Podcasts about environmental science policy

In this Convo of Flanigan's Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Brian Thurston, an environmental entrepreneur, currently serving as a Sustainability Solutions Sales Director at APTIM, an environmental solutions firm. He's also worked as a Senior Advisor for multiple companies and nonprofits in the environmental sector, focusing on business development and strategic partnerships. His background is in business development and consulting – utilizing innovation and technology to build multi-disciplinary networks to attack big problems at scale.He and Ted discuss his background, born in Torrance, CA, raised in Manhattan Beach, and still lives in the South Bay area in Hermosa Beach. He shares that he grew up at the beach and in the ocean surfing, which is how he wound up in the environmental field. Being eco-conscious was ingrained in the ethos of growing up where he did, participating in beach clean ups, and very much aware of the deterioration of water quality. He attended Long Beach State to play volleyball, and then transferred to the University of Southern California to study American Literature.  Between his undergraduate degree and graduate degree, he worked in the film and event planning industries. He then decided to shift to a career in the environmental sector, attending graduate school in Washington DC at Johns Hopkins via their hybrid program, studying environmental science policy and sustainability. He and Ted met when he worked at EcoMedia, where he was hired to be a Program Director, developing and managing public/private partnerships. He then worked for Waste Management as a national business development manager, where he focused on customized and scalable programs for Waste Management's Fortune 500 customers, leveraging internal assets and technology. Brian then moved on to consulting with climate tech companies. He and Ted discuss some recent ventures, including the Bluebox energy efficient HVAC solution, Hytch Rewards mobility app, Oceanworks recycled plastic solution, and being a board member of Sustainable Surf. Working with all of these mission-driven companies that tackle big problems, Brian believes that the concept that the environment and profit are at odds is a myth, and that creativity and innovation prove that every day!

Hazel Horvath is the Founder and CEO of Ecolytics, a business management tool that streamlines sustainability work for companies so that impact is easily trackable and better business decisions can be made using these metrics. Her environmental work began in high school during a formative experience where she learned about droughts, and then she went to Duke University and studied Environmental Science & Policy and Global Health. She tells us about her diverse array of experiences throughout college, from working internationally to in the nonprofit sector, and how she eventually decided to pursue entrepreneurship. Hazel explains the process of finding the gap for Ecolytics to fill, iterating the company to create the biggest value add, and the steps she took to overcome the challenges of being a young solo-founder. She ends the episode by leaving her biggest pieces of advice for students interested in energy and climate, and sharing what is next for her!   Keynotes: - The value of getting a diverse range of experiences  - The importance of metrics in sustainability work - Challenges of being a young startup founder   And follow us on: Newsletter: https://www.energy-terminal.com/newsletter-signup LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/energy-terminal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/energyterminal/

Ecosystem Science combines biology, chemistry, and physics to model and predict responses like wine grape yield forecasting, water management, and disease vector mapping. Joshua Fisher, Associate Professor of Environmental Science & Policy at Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University and science lead at Hydrosat explains how high-resolution data from space helps farmers plan for climate change. His research uses satellites to help growers understand how change their practices to succeed in their current location and predict future winegrowing regions around the world. Resources: 199: NASA Satellites Detect Grapevine Diseases from Space 191: CropManage: Improving the Precision of Water and Fertilizer Inputs Hydrosat Joshua Fisher Joshua Fisher on LinkedIn Joshua Fisher on Twitter Martha Anderson, Research Physical Scientist, USDA-ARS NASA Acres - applying satellite data solutions to the most pressing challenges facing U.S. agriculture NASA Earth Observatory NASA JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet   Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member Get More Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.   Transcript Craig Macmillan  0:00  And our guest today is Dr. Joshua Fisher. He is Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Chapman University, and also science lead with Hydrosat. And today, we're gonna be talking about ecosystem research that he's been doing in some modeling ideas. Thanks for being here, Joshua.   Joshua Fisher  0:16  Thanks for having me.   Craig Macmillan  0:17  Your area is broadly defined, I understand as Ecosystem Science, that'd be an accurate description of your professional life.   Joshua Fisher  0:25  Sure, yep.   Craig Macmillan  0:26  Before we get started, what exactly is Ecosystem Science?   Joshua Fisher  0:29  it's kind of a combination of many sciences. And it's a combination of biology, we got to understand plants, animals, in, you know, down to bacteria and fungi. It's a combination of chemistry, you know, we need to understand how different nutrients and water and carbon interact and transform and it's combination of physics in terms of how energy flows through the system and in heat, and how to model and predict responses of the biology and the chemistry through the physics. So I kind of got into Ecosystem Science or environmental science more broadly, because I was indecisive as a student and couldn't pick a science, like all the sciences, and   Craig Macmillan  1:10  I feel your pain.   Joshua Fisher  1:11  And I didn't want to just pick one. So I was looking around for a major that combine the sciences and environmental science was a good one and got me a chance to get outdoors.   Craig Macmillan  1:20  That's an interesting way to get into what are the applied aspects of this area? Like what are the things things are that you're interested in, in terms of like the applications, but what do you do, and then we'll talk about what you do.   Joshua Fisher  1:32  The applications are really interesting. And it's kind of a career trajectory to, I think, as a student, and as an early career scientist, it was really about doing science, with the applications kind of out there more broadly, for context, but not actually doing anything about anything other than coming up with the best science possible, coming up with the best models, launching satellites, developing new datasets and understanding the way the world works. But actually feeding back to society was something that I've really ramped up throughout my career. And I've seen that among my peers as well, you know, especially in terms of the science trajectory and science reward system, science rewards you for publications for getting grants, and for doing a bit of ivory tower research, it doesn't really reward you, promote you and sustain you for doing applied sciences. And that tends to be a luxury that one gets one when gets into mid career, which is where I'm at now. And it's a great aspect. It's a great privilege to be able to feed back to society, to help farmers, water managers, policy makers, communities, people of color, indigenous tribes, and so on. It's a different type of award. Now it's, it's a reward, that's a personal reward. Something that I feel, you know, really happy about satisfied when I go to sleep at night. And I, you know, have to do my part to change the system for the early career scientist of today, to be rewarded for those applications as well. But in terms of my Applied Science, nowadays, I use my technology that I've launched a space and I'm continuing to launch the space, especially on thermal imaging, to monitor plant stress and water stress, heat stress, and plants using that to help inform irrigation and agricultural crop management, forest management, wildfire, prediction response, even down to urban heat and public health. I have got work with environmental justice, and communities of color and using the data that I've launched to help to help sustain public health as well as environmental science and agriculture and food production and food security. So lots of great applications out there. I'm even working with volcanologist. Our technology to help predict volcanic eruption.   Craig Macmillan  3:43  Oh, wow.   Joshua Fisher  3:44  Incredible array, you know, there's geology as well, mineral exploration. So a lot of applications, aquaculture, you know, helping improve shellfish and diversity as well. So when it comes to what I've gotten myself into, or gotten yourself into Dr. Fisher, over the years a bit of that. And it just happens to be that what I do has a lot of the connections, it isn't very limited. And what I what I've been doing for the past decade has a lot on temperature and heat. And so anywhere there's a signal of heat or temperature, whether it's in crops, whether it's in urban settings, whether it's in volcanoes, whether it's in wildfire that temperature permeates everywhere. And my data have and my science have the ability to help not only the science, but also the applications across nearly in the entire earth system.   Craig Macmillan  4:35  All right now, what are you talking about heat you're looking at this, we're talking about what you do so like on any given day, and I know everybody has these crazy lives where we do one thing on Tuesday and something completely different on Wednesday, but you are scientists, scientists work with data. Your data is coming from space. How did you get into that? I know you've worked on a couple of other or a couple of projects both now When in the past with information data collected from sapce, and I want to know more about that, what kind of data? How's it collected? How's it work? Exactly, yeah, how does somebody get into terrestrial data scientist?   Joshua Fisher  5:14  How does someone go from having one's head in the dirt to having one's head in space?   Craig Macmillan  5:21  And then then back in the dirt sounds like.   Unknown Speaker  5:24  I'm back in the dirt again. Back to my college days, environmental science, started doing undergraduate research at Berkeley, where I was at, mostly because as an undergrad, I was like, Why? Why did I go to Berkeley, you know, it's just a number in a class. It's huge, not the best teaching, the reputation of Berkeley is really for the research. So I said, Well, if I'm going to be here, I better get involved in research. And I got involved in research as an undergrad, and started getting into the Environmental Modeling. And I liked it so much that I continued on at Berkeley for my PhD, and my PhD, and continued Environmental Modeling side. But I was like, well, let's add a new tool to my toolkit. And let's start playing with satellites. Because really, they were just cool toys in the sky, I had really no other kind of ambition, other than to learn how to pick up a new tool and play with it.   Craig Macmillan  6:12  I've seen some really pretty pictures, if you go to the NASA Earth Observatory page, and with all their links and stuff there. It's like a Christmas tree with presents under it. It's just all these pretty colors and all these amazing things. So I can see how you could get drawn into it.   Joshua Fisher  6:27  Yeah, I mean, when you get into all the beautiful imagery, not only in the visible spectrum, but across the medic spectrum, you start to wonder if you are looking at science or art, that distinction that polarization between art and science really starts to blur. And you forget, what are you doing? Are you doing art? Are you doing science? And really, you're doing both. And it's all together. And I've been doing a lot of art, science and synergies over the year as well, which I'm happy to talk to you after I answer your first question, which is how I got into it. So playing with cool satellites, cool toys in the sky, interested in water, because I grew up in California and Alaska, kind of two, polar opposites of environmental extremes. And you know, when I was a kid, we were putting low flow showerheads, you know, in my showers in Los Angeles, where I grew up with my mother. And then my parents split when I was little, my dad lived in Alaska. And when I went to visit my dad, Alaska, we were putting on high flow showerheads, as a kid just kind of flying back and forth. It made me wonder how the world worked. And so growing up in California, especially under droughts and water shortages, as I got into college, I got involved in interested in being able to predict water and how much water we need. We had been able to measure rainfall and snow and groundwater, but not the evaporation components so much. And so that was where the models had to come into play. Because we couldn't measure it. We had a model that we had predicted based on other things. So when I started playing with satellites, my PhD, I was started wondering, I wonder if we could get at evapotranspiration from satellite remote sensing. And so that became the focus of my PhD. And sure enough, I was able to do it at the end of a nice long doctorate. So then right around that time, climate change really blew up. And I was in a unique place where I was observing the earth, using cutting edge technology and models and looking at cycles that transcended the whole earth. And so I kind of stepped right into that, for a fact finished my PhD, decided to if I wanted to be a global climate scientist, I needed to work globally. I had been in the Bay Area for almost 10 years in LA and so on. So I left the US and I went to England to Oxford University. And I thought I would leave the satellite and evapotranspiration stuff behind me. I started working on the climate model. There, I started getting into nitrogen, and the nitrogen cycle. And really my number one goal of moving to England was to pick up a British accent so clearly that although I can't say...   Craig Macmillan  8:56  You went to Oxford, you went to Oxford to figure that out. You just couldn't move to the west end and a little apartment for a couple years. That wasn't going to do it clearly.   Joshua Fisher  9:03  But partially because we got a big project in the Amazon as well and Andes. So I moved into the Amazon and Andes and conducted a big nutrient fertilization experiment up and down the Andes along with a larger team studying ecological dynamics of the rainforest and cloud forest there. So my Spanish got a lot better although it's very much field Spanish, you know, I can converse very fluently when it comes to roots and leaves and soils, but put me in a fine dining restaurant. And I'm like, what is all this cutlery? We didn't have this on Amazon. Eventually made my way out of Amazon Andes back to Oxford and was teaching remote sensing and GIS geographic information systems to the students there. We had a collaborator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab who was visiting with us and he had tried to recruit me to JPL back in California. And I said, Ah, you know, I just converted my postdoc to a faculty position at Oxford. we're pretty happy here. But then my partner who's awesome from Los Angeles, got a job at Occidental College in Los Angeles. And so she got the job. And so I was like, okay, so I called up my friend at JPL. She has that position still available. And he said, Yeah, you should apply. And so I did. And so I ended up taking a job as a NASA scientist at JPL. And I was there for about 12 years before I left, and joined Chapman University and Hydrosat. Hydrosat was actually a spinoff from JPL. Some JPL scientists, engineers spun off some technology that we'd actually launched to Mars, and decided that we could actually use it for Earth Science and applications and accelerate that transition to society a lot faster. If we did it from a commercial sphere, than from a governmental, you know, wait for contracts and proposals, sphere prime, the science lead for Hydrosat. And even though it's in the commercial realm, I represent the science community and my push to make sure the data are available for free to the science community. And so that's one of my big pushes. It's all about advancing the earth as a whole. And Hydrosat really supports that. And our employees are driven by that mission as well. So that's exciting. So yeah, that's how I got involved in remote sensing and satellites. And it keeps me here today, because that's just what I've gotten good at, for my time at JPL.   Craig Macmillan  11:19  So what kinds of things is hydroset do?   Joshua Fisher  11:22  So we are launching as of, you know, less than a year just in June of 24, a constellation of satellites. And then they measure thermal infrared, so temperature, have very high spatial resolutions. And because it's a constellation, we can cover the earth really rapidly and frequently. So we can get measurements every day, what we call field scales down to 50 meters, for the thermal and in the visible and near infrared down to 20 meters. So really high resolution really frequent and and that's what we need, especially for growers agriculturalists. But even for other applications, like urban heat waves, volcanic eruptions, you know, a lot of things happen at very fine scales, wildfires, and you need to be able to capture it frequently, you can't just wait. And so there's always been this traditional trade off between high spatial resolution and high temporal resolution, you can have one or the other, but not both. It's because you either have your satellite close to the Earth where you can see close detail, but it takes forever to wrap around the earth in full coverage, or you can be further away and cover the earth more frequently. But then your pixel size is not as sharp. The problem with the thermal infrared imaging is that it's always been really expensive. Because it's a temperature sensor. It requires cooling, cryo, cooling, which takes a lot of energy and takes a lot of mass and volume. And on the engineering side, you start to add those up. And it becomes very expensive, from our public public satellites. Landsat has been our workhorse over the past couple of decades. And it's like a billion dollars to watch Landsat so you cannot have a lot. And that's a 16 day repeat. We advanced from Landsat with eco stress out of JPL I was the science lead for eco stress. We put it on the International Space Station. So we could use that energy system and power in crowd cooling. Interesting overpass cadence. So we didn't have to pay for a lot of the engineering. But you know, the the space station, of course, is very expensive.   Craig Macmillan  13:10  What is the overpass cadence on the International Space Station? I've always wondered that. If you're up there, and you're going around how often do you see your house?   Joshua Fisher  13:17  Yeah. And the answer is funky.   Craig Macmillan  13:21  Scientists love that Josh. Yeah, that's a great scientific, that's great for science.   Joshua Fisher  13:27  That's the jargon. That's the technical term. It is it's really funky. It's really weird. It doesn't go over the poles. For one, it hits about 50 to 15 degrees north and south. So it kind of like starts to get up there near Alaska. But it like it turns around, because what we call precesses kind of turns around, and so has this funky orbit. So if you're living in Los Angeles, or Chicago, or New York, a traditional satellite, like Landsat or MODIS, will pass over at the same time, every day for Motus 1030 or 130, for Landsat every 16 days at about 1030. So it's very consistent. And that's good for scientists, as you said, like scientist like that kind of consistent data, they can see if the planets heating up because at 1030, every time things are getting hotter, or whatever, the space station passes over at different times every time it takes your schedule and rips it up and says, you know, I'm doing my own thing. And so today, it'll be 11am. The next time it'll be 2pm. You know, next time it'll be 9am. It's not like every day or every three days. It's every like, sometimes it can be every day. And then like it just says like sia and then it comes back a week later. So it's very inconsistent. And that's why remote sensing scientists, NASA scientists had historically shied away from using the space station as a platform to observe the earth. I came along and said, You know what, this interesting high resolution spatial resolution because it's pretty close to the surface. You can actually see it from your house, passing over at night in this different times of overpass passes actually really good from a plant centric standpoint, plants, they use water throughout the day. But if you don't have enough water, especially in the afternoon, when it's hot and dry, plants will close this stomata, they'll shut down, and maybe reopen them a little bit in the evening to get a little bit more photosynthesis. And before, you know, there's no more sunlight from a 1030, consistent overpassed, you would never see that even from 130, you might not always see that getting that diurnal sampling was a unique trait that I thought would be valuable for Plant Science Ecosystem Science in agriculture. We propose that as part of the Eco stress mission proposal, the review panel at NASA headquarters, Congress love that we had been spending so much money as a nation on the space station. And we hadn't really been using those unique characteristics for Earth observation until we came along. And I think we were like the second Earth mission on the space station. And really the first one to ever use it to observe the earth with its unique characteristics. After we did that a whole bunch of other missions came up afterwards. We were trailblazers.   Craig Macmillan  15:59  That's cool. There's implications in terms of and you know, we're we're focused on plants and one plant in particular, the grapevine the implications for this are that we can see quite a bit of detail, I mean, 50 meters by 50 meters is actually surprisingly tight pixel, small pixel. But we also can see regional, and learn in larger scale patterns that we wouldn't find otherwise, where let's say grow A has great information about what's happening in terms of ET rates on their property, or plant water stress measured with leaf water potential or something like that. Stem water potential, but I'm guessing the field is probably picking up on some some patterns that are beyond what we might have otherwise known about, even if we had really, really good high quality high definition data just at the ground level, but limited parcel size, for instance.   Joshua Fisher  16:47  Yeah, absolutely. Thing is that hydrostat really combines a lot of great characteristics that you might get one from any, any any other individual instrument. So from again, Landsat, you've got that great spatial resolution, but you missed that frequency, promote us, you have the frequency, you miss the spatial resolution from drones, you get that great spatial resolution, but you don't get that large regional coverage, or even frequency from towers, similar, so from aircraft. So with Hydrosat, we're able to pick that a lot, which means that we can do a lot with I think we don't replace drone operations or towers, because those present and provide really useful information. But what we do provide is that just very consistent objective and large scale coverage at the field scale. So if you're a grower, and you got fields, you can run a drone or a couple of times, but you're really not going to see your field, you can get your Lance and your motors, but you're not gonna get that frequency or that resolution tight. So Hydrosat is really beneficial for you in terms of your audience for growers that have a lot of area, and a lot of interesting dynamics that you know, they need to be able to monitor and evapotranspiration, the soil moisture, the temperature, we can get that we also create a lot of products from our data. We just acquired a company called IrriWatch, which was started by my colleague Wim Bastiaanssen, who's a who's a giant and evapotranspiration, and so with me and Wim teaming up, we've got just where you know, the the two headed dragon of evapotranspiration are really pushing technology and solutions into agriculture, viticulture and all the other applications. So Wim and IrriWatch has done is they've reached out to hundreds hundreds of growers all over the world 60 countries and figuring out what are you what are your decisions? What are your What are your questions? What are your operational needs? And have answered pretty much all of them it can be from transpiration to soil moisture to soil deficit to how long do I need to turn on my hose? How long do I need to turn on my valve for? Where am I seeing water deficits? Where am I seeing water leaks? Can I tell us something about my soil health can I forecast crop yield, you know, in growing in viticulture, of course, we're not always trying to maximize the soil moisture to the field capacity. We're sometimes doing deficit irrigation. You even need more precision on that and more frequency. And so we work a lot with the US Department of Agriculture. I've got colleagues at USDA, Martha Anderson, they'll acoustics and tell him they've been doing a lot of viticulture applications. And so they're very excited about Hydrosat and we've been working with them on our early adopter product and hoping to have the USDA be a direct feed from Hydrosat and as much as all our individual growers and collective so we're definitely excited to support agriculture, viticulture, and anyone who can use the data. We want to make sure everyone has the best crop yield and best production and withstands these increasing heatwaves droughts and climate change that is facing everyone.   Craig Macmillan  19:56  So what kind of products does hydroset producing report it advise advising, like, what? What does it look like?   Joshua Fisher  20:03  Yeah, it's a huge list. I mean, so we actually have, since we acquired IrriWatch, we're trying to distill it because I think, with IrriWatch, we inherited about, like 50 different products. So different. So you got this web portal, this API, you can go in on your phone, or on your laptop, or your tablet, or whatever, and load up your field. And you can get your reports, your maps, your tables, your graphs across your different variables, your your irrigation recommendations, we provide irrigation recommendations, things before 10 In the morning, every day, local time. So people know what to do. But you know, then that's like growers, then there's more like water managers who are trying to manage water for a region, we've got policymakers, we've got consultants, so it's we have got a lot of different users, we've got a government. So we've got a lot of different users with different needs. And we have applications for all these different users. We're focused on agriculture, although we have a lot of interest and buy in from, again, like I said, wildfire communities, and forestry and public health and so on. So we're supporting a lot of those communities as well with our data. But we have a lot more analytics information and services for the Agricultural Committee at this at this time.   Craig Macmillan  21:17  I wanted to transition into that area of analytics. And related, you also are interested in modeling. I understand. To me, that's the Holy Grail, and also the Demon. of anyone who works around data. When I collect data, I've got maybe a great looking backward looking model. Fantastic. I tell you what has happened. Okay, great. Tell me what's going to happen. Josh, that's a little harder. And you are you are interested in this and work with this and which supercomputing Is that correct?   Joshua Fisher  21:48  That's right. That's right. Yeah, I do a lot of our system modeling. And it started with evapotranspiration, right again, because we couldn't measure it. So I had to predict it. And we had a lot of different models starting from him in Monte Thornthwaite. And recently, Taylor. And then moving forward, about the time I was in school, the global community started developing Eddy covariance towers, flux towers. And so we had some of the first ones at Berkeley that were measuring evapotranspiration, you know, frequently and across, you know, an ecosystem. So, I was like, well, let's test the models there. So I was, you know, one of the first scientists to test these different evapotranspiration models, and we got it like a dozen or so tested at the number of reflex sights, and I installed sap flow sensors and measured a bunch of things about water to be able to predict the models, or predict, predict evapotranspiration. That got me into understanding the process really well in the mathematics and the predictive capabilities. And then when I moved into the satellite remote sensing realm, we couldn't measure evapotranspiration directly as a gas flux. But you know, we were measuring the temperature signal, which is directly related, we can measure soil moisture, we can measure meteorology, we can measure vegetation, phonology. And so these components start to go together to get out of Apple transpiration. Actually, we can measure evapotranspiration using kind of atmospheric layers. It's very coarse resolution. It's not particularly useful for our land applications, but useful for weather and things like that. That modeling continued into using satellite data as the inputs to those models. And then like I said, I thought I would leave evapotranspiration remote sensing behind me as I moved to England and worked on the climate model. So I got into earth system modeling, and being able to predict, you know, essentially climate change, and what's happening to the fate of the whole planet, not just this year, next year, but 20 years from now, 50 years from now, and at the end of the century, as climate change is really ramping up and we're looking at tipping points in their system. When do plants really start running out of water? When do they run out of nutrients? When are the temperature extremes so much that plants can't survive? And this was actually just a paper that we published last month in nature made the cover of nature, and we use eco stress to detect temperature limits that we're seeing in tropical rainforests right now that we're just seeing starting to exceed the critical temperature in which photosynthesis shuts down. So that got a lot of widespread news coverage. Now we can put this back into their system models and say, are their system models doing this correctly? Some of my volcanology work is actually linked to earth system models, because one of the big uncertainties and unknowns and the fate of the planet is what are the rainforests going to do with increasing co2 And normally, we would set up experiments and pump co2 on to ecosystems and see what's happened. But it's hard to do that and rainforests working with my volcanologist colleagues, we've discovered that volcanoes leak co2 out of their like flanks into the low lying forests. And there's a chain of volcanoes in Costa Rica that are doing this in the rainforests. So we're going in again, back into the jungle, this time, the jungles of the volcanoes, flying drones to sniff out those co2 leaks, flying Lidar and thermal hyperspectral to see what the rainforest responses are. So that all ecology that remote sensing ties back to their system modeling predictive capabilities.   Craig Macmillan  25:05  One of the things I think is fascinating is here we have an ecosystem where we can collect data, we can the ground truth, that data or collect other variables to ground truth and connect, we can then develop like you said, some predictive modeling, and you go, what would a rainforest have to do with Cabernet Sauvignon? My answer is a lot. So where I want to steer things next, as a viticulturist. This is where I should say, the viticulture side of me. I'm very selfish. Not all viticulturist are many are giving open people, but I'm very selfish, and the only thing I care about is okay, what's happening with my vineyard? And what's that gonna look like? 10, 15 years from now, very hot topic right now in the in the wine industry is Wow, things are changing clearly. And so what kinds of changes Am I gonna have to make? Or can I make in terms of what plants I'm planting? Going forward? And I'm guessing that you probably are having some, some insights into plant response under these different conditions? Do you think that we're going to have some models or some ideas in the future about how, you know specific crops like vines might be modified, either in terms of species choice varieties choice or management techniques, or things like that? Is there is there some help for us here?   Joshua Fisher  26:18  Yeah, we already have those, there's kind of two paths or two, two sides to this coin, when it comes to climate change, and viticulture. One is big scale, where can we grow grapes that we couldn't grow before? And to where are we no longer going to be able to grow grapes into the future? The second one is, you know, it's hard to pick up a move to move into a new place or to move out of an old place, what can we do under the changing temperature and changing water cycle and changing seasonal cycle? And so I think that's probably the more immediate pressing question to potentially some of your your listeners is what can we do now? And so, you know, we're working with like the USDA and testing out different seed varieties, and so on. And there's a lot of commercial companies that do to do that as well. And so how do we help? We're not doing seed varieties. We're not doing the genetics of it, although I've got colleagues at Chapman University who are doing that. But what we can do is say, all right, you've got 5, 10 different varieties of the same type of grape, how much water are they using, what's the temperature sensitivity, and not just in a greenhouse or a lab, but across the field. And you can't always get towers and drones everywhere. And you know, maybe you can, but there's local conditions are a little bit unusual. So let's go ahead and plant 10 experimental fields, or maybe you're a grower, and you have a couple fields that you're willing to try out some new varieties. And we can just tell you, yeah, they use less water, or we have also another product called Water Use Efficiency crop for drop in terms of how much carbon is being taken up relative to how much water is being used. And so we can tell you that variety was was pretty good. I think that's the main crux, we can also tell you other things that other people can tell you in terms of phonology, and in Greenup, and so on. I think that helps and dovetails with how I actually got on your podcast with my buddy and colleague, Professor Katie Gold at Cornell University, who does a lot of remote sensing on disease. And so there's diseases are changing with climate change as well. And so with Katie and me arm and arm across, you know, across the coasts, hitting the disease in hyperspectral, and the plant water stress temperature shifts of the thermal, we present a very powerful one, two punch against climate change as it starts to attack our fields and crops. In a more immediate term, we have like a crop yield crop forecast, you know, seasonal forecasts that helps growers understand what they're doing in terms of coming to market, you know, that's a little bit potentially less useful for viticulture, it's more for grain crops and you know, big kind of bulk crops, it's also useful for investors as well. So there's a lot of futures, a lot of crop investors, crop insurance, and so on. And so we can provide just, you know, more accurate forecasts from the existing forecasts, because we have better data on existing conditions and more, a deeper insight into what the plants are seeing doing and feeling and responding because of that temperature signal because of that thermal response.   Craig Macmillan  29:09  That's really cool. And very exciting. And I'm very happy with it. You and Katie, other people are working on this because I think we've done a number of interviews in this area now over the years. And one thing that I have been really inspired by is that 15 years ago, this was kind of a glint in somebody's eye. And then 10 years ago, things were starting to happen. And then probably at least more than even more than five years ago, you'd go to any of the big meetings, and it's like, Hey, we got drones, we can fly your plane. Hey, we got planes, we can fly a plane and these beautiful pictures and stuff. And then suddenly, it actually getting more than five years ago then it was like look at all this NASA stuff. I was like, holy cow. This is taking it to a whole nother level in literally a whole nother level. And so I'm really excited about first I was excited about the data and I'm excited about how we're learning how to use it. And I think that's always been a challenge is We're pretty good at finding ways of collecting data. We're not always so great at figuring out how to use it can run out of time here. But the one thing on this topic that you would tell grape growers in particular, there was one thing that you would tell a grower, what would it be?   Joshua Fisher  30:16  Yeah, if there was one thing I would tell a grape grower is that we're here to support you. And we are working on the technology to meet your needs and demands, the technology is available for you, by all means, reach out, you can Google me, email me, no problem. I'll hook you up some sample data, you know, see if it looks good. If you want to buy in great, if not, no worries, if you just want some advice, consulting, it's all about help. We're all on this ship together Planet Earth to get there. You know, it's all about collaborations and helping across the board.   Craig Macmillan  30:46  Where can people find out more about you?   Joshua Fisher  30:48  I've got a website, my own personal website, you can see all my publications and datasets and so on.   Craig Macmillan  30:54  We will link to that.   Joshua Fisher  30:55  JB Fisher dot org. You can Google me on Josh Fisher and Chapman or Joshua hydrostat. I'm on Twitter, try to tweet out all my papers are relevant papers and science findings in the literature. I'm on LinkedIn and I do meet blog posts on papers met once a quarter on medium. So we're trying to get out there and try to communicate Yeah, more than happy to help.   Craig Macmillan  31:17  Sounds like you're easy to find my guest today. It was Joshua Fisher. He's Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Chapman University. And he's also the science lead for a company called Hydrosat. And we've been talking about things that are a new window, and I'm very excited about having that window opened in that window being opened wider and wider all the time. Josh, thanks for being a guest. This is great.   Joshua Fisher  31:39  Thanks, Craig. And hopefully, your listeners found it interesting.   Nearly perfect transcription by https://otter.ai

In our first-ever episode of The Indisposable Podcast, we celebrated the passing of the 2019 Single Use Foodware and Litter Reduction Ordinance in Berkeley, California. More than 100 episodes later, host Brooking Gatewood welcomes back Martin Bourque, Executive Director of The Ecology Center, to discuss the organization's new toolkit to help others learn from this unique model for both policy and research. Joined by Jessica Heiges, researcher at the Environmental Science Policy and Management Program at UC Berkeley, the three talk about the unique conditions that led to the ordinance's passing, the importance of campaign finance limits for environmental policy, the unexpected setback of COVID-19 – and what we're learning now as implementation and enforcement are finally under way. Tune in for this rich policy and practice discussion as the city of Berkeley works to get off the disposable treadmill. Resources:The Disposable Free Berkeley ToolkitThe Ecology Center

Olivia welcomes on environmental science and policy professor Dr. Richelle Tanner to talk about the intersections between natural science and social science and how younger generations are beginning to shape the field.Links:Check out Richelle's work!Check out her lab!Follow her lab on TikTok!Follow the show on instagram!Email the show at thedomainofwomen@gmail.com

Leah Thomas, Founder of Intersectional Environmentalist & Author of The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet   Leah Thomas is a celebrated environmentalist based in Santa Barbara, CA. Coining the term ‘eco-communicator' to describe her style of environmental activism, Leah uses her passion for writing and creativity to explore and advocate for the critical yet often overlooked relationship between social justice and environmentalism. With this intersection in mind, Leah founded and launched Intersectional Environmentalist in 2020, a resource hub and platform that aims to advocate for environmental justice, provide educational resources surrounding intersectional environmentalism, and promote inclusivity and accessibility within environmental education and movements.    Leah, who is also the founder of eco-lifestyle blog @greengirlleah, uses her multiple years of eco-focused educational and work experience to inform her ever-expanding list of projects, as well as her audience of more than 400k followers across channels. A graduate of Chapman University with a B.S. in Environmental Science & Policy and a cluster in Comparative World Religions, Leah has interned twice with the National Park Service and has worked at leading green companies, including eco-friendly soap company Ecos and most recently, Patagonia. A fundamental optimist and opportunity-maker, Leah used her time after being furloughed during the pandemic to create Intersectional Environmentalist.    Leah is the author of The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet, and her writing has also appeared in a variety of publications, including Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire and Highsnobiety. She has been featured in Harper's Bazaar, W Magazine, Domino, GOOP, and numerous podcasts.    In This Episode: Leah shares her origins story. How Leah found intersectional environmentalism through her connection to the land, farming, and her ancestral roots.  She defines intersectional environmentalism and also speaks about lateral oppression. Leah shares how she's able to share about the intersections of environmentalism and meet people where they are. Leah shares her views on why Indigenous and POC are not included in environmental education and why Leah is excited about the future. The importance of local policy and climate reparations. The importance of finding joy when working in social justice. Full Show Notes: Green Girl Leah Website Green Girl Leah's Instagram Twitter: @Leahtommi Leah's book The Intersectional Environmentalist Intersectional Environmentalist Website Laura Chung Instagram Brittany Simone Anderson's Instagram The Werk Podcast Instagram The Werk Podcast Website YouTube Channel Connect with The Werk:   If you enjoyed the podcast and you feel called, please share it, and tag us! Subscribe, rate, and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. Your rating and review help more people discover it! Follow on Instagram @thewerkpodcast Let us know your favorite guests, lessons, or any topic requests.

