing: Sounds uh, sounds illegal.

Karns: Yes, um and, and that pretty much existed until we got to World War II. So, when we get to World War II that actually ends up being a real big game changer for fire management, and there's a couple major shifts that happen. The first is there's a drastic shift in the men and equipment, the first being you have many, many GIs are returning. They're highly trained. They have the ability to bring paramilitary tactics to fire suppression, and the second component being the equipment itself. You have many decommissioned jeeps, planes, helicopters, radios. All those things get immediately applied to fire management, and they drastically change the vocation. I mean you could imagine responding to a fire on horseback or on foot versus, you know, a jeep with aerial assistance using radio communication, so it drastically changes: one, how aggressive you can be in terms of fighting fire, and two, how quickly it can be done. But also, on the inverse of that, you have a group of radical foresters that are questioning some of these basic notions of forestry, the first being that fire is bad.

Saintsing: Right.

Karns: And, one of them actually came from this university, is a very famous forester. His name was Harold Biswell, and Biswell and others went out, and they began to listen to a variety of communities around California, primarily sheepherders, cattlemen, those that were often frequently hit by wildfires and affected by wildfires but also were around to see the aftermath. And, there was a consensus coming up that, you know, these fires may not be all that bad, you know? The landscape after a fire, it grows back fairly quickly, it tends to be more diverse, and these foresters really started investigating these claims, and they started to understand fire in a variety of ecosystems, and that's why we now refer to them as fire ecologists. 

Saintsing: Yeah, I feel like now… Well, you know, I'm studying biology, so I guess, I'm used to thinking of fire as being important to ecosystems, and I guess… So, how long ago was it that people were kind of coming to these conclusions that maybe fire isn't an enemy but it should be part of life?

Karns: Well, it's, it's very difficult because I'm sure as you can appreciate as a scientist, there's the understanding in the scientific community, and then there's the understanding in the public, and it can be two very different things. So, when we get to the 1960s, 70s, particularly 80s, there tends to be a wider understanding amongst foresters, forest ecologist that fire in certain ecosystems is necessary and that helps with the recognition of fire dependent species, things of that nature. And, that's also when you see more and more experimentation with what we now call prescribed burning, a gang out there intentionally setting fires with, with the hope that there will be beneficial effects. However, you know, this understanding isn't as well known in the general at large, you know? California, here, we're in a very, very unique place because it seems every fire season we get a ton of media coverage in our fires wherever they happen to be in the state. Around the world, if California is burning, you will know about it, and we've been great at conveying this message that we need to go out there and aggressively fight these fires, some of them rightly so, some of them maybe not, you know? What one of the difficulties about this state is we really don't have any limitation on where we can set up homes, where we can set up communities, and though you'd find these limitations in other countries, we really don't have them here.

Saintsing: Well, there's, you mean, there's no like legal limitations…

Karns: Well, in terms of zoning, where you can build homes, and all that. So, for instance, let's, let's take that ever popular community of Malibu. You know Malibu. It's in Southern California, extremely popular and extremely affluent community, but when you look at the ecosystem it's built in, it's built in a coastal chaparral ecosystem, and that happens to be one of the most flammable, if not the most flammable, ecosystems in the world. You know, if things were to occur “naturally,” if you will, there would be a fire generally in the ballpark of once every five to 15 years in Malibu. However, within that same community we've also developed huge mansions, large homes, like I said very affluent communities really without much regard to what would occur along those hillsides to keep that ecosystem healthy.

Saintsing: Right, so you're saying that it was, I mean I guess in my mind, when you brought that point up, I was thinking about how there's all of this protected land that we couldn't build on, but it's that the places we've already started building weren't planned out well?

Karns: Absolutely, and so, it, it can be a bit tough if you build structures within deep forest and within chaparral ecosystems to then expect fire agencies, the state to come in and protect these structures in these highly, highly flammable surroundings, and that's something that the state of California has continually grappled with and will continually grapple with.

Saintsing: So, what do you think a place like Malibu, I mean you know it's such an iconic place kind of, right? Like, there's no way you're going to get people to just abandon it, right?

Karns: You know, I would never recommend doing that, but, you know like I mentioned earlier, we do have proactive and prescriptive means either through thinning, either through prescribed burning, to go out there and minimize this threat to these communities as well as have a beneficial ecological impact as well. However, these moves tend to be a bit difficult: one, gaining support for them – you know, nobody really likes to look in their backyard and see kind of a charred moonscape, it will never, ever be a popular – and, two, developing the license for these prescribed burnings, thing can sometimes be difficult as certain agencies have found that they run into a number of bureaucratic hurdles in, in doing so.

Saintsing: Right, I see. Going a little bit back, when you talked about starting the new chapter from Spanish – I guess, American…?

Karns: Yes.

Saintsing: Jurisdiction, and you're talking about forestry kind of being established in Germany and France. I've never been to Europe, but I have heard, right, that forests, they're kind of like these really manicured places, especially in comparison to the US. And so, I guess, would it even be possible to apply the same logic to European forests as to North American forests?

Karns: Well, I, I think we tried, you know? If, if we think of the science kind of flowing from Europe over here to the west, you know, one of the things that now obviously stands out to us is the ecosystems are vastly different, and, you know, what stands out and becomes most apparent, those forests over there in Europe they're just wetter. It's harder to start a fire, they don't occur as frequently, but one of the things that's really interesting is, with global warming across the globe, we see fires sprouting up with a greater occurrence and frequency in areas where historically they wouldn't occur at that rate. And so, in many ways we're seeing the flow of techniques coming from the states back to other regions of the world, where now they're kind of looking at our specialty in firefighting.

Saintsing: Well, we're about out of time. Are there any thoughts you'd like to leave the audience with?

Karns: Yeah, the last thing I would say, you know, I, I'm a historian, so I'm definitely not going to say what will or will not happen in the future, but I do think California and the United States as a whole is at a really interesting point, you know? As I mentioned, many say that we're in the age of mechanized fire suppression, and we do have the option of continuing that, you know? Some agencies right now are currently playing with using predator drones to assist them in fire management, so many think that we will continue along that path, but the other option there is also to look back at some of the prior chapters and really consider some of the prescriptive and proactive forms of management that exist out there, and it's something that we will have to confront sooner or later, you know? Climate change is making this a really interesting and demanding topic. So, this is a situation that's going to force us to commit to one of these paths

Saintsing: You think we might expect to see in the future California looking more like the way the Spanish saw it when they first got here, more consistently seeing the effects of fire in our day-to-day lives? Ash in the sky, maybe scorched landscapes?

