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Ecological Restoration Began with the Wild and Wonderful Gardens of Early Female Botanists

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Friday, June 14, 2024

When historian and ecologist Laura J. Martin decided to write a history of ecological restoration, she didn’t think she would have to go back further than the 1980s to uncover its beginnings. Deep in the archives, she found evidence of a network of early female botanists from the turn of the 20th century. Martin’s book Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration brings their work back into the record. The nonfiction account tells the stories of Eloise Butler, Edith Roberts and the wild and wonderful gardens they planted and studied. LISTEN TO THE PODCASTOn supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Lost Women of Science is produced for the ear. Where possible, we recommend listening to the audio for the most accurate representation of what was said.EPISODE TRANSCRIPTLaura Martin: I found all of these, you know, gems of untold stories of women scientists in the early twentieth century, who really were laying the scientific foundation for restoration.Sophie McNulty: I'm Sophie McNulty and I'm a producer for Lost Women of Science.I worked on the first two seasons of the show before I moved to the UK and ended up working on a gardening podcast for the Royal Horticultural Society. I recently returned to Lost Women of Science and apropos of horticulture, I'm particularly excited to be hosting today's episode on ecological restoration. This is quite the hot topic in the world of horticulture and environmental management at large. To give you a sense of just how hot it is, today billions are spent on ecological restoration projects each year, and the UN General Assembly declared 2021 to 2030 to be the UN decade on ecosystem restoration. But,the history of this field has been largely overlooked, and when it is told, women are often written out of the narrative.And so today, we're going to try to remedy that by zeroing in on important early restorationists who were themselves women. We’ll be focusing on botanists Eloise Butler and Edith Roberts. And to do this, I'm so pleased to welcome Laura Martin, a professor at Williams College and author of Wild By Design, The Rise of Ecological Restoration.Hi, Laura. Thanks for coming on the show.Laura Martin: Thank you. I'm very excited to speak with you today, Sophie.Sophie McNulty: So to start, before we go back in time to the stories of these early restorationists, I want to quickly define terms. So what exactly is ecological restoration and how is it different from say, conservation or preservation?Laura Martin: So there's, there's now an international organization of scientists, restoration ecologists, the Society for Ecological Restoration, that defines ecological restoration as an attempt to repair an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed.And in Wild by Design, I define restoration a little bit differently. I define it as an attempt to collaborate with non-human species, in order to create an environment. So I chose the term collaborate over the term assist because I think what unifies all of these different attempts to do restoration is a desire to find, to strike some balance between controlling nature and letting nature do its own thing, letting nature be autonomous.Sophie McNulty: MmhmLaura Martin: So you can think about removing non native species as one type of restoration, but that's just only one of many different practices. There's also breeding species in domestic spaces or in laboratories and then re-releasing them to the environment.There's removing dams in order to restore hydrological connectivity between streams or rivers. There's burning in a controlled way, burning forests or prairies in order to simulate natural wildfire for species that are fire-adapted.Sophie McNulty: Yeah, there's a great example in the introduction of your book. You describe the way scientists were trying to save the whooping crane population in North America, and you know,  very much involved people, you know, dressing up in costumes, pretending to be mama cranes in order to raise these birds in captivity, you know, before working out how to release them into the wild, or even if this was a possibility. So all that to say, there's clearly this huge range of things that ecological restoration can be. But turning to the history of this field, what are the roots of ecological restoration, and what surprised you as you look back in time?Laura Martin: I went into the project kind of expecting that restoration would have a very recent history. The Society for Ecological Restoration, in their kind of internal histories, cites the founding of the society in the 1980s as the beginning of ecological restoration. And if they do go further back in time, they credit Aldo Leopold as the kind of soul inventor of ecological restoration.Leopold was the author of Sand County Almanac, a pretty famous environmental text, and he was involved in the University of Wisconsin Madison Prairie Restoration Project in the 1930s. And so when I started to do this project, I thought, you know, okay, I'm going to be looking at what management has looked like since the 1980s.And to my great surprise, I found a much deeper history and a longer, a much longer chronology and tradition of scientists thinking about how to restore degraded biotic communities.Sophie McNulty: Yeah, you know it seems from your book that when you go back and you look at this deeper history,this deeper tradition of ecological restoration that you just described, that many of the people involved in this early era were actually women, though maybe they were a bit more difficult to find.Laura Martin: Yeah, so I had, in doing this, preliminary research for the book, gone to the the archives of the Ecological Society of America. And this was the first professional society of ecologists in the United States. It was founded in 1915. And that society was comprised almost entirely of men and all of the leadership positions were held by men, but I knew from general history of science that there at the time and, before that had been a number of really important influential women botanists. And so I was curious about why weren't these women botanists in the Ecological Society of America when all of these, these men were and what were they doing, what were they working on at that time?And I found that quite a few of them were working on what we today would call ecological restoration very directly. They were doing things like founding Native plant societies, they were doing experiments on native plants to see how to propagate them and how to enable them to flourish, and they were really setting the groundwork for the work that Aldo Leopold and his team did in the 1930s.So this was, this was work being done by women scientists 10, 20, 30 years prior to the University of Wisconsin Restoration project.And I found that all of these, you know, gems of untold stories of women scientists in the early twentieth century who really were laying the scientific foundation for restoration.Sophie McNulty: I feel like with Lost Women of Science, this happens so often where you'll read a paper and you're like, oh, who's this person who's quoted in the footnotes of having done this fieldwork for this research? And you go and you find out that it's a woman who did all this, you know, groundbreaking work, but she isn't given proper credit and she's not part of these large societies like the Ecological Society of America you just mentioned, which, I meant to add, is different from the Ecological Restoration Society founded in the 1980s.  Laura Martin: That is correct. and again, in Wild by Design, it hadn't been my, my initial, my initial project, and I hope that listeners will take up the call to do some further research into these women scientists, because there's, there's still a bunch of, there's still a unanswered questions about their, their lives and their research, but I found that it really was a network, a robust network of women that developed the idea of ecological gardening and wild gardening, which was this first incarnation of the idea of restoration, the idea that people would help species survive, but that they would limit how far they intervened so that the species still had some autonomy.They were kind of guided by natural processes. Uh, one ecologist who was one of the kind of founders of ecological gardening, Eloise Butler called this laissez faire, the idea of you know, planting a plant and then not you know, not trimming its leaves, not taking weeds out.It was both about having a more natural aesthetic, but I think also really it was about the experience of the plants themselves. The idea that the plant should be allowed to grow as they would grow without constant human intervention.Sophie McNulty: So you just mentioned Eloise Butler there, which is a great segway, because I want to get into the stories of both Eloise Butler and Edith Roberts, so to start, who was Eloise Butler and why is she a key figure in this history? Laura Martin: So Eloise Butler was the scientist who created the first native plant garden and research facility in North America. I think her life really illustrates what it was like to be a woman botanist at the turn of the 20th century. She was born in rural Maine in 1851 to parents who were teachers.And we have the benefit of the fact that in her 70s, before her death, Eloise Butler wrote a memoir. It wasn't published, but we still have it.And so we know her account of what it was like to be a scientist in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s. And so she wrote in her own words, at that time and place, so in Maine in the 1860s, 1870s, there was no other career than teaching that was thought of for a studious girl. So she felt, very constrained in her, what her career would be.And she wrote in the margins of her, of her memoir, “In my next incarnation, I shall not be a teacher.” And she decided that she wanted to retire from teaching. She really didn't enjoy it, but she wanted to continue to do science. By this point she was living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She led a petition of science teachers in Minneapolis to the, the city council to establish a native plant preserve, which she calls the Wild Botanic Garden, and her goal there was, again, we have her own words. It was to show plants as living things and their adaptations to their environment to display in miniature, the rich and varied flora of Minnesota and to teach the principles of forestry. Her initial goal was to establish a teaching site. She felt like, you know, with the expansion and development of cities like Minneapolis, teachers were losing the sites that they would take students to in order to teach them species, in order to teach them ecology.And so she wanted to make sure that there was a site that was close enough to schools preserved as an outdoor laboratory for students to teach them the fundamentals of botany and ecology. Um, and I think what's interesting is this petition convinces the board to establish this, this preserve, but then she doesn't just leave it as a preserve, she decides to use it as an active experimental site and to try and do a, a different type of botanical garden. So at the time, botanical gardens were typically organized by evolutionary relationship, or they were organized just aesthetically by color or by size, and Eloise Butler really wanted to organize the plants within this research site by their habitat requirements and by their environmental conditions and to display them in the sorts of situations and communities that they would be found in, in the wild.And so she, she convinces, through sheer tenacity, she convinces the, the city council to appoint her as curator of this botanical garden. And she works to bring hundreds of species to the site. So just between 1912 and 1916, she collects 262 seedlings and