We've all heard environmental science, policy, and studies, but what makes each of these different? What kinds of jobs can you get? Do you need a degree? Our host, Taylor, answers all of these questions in this episode. Grab a piece of bamboo paper and a biodegradable pen, and get ready to take some notes!

In this episode of the Get Loved Up podcast, Koya talks to celebrated environmentalist Leah Thomas. Leah talks about Intersectional Environmentalism and how we can't separate social justice from true environmentalism. While a little goes a long way when it comes to protecting the planet, Leah also recognizes that unsustainable practices also stem from social realities that need to be changed. Our planet's struggles are also our own and to solve environmental issues would also require solving the problems that hound human species alone. GUEST BIOLeah Thomas is a celebrated environmentalist based in Santa Barbara, CA. Coining the term ‘eco-communicator' to describe her style of environmental activism, Leah uses her passion for writing and creativity to explore and advocate for the critical yet often overlooked relationship between social justice and environmentalism. With this intersection in mind, Leah founded and launched Intersectional Environmentalist in 2020, a resource hub and platform that aims to advocate for environmental justice, provide educational resources surrounding intersectional environmentalism, and promote inclusivity and accessibility within environmental education and movements.Leah, who is also the founder of eco-lifestyle blog @greengirlleah, uses her multiple years of eco-focused educational and work experience to inform her ever-expanding list of projects, as well as her audience of more than 350k followers. A graduate of Chapman University with a B.S. in Environmental Science & Policy and a cluster in Comparative World Religions, Leah has interned twice with the National Park Service and has worked at leading green companies, including eco-friendly soap company Ecos and most recently, Patagonia. A fundamental optimist and opportunity-maker, Leah used her time after being furloughed during the pandemic to create Intersectional Environmentalist. Leah's writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire and Highsnobiety, and she has been featured in Harper's Bazaar, W Magazine, Domino, GOOP, and numerous podcasts.Connect with Leah and follow her work through the links below: Website: https://www.greengirlleah.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greengirlleah/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahpthomas/HIGHLIGHTS04:34 Leah's political awakening 07:42 What 'intersectional' means 23:27 Top 5 questions to dive into to become a better person26:08 Support conscious capitalism as much as you can 30:30 Living the nomad life in LA40:22 How to get started in becoming an environmentalistQUOTES05:35 Leah: "Really early on, I started seeing in my studies that environmental legislation is not enforced equally for all people, especially along racial and economic lines. That's something that always stuck with me for a really long time, just not understanding why there wasn't more representation of all the incredible black folks and our contributions to sustainability. " 06:22 Leah: "We can't separate the liberation of people from environmentalism. And if we do, I don't really want to take part in that type of environmentalism." 22:04 Leah: "I think about my time spent writing the book and it's all kind of a haze. I was just so into it, I was writing it during the pandemic. And I'm the type of person where if I have something to say, I'll say it. And when I don't, I'll be quiet. I'll be quiet for years. But I had something to say, I had it in my heart, and there's something just so freeing about that and then also I know that I can back it up." 26:10 Leah: "If you can, I mean, supporting conscious capitalism, shopping local, trying to reduce harm by getting things that are fair-trade, locally sourced, ethically made. I know sometimes there's a really hefty price tag on that." 41:03 Leah: "Do a little audit. Reward yourself with the things that you are doing. Compassionately guide yourself to do better in the areas that you're not." Please leave a five-star review for the Get Loved Up Podcast. When you leave that review, please take a screenshot and email me at koya@koyawebb.com, and I've got a little gift for you.Your thoughts light up Koya's soul, and it helps continue to bring on great guests.To hear more about Koya Webb and Get Loved Up episodes, please visit her website at https://koyawebb.com/.

This week, Ben and Radha talk with David Osterberg about the environment and public policy and how the connect with public health and efforts to make stronger, healthier communities. You can read more about David and his work at https://www.public-health.uiowa.edu/people/david-osterberg/ A transcript of this episode will be available soon. Have an idea for a show? Questions or comments for our hosts? Send email to cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu

In this episode, Michael speaks with Hallie Eakin, a professor in the School of Sustainability, College of Global Futures at Arizona State University. They discuss Hallie's research on social adaptation and vulnerability in Mexico, Latin America, and the American Southwest.  Hallie's website: https://sustainability-innovation.asu.edu/person/hallie-eakin/ Website for the megadapt project: http://megadapt.weebly.com/   References Eakin, Hallie, et al. 2016. “Adapting to Risk and Perpetuating Poverty: Household's Strategies for Managing Flood Risk and Water Scarcity in Mexico City.” Environmental Science & Policy 66 (December): 324–33. Book that Michael mentions on academic norms: Berg, Maggie, and Barbara K. Seeber. 2016. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. University of Toronto Press. Book by James Ferguson that Michael mentions: Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: 'development', Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. University of Minnesota Press.

In this episode of the Navigating Interdisciplinarity series, Hita, Maria and Dane  were joined by Vanesa Castán Broto, Professor of Climate Urbanism at the Urban Institute, The University of Sheffield; and Jennifer Vanos, Professor of Climate at Health at the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University. We talked about Jenni's and Vanesa's journey towards interdisciplinary research, and the idea of interdisciplinarity as an interplay of disciplinary institutions. We also touched upon balancing our passion for research with strategizing for career advancement, and ended with our guests sharing some of their epic fails in their academic journey.   Vanesa's website: https://urbaninstitute.group.shef.ac.uk/who-we-are/prof-vanesa-castan-broto/   Jenni's website: https://sustainability.asu.edu/person/jennifer-vanos/   Dane's website: https://sustainability.asu.edu/person/dane-whittaker/    References: Castán Broto, Vanesa, Maya Gislason, and Melf-Hinrich Ehlers. 2009. “Practising Interdisciplinarity in the Interplay between Disciplines: Experiences of Established Researchers.” Environmental Science & Policy 12 (7): 922–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2009.04.005. Vanos, Jennifer K., Ariane Middel, Michelle N. Poletti, and Nancy J. Selover. 2018. “Evaluating the Impact of Solar Radiation on Pediatric Heat Balance within Enclosed, Hot Vehicles.” Temperature (Austin, Tex.) 5 (3): 276–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/23328940.2018.1468205.   We also spoke about these other books and lectures Bogaard, Paul, ed. Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead: Philosophical Presuppositions of Science, 1924-1925. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Kuhn, Thomas S. The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago press, 2012. Halberstam, Judith, and Jack Halberstam. The queer art of failure. Duke University Press, 2011. Vatn, Arild. Institutions and the Environment. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007.

In this episode, Divya and Michael interview Tomas Koontz and Praneeta Mudaliar. Tomas Koontz is a Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington. Praneeta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences at the Ithaca College. Tom was Divya's Ph.D. advisor, and Praneeta was her Ph.D. cohort, so doing this episode was also like a virtual reunion and served as an opportunity for Praneeta and Divya to reminisce and reflect on their journeys of navigating graduate school as international students in the United States, and Tom shared his experience of working with and mentoring international students.   Both Tom and Praneeta discussed their case studies on using polycentricity as a lens to study fisheries management in Lake Victoria (Praneeta) and collaborative governance of the socio-ecological systems in Puget Sound (Tom). Praneeta elaborated on how she used the concept of polycentricity to examine power dynamics in multi-level and multi-actor interactions in lake fisheries governance. Tom shared how the lens of polycentricity enabled him to examine multi-stakeholder collaboration in decision-making and collaborative governance among stakeholders across different scales. Together, both Tom and Praneeta reflected on ways science and scientific theories can inform practitioners in their decision-making process.     Praneeta's website: https://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/pmudliar Tom's website: https://directory.tacoma.uw.edu/employee/koontz31   References: 1. Mudaliar, P. (2020). Polycentric to monocentric governance: Power dynamics in Lake Victoria's fisheries. Environmental Policy and Governance. 2. Mudaliar, P., & O'Brien, L. (2021). Crowding-out lower-level authorities: Interactions and transformations of higher and lower-level authorities in Kenya's polycentric fisheries. Environmental Science & Policy, 118, 27-35. 3. Koontz, T. M. (2021). Science and scale mismatch: Horizontal and vertical information sharing in the Puget Sound polycentric governance system. Journal of Environmental Management, 290, 112600. 4. Koontz, T. M. (2019). Cooperation in polycentric governance systems. Governing complexity: Analyzing and applying polycentricity, 115-132.

Addyson Rowe is a Research Assistant intern with us at BREDL and graduate student in Environmental Science Policy at Duke University. She has been identifying heired properties that Dominion energy has bought or tried to buy in order to construct the pipeline there. A lot of these properties end up not getting signed off on by the owners because heir properties have so many owners that often don't even live in the state anymore, so they can't get in contact with them to sign or they fail to show up to court and Dominion automatically gets the land by default; without having to pay all of the owners. She is calling attention to this as well as identifying the different amounts paid to owners depending on when they agreed to sign. Gabrielle James is an intern with us a BREDL and a law student at UNC Chapel Hill. She is doing legal research on the Atlantic coast pipelines acquisition of heired property or essentially property that is passed to heirs without a will. This practice significantly disadvantages poor people and communities of color and allows corporations like Dominion who were building the ACP to easily (and often unfairly) acquire property and easements. Contact and connect with Addyson and Gabrielle: addyson.rowe@duke.edu and gabj23@live.unc.edu Heired Properties: https://friendsofnelson.com/bredl-releases-report-on-union-hill/ http://www.bredl.org/safeguard_americas_resources/200407_ACP_Invasion_during_Pandemic.htm https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/article185036078.html Cancellation of the ACP: https://atlanticcoastpipeline.com/news/2020/7/5/dominion-energy-and-duke-energy-cancel-the-atlantic-coast-pipeline.aspx Eminent Domain: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/eminent_domain https://www.justice.gov/enrd/history-federal-use-eminent-domain Background Music Credits: https://www.youtube.com/c/mbbmusic https://soundcloud.com/mbbofficial https://www.instagram.com/mbb_music

Dr. Lauren Ponisio is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Oregon. The United States is home to thousands of different species of native bees that are important for agriculture and natural ecosystems. Lauren’s research revolves around preserving and restoring bee populations in agriculture areas and other natural habitats. She is interested in understanding the distribution and health of different populations of native bees. When she’s not working, you can often find Lauren in her garden. She has been an avid gardener since childhood, and she currently has a thriving garden with lots of vegetables and plants to attract bees and other pollinators. She received her B.S. degree in biology with honors in ecology and evolution, as well as her M.S. degree in biology, from Stanford University. Lauren was awarded her Ph.D. from the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. She conducted postdoctoral research at UC, Berkeley afterwards, and she served on the faculty University of California, Riverside before recently accepting her current position at the University of Oregon. Lauren received graduate fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, as well as a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. She was also named among the Global Food Initiative’s "30 Under 30" in Food Systems in 2016. In our interview, Lauren shares more about her life and science.

Fighting for Climate Policy Dismantling the energy system is crucial to breaking the energy crisis. Implementing clean energy policies is the most effective way to change our current energy system and undo the playbook of the fossil fuel and utility industries. Citizens need to demand legislators to support green policies because a policy problem can only be fought with policy solutions. Mass public pressure, such as the youth protests led by Greta Thunberg, can disrupt the status quo and compel lawmakers to act. Policy Feedback Policy feedback is the idea that once policies are enacted, they reshape the next generation of politics. In the case of clean energy, the implementation of policies would kick start new industries and create jobs. As these industries become entrenched, they would defend the policies that created them and promote additional policy aimed at more green energy. Once this path dependence is created, a totally clean and renewable energy future is the result. Policy Retrenchment Fossil fuel and utility companies have immense power in state legislatures to reverse clean energy policies. Utilities around the country know how to run profitable power plants that burns fossil fuels and thus do not have incentives to switch to renewables. They fight against decarbonization by resisting implementation; rolling back existing guidelines for retrenchment; and even challenging pro-renewable candidates in primary races. Find out more: Leah Stokes an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and affiliated with the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is the author of the forthcoming book Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American State. She works on energy, climate and environmental politics. Within American Politics, her work focuses on representation and public opinion; voting behavior; and public policy, particularly at the state level. Within environmental politics, she researches climate change, renewable energy, water and chemicals policy. She completed a PhD in Public Policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning’s Environmental Policy & Planning group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); received a masters from MIT's Political Science Department; and completed an MPA in Environmental Science & Policy at the School of International & Public Affairs (SIPA) and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. You can follow her on Twitter @leahstokes

In episode 87 of America Adapts, host Doug Parsons interviews Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte. Kyle is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability and a faculty affiliate of the American Indian & Indigenous Studies and Environmental Science & Policy programs at Michigan State University. Kyle is also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kyle and I discuss how indigenous people define urgency in the face of climate change, managed retreat for tribal communities, the national climate assessment and tribal issues, the sometimes controversial relationship between tribes and climate scientists, climate change’s role in ongoing colonization of indigenous people, effective tribal engagement and much more in a fascinating and sometimes raw conversation. Donate to America Adapts Other Topics covered: Fundamentals of indigenous people and climate adaptation. Tribal people have historically ‘adapted’ to environmental change many times. What does managed retreat mean for tribal people? Is history repeating itself with displacing native people in response to climate change? Can existing tribal treaty rights be used as a legal tool to combat climate change? How did the recent national climate assessment do on tribal issues (hint: pretty well); Does tribal integrity help with adapting to climate change more effectively? For tribes, resilience is cultural and spiritual, and something always done by tribes. Indigenous people can define climate urgency and intrinsic value differently than western cultures. The challenges of tribal engagement, from both tribal perspective and western cultures. Does tribal ‘bureaucracy’ inhibit climate adaptation and partner building? The sometimes controversial relationship between tribes and climate scientists. Raw transcripts of this episode are available here. Links in this episode: https://risingvoices.ucar.edu/ https://kylewhyte.cal.msu.edu/climate-justice/ https://kylewhyte.cal.msu.edu/ https://kylewhyte.cal.msu.edu/about/ https://www.potawatomi.org/ Donate to America Adapts Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on Android Podcasts in the Classroom – All episode discussion guides available here. “Watch” America Adapts on the Climate Monitor tv channel. For more information, here. Doug Parsons and Speaking Opportunities: If you are interested in having Doug speak at corporate and conference events, sharing his unique, expert perspective on adaptation in an entertaining and informative way, more information can be found here! Now on Spotify! List of Previous Guests on America Adapts Subscribe/listen to podcast on Apple Podcasts. Facebook and Twitter: @usaadapts https://www.facebook.com/americaadapts/timeline www.americaadapts.org @kylepowyswhyte Subscribe to America Adapts on Apple Podcasts https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/america-adapts-climate-change/id1133023095?mt=2 On Google Play here. Please share on Facebook! The best climate change podcasts on The Climate Advisor http://theclimateadvisor.com/the-best-climate-change-podcasts/ Directions on how to listen to America Adapts on Amazon Alexa https://youtu.be/949R8CRpUYU America Adapts also has its own app for your listening pleasure!  Just visit the App store on Apple or Google Play on Android and search “America Adapts.” Join the climate change adaptation movement by supporting America Adapts!  Please consider supporting this podcast by donating through America Adapts fiscal sponsor, the Social Good Fund. All donations are now tax deductible! For more information on this podcast, visit the website at http://www.americaadapts.org and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.   Podcast Music produce by Richard Haitz Productions Write a review on Apple Podcasts! America Adapts on Facebook!   Join the America Adapts Facebook Community Group. Check us out, we’re also on YouTube! Producer Dan Ackerstein Subscribe to America Adapts on Apple Podcasts Doug can be contacted at americaadapts @ g mail . com

     Stephanie M. Landing is the Vice President for Construction/Environmental at A. Harold and Associates, LLC.  She is responsible for profit and loss for the multi-million dollar division and the Joint Venture effort focused on Base Operating Support projects.  With 10 years project management experience and 5 years focused on Federal Government contracts, she ensures the construction division is running efficiently by overseeing operations, staffing, business development opportunities and coordinates proposal team efforts.   She started with A. Harold and Associates, LLC as a project manager for the USACE with project oversight for the $50 million Everglades Restoration project. Stephanie is also founding Executive Director of the Florida 8(a) Alliance. She has over seven years of project and grant management experience and brings to the role her non-profit experience as a previous Grants Manager for the National Park Foundation with responsibility for manaing a number of grants awarded from $10 to $29 million over 3 years.  In her role as Executive Director of the Florida 8(a) Alliance, she ensures that program activities and operations are following standard processes and that quality services are delivered to the small business community. She coordinates the webinar series, training sessions, newsletter, web portal and conference planning and works closely with external stakeholders for delivery of success programs.   She holds a B.S. in Biology from Dickinson College and an M.S. in  Environmental Science & Policy from the John Hopkins University. Contact: smarquardt@florida8a.org Register for the Annual Florida 8(a) Conference  