Karns: Well, I think it would be nice to see more forms of localized proactive fire management, people getting out there and interacting with these ecosystems and developing situations where they could not only benefit the environment but keep their communities safe as well.

Saintsing: Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Jameson. It's been a great pleasure talking to you.

Karns: You know, I'd like to thank the Scott Stephens fire lab here at UC Berkeley, and, if anybody's interested in monitoring fire here in California or anywhere around the world, they could check out the Global Fire Monitoring Center at GFMC.online. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Saintsing: Tune in in two weeks for the next episode of The Graduates.

Transcript

Andrew S.: You're tuned in to 90.7 FM, KALX Berkeley. I'm Andrew Saintsing and this is The Graduates, the interview talk show where we speak to UC Berkeley graduate students about their work here on campus and around the world. Today I'm joined by Eliot Bessette of the Department of Film and Media Studies. Welcome to the show, Eliot.

Eliot Bessette: Thanks Andrew. Great to be here. 

Andrew S.: Great to have you here. Eliot, you study horror movies, is that correct? 

Eliot Bessette: That's right. I'm writing a dissertation on fear in horror films and haunts, is walk through haunted house attractions. I'm in my eighth year or seventh year in the program and I want to figure out what art can show us about how fear works. 

Andrew S.: Interesting, so you want to understand psychologically how fear affects our minds through art. That's what you're saying? 

Eliot Bessette: Yes, that's right. Kind of as a guiding principle of my project is that both the sciences and the humanities can converge in their understanding of the emotions, but we're actually missing part of the picture of how emotions work if we don't get the humanistic philosophical side. That's what I'm trying to provide. 

Andrew S.: Okay. You use a lot of psychology in the science in your research or not so much or?

Eliot Bessette: Somewhat. I try to keep one foot in that world and I try to be conversant with what's going on, but for instance, we do rattle off some things we know from the sciences of emotion. We know that the amygdala fires when there's a threat that we haven't quite processed and that the hippocampus has something to do with the memory of fear and that's very interesting. 

But what does that tell us or how much does that tell us about our viewing experience of psycho or the shining? Not nothing, but it's not the whole picture. 

Andrew S.: You're more interested in what exactly?

Eliot Bessette: Well, I'm interested in figuring out a philosophy of fear through the analysis of horror films and haunts. And I can weave in some science with that. But I think by studying fear and by studying the emotions in this way, we can learn about the emotions and also learn about ourselves, learning how the emotions go through us and how we live them out. 

Andrew S.: I see. Okay. You analyze these movies and you're kind of always asking yourself like, "What am I feeling right now?" Or are you also talking to other people? You're trying to get ideas of how other people interact with these movies or like comparing? Are you trying to find general ideas that connect people? Or is it more like your own experience?

Eliot Bessette: A bit of both, the groundwork... let me put it this way. The fundamental thing that I'm working with is my own experience, that's where I start and I think that's where everyone starts with. I assume that what I experience is somehow communicable or sharable with other people, but it's also somewhat idiosyncratic, somewhat personal. 

When I experience fear, I am learning about myself very particularly. But in a broader sense, I'm also learning something about how people generally experience fear. I want to look at things like... One of the questions I'm asking you is how does fear relate to empathy? Many people assume in horror films that we empathize with the fear of frightened characters. I think that's wrong.

I think we don't experience fear empathetically. We may empathize with other emotions, but we don't empathize with characters' fear. Why? Because I'm assuming on my understanding of empathy, we need two things. One, the same emotion as someone else. And two, having acquired that emotion through some sort of imaginative, putting ourselves in their shoes. 

Andrew S.: Right? That's kind of interesting, right? Because when we watch horror movies, at least thinking about Halloween or Texas chainsaw massacre, right? Things like this where you almost identify with the person who's killing these victims, at least in terms of the camera work. That makes me sound bad doesn't it?

Eliot Bessette: A lot of people have made that argument. I do think there is some way in which we can align ourselves with the killer sometimes. But I don't think we do that as often as one might suppose and if we do, I don't think it makes horror films retrograde entertainment, it's not all sadism. There's a famous argument put forward by Carol Clover, who came up with the term final girl, that we don't just identify with the monster. We may start by identifying with the monster, but then we shift to identifying with the final girl, which means that we move from a sadistic orientation to a masochistic orientation. 

Andrew S.: Sounds like why would people want to watch horror? 

Eliot Bessette: That's another great question and a lot of ink has been spilled on it and no one really knows. But to float out a few ideas, I've always been interested in being scared and since I was a kid, I've loved being scared, I loved roller coasters, I love goosebumps and horror novels and I watched some horror films when I was a kid. And what I'm doing now is still trying to figure out what I loved then and what I and many other people love so much now.

There's something about the fun of the physical excitation for horror films that is very hard to get anywhere else. I also think horror films in drilling home on one emotion and I really think that emotion is fear, not horror, so the genre is a bit of a misnomer. 

Andrew S.: What's the difference between fear and horror?

Eliot Bessette: By horror, I understand the sort of emotion we have in response to something like a beheading video or a car crash. You say you're horrified to see this video, you are aghast, you are appalled. It's not fun. It is definitively not fun.

Andrew S.: Right, but thus we do watch a lot of horror, there are a lot of our movies, right? That would fit that category, right? I'm thinking of Saw or Hostile, right? 

Eliot Bessette: Somewhat, yes. Saw and Hostile are a bit unlike a lot of the horror precedents which have more to do with fear. Fear I understand is something like an emotional response to a threat that is not threatening primarily because of its impurity. If you are primarily threatening because of its impurity, that would be discussed. 

Fear as I understand it can be fun. Fear is much more inactively involved emotional response, whereas horror seeing a beheading videos, seeing a car crash doesn't invite a physical response. There's nothing to do other than gaze, aghast.

Andrew S.: Maybe gag?