seeds and specimens and brings them to the botanic garden and kind of experiments with how to propagate them and how to get them to survive in the landscape.Sophie McNulty: What was the work of collecting these specimens like for her? Can you tell me about some of these specimen-collecting expeditions?Laura Martin: Yeah, it was very difficult, very physically demanding fieldwork. Eloise Butler was doing this fieldwork and she was doing it in long late Victorian era skirts and fancy hats. It's incredible—she called this “bog trotting” and so basically anytime she went anywhere to see friends or family, she would bring along collecting tools. She was on a train ride to Toronto once, and her train broke down, and while, instead of just waiting in the train car, she got out, hiked two miles, and collected epilobium,Sophie McNulty: Oh my gosh.Laura Martin: seeds to bring back to the, the garden.So, you know, she and her collaborators went to great lengths to acquire some of the species that they were trying to, to bring into the wild botanic garden.And once they had collected these species, they also did experiments on them. Butler kept meticulous notes about what methods worked to keep species alive and what did not. She has also detailed notes about the emergence and flowering times of species at the Botanical Garden in the 1910s and 1920s.And that could be a resource for people interested in understanding the effects of climate change on flowering time.Sophie McNulty: Yeah, quickly just commenting on her bog trotting specimen collecting adventures, there's a photo that you include in the book of Eloise Butler kind of out, in a bog, and she is wearing, you know, as you say, this long, looks incredibly heavy skirt, and this fabulous hat, and it looks like it has like little flowers in it and stuff, like a huge hat and she's, you know, standing on a log over this bog, kind of like picking up, different sticks and plants and things, and yeah, it's, it is an amazing photo.Laura Martin: Yeah and she was, she, you know, despite dressing that way, I think she was well that she was defying gender norms at the time, just by working, you know, by being a scientist, by working in those sorts of environments and not being afraid of getting muddy and getting wet and, and enjoying it and encouraging other people and other women to do it.Sophie McNulty: We'll get into the stories of these other women after the break.[BREAK]Sophie McNulty: So beyond Eloise Butler, who were the other women leading the way with ecological restoration in the early 1900s, and what do we know about them?Laura Martin: So the, the richness of what we know about Eloise Butler can be contrasted to another woman that I talk about in Wild By Design. Edith Roberts, who was a botany professor at Vassar College in the 1920s and 1930s, and she started the first ecological restoration experiment, and I'll tell you a little bit more about that, but this was more than a decade before Aldo Leopold's restoration experiment.This was a really important site in the history of restoration.But all we have is the, the scientific papers that Edith. Roberts published. We don't have anything written in her voice besides those, those peer-reviewed scientific papers. And so we just know much less about what her experience was as a woman ecologist. And what her thoughts were about where the field should go.Sophie McNulty: But what do we know about her work? Can you kind of paint me a picture of this ecological laboratory that she started at Vassar and how it was both similar and different from the work that Eloise Butler was doing?Laura Martin: Yes, so Roberts received a doctorate in botany from the University of Chicago in 1915. So again, very rare for, for that time. And after that she was hired as a professor of botany at Vassar College, and as soon as she arrived there, she began developing plans to establish an ecological laboratory and her goals were twofold.It was to train students in the new discipline of ecology. And her other goal was to do experiments to see whether native plants could be reestablished on degraded lands. So, in this experiment, Roberts and her students cleared around two acres of grass and poison ivy and shrubs and just kind of weedy non-native species from a streamside that was on campus.And they planted 600 species that they had collected from across the East Coast of the United States, arranging them into 30 different plant communities that they felt represented the diversity of ecological communities in eastern North America.So what Roberts was doing that was different than what Butler was doing is that Roberts was really asking, what can we do with degraded landscapes? Can we succeed in re-establishing Native ecological communities on them? Whereas, Eloise Butler was really working at an already botanically interesting site and she wasn't trying to get rid of species. She was kind of adding species to the landscape.Sophie McNulty: So, why are the stories of people like Eloise Butler and Edith Roberts so often left out from this history of ecological restoration?Why do we only kind of hear about the Aldo Leopolds of the world or kind of things that happened much more recently in the 1980s?Laura Martin: The archives and stories of women scientists are missing from institutional archives, and I think there's two reasons for that. One reason is that women were actively excluded from professional societies and from universities. So if you're interested in studying the history of ecology and you go to the Ecological Society of America archives, or you go to archives that say the University of Chicago, where there were a lot of ecologists employed in the early 20th century, you're not going to find the records of women scientists because women scientists were not allowed in those spaces. And so it can be hard as a storyteller to, to find people to be able to really paint a picture of what, what the work was like at the time and what it was like to be a woman in science.And I think separately from that, there also were direct conspiracies to keep women out of leadership positions in early environmental movements and early conservation organizations and efforts. In the book, I talked briefly about the experience of Elizabeth Britton, who, as I mentioned, was a co-founder of the New York Botanical Garden.And also she was a renowned expert on, on ferns and mosses. And she created the Wildflower Preservation Society in 1901, in order to try and raise awareness about native plant species and the need to protect and restore them. And this was a very successful society. It expanded during World War I and afterwards establishing chapters across the country. And women accounted for most of its membership,The society became attractive enough that in 1924, a U.S. Department of Agriculture botanist, Percy Ricker, who was a member of the Washington, D.C. chapter, you know, began conspiring to take over the society from Elizabeth Britton. And he argued that under the leadership of women, the society had become a radical organization, and in using this word specifically, he was echoing the language used to disparage women's suffrage activists, and so he, when Elizabeth Britton had to be out of town for another meeting, he organized a hostile takeover of the society and became president.Sophie McNulty: Horrible.Laura Martin: Right, so when people write about the Wildflower Preservation Society, they're often writing about later decades and they're saying, oh, it was run by Percy Ricker and there's just a total lost history of the many women scientists that founded that organization. And I think what's really interesting there, too, is that Ricker moves the Wildflower Preservation Society from a restoration model to a preservation model. Restoration is very hands on, it's about intervening in ecosystems, whereas preservation is very hands off. It's the idea that people should be apart from nature and that we should protect nature from people.He says restoration isn't the way and gardening is not the way to save native species. What we need to do is to set aside wild plant preserves. And I think it's, you know, it's telling that his efforts really didn't go anywhere. The, the native plant preserves that we have in the United States were established by garden societies and the efforts of people like Eloise Butler and Edith Roberts, and not through any of Percy Ricker's proposals or that kind of preservation model.Sophie McNulty: So, Eloise Butler and Edith Roberts with their wild botanic gardens slash outdoor laboratories, they were intervening with the land. So in some ways, could we say that they were ahead of their time?Laura Martin: I would say that they laid the groundwork for what's happening today, that they were maybe not so much ahead of their time, but they were the main actors in their time. There was a large network of botanists and many of them women who were doing this work in the early 20th century and we can turn to it. If we understand the history, we can use it as a resource to think about what options are available to us today.Sophie McNulty: That brings me perfectly to my final question. So to end, I want to turn to you for a moment. You know, you started your career as wetlands ecologist, working in the field before turning to the history of the work. And you write in the opening of the book, Wild by Design, that fieldwork offered insights into how to establish and care for a particular species, but it did not offer solutions to ongoing ecological degradation.So, in what ways do you think turning to the history of people like Eloise Butler, Edith Roberts, or Elizabeth Britton has given you hope? And would you say that their stories offer any sort of solutions to our future?Laura Martin: I do often miss fieldwork and working directly with species, but I think that history allows us at the end of the day, to imagine how things could be different. It teaches us that nothing is predetermined and that nothing is without alternative. And so, the perspective of, of doing archival research and of history really, really just emphasizes how things could have turned out differently.And I think it brings me to reflect upon the fact that none of the environmental degradation that we are facing today was inevitable. It all results from the choices of individuals, of powerful individuals, and of societies to operate in particular ways. And so we can go back to examples of people before us to understand how they imagined alternative relationships with the environment and how they imagined doing something to try and reverse the environmental harms that were happening at their moments in time.Sophie McNulty: What a great note to end on. Thank you so much, Laura, for coming on Lost Women of Science.Laura Martin: Thank you, Sophie.Sophie McNulty: This episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations was produced by me, Sophie McNulty. Many thanks to Laura Martin for taking the time to talk to us. Lexi Atiya was our fact checker, Lizzie Younan composes all of our music, and Karen Meverack designs our art. Thanks to Jeff DelVisio at our publishing partner, Scientific American.Thanks also to executive producers Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner, as well as the senior managing producer, Deborah Unger. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX. Thanks for listening and do subscribe to Lost Women of Science at lostwomenofscience.org so you never miss an episode.Further ReadingWild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration, by Laura J. Martin, Harvard University Press, 2022.The Women Who Saved Wildflowers, by Laura J. Martin, Sierra, June 2, 2022. "Women’s Work" in Science, 1880-1910, by Margaret W. Rossiter, Isis, Volume 71, Number 3, Sep., 1980.The Wild Gardener: The Life and Selected Writings of Eloise Butler, by Martha E. Hellander, North Star Press of St. Cloud, 1992.Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America, by Philip J. Pauly, Harvard University Press, 2008.