Steve Blank, lecturer Haas School of Business UCB. He has been a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. He has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. Built a method for high tech startups, the Lean LaunchPad.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a [00:00:30] biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Today we present part two of two interviews with Steve Blank. I lecture at the High School of business at UC Berkeley. Steve has been a serial entrepreneur in silicon valley since the late 1970s in the early two thousands he retired from the day to day involvement [00:01:00] of running a company. He has been teaching entrepreneurship training ever since. By 2011 he was said to have devised a scientific method for launching high tech startups, dubbed the lean launchpad. The National Science Foundation caught wind of this and asked Steve to build a variation for teaching scientists and engineers how to launch startups. In 2013 Steve partnered with UCLA and the NSF to offer the lean launch pad class for life science and healthcare. In part two, Steve Talks about getting [00:01:30] the NSF lean launch pad classes going, the evolution of startup companies and innovation, and now Brad swift continued his interview with Steve Blank. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 5: In your experience with these scientists and teaching them, are these people self selected? They're the ones who are anxious and eager and there are other scientists maybe back in the lab are reluctant afraid of the process. Speaker 4: So just the personality of it. Yeah, so this goes back to the comment I made earlier about entrepreneurs being artists. It was the implicit comment [00:02:00] I just kind of both through in the beginning, but as important is that you can't assign entrepreneurship as a job, right? If you really think about them, you can't split up a room and say, those of you on the left, you're going to be musicians. And those are you on the right, you're working on the assembly line like, Oh yeah, WTI. I mean, it doesn't work. It doesn't work like that. All right. Entrepreneurship is a calling. Just like art, just like music, just like writing is something you have to passionately want to do, but much like art, we've learned something [00:02:30] a couple hundred years ago that very early on in people's lives in elementary school and junior high school in high school, we want to have our depreciation. Speaker 4: They're not intensive classes, but their exposure to art that people might not know their artists. They might not know they have a passion to paint or to sculpt or to write or to entertain. I will contend because entrepreneurship is an art. We actually need those type of classes early on because scientists didn't understand [00:03:00] that not was their passion to invent and create. They might actually have an equal passion to wait a minute, I actually want to take this thing all the way through when I want to see what happens. If hundreds of thousands of people were being affected by this medicine, not just, here's my paper in the latest publication. It doesn't mean everybody could do that, but it means we've not yet gotten the culture to where we could say, well is this something that kind of excites you? And I think we're getting better to understand what it takes to do that. Speaker 4: Would you have any [00:03:30] idea what that would look like? The kind of exposure that you would be talking about in grammar school or Middle School? Sure. It turns out one of the unintended consequences of teaching the scientists that National Science Foundation is, remember their professors, almost all of them tenured running labs and universities across the country. And so here they take this class from the national science foundation and about half or two thirds of them now go back to their own universities, pissed cause they go, how come we're not teaching this? And so what happens is the National Science Foundation asked [00:04:00] me and Jerry Angle, who was the head of entrepreneurship at Haas, why don't you guys put on a course through a nonprofit called NCIA to teach educators in the United States who want to learn how to teach this class. And so we teach the lean launchpad for educators. We teach now 300 educators a year. Speaker 4: One of the outgrowths of that class was entrepreneur educators from middle school and high school started showing up and I went, you're not really teaching this to kids. They went, [00:04:30] oh Steve, you should see our class. And I went, oh my gosh, this is better than I'm doing. So they'd taken the same theory and they modified the language. So it was age appropriate. And so the two schools that had some great programs were Hawkin school outside of Cleveland and Dunn's school here in California. And in fact they're going to hold their own version of the educator class in June of 2014 for middle school and high school educators who were interested in teaching this type of entrepreneurial education. So I think it's starting to be transformative. I think we [00:05:00] have found the process to engage people early and not treated like we're teaching accounting to do, treating it like we're teaching art. Speaker 4: And again, we're still experiment thing. I wish I could tell you we got it now. I don't think so. I think we're learning, but the speed at which we're learning through it makes me smile. That's great. It is great. The Passion of the educators really is exciting. And Are you able to teach us remotely so that scientists from around the country don't have to come to you and sort of stop what they're doing? I was teaching the class [00:05:30] remotely. It's now taught in person in multiple regions. So that's how we solved that problem. But my lectures were recorded and not only were they recorded, they were recorded with really interesting animation. So instead of just watching me was a talking head. These are broken up into two minute clips and it's basically how to start a company and it's on you udacity.com so if you want to see the lean launch pad class in the lectures, it's on your udacity.com it's called the p two 45 but by accident we made these lectures public to not only the [00:06:00] national science foundation scientists, but we opened it up to everybody. Speaker 4: And surprisingly there is now over a quarter million people have taken the class. I've had people stop me at conferences and have told me that the Arabic translation, which I didn't even know existed, it's the standard in the Middle East. I had people from Dubai and Saudi Arabia in Lebanon literally within 10 feet go, oh well we recognize you. And I went, who are you turning over, Mr Blank, you worthy? I went, what's going on? I laugh not because it's me, but because [00:06:30] this is the power of the democratization of entrepreneurship. I have to tell you a funny story is that I grew up with the entrepreneur cluster was silicon valley and something in the last five years that I've gotten to travel with both Berkeley and Stanford and National Science Foundation to different countries to talk and teach about entrepreneurship. And my wife and I happened to be on vacation in Prague and when I really knew the world had changed as my wife had said, you know Steve, we're kind of tired of eating hotel food. Speaker 4: I wonder if there were ending entrepreneurs and Proc, I didn't want to, I [00:07:00] don't know. You know, let me go tweet and any entrepreneurs and Prague, you know, looking for a good check. Brie hall and hour and a half later we're having dinner with 55 entrepreneurs and Prague television is there and they said, Steve, you don't understand. Here's why. Here's an entrepreneur community everywhere. The only thing we still have unique in the bay area is that entrepreneurship and innovation. We've become a company town. That is our product. Much like Hollywood used to be movies in Detroit used to be cars in Pittsburgh steel. [00:07:30] While obviously there are people who do other stuff, teach in restaurants, put the business. The business to the bay area really is entrepreneurship and innovation. While we tell stories about the entrepreneurs, the unheralded part of that ecosystem is that we have equally insane financial people. Speaker 4: Why Silicon Valley happened was that the venture capitalist in the 1970s in Boston when it wasn't clear whether it was going to be Boston or Silicon Valley to be the center of entrepreneurship, the venture capitalist in Boston continued to act [00:08:00] like bankers, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. They decided to act like pirates and the pirates want and so what really differentiates the observational make with an entrepreneurship is everywhere in the world. Entrepreneurial clusters only happen when all these things, these components, primarily entrepreneurs, but a heavy dose of risk capital capable of writing not only small checks but large checks and doubling and tripling down on startups. That's why you have the Facebooks and the googles and the twitters [00:08:30] around here. You also have a culture let's people know and understand. In the 1950s and sixties people came to San Francisco and Berkeley to live an alternate personal lifestyle, but they were hitting 30 miles south to have an alternate business lifestyle around Stanford and it was this kind of magic combination of great weather, the ability to do things in both business and your personal life that you couldn't anywhere else. These cultural phenomenons actually were and under appreciated until a very smart professor at Berkeley [inaudible] [00:09:00] wrote a book called regional advantage that actually described a lot of these things and open my eyes about why this region actually won. Speaker 1: You're listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Steve Blank is our guest. He's a former entrepreneur and current lecturer at the High School of business. And the next segment he talks about how startups has changed since he first began in Silicon Valley in the 1970s Speaker 4: is entrepreneurship then changed as a result [00:09:30] of that. What really happened was the harmonic conversion of a really interesting set of events. One is, is that if you think back on how startups worked in the, in the golden age of Silicon Valley in the seventies and eighties to build a startup required millions if not tens of millions of dollars, not to run it, but just to start it, you needed to buy computers, either mainframes or mini computers and then workstations. You needed to license millions of dollars of expensive software. The only venture people were either in [00:10:00] Boston or silicon valley and they lived on sand hill road and nowhere else, and therefore it was kind of a formal process and the cost of entry was literally millions or tens of millions of dollars. There was no other way to get computing. There was no other way to get money. The second is, we had no theory about startups. Speaker 4: That is, there were no management tools at all. But what happened starting out of the rubble actually of the last Internet bubble, things change in technology in a way. I don't think people outside the technology business appreciate it off. Probably the biggest [00:10:30] one was actually generated by Amazon. It turns out Amazon created something called Amazon web services. And if you're a consumer, all you know is Amazon maybe for kindle and for sure for their books or their website. But if you're a programmer, Amazon has become the computing utility. You no longer have to buy computers from your laptop. You literally log in to hundreds of millions of dollars of computers and you have access to the world's largest computing resource ever assembled [00:11:00] for pennies, for pennies, and you don't need any storage. You're storing it all and online and all the computing. So number one, Amazon web services truly turned computing hardware and software into a pennies per gigabyte and MIPS, et Cetera, in a way that was unbelievable 10 years earlier. Speaker 4: Two is that changed the cost of entry of an early stage venture. You no longer needed millions of dollars. In fact, if you were smart entrepreneur, you could start on your credit card and if you didn't have your credit card, maybe some friends and family, [00:11:30] and that started a very different wave because it changed venture capital. It used to be there were either doctors or dentists or other reform of venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins and Mayfield and sequoia. But the fact is that now after a ton of entrepreneurs could start on their credit cards, they still didn't need $20 million. Maybe eventually they did, but they could just take $100,000 or half a million dollars and get pretty far. And that created a new class of super angels or angel investors [00:12:00] that just never existed before. Kind of this intermediate level. And so venture capital changed. And also with that change, it changed where they could be located. Speaker 4: You no longer had to be located to be a investor in New York, Boston, or San Diego. Th that amount of capital could be available in the London or Helsinki or Estonia or Jordan, Beijing. Third is, and I will take credit for some of this, the invention of a new way to look and how to build these startups. It used to be that if you were building [00:12:30] a physical product, you would do something called the functional Spec or you'd get requirements from a customer. You build a specification and then you'd make an early version of the product called Alpha test, maybe a less buggy version called Beta test, which foist on some poor unsuspecting customers and then you'd have a party at something called first customer ship and that process was called waterfall development and from beginning to end typically took years and insight in the software business and Toyota had it even [00:13:00] earlier is that we could build products differently, we could build products incrementally and iteratively and that's called agile engineering and for startups, how you want to build your products is agily and iteratively because almost always what you believe on day one are all the customer features that they need. Speaker 4: It's a pretty safe bet. You're not a visionary, you're actually hallucinating and that most of the features you would historically have built in go unused on needed and unwanted. But if [00:13:30] in fact you could actually test intermediate versions of the product iteratively and rapidly on those customers with a formal process which I invented called customer development, those two hand in hand change the speed and trajectory of how startups get built. And so now you see these startups coming out of nowhere and getting acquired in three years, but they have tens of millions of customer. Where did that come from? Well, in the old days we'd still be writing the software, building the hardware. Speaker 6: Aw, it's [00:14:00] a public affairs show, k, a l X. Berkeley. Our guest is Steve Link a lecture at UC Berkeley's Haas School of business. The next segment, Steve Talks about his current work, trying to understand how innovation drives some companies and fails in others. Speaker 4: If I can, the unintended consequence of all this stuff. Remember this whole lean startup stuff has become a movement by itself. Harvard business review contacts me and says, Steve, [00:14:30] every large corporation is now desperately struggling how to deal with continuous disruption in the 21st century. That is all the rules that worked in the 20th century, you know, be number one in market share, you know, like be number one and two, I mean all the Jack Welsh rules, you follow those who be out of business in seven years. Why, you know, globalization in China Inc Internet has made consumers flighty very little brand loyalty. Pricing is almost transparent. Cost of starting a new business is infinitely lower. All of the things [00:15:00] that made you strong in the 20th century as a corporation are no longer true. Some of them are obviously, but not really. And so every large corporation are trying to relearn a set of rules and guess where they're looking for, they're looking at startups of how do we be as innovative as apple as that. Speaker 4: That is, the models are now silicon valley and other technology companies. And so my article, the lean startup changes everything became the cover of the Harvard Business Review and May, 2013 what was interesting is that I started [00:15:30] getting calls from executives whose titles I had never heard of before. It turns out almost every large company is now appointing a VP of corporate innovation. I had never heard of it. You know what's that? And when you go talk to them, and I've talked to a bunch of them, now you find out that they're all struggling to solve this continuous disruption problem by trying to build innovation inside the DNA of large corporations in the u s and overseas and the first sign of companies [00:16:00] trying to do that is appointing somebody typically as a corporate staff person to have some kind of internal incubator. I could politely say, that's a nice first step put it really doesn't solve the problem. Speaker 4: It actually just points out what the problem is and can I digress for another 10 seconds? It turns out that the problem that corporations are having is not a tactical organizational problem. The things I described, the globalization, the effect of the [00:16:30] Internet, et Cetera, are just strategic problems that every corporation is facing. The last time companies faced something, this major was in the 1920s, uh, u s corporations grew from small mom and pop businesses from the 1870s to 1920s and they kind of came up with a form of organization called functional organizations, meaning you had a head of sales, a head of marketing, a head of manufacturing, but by function that was the only way companies were organized. But by 1920, some [00:17:00] u s corporations spans from New York to San Francisco. And so there was a geography problem here. You had a head of sales tryna run multiple geography. Speaker 4: It wasn't even the same time zone. And some companies like dupont had a different problem while they also had geography problems. Dupont made everything from explosives to paint. But you only had one marketing group and one manufacture. How do, how do you manage that? And for about five or six years for corporations, dupont, General Motors, Sears and standard oil, understood. They had a strategy [00:17:30] problem and attacked it by playing with the structure of the company, meaning how the company was organized and they all finally decided that they were going to organize in a radically different form called divisions. Instead of just having functions, they would actually break up like for example, General Motors into the Buick Division and ultimate build division or whatever, or for dupont explosives divisions and the paint division and on top of a thin layer of corporate staff, but now have a company organized by divisions first changed in [00:18:00] 50 years and how companies were organized. Speaker 4: Fast forward 40 years later, the third form of corporate organization to emerged called Matrix organizations where you start with a functional organization, but now all of a sudden we would have specific projects pop up, gee, I want to work on the new fad six fighter. Well, I have an engineering group, but let me put together a team that could pull out of engineering and pull out a product management and put together for our temporary amount of time and then they'll go back into their functions and then be pulled out again. But that's it. Those are the only three forms [00:18:30] of corporate organization. I'll contend that we're facing a common strategy problem that is not solvable by just pasting on vps of innovation. I believe it's solvable by rethinking on the highest possible level is do we need a fourth form of corporate organization? And I gotta tell you I got the answer, but I'm not going to tell you now. Okay.Speaker 5: Is this sort of then turning all the operations research that's been done over the past? You know, since World War II, [00:19:00] that was when it seemed to be salient. Is it on its ear now? Is this, Speaker 4: so if you really think about what we built for the last 150 years is corporations were the epitome of operational efficiency through operations research, the output of business schools. I mean all our stuff has had to be continuous execution, driving to the lowest cost provider and outsourcing and all that stuff. That's great. But you're going out of business and in fact, companies that do that, [00:19:30] I will contend have a much shorter lifespan that companies that now do continuous innovation. That is, if you think about the difference between Amazon and Netflix and apple, when jobs was alive versus standard US companies, the distinction was they were continuously innovating, ruined Leslie, innovating, and it was not some department that was innovating. It's a big idea. It was the entire company was innovating, yet they were making obscene profits. So clearly there are some models of some companies who [00:20:00] have figured out and in fact HP in the 70s and eighties had figured out how to do and then they lost the formula. I think we now actually have a theory, a strategy of how to do that and some really specific tactics. How, I know we could do this in detail for u s corporations and corporations worldwide, but I want to start at the u s and we're going to be talking and writing about that in the next year. Speaker 5: Great. So that's what you're actively working. Speaker 4: Oh, actively working. And I'm Hank Chesboro who have inventor of open innovation here at Haas business school and with Alexander Osterwalder [00:20:30] and venture of the business model canvas. All have been part of some of these discussions. You know, I just get smarter by hanging out with much smarter people. And I'm not the only one who's thinking about that. There are lots of very smart people trying to crack the code and at the same time, companies are raising their hand and the symptom of raising their hand is they're appointing vps of innovation and her likes saying, yeah, you know, here's what we are. Oops, it doesn't quite work. And finance has different rules and but wait a minute, I'm trying to be innovative, but the HR manual doesn't allow me to hire people. No, [00:21:00] no. Legal says I can't use our brand here. So what you're really finding is that it's not an org problem. Speaker 4: It's not anybody's trying to be mean. Is that what we're missing is the CEO and board conversation is, oh my gosh, maybe we need to get innovation in every part of the company, not by exception. That's the idea I'll telegraph for now. And how do you do that without affecting current profits? And it's quite possible because again, there are these experiments of companies that are insanely from a profitable, who've done this. [00:21:30] Now can we just make a teachable and doable by other corporations? And the answer is yes, we're going to go do that. Do you see that pace of technology accelerating? Absolutely. I think we're in the golden age of both technology and entrepreneurship. You ain't seen anything yet. I'm still constantly amazed sitting here smiling. When you say that is why I still love to teach is that, you know, I get to see my students come up with things. Speaker 4: You hear the 400th hotel automation package or the whatever, but you know, and then you see something, again, drones are three d printing [00:22:00] or you could do white with your phone, you're gonna make a turn on or you're a password through. It's just things that are unimaginable. And then you watch the next generation of Steve Jobs that said, you know, the current version silicon valley is you go on much. Who single handedly is val to obsolete the automobile industry? And at the same time just wrecking havoc in this space launch industry, single individual who had, by the way, zero qualifications to do any of those. Congratulations. Welcome to entrepreneurship. He had the will to be disruptive [00:22:30] and he understood that the technology was about at the edge of being able to do what he did. That's how we got the iPod and the iPhone or else in a perfect world and Nokia would still have 89% market share. If I was General Motors and Ford, I'd be really concerned. Steve Blank, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Great. Thanks for having me. Speaker 6: You'd like more insight into Steve Blank's ideas. Go to his website, Steve blank.com [00:23:00] as Steve mentioned, the Lean launch pad course is available. I knew udacity.com to learn more about the NSF mean launchpad curriculum, search for NSF [inaudible] your local to the bay area. Go to [inaudible] dot com if you're interested in startup appreciation materials for educators, go to n c I n aa.org/l l p. Stretching shows [00:23:30] are archived on iTunes yet it gives created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/calex spectrum and now a few some technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Brad Swift joins me for the calendar. Speaker 3: California's coastal waters are home to one of the four richest temperate marine biota is in the world. The California Academy of Sciences will be holding [00:24:00] a series of lectures and events to explore this incredible diversity of life. They look, explain what makes this region so productive and why it needs to be protected on Saturday, March 22nd from nine to 11:00 AM a variety of Speakers will consider the impacts of human activity on the local marine ecosystems and the establishment and efficacy of marine protected areas. They will also discuss how diversity is monitored in California's oceans and which areas will need to be most closely scrutinized for future impact. For more information on the [00:24:30] March 22nd event. Please visit cal academy.org Speaker 5: on Monday, March 31st University of Maryland professor of human development, Nathan Fox will give a lecture on his recent studies on whether experiences shaped the brain and neural circuitry for emerging cognitive and social behaviors over the first years of life. Something that many developmental scientists take for granted. Foxes study the Bucharest early intervention project [00:25:00] is the first randomized trial of a family intervention for children who experienced significant psychosocial neglect early in their lives. A group of infants living in institutions in Romania were recruited and randomized to be taken out of the institution and placed into family foster care homes or to remain in the institution. He then followed up with the children several times over the next eight years and examine the lasting [00:25:30] effects of the deprivation and which, if any interventions were successful in assuaging the harmful effects, the free public talk will be held on March 31st from 12 to 1:30 PM on the UC Berkeley campus in room 31 50 of Tolman hall Speaker 3: on Wednesday per second. You see Berkeley's department of Environmental Science Policy and management will present a speech by Chris Mooney, a journalist who's written several books on the resistance that many [00:26:00] Americans have to accepting scientific conclusions. His lecture will be titled The Science of why we don't believe in science and we'll examine the reasons behind Americans disinterest in scientific solutions to the world's problems. The free public lecture will be held on Wednesday, April 2nd at 7:00 PM in the International House Auditorium of UC Berkeley. Here at spectrum, we like to present new stories we find particularly interesting. Brad Swift joins me in presenting the news. Speaker 5: UC Berkeley Professor, Dr. Richard Kramer [00:26:30] and his research team have been able to temporarily restore light sensitivity to mice, missing a majority of their rods and cones in healthy mammals. The eyes detect light with specialized photo receptor cells or rods and cones and then transmit a signal to their optic nerve cells which eventually communicate with the brain. Dr. Kramer and his team explored the effects of a similarly light-sensitive molecule known as d n a Q in healthy mice and mice [00:27:00] with a degenerative disease that caused them to lose nearly all their rods and cones. After dosing, the mice with d n a Q, the mice were exposed to lights and their optic nerve activity was measured via electrode arrays. The diseased mice showed strong light sensitivity. The team next examined a small number of animals in light and dark conditions to test whether the sensitivity conferred any perception of the light. In the diseased mice, [00:27:30] the injected mice were better able to form an association between a light stimuli and electric shock than those in the control group. While millions of humans suffer from similar degenerative retinal conditions, definitive conclusions on the broader therapeutic and deleterious effects of the molecule. D n a Q are still years away. Speaker 3: In a recent study published in the journal bio materials, UC Berkeley researchers were able to eliminate the transmission rep [00:28:00] of a common infection. Staphylococcus Aureus is a bacterium that commonly infects patients who've had surgeries involving prosthetic joints and artificial heart, bowels, staff, or aces. Ability to adhere to medical advices is key to experience as once introduced to the body. It can cause severe illness. UC Berkeley Bio and mechanical engineering, Professor Mohammad [inaudible] fraud and others in his lab examined how the clusters of staff warriors were able to adhere so well to certain Yana surfaces as well as the type of surfaces [00:28:30] that increased or decreased the bacteria's ability to clean. They quickly found that while staff [inaudible] can adhere to a variety of flattened curves services, it does seem to have a preference for certain structures including a tubular pillar where the bacteria was able to partially embed itself within holes in the structure. Professor, my fraud expressed hope that the improved understanding of these preferences could allow the design of medical devices built to attenuate bacterial adhesion while escaping the need to chemically damaged the bacteria to prevent transmission Speaker 7: [00:29:00] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum to a k a l ex@yahoo.com Trina's in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible] Speaker 8: [00:29:30] [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Steve Blank, lecturer Haas School of Business UCB. He has been a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. He has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. Built a method for high tech startups, the Lean LaunchPad.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a [00:00:30] biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Today we present part two of two interviews with Steve Blank. I lecture at the High School of business at UC Berkeley. Steve has been a serial entrepreneur in silicon valley since the late 1970s in the early two thousands he retired from the day to day involvement [00:01:00] of running a company. He has been teaching entrepreneurship training ever since. By 2011 he was said to have devised a scientific method for launching high tech startups, dubbed the lean launchpad. The National Science Foundation caught wind of this and asked Steve to build a variation for teaching scientists and engineers how to launch startups. In 2013 Steve partnered with UCLA and the NSF to offer the lean launch pad class for life science and healthcare. In part two, Steve Talks about getting [00:01:30] the NSF lean launch pad classes going, the evolution of startup companies and innovation, and now Brad swift continued his interview with Steve Blank. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 5: In your experience with these scientists and teaching them, are these people self selected? They're the ones who are anxious and eager and there are other scientists maybe back in the lab are reluctant afraid of the process. Speaker 4: So just the personality of it. Yeah, so this goes back to the comment I made earlier about entrepreneurs being artists. It was the implicit comment [00:02:00] I just kind of both through in the beginning, but as important is that you can't assign entrepreneurship as a job, right? If you really think about them, you can't split up a room and say, those of you on the left, you're going to be musicians. And those are you on the right, you're working on the assembly line like, Oh yeah, WTI. I mean, it doesn't work. It doesn't work like that. All right. Entrepreneurship is a calling. Just like art, just like music, just like writing is something you have to passionately want to do, but much like art, we've learned something [00:02:30] a couple hundred years ago that very early on in people's lives in elementary school and junior high school in high school, we want to have our depreciation. Speaker 4: They're not intensive classes, but their exposure to art that people might not know their artists. They might not know they have a passion to paint or to sculpt or to write or to entertain. I will contend because entrepreneurship is an art. We actually need those type of classes early on because scientists didn't understand [00:03:00] that not was their passion to invent and create. They might actually have an equal passion to wait a minute, I actually want to take this thing all the way through when I want to see what happens. If hundreds of thousands of people were being affected by this medicine, not just, here's my paper in the latest publication. It doesn't mean everybody could do that, but it means we've not yet gotten the culture to where we could say, well is this something that kind of excites you? And I think we're getting better to understand what it takes to do that. Speaker 4: Would you have any [00:03:30] idea what that would look like? The kind of exposure that you would be talking about in grammar school or Middle School? Sure. It turns out one of the unintended consequences of teaching the scientists that National Science Foundation is, remember their professors, almost all of them tenured running labs and universities across the country. And so here they take this class from the national science foundation and about half or two thirds of them now go back to their own universities, pissed cause they go, how come we're not teaching this? And so what happens is the National Science Foundation asked [00:04:00] me and Jerry Angle, who was the head of entrepreneurship at Haas, why don't you guys put on a course through a nonprofit called NCIA to teach educators in the United States who want to learn how to teach this class. And so we teach the lean launchpad for educators. We teach now 300 educators a year. Speaker 4: One of the outgrowths of that class was entrepreneur educators from middle school and high school started showing up and I went, you're not really teaching this to kids. They went, [00:04:30] oh Steve, you should see our class. And I went, oh my gosh, this is better than I'm doing. So they'd taken the same theory and they modified the language. So it was age appropriate. And so the two schools that had some great programs were Hawkin school outside of Cleveland and Dunn's school here in California. And in fact they're going to hold their own version of the educator class in June of 2014 for middle school and high school educators who were interested in teaching this type of entrepreneurial education. So I think it's starting to be transformative. I think we [00:05:00] have found the process to engage people early and not treated like we're teaching accounting to do, treating it like we're teaching art. Speaker 4: And again, we're still experiment thing. I wish I could tell you we got it now. I don't think so. I think we're learning, but the speed at which we're learning through it makes me smile. That's great. It is great. The Passion of the educators really is exciting. And Are you able to teach us remotely so that scientists from around the country don't have to come to you and sort of stop what they're doing? I was teaching the class [00:05:30] remotely. It's now taught in person in multiple regions. So that's how we solved that problem. But my lectures were recorded and not only were they recorded, they were recorded with really interesting animation. So instead of just watching me was a talking head. These are broken up into two minute clips and it's basically how to start a company and it's on you udacity.com so if you want to see the lean launch pad class in the lectures, it's on your udacity.com it's called the p two 45 but by accident we made these lectures public to not only the [00:06:00] national science foundation scientists, but we opened it up to everybody. Speaker 4: And surprisingly there is now over a quarter million people have taken the class. I've had people stop me at conferences and have told me that the Arabic translation, which I didn't even know existed, it's the standard in the Middle East. I had people from Dubai and Saudi Arabia in Lebanon literally within 10 feet go, oh well we recognize you. And I went, who are you turning over, Mr Blank, you worthy? I went, what's going on? I laugh not because it's me, but because [00:06:30] this is the power of the democratization of entrepreneurship. I have to tell you a funny story is that I grew up with the entrepreneur cluster was silicon valley and something in the last five years that I've gotten to travel with both Berkeley and Stanford and National Science Foundation to different countries to talk and teach about entrepreneurship. And my wife and I happened to be on vacation in Prague and when I really knew the world had changed as my wife had said, you know Steve, we're kind of tired of eating hotel food. Speaker 4: I wonder if there were ending entrepreneurs and Proc, I didn't want to, I [00:07:00] don't know. You know, let me go tweet and any entrepreneurs and Prague, you know, looking for a good check. Brie hall and hour and a half later we're having dinner with 55 entrepreneurs and Prague television is there and they said, Steve, you don't understand. Here's why. Here's an entrepreneur community everywhere. The only thing we still have unique in the bay area is that entrepreneurship and innovation. We've become a company town. That is our product. Much like Hollywood used to be movies in Detroit used to be cars in Pittsburgh steel. [00:07:30] While obviously there are people who do other stuff, teach in restaurants, put the business. The business to the bay area really is entrepreneurship and innovation. While we tell stories about the entrepreneurs, the unheralded part of that ecosystem is that we have equally insane financial people. Speaker 4: Why Silicon Valley happened was that the venture capitalist in the 1970s in Boston when it wasn't clear whether it was going to be Boston or Silicon Valley to be the center of entrepreneurship, the venture capitalist in Boston continued to act [00:08:00] like bankers, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. They decided to act like pirates and the pirates want and so what really differentiates the observational make with an entrepreneurship is everywhere in the world. Entrepreneurial clusters only happen when all these things, these components, primarily entrepreneurs, but a heavy dose of risk capital capable of writing not only small checks but large checks and doubling and tripling down on startups. That's why you have the Facebooks and the googles and the twitters [00:08:30] around here. You also have a culture let's people know and understand. In the 1950s and sixties people came to San Francisco and Berkeley to live an alternate personal lifestyle, but they were hitting 30 miles south to have an alternate business lifestyle around Stanford and it was this kind of magic combination of great weather, the ability to do things in both business and your personal life that you couldn't anywhere else. These cultural phenomenons actually were and under appreciated until a very smart professor at Berkeley [inaudible] [00:09:00] wrote a book called regional advantage that actually described a lot of these things and open my eyes about why this region actually won. Speaker 1: You're listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Steve Blank is our guest. He's a former entrepreneur and current lecturer at the High School of business. And the next segment he talks about how startups has changed since he first began in Silicon Valley in the 1970s Speaker 4: is entrepreneurship then changed as a result [00:09:30] of that. What really happened was the harmonic conversion of a really interesting set of events. One is, is that if you think back on how startups worked in the, in the golden age of Silicon Valley in the seventies and eighties to build a startup required millions if not tens of millions of dollars, not to run it, but just to start it, you needed to buy computers, either mainframes or mini computers and then workstations. You needed to license millions of dollars of expensive software. The only venture people were either in [00:10:00] Boston or silicon valley and they lived on sand hill road and nowhere else, and therefore it was kind of a formal process and the cost of entry was literally millions or tens of millions of dollars. There was no other way to get computing. There was no other way to get money. The second is, we had no theory about startups. Speaker 4: That is, there were no management tools at all. But what happened starting out of the rubble actually of the last Internet bubble, things change in technology in a way. I don't think people outside the technology business appreciate it off. Probably the biggest [00:10:30] one was actually generated by Amazon. It turns out Amazon created something called Amazon web services. And if you're a consumer, all you know is Amazon maybe for kindle and for sure for their books or their website. But if you're a programmer, Amazon has become the computing utility. You no longer have to buy computers from your laptop. You literally log in to hundreds of millions of dollars of computers and you have access to the world's largest computing resource ever assembled [00:11:00] for pennies, for pennies, and you don't need any storage. You're storing it all and online and all the computing. So number one, Amazon web services truly turned computing hardware and software into a pennies per gigabyte and MIPS, et Cetera, in a way that was unbelievable 10 years earlier. Speaker 4: Two is that changed the cost of entry of an early stage venture. You no longer needed millions of dollars. In fact, if you were smart entrepreneur, you could start on your credit card and if you didn't have your credit card, maybe some friends and family, [00:11:30] and that started a very different wave because it changed venture capital. It used to be there were either doctors or dentists or other reform of venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins and Mayfield and sequoia. But the fact is that now after a ton of entrepreneurs could start on their credit cards, they still didn't need $20 million. Maybe eventually they did, but they could just take $100,000 or half a million dollars and get pretty far. And that created a new class of super angels or angel investors [00:12:00] that just never existed before. Kind of this intermediate level. And so venture capital changed. And also with that change, it changed where they could be located. Speaker 4: You no longer had to be located to be a investor in New York, Boston, or San Diego. Th that amount of capital could be available in the London or Helsinki or Estonia or Jordan, Beijing. Third is, and I will take credit for some of this, the invention of a new way to look and how to build these startups. It used to be that if you were building [00:12:30] a physical product, you would do something called the functional Spec or you'd get requirements from a customer. You build a specification and then you'd make an early version of the product called Alpha test, maybe a less buggy version called Beta test, which foist on some poor unsuspecting customers and then you'd have a party at something called first customer ship and that process was called waterfall development and from beginning to end typically took years and insight in the software business and Toyota had it even [00:13:00] earlier is that we could build products differently, we could build products incrementally and iteratively and that's called agile engineering and for startups, how you want to build your products is agily and iteratively because almost always what you believe on day one are all the customer features that they need. Speaker 4: It's a pretty safe bet. You're not a visionary, you're actually hallucinating and that most of the features you would historically have built in go unused on needed and unwanted. But if [00:13:30] in fact you could actually test intermediate versions of the product iteratively and rapidly on those customers with a formal process which I invented called customer development, those two hand in hand change the speed and trajectory of how startups get built. And so now you see these startups coming out of nowhere and getting acquired in three years, but they have tens of millions of customer. Where did that come from? Well, in the old days we'd still be writing the software, building the hardware. Speaker 6: Aw, it's [00:14:00] a public affairs show, k, a l X. Berkeley. Our guest is Steve Link a lecture at UC Berkeley's Haas School of business. The next segment, Steve Talks about his current work, trying to understand how innovation drives some companies and fails in others. Speaker 4: If I can, the unintended consequence of all this stuff. Remember this whole lean startup stuff has become a movement by itself. Harvard business review contacts me and says, Steve, [00:14:30] every large corporation is now desperately struggling how to deal with continuous disruption in the 21st century. That is all the rules that worked in the 20th century, you know, be number one in market share, you know, like be number one and two, I mean all the Jack Welsh rules, you follow those who be out of business in seven years. Why, you know, globalization in China Inc Internet has made consumers flighty very little brand loyalty. Pricing is almost transparent. Cost of starting a new business is infinitely lower. All of the things [00:15:00] that made you strong in the 20th century as a corporation are no longer true. Some of them are obviously, but not really. And so every large corporation are trying to relearn a set of rules and guess where they're looking for, they're looking at startups of how do we be as innovative as apple as that. Speaker 4: That is, the models are now silicon valley and other technology companies. And so my article, the lean startup changes everything became the cover of the Harvard Business Review and May, 2013 what was interesting is that I started [00:15:30] getting calls from executives whose titles I had never heard of before. It turns out almost every large company is now appointing a VP of corporate innovation. I had never heard of it. You know what's that? And when you go talk to them, and I've talked to a bunch of them, now you find out that they're all struggling to solve this continuous disruption problem by trying to build innovation inside the DNA of large corporations in the u s and overseas and the first sign of companies [00:16:00] trying to do that is appointing somebody typically as a corporate staff person to have some kind of internal incubator. I could politely say, that's a nice first step put it really doesn't solve the problem. Speaker 4: It actually just points out what the problem is and can I digress for another 10 seconds? It turns out that the problem that corporations are having is not a tactical organizational problem. The things I described, the globalization, the effect of the [00:16:30] Internet, et Cetera, are just strategic problems that every corporation is facing. The last time companies faced something, this major was in the 1920s, uh, u s corporations grew from small mom and pop businesses from the 1870s to 1920s and they kind of came up with a form of organization called functional organizations, meaning you had a head of sales, a head of marketing, a head of manufacturing, but by function that was the only way companies were organized. But by 1920, some [00:17:00] u s corporations spans from New York to San Francisco. And so there was a geography problem here. You had a head of sales tryna run multiple geography. Speaker 4: It wasn't even the same time zone. And some companies like dupont had a different problem while they also had geography problems. Dupont made everything from explosives to paint. But you only had one marketing group and one manufacture. How do, how do you manage that? And for about five or six years for corporations, dupont, General Motors, Sears and standard oil, understood. They had a strategy [00:17:30] problem and attacked it by playing with the structure of the company, meaning how the company was organized and they all finally decided that they were going to organize in a radically different form called divisions. Instead of just having functions, they would actually break up like for example, General Motors into the Buick Division and ultimate build division or whatever, or for dupont explosives divisions and the paint division and on top of a thin layer of corporate staff, but now have a company organized by divisions first changed in [00:18:00] 50 years and how companies were organized. Speaker 4: Fast forward 40 years later, the third form of corporate organization to emerged called Matrix organizations where you start with a functional organization, but now all of a sudden we would have specific projects pop up, gee, I want to work on the new fad six fighter. Well, I have an engineering group, but let me put together a team that could pull out of engineering and pull out a product management and put together for our temporary amount of time and then they'll go back into their functions and then be pulled out again. But that's it. Those are the only three forms [00:18:30] of corporate organization. I'll contend that we're facing a common strategy problem that is not solvable by just pasting on vps of innovation. I believe it's solvable by rethinking on the highest possible level is do we need a fourth form of corporate organization? And I gotta tell you I got the answer, but I'm not going to tell you now. Okay.Speaker 5: Is this sort of then turning all the operations research that's been done over the past? You know, since World War II, [00:19:00] that was when it seemed to be salient. Is it on its ear now? Is this, Speaker 4: so if you really think about what we built for the last 150 years is corporations were the epitome of operational efficiency through operations research, the output of business schools. I mean all our stuff has had to be continuous execution, driving to the lowest cost provider and outsourcing and all that stuff. That's great. But you're going out of business and in fact, companies that do that, [00:19:30] I will contend have a much shorter lifespan that companies that now do continuous innovation. That is, if you think about the difference between Amazon and Netflix and apple, when jobs was alive versus standard US companies, the distinction was they were continuously innovating, ruined Leslie, innovating, and it was not some department that was innovating. It's a big idea. It was the entire company was innovating, yet they were making obscene profits. So clearly there are some models of some companies who [00:20:00] have figured out and in fact HP in the 70s and eighties had figured out how to do and then they lost the formula. I think we now actually have a theory, a strategy of how to do that and some really specific tactics. How, I know we could do this in detail for u s corporations and corporations worldwide, but I want to start at the u s and we're going to be talking and writing about that in the next year. Speaker 5: Great. So that's what you're actively working. Speaker 4: Oh, actively working. And I'm Hank Chesboro who have inventor of open innovation here at Haas business school and with Alexander Osterwalder [00:20:30] and venture of the business model canvas. All have been part of some of these discussions. You know, I just get smarter by hanging out with much smarter people. And I'm not the only one who's thinking about that. There are lots of very smart people trying to crack the code and at the same time, companies are raising their hand and the symptom of raising their hand is they're appointing vps of innovation and her likes saying, yeah, you know, here's what we are. Oops, it doesn't quite work. And finance has different rules and but wait a minute, I'm trying to be innovative, but the HR manual doesn't allow me to hire people. No, [00:21:00] no. Legal says I can't use our brand here. So what you're really finding is that it's not an org problem. Speaker 4: It's not anybody's trying to be mean. Is that what we're missing is the CEO and board conversation is, oh my gosh, maybe we need to get innovation in every part of the company, not by exception. That's the idea I'll telegraph for now. And how do you do that without affecting current profits? And it's quite possible because again, there are these experiments of companies that are insanely from a profitable, who've done this. [00:21:30] Now can we just make a teachable and doable by other corporations? And the answer is yes, we're going to go do that. Do you see that pace of technology accelerating? Absolutely. I think we're in the golden age of both technology and entrepreneurship. You ain't seen anything yet. I'm still constantly amazed sitting here smiling. When you say that is why I still love to teach is that, you know, I get to see my students come up with things. Speaker 4: You hear the 400th hotel automation package or the whatever, but you know, and then you see something, again, drones are three d printing [00:22:00] or you could do white with your phone, you're gonna make a turn on or you're a password through. It's just things that are unimaginable. And then you watch the next generation of Steve Jobs that said, you know, the current version silicon valley is you go on much. Who single handedly is val to obsolete the automobile industry? And at the same time just wrecking havoc in this space launch industry, single individual who had, by the way, zero qualifications to do any of those. Congratulations. Welcome to entrepreneurship. He had the will to be disruptive [00:22:30] and he understood that the technology was about at the edge of being able to do what he did. That's how we got the iPod and the iPhone or else in a perfect world and Nokia would still have 89% market share. If I was General Motors and Ford, I'd be really concerned. Steve Blank, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Great. Thanks for having me. Speaker 6: You'd like more insight into Steve Blank's ideas. Go to his website, Steve blank.com [00:23:00] as Steve mentioned, the Lean launch pad course is available. I knew udacity.com to learn more about the NSF mean launchpad curriculum, search for NSF [inaudible] your local to the bay area. Go to [inaudible] dot com if you're interested in startup appreciation materials for educators, go to n c I n aa.org/l l p. Stretching shows [00:23:30] are archived on iTunes yet it gives created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/calex spectrum and now a few some technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Brad Swift joins me for the calendar. Speaker 3: California's coastal waters are home to one of the four richest temperate marine biota is in the world. The California Academy of Sciences will be holding [00:24:00] a series of lectures and events to explore this incredible diversity of life. They look, explain what makes this region so productive and why it needs to be protected on Saturday, March 22nd from nine to 11:00 AM a variety of Speakers will consider the impacts of human activity on the local marine ecosystems and the establishment and efficacy of marine protected areas. They will also discuss how diversity is monitored in California's oceans and which areas will need to be most closely scrutinized for future impact. For more information on the [00:24:30] March 22nd event. Please visit cal academy.org Speaker 5: on Monday, March 31st University of Maryland professor of human development, Nathan Fox will give a lecture on his recent studies on whether experiences shaped the brain and neural circuitry for emerging cognitive and social behaviors over the first years of life. Something that many developmental scientists take for granted. Foxes study the Bucharest early intervention project [00:25:00] is the first randomized trial of a family intervention for children who experienced significant psychosocial neglect early in their lives. A group of infants living in institutions in Romania were recruited and randomized to be taken out of the institution and placed into family foster care homes or to remain in the institution. He then followed up with the children several times over the next eight years and examine the lasting [00:25:30] effects of the deprivation and which, if any interventions were successful in assuaging the harmful effects, the free public talk will be held on March 31st from 12 to 1:30 PM on the UC Berkeley campus in room 31 50 of Tolman hall Speaker 3: on Wednesday per second. You see Berkeley's department of Environmental Science Policy and management will present a speech by Chris Mooney, a journalist who's written several books on the resistance that many [00:26:00] Americans have to accepting scientific conclusions. His lecture will be titled The Science of why we don't believe in science and we'll examine the reasons behind Americans disinterest in scientific solutions to the world's problems. The free public lecture will be held on Wednesday, April 2nd at 7:00 PM in the International House Auditorium of UC Berkeley. Here at spectrum, we like to present new stories we find particularly interesting. Brad Swift joins me in presenting the news. Speaker 5: UC Berkeley Professor, Dr. Richard Kramer [00:26:30] and his research team have been able to temporarily restore light sensitivity to mice, missing a majority of their rods and cones in healthy mammals. The eyes detect light with specialized photo receptor cells or rods and cones and then transmit a signal to their optic nerve cells which eventually communicate with the brain. Dr. Kramer and his team explored the effects of a similarly light-sensitive molecule known as d n a Q in healthy mice and mice [00:27:00] with a degenerative disease that caused them to lose nearly all their rods and cones. After dosing, the mice with d n a Q, the mice were exposed to lights and their optic nerve activity was measured via electrode arrays. The diseased mice showed strong light sensitivity. The team next examined a small number of animals in light and dark conditions to test whether the sensitivity conferred any perception of the light. In the diseased mice, [00:27:30] the injected mice were better able to form an association between a light stimuli and electric shock than those in the control group. While millions of humans suffer from similar degenerative retinal conditions, definitive conclusions on the broader therapeutic and deleterious effects of the molecule. D n a Q are still years away. Speaker 3: In a recent study published in the journal bio materials, UC Berkeley researchers were able to eliminate the transmission rep [00:28:00] of a common infection. Staphylococcus Aureus is a bacterium that commonly infects patients who've had surgeries involving prosthetic joints and artificial heart, bowels, staff, or aces. Ability to adhere to medical advices is key to experience as once introduced to the body. It can cause severe illness. UC Berkeley Bio and mechanical engineering, Professor Mohammad [inaudible] fraud and others in his lab examined how the clusters of staff warriors were able to adhere so well to certain Yana surfaces as well as the type of surfaces [00:28:30] that increased or decreased the bacteria's ability to clean. They quickly found that while staff [inaudible] can adhere to a variety of flattened curves services, it does seem to have a preference for certain structures including a tubular pillar where the bacteria was able to partially embed itself within holes in the structure. Professor, my fraud expressed hope that the improved understanding of these preferences could allow the design of medical devices built to attenuate bacterial adhesion while escaping the need to chemically damaged the bacteria to prevent transmission Speaker 7: [00:29:00] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum to a k a l ex@yahoo.com Trina's in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible] Speaker 8: [00:29:30] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Duke Human Rights Center@FHI is examining what it means to study human rights at the university level in a new project titled RightsConnect. RightsConnect hosts a series of lectures and workshops on rights teaching and practice, with noted outside faculty and practitioners who face real world challenges to rights campaigns. Rachel Morello-Frosch is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley working in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management. Her research focuses on environmental health and justice, centering on air pollution’s increased effects upon races and classes already vulnerable to other health issues due to disparities. Her work focuses on these community-based health issues and the policy-making around these issues. This talk was given at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University on Feb. 20, 2014.