Eliot Bessette: Maybe gag, but horror, I'd rather fear by contrast usually invites some sort of bodily reaction like commonly set of fight or flight response, there are other things we can do too like freeze. I think this as a possible somatic theory reaction, this doesn't get enough credit, but think of the scene in Jurassic Park where the water starts shaking and the T-Rex realizes or rather the people realize the T-Rex is nearby. 

The thing to do is not to move, that's how you stay safe and fear leads to the characters freezing. And in every time I've seen Jurassic Park with an audience, it leads to everyone in the audience freezing. 

Andrew S.: Yeah, that's true. We're all kind of like possums in some ways or anything. 

Eliot Bessette: In a way.

Andrew S.: Are there any, you would think evolutionary reasons why we might freeze? Would that be helpful?

Eliot Bessette: Oh, yes. I think the reasons why we have the basic suite of reactions to fear that we do is for evolutionary reasons. The pop science writer Jeff Weiss says there are four main responses, fight, flight, freeze or faint. And all of them can do different things in reaction to a predator depending on, for instance, how close or far you are from the predator.

Freezing is very good. If there is a predator hundreds of yards away that might not notice you if you don't move. Fainting is good if there's a predator up close that wants to eat you, but won't eat something it thinks is dead. And of course fighting and fleeing can obviously have their utility too. 

The way I think of it, the basic initial response that we might have probably has to do with the long evolutionary history. But on top of that is overlaid so much human development and learning and culture and personality, which is what makes fear so cool that it stretches across our most basic reptilian brain to our most evolved cognitive self. 

Andrew S.: Yeah, that's pretty cool. I wanted to go back to the empathy thing. And so you said horror movies [inaudible] in your opinion make you empathize with the fear. Do you empathize with the characters on other emotional levels?

Or I'm just wondering if you are saying that you would argue that you're more removed from horror movies than people would normally try to suggest? Horror movies tend to be a visceral experience I would think, where you are experiencing emotions along with the characters. 

Eliot Bessette: Let me first sketch out why I think we don't empathize with the fear of horror characters. I think we need two things, a shared emotion and second to have arrived at that emotion through some imaginative, putting yourself in someone else's shoes. The reason why we don't empathize with characters fear is that we're lucking the second part. We have, they feel fear and we feel fear. 

But we don't get to fear by imagining what it's like to be Laurie in Halloween or Sally in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The film is independently scaring us. Everything about it is conducing to make us feel afraid. We're not on top of that imagining what is it like to be afraid in that position? We're already afraid in our position. 

Andrew S.: It's a separate fear than we would feel in a fight or flight situation, it's sort of performative almost.

Eliot Bessette: There are certainly performative aspects of fear and this is one of the differences of watching a horror film in a theater versus watching it by yourself or watching it with a significant other versus watching it by yourself. You may act differently if you know that other people are seeing your fear, but there's something shared across all of those. 

Andrew S.: Right. Okay. But it's the music, it's the lighting?

Eliot Bessette: Yes.

Andrew S.: Or is it seeing somebody else in that situation? Do we feel similarly as we watch a horror movie to how we would feel if we actually saw somebody being victimized in a terrifying situation? 

Eliot Bessette: Two things. One, it's noticeable that we can experience fear from horror films even when there's no character present. If you just imagine a scene with a monster visible or a monster glimpsed in an empty house, that could be scary, although no one is threatened. Then you asked, "Is it like how we relate to people being threatened in the real world?" 

I think a crucial difference there is the matter of belief. Belief doesn't decide whether or not you're afraid, but it will strongly color what your fear feels like and whether the fear can be fun. Why horror films can be fun to a lot of people is that we don't believe that we or any other real person is threatened. 

We can enjoy the play of emotions, we can enjoy the narrative, we can enjoy the creativity of the aesthetics, but we're not worrying on anyone's behalf. But if I saw someone getting mugged or if I were being mugged, there would be someone to worry for or I would believe in the reality of the threat and that would strongly color how the emotion feels.

Andrew S.: It's kind of like playing a game, watching a horror movie, it's like playing football. You can kind of like almost go to war, get really amped like battle this team, but it's not real. Although football is a little weird because there are a lot of injuries.

Eliot Bessette: [crosstalk] that analogy. But yeah, basically the idea. Right?

Andrew S.: Yes. Okay. You don't just study horror movies you study haunts?

Eliot Bessette: Yes, that's right.

Andrew S.: Physical attractions?

Eliot Bessette: Yeah.

Andrew S.: Do you like going to those a lot? 

Eliot Bessette: Oh, I love it. I'd be doing it for seven or eight years and I started at the big amusement park attractions, specifically Halloween horror nights at Universal Studios. But I quickly grew tired of that. I quickly outgrew it and wanted something more intense. 

I started looking up more experiences that were more physical, more immersive, more tactile, which has led me to the very weird world of extreme haunts, where there is a safe word that you can say if it gets too intense and you sign a waiver and they can put bugs on you, they can smack you around. It's a wild obscure world. 

Andrew S.: Oh, are there places where you can go and you get a bunch of money if you stay the whole night, if you make it through? Is that a thing?

Eliot Bessette: That is a common urban legend? I don't think it actually exists anywhere, but I've heard it.

Andrew S.: Bummer. Well, so that's a little weird. 

Eliot Bessette: It is. I agree [crosstalk]

Andrew S.: At that point. I mean I guess you know you're safe overall, but they can cross boundaries that you would normally not cross and even these physical haunted house situations. Why does that add things to report to you? 

Eliot Bessette: What interests me there is first of all, how much I can handle. I'm interested just in the survival challenge aspect of it. At the same time, from a scholarly perspective, I'm interested in how the fear changes as layers of safety get stripped away. When we watch a horror film, we know that we can see things and we can hear things and that's it.

When we go to a haunt, there is so much more room for sensory engagement or even pain. In one that I went to in New York a years ago, I was waterboarded.

Andrew S.: Why?

Eliot Bessette: I know. First of all, I didn't know this is going to happen going in, but I now have been through a mild version of that. And I know, at least within this very confined, aesthetically managed situation, I have this entire new sensory memory experience of a certain sort of fear. And first of all, I can tell you it's not fun.

Andrew S.: I believe it.

Eliot Bessette: But it's interesting how that could be rolled into an overall theatrical experience with aesthetic value. I know I'm sounding completely crazy. 