Historian and ecologist Laura J. Martin rediscovers the female scientists who established ecological restoration in her book Wild by Design

When historian and ecologist Laura J. Martin decided to write a history of ecological restoration, she didn’t think she would have to go back further than the 1980s to uncover its beginnings. Deep in the archives, she found evidence of a network of early female botanists from the turn of the 20th century. Martin’s book Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration brings their work back into the record. The nonfiction account tells the stories of Eloise Butler, Edith Roberts and the wild and wonderful gardens they planted and studied.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST


On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.


Lost Women of Science is produced for the ear. Where possible, we recommend listening to the audio for the most accurate representation of what was said.


EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Laura Martin: I found all of these, you know, gems of untold stories of women scientists in the early twentieth century, who really were laying the scientific foundation for restoration.

Sophie McNulty: I'm Sophie McNulty and I'm a producer for Lost Women of Science.

I worked on the first two seasons of the show before I moved to the UK and ended up working on a gardening podcast for the Royal Horticultural Society. I recently returned to Lost Women of Science and apropos of horticulture, I'm particularly excited to be hosting today's episode on ecological restoration. 

This is quite the hot topic in the world of horticulture and environmental management at large. To give you a sense of just how hot it is, today billions are spent on ecological restoration projects each year, and the UN General Assembly declared 2021 to 2030 to be the UN decade on ecosystem restoration. But,the history of this field has been largely overlooked, and when it is told, women are often written out of the narrative.

And so today, we're going to try to remedy that by zeroing in on important early restorationists who were themselves women. We’ll be focusing on botanists Eloise Butler and Edith Roberts. And to do this, I'm so pleased to welcome Laura Martin, a professor at Williams College and author of Wild By Design, The Rise of Ecological Restoration.

Hi, Laura. Thanks for coming on the show.

Laura Martin: Thank you. I'm very excited to speak with you today, Sophie.

Sophie McNulty: So to start, before we go back in time to the stories of these early restorationists, I want to quickly define terms. So what exactly is ecological restoration and how is it different from say, conservation or preservation?

Laura Martin: So there's, there's now an international organization of scientists, restoration ecologists, the Society for Ecological Restoration, that defines ecological restoration as an attempt to repair an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed.

And in Wild by Design, I define restoration a little bit differently. I define it as an attempt to collaborate with non-human species, in order to create an environment. So I chose the term collaborate over the term assist because I think what unifies all of these different attempts to do restoration is a desire to find, to strike some balance between controlling nature and letting nature do its own thing, letting nature be autonomous.

Sophie McNulty: Mmhm

Laura Martin: So you can think about removing non native species as one type of restoration, but that's just only one of many different practices. There's also breeding species in domestic spaces or in laboratories and then re-releasing them to the environment.

There's removing dams in order to restore hydrological connectivity between streams or rivers. There's burning in a controlled way, burning forests or prairies in order to simulate natural wildfire for species that are fire-adapted.

Sophie McNulty: Yeah, there's a great example in the introduction of your book. You describe the way scientists were trying to save the whooping crane population in North America, and you know,  very much involved people, you know, dressing up in costumes, pretending to be mama cranes in order to raise these birds in captivity, you know, before working out how to release them into the wild, or even if this was a possibility. So all that to say, there's clearly this huge range of things that ecological restoration can be. But turning to the history of this field, what are the roots of ecological restoration, and what surprised you as you look back in time?

Laura Martin: I went into the project kind of expecting that restoration would have a very recent history. The Society for Ecological Restoration, in their kind of internal histories, cites the founding of the society in the 1980s as the beginning of ecological restoration. And if they do go further back in time, they credit Aldo Leopold as the kind of soul inventor of ecological restoration.