Steve Blank, lecturer Haas School of Business UCB. He has been a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. He has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. Built a method for high tech startups, the Lean LaunchPad.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a [00:00:30] l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Hi, and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we present part one of two interviews with Steve Blank, a lecturer at the Haas School of business at UC Berkeley. Steve has been a serial entrepreneur in silicon valley since the late 1970s [00:01:00] see if you recognize any of these companies. He was involved with Xylog convergent technologies, MIPS, computer, ardent, super Mack, rocket science games and epiphany. In 1999 Steve Retired from day to day involvement in running a company since 2002 he has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. By 2011 he was said to have devised [00:01:30] the scientific method for launching high tech startups, dubbed the Lean launch pad. In part one Steve Talks about his beginnings, the culture of Silicon Valley, the intersection of science, technology, finance, and business. Steve Blank, welcome to spectrum. Oh, thanks for having me. I wanted to find out from you how it is you got started as an entrepreneur. What attracted you to that? Speaker 5: He's probably the military. I, uh, spent four years in the air [00:02:00] force during Vietnam and a year and a half in Southeast Asia. And then when I came back to the United States, I worked on a B, 52 bombers in the strategic air command. And I finally years later understood the difference between working in a crisis organization, which was in a war zone where almost anything was acceptable to get the job done versus an execution organization that was dealing with mistakes. Men dropping a 20 megaton nuclear weapon where you process and procedure was actually imperative. And it turned [00:02:30] out I was much better in the organizations that required creativity and agility and tenacity and resilience. And I never understood that I was getting the world's best training for entrepreneurship. I went back to school in Ann Arbor and managed to get thrown out the second time in my life out of University of Michigan. Speaker 5: I call that the best school I was ever thrown out of a Michigan state was the next best school where it was a premed. And then, um, I was sent out to silicon valley. I was working as a field service engineer and what I didn't realize two years later was 16% [00:03:00] startup to bring up a computer system in a place called San Jose. And San Jose was so unknown that my admin got us tickets for San Jose, Puerto Rico until I said, I think it's not out of the country. I came out there to do a job to install a process control system. I thought it was some kind of joke is that there were 45 pages of advertisements in the newspaper at the time for scientists, engineers, et cetera. And I flew back and quit, got a job at my first startup in Silicon Valley [00:03:30] and subsequently I did eight of them in 21 years. Speaker 5: What were some of the ones that stand out out of the eight? You know, I had some great successes. There were four IPOs out of the eight, I'd say one or two. I had something to do with the others. I was just kinda standing there when the safe fell on the guy in front of me and the money dropped down and I got to pick it up. But honestly, in hindsight, and I can now say this only in hindsight, I learned the most from some of the failures though I wouldn't tell you why I wanted to learn that at the time, but failing [00:04:00] and failing hard when it was absolutely clear it was your fault and no one else's forced me to go through the stages of denial and then blame others and then whatever. And then acceptance and then ultimately kind of some real learning about how to build early stage ventures. Speaker 5: You know, I blew my Nixon last company, I was on the cover of wired magazine and 90 days after the cover I realized my company was going out of business and eventually did. And I called my mother who was a Russian immigrant and every time I spoke to my mother I [00:04:30] had to pause because English wasn't her first language. And you know, I'd say something and pause and then she'd say something back and pause. And whenever I said, mom, I lost 35 million hours, pause. And then she said, where'd you put it? I said, no, no, no mom, I'm calling you to tell you none of them was 30 I didn't even get the next sentence out. Cause then she went, oh my gosh, she wants $35 million. We can't even change your name. It's already plank. And then she started thinking about it and she said, and the country we came from [00:05:00] is gone. Speaker 5: There's no fast to go. I said, no, no mom though. What I'm trying to tell you is that the people gave me $35 million, just give me another $12 million to do the next startup. And it was in comprehensible because what I find when I talked to foreign visitors to silicon valley or to any entrepreneurial cluster, you know, we have a special name for failed entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Do you know what it is? Experienced? It's a big idea in the u s around entrepreneurial clusters, failure equals experience. [00:05:30] People don't ask you if you change your name or have to leave town or you're going to go bankrupt, et cetera. The first thing your best friend will ask you is, so what's your next startup? That's an amazing part of this culture that we've built here and that's what happened to me. My last startup, I returned $1 billion each to those two investors and it's not a story about me, it's a story about the ecosystem that we live in that's both supremely American and supremely capitalists, but also Sir Pulliam clustered in just [00:06:00] a few locations in the United States where there are clear reasons why one succeeded to some fail. Speaker 5: You know, when I retired from my last one, I decided that after eight startups in 21 years, my company was about to go public and my kids were seven and eight years old at the time and luckily we had children when I was in my late thirties and so therefore I got to watch people I admired incredibly at work, watch how they dealt with their families. And what was surprising [00:06:30] is that most of them had feet of clay when it came to home. They basically focused 100% of their efforts at work and as their kids grew up, their kids hated them. I kind of remember that in the back of my head, and so when I had the opportunity to retire, I said, I want to watch my kids grow up. And so I did. And that's a preambled answer your question. That's at the end. Speaker 5: For the first time in my life, my head wasn't down completely inside trying to execute in a single company. I had a chance to reflect on [00:07:00] the 21 years and believe it or not, I started to write my memoirs and I got, you know what I realize now in hindsight, it was actually an emotional catharsis of kind of purging. What did I learn? And I asked, it was 80 pages into it writing. He was a vignette and I would write lessons learned from each of those experiences and what I realized truly the hair was standing up and back of my neck. On page 80 there was a pattern I had never recognized in my career and I realized no one else had recognized [00:07:30] it either and either I was very wrong or there might be some truth and here was the pattern in silicon valley since the beginning we had treated startups like they were smaller versions of large companies. Speaker 5: Everything a large company did. The investment wisdom was, well they write business plans, you write business plans, they organize sales, marketing and Bizdev and you do that. They write our income statement, balance sheet and cashflow and do five year plans and then you do that too. Never noticing that. In fact that distinction, and no one had ever said this [00:08:00] before, what large companies do is execute known business models and the emphasis is on execution, on process. What a known business model means is we know who our customer is, we know how to sell it, we know who competitors are. We know what pride in an existing company it's existing cause somebody in the dim past figured that stuff out. But what a startup is doing is not executing. You think you're executing. That's what they told you to go do, but reality you failed most of the time because you were actually searching [00:08:30] for something. Speaker 5: You were just guessing in front of my students here at Berkeley and at Stanford I used the word, you have a series of hypotheses that are untested, but that's a fancy word for you're just guessing. And so the real insight was somebody needed to come up with a set of tools for startups that were different than the tools that were being taught on how to run and manage existing corporations. And that tool set in distinction at the turn of the century didn't exist. That is 1999 [00:09:00] there was not even a language to describe what I just said and I decided to embark on building the equivalent of the management stack that large corporations have for founders and early stage ventures. Speaker 6: Mm, Speaker 7: [00:09:30] yeah. Speaker 8: You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Steve Blank is our guest. He is an entrepreneur and lecturer at the hospital of business. In the next segment of your talks about collaborating with the National Science Foundation Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 4: [00:10:00] So when you're advising scientists and engineers who think they might be interested in trying to do a startup, what do you tell them they need to know about business and business people? Okay. Speaker 5: It's funny you mentioned scientists and engineers because I didn't know too many years in my career. I mean I sold to them as customers, [00:10:30] but in the last three or four years I got to know some of the top scientists in the u s for a very funny experience. Can I tell you what happened? It turned out that this methodology, I've been talking about how to build startups efficiently with customer development and agile engineering and one other piece called the business model canvas. This theory ended up being called the lean startup. One of my students, Eric Reese and I had actually invested in his company and then actually made him sit for my class at Berkeley because his cofounder, [00:11:00] the lost my money last time I invested. I said, no, no, sit through my class. And of course his co founder was slow to get it, but Eric got it in a second, but came the first practitioner of customer development, the first lean startup practitioner in the world. Speaker 5: Eric got it so much he became the Johnny Appleseed of the idea. In fact, it was actually Ericson side, the customer development. Then agile development went together and he named it the lean startup. But even though we had this theory, the practice was really kind of hard. It was like liking the furniture and Ikea until you got the pieces at home [00:11:30] and then realized it was Kinda hard to assemble. So I decided to do is take the pieces and teach entrepreneurs in a way they have never been taught before on how to start a company. Now this requires a two minutes sidebar. Can I give you? It turns out one of the other thing that I've been involved with is entrepreneurial education as I teach here at Haas, but I also teach at Stanford at UCF and a Columbia, but entrepreneurship used to be kind of a province, mostly of business schools and we used [00:12:00] to teach entrepreneurs just like they were accountants. Speaker 5: No one ever noticed that accountants don't run startups. It's a big idea. No one ever noticed. That's the g. We don't teach artists that way and we don't teach brain surgeons that way. That is sit in the class, read these cases like you were in the law school and somehow you'll get smarter and know how to be an operating CEO of an early stage venture. Now with this, you have to understand that when I was an entrepreneur, rapacious was applied word to describe my behavior and my friends who knew me as an entrepreneur [00:12:30] would laugh when they realized that was an educator and say, Steve, you were born entrepreneur. You knew you can't teach entrepreneurship. You can't be taught. You were born that way. Now since I was teaching entrepreneurship, this set of somewhat of a conundrum in my head, and I pondered this for a couple of years until I realized it's the question everybody asks, but it was the wrong question. Speaker 5: Of course you could teach entrepreneurship. The question is that we've never asked is who can you teach it to and that once you frame the question that way you start [00:13:00] slapping your forehead because you realize that founders of companies, they're not like accountants or MBAs. I mean they were engineers, they might be by training and background, but founders, visionaries, they're closer to artists than anybody else in the world and we now know how to teach artists for the last 500 years since the renaissance. How do we teach artists what we teach them theory, but then we immerse them in experiential practice until they're blue in the face or the hands fall off or they never want to look at another [00:13:30] brusher instrument or write another novel again in their life. We just beat them to death as apprentices, but we get their hands dirty or brain surgeons. Speaker 5: You have, they go to school, but there's no way you'd ever want to go to a doctor who hadn't cracked open chest or skulls or whatever or a surgeon, but we were teaching entrepreneurship like somehow you could read it from the book. My class at Stanford was one of the first experiential, hands-on, immersive float body experience and I mean immersive is that basically [00:14:00] we train our teams in theory that they're going to frame hypotheses with something called the business model canvas from a very smart guide named Alexander Osterwalder. They were going to test those hypotheses by getting outside the building outside the university, outside their lab, outside of anywhere and talk. I bought eyeball to 10 to 15 customers a week. People they've never met and start validating or invalidating those hypotheses and they were going to in parallel build as much of the product as [00:14:30] they can with this iterative and incremental development using agile engineering, whether it was hardware or software or medical device, it doesn't matter. Speaker 5: I want you to start building this thing and also be testing that. Now, this worked pretty well for 20 and 22 year olds students with hoodies and flip flops. But it was open question. If this would work with scientists and engineers, and about three years ago I was driving on campus and I got a call and then went like this, hi Steve, you don't know me. My name is heirarchical lick. I'm the head of the National Science Foundation [00:15:00] SBR program. We're from the U s government. We're calling you because we need your help. And because I was still a little bit of a jerk, I said, the government got my help during Vietnam. I'm not giving it an anymore. And he went, no, no, no, no. We're talking about your class. I went, how do you know about my class? They said, well, you've clogged every session of it. Speaker 5: And I just tend to open source everything I do, which is a luxury I have, not being a tenured professor, you know, I, I think giving back to our community is one of the things that silicon valley excels [00:15:30] at. And I was mentored and tutored by people who gave back. And so therefore since I can't do it, I give back by open sourcing almost everything I do. If I learn it and my slides are out there and I write about it and I teach them. And so I was sharing the experiences of teaching this first class. I didn't realize there were 25 people at the National Science Foundation following every class session. And I didn't even know who the National Science Foundation was. And I had to explain what Steve, we give away $7 billion [00:16:00] a year. We're the group that funds all basic science in universities in the u s where we're on number two to the National Institute of Health, which is the largest funder of medical and research in the u s and that's great. Speaker 5: So why are you calling? We want you to do this class for the government. I said, for the government, and I thought, you guys just fund bigger. He said, no, we're, we're under a mandate from theU s congress. All research organizations is that if any scientist wants to commercialize their basic research, we have programs called the spr and STTR programs that [00:16:30] give anywhere from $500,000 in the first phase or up to three quarters of a million dollars in phase two or more for scientists who want to build companies. Well, why are you calling me? And they're all nicely said, well thank God Congress doesn't actually ask how well those teams are doing. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, we're essentially giving away cars without requiring drivers Ed and you can imagine the results. And I said, okay, but what did you see in what I'm doing? Speaker 5: He said, Steve, you've invented the scientific [00:17:00] method for entrepreneurship. We want you to teach scientists. They already know the scientific method. Our insight here is they'll get what you're doing in a second. You just need to teach them how to do it outside the building. And so within 90 days I've got a bunch of my VC friends, John Fiber and Jim Horton follow and a Jerry angle and a bunch of others. And we put together a class for the national science foundation as a prototype. They got 25 teams headed up by principal investigators in material science and robotics and computer science and fluidics and teams [00:17:30] of three from around the country. And we put them through this 10 week process and we trained scientists how to get outside the building and test hypotheses. And the results were spectacular. So much so that the NSF made it a permanent program. Speaker 5: I trained professors from Georgia tech and university of Michigan who then went off to train 15 other universities. It's now the third largest accelerator in the world. We just passed 300 teams of her best scientists. Well, let me exhale and tell you the next step, which really got interesting. This worked for [00:18:00] National Science Foundation, but I had said that this would never work for life sciences because life sciences therapeutics, cancer, dry. I mean, you know, you get a paper and sell nature and science and maybe 15 years later, you know, something happens and she, you know, what's the problem? If you cure cancer, you don't have a problem finding customers. But at the same time I've been saying this, you CSF, which is probably the leading biotech university in the world here in San Francisco, was chasing me to actually put on this class for them. And I kept saying, no, you don't [00:18:30] understand. Speaker 5: I say it doesn't work. And they said, Steve, we are the experts in this. We say it does. And finally they called my bluff and said, well, why don't you get out of the building with us and talk to some of the leading venture capitalists in this area who basically educated me that said, look, the traditional model of drug companies for Pharma has broken down. They're now looking for partnerships, Obamacare and the new healthcare laws have changed how reimbursement works. Digital health is an emerging field, you know, medical devices. Those economics have changed. So we decided [00:19:00] to hold the class for life sciences, which is really a misnomer. It was a class for four very distinct fields for therapeutics, diagnostics, devices, and digital health. How to use CSF in October, 2013 is an experiment. First we didn't know if anyone would be interested because I know like the NSF, we weren't going to pay the teams. Speaker 5: We were going to make them pay nominal tuition and GCSF and we were going after clinicians and researchers and they have day jobs. Well, surprisingly we had 78 teams apply for 25 slots and we took 26 [00:19:30] teams including Colbert Harris, who was the head of surgery of ucs, f y Kerrison, the inventor of fetal surgery. Two teams didn't even tell Genentech they were sneaking out at night taking the class as well. And the results, I have to tell you, I still smile when I talk about this, exceeded everybody's wildest expectations such that we went back to Washington, took the results to the National Institute of Health and something tells me that in 2014 the National Institute of Health will probably be the next major government organization to adopt [00:20:00] this class in this process. Again, none of this guarantees success and these are all gonna turn into winners. What it does is actually allow teams to fail fast, allows us to be incredibly effective about the amount of cash we spent because we could figure out where the mistakes are rather than just insisting that we're right, but we now have a process that we've actually tested. Speaker 5: Well, I got a call from the National Science Foundation about six months ago that said, Steve, we thought we tell you we need to stop the experiment. And I thought, why? [00:20:30] What do you mean? Well, we got some data back on the effectiveness of the class. He said, well, we didn't believe the numbers. You know us. We told you we've been running this SBI our program for 30 years and what happens to the teams who want to get funded after? It's kind of a double blind review. People don't know who they are. They review their proposals and they on average got funded 18% of the time. Teams that actually have taken this class get funded 60% of the time. I thought we might've improved effectiveness 10 20% but this is a 300% [00:21:00] now let's be clear. It wasn't. That was some liquidity event mode as they went public. Speaker 5: It was just a good precursor on a march to how much did they know about customers and channels and partners and product market fit, et Cetera, and for the first time somebody had actually instrumented the process. So much so that the national science foundation now requires anybody applying for a grant. It's no longer an option to get out of the building and talk to 30 customers before they could even show up at the conference to get funded. That was kind of the science side and that's still going on and [00:21:30] I'm kind of proud that we might've made a dent in how the government thinks for national science foundation stuff, commercialization and how the National Institute of Health might be thinking of what's called translational medicine, but running those are 127 clinicians and researchers through the f program was really kind of amazing. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:22:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Steve Blank electrode at UC Berkeley's Haas School of business. In the next segment, he goes into more detail about the lean startup, also known as the lean launchpad Speaker 2: [00:22:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 4: with your launchpad startup launchpad. Is that, Speaker 5: well, there's two things. The class is called the lean launchpad lean launch and the software [00:23:00] we built for the National Science Foundation and now we use in classes and for corporations it's called launchpad central. We've basically built software that for the first time allows us to manage and view the innovation process as we go. Think of it as salesforce.com which is sales automation tool for salespeople. We now have a tool for the first time for entrepreneurs and the people working with them and managing them and trying to keep track of them and we just crossed 3000 teams who are using the software and I [00:23:30] use it in everything I teach and dude, Speaker 4: how long does the class take for a scientist or engineer who might be trying to think about, well, what's the time sink here? Yeah, Speaker 5: there's a shock to the system version, which I taught at cal tech and now teach twice a year at Columbia, which is days, 10 hours a day. But the ones that we teach from national science foundation, one I teach at Stanford and Berkeley, Stanford, it's a quarter at Berkeley semester from the NSF. It depends. It's about an eight to 10 week class. You could do this over a period of time. There's no magic. [00:24:00] There is kind of the magic and quantity to people you talk to and it's just a law of numbers. You talk to 10 people, I doubt you're going to find any real insight in that data. It talked to a thousand people. You know, you're probably, if you still haven't found the repeatable pattern, probably 20 [inaudible] too many or Tenex, too many a hundred just seem to be kind of a good centroid. And what you're really looking for is what we call product market fit. Speaker 5: And there are other pieces of the business model that are important. But the first two things you're writing at is, are you building something [00:24:30] that people care about? Am I care about? I don't mean say, oh, that's nice. I mean is when you show it to them, do they grab it out of your hands or grab you by the collar and say you're not leaving until I can have this. Oh, and by the way, if you built the right thing or your ideas and the right place, you will find those people. That's not a sign of a public offering, but it's at least a sign that you're on the right track. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [00:25:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: be sure to catch part two of this interview with Steve Blank in two weeks on spectrum. [00:25:30] In that interview, Steve Talks more about the lean launch pad, the challenge of innovation, Speaker 10: modern commerce, the evolution of entrepreneurship and the pace of technology. Steve's website is a trove of information and resources. Go to Steve Blank, all one word.com Steve Aalto, I mentioned the lean launchpad course available Speaker 2: on you, Udacity. That's you. [00:26:00] udacity.com Speaker 8: spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum Speaker 2: [00:26:30] [inaudible]. Speaker 10: Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Naoshima joins me for the calendar. Speaker 1: Dr Claire Kremen. Our previous guest on spectrum is a professor in the Environmental Science Policy and management department at UCB. She is the CO director of the center [00:27:00] for diversified farming systems and a co faculty director of the Berkeley Food Institute. Claire [inaudible] will be giving a talk on Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. She will be talking about pollinators as a poster child for diversified farming systems. Dr Kremlin's research on pollinators has attracted national news coverage and is of great importance to California agriculture. The talk will be followed by a reception with snacks and drinks. Again, this will be Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. Speaker 6: [00:27:30] Okay. Speaker 4: The science of cal lecture for March will be delivered by Dr Troy Leonberger. The topic is genetics. The lecture is Saturday, March 15th at 11:00 AM in room one 59 of Mulford Hall. Now a single news story presented by Neha Shah Speaker 1: just over a week ago. You see Berkeley's own. Jennifer Doudna, a professor of several biology and chemistry classes at cal, was awarded [00:28:00] the lorry prize in the biomedical sciences for her work on revealing the structure of RNA and its roles in gene therapy. Doudna will receive the Lurie metal and $100,000 award this May in Washington DC. The Lurie Prize is awarded by the foundation for the National Institutes of health and this is its second year of annually recognizing young scientists in the biomedical field. Doudna was originally intrigued by the 1980 breakthrough that RNA could serve as enzymes. In contrast to the previously accepted notion that RNA was [00:28:30] exclusively for protein production. Downness is work today with RNA deals specifically with a protein known as cas nine which can target and cut parts of the DNA of invading viruses. Doudna and her collaborators made use of this knowledge of cast nine to develop a technique to edit genes which will hopefully lead to strides in human gene therapy. Dowden is delighted by her recent recognition and confident in the future of RNA research and the medical developments that will follow Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 10: [00:29:00] The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 7: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them. Speaker 9: All [00:29:30] right. Email address is spectrum to klx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Steve Blank, lecturer Haas School of Business UCB. He has been a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. He has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. Built a method for high tech startups, the Lean LaunchPad.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a [00:00:30] l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Hi, and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we present part one of two interviews with Steve Blank, a lecturer at the Haas School of business at UC Berkeley. Steve has been a serial entrepreneur in silicon valley since the late 1970s [00:01:00] see if you recognize any of these companies. He was involved with Xylog convergent technologies, MIPS, computer, ardent, super Mack, rocket science games and epiphany. In 1999 Steve Retired from day to day involvement in running a company since 2002 he has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. By 2011 he was said to have devised [00:01:30] the scientific method for launching high tech startups, dubbed the Lean launch pad. In part one Steve Talks about his beginnings, the culture of Silicon Valley, the intersection of science, technology, finance, and business. Steve Blank, welcome to spectrum. Oh, thanks for having me. I wanted to find out from you how it is you got started as an entrepreneur. What attracted you to that? Speaker 5: He's probably the military. I, uh, spent four years in the air [00:02:00] force during Vietnam and a year and a half in Southeast Asia. And then when I came back to the United States, I worked on a B, 52 bombers in the strategic air command. And I finally years later understood the difference between working in a crisis organization, which was in a war zone where almost anything was acceptable to get the job done versus an execution organization that was dealing with mistakes. Men dropping a 20 megaton nuclear weapon where you process and procedure was actually imperative. And it turned [00:02:30] out I was much better in the organizations that required creativity and agility and tenacity and resilience. And I never understood that I was getting the world's best training for entrepreneurship. I went back to school in Ann Arbor and managed to get thrown out the second time in my life out of University of Michigan. Speaker 5: I call that the best school I was ever thrown out of a Michigan state was the next best school where it was a premed. And then, um, I was sent out to silicon valley. I was working as a field service engineer and what I didn't realize two years later was 16% [00:03:00] startup to bring up a computer system in a place called San Jose. And San Jose was so unknown that my admin got us tickets for San Jose, Puerto Rico until I said, I think it's not out of the country. I came out there to do a job to install a process control system. I thought it was some kind of joke is that there were 45 pages of advertisements in the newspaper at the time for scientists, engineers, et cetera. And I flew back and quit, got a job at my first startup in Silicon Valley [00:03:30] and subsequently I did eight of them in 21 years. Speaker 5: What were some of the ones that stand out out of the eight? You know, I had some great successes. There were four IPOs out of the eight, I'd say one or two. I had something to do with the others. I was just kinda standing there when the safe fell on the guy in front of me and the money dropped down and I got to pick it up. But honestly, in hindsight, and I can now say this only in hindsight, I learned the most from some of the failures though I wouldn't tell you why I wanted to learn that at the time, but failing [00:04:00] and failing hard when it was absolutely clear it was your fault and no one else's forced me to go through the stages of denial and then blame others and then whatever. And then acceptance and then ultimately kind of some real learning about how to build early stage ventures. Speaker 5: You know, I blew my Nixon last company, I was on the cover of wired magazine and 90 days after the cover I realized my company was going out of business and eventually did. And I called my mother who was a Russian immigrant and every time I spoke to my mother I [00:04:30] had to pause because English wasn't her first language. And you know, I'd say something and pause and then she'd say something back and pause. And whenever I said, mom, I lost 35 million hours, pause. And then she said, where'd you put it? I said, no, no, no mom, I'm calling you to tell you none of them was 30 I didn't even get the next sentence out. Cause then she went, oh my gosh, she wants $35 million. We can't even change your name. It's already plank. And then she started thinking about it and she said, and the country we came from [00:05:00] is gone. Speaker 5: There's no fast to go. I said, no, no mom though. What I'm trying to tell you is that the people gave me $35 million, just give me another $12 million to do the next startup. And it was in comprehensible because what I find when I talked to foreign visitors to silicon valley or to any entrepreneurial cluster, you know, we have a special name for failed entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Do you know what it is? Experienced? It's a big idea in the u s around entrepreneurial clusters, failure equals experience. [00:05:30] People don't ask you if you change your name or have to leave town or you're going to go bankrupt, et cetera. The first thing your best friend will ask you is, so what's your next startup? That's an amazing part of this culture that we've built here and that's what happened to me. My last startup, I returned $1 billion each to those two investors and it's not a story about me, it's a story about the ecosystem that we live in that's both supremely American and supremely capitalists, but also Sir Pulliam clustered in just [00:06:00] a few locations in the United States where there are clear reasons why one succeeded to some fail. Speaker 5: You know, when I retired from my last one, I decided that after eight startups in 21 years, my company was about to go public and my kids were seven and eight years old at the time and luckily we had children when I was in my late thirties and so therefore I got to watch people I admired incredibly at work, watch how they dealt with their families. And what was surprising [00:06:30] is that most of them had feet of clay when it came to home. They basically focused 100% of their efforts at work and as their kids grew up, their kids hated them. I kind of remember that in the back of my head, and so when I had the opportunity to retire, I said, I want to watch my kids grow up. And so I did. And that's a preambled answer your question. That's at the end. Speaker 5: For the first time in my life, my head wasn't down completely inside trying to execute in a single company. I had a chance to reflect on [00:07:00] the 21 years and believe it or not, I started to write my memoirs and I got, you know what I realize now in hindsight, it was actually an emotional catharsis of kind of purging. What did I learn? And I asked, it was 80 pages into it writing. He was a vignette and I would write lessons learned from each of those experiences and what I realized truly the hair was standing up and back of my neck. On page 80 there was a pattern I had never recognized in my career and I realized no one else had recognized [00:07:30] it either and either I was very wrong or there might be some truth and here was the pattern in silicon valley since the beginning we had treated startups like they were smaller versions of large companies. Speaker 5: Everything a large company did. The investment wisdom was, well they write business plans, you write business plans, they organize sales, marketing and Bizdev and you do that. They write our income statement, balance sheet and cashflow and do five year plans and then you do that too. Never noticing that. In fact that distinction, and no one had ever said this [00:08:00] before, what large companies do is execute known business models and the emphasis is on execution, on process. What a known business model means is we know who our customer is, we know how to sell it, we know who competitors are. We know what pride in an existing company it's existing cause somebody in the dim past figured that stuff out. But what a startup is doing is not executing. You think you're executing. That's what they told you to go do, but reality you failed most of the time because you were actually searching [00:08:30] for something. Speaker 5: You were just guessing in front of my students here at Berkeley and at Stanford I used the word, you have a series of hypotheses that are untested, but that's a fancy word for you're just guessing. And so the real insight was somebody needed to come up with a set of tools for startups that were different than the tools that were being taught on how to run and manage existing corporations. And that tool set in distinction at the turn of the century didn't exist. That is 1999 [00:09:00] there was not even a language to describe what I just said and I decided to embark on building the equivalent of the management stack that large corporations have for founders and early stage ventures. Speaker 6: Mm, Speaker 7: [00:09:30] yeah. Speaker 8: You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Steve Blank is our guest. He is an entrepreneur and lecturer at the hospital of business. In the next segment of your talks about collaborating with the National Science Foundation Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 4: [00:10:00] So when you're advising scientists and engineers who think they might be interested in trying to do a startup, what do you tell them they need to know about business and business people? Okay. Speaker 5: It's funny you mentioned scientists and engineers because I didn't know too many years in my career. I mean I sold to them as customers, [00:10:30] but in the last three or four years I got to know some of the top scientists in the u s for a very funny experience. Can I tell you what happened? It turned out that this methodology, I've been talking about how to build startups efficiently with customer development and agile engineering and one other piece called the business model canvas. This theory ended up being called the lean startup. One of my students, Eric Reese and I had actually invested in his company and then actually made him sit for my class at Berkeley because his cofounder, [00:11:00] the lost my money last time I invested. I said, no, no, sit through my class. And of course his co founder was slow to get it, but Eric got it in a second, but came the first practitioner of customer development, the first lean startup practitioner in the world. Speaker 5: Eric got it so much he became the Johnny Appleseed of the idea. In fact, it was actually Ericson side, the customer development. Then agile development went together and he named it the lean startup. But even though we had this theory, the practice was really kind of hard. It was like liking the furniture and Ikea until you got the pieces at home [00:11:30] and then realized it was Kinda hard to assemble. So I decided to do is take the pieces and teach entrepreneurs in a way they have never been taught before on how to start a company. Now this requires a two minutes sidebar. Can I give you? It turns out one of the other thing that I've been involved with is entrepreneurial education as I teach here at Haas, but I also teach at Stanford at UCF and a Columbia, but entrepreneurship used to be kind of a province, mostly of business schools and we used [00:12:00] to teach entrepreneurs just like they were accountants. Speaker 5: No one ever noticed that accountants don't run startups. It's a big idea. No one ever noticed. That's the g. We don't teach artists that way and we don't teach brain surgeons that way. That is sit in the class, read these cases like you were in the law school and somehow you'll get smarter and know how to be an operating CEO of an early stage venture. Now with this, you have to understand that when I was an entrepreneur, rapacious was applied word to describe my behavior and my friends who knew me as an entrepreneur [00:12:30] would laugh when they realized that was an educator and say, Steve, you were born entrepreneur. You knew you can't teach entrepreneurship. You can't be taught. You were born that way. Now since I was teaching entrepreneurship, this set of somewhat of a conundrum in my head, and I pondered this for a couple of years until I realized it's the question everybody asks, but it was the wrong question. Speaker 5: Of course you could teach entrepreneurship. The question is that we've never asked is who can you teach it to and that once you frame the question that way you start [00:13:00] slapping your forehead because you realize that founders of companies, they're not like accountants or MBAs. I mean they were engineers, they might be by training and background, but founders, visionaries, they're closer to artists than anybody else in the world and we now know how to teach artists for the last 500 years since the renaissance. How do we teach artists what we teach them theory, but then we immerse them in experiential practice until they're blue in the face or the hands fall off or they never want to look at another [00:13:30] brusher instrument or write another novel again in their life. We just beat them to death as apprentices, but we get their hands dirty or brain surgeons. Speaker 5: You have, they go to school, but there's no way you'd ever want to go to a doctor who hadn't cracked open chest or skulls or whatever or a surgeon, but we were teaching entrepreneurship like somehow you could read it from the book. My class at Stanford was one of the first experiential, hands-on, immersive float body experience and I mean immersive is that basically [00:14:00] we train our teams in theory that they're going to frame hypotheses with something called the business model canvas from a very smart guide named Alexander Osterwalder. They were going to test those hypotheses by getting outside the building outside the university, outside their lab, outside of anywhere and talk. I bought eyeball to 10 to 15 customers a week. People they've never met and start validating or invalidating those hypotheses and they were going to in parallel build as much of the product as [00:14:30] they can with this iterative and incremental development using agile engineering, whether it was hardware or software or medical device, it doesn't matter. Speaker 5: I want you to start building this thing and also be testing that. Now, this worked pretty well for 20 and 22 year olds students with hoodies and flip flops. But it was open question. If this would work with scientists and engineers, and about three years ago I was driving on campus and I got a call and then went like this, hi Steve, you don't know me. My name is heirarchical lick. I'm the head of the National Science Foundation [00:15:00] SBR program. We're from the U s government. We're calling you because we need your help. And because I was still a little bit of a jerk, I said, the government got my help during Vietnam. I'm not giving it an anymore. And he went, no, no, no, no. We're talking about your class. I went, how do you know about my class? They said, well, you've clogged every session of it. Speaker 5: And I just tend to open source everything I do, which is a luxury I have, not being a tenured professor, you know, I, I think giving back to our community is one of the things that silicon valley excels [00:15:30] at. And I was mentored and tutored by people who gave back. And so therefore since I can't do it, I give back by open sourcing almost everything I do. If I learn it and my slides are out there and I write about it and I teach them. And so I was sharing the experiences of teaching this first class. I didn't realize there were 25 people at the National Science Foundation following every class session. And I didn't even know who the National Science Foundation was. And I had to explain what Steve, we give away $7 billion [00:16:00] a year. We're the group that funds all basic science in universities in the u s where we're on number two to the National Institute of Health, which is the largest funder of medical and research in the u s and that's great. Speaker 5: So why are you calling? We want you to do this class for the government. I said, for the government, and I thought, you guys just fund bigger. He said, no, we're, we're under a mandate from theU s congress. All research organizations is that if any scientist wants to commercialize their basic research, we have programs called the spr and STTR programs that [00:16:30] give anywhere from $500,000 in the first phase or up to three quarters of a million dollars in phase two or more for scientists who want to build companies. Well, why are you calling me? And they're all nicely said, well thank God Congress doesn't actually ask how well those teams are doing. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, we're essentially giving away cars without requiring drivers Ed and you can imagine the results. And I said, okay, but what did you see in what I'm doing? Speaker 5: He said, Steve, you've invented the scientific [00:17:00] method for entrepreneurship. We want you to teach scientists. They already know the scientific method. Our insight here is they'll get what you're doing in a second. You just need to teach them how to do it outside the building. And so within 90 days I've got a bunch of my VC friends, John Fiber and Jim Horton follow and a Jerry angle and a bunch of others. And we put together a class for the national science foundation as a prototype. They got 25 teams headed up by principal investigators in material science and robotics and computer science and fluidics and teams [00:17:30] of three from around the country. And we put them through this 10 week process and we trained scientists how to get outside the building and test hypotheses. And the results were spectacular. So much so that the NSF made it a permanent program. Speaker 5: I trained professors from Georgia tech and university of Michigan who then went off to train 15 other universities. It's now the third largest accelerator in the world. We just passed 300 teams of her best scientists. Well, let me exhale and tell you the next step, which really got interesting. This worked for [00:18:00] National Science Foundation, but I had said that this would never work for life sciences because life sciences therapeutics, cancer, dry. I mean, you know, you get a paper and sell nature and science and maybe 15 years later, you know, something happens and she, you know, what's the problem? If you cure cancer, you don't have a problem finding customers. But at the same time I've been saying this, you CSF, which is probably the leading biotech university in the world here in San Francisco, was chasing me to actually put on this class for them. And I kept saying, no, you don't [00:18:30] understand. Speaker 5: I say it doesn't work. And they said, Steve, we are the experts in this. We say it does. And finally they called my bluff and said, well, why don't you get out of the building with us and talk to some of the leading venture capitalists in this area who basically educated me that said, look, the traditional model of drug companies for Pharma has broken down. They're now looking for partnerships, Obamacare and the new healthcare laws have changed how reimbursement works. Digital health is an emerging field, you know, medical devices. Those economics have changed. So we decided [00:19:00] to hold the class for life sciences, which is really a misnomer. It was a class for four very distinct fields for therapeutics, diagnostics, devices, and digital health. How to use CSF in October, 2013 is an experiment. First we didn't know if anyone would be interested because I know like the NSF, we weren't going to pay the teams. Speaker 5: We were going to make them pay nominal tuition and GCSF and we were going after clinicians and researchers and they have day jobs. Well, surprisingly we had 78 teams apply for 25 slots and we took 26 [00:19:30] teams including Colbert Harris, who was the head of surgery of ucs, f y Kerrison, the inventor of fetal surgery. Two teams didn't even tell Genentech they were sneaking out at night taking the class as well. And the results, I have to tell you, I still smile when I talk about this, exceeded everybody's wildest expectations such that we went back to Washington, took the results to the National Institute of Health and something tells me that in 2014 the National Institute of Health will probably be the next major government organization to adopt [00:20:00] this class in this process. Again, none of this guarantees success and these are all gonna turn into winners. What it does is actually allow teams to fail fast, allows us to be incredibly effective about the amount of cash we spent because we could figure out where the mistakes are rather than just insisting that we're right, but we now have a process that we've actually tested. Speaker 5: Well, I got a call from the National Science Foundation about six months ago that said, Steve, we thought we tell you we need to stop the experiment. And I thought, why? [00:20:30] What do you mean? Well, we got some data back on the effectiveness of the class. He said, well, we didn't believe the numbers. You know us. We told you we've been running this SBI our program for 30 years and what happens to the teams who want to get funded after? It's kind of a double blind review. People don't know who they are. They review their proposals and they on average got funded 18% of the time. Teams that actually have taken this class get funded 60% of the time. I thought we might've improved effectiveness 10 20% but this is a 300% [00:21:00] now let's be clear. It wasn't. That was some liquidity event mode as they went public. Speaker 5: It was just a good precursor on a march to how much did they know about customers and channels and partners and product market fit, et Cetera, and for the first time somebody had actually instrumented the process. So much so that the national science foundation now requires anybody applying for a grant. It's no longer an option to get out of the building and talk to 30 customers before they could even show up at the conference to get funded. That was kind of the science side and that's still going on and [00:21:30] I'm kind of proud that we might've made a dent in how the government thinks for national science foundation stuff, commercialization and how the National Institute of Health might be thinking of what's called translational medicine, but running those are 127 clinicians and researchers through the f program was really kind of amazing. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:22:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Steve Blank electrode at UC Berkeley's Haas School of business. In the next segment, he goes into more detail about the lean startup, also known as the lean launchpad Speaker 2: [00:22:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 4: with your launchpad startup launchpad. Is that, Speaker 5: well, there's two things. The class is called the lean launchpad lean launch and the software [00:23:00] we built for the National Science Foundation and now we use in classes and for corporations it's called launchpad central. We've basically built software that for the first time allows us to manage and view the innovation process as we go. Think of it as salesforce.com which is sales automation tool for salespeople. We now have a tool for the first time for entrepreneurs and the people working with them and managing them and trying to keep track of them and we just crossed 3000 teams who are using the software and I [00:23:30] use it in everything I teach and dude, Speaker 4: how long does the class take for a scientist or engineer who might be trying to think about, well, what's the time sink here? Yeah, Speaker 5: there's a shock to the system version, which I taught at cal tech and now teach twice a year at Columbia, which is days, 10 hours a day. But the ones that we teach from national science foundation, one I teach at Stanford and Berkeley, Stanford, it's a quarter at Berkeley semester from the NSF. It depends. It's about an eight to 10 week class. You could do this over a period of time. There's no magic. [00:24:00] There is kind of the magic and quantity to people you talk to and it's just a law of numbers. You talk to 10 people, I doubt you're going to find any real insight in that data. It talked to a thousand people. You know, you're probably, if you still haven't found the repeatable pattern, probably 20 [inaudible] too many or Tenex, too many a hundred just seem to be kind of a good centroid. And what you're really looking for is what we call product market fit. Speaker 5: And there are other pieces of the business model that are important. But the first two things you're writing at is, are you building something [00:24:30] that people care about? Am I care about? I don't mean say, oh, that's nice. I mean is when you show it to them, do they grab it out of your hands or grab you by the collar and say you're not leaving until I can have this. Oh, and by the way, if you built the right thing or your ideas and the right place, you will find those people. That's not a sign of a public offering, but it's at least a sign that you're on the right track. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [00:25:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: be sure to catch part two of this interview with Steve Blank in two weeks on spectrum. [00:25:30] In that interview, Steve Talks more about the lean launch pad, the challenge of innovation, Speaker 10: modern commerce, the evolution of entrepreneurship and the pace of technology. Steve's website is a trove of information and resources. Go to Steve Blank, all one word.com Steve Aalto, I mentioned the lean launchpad course available Speaker 2: on you, Udacity. That's you. [00:26:00] udacity.com Speaker 8: spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum Speaker 2: [00:26:30] [inaudible]. Speaker 10: Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Naoshima joins me for the calendar. Speaker 1: Dr Claire Kremen. Our previous guest on spectrum is a professor in the Environmental Science Policy and management department at UCB. She is the CO director of the center [00:27:00] for diversified farming systems and a co faculty director of the Berkeley Food Institute. Claire [inaudible] will be giving a talk on Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. She will be talking about pollinators as a poster child for diversified farming systems. Dr Kremlin's research on pollinators has attracted national news coverage and is of great importance to California agriculture. The talk will be followed by a reception with snacks and drinks. Again, this will be Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. Speaker 6: [00:27:30] Okay. Speaker 4: The science of cal lecture for March will be delivered by Dr Troy Leonberger. The topic is genetics. The lecture is Saturday, March 15th at 11:00 AM in room one 59 of Mulford Hall. Now a single news story presented by Neha Shah Speaker 1: just over a week ago. You see Berkeley's own. Jennifer Doudna, a professor of several biology and chemistry classes at cal, was awarded [00:28:00] the lorry prize in the biomedical sciences for her work on revealing the structure of RNA and its roles in gene therapy. Doudna will receive the Lurie metal and $100,000 award this May in Washington DC. The Lurie Prize is awarded by the foundation for the National Institutes of health and this is its second year of annually recognizing young scientists in the biomedical field. Doudna was originally intrigued by the 1980 breakthrough that RNA could serve as enzymes. In contrast to the previously accepted notion that RNA was [00:28:30] exclusively for protein production. Downness is work today with RNA deals specifically with a protein known as cas nine which can target and cut parts of the DNA of invading viruses. Doudna and her collaborators made use of this knowledge of cast nine to develop a technique to edit genes which will hopefully lead to strides in human gene therapy. Dowden is delighted by her recent recognition and confident in the future of RNA research and the medical developments that will follow Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 10: [00:29:00] The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 7: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them. Speaker 9: All [00:29:30] right. Email address is spectrum to klx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire Kremen and Alastair Iles of ESPM at UC Berkeley, who ran the Berkeley Center for Diversified Farming. Next on their agenda is the Berkeley Food Institute, which will include College of Natural Resources, Goldman School of Public Policy, School of Journalism, Berkeley Law and School of Public Health.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Our guest today, our professor Claire Kremen and Assistant Professor Allister isles in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and management at the University of California Berkeley. Claire Carmen focuses her research on conservation, biology and biodiversity. [00:01:00] Allister isles focuses his research on the intersections of science, technology, and environment that contribute to public policy, community welfare, environmental justice, and increased democracy and societal governance. Brad swift interviews the pair about their time as faculty directors of the Berkeley Center for diversified farming and the recent launch of the Berkeley Food Institute. This ambitious enterprise is a collaboration between the College of natural resources, the Goldman School of public policy, the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, [00:01:30] Berkeley Law School, and the school of public health. Allister isles is hearing impaired, so phd candidate Patrick Bower will be reading Alistair's answers during this interview. Speaker 4: In today's interview we have three folks, Claire, Carmen, Allister isles and Patrick Bower. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you and a nod from Allister. I want to ask each of you, how were you drawn [00:02:00] to the study of sustainability and diversified farming Speaker 1: on native bees and how they contribute to crop pollination in California and it was really through my study of the bees and particularly of how bees respond to agriculture that I got interested in farming and that my eyes got opened to how unsustainable our current farming system is, particularly with its heavy reliance on monoculture. Speaker 4: [00:02:30] My background is in environmental policies and I've mostly worked on industrial chemical issues for a long time. I've also researched the consumption side of food starting with sustainable seafood. About three years ago, Claire was running a series of round tables on diversified farming systems and by a chance at a faculty lunch, she invited me to participate. I wasn't sure what it was all about, but I enjoyed learning about ecosystem services. I realized that agriculture has a major role to play. I'm making the planet more in the face [00:03:00] of many 21st century environmental dangers like climate change. Trying to change consumer behavior isn't going to be enough to achieve greater sustainability. We need to cover the whole food system and to find new connections across each part, so that's why I moved much more upstream into agriculture. Talk about the new Berkeley Food Institute that you've formed a cow. Speaker 4: How did it get started and what are its goals? We began with [00:03:30] a round table series on diversified farming systems or DFS about three years ago. I can't believe how far we've already come since then. The series was based on a seed grant from the Berkeley Institute of Environment. It had monthly meetings and spent an enormous range of topics from conservation, biology, consumer behavior, the health effects of pesticides on farm workers to policies for promoting DFS. At first, we weren't sure what our goals were. We had a vague idea that the round [00:04:00] table might evolve into a more institutionalized forum. Claire wanted to co-write a paper covering the results of the round tables, but it quickly became obvious that it was such a large topic that we needed a whole special issue. Do you even do justice to the topics? Fortunately we were able to persuade the ecology and society journal to accept our specialists. You plan. It was a lengthy process of assembling the various papers as students are coauthors on most of the papers. We believe strongly in promoting student research and Claire and I wanted [00:04:30] to institutionalize the round tables and that is how we can see to the DFS center. We realized that we couldn't manage all this new growth without hiring an executive director, which meant that we needed to start raising funds Speaker 1: and as we started looking into funding for the center for diversified farming and as we engaged both with donors and also with the top levels of the College of natural resources administration, it became clear that there was actually an opportunity to do something much bigger and much more far reaching [00:05:00] by partnering with the schools of journalism and of public policy. And that's because it's not sufficient to conduct the research that demonstrates the social and environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture or diversified farming systems. You really have to get the word out to a large public and you have to be able to influence key decision makers. So it makes a lot of sense for us to be partnering with journalism and Public Policy. Later on in the institutes development we also were joined [00:05:30] by other key actors, specifically the schools of public health and also the school of law. Speaker 1: So the goal of the institute is really a lofty one. We want nothing less than to be able through research teaching and outreach to be able to actually transform our current food system to one that is far more resilient, far more healthy and far more just how is the institute funded. We're funded this point by private individuals and also by family foundations [00:06:00] are their undergraduate and graduate degree programs within the institute? Not yet, but we are contemplating creating something called a designated emphasis for graduate students, which means several different departments combined together and create an additional degree program that graduate students can go through and we're also beginning to assess whether an undergraduate major makes sense. The first step we're taking already is to conduct an inventory of what's already [00:06:30] available on campus. There are quite a few different faculty that are already teaching courses related to the food system and so we're identifying all of these so that students can have access to this information. Those who are already interested in this Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Our guest today on Spec gem are Claire Allister Isles. In the next segment they talk about impediments to sustainable farming. Is k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: [00:07:00] What sort of collaborations will you be trying to foster with the institute? One of the key actions that the new institute will emphasize is nurturing new research and policy collaborations between faculty and students. Many parts of the food system are balkanized. They're divided up from each other and seldom communicate across disciplinary industry or supply chain segment lines. For example, urban agriculture policy makers might not think much about the sorts of foods [00:07:30] that city gardens are providing to poor minority neighborhoods. What we hope for is a set of collaborations that will cross disciplinary lines and that will address research topics that aren't being done but they could help bring about positive changes in the food system. Another thing that we are eager to look into is helping foster stronger connections with off campus actors such as farmers, food worker unions, government agencies and Bay area communities. This is where this would help inform the research being done on campus and where it might help enhance the ability [00:08:00] of these actors to work toward the transformation of the food system that Claire talked about. Some of our faculty already have off campus partners that they run research projects with citizen science or working with lay people and helping generate new science will likely be an important element, but not the only one. How directly will the institute be involved in actual farming or working directly with farmers? Speaker 1: We will definitely include growers on our advisory board and [00:08:30] also some faculty actually work with growers. For example, my work is all on farms owned by real people and so I work with growers on the kinds of experiments we're going to do and also on sometimes on land management that they're doing on their land. Speaker 4: What do you see as the impediments to the broad practice of sustainable agriculture and how can research and education help the impediments to sustainable agriculture legion? The most important impediment is arguably [00:09:00] the industrialized food system that we currently live in. The system is based on farming methods that include monoculture farming, the pervasive use of chemical and fossil fuel inputs, and an emphasis on increasing yields to the exclusion of other outcomes. The system is so entrenched that everyone who grows processes and eats food is caught in it. One example of how the industrial system discourages sustainable farming is the artificially cheap price of foods the food industry can externalize most environmental and social costs of producing food [00:09:30] by displacing these into farming communities, consumers and ecosystems. Public policies can Ivan this by promoting inappropriate subsidies for commodity crops and not properly funding conservation measures on farmland. Speaker 4: In turn, many farmers are trapped within a production structure or they have little room to adopt sustainable farming methods. They may have to comply with supply chain pressures such as contract farming that prescribes exactly what they should do on the farm or the rapid growth and market power of the agrifood corporations. [00:10:00] For decades, farmers have been struggling with the technological treadmill or they're obliged to adopt technological innovations such as pesticides and now GM seeds to be able to maintain their yields and cost structures in order to compete with other farmers doing likewise. Conversely, it can be very challenging for farmers to move to more sustainable methods. It is risky for farmers to try something new that they aren't familiar with and that requires them to develop new skills and knowledge. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of farmers in the u s [00:10:30] and there has been a trend of fewer new farmers entering the sector. On the positive side. These new entrants are more likely to use sustainable farming methods because they've been trained differently. Speaker 1: I think the broadest impediments are some aspects of our regulatory system and also market forces that encourage economies of scale sort of thing that make farmers have to get big or get out. For example, on the regulatory side, this new food safety modernization act is something that's going to impose [00:11:00] a lot of regulations on growers and that can actually disadvantage small growers. And sometimes it's the small growers that are the ones that are practicing more sustainable or more diversified forms of agriculture. But with this new food safety modernization act, they just might not be able to stay in business any longer. So the critical research that we need to do is to document the benefits and the costs and also the trade offs of different approaches. We need to be able to show what these benefits are so that we can hopefully have an influence [00:11:30] on some of the regulations. Speaker 6: Oh, you are listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guests today are Claire Kremen and Alister aisles. Patrick Bower will be reading out and styles and series Alistair's hearing impaired. In the next segment, they talk about how they analyze farming. Oh, okay. Speaker 4: Would you explain [00:12:00] how you analyze an agricultural system for sustainability? Speaker 1: From an ecological perspective? What I find helpful is the concept of an agriculture that is regenerative. What that means, it's an agriculture that demands few external inputs and creates few wastes. Instead it tends to use the waste products that are produced in the production cycle as inputs, so for example, by composting waste materials or by integrating animals back onto the farm, growers can build soils. [00:12:30] These wells are then able to store water much more effectively protecting against droughts and they can also require, in that case, less water from external sources. Also, these oils can trap and filter nutrients leading to less nutrient waste and less pollution off site, and then such soils are also much more productive so they can lead to greater yields, so it's really a win, win, win, win. I can't really see any downside to farming like that. Speaker 4: In terms of the social and economic components [00:13:00] of an agricultural system, there are many possible measures that we could use. Social scientists have looked at measures such as the justice that is embodied in the system. That is as the agricultural system assuring justice for all the workers, growers in communities across the system. This justice could take the form of fair worker treatment such as paying farm workers better wages and preventing adverse health effects like heatstroke. It could also be limiting the exposures of farm workers in rural communities to pesticides. [00:13:30] Another measure is food security or the ability of consumers and communities, especially poor and minority people to gain access to enough nutritious and healthy foods to feed themselves. In the u s there are at least 40 million people who depend on food stamps to supplement their diets. Yet these people may not be able to afford healthy, sustainably produced foods. Speaker 4: Yet another measure is whether farmers able to sustain themselves through their work or whether they fall into greater debt to be able to stay in farming at all. Many [00:14:00] NGOs and food movements such as the food sovereignty movement would argue that the ability of farmers and communities to decide on what sorts of foods they want to produce and eat isn't an important outcome in and of itself. How has the understanding and measurement of sustainability changed over the years? You have studied it. Social scientists have only been thinking about sustainability for a fairly short time since about the early 1990s sustainable development as a discourse [00:14:30] first began developing in the late 1980s with the Brundtland Commission's report. Initially, social scientists were focused more on the rural sociology of agricultural production. They looked at issues in isolation and emphasized farmers only, but as more researchers began to enter the sustainability field, the focus shifted to thinking more holistically. They started to look at food supply Speaker 7: chains and commodities and how these shape the sustainability of farming. Researchers also began looking at how communities were defining sustainability [00:15:00] in their own terms. In 2000 Jack Kloppenburg led a very interesting study that surveyed a set of rural and urban communities for the sorts of words they would use to describe sustainability. More recently, social scientists have looked at how ecological and social sustainability are closely interconnected. Some of the most exciting new work is looking at the concept of socio ecological systems or how farmers are actively shaping farming landscapes and vice versa. Speaker 8: [00:15:30] Are there estimates or models that show the reductions in greenhouse gas that could be achieved in the conversion from industrial monoculture agriculture to sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: This is actually something that's fairly well known. The production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is a really energy intensive process and so where it has been looked at, when people compare organic agriculture that avoids using those chemicals with conventional agriculture, organic agriculture [00:16:00] usually stacks up much better as far as greenhouse gas emissions, and this is true even though often organic growers have to perhaps use more fuel to do more cultivation practices on their lands, but it balances out because they're not using these energy intensively produced chemicals. Speaker 8: Biofuels were thought to be a sustainable source of energy and an enormous boost for agriculture as well. What are your thoughts on biofuels? Speaker 7: I've been looking [00:16:30] at the environmental and social effects of biofuels in the u s and Brazil for a few years now. Some years ago, biofuels were seen as a very promising technology that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in 2008 and a scientists called Tim searching gear sparked off a long debate about whether biofuels actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the overall picture. Some biofuels can actually lead to increased emissions because their production involves a direct or indirect cutting down forests to clear land for agriculture, which results in carbon [00:17:00] dioxide release. The upshot is that governments and NGOs now see biofuels much more skeptically. I think this is a positive development rather than uncritically embracing biofuels as a new development pathway. At the same time, the debate has now swung so much that people often don't distinguish between different types of biofuels. Biofuels are actually very diverse in their feedstock and production methods. Speaker 7: Most of the bad press is around corn ethanol in the u s and I think it's justified because as Michael Pollan, [00:17:30] for example, has written about the corn industry has created countless environmental problems, but there are what we call cellulosic feedstocks, grasses, agricultural crop, leftovers and trees and principle. We can have diversified farming systems that include these sorts of cellulosic crops as part of a fully integrated and diversified rather than having a few larger farmers and agrifood businesses dominate corn ethanol and thereby the biofuels industry. We could alternatively have many smaller farmers produce [00:18:00] grasses. For example. This is something that the new institute may look at. The challenge however is that cellulosic ethanol could easily succumb to the same industrialized monoculture model models we see for corn. So policy will have a very important role in the next decade and helping decide whether this will happen or not. Speaker 6: [inaudible] spectrum is a public affairs show. Hey Alex Berkley, our guests are clear come in and Allister isles, [00:18:30] they're starting the Berkeley food institute this fall and the next thing they talk about the scalability of sustainable farming and its impact on rural communities. Speaker 7: From your experience, what is the scale range of farms doing sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: Even large scale farms are starting to incorporate sustainability practices into their businesses, which is really exciting, but it's a question whether they're truly sustainable. [00:19:00] As an ecologist, I don't believe that the practice of monoculture is compatible with sustainability. To have sustainability. We need more diverse farming systems when we have these diverse farming systems that can reduce the need for off farm inputs and also generate fewer ways. A good example of this is going back to pesticides and monoculture. When a grower grows a monoculture, they're pretty much forced to use pesticides. When you think about it, they're planting [00:19:30] a huge expanse of the same thing and it's kind of like laying out a feast for a pest species that can just go and rampage through that. And at the same time they've also eradicated the habitat that would have promoted the natural enemies that could've kept that past in check. Speaker 1: So then they really have no other recourse. They have to use pesticides and as I already noted, these take a great deal of energy to produce the results in greenhouse gas emissions. They pollute the surrounding environment. They can lead to unintended loss of biodiversity, of [00:20:00] non target insects. Also both subtle and not so subtle impacts on human health. When we do that, we can't really have a sustainable system, but on the other hand, we shouldn't conflate the practice of monoculture with scale because smaller farms can also practice monoculture and do sometimes practice monoculture and at the same time, perhaps larger farms can practice really diversified agriculture. It's not what I would think of as typical, but that doesn't mean it's impossible and I think it's important that we not limit [00:20:30] our imagination. We'd be able to imagine that a really large farm could be diverse, could be sustainable. Why not? Speaker 7: Does sustainability in any way limit the scale that can be achieved? Speaker 1: Well, I think it's an excellent question and we don't really have the answer to it. If we just look at what's out there, it seems like if you're at a larger scale, maybe that's going to be less sustainable in some ways, but it might be more sustainable in some other ways. There's certainly a relationship between scale ins and sustainability. If [00:21:00] we just look out at what's happening now, there can be unexpected twists. For example, very large companies may be able to develop sustainable practices of certain types such as efficiencies in distribution that small companies can't. On the other hand, smaller farms or companies might be better able to create the ecological complexity that we think is required to engender sustainable processes on farms. Also, when we think about it, some of these limits if do exist to creating sustainable systems [00:21:30] might relate not to biophysical limits, but to institutional arrangements or governance structures, business plans, et cetera. And again, they might be failures of our imagination to conceive of a better way of doing things. So I think it's really an excellent research topic. We need to study the successful models that exist out there at various scales and try to learn from them. Speaker 7: Are there studies that show the impact of sustainable agriculture on rural societies and economies and Willy Institute [00:22:00] undertake work in this area? Frankly, we don't really know what the answers may be. This is because there've been very few systemic studies done of the ways in which sustainable agriculture might benefit rural areas. And the 1940s a UC researcher called Walter Goldschmidt did a very important study and compared to rural towns in California that deferred in the degree of diversified farming and the degree to which they relied on industrialized farming methods. The town that you used more diversified from methods [00:22:30] showed significant gains of social and economic outcomes such as employment and community cohesiveness compared to the more industrialized town. Unfortunately, this sorta study hasn't been done. Again, as far as we are aware, thus the priority of the new institute will be to help sponsor a collaborative research project that updates this research and uses the tools and data that we now have to appraise whether and how diversified farming can provide greater benefits compared to the existing system. Speaker 7: What do you feel [00:23:00] are the best ways to encourage and enable young people to pursue farming? One of the most challenging obstacles we face in the food system today is that there is a rapidly aging farmer workforce. The average age of farmers in the U S is about 57 years, which is something you see in other industrial countries as well. There are widespread perceptions of farming as an acronystic and tedious. Many commentators think that many young people are unenthusiastic [00:23:30] about taking up farming for this reason. Farming is in the past. Therefore, one argument goes, we should invest more and more in labor saving technology to help offset the fact that fewer young people are entering farming in Australia. Where I come from, I heard about a farmer recently who just installed a $400,000 robotic system to milk cows. I don't agree with this sort of argument. To the contrary. Speaker 7: We are seeing a good number of young people take up farming in [00:24:00] both rural and especially urban areas. Farming seems to be a way to reconnect these people with a more sensory and experience rich life. There are tens of farmers schools that are developed across the countries such as the Alba Center near Salinas, where immigrant workers learn to be farmers and are given some support for entering the sector. This is one very powerful way to help new farmers provide training programs to help equip them for actual production, but they then face enormous problems and even getting a [00:24:30] toehold on the farming landscape because land can be very costly and very scarce. So they need financial help like loans and grants to sustain their first few years. At least. There's a new farmer network that has been pushing for bill and Congress to create this new institutional base, but unfortunately, so far it's not been very successful. Speaker 6: A big thanks to Claire Kremen at Alster Isles [00:25:00] for coming on to spectrum. I'll pass. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes. You we've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few of the signs of technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. We kind of ski and I present the calendar. Speaker 3: On September 8th the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden will be hosting a workshop led by author [00:25:30] Amy Stewart, who wrote the drunken botanist, the plants that create the world's greatest strengths, a book that details the leaves, bark seeds, roots, flowers and fruit around the world that humans have contrived to turn into alcohol. Stuart will lead a walk through the garden to look at some of the typical plants that have been used throughout the ages. The workshop will be held in the garden from three to 6:00 PM on September 8th the first installment of the six part public lecture series, not on the test. The pleasures and uses [00:26:00] of mathematics will be held this September 11th past spectrum guests, Tony de Rose, a senior scientist and leader of the research group at Pixar animation studios presented a lecture on the use of mathematics in the making of Pixars animated films. Pixar animation is done entirely by computer and Dr. Rose will demonstrate how math and science helped create these stunning visuals in each Pixar film and explain the underlying computer technology, physics, geometry, and applied mathematics that made these pictures possible. [00:26:30] The lecture will be held on September 11th at 7:00 PM in the Berkeley City College Auditorium located at 2050 Center street in Berkeley. The rent is free and open to the public Speaker 7: this month. Science neat is on Tuesday the 17th the topic is fun guy here talks about mushrooms and bring your own mushrooms to have my colleges. Chris Green help you identify them. Science need is a monthly science happy hour for those 21 and over at El Rio bar [00:27:00] three one five eight mission street in San Francisco. Admission is $4 Speaker 3: here at spectrum. We'd like to share our favorite science stories with you. Rick Kaneski joins me for presenting the news. Speaker 7: Nature news reports that several journals have been caught in a scheme to artificially inflate their impact factors by strongly encouraging citations to other journals that were in on the scheme. The impact factor of journals is a measure of the average number of citations to recent articles [00:27:30] and is often used to compare the relative importance of a journal to the field. That is general is with higher impact factors are generally thought of more favorably than lower impact journals. The factors are calculated by Thomson Reuters, the company responsible for both end note citation software and the web of science literature database. Well, self citations have been caught in the past weeding out this collaborative gaming of the system is difficult and it can be costly for those journals [00:28:00] caught Thomson Reuters has suspended the impact factors of 0.6% of the more than 10,000 journals. They index a record percentage. In some cases, editors have been fired in others. Articles published in the suspended journals will not contribute to the rankings of universities responsible for them. Speaker 3: According to a UC Berkeley study published in the Journal proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, blocking a certain enzyme can dramatically slow the ability of tumor cells [00:28:30] to multiply and spread to other tissues. Scientists have long observed that cancer cells metabolize lipids in particular ester lipids at higher rates than normal cells. The UC Berkeley team in activated a certain enzyme known as LPL glycerol phosphate synthase, or a gps that is critical to lipid formation and human breasts and skin cancer cells knocking out the enzymes, significantly reduced tumor growth and movement. The inhibitor has also been [00:29:00] tested in live mice, injected with Kansas owls too, promising results. While other studies have examined specific lipids, a gps appears to regulate a much broader portion of tumor growth and malignancy. Next steps will include developing a cancer therapy based on the age gps inhibitors. Speaker 5: Mm. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. We'd also like to thank Patrick Bower [00:29:30] first assistance during the interview. Thank you for listening to spectrum. Join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire Kremen and Alastair Iles of ESPM at UC Berkeley, who ran the Berkeley Center for Diversified Farming. Next on their agenda is the Berkeley Food Institute, which will include College of Natural Resources, Goldman School of Public Policy, School of Journalism, Berkeley Law and School of Public Health.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Our guest today, our professor Claire Kremen and Assistant Professor Allister isles in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and management at the University of California Berkeley. Claire Carmen focuses her research on conservation, biology and biodiversity. [00:01:00] Allister isles focuses his research on the intersections of science, technology, and environment that contribute to public policy, community welfare, environmental justice, and increased democracy and societal governance. Brad swift interviews the pair about their time as faculty directors of the Berkeley Center for diversified farming and the recent launch of the Berkeley Food Institute. This ambitious enterprise is a collaboration between the College of natural resources, the Goldman School of public policy, the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, [00:01:30] Berkeley Law School, and the school of public health. Allister isles is hearing impaired, so phd candidate Patrick Bower will be reading Alistair's answers during this interview. Speaker 4: In today's interview we have three folks, Claire, Carmen, Allister isles and Patrick Bower. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you and a nod from Allister. I want to ask each of you, how were you drawn [00:02:00] to the study of sustainability and diversified farming Speaker 1: on native bees and how they contribute to crop pollination in California and it was really through my study of the bees and particularly of how bees respond to agriculture that I got interested in farming and that my eyes got opened to how unsustainable our current farming system is, particularly with its heavy reliance on monoculture. Speaker 4: [00:02:30] My background is in environmental policies and I've mostly worked on industrial chemical issues for a long time. I've also researched the consumption side of food starting with sustainable seafood. About three years ago, Claire was running a series of round tables on diversified farming systems and by a chance at a faculty lunch, she invited me to participate. I wasn't sure what it was all about, but I enjoyed learning about ecosystem services. I realized that agriculture has a major role to play. I'm making the planet more in the face [00:03:00] of many 21st century environmental dangers like climate change. Trying to change consumer behavior isn't going to be enough to achieve greater sustainability. We need to cover the whole food system and to find new connections across each part, so that's why I moved much more upstream into agriculture. Talk about the new Berkeley Food Institute that you've formed a cow. Speaker 4: How did it get started and what are its goals? We began with [00:03:30] a round table series on diversified farming systems or DFS about three years ago. I can't believe how far we've already come since then. The series was based on a seed grant from the Berkeley Institute of Environment. It had monthly meetings and spent an enormous range of topics from conservation, biology, consumer behavior, the health effects of pesticides on farm workers to policies for promoting DFS. At first, we weren't sure what our goals were. We had a vague idea that the round [00:04:00] table might evolve into a more institutionalized forum. Claire wanted to co-write a paper covering the results of the round tables, but it quickly became obvious that it was such a large topic that we needed a whole special issue. Do you even do justice to the topics? Fortunately we were able to persuade the ecology and society journal to accept our specialists. You plan. It was a lengthy process of assembling the various papers as students are coauthors on most of the papers. We believe strongly in promoting student research and Claire and I wanted [00:04:30] to institutionalize the round tables and that is how we can see to the DFS center. We realized that we couldn't manage all this new growth without hiring an executive director, which meant that we needed to start raising funds Speaker 1: and as we started looking into funding for the center for diversified farming and as we engaged both with donors and also with the top levels of the College of natural resources administration, it became clear that there was actually an opportunity to do something much bigger and much more far reaching [00:05:00] by partnering with the schools of journalism and of public policy. And that's because it's not sufficient to conduct the research that demonstrates the social and environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture or diversified farming systems. You really have to get the word out to a large public and you have to be able to influence key decision makers. So it makes a lot of sense for us to be partnering with journalism and Public Policy. Later on in the institutes development we also were joined [00:05:30] by other key actors, specifically the schools of public health and also the school of law. Speaker 1: So the goal of the institute is really a lofty one. We want nothing less than to be able through research teaching and outreach to be able to actually transform our current food system to one that is far more resilient, far more healthy and far more just how is the institute funded. We're funded this point by private individuals and also by family foundations [00:06:00] are their undergraduate and graduate degree programs within the institute? Not yet, but we are contemplating creating something called a designated emphasis for graduate students, which means several different departments combined together and create an additional degree program that graduate students can go through and we're also beginning to assess whether an undergraduate major makes sense. The first step we're taking already is to conduct an inventory of what's already [00:06:30] available on campus. There are quite a few different faculty that are already teaching courses related to the food system and so we're identifying all of these so that students can have access to this information. Those who are already interested in this Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Our guest today on Spec gem are Claire Allister Isles. In the next segment they talk about impediments to sustainable farming. Is k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: [00:07:00] What sort of collaborations will you be trying to foster with the institute? One of the key actions that the new institute will emphasize is nurturing new research and policy collaborations between faculty and students. Many parts of the food system are balkanized. They're divided up from each other and seldom communicate across disciplinary industry or supply chain segment lines. For example, urban agriculture policy makers might not think much about the sorts of foods [00:07:30] that city gardens are providing to poor minority neighborhoods. What we hope for is a set of collaborations that will cross disciplinary lines and that will address research topics that aren't being done but they could help bring about positive changes in the food system. Another thing that we are eager to look into is helping foster stronger connections with off campus actors such as farmers, food worker unions, government agencies and Bay area communities. This is where this would help inform the research being done on campus and where it might help enhance the ability [00:08:00] of these actors to work toward the transformation of the food system that Claire talked about. Some of our faculty already have off campus partners that they run research projects with citizen science or working with lay people and helping generate new science will likely be an important element, but not the only one. How directly will the institute be involved in actual farming or working directly with farmers? Speaker 1: We will definitely include growers on our advisory board and [00:08:30] also some faculty actually work with growers. For example, my work is all on farms owned by real people and so I work with growers on the kinds of experiments we're going to do and also on sometimes on land management that they're doing on their land. Speaker 4: What do you see as the impediments to the broad practice of sustainable agriculture and how can research and education help the impediments to sustainable agriculture legion? The most important impediment is arguably [00:09:00] the industrialized food system that we currently live in. The system is based on farming methods that include monoculture farming, the pervasive use of chemical and fossil fuel inputs, and an emphasis on increasing yields to the exclusion of other outcomes. The system is so entrenched that everyone who grows processes and eats food is caught in it. One example of how the industrial system discourages sustainable farming is the artificially cheap price of foods the food industry can externalize most environmental and social costs of producing food [00:09:30] by displacing these into farming communities, consumers and ecosystems. Public policies can Ivan this by promoting inappropriate subsidies for commodity crops and not properly funding conservation measures on farmland. Speaker 4: In turn, many farmers are trapped within a production structure or they have little room to adopt sustainable farming methods. They may have to comply with supply chain pressures such as contract farming that prescribes exactly what they should do on the farm or the rapid growth and market power of the agrifood corporations. [00:10:00] For decades, farmers have been struggling with the technological treadmill or they're obliged to adopt technological innovations such as pesticides and now GM seeds to be able to maintain their yields and cost structures in order to compete with other farmers doing likewise. Conversely, it can be very challenging for farmers to move to more sustainable methods. It is risky for farmers to try something new that they aren't familiar with and that requires them to develop new skills and knowledge. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of farmers in the u s [00:10:30] and there has been a trend of fewer new farmers entering the sector. On the positive side. These new entrants are more likely to use sustainable farming methods because they've been trained differently. Speaker 1: I think the broadest impediments are some aspects of our regulatory system and also market forces that encourage economies of scale sort of thing that make farmers have to get big or get out. For example, on the regulatory side, this new food safety modernization act is something that's going to impose [00:11:00] a lot of regulations on growers and that can actually disadvantage small growers. And sometimes it's the small growers that are the ones that are practicing more sustainable or more diversified forms of agriculture. But with this new food safety modernization act, they just might not be able to stay in business any longer. So the critical research that we need to do is to document the benefits and the costs and also the trade offs of different approaches. We need to be able to show what these benefits are so that we can hopefully have an influence [00:11:30] on some of the regulations. Speaker 6: Oh, you are listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guests today are Claire Kremen and Alister aisles. Patrick Bower will be reading out and styles and series Alistair's hearing impaired. In the next segment, they talk about how they analyze farming. Oh, okay. Speaker 4: Would you explain [00:12:00] how you analyze an agricultural system for sustainability? Speaker 1: From an ecological perspective? What I find helpful is the concept of an agriculture that is regenerative. What that means, it's an agriculture that demands few external inputs and creates few wastes. Instead it tends to use the waste products that are produced in the production cycle as inputs, so for example, by composting waste materials or by integrating animals back onto the farm, growers can build soils. [00:12:30] These wells are then able to store water much more effectively protecting against droughts and they can also require, in that case, less water from external sources. Also, these oils can trap and filter nutrients leading to less nutrient waste and less pollution off site, and then such soils are also much more productive so they can lead to greater yields, so it's really a win, win, win, win. I can't really see any downside to farming like that. Speaker 4: In terms of the social and economic components [00:13:00] of an agricultural system, there are many possible measures that we could use. Social scientists have looked at measures such as the justice that is embodied in the system. That is as the agricultural system assuring justice for all the workers, growers in communities across the system. This justice could take the form of fair worker treatment such as paying farm workers better wages and preventing adverse health effects like heatstroke. It could also be limiting the exposures of farm workers in rural communities to pesticides. [00:13:30] Another measure is food security or the ability of consumers and communities, especially poor and minority people to gain access to enough nutritious and healthy foods to feed themselves. In the u s there are at least 40 million people who depend on food stamps to supplement their diets. Yet these people may not be able to afford healthy, sustainably produced foods. Speaker 4: Yet another measure is whether farmers able to sustain themselves through their work or whether they fall into greater debt to be able to stay in farming at all. Many [00:14:00] NGOs and food movements such as the food sovereignty movement would argue that the ability of farmers and communities to decide on what sorts of foods they want to produce and eat isn't an important outcome in and of itself. How has the understanding and measurement of sustainability changed over the years? You have studied it. Social scientists have only been thinking about sustainability for a fairly short time since about the early 1990s sustainable development as a discourse [00:14:30] first began developing in the late 1980s with the Brundtland Commission's report. Initially, social scientists were focused more on the rural sociology of agricultural production. They looked at issues in isolation and emphasized farmers only, but as more researchers began to enter the sustainability field, the focus shifted to thinking more holistically. They started to look at food supply Speaker 7: chains and commodities and how these shape the sustainability of farming. Researchers also began looking at how communities were defining sustainability [00:15:00] in their own terms. In 2000 Jack Kloppenburg led a very interesting study that surveyed a set of rural and urban communities for the sorts of words they would use to describe sustainability. More recently, social scientists have looked at how ecological and social sustainability are closely interconnected. Some of the most exciting new work is looking at the concept of socio ecological systems or how farmers are actively shaping farming landscapes and vice versa. Speaker 8: [00:15:30] Are there estimates or models that show the reductions in greenhouse gas that could be achieved in the conversion from industrial monoculture agriculture to sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: This is actually something that's fairly well known. The production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is a really energy intensive process and so where it has been looked at, when people compare organic agriculture that avoids using those chemicals with conventional agriculture, organic agriculture [00:16:00] usually stacks up much better as far as greenhouse gas emissions, and this is true even though often organic growers have to perhaps use more fuel to do more cultivation practices on their lands, but it balances out because they're not using these energy intensively produced chemicals. Speaker 8: Biofuels were thought to be a sustainable source of energy and an enormous boost for agriculture as well. What are your thoughts on biofuels? Speaker 7: I've been looking [00:16:30] at the environmental and social effects of biofuels in the u s and Brazil for a few years now. Some years ago, biofuels were seen as a very promising technology that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in 2008 and a scientists called Tim searching gear sparked off a long debate about whether biofuels actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the overall picture. Some biofuels can actually lead to increased emissions because their production involves a direct or indirect cutting down forests to clear land for agriculture, which results in carbon [00:17:00] dioxide release. The upshot is that governments and NGOs now see biofuels much more skeptically. I think this is a positive development rather than uncritically embracing biofuels as a new development pathway. At the same time, the debate has now swung so much that people often don't distinguish between different types of biofuels. Biofuels are actually very diverse in their feedstock and production methods. Speaker 7: Most of the bad press is around corn ethanol in the u s and I think it's justified because as Michael Pollan, [00:17:30] for example, has written about the corn industry has created countless environmental problems, but there are what we call cellulosic feedstocks, grasses, agricultural crop, leftovers and trees and principle. We can have diversified farming systems that include these sorts of cellulosic crops as part of a fully integrated and diversified rather than having a few larger farmers and agrifood businesses dominate corn ethanol and thereby the biofuels industry. We could alternatively have many smaller farmers produce [00:18:00] grasses. For example. This is something that the new institute may look at. The challenge however is that cellulosic ethanol could easily succumb to the same industrialized monoculture model models we see for corn. So policy will have a very important role in the next decade and helping decide whether this will happen or not. Speaker 6: [inaudible] spectrum is a public affairs show. Hey Alex Berkley, our guests are clear come in and Allister isles, [00:18:30] they're starting the Berkeley food institute this fall and the next thing they talk about the scalability of sustainable farming and its impact on rural communities. Speaker 7: From your experience, what is the scale range of farms doing sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: Even large scale farms are starting to incorporate sustainability practices into their businesses, which is really exciting, but it's a question whether they're truly sustainable. [00:19:00] As an ecologist, I don't believe that the practice of monoculture is compatible with sustainability. To have sustainability. We need more diverse farming systems when we have these diverse farming systems that can reduce the need for off farm inputs and also generate fewer ways. A good example of this is going back to pesticides and monoculture. When a grower grows a monoculture, they're pretty much forced to use pesticides. When you think about it, they're planting [00:19:30] a huge expanse of the same thing and it's kind of like laying out a feast for a pest species that can just go and rampage through that. And at the same time they've also eradicated the habitat that would have promoted the natural enemies that could've kept that past in check. Speaker 1: So then they really have no other recourse. They have to use pesticides and as I already noted, these take a great deal of energy to produce the results in greenhouse gas emissions. They pollute the surrounding environment. They can lead to unintended loss of biodiversity, of [00:20:00] non target insects. Also both subtle and not so subtle impacts on human health. When we do that, we can't really have a sustainable system, but on the other hand, we shouldn't conflate the practice of monoculture with scale because smaller farms can also practice monoculture and do sometimes practice monoculture and at the same time, perhaps larger farms can practice really diversified agriculture. It's not what I would think of as typical, but that doesn't mean it's impossible and I think it's important that we not limit [00:20:30] our imagination. We'd be able to imagine that a really large farm could be diverse, could be sustainable. Why not? Speaker 7: Does sustainability in any way limit the scale that can be achieved? Speaker 1: Well, I think it's an excellent question and we don't really have the answer to it. If we just look at what's out there, it seems like if you're at a larger scale, maybe that's going to be less sustainable in some ways, but it might be more sustainable in some other ways. There's certainly a relationship between scale ins and sustainability. If [00:21:00] we just look out at what's happening now, there can be unexpected twists. For example, very large companies may be able to develop sustainable practices of certain types such as efficiencies in distribution that small companies can't. On the other hand, smaller farms or companies might be better able to create the ecological complexity that we think is required to engender sustainable processes on farms. Also, when we think about it, some of these limits if do exist to creating sustainable systems [00:21:30] might relate not to biophysical limits, but to institutional arrangements or governance structures, business plans, et cetera. And again, they might be failures of our imagination to conceive of a better way of doing things. So I think it's really an excellent research topic. We need to study the successful models that exist out there at various scales and try to learn from them. Speaker 7: Are there studies that show the impact of sustainable agriculture on rural societies and economies and Willy Institute [00:22:00] undertake work in this area? Frankly, we don't really know what the answers may be. This is because there've been very few systemic studies done of the ways in which sustainable agriculture might benefit rural areas. And the 1940s a UC researcher called Walter Goldschmidt did a very important study and compared to rural towns in California that deferred in the degree of diversified farming and the degree to which they relied on industrialized farming methods. The town that you used more diversified from methods [00:22:30] showed significant gains of social and economic outcomes such as employment and community cohesiveness compared to the more industrialized town. Unfortunately, this sorta study hasn't been done. Again, as far as we are aware, thus the priority of the new institute will be to help sponsor a collaborative research project that updates this research and uses the tools and data that we now have to appraise whether and how diversified farming can provide greater benefits compared to the existing system. Speaker 7: What do you feel [00:23:00] are the best ways to encourage and enable young people to pursue farming? One of the most challenging obstacles we face in the food system today is that there is a rapidly aging farmer workforce. The average age of farmers in the U S is about 57 years, which is something you see in other industrial countries as well. There are widespread perceptions of farming as an acronystic and tedious. Many commentators think that many young people are unenthusiastic [00:23:30] about taking up farming for this reason. Farming is in the past. Therefore, one argument goes, we should invest more and more in labor saving technology to help offset the fact that fewer young people are entering farming in Australia. Where I come from, I heard about a farmer recently who just installed a $400,000 robotic system to milk cows. I don't agree with this sort of argument. To the contrary. Speaker 7: We are seeing a good number of young people take up farming in [00:24:00] both rural and especially urban areas. Farming seems to be a way to reconnect these people with a more sensory and experience rich life. There are tens of farmers schools that are developed across the countries such as the Alba Center near Salinas, where immigrant workers learn to be farmers and are given some support for entering the sector. This is one very powerful way to help new farmers provide training programs to help equip them for actual production, but they then face enormous problems and even getting a [00:24:30] toehold on the farming landscape because land can be very costly and very scarce. So they need financial help like loans and grants to sustain their first few years. At least. There's a new farmer network that has been pushing for bill and Congress to create this new institutional base, but unfortunately, so far it's not been very successful. Speaker 6: A big thanks to Claire Kremen at Alster Isles [00:25:00] for coming on to spectrum. I'll pass. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes. You we've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few of the signs of technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. We kind of ski and I present the calendar. Speaker 3: On September 8th the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden will be hosting a workshop led by author [00:25:30] Amy Stewart, who wrote the drunken botanist, the plants that create the world's greatest strengths, a book that details the leaves, bark seeds, roots, flowers and fruit around the world that humans have contrived to turn into alcohol. Stuart will lead a walk through the garden to look at some of the typical plants that have been used throughout the ages. The workshop will be held in the garden from three to 6:00 PM on September 8th the first installment of the six part public lecture series, not on the test. The pleasures and uses [00:26:00] of mathematics will be held this September 11th past spectrum guests, Tony de Rose, a senior scientist and leader of the research group at Pixar animation studios presented a lecture on the use of mathematics in the making of Pixars animated films. Pixar animation is done entirely by computer and Dr. Rose will demonstrate how math and science helped create these stunning visuals in each Pixar film and explain the underlying computer technology, physics, geometry, and applied mathematics that made these pictures possible. [00:26:30] The lecture will be held on September 11th at 7:00 PM in the Berkeley City College Auditorium located at 2050 Center street in Berkeley. The rent is free and open to the public Speaker 7: this month. Science neat is on Tuesday the 17th the topic is fun guy here talks about mushrooms and bring your own mushrooms to have my colleges. Chris Green help you identify them. Science need is a monthly science happy hour for those 21 and over at El Rio bar [00:27:00] three one five eight mission street in San Francisco. Admission is $4 Speaker 3: here at spectrum. We'd like to share our favorite science stories with you. Rick Kaneski joins me for presenting the news. Speaker 7: Nature news reports that several journals have been caught in a scheme to artificially inflate their impact factors by strongly encouraging citations to other journals that were in on the scheme. The impact factor of journals is a measure of the average number of citations to recent articles [00:27:30] and is often used to compare the relative importance of a journal to the field. That is general is with higher impact factors are generally thought of more favorably than lower impact journals. The factors are calculated by Thomson Reuters, the company responsible for both end note citation software and the web of science literature database. Well, self citations have been caught in the past weeding out this collaborative gaming of the system is difficult and it can be costly for those journals [00:28:00] caught Thomson Reuters has suspended the impact factors of 0.6% of the more than 10,000 journals. They index a record percentage. In some cases, editors have been fired in others. Articles published in the suspended journals will not contribute to the rankings of universities responsible for them. Speaker 3: According to a UC Berkeley study published in the Journal proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, blocking a certain enzyme can dramatically slow the ability of tumor cells [00:28:30] to multiply and spread to other tissues. Scientists have long observed that cancer cells metabolize lipids in particular ester lipids at higher rates than normal cells. The UC Berkeley team in activated a certain enzyme known as LPL glycerol phosphate synthase, or a gps that is critical to lipid formation and human breasts and skin cancer cells knocking out the enzymes, significantly reduced tumor growth and movement. The inhibitor has also been [00:29:00] tested in live mice, injected with Kansas owls too, promising results. While other studies have examined specific lipids, a gps appears to regulate a much broader portion of tumor growth and malignancy. Next steps will include developing a cancer therapy based on the age gps inhibitors. Speaker 5: Mm. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. We'd also like to thank Patrick Bower [00:29:30] first assistance during the interview. Thank you for listening to spectrum. Join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dale McCollough of UCB and Wayne Linklater of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand discuss a survey of wild animals in El Cerrito and Kensington, CA that McCullough and K. Jennings did in 1995 and 98. Linklater and J. Benson repeated the survey in 2010.