Andrew S.: No, you're good. But, so there, yeah, you're actually feeling, I'm just imagining the situation. Okay. I feel like waterboarding is about as far as it could go. And it's almost like it's not even theatrical at that point. It's just like you were experiencing things, right? 

Eliot Bessette: Yeah, that's exactly right. That what's so strange is it's like the fiction get stripped away. There's nothing fictional in that moment or the times that I've been electrically shocked. It's just reacting to that moment and emotionally reacting, physically reacting, figuring out what you will do or what you can take. 

Andrew S.: Wait, so what was the situation like when you were being waterboarded? Were they trying to get something out of you? What's [inaudible] happening in this scenario. 

Eliot Bessette: I was in some weird suburb of Buffalo. I had no idea where I was. I was about an hour, 15 minutes into this experience. I was the first person to have gone through. And apparently I learned afterwards the performers were talking amongst themselves and were concerned that I wasn't reacting enough to the other stuff they had thrown at me.

They decided just on a lark to improvise and waterboard me and it worked. It got a reaction. I definitely felt something. And once they saw my legs start jerking, they let me out.

Andrew S.: That was you tapping out? 

Eliot Bessette: I didn't want to tap out. I knew I could, I knew there was a safe word although I wouldn't really have been able to say it through a wet cloth hood, but there was a safe word ostensibly. And they could tell that the first round of it had gotten to me. And so they let me take a breather. 

And then I was restrained in a wheelchair and they pitched the wheelchair back a second time as though to do it for a second round. And I asked them to stop, but I didn't say the safe word because I didn't want the experience to end and they did stop and then other things happened and they put spiders on me, et cetera. Then the experience wound down. 

Andrew S.: Now I'm interested. Okay. Have you worked at one of these places?

Eliot Bessette: No. I bet it would be a ton of fun, but I haven't myself.

Andrew S.: Yeah, because I'm interested in the experience of working at the place. Right. I mean that would be a interesting comparison. Yeah.

Eliot Bessette: I would think so. I would think there would be some interesting sadistic, masochistic polls there as well.

Andrew S.: Yeah, for sure. I don't even know what to say at this one. 

Eliot Bessette: Yeah, where do you go from there? 

Andrew S.: Now, when I was emailing you to set this up, I said one of my questions might be comparing, these kinds of theatrical haunted houses, although as we've demonstrated, like the theater kind of blurs at some moments there. 

But to things like haunted experiences that people might actually believe in, right, if somebody goes to a house... people that are really into saying that the Winchester House right in San Jose is haunted, I think you sent back a response. I was like, "Whoa, man, I don't really believe in ghosts."

Eliot Bessette: I ain't afraid of no ghost.

Andrew S.: But, yeah, I guess so and my mind, I was thinking like there wouldn't be a whole lot of the difference there. You go with this intention of scaring yourself, but when you brought up, the difference between watching a horror movie and watching something terrifying happen to someone else, there's a difference between beliefs. I guess you would argue that there might be a difference, assuming you do believe in supernatural threats.

Eliot Bessette: I think that would be the salient difference. If you go into an allegedly haunted house and you believe in the haunting or the possibility of haunting, then that experience carries with it for you the threat of possession or some sort of paranormal attack. And that's something worth being worried about to return to earlier distinction. 

You would worry for your life, for your soul or something. Whereas, like you said, "I don't believe any of that in anything paranormal." If I were to go through a haunted house, I might be affected by the creepy atmosphere, I might think about the history of the place, I might even fear something more pedestrian in the present day like, what if there is a clandestine drug deal happening somewhere? Which would again lead to a sort of worry, but setting that aside, I think I would have a much milder encounter than someone who believe they might be possessed. 

Andrew S.: Right. Yeah. I guess I was thinking more of teenagers egging each other on to go into the graveyard vibes and someone who is seriously afraid of becoming possessed. And then it's kind of more back to the whole theatrical thing, right, like your friends and you are collectively saying, "Oh, this is on and but we're trying to go or we're going to prove ourselves anyway." It's almost like a haunted or a haunt at that point. Right?

Eliot Bessette: Yeah, that's a good point. I wonder though, for the teenagers egging each other on how many would kind of maybe sort of hold out the possibility that there is something. 

Andrew S.: Right, for sure. Yeah. Did you do that a lot as a kid? Did you like try to go and I don't know, mausoleums or something? 

Eliot Bessette: No, there were no good haunted spooky things nearby. I grew up around Chicago that I was aware of, so I had to contend myself with roller coasters and R.L. Stine books. 

Andrew S.: Rollercoaster, same kind of line of entertainment as a haunt would you argue or no? 

Eliot Bessette: It's pretty similar. I have, I think outgrown roller coasters in a way. They just don't do it for me anymore. And in a way I'm still chasing that fix by going to more and more intense haunts, so they are similar.

Andrew S.: All right? Do you like track them down? Is it like every Halloween, you're just traveling and to find these places?

Eliot Bessette: That's exactly right. It's become one of my main hobbies every October. I write also for a website online, haunting.net. We write news and reviews about the haunt world to share the experiences with people. 

One of the things is that many of these immersive experiences let in very few people, sometimes 10 will go through the entire run of the show. Most of the haunt world doesn't get to experience it. And correspondingly reviews from those who have been through take on a more important role than say a Broadway show that might be playing for six months. 

Andrew S.: Right. Are there world famous haunt people? People who create the haunts that everybody in the community's like, "Oh, this guy just set up a new haunt I got to check that out."

Eliot Bessette: There are, 2019 is a bit of a down year now that we're talking two of the main creators, the creator of Blackout Out Haunted Houses and the creator of Heretic are both currently not operating. There's a bit of a power vacuum in the community and we're waiting for the next top dog to emerge. 

Andrew S.: Got you. Is it just a US thing or do you go internationally?

Eliot Bessette: There are international haunts, I haven't been there. Heretic, had a haunt in Switzerland a year or two ago and I couldn't make that trip. 

But I had heard of the setup that you were supposed to fly or otherwise traveled to Basel, take a bus just so far down a road, walk then down a country lane by yourself where you would find a house. You were supposed to go to the house at midnight, knock on the front door and then turn away from the door and wait. 