Leopold was the author of Sand County Almanac, a pretty famous environmental text, and he was involved in the University of Wisconsin Madison Prairie Restoration Project in the 1930s. And so when I started to do this project, I thought, you know, okay, I'm going to be looking at what management has looked like since the 1980s.

And to my great surprise, I found a much deeper history and a longer, a much longer chronology and tradition of scientists thinking about how to restore degraded biotic communities.

Sophie McNulty: Yeah, you know it seems from your book that when you go back and you look at this deeper history,this deeper tradition of ecological restoration that you just described, that many of the people involved in this early era were actually women, though maybe they were a bit more difficult to find.

Laura Martin: Yeah, so I had, in doing this, preliminary research for the book, gone to the the archives of the Ecological Society of America. And this was the first professional society of ecologists in the United States. It was founded in 1915. 

And that society was comprised almost entirely of men and all of the leadership positions were held by men, but I knew from general history of science that there at the time and, before that had been a number of really important influential women botanists. And so I was curious about why weren't these women botanists in the Ecological Society of America when all of these, these men were and what were they doing, what were they working on at that time?

And I found that quite a few of them were working on what we today would call ecological restoration very directly. They were doing things like founding Native plant societies, they were doing experiments on native plants to see how to propagate them and how to enable them to flourish, and they were really setting the groundwork for the work that Aldo Leopold and his team did in the 1930s.

So this was, this was work being done by women scientists 10, 20, 30 years prior to the University of Wisconsin Restoration project.

And I found that all of these, you know, gems of untold stories of women scientists in the early twentieth century who really were laying the scientific foundation for restoration.

Sophie McNulty: I feel like with Lost Women of Science, this happens so often where you'll read a paper and you're like, oh, who's this person who's quoted in the footnotes of having done this fieldwork for this research? And you go and you find out that it's a woman who did all this, you know, groundbreaking work, but she isn't given proper credit and she's not part of these large societies like the Ecological Society of America you just mentioned, which, I meant to add, is different from the Ecological Restoration Society founded in the 1980s.  

Laura Martin: That is correct. and again, in Wild by Design, it hadn't been my, my initial, my initial project, and I hope that listeners will take up the call to do some further research into these women scientists, because there's, there's still a bunch of, there's still a unanswered questions about their, their lives and their research, but I found that it really was a network, a robust network of women that developed the idea of ecological gardening and wild gardening, which was this first incarnation of the idea of restoration, the idea that people would help species survive, but that they would limit how far they intervened so that the species still had some autonomy.

They were kind of guided by natural processes. Uh, one ecologist who was one of the kind of founders of ecological gardening, Eloise Butler called this laissez faire, the idea of you know, planting a plant and then not you know, not trimming its leaves, not taking weeds out.

It was both about having a more natural aesthetic, but I think also really it was about the experience of the plants themselves. The idea that the plant should be allowed to grow as they would grow without constant human intervention.

Sophie McNulty: So you just mentioned Eloise Butler there, which is a great segway, because I want to get into the stories of both Eloise Butler and Edith Roberts, so to start, who was Eloise Butler and why is she a key figure in this history? 

Laura Martin: So Eloise Butler was the scientist who created the first native plant garden and research facility in North America. I think her life really illustrates what it was like to be a woman botanist at the turn of the 20th century. She was born in rural Maine in 1851 to parents who were teachers.

And we have the benefit of the fact that in her 70s, before her death, Eloise Butler wrote a memoir. It wasn't published, but we still have it.

And so we know her account of what it was like to be a scientist in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s. And so she wrote in her own words, at that time and place, so in Maine in the 1860s, 1870s, there was no other career than teaching that was thought of for a studious girl. So she felt, very constrained in her, what her career would be.

And she wrote in the margins of her, of her memoir, “In my next incarnation, I shall not be a teacher.” And she decided that she wanted to retire from teaching. She really didn't enjoy it, but she wanted to continue to do science. By this point she was living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She led a petition of science teachers in Minneapolis to the, the city council to establish a native plant preserve, which she calls the Wild Botanic Garden, and her goal there was, again, we have her own words. It was to show plants as living things and their adaptations to their environment to display in miniature, the rich and varied flora of Minnesota and to teach the principles of forestry. 

Her initial goal was to establish a teaching site. She felt like, you know, with the expansion and development of cities like Minneapolis, teachers were losing the sites that they would take students to in order to teach them species, in order to teach them ecology.

And so she wanted to make sure that there was a site that was close enough to schools preserved as an outdoor laboratory for students to teach them the fundamentals of botany and ecology. Um, and I think what's interesting is this petition convinces the board to establish this, this preserve, but then she doesn't just leave it as a preserve, she decides to use it as an active experimental site and to try and do a, a different type of botanical garden. So at the time, botanical gardens were typically organized by evolutionary relationship, or they were organized just aesthetically by color or by size, and Eloise Butler really wanted to organize the plants within this research site by their habitat requirements and by their environmental conditions and to display them in the sorts of situations and communities that they would be found in, in the wild.

And so she, she convinces, through sheer tenacity, she convinces the, the city council to appoint her as curator of this botanical garden. And she works to bring hundreds of species to the site. So just between 1912 and 1916, she collects 262 seedlings and seeds and specimens and brings them to the botanic garden and kind of experiments with how to propagate them and how to get them to survive in the landscape.

Sophie McNulty: What was the work of collecting these specimens like for her? Can you tell me about some of these specimen-collecting expeditions?

Laura Martin: Yeah, it was very difficult, very physically demanding fieldwork. Eloise Butler was doing this fieldwork and she was doing it in long late Victorian era skirts and fancy hats. It's incredible—she called this “bog trotting” and so basically anytime she went anywhere to see friends or family, she would bring along collecting tools. She was on a train ride to Toronto once, and her train broke down, and while, instead of just waiting in the train car, she got out, hiked two miles, and collected epilobium,

Sophie McNulty: Oh my gosh.

Laura Martin: seeds to bring back to the, the garden.

So, you know, she and her collaborators went to great lengths to acquire some of the species that they were trying to, to bring into the wild botanic garden.

And once they had collected these species, they also did experiments on them. Butler kept meticulous notes about what methods worked to keep species alive and what did not. She has also detailed notes about the emergence and flowering times of species at the Botanical Garden in the 1910s and 1920s.

And that could be a resource for people interested in understanding the effects of climate change on flowering time.

Sophie McNulty: Yeah, quickly just commenting on her bog trotting specimen collecting adventures, there's a photo that you include in the book of Eloise Butler kind of out, in a bog, and she is wearing, you know, as you say, this long, looks incredibly heavy skirt, and this fabulous hat, and it looks like it has like little flowers in it and stuff, like a huge hat and she's, you know, standing on a log over this bog, kind of like picking up, different sticks and plants and things, and yeah, it's, it is an amazing photo.

Laura Martin: Yeah and she was, she, you know, despite dressing that way, I think she was well that she was defying gender norms at the time, just by working, you know, by being a scientist, by working in those sorts of environments and not being afraid of getting muddy and getting wet and, and enjoying it and encouraging other people and other women to do it.

Sophie McNulty: We'll get into the stories of these other women after the break.

