Translator: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Denise RQ
Do you guys like a mystery?
(Audience) Oh yeah.
Mary Beth Nawor: Most people do, and my students are no exception.
Here you see my students in the Chicago River.
We're trying to figure out the water quality,
and we do some chemical tests,
but we also want to confirm what we find by doing a biological assessment.
So the students are scooping up the sediment at the bottom,
and they're trying to determine what kind of organisms are living there.
In this particular occasion, we were having a problem,
because we looked,
and we scooped,
and we looked,
and we couldn't find anything.
I've done this with my students a lot and so I know what to expect.
The kind of things we were looking for
are things that live on or in the sediment at the bottom,
things we call benthic macroinvertebrates.
Many of them are juvenile forms of insects.
Believe it or not, these are the juvenile forms of dragonflies.
We also look for things like clams, mussels, snails, crayfish.
But for some reason, in this particular day,
there was nothing there,
and so we had our mystery.
My students are pretty good detectives;
they were tenacious in trying to solve this mystery.
They made a lot of calls, they did research.
We had some problems though.
Not everybody was forthcoming.
At one point, we even considered filing a FOIA request -
a Freedom of Information Act request.
But in the end, they were able to figure out what had happened.
Several miles upstream, a storm sewer had gotten clogged.
The storm sewer had gotten clogged with debris and whatnot.
It overflowed into the sanitary sewer, which then overflowed onto the surface.
To remedy the situation,
the Sanitary District emptied a retention pond
and washed all of that overflow
into the river you see my students standing in.
They were appalled.
They were appalled for several reasons.
They had solved the mystery of what happened to these organisms,
but out of that came a bigger, more important mystery,
and that bigger mystery was why would we solve one problem
by killing the life in this river?
Why would we destroy the biodiversity?
This is a picture a student took at Middlefork Savanna,
in our community, in Lake Forest, Illinois.
A couple of years ago, scientists went out,
and they wanted to look at the biodiversity in this preserve.
And they did this really cool scavenger hunt called the "bioblitz."
For 24 hours, the scientists went out - microscopes, shovels, nets, traps -
to catalog, photograph, whatever they could,
to see how many native plants and animals they could find in this preserve.
And the result was pretty outstanding:
1,500 different species.
So I say to my students, "Let's think about this biodiversity.
How are we connected to this biodiversity?"
Let's play six degrees of separation.
Do you know 'six degrees of separation'?
Yeah?
We were doing a variation of that.
We wanted to figure out how we were connected
to any of these 1,500 plants and animals.
And really, for the most part, students were at a loss.
Does this wildness have any value to us?
Is it worth preserving
or perhaps even increasing?
What if we let our environment just go to the landscape plants in our yard?
Are we really connected in any way to nature or these organisms?
Well, it's easy to see the wildness when we look at our physical being.
We are covered, inside and out, in bacteria.
They're in our mouths, they're in our intestines,
they cover our skin.
For the average 150-pound man or woman,
he or she will have 39 trillion microbes in their intestines.
Thirty-nine trillion microbes.
That's only the bacteria.
That doesn't account for the viruses which vastly outnumber the bacteria,
or the fungi, or the other microbes.
When you move about, three to five pounds of you,
isn't even you.
And look around you.
Even as you sit here right now,
you're each shedding your own unique cloud of these microbes.
You don't need to say hi to people around you,
your microbes are already doing it for you.
(Laughter)
And if you have a dog, you and your dog share significant intestinal bacteria.
(Laughter)
And what happens if we don't treat these organisms well?
Stress, poor diet, lack of exposure to dirt and other animals -
they all have reduced our diversity in our intestines.
In fact, native Peruvians have 50% more species in their intestines
than do North Americans.
Isn't that weird to think that you and I, our cells, are lacking in biodiversity?
And really, the strangeness comes
because we think of ourselves as an individual.
But we are really anything but.
In order for me to be healthy,
I need all 39 trillion plus one of me to be healthy;
are in my own ecosystem.
I depend on them, and they depend on me.
Some scientists are even suggesting that we may need to rewild our intestines
with bacteria from indigenous people.
We need wildness.
And just as we evolved with those microbes,
so have we evolved with the plants and animals around us.
Think about this: the human genome hasn't really changed much
in the last 10,000 years.
But think how radically different our environment is.
And although we can live in this less-wild environment,
study after study after study shows we are much less stressed and more sane
in environments that resemble those in which we evolved.
Anecdotally, my students confirm this.
Once a month, I send them out to the prairie.
Their goal is to do something called phenology:
each month they have to observe changes in nature.
They might look for things
like how do plants and animals prepare for winter?
And what happens when they emerge in spring?
Now, like you guys, my students are busy.
And if I said to you,
"Go out to the prairie for an hour. Won't that be fun?"
They're stressed.
They have school, and sports, and commitments.
But they go out there, and they always report
when they come back or when they're out there,
how much happier and healthier they feel.
Nature has this effect on us.
Marc Berman from the University of Chicago did a study.
He said if you add ten trees to any given block,
residents report a 1% increase in wellness.
And that if you wanted to get the same effect with money for happiness,
you'd have to pay each household 10,000 dollars,
or make the residents seven years younger.
(Laughter)
Want to be happy and healthy?
We need wildness.
Consider the biodiversity in our own space.
If we remove the footprint of our house,
and if we remove the paved areas,
what we're left with is mostly turf grass.
But non-native turf grass, which covers 80% of suburbia,
is about as useful
as asphalt
to most native plants and animals.
Consider this: this is where we do battle with Mother Nature in suburbia.
Our goal here with lawn
- lawn, which is the junk food of the plant world -
it covers 50,000 square miles of the United States,
and our goal is to have the best monoculture we can have.
We want every blade of grass perfect.
We want to push every other species out.
We want to hoard our space.
That's what we've come to see as beautiful.
And consider my students' question in the river:
why would we intentionally destroy biodiversity?
Consider your house, your neighbor's house,
your street, and your community,
from the lens of a monarch butterfly.
There's really not much for you there;
there's no habitat, and there's no food.
But what if instead, we had a different vision for our space?
What if we decided we were going to take some of those 1,500 species,
and even in a small way include them in our own community?
What if you stepped outside your front door
and saw some of the richness my students have captured
in these photographs from Middlefork?
It's those small choices we make every day
that help us create the kind of world in which we want to live.
Even in this small prairie that we put in on our campus,
students noticed the number of birds, and bees, and butterflies
which visited it was remarkable.
So much so that they applied for a grant,
and we're now going to expand that prairie.
Habitat loss is the number one reason for species extinction.
In Illinois, there is less than one tenth of one percent
of original tall grass prairie left.
When students ask me, "What can I do for the environment?"
the biggest thing you guys can do,
the most powerful thing you guys can do for the environment,
is create habitat and biodiversity.
Your parents might not be too happy
if you rip up your front lawn and put in a prairie.
But don't let that stop you, there are other ways to get involved.
(Laughter)
No, I don't mean that.
But don't let that stop you, there are other ways to get involved.
You can come and help us in our prairie on campus.
You can go and volunteer and do restoration work
at one of the preserves.
You can go to city council
and ask if they'd consider planting some native species
in some of the green spaces.
Think of the divine power when you plant something and give it life.
And how much more powerful even,
when you plant something native and create community.
We need wild things,
and we should think about a future with much wildness.
Henry David Thoreau said it best,
"In wildness is the salvation of the world."
My students solved the mystery of what happened in the river.
They also solved the bigger mystery about biodiversity.
Their advice?
Rewild yourself and rewild your space.
Thank you.
(Applause)