Andrew S.: That sounds pretty terrifying. 

Eliot Bessette: I agree.

Andrew S.: As we wrap up this interview, usually, we get time for the guests to say any major point they want to make about, I don't know, their field of study, social issues, anything you want to say? Is there any bigger point you want to make?

Eliot Bessette: I would say that anytime someone watches a horror film, they are being a philosopher. Because what horror films do is present you with fear and allow you to make of it what you will and fear can teach you things about yourself. 

All you have to do is pay attention to the feeling, pay attention to how you react to the feeling, how it relates to other feelings, what affects you, what doesn't affect you, but you have a real opportunity to learn about yourself when you watch horror films. Yeah, watch them.

Andrew S.: Sounds great. All right. I've been speaking today with Eliot Bessette from the Department of Film and Media Studies, with some talking about his lifelong interest in horror movies and in experiencing fear at haunts and through the movies. Thank you so much for being on the show, Eliot.

Eliot Bessette: Thank you very much. 

Andrew S.: Tune in two weeks for the next episode of The Graduates.

Transcript

Andrew S.: Hi. You're tuned into 90.7 FM, KALX Berkeley. I'm Andrew Saintsing, and this is The Graduates, the interview talk show where we speak to UC Berkeley graduate students about their work here on campus and around the world. Today I'm joined by Emily King of the Department of Integrative Biology. Welcome to the show, Emily.

Emily K.: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Andrew S.: It's great to have you here. So Emily, you study invasive species, is that correct?

Emily K.: Yeah.

Andrew S.: Why don't we just start by defining an invasive species?

Emily K.: That is a good place to start, and kind of a complicated place to start. So most folks define an invasive species as something that did not evolve in the place where it currently resides, and it could have been brought there accidentally by humans or accidentally by extreme weather events, but most folks now put another kind of caveat on top of that. It's not just something that didn't evolve in the place where it currently is; it also is causing damage in that place or has the potential to cause damage.

So we can think of a lot of invasive species as being like weedy plants, things that grow over their neighbors or out-compete their neighbors, and some animals species especially, they eat other animals that we care about. So yeah, usually invasive species are associated with bad things, but that's part of where some of the complexity comes from. Some scientists don't like that. They think we're kind of assigning value judgments to just what's happening in nature and they think that's a bad idea because so many folks want to remove invasive species. The scientists who think that we are misplacing our values think we're trying to play God a little bit in whatever we think of as restoration.

Andrew S.: Right. That's really interesting. So, I just had in my mind that an invasive species is something that human beings introduced, but you're saying that that's not even necessarily true.

Emily K.: Yeah. Sometimes there are accidents. So in the case of like the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, we've found animals that have made it to the west coast of North America that we only used to find in Japan, but they were attached to tsunami debris that also made it across the ocean. So some of those things have established here on the west coast, and another, in a human adjacent case, a lot of marine organisms especially get transported around on the holes of ships. So, you know, those aren't people actively saying, "We want to bring this thing to a new place." You know, it was in the harbor where they docked their ship the first time and it goes into the next harbor on the other side. That's not on purpose, but it's definitely, it's an accident but something to think about.

Andrew S.: Right. So like you were saying with the value judgment, I guess in the case of the Japanese tsunami, you could argue that that's just a natural occurrence, and so how could we to decide whether or not to remove Japanese animals that have established from that event?

Emily K.: Exactly. So that's where the complexity really lies, and I think a lot of folks are just encouraging each other to think about what their values are. At least if you can acknowledge that you have values around what you're talking about, you might try to work to not include those and how you do your science, but if you do, you can say that that's part of your worldview.

Andrew S.: So how would you remove human assigning values, you know what I mean, to the study of invasive species?

Emily K.: Yes. A lot of it's a language thing. So we often use almost aggressive language when describing invasive species. They "take over" and they "out-compete" and they "push out." We sometimes also say that we're "combating" native species or you know, we're trying to "protect" our ecosystems, and those are all things that are really human human values.

Andrew S.: It's like we're going to war, yeah.

Emily K.: Yeah. Some people even say that there's a war on non-native species. So that's like a very clear example of when we let our human values or desires color the way we talk about science.

Andrew S.: Right.

Emily K.: So instead of just thinking about a cause and effect, you know, the effect of one species next to another, we're talking about, you know, detriments of having this species next to another. Sometimes that might be the effect, but if we talk about it like that from the outset, we're setting ourselves up to expect something "bad" to be happening when sometimes nothing is happening.

Andrew S.: So there's examples of like species that have "invaded," but they haven't disturbed the ecosystem they've invaded.

Emily K.: Yeah, I mean there a lot of evidence, and I can't come up with a good example off the top of my head, but sometimes when you think about weedy plants, you know, especially in like an urban environment. We already took out our native plant species. When we get weeds, they're not disrupting maybe what was already disrupted. It's just not going back to what it might have looked like before humans ended up in that place.

Andrew S.: Right. Okay. So that's an example where I guess the ecosystem that was there is completely gone now.

Emily K.: Mm-hmm.

Andrew S.: So can there ever be a species that invades an undisturbed ecosystem that doesn't disturb that ecosystem?

Emily K.: I mean, I imagine it could happen. I can't think of an example right now. There are a lot of, especially ecologists and like wildlife managers, asking these questions because we want to know, you know, are we spending money to get rid of something that either we can't get rid of or it's actually not doing the horrible things that we thought it might? So are we wasting resources? Are we wasting energy? Are we assigning values to things that really don't make a difference to us or the way that we see the ecosystem?

Andrew S.: Right. So I guess the main problem is there are some obvious examples where invasive species have come at, like rats on islands-

Emily K.: Rats on islands, zebra mussels in the Great Lakes. There's a lot of beavers where beavers shouldn't exist, which is kind of funny because lots of places in North America want their beavers back.

Andrew S.: Oh, interesting. I didn't know beavers were an invasive species or-

Emily K.: Yeah, beavers are invasive, or at least problematic, in parts of South America. They are eating forests that don't need beavers to regenerate. Whereas a lot of the southeastern part of the United States needs beavers and has no beavers.

Andrew S.: Interesting. Wow, so like there's the two issues there: you gotta get beavers out of the one place and then you've got to reestablish beavers and the other place.