[BREAK]

Sophie McNulty: So beyond Eloise Butler, who were the other women leading the way with ecological restoration in the early 1900s, and what do we know about them?

Laura Martin: So the, the richness of what we know about Eloise Butler can be contrasted to another woman that I talk about in Wild By Design. Edith Roberts, who was a botany professor at Vassar College in the 1920s and 1930s, and she started the first ecological restoration experiment, and I'll tell you a little bit more about that, but this was more than a decade before Aldo Leopold's restoration experiment.This was a really important site in the history of restoration.

But all we have is the, the scientific papers that Edith. Roberts published. We don't have anything written in her voice besides those, those peer-reviewed scientific papers. And so we just know much less about what her experience was as a woman ecologist. And what her thoughts were about where the field should go.

Sophie McNulty: But what do we know about her work? Can you kind of paint me a picture of this ecological laboratory that she started at Vassar and how it was both similar and different from the work that Eloise Butler was doing?

Laura Martin: Yes, so Roberts received a doctorate in botany from the University of Chicago in 1915. So again, very rare for, for that time. And after that she was hired as a professor of botany at Vassar College, and as soon as she arrived there, she began developing plans to establish an ecological laboratory and her goals were twofold.

It was to train students in the new discipline of ecology. And her other goal was to do experiments to see whether native plants could be reestablished on degraded lands. So, in this experiment, Roberts and her students cleared around two acres of grass and poison ivy and shrubs and just kind of weedy non-native species from a streamside that was on campus.

And they planted 600 species that they had collected from across the East Coast of the United States, arranging them into 30 different plant communities that they felt represented the diversity of ecological communities in eastern North America.

So what Roberts was doing that was different than what Butler was doing is that Roberts was really asking, what can we do with degraded landscapes? Can we succeed in re-establishing Native ecological communities on them? Whereas, Eloise Butler was really working at an already botanically interesting site and she wasn't trying to get rid of species. She was kind of adding species to the landscape.

Sophie McNulty: So, why are the stories of people like Eloise Butler and Edith Roberts so often left out from this history of ecological restoration?

Why do we only kind of hear about the Aldo Leopolds of the world or kind of things that happened much more recently in the 1980s?

Laura Martin: The archives and stories of women scientists are missing from institutional archives, and I think there's two reasons for that. One reason is that women were actively excluded from professional societies and from universities. So if you're interested in studying the history of ecology and you go to the Ecological Society of America archives, or you go to archives that say the University of Chicago, where there were a lot of ecologists employed in the early 20th century, you're not going to find the records of women scientists because women scientists were not allowed in those spaces. 

And so it can be hard as a storyteller to, to find people to be able to really paint a picture of what, what the work was like at the time and what it was like to be a woman in science.

And I think separately from that, there also were direct conspiracies to keep women out of leadership positions in early environmental movements and early conservation organizations and efforts. In the book, I talked briefly about the experience of Elizabeth Britton, who, as I mentioned, was a co-founder of the New York Botanical Garden.

And also she was a renowned expert on, on ferns and mosses. And she created the Wildflower Preservation Society in 1901, in order to try and raise awareness about native plant species and the need to protect and restore them. And this was a very successful society. It expanded during World War I and afterwards establishing chapters across the country. And women accounted for most of its membership,

The society became attractive enough that in 1924, a U.S. Department of Agriculture botanist, Percy Ricker, who was a member of the Washington, D.C. chapter, you know, began conspiring to take over the society from Elizabeth Britton. And he argued that under the leadership of women, the society had become a radical organization, and in using this word specifically, he was echoing the language used to disparage women's suffrage activists, and so he, when Elizabeth Britton had to be out of town for another meeting, he organized a hostile takeover of the society and became president.

Sophie McNulty: Horrible.

Laura Martin: Right, so when people write about the Wildflower Preservation Society, they're often writing about later decades and they're saying, oh, it was run by Percy Ricker and there's just a total lost history of the many women scientists that founded that organization. And I think what's really interesting there, too, is that Ricker moves the Wildflower Preservation Society from a restoration model to a preservation model. Restoration is very hands on, it's about intervening in ecosystems, whereas preservation is very hands off. It's the idea that people should be apart from nature and that we should protect nature from people.

He says restoration isn't the way and gardening is not the way to save native species. What we need to do is to set aside wild plant preserves. And I think it's, you know, it's telling that his efforts really didn't go anywhere. The, the native plant preserves that we have in the United States were established by garden societies and the efforts of people like Eloise Butler and Edith Roberts, and not through any of Percy Ricker's proposals or that kind of preservation model.

Sophie McNulty: So, Eloise Butler and Edith Roberts with their wild botanic gardens slash outdoor laboratories, they were intervening with the land. So in some ways, could we say that they were ahead of their time?

Laura Martin: I would say that they laid the groundwork for what's happening today, that they were maybe not so much ahead of their time, but they were the main actors in their time. There was a large network of botanists and many of them women who were doing this work in the early 20th century and we can turn to it. If we understand the history, we can use it as a resource to think about what options are available to us today.

Sophie McNulty: That brings me perfectly to my final question. So to end, I want to turn to you for a moment. You know, you started your career as wetlands ecologist, working in the field before turning to the history of the work. And you write in the opening of the book, Wild by Design, that fieldwork offered insights into how to establish and care for a particular species, but it did not offer solutions to ongoing ecological degradation.

So, in what ways do you think turning to the history of people like Eloise Butler, Edith Roberts, or Elizabeth Britton has given you hope? And would you say that their stories offer any sort of solutions to our future?

Laura Martin: I do often miss fieldwork and working directly with species, but I think that history allows us at the end of the day, to imagine how things could be different. It teaches us that nothing is predetermined and that nothing is without alternative. And so, the perspective of, of doing archival research and of history really, really just emphasizes how things could have turned out differently.

And I think it brings me to reflect upon the fact that none of the environmental degradation that we are facing today was inevitable. It all results from the choices of individuals, of powerful individuals, and of societies to operate in particular ways. And so we can go back to examples of people before us to understand how they imagined alternative relationships with the environment and how they imagined doing something to try and reverse the environmental harms that were happening at their moments in time.

Sophie McNulty: What a great note to end on. Thank you so much, Laura, for coming on Lost Women of Science.

Laura Martin: Thank you, Sophie.

Sophie McNulty: This episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations was produced by me, Sophie McNulty. Many thanks to Laura Martin for taking the time to talk to us. Lexi Atiya was our fact checker, Lizzie Younan composes all of our music, and Karen Meverack designs our art. Thanks to Jeff DelVisio at our publishing partner, Scientific American.

Thanks also to executive producers Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner, as well as the senior managing producer, Deborah Unger. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX. Thanks for listening and do subscribe to Lost Women of Science at lostwomenofscience.org so you never miss an episode.

Further Reading

Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration, by Laura J. Martin, Harvard University Press, 2022.
The Women Who Saved Wildflowers, by Laura J. Martin, Sierra, June 2, 2022.
"Women’s Work" in Science, 1880-1910, by Margaret W. Rossiter, Isis, Volume 71, Number 3, Sep., 1980.
The Wild Gardener: The Life and Selected Writings of Eloise Butler, by Martha E. Hellander, North Star Press of St. Cloud, 1992.
Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America, by Philip J. Pauly, Harvard University Press, 2008.