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible].Speaker 2: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with news events and interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. My name is Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Dale McCullough and Wayne Linklater. They're both researchers of large wild mammals. Del Macola is a professor Ameritas at the environmental science and Policy Management Department of the College [00:01:00] of natural resources at UC Berkeley. Wayne link ladder is a senior lecturer in the school of biological sciences at Victoria, University of Wellington in New Zealand. We talk about their research in wild animals in urban settings, specifically a survey of deer and other wild animals in El Sorito and Kensington, the Dale Macola and Kathleen Jennings first completed in 1995 and again in 1998 Wayne link ladder [00:01:30] and Jeffrey Benson repeated the survey in 2010 a summary report of the surveys can be downloaded from Wayne's website. Wayne's website address is really long, so if you would like it, send us an email and we'll pass it along to you. Our address is spectrum dot k a l ex@yahoo.com. This interview is prerecorded and edited. Speaker 3: We're joined by Dale McCullough and Wayne Linklater. [00:02:00] And Dale, why don't you tell us about yourself and where you're currently positioned at UC? I know that you're a professor Ameritus, which is Speaker 4: Professor Ameritus. Yes. Which means I am retired and ordinary person's language and I retired in 2004. Most of the things I did at UC Berkeley had have wound down and hadn't been done. But I've continued to do research on several projects that I've been interested in. So I'm have been [00:02:30] continuing research on Kangaroos and outback Australia and leopards and tigers and far east Russia and seek a deer throughout Southeast Asia. Speaker 3: Great. And Wayne? Well, I'm a wildlife biologist from New Zealand, from Victoria University, in fact that the, it's quite a handle, but at the scene provide a of est in restoration ecology at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and like daylight. My history is full of work on, on large mammals to [00:03:00] exciting places and phd students working in Malaysia and India on elephants and in, uh, South Africa. On Rhinoceros. What brings me here is my growing interest in the relationships between people and Wildlife, which is why I came and did a sabbatical here for six months in 2008, 2009 the year in which we replicated, um, some work that we'd done in Wellington looking at people's relationships with wildlife in their backyard. [00:03:30] So is that when you and Dale hooked up on this wildlife survey that you've done in the El Cerrito and Kensington hills or just, I guess it's the entire, it's all of Kensington and all of El Sorito. That's right, yes. What happened was that Dale pointed out a phd thesis to me from Kathleen Genie and it immediately put to my interest, I contacted Kathleen and she had done the survey in the mid 1990s with Dale's a advice [00:04:00] and I saw a really quite exciting opportunity to replicate their work 10 years later. But Dale knows better how that Sioux, they evolved in the first place. Speaker 4: Yeah. It happened sort of accidentally in the deer population and in the East Bay was building up and becoming a problem and people were going to city councils and places like that and complaining and I live in Kensington and [00:04:30] the deer, my neighborhood had gone up so I could are going to have dinner and sit out on the deck in the evening and guarantee that there'd be going up and down the street. And then I thought, well, Geez, here I get on airplanes and fly off to Japan and Taiwan and Vietnam and so on to, to study there and I don't even know what these deer out in my street are doing. And so I decided, well, we better do a biological study of them to find out how they are behaving in the urban area [00:05:00] and how that compares with what they do in the wild. Speaker 4: And so we started, started out with the, uh, survey to get some sort of background. It's, it's hard to apply a lot of the methods that we use in the wild to an urban situation because the high density of people and particularly in, in, uh, in places like Kensington and El Serita where the traditional law is very small and houses very big. That was the motivation. And so we did the, uh, [00:05:30] the first survey, um, on a random systematic random sample. So it covered a certain area, these two cities. And uh, and then we repeated it in 1998 because we, from our work, we're seeing something of a decline in the number of deer. And we wanted to see if that was what was happening across these, these two, uh, communities. And in general, it was [00:06:00] a lot, it was mainly in the areas on the higher parts of the hill. And just to sort of anticipate the deer continued to go down and were low levels. And one of the things that is peaked our interest recently is there is evidence that the deer are starting to build up again. And so Wayne's interest fit right into, well if we're going to have another in increase in deer [00:06:30] then it would be really good to be able to document that. And so, um, the, the, the timing from my point of view was perfect. Speaker 3: And Wayne, with your current survey, you're picking up the laurels of this, uh, this research and so I don't have, we don't have the facility to repeat the biology on the ground and unfortunately we'd love to but we don't. But what we can do is a use this EC ground information already gathered by Kathleen Jennings [00:07:00] and Dale to look at with the pictures changed for the people in the 10 12 years since the last survey in 1998 and in particular, I'm very interested in as a seed the relationship between people and wildlife and what does, what replicating a survey like this enables us to do is to try and build a relationship or understand the relationship between people's beliefs or attitudes about wildlife in this case, deer and [00:07:30] the presence of dia themselves and how that changes over time. The reason we're interested in that is because these days when it comes to managing wildlife, understanding how to manage the problem with wildlife, data's the people in the equation is becoming more important. Speaker 3: So it's very important to understand how are people's attitudes and beliefs change? How dynamic are they to external influences like the density of d or or, [00:08:00] or um, experience and uh, so living around the deer that's right for a longer period of time, increased tolerance or not oh, not and actually understanding that that dynamic is important for managers who need to prioritize in a landscape that's full of people whose, uh, relationship with a deer is variously extremely negative to extremely positive. It's a very challenging environment to work in. I mean, he manages to, they hear out at the sort of problem, but if we [00:08:30] could add a social dimension to this map wildlife management problem, we might be some of the wider, resolving some of those issues. I think. Is there any way within the survey to try to take account of the management of the area? Is there an overlaid management in the El Sorito Kensington area or is there really no public policy or is and, Speaker 4: uh, a management system in most, I mean, you know, the, the way deer populations are traditionally controlled [00:09:00] is through hunting. And obviously you can't have hunting in this situation, but in places like Kensington and El Serita, you just, you can take an animal maybe under extraordinary circumstances, but the hazard is just too great. Speaker 3: Well, does, does trapping become a solution or is that Speaker 4: it's very, very expensive and hard to do and people think contraception, well again, if you have animals in captivity or that sort [00:09:30] of thing, contraception works great, but unfree and roaming animals is very expensive. It just won't work. So literally there is no, no good solution. And you know, again, to refer to the Monterey Peninsula where we have this longer record, people get excited, you know, and they, they finally get enough information to see that there's really not much that can be done. And by that time the deer start going down on their own and people forget [00:10:00] about the problem and 15 years later Speaker 3: back comes back again. Yeah. One of the other interesting parts of that original survey too was that all day the deer at concentrated toward the upland, the penetration to the El Sorito down near the bat, it's actually quite deep. Although in low numbers they actually get right down there and to very high density, high traffic areas. Basically they go down pillars Speaker 4: too much concrete, you know, and not enough deer habitat. Right. But if there's any [00:10:30] residential neighborhood with the typical local gardens and some on their there, they were on Albany Hill. Yeah, they went clear down to the bay. Were any place that there was suitable habitat that they were there? Yeah. Speaker 3: And Wayne would the current survey and then hopefully you're going to try to continue this project. Do you need to get funding for it or how will you maintain? Well, fortunately the sort of work doesn't require large amounts of funding. I shouldn't say that publicly [00:11:00] because of course we're always after funding, but, but unfortunately, this sort of work can be data rich without large amounts of funding because we were primarily interested in people's observations and their opinions. And in a topic like this, uh, people are actually very forthcoming and very helpful for some reason. Uh, most sorts of surveys have very low response rate. So I think people fear, feel harassed and harried by surveys, political surveys, commercial surveys. But [00:11:30] when it comes to wildlife, the seems to attract people's interest and, and, um, most everyone has an opinion on wildlife in their, in their locality. Speaker 3: And so fortunately, uh, we get very high response rates, which we're very grateful for for the sort of survey. So, um, the resources required to undertake a survey, a fairly rudimentary, which actually makes it possible to do this sort of work over the long term with some confidence. So I, I think depending on the outcomes of this one, [00:12:00] we'll almost certainly repeat it. I'd be very interested in knowing how our, uh, deer and other wildlife disperse through this landscape. What are the barriers and triggers to that widespread movement? I suspect that there are elements of the urban landscape that actually landscape architects and urban designers plan for other reasons. The deer and other wildlife I find very useful for moving about the landscape. [00:12:30] These corridors that I mentioned, for example, when people count sell land anymore under [inaudible]. So, uh, electric was our, um, these, these, my function is very important corridors for wildlife movement through the landscape, uh, in fact may be making the urban landscape much more permeable than it used to be. Speaker 5: [inaudible] [00:13:00] you're listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Today we're talking with Wayne Linklater and Dale Macola about wild animals, urban sentence. [inaudible] Speaker 4: so you're really focused on deer because they were the past, so to speak. Well, that's what we focused [00:13:30] on, but you know, rod also keeping a very pretty close watch on what was going on with pay odis because they were one of the predators. And again, I'm not familiar with what coyotes are doing right now, but they were coming down through that Mosher corridor clear down to the middle school down there. Uh, and, uh, you know, we had some evidence that mountain lines were, you know, on the verge of coming in one case where it probably [00:14:00] was a mountain lion, it came down below Arlington Avenue and of course a that recent mountain lion, you know, Jason White, Shaddock Shaddock Avenue, I think Shotokan Cedar. And uh, so it's a problem with the disparate young dispersing animals meanly. You know, these aren't mountain lions that have territories that overlap. It. Speaker 4: It usually when we see animals like that, they're, they're young [00:14:30] animals that are dispersing and trying to find a territory where they can, they can live. And I, and of course these, uh, sere make awfully good meals and of course we worry about an attack on a person. You know, that, right? That's the, the big concern because it, in each case, the probability is very, very low, but enough cases and then, you know, eventually will become inevitable that there [00:15:00] will be some attack and then all the wheels will come off because there would be zero tolerance for that. So then that would reintroduce hunting. Well you can't hunt here. So it would be hard to do any kind of control. That's what makes this so difficult is uh, the, the sort of example we have is down, uh, on the Monterey peninsula where the deer have periodically [00:15:30] gone up and gone down again for reasons that we don't really understand. Speaker 4: We know it's not direct mortality, it's failure and success of reproduction, not the attempt to reproduce, but that the fond doesn't survive for reasons that we don't understand, but they've gone up and down on like a 15 to 18 year time period. So my [00:16:00] expectation is that these deer may show some sort of similar pattern. Eventually we may figure out why. And like I say, just over the last year or so, there are the signs that the deer are starting to come up. So peaked in 1995 already started going down. They went down very, very gradually. Our radio collared animals, you know, live, normal lifespans and very gradually disappeared just like [00:16:30] you would, you would expect. What is that life span? How long? Well, the urban area, uh, the equivalent of 70 would probably be about 12 or 13 years for deer and, but you know, some humans live to be a hundred, so occasionally you're gonna probably get a 16 or 17 year old, uh, deer. And then again in the urban area where the hazards aren't that great. Interestingly, the animal that was the radio animal that [00:17:00] we had that lived along this time died in a yard right across the street from the yard where we captured it. Speaker 4: You could easily toss the rock, the spot where we captured it to where it went to its final resting. It goes back to that really small range that you were talking about in hotspots for food because of gardening and also fruit trees, [00:17:30] which isn't major attracted when, when there's fruit in the falls. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Today we're talking with [inaudible] and Dale McCullough about wild animals and urban sex. [inaudible] Speaker 4: [00:18:00] just, uh, you know, just the recent illustration of what we're talking about, who I know, the biology of the animals, they, uh, have had some problems with deer attacks, quote on people. Also down near the the food ghetto. I was contacted indirectly by one of the graduate students in, in the [00:18:30] department here who is working with, uh, a city official on that. And I said, well, I don't, I don't know what's going on, but my guess is that people are walking dogs and it's females with Fonz that are attacking because in the wild they recognize that dog is a coyote or so on. Well, it turns out that is exactly what the situation was when they talked about it a bit. But see, just having that little [00:19:00] clue about, you know, the biology of the animal and how those interactions work puts that whole problem into a different context. Speaker 3: Piece of information. Like that immediately informs because suddenly the options are a, the biological control of her mother, Dia. But also this becomes an information management problem, doesn't it? Because for most people, when they understand that the steer is acting in defense, they'll change the [00:19:30] behavior, but that information becomes a way of managing the problem by changing people's behavior rather than potentially the cost of managing a deer population. Right. Wildlife feeding is a classic example of this, isn't it? Where in places where the feeding of wildlife becomes a problem, the wildlife come in, they come in at last dean's states, they lose their fear of people. They immediately become more dangerous. Just that piece of information [00:20:00] and some sort of social marketing campaign to inform people that actually the magnitude of the problem, that feeling causes is sometimes often enough, enough to reduce the magnitude of the problem. People change their behavior. It also empowers people and it empowers management agencies in ways that other sorts of solutions, which grant all sorts of controls. He don't [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Yeah. The thing is it, it sensitizes people. So if you say you shouldn't be feeding them, you shouldn't be taming them. That's dangerous. [00:20:30] You should be a little afraid of the deer and the deer should be a little afraid of you. And then there are homeless nerve problems. But if the deer totally becomes on afraid, that's when the problem comes in. And most wildlife problems are of that kind. So like where there've been cases, coyotes if attack children, it's in cases where people have been feeding them, they've completely lost their fear. And the other thing, as you can tell people, you should reinforce if, if you approach the deer [00:21:00] and, and they don't go, go away, you know, get your darn broom or whatever you have, you know, but just make that deer get outta there to establish the fact that it is still not running the place. [inaudible] Speaker 3: if we take a step back and, and think about, uh, relationships between wildlife and people in urban landscapes, one of the really interesting parts of that context to me is that this year the world's urban population just tipped 50%. [00:21:30] The world's population just took 50% of than most people in the world now live in urban areas. They live in, in areas which should depauperate of wildlife and wilderness. It's really interesting to me to try and understand what the implications of that are for the future of wildlife conservation and wilderness conservation. Because increasingly the world is going to depend on people making decisions who [00:22:00] no longer have contact with wilderness or wildlife anymore. The way that our grandparents did for instance, and other academics have talked about this idea of extinction of experience. So the voting populous in North America for instance, are going to be less and less ecologically or environmentally literate with time. The more open eyes they become, it makes you wonder, doesn't it? Hair important. Therefore, relationships with wildlife in urban areas might [00:22:30] become for facilitating this relationship with wilderness. So that's one of the things that gets me interested in in urban landscapes and these urban things like DNA. So let me just say thank you very much for your time in talking about this with us. You're most welcome Speaker 5: [inaudible] [00:23:00] [inaudible], Speaker 2: [00:23:30] a regular feature of spectrum's dimension, few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. The science at cow lecture for May is associate Professor Neil Seuss. We from the Department of Environmental Science Policy and management at the College of natural resources. The lecture will be May 21st at 11:00 AM in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 he will be talking about extreme sociality, super colonies of the invasive [00:24:00] Argentine ant with the end of the semester days away. Here's an on campus resource you may find helpful. Reuse. Reuse is a student run program dedicated to promoting the reuse of materials on the UC Berkeley campus. They promote reuse by providing spaces for the campus community to freely exchange reusable goods. The reuse stations consist of shelving units placed in buildings where campus members donate and pick up reusable materials [00:24:30] to learn where the stations are located. Visit their website, reuse.berkeley.edu for those with bigger items or specific needs. Speaker 2: Reuse now sponsors an online forum for exchanging things. The forum address is exchange.berkeley.edu you do need to have a berkeley.edu email address to use the forum Thursday May 12th his bike to work day at UC Berkeley on bike to work day. [00:25:00] UC Berkeley will host an energizer station in Sproul Plaza from 7:00 AM to 10:00 AM I have no idea what an energizer station is. If you have a bike and you need help fixing it or maintaining it, there are at least two groups on campus ready to help citizens cycle and by cy cow. Both have free sessions to repair bikes and hopefully teach you how to maintain your bike. Citizens Cycle has two free clinics a week in front of the East Asian library. The Monday clinic is held [00:25:30] from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM and the Friday clinic is from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM citizens cycle is a voluntary student group. Buy Cycle has free repair three days a week. Speaker 2: Monday 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM Wednesday 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM Friday 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM their website is buy-side cow, B I c y c a l.com. The free repair [00:26:00] sessions are held just behind the Golden Bear cafe at Sproul Plaza by cycle is a student funded cooperative. Two news items of note. This first news story was derived from the UC Berkeley News Center story by Sarah Yang in early April, 2011 energy secretary Steven Chu announced grants totaling 112 point $5 million of funding over five years to support the development of advanced solar photovoltaic [00:26:30] related manufacturing processes throughout the United States. The Energy Department's sunshot advanced manufacturing partnerships will help the solar power industry overcome technical barriers and reduce for photo-voltaic installations. A local outgrowth of this sunshot funding is the bay area photovoltaics consortium jointly led by the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University. The consortium will receive [00:27:00] $25 million spread over five years. Industry sources will provide $1 million annually to the consortium budget. Speaker 2: The Bay area photovoltaics consortium will fund competitive grants through a process open to all universities, national laboratories and research institutions. The consortium seeks to spur research and development of new materials and manufacturing processes that will cut the cost significantly, increased production volume and improve the performance [00:27:30] of solar cells and devices. Ali's Javi, UC Berkeley, associate professor of electrical engineering and co-director of the consortium addressed their goals by saying the cost of solar energy in 2010 was about $3 and 40 cents per watt of power installed. Our end goal is to decrease that cost to $1 per watt installed. Our collaboration with industry will be critical in achieving this goal. We are fortunate that the bay area is home to such a high density of photo-voltaic related [00:28:00] companies. Cal Green Fund grants for 2011 were announced at the eighth annual UC Berkeley Sustainability Summit. April 19th the grants were awarded to Christopher carbuncle at the UC botanical garden. Josh Mendell College of letters and science. Elizabeth Chan of the energy and Resources Class one nine zero any Gordon and Paris Yacht Chakrabarti at the UC Berkeley compost alliance and frank you [00:28:30] at UC residents hall assembly Speaker 5: [inaudible] can use occurred during the show is from an Austin, a David album titled Volker and [00:29:00] [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from our listeners. If you have comments about the show or we'd like to link to Wayne Linklater's website, which you can download the El Cerrito Kensington wild animal survey, send us an email or an email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com [00:29:30] join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dale McCollough of UCB and Wayne Linklater of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand discuss a survey of wild animals in El Cerrito and Kensington, CA that McCullough and K. Jennings did in 1995 and 98. Linklater and J. Benson repeated the survey in 2010.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible].Speaker 2: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with news events and interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. My name is Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Dale McCullough and Wayne Linklater. They're both researchers of large wild mammals. Del Macola is a professor Ameritas at the environmental science and Policy Management Department of the College [00:01:00] of natural resources at UC Berkeley. Wayne link ladder is a senior lecturer in the school of biological sciences at Victoria, University of Wellington in New Zealand. We talk about their research in wild animals in urban settings, specifically a survey of deer and other wild animals in El Sorito and Kensington, the Dale Macola and Kathleen Jennings first completed in 1995 and again in 1998 Wayne link ladder [00:01:30] and Jeffrey Benson repeated the survey in 2010 a summary report of the surveys can be downloaded from Wayne's website. Wayne's website address is really long, so if you would like it, send us an email and we'll pass it along to you. Our address is spectrum dot k a l ex@yahoo.com. This interview is prerecorded and edited. Speaker 3: We're joined by Dale McCullough and Wayne Linklater. [00:02:00] And Dale, why don't you tell us about yourself and where you're currently positioned at UC? I know that you're a professor Ameritus, which is Speaker 4: Professor Ameritus. Yes. Which means I am retired and ordinary person's language and I retired in 2004. Most of the things I did at UC Berkeley had have wound down and hadn't been done. But I've continued to do research on several projects that I've been interested in. So I'm have been [00:02:30] continuing research on Kangaroos and outback Australia and leopards and tigers and far east Russia and seek a deer throughout Southeast Asia. Speaker 3: Great. And Wayne? Well, I'm a wildlife biologist from New Zealand, from Victoria University, in fact that the, it's quite a handle, but at the scene provide a of est in restoration ecology at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and like daylight. My history is full of work on, on large mammals to [00:03:00] exciting places and phd students working in Malaysia and India on elephants and in, uh, South Africa. On Rhinoceros. What brings me here is my growing interest in the relationships between people and Wildlife, which is why I came and did a sabbatical here for six months in 2008, 2009 the year in which we replicated, um, some work that we'd done in Wellington looking at people's relationships with wildlife in their backyard. [00:03:30] So is that when you and Dale hooked up on this wildlife survey that you've done in the El Cerrito and Kensington hills or just, I guess it's the entire, it's all of Kensington and all of El Sorito. That's right, yes. What happened was that Dale pointed out a phd thesis to me from Kathleen Genie and it immediately put to my interest, I contacted Kathleen and she had done the survey in the mid 1990s with Dale's a advice [00:04:00] and I saw a really quite exciting opportunity to replicate their work 10 years later. But Dale knows better how that Sioux, they evolved in the first place. Speaker 4: Yeah. It happened sort of accidentally in the deer population and in the East Bay was building up and becoming a problem and people were going to city councils and places like that and complaining and I live in Kensington and [00:04:30] the deer, my neighborhood had gone up so I could are going to have dinner and sit out on the deck in the evening and guarantee that there'd be going up and down the street. And then I thought, well, Geez, here I get on airplanes and fly off to Japan and Taiwan and Vietnam and so on to, to study there and I don't even know what these deer out in my street are doing. And so I decided, well, we better do a biological study of them to find out how they are behaving in the urban area [00:05:00] and how that compares with what they do in the wild. Speaker 4: And so we started, started out with the, uh, survey to get some sort of background. It's, it's hard to apply a lot of the methods that we use in the wild to an urban situation because the high density of people and particularly in, in, uh, in places like Kensington and El Serita where the traditional law is very small and houses very big. That was the motivation. And so we did the, uh, [00:05:30] the first survey, um, on a random systematic random sample. So it covered a certain area, these two cities. And uh, and then we repeated it in 1998 because we, from our work, we're seeing something of a decline in the number of deer. And we wanted to see if that was what was happening across these, these two, uh, communities. And in general, it was [00:06:00] a lot, it was mainly in the areas on the higher parts of the hill. And just to sort of anticipate the deer continued to go down and were low levels. And one of the things that is peaked our interest recently is there is evidence that the deer are starting to build up again. And so Wayne's interest fit right into, well if we're going to have another in increase in deer [00:06:30] then it would be really good to be able to document that. And so, um, the, the, the timing from my point of view was perfect. Speaker 3: And Wayne, with your current survey, you're picking up the laurels of this, uh, this research and so I don't have, we don't have the facility to repeat the biology on the ground and unfortunately we'd love to but we don't. But what we can do is a use this EC ground information already gathered by Kathleen Jennings [00:07:00] and Dale to look at with the pictures changed for the people in the 10 12 years since the last survey in 1998 and in particular, I'm very interested in as a seed the relationship between people and wildlife and what does, what replicating a survey like this enables us to do is to try and build a relationship or understand the relationship between people's beliefs or attitudes about wildlife in this case, deer and [00:07:30] the presence of dia themselves and how that changes over time. The reason we're interested in that is because these days when it comes to managing wildlife, understanding how to manage the problem with wildlife, data's the people in the equation is becoming more important. Speaker 3: So it's very important to understand how are people's attitudes and beliefs change? How dynamic are they to external influences like the density of d or or, [00:08:00] or um, experience and uh, so living around the deer that's right for a longer period of time, increased tolerance or not oh, not and actually understanding that that dynamic is important for managers who need to prioritize in a landscape that's full of people whose, uh, relationship with a deer is variously extremely negative to extremely positive. It's a very challenging environment to work in. I mean, he manages to, they hear out at the sort of problem, but if we [00:08:30] could add a social dimension to this map wildlife management problem, we might be some of the wider, resolving some of those issues. I think. Is there any way within the survey to try to take account of the management of the area? Is there an overlaid management in the El Sorito Kensington area or is there really no public policy or is and, Speaker 4: uh, a management system in most, I mean, you know, the, the way deer populations are traditionally controlled [00:09:00] is through hunting. And obviously you can't have hunting in this situation, but in places like Kensington and El Serita, you just, you can take an animal maybe under extraordinary circumstances, but the hazard is just too great. Speaker 3: Well, does, does trapping become a solution or is that Speaker 4: it's very, very expensive and hard to do and people think contraception, well again, if you have animals in captivity or that sort [00:09:30] of thing, contraception works great, but unfree and roaming animals is very expensive. It just won't work. So literally there is no, no good solution. And you know, again, to refer to the Monterey Peninsula where we have this longer record, people get excited, you know, and they, they finally get enough information to see that there's really not much that can be done. And by that time the deer start going down on their own and people forget [00:10:00] about the problem and 15 years later Speaker 3: back comes back again. Yeah. One of the other interesting parts of that original survey too was that all day the deer at concentrated toward the upland, the penetration to the El Sorito down near the bat, it's actually quite deep. Although in low numbers they actually get right down there and to very high density, high traffic areas. Basically they go down pillars Speaker 4: too much concrete, you know, and not enough deer habitat. Right. But if there's any [00:10:30] residential neighborhood with the typical local gardens and some on their there, they were on Albany Hill. Yeah, they went clear down to the bay. Were any place that there was suitable habitat that they were there? Yeah. Speaker 3: And Wayne would the current survey and then hopefully you're going to try to continue this project. Do you need to get funding for it or how will you maintain? Well, fortunately the sort of work doesn't require large amounts of funding. I shouldn't say that publicly [00:11:00] because of course we're always after funding, but, but unfortunately, this sort of work can be data rich without large amounts of funding because we were primarily interested in people's observations and their opinions. And in a topic like this, uh, people are actually very forthcoming and very helpful for some reason. Uh, most sorts of surveys have very low response rate. So I think people fear, feel harassed and harried by surveys, political surveys, commercial surveys. But [00:11:30] when it comes to wildlife, the seems to attract people's interest and, and, um, most everyone has an opinion on wildlife in their, in their locality. Speaker 3: And so fortunately, uh, we get very high response rates, which we're very grateful for for the sort of survey. So, um, the resources required to undertake a survey, a fairly rudimentary, which actually makes it possible to do this sort of work over the long term with some confidence. So I, I think depending on the outcomes of this one, [00:12:00] we'll almost certainly repeat it. I'd be very interested in knowing how our, uh, deer and other wildlife disperse through this landscape. What are the barriers and triggers to that widespread movement? I suspect that there are elements of the urban landscape that actually landscape architects and urban designers plan for other reasons. The deer and other wildlife I find very useful for moving about the landscape. [00:12:30] These corridors that I mentioned, for example, when people count sell land anymore under [inaudible]. So, uh, electric was our, um, these, these, my function is very important corridors for wildlife movement through the landscape, uh, in fact may be making the urban landscape much more permeable than it used to be. Speaker 5: [inaudible] [00:13:00] you're listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Today we're talking with Wayne Linklater and Dale Macola about wild animals, urban sentence. [inaudible] Speaker 4: so you're really focused on deer because they were the past, so to speak. Well, that's what we focused [00:13:30] on, but you know, rod also keeping a very pretty close watch on what was going on with pay odis because they were one of the predators. And again, I'm not familiar with what coyotes are doing right now, but they were coming down through that Mosher corridor clear down to the middle school down there. Uh, and, uh, you know, we had some evidence that mountain lines were, you know, on the verge of coming in one case where it probably [00:14:00] was a mountain lion, it came down below Arlington Avenue and of course a that recent mountain lion, you know, Jason White, Shaddock Shaddock Avenue, I think Shotokan Cedar. And uh, so it's a problem with the disparate young dispersing animals meanly. You know, these aren't mountain lions that have territories that overlap. It. Speaker 4: It usually when we see animals like that, they're, they're young [00:14:30] animals that are dispersing and trying to find a territory where they can, they can live. And I, and of course these, uh, sere make awfully good meals and of course we worry about an attack on a person. You know, that, right? That's the, the big concern because it, in each case, the probability is very, very low, but enough cases and then, you know, eventually will become inevitable that there [00:15:00] will be some attack and then all the wheels will come off because there would be zero tolerance for that. So then that would reintroduce hunting. Well you can't hunt here. So it would be hard to do any kind of control. That's what makes this so difficult is uh, the, the sort of example we have is down, uh, on the Monterey peninsula where the deer have periodically [00:15:30] gone up and gone down again for reasons that we don't really understand. Speaker 4: We know it's not direct mortality, it's failure and success of reproduction, not the attempt to reproduce, but that the fond doesn't survive for reasons that we don't understand, but they've gone up and down on like a 15 to 18 year time period. So my [00:16:00] expectation is that these deer may show some sort of similar pattern. Eventually we may figure out why. And like I say, just over the last year or so, there are the signs that the deer are starting to come up. So peaked in 1995 already started going down. They went down very, very gradually. Our radio collared animals, you know, live, normal lifespans and very gradually disappeared just like [00:16:30] you would, you would expect. What is that life span? How long? Well, the urban area, uh, the equivalent of 70 would probably be about 12 or 13 years for deer and, but you know, some humans live to be a hundred, so occasionally you're gonna probably get a 16 or 17 year old, uh, deer. And then again in the urban area where the hazards aren't that great. Interestingly, the animal that was the radio animal that [00:17:00] we had that lived along this time died in a yard right across the street from the yard where we captured it. Speaker 4: You could easily toss the rock, the spot where we captured it to where it went to its final resting. It goes back to that really small range that you were talking about in hotspots for food because of gardening and also fruit trees, [00:17:30] which isn't major attracted when, when there's fruit in the falls. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Today we're talking with [inaudible] and Dale McCullough about wild animals and urban sex. [inaudible] Speaker 4: [00:18:00] just, uh, you know, just the recent illustration of what we're talking about, who I know, the biology of the animals, they, uh, have had some problems with deer attacks, quote on people. Also down near the the food ghetto. I was contacted indirectly by one of the graduate students in, in the [00:18:30] department here who is working with, uh, a city official on that. And I said, well, I don't, I don't know what's going on, but my guess is that people are walking dogs and it's females with Fonz that are attacking because in the wild they recognize that dog is a coyote or so on. Well, it turns out that is exactly what the situation was when they talked about it a bit. But see, just having that little [00:19:00] clue about, you know, the biology of the animal and how those interactions work puts that whole problem into a different context. Speaker 3: Piece of information. Like that immediately informs because suddenly the options are a, the biological control of her mother, Dia. But also this becomes an information management problem, doesn't it? Because for most people, when they understand that the steer is acting in defense, they'll change the [00:19:30] behavior, but that information becomes a way of managing the problem by changing people's behavior rather than potentially the cost of managing a deer population. Right. Wildlife feeding is a classic example of this, isn't it? Where in places where the feeding of wildlife becomes a problem, the wildlife come in, they come in at last dean's states, they lose their fear of people. They immediately become more dangerous. Just that piece of information [00:20:00] and some sort of social marketing campaign to inform people that actually the magnitude of the problem, that feeling causes is sometimes often enough, enough to reduce the magnitude of the problem. People change their behavior. It also empowers people and it empowers management agencies in ways that other sorts of solutions, which grant all sorts of controls. He don't [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Yeah. The thing is it, it sensitizes people. So if you say you shouldn't be feeding them, you shouldn't be taming them. That's dangerous. [00:20:30] You should be a little afraid of the deer and the deer should be a little afraid of you. And then there are homeless nerve problems. But if the deer totally becomes on afraid, that's when the problem comes in. And most wildlife problems are of that kind. So like where there've been cases, coyotes if attack children, it's in cases where people have been feeding them, they've completely lost their fear. And the other thing, as you can tell people, you should reinforce if, if you approach the deer [00:21:00] and, and they don't go, go away, you know, get your darn broom or whatever you have, you know, but just make that deer get outta there to establish the fact that it is still not running the place. [inaudible] Speaker 3: if we take a step back and, and think about, uh, relationships between wildlife and people in urban landscapes, one of the really interesting parts of that context to me is that this year the world's urban population just tipped 50%. [00:21:30] The world's population just took 50% of than most people in the world now live in urban areas. They live in, in areas which should depauperate of wildlife and wilderness. It's really interesting to me to try and understand what the implications of that are for the future of wildlife conservation and wilderness conservation. Because increasingly the world is going to depend on people making decisions who [00:22:00] no longer have contact with wilderness or wildlife anymore. The way that our grandparents did for instance, and other academics have talked about this idea of extinction of experience. So the voting populous in North America for instance, are going to be less and less ecologically or environmentally literate with time. The more open eyes they become, it makes you wonder, doesn't it? Hair important. Therefore, relationships with wildlife in urban areas might [00:22:30] become for facilitating this relationship with wilderness. So that's one of the things that gets me interested in in urban landscapes and these urban things like DNA. So let me just say thank you very much for your time in talking about this with us. You're most welcome Speaker 5: [inaudible] [00:23:00] [inaudible], Speaker 2: [00:23:30] a regular feature of spectrum's dimension, few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. The science at cow lecture for May is associate Professor Neil Seuss. We from the Department of Environmental Science Policy and management at the College of natural resources. The lecture will be May 21st at 11:00 AM in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 he will be talking about extreme sociality, super colonies of the invasive [00:24:00] Argentine ant with the end of the semester days away. Here's an on campus resource you may find helpful. Reuse. Reuse is a student run program dedicated to promoting the reuse of materials on the UC Berkeley campus. They promote reuse by providing spaces for the campus community to freely exchange reusable goods. The reuse stations consist of shelving units placed in buildings where campus members donate and pick up reusable materials [00:24:30] to learn where the stations are located. Visit their website, reuse.berkeley.edu for those with bigger items or specific needs. Speaker 2: Reuse now sponsors an online forum for exchanging things. The forum address is exchange.berkeley.edu you do need to have a berkeley.edu email address to use the forum Thursday May 12th his bike to work day at UC Berkeley on bike to work day. [00:25:00] UC Berkeley will host an energizer station in Sproul Plaza from 7:00 AM to 10:00 AM I have no idea what an energizer station is. If you have a bike and you need help fixing it or maintaining it, there are at least two groups on campus ready to help citizens cycle and by cy cow. Both have free sessions to repair bikes and hopefully teach you how to maintain your bike. Citizens Cycle has two free clinics a week in front of the East Asian library. The Monday clinic is held [00:25:30] from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM and the Friday clinic is from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM citizens cycle is a voluntary student group. Buy Cycle has free repair three days a week. Speaker 2: Monday 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM Wednesday 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM Friday 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM their website is buy-side cow, B I c y c a l.com. The free repair [00:26:00] sessions are held just behind the Golden Bear cafe at Sproul Plaza by cycle is a student funded cooperative. Two news items of note. This first news story was derived from the UC Berkeley News Center story by Sarah Yang in early April, 2011 energy secretary Steven Chu announced grants totaling 112 point $5 million of funding over five years to support the development of advanced solar photovoltaic [00:26:30] related manufacturing processes throughout the United States. The Energy Department's sunshot advanced manufacturing partnerships will help the solar power industry overcome technical barriers and reduce for photo-voltaic installations. A local outgrowth of this sunshot funding is the bay area photovoltaics consortium jointly led by the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University. The consortium will receive [00:27:00] $25 million spread over five years. Industry sources will provide $1 million annually to the consortium budget. Speaker 2: The Bay area photovoltaics consortium will fund competitive grants through a process open to all universities, national laboratories and research institutions. The consortium seeks to spur research and development of new materials and manufacturing processes that will cut the cost significantly, increased production volume and improve the performance [00:27:30] of solar cells and devices. Ali's Javi, UC Berkeley, associate professor of electrical engineering and co-director of the consortium addressed their goals by saying the cost of solar energy in 2010 was about $3 and 40 cents per watt of power installed. Our end goal is to decrease that cost to $1 per watt installed. Our collaboration with industry will be critical in achieving this goal. We are fortunate that the bay area is home to such a high density of photo-voltaic related [00:28:00] companies. Cal Green Fund grants for 2011 were announced at the eighth annual UC Berkeley Sustainability Summit. April 19th the grants were awarded to Christopher carbuncle at the UC botanical garden. Josh Mendell College of letters and science. Elizabeth Chan of the energy and Resources Class one nine zero any Gordon and Paris Yacht Chakrabarti at the UC Berkeley compost alliance and frank you [00:28:30] at UC residents hall assembly Speaker 5: [inaudible] can use occurred during the show is from an Austin, a David album titled Volker and [00:29:00] [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from our listeners. If you have comments about the show or we'd like to link to Wayne Linklater's website, which you can download the El Cerrito Kensington wild animal survey, send us an email or an email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com [00:29:30] join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy & Management in the College of Natural Resources at UCB talks about his work in wildfire and forest management research. Wildfire suppression history and current policy is discussed.