Emily K.: Right.

Andrew S.: Do you look into that as well, and re-establishing?

Emily K.: No, but at least the species that I work on kind of flies under the radar in its native habitat and people are worried about it here, but yeah. In New Zealand, they don't really care about the mud snails.

Andrew S.: Oh yeah. So let's talk about the species you work on. So you work on a mud snail from New Zealand?

Emily K.: Right.

Andrew S.: Can you just describe it a little more?

Emily K.: Yeah, it's really, really tiny. You know, smaller than the eraser on the end of your pencil. They are freshwater snails. They are clones of each other, at least in places outside of New Zealand. Because they're clones, they can have incredibly large population sizes very, very quickly after being introduced to a new place. They have incredibly broad tolerance for types of environments that they might live in. Everything from the freshest of glacier melt water in rivers to salty estuary conditions, warm water, cold water. They just do their little snail thing.

Andrew S.: Is that kind of like an invasive species thing that you can survive in extreme regions?

Emily K.: Yeah. One hallmark of a lot of invasive species is that they, yeah, they're like weeds. They just hang out everywhere.

Andrew S.: Right, yeah. So they reproduce asexually-

Emily K.: Right.

Andrew S.: And so there's like no diversity in their population or ...?

Emily K.: Yeah, that's what we think about the western US. So a lot of other scientists that have worked on this in the last 30 or 40 years in the US have done a lot of work trying to understand if around the country we do have all the same strain or if they're different. They have pretty much decided that everything west of the Rockies is one clonal strain that started in Idaho. I was introduced originally to Idaho.

Andrew S.: So they can trace it back to a single snail in Idaho.

Emily K.: Yeah.

Andrew S.: Do they know like where in Idaho?

Emily K.: Yeah, there's like a pinpoint in the snake river, but that's because this snail has another kind of cool ability, that it is almost indigestible by fish. So the leading theory is that we were stocking imported fish from New Zealand in Idaho, and one of these snails was inside the gut of a fish. Because they pass through the fish mostly unharmed, it established in the river.

Andrew S.: Wow.

Emily K.: Yeah. There's-

Andrew S.: It can pass through the stomach unharmed.

Emily K.: Yes.

Andrew S.: Why, or how?

Emily K.: If you think about a snail shell, these guys have, or gals I suppose; they're all female, have like a really spiral shaped shell, and if you think of like a spiral-shaped seashell, but snails of lots of species have what's called an operculum. Basically it's a trap door that they use to cover the opening of the shell. So once they kind of close up and deploy this trap door, they are almost impenetrable.

Andrew S.: Dang.

Emily K.: Their biggest risk is, I mean chemical that might get into the shell, or drying out becomes the biggest risk at that point.

Andrew S.: So does anything eat these snails in New Zealand?

Emily K.: Yeah, some birds do eat them, but mostly what keeps them in check in New Zealand is that they have 13 different types of parasites, or there's 13 parasitic worms that could essentially castrate them and keep them from reproducing.

Andrew S.: Interesting.

Emily K.: Right, and we don't have those here.

Andrew S.: I guess it would be a bad idea to introduce a parasitic worm into the population-

Emily K.: Yeah. Usually that's another sticky subject and a dangerous game to play, but some researchers have tried in the lab, and it did work for a little while, but they think that the co-evolution between the parasite and the host is so fast that after about five years, it didn't work anymore.

Andrew S.: Yeah, and I assume people would test how the parasite interacts with natural populations before they-

Emily K.: Right, yeah. I don't know if they got that far, if they tried their lab studies and decided it wasn't working well enough and to even go beyond that, but there are some other types of animals that can eat them. Some fish have like almost like, what's this, kind of like a gizzard in a chicken or something that would grind, but there aren't that many fish of that kind around here, and the best is critically endangered. It's called the tidewater goby. There's like, they're mostly up in Humboldt Bay and there's a couple out on the Golden Gate National Seashore, but they're not going to help us in the inland waters, and some crayfish, but because crayfish, again, can crush with their kind of chelipeds, but there's not enough of those things to kind of combat the problem we have now.

Andrew S.: Do you think if we had this problem just overrun our streams and lakes that then we would see increases in populations of these crawdads and fishes with like gizzards?

Emily K.: You know, I don't know. The snails are not particularly nutritious. They're mostly water. So, I imagine that it would probably be frustrating to be a crawfish trying to eat enough of these snails, or crushing up shells to get somewhere good enough nutrition.

Andrew S.: So the snail is bad news.

Emily K.: Yeah, in some places. In some of the older populations in Idaho and Wyoming, there have been lots of studies about how they eat most of the algae that is produced in the river, which doesn't allow anything else to eat that algae, you know, other invertebrates that become fish food, essentially. It can take up all this space that all these other little invertebrates might be crawling on because they essentially can form mats over rock surfaces, but here in California, we have some really large populations, but we haven't seen these declines in other types of organisms yet.

Andrew S.: So that's good.

Emily K.: Yeah.

Andrew S.: Is it just a matter of time or is it just that there's something in the California ecosystems that's-

Emily K.: Yeah, we're not really sure. So, part of my work has been trying to understand seasonal population size and trying to understand what else we see in creeks with these snails. So far, I haven't looked very comprehensively; it's been mostly observational, like, "What do I see when I'm in the creek?", and I see other things, and I sometimes see other native snails. So the worst case scenario, it doesn't seem to be happening here, and they're mostly in urban creeks, which as an example I gave before, are kind of already not the same ecosystem they might've been without human involvement.

Andrew S.: Right.

Emily K.: So lots of storm drains go into to our Bay Area, creeks. They've been kind of channelized, so many folks have probably driven over what looks like a creek or a river, but it's encased in concrete and sometimes they're very deep and there's not very much water at the bottom. Litter becomes a problem. All those things kind of changed the landscape already, so it's unclear if the same thing would happen in a really natural system where this snail had been introduced versus the urban systems where we see them most.

Andrew S.: Right. So are they in Strawberry Creek here on campus?