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Freedom of Voice: A Newcomer’s Guide to Safe and Effective Protesting

How to participate in causes you believe in — in a manner that will be noticed, respected, and heard. The post Freedom of Voice: A Newcomer’s Guide to Safe and Effective Protesting appeared first on The Revelator.

The “No Kings” protests in June drew an estimated 4-6 million people to more than 2,000 events around the country — making it one of the largest protest turnouts in history. Many attendees interviewed during “No Kings” revealed that they had never attended a protest before. This continues two trends we’ve seen since the Women’s March in 2017: More and more people are protesting, and every event is someone’s first protest. Environmental causes have been a big part of this. The 2019 Global Climate Strike was the largest climate protest to date. And a recent survey found that 1 in 10 people in the United States attended environmental protests between June 2022 and June 2023. But protesting for the planet (or against oppressive government actions) poses risks that newcomers should understand. Protesting itself can be physically demanding. Meanwhile, legislatures around the country (and the world) have taken steps to criminalize protest, and right-wing agitators have increasingly used violence to harm or intimidate protestors. With all of that in mind, The Revelator has launched a multipart series on protest safety, especially geared toward first-timers. After all, it’s going to be a long, hot summer for environmental advocates seeking to make their voices heard in public across America and the globe. Before the Protest Are there meetings, including virtual meetings, from the organizing entity? Attend if you can; they’ll help you to understand the specific protest messaging so everyone is on the same page before the protest. Learn if there’s a check-in process: Will there be signs, T-shirts, hats, or other identifying items to receive while registering or when you show up for this protest? Make sure you sign up for text lists and other communications in case of inclement weather, parking issues, and other last-minute changes for the location and presentation of the protest. Know who to contact and what to do if you run into trouble while protesting. Decide how you’re getting there (in an eco-friendly way, if possible): Find out if public transportation or carpools are available, or organize your own rideshares. What to Bring to a Protest — and What NOT to Bring Plan ahead: Bring the right supplies for a day of protesting. What to Bring: A backpack and belt bag that are durable and not bulky. The belt pack keeps your hands free. Comfortable, quality walking shoes. This is non-negotiable. Wear closed-toe shoes that are broken-in and for walking long distances. Protest signs that clearly display your message in big, bold letters and can be easily read from far away. Make sure your signs are made with sturdy, bright, durable boards, with a comfortable handle. Short messages are better than a block of text. Stay hydrated. Bring a lot of water — which may also prove useful for clearing eyes and face of tear gas and pepper spray. (Milk has been disproven as tear-gas relief.) Lightweight, nutritious, protein-rich snacks: energy bars, nuts, etc. A face mask and safety goggles for smoke and tear gas. These can also hide your identity from cameras and police surveillance. A hat, sunglasses, jacket, umbrella…Clothing should be appropriate for changing weather conditions and can perform double duty as cover for any identifying skin markings. These items can also obscure your face from facial recognition technology. A change of clothes (just in case). Hand sanitizer and wipes. A first-aid kit if the organization does not provide a medical station or personnel that can be easily identified as first aid providers in the crowd. Your ID in case you’re detained. Your phone. (Essential for staying connected, but digital privacy may be a concern. See our resources section below for some guidance.) A power bank to charge devices. Other items might include a cooling towel; flashlight or headlamp; and a lanyard with a list of emergency contacts, medical conditions and medications. Things Not to Bring for a Demonstration: Alcohol or drugs. Spray paint. Firearms, knives, mace, pepper spray, tasers or weapons of any sort, even items that might be construed as weapons (such as a small Swiss army knife, metal eating utensils, etc.). Firecrackers or fireworks or anything explosive. Flammable liquids. Flares and smoke bombs. Torches (flashlights are okay). While You’re at the Protest The late civil rights icon John Lewis said, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble,” encouraging people to challenge the status quo. Do: engage in group activities, meet and greet people. This is a great opportunity to forge friendships behind a greater cause, and for future protests or community organizing. Help those around you. Study your surroundings and people around you. Stay alert and be aware of the people in your group: Is there someone who has joined the demonstration who seems too aggressive and appears to be carrying firearms, weapons, and other tools of violence? If you get triggered and feel overly emotional with what’s happening, take that as your cue to head home. Empirical research shows that the most effective protests are non-violent. Political scientist Omar Wasow saw this in a study of the 1960s U.S. Civil Rights movement, finding that when protesters were violent, it prompted news stories focused on crime and disorder, and lent more sympathy to the opposition, who then become viewed as promoting law and order. In contrast, peaceful demonstrations that are violently repressed by the state make media coverage sympathetic to the protesters and strengthen peaceful movements. Remember that you’re not protesting in a vacuum. Don’t take actions that feed the opposition news media. Your behavior, attire, and reactions to provocative actions by the opposition and the police, National Guard, or military could be recorded by smart phones or the media, especially social media. Assume you’re being watched and that your words are being listened to. Don’t taunt or antagonize the opposition and de-escalate any confrontations that are becoming heated or aggressive. Stay calm and focused. Don’t rise to the bait of police or military force. Don’t throw things at them. Be passive but firm in your presentation. If you are arrested, don’t struggle or fight. Be polite and compliant — and the only word coming from your mouth should be, “lawyer.” Staying calm and respectful can be challenging when participating in a protest demonstration. Emotions run high, especially in the hot summer months. However, being a “peaceful protester” with resolute calm and dignity makes a greater impression on the public, many of whom sit on the fence about current issues and events. These are people who may be getting inaccurate information and have become dismissive of our endeavors as “unserious” activism. Screaming, yelling, and deriding don’t win them over but reinforce their opinion of us as obnoxious troublemakers. Opposition media outlets will cherry-pick video footage of “bad actors” and edit these bits of footage in loops that will play constantly in the media. As a result, your protest message will be ignored over the more inflammatory messaging about your cause. Coming Up: This series will continue with a look at the history of peaceful protesting and tips on how to organize a protest. And we want to hear from you. What questions do you have about protesting? What advice would you share? Send your comments, suggestions, questions, or even brief essays to comments@therevelator.org. Sources and Resources: Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action The Activist Handbook and other sources below provide practical guides and resources so you can plan your demonstration successfully. Indivisible  and No Kings offer training and education on protesting safely and effectively, as well as new and upcoming protest events. The Human Rights Campaign: Tips for Preparedness, Peaceful Protesting, and Safety ACLU Guide: How to Protest Safely and Responsibly Amnesty International Protest Guide Wired: How to Protest Safely: What to Bring, What to Do, and What to Avoid Infosec 101 for Activists “The New Science of Social Change: A Modern Handbook for Activists”  by Lisa Mueller “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting”  by Omar Wasow “Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha)”  by M. K. Gandhi Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator: Saving America’s National Parks and Forests Means Shaking Off the Rust of Inaction The post Freedom of Voice: A Newcomer’s Guide to Safe and Effective Protesting appeared first on The Revelator.

Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action

America’s summer celebrations are upon us, and these eight books will inspire environmentalists to act for our country and our planet. The post Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action appeared first on The Revelator.

“A patriot…wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where their country can be loved and sustained. The patriot has universal values, standards by which they judge their nation, always wishing it well — and wishing that it would do better.” — Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny It’s the summer season: Barbeques are firing up, the stars and stripes are in view, and people are preparing to make a difference in the second half of the year. As we look to the “patriotic threesome” of holidays celebrated across the United States — Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day — it’s a good time to ask how you’ll show your patriotism for the planet. It’s especially important this year, given the current wave of misappropriation and compromises facing our natural lands and resources. Eight new environmental books might offer you some ideas on how to accomplish that. They offer ideas for getting involved in politics, improving your activism, and making important changes in your homes and communities. We’ve excerpted the books’ official descriptions below and provided links to the publishers’ sites, but you should also be able to find these books in a variety of formats through your local bookstore or library. Tools to Save Our Home Planet: A Changemaker’s Guidebook edited by Nick Mucha, Jessica Flint, and Patrick Thomas The need for activism is more urgent than ever before and the risks are greater, too. Safe and effective activism has always required smart strategic planning, clear goals and creative tactics, and careful and detailed preparation. Without these, activists can end up injured, penalized, or jailed. If anything, these risks are greater today as powerful forces in government and industry resist the big changes needed to slow the climate crisis and keep Earth livable for generations to come. Tools to Save Our Home Planet: A Changemaker’s Guidebook reflects the wisdom and best advice from activists working in today’s volatile world. A go-to resource for driving change, it offers timely and relevant insights for purpose-aligned work. It is intended as a primer for those new to activism and a refresher for seasoned activists wanting to learn from their peers, a reassuring and inspirational companion to the environmental and justice movements that we desperately need as a society. When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership by Amanda Litman Most leadership books treat millennials and Gen Z like nuisances, focusing on older leadership constructs. Not this one. When We’re in Charge is a no-bullshit guide for the next generation of leaders on how to show up differently, break the cycle of the existing workplace. This book is a vital resource for new leaders trying to figure out how to get stuff done without drama. Offering solutions for today’s challenges, Litman offers arguments for the four-day workweek, why transparency is a powerful tool, and why it matters for you to both provide and take family leave. A necessary read for all who occupy or aspire to leadership roles, this book is a vision for a future where leaders at work are compassionate, genuine, and effective. Scientists on Survival: Personal Stories of Climate Action by Scientists for XR In this important and timely book, scientists from a broad range of disciplines detail their personal responses to climate change and the ecological crises that led them to form Scientists for XR [Extinction Rebellion] and work tirelessly within it. Whether their inspiration comes from education or activism, family ties or the work environment, the scientists writing here record what drives them, what non-violent direct action looks like to them, what led them to become interested in the environmental crisis that threatens us all, and what they see as the future of life on Earth. Public Land and Democracy in America: Understanding Conflict over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by Julie Brugger Public Land and Democracy in America brings into focus the perspectives of a variety of groups affected by conflict over the monument, including residents of adjacent communities, ranchers, federal land management agency employees, and environmentalists. In the process of following management disputes at the monument over the years, Brugger considers how conceptions of democracy have shaped and been shaped by the regional landscape and by these disputes. Through this ethnographic evidence, Brugger proposes a concept of democracy that encompasses disparate meanings and experiences, embraces conflict, and suggests a crucial role for public lands in transforming antagonism into agonism. The State of Conservation: Rural America and the Conservation-Industrial Complex since 1920 by Joshua Nygren In the twentieth century, natural resource conservation emerged as a vital force in U.S. politics, laying the groundwork for present-day sustainability. Merging environmental, agricultural, and political history, Nygren examines the political economy and ecology of agricultural conservation through the lens of the “conservation-industrial complex.” This evolving public-private network — which united the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Congress, local and national organizations, and the agricultural industry — guided soil and water conservation in rural America for much of the century. Contrary to the classic tales of U.S. environmental politics and the rise and fall of the New Deal Order, this book emphasizes continuity. Nygren demonstrates how the conservation policies, programs, and partnerships of the 1930s and 1940s persisted through the age of environmentalism, and how their defining traits anticipated those typically associated with late twentieth-century political culture. Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future by Slavoj Žižek We hear all the time that we’re moments from doomsday. Around us, crises interlock and escalate, threatening our collective survival: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with its rising risk of nuclear warfare, is taking place against a backdrop of global warming, ecological breakdown, and widespread social and economic unrest. Protestors and politicians repeatedly call for action, but still we continue to drift towards disaster. We need to do something. But what if the only way for us to prevent catastrophe is to assume that it has already happened — to accept that we’re already five minutes past zero hour? Too Late to Awaken sees Slavoj Žižek forge a vital new space for a radical emancipatory politics that could avert our course to self-destruction. He illuminates why the liberal Left has so far failed to offer this alternative, and exposes the insidious propagandism of the fascist Right, which has appropriated and manipulated once-progressive ideas. Pithy, urgent, gutting and witty Žižek’s diagnosis reveals our current geopolitical nightmare in a startling new light, and shows how, in order to change our future, we must first focus on changing the past. How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change by Jens Beckert For decades we have known about the dangers of global warming. Nevertheless, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. How can we explain our failure to take the necessary measures to stop climate change? Why are we so reluctant to act? Beckert provides an answer to these questions. Our apparent inability to implement basic measures to combat climate change is due to the nature of power and incentive structures affecting companies, politicians, voters, and consumers. Drawing on social science research, he argues that climate change is an inevitable product of the structures of capitalist modernity which have been developing for the past 500 years. Our institutional and cultural arrangements are operating at the cost of destroying the natural environment and attempts to address global warming are almost inevitably bound to fail. Temperatures will continue to rise, and social and political conflicts will intensify. We are selling our future for the next quarterly figures, the upcoming election results, and today’s pleasure. Any realistic climate policy needs to focus on preparing societies for the consequences of escalating climate change and aim at strengthening social resilience to cope with the increasingly unstable natural world. Parenting in a Climate Crisis: A Handbook for Turning Fear into Action by Bridget Shirvell In this urgent parenting guide, learn how to navigate the uncertainty of the climate crisis and keep your kids informed, accountable, and hopeful — with simple actions you can take as a family to help the earth. Kids today are experiencing the climate crisis firsthand. Camp canceled because of wildfire smoke. Favorite beaches closed due to erosion. Recess held indoors due to extreme heat. How do parents help their children make sense of it all? And how can we keep our kids (and ourselves) from despair? Environmental journalist and parent Bridget Shirvell has created a handbook for parents to help them navigate these questions and more, weaving together expert advice from climate scientists, environmental activists, child psychologists, and parents across the country. She helps parents answer tough questions (how did we get here?) and raise kids who feel connected to and responsible for the natural world, feel motivated to make ecologically sound choices, and feel empowered to meet the challenges of the climate crisis—and to ultimately fight for change. Enjoy these summer reads throughout the holidays and get involved with activities and protests that support our environment and wildlife. Whether it’s changing the way you celebrate to more sustainable fun or joining environmental summer pursuits, we hope you’ll make good trouble this holiday season. For hundreds of additional environmental books — including several on staying calm in challenging times — visit the Revelator Reads archives. Republish this article for free! The post Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action appeared first on The Revelator.