Emily K.: I have not found them on campus, but they are in Strawberry Creek, you know,, like about a mile or so away from campus at this [inaudible 00:14:58]. I think it's called Strawberry Creek Park actually, down off of Allston. So I have found them there. They are in the creek, but exactly how much of the creek is hard to tell because Strawberry Creek is mostly above ground here on campus and spends most of the rest of its journey out towards the Bay underground in tunnels. So the park is one of the other places where the stream is open to the air, and someone could get into observe what's in it, but there aren't very many places along the creek where you could do that south or west of campus.

Andrew S.: In creeks that are below ground, is there much life going on there?

Emily K.: That's something I don't know the answer to. I'm sure there are a lot of folks who do know, but because I've only gotten in where I can get in right now and I haven't thought about it, but I would imagine there's not a whole lot going on if it's not close to one of the ends of these tunnels, mostly because the aquatic food webs are based on algae which need light to grow. So, unless some of these almost cave-like sections of the creek are having bacterial-based food webs, I don't know if we would find much and out there.

Andrew S.: So that's like a thing, like a barrier maybe for these mud snails?

Emily K.: Yeah, they could be washed through though. So a lot of animals could move, you know, through some sort of tunnel or piping system to traverse the length of the creek and we would only see them in one place at where it's open.

Andrew S.: Right.

This is just a reminder that you tended to the graduates. I'm Andrew Saintsing and today I'm speaking with Emily King.

Have you always been interested in studying invasive species or this particular snail? I mean, how did you get on this topic?

Emily K.: I've always been interested in aquatic systems. My background and my undergraduate work is all in marine science, and I think the best way to describe myself as a scientist is a physiologist, an environmental physiologists. So that means that all of my interest is about how animals live where they are, how they deal with the challenges of living in that kind of an environment, whether it's places that change in temperature or the amounts of oxygen in the water. When I got to Berkeley I knew that just kind of some resource limitations were going to make it really hard for me to study ocean critters, and I was thinking about other types of aquatic systems, and I kind of happened on this snail by accident.

I was working with an undergraduate who was telling me about some aquatic snail that was invading rivers. So I got online and I was looking at invasive snails in California, and this one is newsworthy. I suppose. There's lots of writing, especially from fish and wildlife agencies, to talk about how it's spreading all over the state and we'd like to stop it. So once I was like, "What is this thing that's everywhere?", that was really interesting to me, and when I learned that fish can't eat it, it survives in salt water and in freshwater I was like, "Oh I have to study this." It seems like almost like a little super-powered animal that nobody knows how to get rid of.

I'm not necessarily interested in how to get rid of it, but why does it survive in all the places that it does is an interesting question. From a management perspective, how do we manage our lands and creeks, but also from like an evolutionary perspective, like how does something evolve in one place that potentially is very, very different from all the places that it ends up and it does just fine? So that's another question that kind of fits really well with what a lot of my colleagues in integrative biology look at.

Andrew S.: Right. So that's what you would say, like management is the answer for why other people should be interested in this-

Emily K.: Right.

Andrew S.: But you're more interested in this idea that animals can live in these extreme environments, but not all animals, and what's the difference between the animals that can live in the extreme environments.

Emily K.: Yeah, and especially without a lot of genetic diversity.

Andrew S.: Yeah.

Emily K.: So one strain of snail lives in geothermal fed streams in Yellowstone and also the Columbia River estuary and high mountain streams in the eastern Sierra, but also just right here in Berkeley. So those environments are very different in temperature and salinity, in other nutrients that are in the water, and that's just mind boggling to me.

Andrew S.: Yeah. People have sort of sequenced the genes of the snails collected from these different environments.

Emily K.: Mm-hmm, and they seem to be pretty similar. Yeah, no large scale patterns at all.

Andrew S.: That's crazy. Okay. So you were interested in aquatic systems to start with. So in undergrad, you studied marine science.

Emily K.: Mm-hmm.

Andrew S.: So did you think that you would be studying the ocean? You said that you were kind of thinking you would study the ocean. How do you feel about moving from the ocean to freshwater?

Emily K.: I think that it's been a real process of discovery for me. I grew up in this area, I'm working in creeks that I have seen my whole life, and I never considered really what was in them and should we be protecting them. I walked next to them and I drove over them and that was the end, and I think a lot of folks get really excited about marine science because of the diversity of animals. Those animals tend to be really exciting to the public, but there's also really exciting things happening in our backyards, and I think I'm really, really building an appreciation for freshwater systems, and I think it's really fun. Part of why I wanted to be a scientist is to keep discovering things, and even if this process of discovery is to kind of fuel my own enjoyment, I'll take it.

Andrew S.: Yeah. So the PhD is the first time you studied freshwater, though.

Emily K.: Yeah.

Andrew S.: As an undergrad, you did research on marine systems?

Emily K.: Yeah, yeah. I did mostly fish and crab research as an undergrad and those systems are also, you know, really cool, and I worked on a lot of fish species that people eat, so those were exciting species to study-

Andrew S.: Because you got to eat the-

Emily K.: You know, I never did. I didn't, but you know, other folks. You know, I was eating, I was not eating, I was studying fish species that other folks might buy in a grocery store, so thinking about how we could protect fish species for their own intrinsic value to the environment, but also first for human consumption was really interesting and exciting.

Andrew S.: Did you go straight from undergrad into grad school into your PhD program here or ...?

Emily K.: Yeah, I did. So I mentioned really briefly working on crabs, and I did that with one of my PhD advisors, Dr Jonathon Stillman, when I was in undergrad, and I was really just interested in how their lab thought about physiology and environmental change and how that affects organisms. So their lab is very focused on climate change and how shifts in temperature especially will change the distribution of these crabs and potentially make it very hard for them to survive, in the places that they're already living, but thinking about, again, why animals are distributed where they are. How do they do it now, and can they do it in the future, I think is a problem that's really pressing in science.

Andrew S.: So what did you actually do with the crabs?

Emily K.: My project was about trying to understand if stress experienced by competition between species of crabs or different individuals can be seen at the cellular level. So in this system, if you imagine kind of a rocky beach that are common in northern California, in a lot of places, under these big boulders are these tiny crabs called porcelain crabs, and we have lots of different species in California, but they live in these kind of stripes along the beach from where it's wettest the longest to where it stays dry or when the tide goes out. So there is two or sometimes three species depending on where you are, and they don't really interact with each other much but at the edges of these boundaries. With climate change, with rising ocean temperatures and rising air temperatures, we think that the ones that are normally driest the longest at high tide were going to get too hot and they're going to have to migrate down the shore towards the water, but as they do that, they're likely to run into the species that borders them.