Climate Activist Throws Bright Pink Paint on Glass Covering Picasso Painting in Montreal

The stunt is part of an environmental organization's efforts to draw attention to the dangerous wildfires spreading through Canada

Climate Activist Throws Bright Pink Paint on Glass Covering Picasso Painting in Montreal The stunt is part of an environmental organization’s efforts to draw attention to the dangerous wildfires spreading through Canada The activist threw paint on Pablo Picasso’s L'hétaïre (1901). Last Generation Canada A climate activist threw pink paint at Pablo Picasso’s L’hétaïre (1901) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts last week. The 21-year-old man, identified as Marcel, is a member of Last Generation Canada, an environmental organization that works to combat climate change. After splashing Picasso’s portrait with the paint, Marcel made a speech in French to the gallery, which was captured on video and posted on social media by Last Generation Canada. “There are more than 200 wildfires in Canada at this moment, 83 of which are not protected [and] which are out of control,” he said. “There are too many problems here. There are people who are dying. … If Canada doesn’t do much, soon we will all be dying.” Quick fact: Picasso’s blue period Pablo Picasso created L’hétaïre during his famous “blue period,” when the artist painted monochromatic artworks in shades of blue and blue-green. Canada is in the midst of its wildfire season, which occurs between April and October. The blazes have consumed almost nine million acres across four Canadian provinces, report the New York Times’ Nasuna Stuart-Ulin and Vjosa Isai. This season is a particularly bad one. In early June, satellite data revealed that the number of fire hotspots was four times higher than normal, per the Associated Press’ M.K. Wildeman. Marcel’s stunt is part of a three-week “action phase” by Last Generation Canada, according to a statement from the organization. The group is demanding that the Canadian government form a “Climate Disaster Protection Agency” to aid those “whose homes, communities, lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by extreme weather, including wildfires worsened by the burning of fossil fuels.” Picasso’s L’hétaïre, which was on loan from the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, Italy, was covered by a layer of protective glass, and the pink paint caused no visible damage, according to a statement from the museum. Two museum security guards confronted Marcel and turned him over to the Montreal police. Officials tell Hyperallergic’s Maya Pontone that Marcel has been released from custody and will later appear in court. “It is most unfortunate that this act carried out in the name of environmental activism targeted a work belonging to our global cultural heritage and under safekeeping for the benefit of future generations,” Stéphane Aquin, the director of the museum, says in the statement. “Museums and artists alike are allies in the fight for a better world.” In recent years, damaging the glass protecting famous artworks has become a popular method of protest among some climate change groups. However, one of the best-known groups, a British organization called Just Stop Oil, announced in March that it would start winding down such tactics after the United Kingdom decided to stop issuing new oil and gas licenses. “We value paint strokes and color composition over life itself,” Marcel says in the statement from Last Generation Canada. “A lot more resources have been put in place to secure and protect this artwork than to protect living, breathing people.” The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was displaying L’hétaïre as part of the exhibition “Berthe Weill, Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde,” focused on the 20th-century French gallery-owner who exhibited Picasso’s early work. After the June 19 incident, the museum was closed for a short period before reopening later that day. L’hétaïre has not yet returned to the gallery. “I am not attacking art, nor am I destroying it. I am protecting it,” says Marcel in a social media post by Last Generation Canada. “Art, at its core, is depictions of life. It is by the living, for the living. There is no art on a dead planet.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Measles Misinformation Is on the Rise – and Americans Are Hearing It, Survey Finds

Republicans are far more skeptical of vaccines and twice as likely as Democrats to believe the measles shot is worse than the disease.

By Arthur Allen | KFF Health NewsWhile the most serious measles epidemic in a decade has led to the deaths of two children and spread to nearly 30 states with no signs of letting up, beliefs about the safety of the measles vaccine and the threat of the disease are sharply polarized, fed by the anti-vaccine views of the country’s seniormost health official.About two-thirds of Republican-leaning parents are unaware of an uptick in measles cases this year while about two-thirds of Democratic ones knew about it, according to a KFF survey released Wednesday.Republicans are far more skeptical of vaccines and twice as likely (1 in 5) as Democrats (1 in 10) to believe the measles shot is worse than the disease, according to the survey of 1,380 U.S. adults.Some 35% of Republicans answering the survey, which was conducted April 8-15 online and by telephone, said the discredited theory linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism was definitely or probably true – compared with just 10% of Democrats.Get Midday Must-Reads in Your InboxFive essential stories, expertly curated, to keep you informed on your lunch break.Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S. News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy.The trends are roughly the same as KFF reported in a June 2023 survey. But in the new poll, 3 in 10 parents erroneously believed that vitamin A can prevent measles infections, a theory Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought into play since taking office during the measles outbreak.“The most alarming thing about the survey is that we’re seeing an uptick in the share of people who have heard these claims,” said co-author Ashley Kirzinger, associate director of KFF’s Public Opinion and Survey Research Program. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.“It’s not that more people are believing the autism theory, but more and more people are hearing about it,” Kirzinger said. Since doubts about vaccine safety directly reduce parents’ vaccination of their children, “that shows how important it is for actual information to be part of the media landscape,” she said.“This is what one would expect when people are confused by conflicting messages coming from people in positions of authority,” said Kelly Moore, president and CEO of Immunize.org, a vaccination advocacy group.Numerous scientific studies have established no link between any vaccine and autism. But Kennedy has ordered HHS to undertake an investigation of possible environmental contributors to autism, promising to have “some of the answers” behind an increase in the incidence of the condition by September.The deepening Republican skepticism toward vaccines makes it hard for accurate information to break through in many parts of the nation, said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer at The Immunization Partnership, in Houston.Lakshmanan on April 23 was to present a paper on countering anti-vaccine activism to the World Vaccine Congress in Washington. It was based on a survey that found that in the Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma state assemblies, lawmakers with medical professions were among those least likely to support public health measures.“There is a political layer that influences these lawmakers,” she said. When lawmakers invite vaccine opponents to testify at legislative hearings, for example, it feeds a deluge of misinformation that is difficult to counter, she said.Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Ladera Ranch, California, which was hit by a 2014-15 measles outbreak that started in Disneyland, said fear of measles and tighter California state restrictions on vaccine exemptions had staved off new infections in his Orange County community.“The biggest downside of measles vaccines is that they work really well. Everyone gets vaccinated, no one gets measles, everyone forgets about measles,” he said. “But when it comes back, they realize there are kids getting really sick and potentially dying in my community, and everyone says, ‘Holy crap; we better vaccinate!’”Ball treated three very sick children with measles in 2015. Afterward his practice stopped seeing unvaccinated patients. “We had had babies exposed in our waiting room,” he said. “We had disease spreading in our office, which was not cool.”Although two otherwise healthy young girls died of measles during the Texas outbreak, “people still aren’t scared of the disease,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has seen a few cases.But the deaths “have created more angst, based on the number of calls I’m getting from parents trying to vaccinate their 4-month-old and 6-month-old babies,” Offit said. Children generally get their first measles shot at age 1, because it tends not to produce full immunity if given at a younger age.KFF Health News’ Jackie Fortiér contributed to this report.This article was produced by KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF. It was originally published on April 23, 2025, and has been republished with permission.

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