So my work was trying to understand, "Okay, when you put these two species together, what happens? Do they coexist? Do they fight? Do they push each other out? Are they just going to keep pushing down the shore until they're underwater all the time? And, is that process going to be stressful? So I had some behavioral components. I essentially had little crab boxing rings to see=

Andrew S.: Nice. That sounds fun.

Emily K.: It was cold, it was cold, and lots of watching crabs do nothing, but when they did, they do get very territorial. This particular species of crab is a filter feeder, so they have almost fan-like mouth parts that they sweep through the water in front of their face to gather up particles that they then put into their mouth. So with too many crabs densely packed, they don't have room for these mouth parts to do that.

So they have kind of buff little crab arm claws that are really good for pushing each other out of the way. I was essentially tallying how many times did different groupings of crabs just push each other out of the way, trying to maintain this space. Then we wanted to know, "Do we see differences in the expression of genes associated with stress after these kind of battles?", I suppose. Unfortunately we didn't see a direct correlation, but that's still something that's really highly, [inaudible] under a lot of investigation right now. Lots of scientists in lots of different kind of species groups are trying to understand, you know, "Can we see markers of this type of stress because pushing away your neighbor all the time has got to be stressful, but do we see it on the cellular level?" We're not sure yet. We might see effects in other levels. So that's how I met one of my PhD advisors, and he got me here at Berkeley.

Andrew S.: Nice. So you said that your research there was mostly watching crabs.

Emily K.: It was a lot of watching crabs and a lot of DNA sequencing.

Andrew S.: Would you say that on a day-to-day basis, the actual things that you do to gather data are not the most interesting?

Emily K.: You know, when the grabs were moving, it was really fun to watch. I do a lot of behavioral- adjacent experiments; right now, I watch snails climbing tubes, so there's a lot of folks, I imagine, would think that that is the most boring thing I could spend my time doing, but I don't. I like to think about why animals might be doing what they're doing and under what conditions will they change those behaviors. So yeah, so I think it's fun. I imagine some folks don't.

Andrew S.: So it's fun because you know why you're looking at it today.

Emily K.: Right, right. Yeah, so it's not always the most fun story to tell at a party. Like, "Hey, I just spent three hours watching snails climb in a tube," but you have to put it in context for folks to understand why that might be interesting.

Andrew S.: For sure. Did you know before you got to undergrad that you wanted to be a scientist?

Emily K.: Yeah. I was interested in science from a very young age, especially marine science. I think if you had told my 10 year old self that I was studying things in creeks and rivers, my 10 year old self would be almost appalled, but I was an avid fan of the film Free Willy, and I thought I was going to study orcas from a very, very young age. I watched the VHS tape so many times that I think I burnt it out or I broke it, and my parents desperately needed to find another one, so they've known for a long time that animals really excited me. So I spent a lot of time at the beach as a kid trying to understand what the different types of animals are, why they do what they do.

So that kind of sustained me through my childhood into adulthood. Science has always been important to me.

Andrew S.: And you're thinking that it's going to be like your career as you move forward. Are you thinking about being an academic scientist afterwards?

Emily K.: I've thought about it. I can't say that I know my path is after finishing my program here, but I know that it'll involve science, but it'll probably also be heavily involving mentorship. I've learned a lot about being a mentor and being mentored here, and I work with a lot of students, so I found a lot of enjoyment in doing that and helping other folks navigate academia, navigate science and research, and that has been really fulfilling too. So, being in a space where there are scientists and lots of scientific ideas is important to me, but also helping other folks flourish in science is really important to me.

Andrew S.: What sort of programs are there to help people flourish in science here?

Emily K.: Yeah, I am the research coordinator for the Biology Scholars program, and we're a program that supports students in stem. Generally, most of the students that we work with come from underrepresented backgrounds, and that includes both ethnic or gender, like gender expression and socioeconomic groups. We spend our time helping them, yeah, navigate Cal, navigate their route towards their chosen career path in STEM. I'm just kind of being supportive, right? We want to take students that have these aspirations and give them just the support to continue doing the great things that they were already planning to do.

Andrew S.: Great, and you do a BASIS as well, right?

Emily K.: Yeah, yeah. So BASIS is Bay Area Scientists in Schools, and it's mostly graduate students and some post-docs, and some actually professional scientists from other groups around the Bay area, but we do science lessons in elementary schools. So yeah, there's lots of different lessons and lots of topic areas, and for K through five. We spend an hour at a time in a classroom doing science with young kids because most kids have never met a scientist. They might think science is not for them cause if they have seen scientists, maybe that person doesn't look like them, they don't talk like them. We want to show students that science could be for them and that it's fun, and that you can answer all kinds of cool questions but it also helps teachers.

Many primary school teachers are not formally trained to a very high level in science. They're all trained in science because they do teach it, but they sometimes aren't very comfortable teaching science as they spend a lot of time focusing on some other subjects. So in addition to helping students feel more comfortable with science, we want to help teachers feel more comfortable teaching science. So some of us write our own lessons to grade level. That's something I've done. In my lesson plans, I can help teachers do the same activity that I did with his or her students, or their students. They could do it again the next year if another volunteer isn't available to come. So yeah, we do it the first time and they can see how it went, and then they can kind of replicate it and feeling more comfortable about doing so.

Andrew S.: This is just a reminder that I've been speaking with Emily King. We've talked about her work on invasive snails and how she got here to Berkeley, but is there anything else you'd like to say?

Emily K.: Yeah. I would just encourage folks to check out their local streams. Lots of streams are accessible at public parks. Go appreciate them and then help other folks appreciate them by reminding everyone that they're important. They're often where some of our drinking water comes from and they are full of lots of cool animals, but when you do that and make sure you clean off your shoes, because the snails that I mentioned get tracked around mostly by people's footwear. So if you go between streams, you want to make sure that you've cleaned off the bottom of your shoes and you don't have any hitchhikers.

Andrew S.: Good advice for everyone. Keep a clean shoe.

I'm Andrew Saintsing. This has been The Graduates. Tune in in two weeks for the next episode.