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:00:30] [inaudible]Speaker 2: welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on KALX Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. My name is Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Scott Stevens and associate professor in the Environmental Science Policy and Management Department of the College of natural resources at UC Berkeley. This interview is prerecorded and edited. We're here with [00:01:00] Scott Stevens and Scott, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Well, wanted to ask you about your research in wildfire management and forestry management and have you described the arc of your research over your career and where you're at now?Speaker 3: Well, I started here at Berkeley in 2000 actually, I was a graduate student here from 91 to 95 so I was phd student here and I came back to Berkeley in 2000 really started to work on [00:01:30] kind of looking at the effectiveness of different fuel treatments that can be used to try to reduce fire hazard and maybe reduce the negative impacts of wildfire on forest. So we started a project with a bunch of collaborators all over the United States that were the fire and fire surrogate study. That study looked at trying to reduce fire hazards in forest at once. Burn frequently with mechanical methods alone, prescribed fire methods alone, combination mechanical followed by fire and that controls. [00:02:00] And that study also had a pretty broad suite of ecological variables including soils and vegetation, insects, economics, some social fire behavior. So it tried to look at the stand scale, a hundred acres, 50 acres.Speaker 3: If a manager wants to go in and actually modify vegetation to try to reduce that potential for bad wildfire effects, what ecological similarities are different, just might be with all those treatments. That went on for about five years. And we have a research for us at Berkeley called [00:02:30] UC Blodgett forest, which is up near Georgetown campus. Got that donated to them in 1933 so it's a fantastic place to do your research. We did that work, um, in kind of with a bunch of other people in different states. Even this was a national study that included about 13 states. Each of us kind of doing a similar exercise, so you went through that funded by the u s joint fire sciences program. More recent research has moved away from kind of the stand level of trying to go to Morton landscape level. So happens when you actually [00:03:00] think about reintroducing fire into landscapes that have had fire exclusion for maybe a century and then maybe do that repeatedly over an area and look at the patterns of burning severity, mortality patterns, what's the size difference between landscape and stand?Speaker 3: That's a great point and the standards I think are on the order of 2050 a hundred acres or so and the landscape work we're doing now is much, much larger. It's 5,000 maybe to 25,000 acres, [00:03:30] so really, really watersheds or pieces of watersheds and sometimes even small watershed inside a large and really much, much larger kind of more of a functional unit where people might work in terms of planning at a landscape scale further work down the road. Now it's kind of changed a little bit also into fire policy. That was something I've always been interested in trying to understand how science actually interact with policy, how a policy is formed, trying to maybe look at some objectivity and some of the fire [00:04:00] science research. It could maybe help inform policy, not really shape it completely, but informant most recently we've worked with Australians on the policy of urban interface fire areas.Speaker 3: So this has been an interesting um, kind of partnership because Australia and us have a lot of similarities in fire policy and the urban interface and also some real market differences. And probably the, maybe the, the final area is trying to understand, um, dynamics also in struggling. So we've actually moved away from the forest [00:04:30] and moving into some struggling systems, chaparral, try to understand kind of the dynamics of fire and how you might modify fire behavior and m chaparral systems, which are really, really different than, um, say, um, force. So when we continue, I've got a great group of graduate students in my lab and um, all those folks have done great work. So it's a, it's kind of a group effort.Speaker 2: And the research proposals that you write, are you responding to requests from the field, so to speak, or are you driving [00:05:00] some of the subject matter?Speaker 3: Well, what's happened in my program, there's a program called the U s joint fire sciences program, which is funded by the US Department of Agriculture in the u s department of Interior. And they put out a call for proposals every year in the fall. They just came out here recently and they actually put on their website the areas they're most interested in. So most of my research proposals is when I look at those calls, I look at the USDA, look at maybe another competitive research grant [00:05:30] proposal system, look what's being proposed, and then see how that Meld with the interest I've had maybe in the last few years and tried to say, oh, there's an opportunity, we can do something. Um, let's go ahead. It's interesting. One thing has happened is the success rate on the proposals has gone way down in terms of percentage, but this started around 97 98 or percentage of successful proposals. Maybe about 40%. Most recently it's going between 10 and 15. So it has gotten more competitive to get the um, the research proposals [00:06:00] funded.Speaker 2: Is there a general consensus within the research community, a fire, wildfire management community on what the best practices are, where the research should be going?Speaker 3: Well that, there is, I think a lot of consensus with some debate. Um, what's happened in the joint fire sciences program, which I think has happened too many research programs, United States that I'm aware of is calls used to be a little bit more broad in terms of what they were asking for. Kind [00:06:30] of more of a broad question and then maybe you could come up with many different ideas that might fit that question. And I've seen more and more of that. The questions seem to be getting more and more narrow. And I think in some cases they're probably tied to um, you know, entities such as, um, organizations that need information they think is really, really important. Um, maybe also this evolution of science where more certainly known, there's probably young questions are getting maybe more focused in some ways. I think that's a lost opportunity because it allows certainly you to look at what's [00:07:00] being proposed and see if you fit it, but it also doesn't allow maybe the more general research to happen that maybe isn't a tie to an exact objective. And I, I know NSF National Science Foundation does that better where you're able to put in a proposal that may meet that objective, but also it doesn't have to really directly be on right on top of it for a short term, particularly in the fire science research community, we're talking about both Australia, Europe and the United States. More and more research is actually being targeted to questions that managers have on a time scale, [00:07:30] probably less than five years.Speaker 2: What do you see as the time frame that you would need to have for having an impact on a large forest ecosystem?Speaker 3: Well, I think the timeframe for a large one is, is going to be decades. And then continuous, um, places that we've worked at were fire has been reintroduced saying you sent me a national park since about 1974. Um, lightning fire milliwatt creek basin has been allowed to burn kind of unabated with a little bit of suppression for [00:08:00] the last 35 years or so. And it really took decades for that place to be sculpted by fire once again is before 74 fire was excluded and Yosemite really for a hundred years. Totally. So when fire gets back into those systems and seeing the patterns that we see today for some papers with Brandon Collins and others, it really has started to really have an incredible impact the dynamic on that forest. But it took, you know, 2030 years or so. And then when we do things on the other side mechanically, [00:08:30] when we try to maybe reduce fire hazards with mechanical means, thinning, chipping, things of that nature, there are, I think, similar timeframe.Speaker 3: You're talking about decades because the project sizes are so large and one of the big challenges is so much area that really does need some treatment for both fire and also restoration versus what is able to be done annually. And that's really a huge disconnect. What can be done is a tiny drop in some ways connected to what really needs to be done. So I think they all say that it's going to be a [00:09:00] longterm view decades and decades. And once you kind of get into that philosophy of management, you're changing your learning. Since forests never are static, they're always changing. Sense of that means a manager is going to be basically doing things continuously forever.Speaker 4: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:09:30] [inaudible] [inaudible]Speaker 2: uh, to put it in perspective, the idea of forest management and fire abatement, was it about a hundred years ago that the, the process of trying to put fires out began?Speaker 3: It sure was. It was really about 1905 is one of the forest service was created by Congress. And when the forest was created, they really had a few really critical missions put out by the, [00:10:00] um, the congress and also from the president. One was to try to safeguard the timber resources for the nation and try to actually create it to continuous supply timber. The other was actually create continuous and good quality water supplies. So even back in 1905 they were talking about water. There was actually enacted debate in the early 19 hundreds whether or not fire was seen as a menace or possibly couldn't be used as a tool. The debate went on for several years. In fact, California was a big part of that debating particular private land [00:10:30] owners of forest around lake Amador and other places. After a little bit of debate, some study, it was decided that fire was the enemy, both from a water standpoint, timber stand standpoint and Ryder early 19 hundreds 1910 1905 we really have a national fire suppression policy that happens in the western us. The southeast United States continues to debate longer. They have a much longer kind of connection to fire on land based on just immigrants and other things down there and they basically [00:11:00] didn't take the western line for a long time, but around 1905 we really do see an active fire suppression system and things like federal dollars from Congress actually having to be procured to states only. They actually adopted policy.Speaker 2: That's what's built up this incredible amount of fuel. And density of forest in North America that has created a real hazard for wildfire. But then you were saying that in the past 20 [00:11:30] or 30 years that's been rethought and now fire is allowed in areas and there's active management to try to remove fuel than that. You're starting to see the effects of thatSpeaker 3: currently actually has quite a history in this. There was a professor, Harold Vizquel Isabel came here in 1947 and he retired about 1972 so he was one of the earliest that basically started to ask those exact questions, is fire always the enemy? Can we use it actually for some purposes that actually would make sense? Do [00:12:00] we always want to exclude it? You know? So Harold had his career really during that time and there was massive debate and also a massive bias to fire me. Always the enemy. He had a thick skin. Yeah, he was basically, I'm beat up in political settings from comments and written comments, but he persisted and um, did a marvelous job and it has changed. It has changed. It's been slow. It's been really slow. You know, most areas in California, since we're in a Mediterranean climate, really [00:12:30] did have fire at really, really short intervals in the past, say maybe 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.Speaker 3: So we have a lot of places that used to burn with a lot of frequency, very, very common grasslands. You know, um, woodlands, the Savannah Woodlands, Oak Woodlands, many of the forests, mixed conifer, Ponderosa Pine, even wetlands from native American burning. So there was a great area of California that used to burn. Very, very common. And then there are other places in California, high elevation [00:13:00] forests, um, Alpine environments, deserts like the Mojave desert were fired, we think was actually a pretty minor factor maybe once in awhile, but maybe on a century scale. So we really had the gamut here. We had some that burned very, very frequently and others that had very, very little fire. And as you alluded to, the places that used to burn frequently, you take fire out for a hundred years. Those are the places that changed. And it's also past management such as harvesting the way we've harvested, forced partially cut force and left a lot of fuel on the ground that has also had [00:13:30] a profound impact.Speaker 2: And so is there within the community a bit of debate really just around the edges of the issue or are there some people that really have very different takes on, on how management should be done?Speaker 3: You know, there are apps, there are, there are. Both are absolutely both. Um, there are some, there's a debate going on in California right now about high severity fire. So the eye high severity simply means that you killed the majority of you overstory. So when a forest, you're killing maybe 75% [00:14:00] of the overstory or more to the fire, that causes great change. And interestingly, some people would argue that maybe there's too much high severity fire in California because of the fuel build up in the other things we alluded to, others actually may argue that they're sufficient or there's actually a deficit. That high severity fire working on our forest is not a bad thing. And it actually is something that maybe some people argue is an a low number. Science tries to come in and help inform that debate. And it's not [00:14:30] easy because we don't have a lot of good data to understand what high severity fire really did in most of our forests.Speaker 3: In California, we have a few places. Um, one is that Illinois at basin and Yosemite that's been working at least for the last 35 years with unabated fire in there, Brandon Collins led him to work at high severity fire at least in the last couple of decades. Brian, 15% of the landscape, so about 50% of it burning when it burns very frequently every 10 years. Every 15 years is really killing majority of trees. [00:15:00] But at what spatial scale? That's another good question. It's just not how much percentage, but how is it distributed? So the high severity fire there, most patches are less than say five acres in size with many on the order of one acre in size. And then there's a few, a few out there, maybe 200 acres, very few. Um, so the distribution of severity on that landscape is also incredibly important. And there's no doubt that when we look at some of our contemporary wildfires, like the moonlight fire and some others in California we've [00:15:30] had in the last seven decade or so, that the patches of high severity can be a thousand acres, can be maybe even a little larger.Speaker 3: And the patches down in that one acre realm are almost intimate because there just don't exist. So that's one area. It's great debate. The other great debate really is whether or not when forest service goes in to federal land and tries to reduce fire hazard, should they really just focus on fire hazards alone and then try to work with those? Or do they [00:16:00] also added maybe a commercial tree harvest that can supplement the costs of that, maybe make it then available over a larger land basis versus just getting money from Congress to do it. So that's another real real debate is whether or not federal lands in California of the forest service should they actually have an objective that maybe a second tier objective, the fire objective, maybe it's number one, but then maybe the second objective is also removing some green timber that could help pay for their treatments on them around.Speaker 3: That's [00:16:30] a, that's a fierce debate and how does that fit into the roads? No roads debate as well. That's a good question because the road, no road to me is also another one that exactly connected to it because some would argue that we need these roads to access these forests to then somehow do a treatment to then reduce their hazard. My answer to that is somewhat is that there are so many wroted acres in California, millions and millions and millions of acres that are rooted already and many of those millions of vast majority, probably 90% of [00:17:00] the treatment. So I think where the roads are, yes. You think about maybe some of those treatments like mechanical prescribed, burning, chipping makes a lot of sense, but I can't imagine myself saying we need to road areas that are unroasted so then we can do the mechanical work when we have such a base already that needs to be worked and we can't even touch it. I think the unroasted areas, if they're remote, we should basically allow more managed wildfire to work those landscapes.Speaker 4: [00:17:30] [inaudible] you are listening to Spec a l x Berkeley.Speaker 3: In your research, are you actively seekingSpeaker 2: new technologies and capabilities to extend your understanding of what's going on in the forest?Speaker 3: We do use a lot of different technologies to try to help us understand [00:18:00] the forest and one is spatial data, so the idea of you're getting data over large areas like we alluded to, maybe a 15,000 acre area, you know that's a big area at 20,000 acres. It's just impossible to go out there and do some sort of field sampling that you're going to be able to get some information over such an extent. But you can go out certainly and do some field sampling with a stratification maybe based on forest type or aspect or slope. And then use things like a geographic information system or remotely sense data from satellites [00:18:30] and space than to try to use your field data and combine it with that remotely sense data. It actually create a map, like a spatial map of the area that we're interested in. So that spatial data, you know, the remote sensing technology to work on spatial data, just critical, critically important. And even the technology of just instruments we use in the field nowadays to measure things like heights, diameters, um, reflectance of vegetation, things of that nature. All of that is just incredibly useful. So the technology continues [00:19:00] to help us try to make assessments at broad scales and also try to answer questions sometimes that aren't easy.Speaker 2: Are you using a quantitative modeling? To some extent,Speaker 3: we sure do. And then the models are just critical in some ways. The fire models are ahead of things like ecosystem models. You know, fire is really a physical process. It really is about combustion oxidation. Fire modeling really began in earnest in this country in the early seventies mostly Missoula, Montana, [00:19:30] and has certainly been able to kind of change over time and we're continuing to try to make it better. But the fire models we have today actually do a pretty good job, not perfect job, but a pretty good job of actually forecasting on a gis landscape work. Fire's gonna move in a landscape. How fast is it going to move? Maybe what kind of flame lights might you expect so that those modeling systems are really used a great deal in our research to try to understand that probability of fire occurrence. What happens to that probability?Speaker 3: Let's say if you treat 20% [00:20:00] of the watershed and reduce the hazard, what happens to the probability of the areas that are treated? What about the 80% that are untreated? It turns out they can also have a reduction in probability. The ecosystem models are so much more challenging than you're asking what happens to the soil? What happens to water, what happens to wildlife habitat. So those become much more challenging that basically, um, generate and also tests. So the fire modeling in some ways is well ahead of those because I think it's more of a physical known system even though there's great [00:20:30] research to try to make it better. But the firewall that we have today a pretty good,Speaker 2: and then there's also the idea that the forests in the equator equatorial area are much more valuable than the, the forest north and south of that area. What sort of feeling do you have about that?Speaker 3: I think that's Friday and that and the carbon debate, that's a really interesting, um, separation because people have shown really conclusively that, you know, removing forest in the equator area is that dramatic [00:21:00] reduction in carbon sequestration. Also the sustainability of those sports. So I think the carbon question when we look at the equator is really clear about trying to keep forced, forced to keep forest alive. Right? Keep that force there and let it allow it to sequester carbon, hold it. But then when we move away from the kind of the equator, we go up into places that are more temporary. Like California. Here we have fire that works on landscapes, fireworks on landscape, just done in the past. It continues [00:21:30] today, fires different, but it's still a big issue. So there I think the debate becomes not just trying to keep Forrest at forested, but also what kind of forest have the ability to hold onto carbon.Speaker 3: It's a question for the long term and then you go to the boreal and my goodness, the boreal forest and now been shown like in northern Canada and Russia, some of the biggest carbon stocks in the planet. These are huge, enormous areas. And actually we know this year Russia had one the biggest fire years in [00:22:00] his history. So talk about, you know, the context of fire and climate is profound and fire force and boreal is going to be the most sensitive to climate change. People have already forecasted that. I think it's already been seen. Temperatures are up even more severely in the boreal regions versus down here and the temporary. So those places should probably be even more important to understand in terms of the dynamics of carbon and fire and forest and even we are a, so how did you get started in science? What was it that got you interested in [00:22:30] becoming a scientist?Speaker 3: It's a great question. It's one that's hard to answer. I mean my background has always been kind of curious about scientific things. I actually had my undergrad degree and masters degree in engineering. I grew up really in a forestry family, my grandfather and my dad and uncles working around forest. But I think for me being so close to it for a while, not for my whole life, but while young childhood life who was so close and I really enjoyed it, but it was also something that I took for granted, right? That just didn't think it was something they wanted [00:23:00] to study and pursue. And somehow I was interested in kind of technology engineering, still got into engineering field. Then I started actually contemplating doing a phd. Then this realize what discussions with my wife, Mary and others that I was so much more interested in the natural world.Speaker 3: So once I started to actually study that, which actually happened at UC Davis in 1988, it just lit a fire. I mean, I didn't, at that time I wasn't really gonna study fire, but it lit a fire and me just a curiosity. This idea of um, natural [00:23:30] systems on soils and plants. I'd never studied any of that in my previous career. It was just, it was just fascinating to me. Then I just decided, um, I thought I'd come down and meet a couple of faculty here at Berkeley at the time, Bob Martin, um, learned that he actually had a bs degree in physics. So in some ways we had some similarities and they just realized that the kind of the quantitative engineering world had some real connections to the natural scientists. And it was really where my heart was. There's no doubt about it. Great. Well thanks very much. [00:24:00] You're welcome.Speaker 4: [inaudible]Speaker 5: special thanks to Gretchen Sanders before editorial assistants, one occurred during the show is from a low star David Alpha and titled Folk and Acoustic. It's made available [00:24:30] via creative Commons license 3.0 Patrick. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We're happy to hear from our listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot Cadillacs had yahoo.comSpeaker 4: [00:25:00] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy & Management in the College of Natural Resources at UCB talks about his work in wildfire and forest management research. Wildfire suppression history and current policy is discussed.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:00:30] [inaudible]Speaker 2: welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on KALX Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. My name is Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Scott Stevens and associate professor in the Environmental Science Policy and Management Department of the College of natural resources at UC Berkeley. This interview is prerecorded and edited. We're here with [00:01:00] Scott Stevens and Scott, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Well, wanted to ask you about your research in wildfire management and forestry management and have you described the arc of your research over your career and where you're at now?Speaker 3: Well, I started here at Berkeley in 2000 actually, I was a graduate student here from 91 to 95 so I was phd student here and I came back to Berkeley in 2000 really started to work on [00:01:30] kind of looking at the effectiveness of different fuel treatments that can be used to try to reduce fire hazard and maybe reduce the negative impacts of wildfire on forest. So we started a project with a bunch of collaborators all over the United States that were the fire and fire surrogate study. That study looked at trying to reduce fire hazards in forest at once. Burn frequently with mechanical methods alone, prescribed fire methods alone, combination mechanical followed by fire and that controls. [00:02:00] And that study also had a pretty broad suite of ecological variables including soils and vegetation, insects, economics, some social fire behavior. So it tried to look at the stand scale, a hundred acres, 50 acres.Speaker 3: If a manager wants to go in and actually modify vegetation to try to reduce that potential for bad wildfire effects, what ecological similarities are different, just might be with all those treatments. That went on for about five years. And we have a research for us at Berkeley called [00:02:30] UC Blodgett forest, which is up near Georgetown campus. Got that donated to them in 1933 so it's a fantastic place to do your research. We did that work, um, in kind of with a bunch of other people in different states. Even this was a national study that included about 13 states. Each of us kind of doing a similar exercise, so you went through that funded by the u s joint fire sciences program. More recent research has moved away from kind of the stand level of trying to go to Morton landscape level. So happens when you actually [00:03:00] think about reintroducing fire into landscapes that have had fire exclusion for maybe a century and then maybe do that repeatedly over an area and look at the patterns of burning severity, mortality patterns, what's the size difference between landscape and stand?Speaker 3: That's a great point and the standards I think are on the order of 2050 a hundred acres or so and the landscape work we're doing now is much, much larger. It's 5,000 maybe to 25,000 acres, [00:03:30] so really, really watersheds or pieces of watersheds and sometimes even small watershed inside a large and really much, much larger kind of more of a functional unit where people might work in terms of planning at a landscape scale further work down the road. Now it's kind of changed a little bit also into fire policy. That was something I've always been interested in trying to understand how science actually interact with policy, how a policy is formed, trying to maybe look at some objectivity and some of the fire [00:04:00] science research. It could maybe help inform policy, not really shape it completely, but informant most recently we've worked with Australians on the policy of urban interface fire areas.Speaker 3: So this has been an interesting um, kind of partnership because Australia and us have a lot of similarities in fire policy and the urban interface and also some real market differences. And probably the, maybe the, the final area is trying to understand, um, dynamics also in struggling. So we've actually moved away from the forest [00:04:30] and moving into some struggling systems, chaparral, try to understand kind of the dynamics of fire and how you might modify fire behavior and m chaparral systems, which are really, really different than, um, say, um, force. So when we continue, I've got a great group of graduate students in my lab and um, all those folks have done great work. So it's a, it's kind of a group effort.Speaker 2: And the research proposals that you write, are you responding to requests from the field, so to speak, or are you driving [00:05:00] some of the subject matter?Speaker 3: Well, what's happened in my program, there's a program called the U s joint fire sciences program, which is funded by the US Department of Agriculture in the u s department of Interior. And they put out a call for proposals every year in the fall. They just came out here recently and they actually put on their website the areas they're most interested in. So most of my research proposals is when I look at those calls, I look at the USDA, look at maybe another competitive research grant [00:05:30] proposal system, look what's being proposed, and then see how that Meld with the interest I've had maybe in the last few years and tried to say, oh, there's an opportunity, we can do something. Um, let's go ahead. It's interesting. One thing has happened is the success rate on the proposals has gone way down in terms of percentage, but this started around 97 98 or percentage of successful proposals. Maybe about 40%. Most recently it's going between 10 and 15. So it has gotten more competitive to get the um, the research proposals [00:06:00] funded.Speaker 2: Is there a general consensus within the research community, a fire, wildfire management community on what the best practices are, where the research should be going?Speaker 3: Well that, there is, I think a lot of consensus with some debate. Um, what's happened in the joint fire sciences program, which I think has happened too many research programs, United States that I'm aware of is calls used to be a little bit more broad in terms of what they were asking for. Kind [00:06:30] of more of a broad question and then maybe you could come up with many different ideas that might fit that question. And I've seen more and more of that. The questions seem to be getting more and more narrow. And I think in some cases they're probably tied to um, you know, entities such as, um, organizations that need information they think is really, really important. Um, maybe also this evolution of science where more certainly known, there's probably young questions are getting maybe more focused in some ways. I think that's a lost opportunity because it allows certainly you to look at what's [00:07:00] being proposed and see if you fit it, but it also doesn't allow maybe the more general research to happen that maybe isn't a tie to an exact objective. And I, I know NSF National Science Foundation does that better where you're able to put in a proposal that may meet that objective, but also it doesn't have to really directly be on right on top of it for a short term, particularly in the fire science research community, we're talking about both Australia, Europe and the United States. More and more research is actually being targeted to questions that managers have on a time scale, [00:07:30] probably less than five years.Speaker 2: What do you see as the time frame that you would need to have for having an impact on a large forest ecosystem?Speaker 3: Well, I think the timeframe for a large one is, is going to be decades. And then continuous, um, places that we've worked at were fire has been reintroduced saying you sent me a national park since about 1974. Um, lightning fire milliwatt creek basin has been allowed to burn kind of unabated with a little bit of suppression for [00:08:00] the last 35 years or so. And it really took decades for that place to be sculpted by fire once again is before 74 fire was excluded and Yosemite really for a hundred years. Totally. So when fire gets back into those systems and seeing the patterns that we see today for some papers with Brandon Collins and others, it really has started to really have an incredible impact the dynamic on that forest. But it took, you know, 2030 years or so. And then when we do things on the other side mechanically, [00:08:30] when we try to maybe reduce fire hazards with mechanical means, thinning, chipping, things of that nature, there are, I think, similar timeframe.Speaker 3: You're talking about decades because the project sizes are so large and one of the big challenges is so much area that really does need some treatment for both fire and also restoration versus what is able to be done annually. And that's really a huge disconnect. What can be done is a tiny drop in some ways connected to what really needs to be done. So I think they all say that it's going to be a [00:09:00] longterm view decades and decades. And once you kind of get into that philosophy of management, you're changing your learning. Since forests never are static, they're always changing. Sense of that means a manager is going to be basically doing things continuously forever.Speaker 4: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:09:30] [inaudible] [inaudible]Speaker 2: uh, to put it in perspective, the idea of forest management and fire abatement, was it about a hundred years ago that the, the process of trying to put fires out began?Speaker 3: It sure was. It was really about 1905 is one of the forest service was created by Congress. And when the forest was created, they really had a few really critical missions put out by the, [00:10:00] um, the congress and also from the president. One was to try to safeguard the timber resources for the nation and try to actually create it to continuous supply timber. The other was actually create continuous and good quality water supplies. So even back in 1905 they were talking about water. There was actually enacted debate in the early 19 hundreds whether or not fire was seen as a menace or possibly couldn't be used as a tool. The debate went on for several years. In fact, California was a big part of that debating particular private land [00:10:30] owners of forest around lake Amador and other places. After a little bit of debate, some study, it was decided that fire was the enemy, both from a water standpoint, timber stand standpoint and Ryder early 19 hundreds 1910 1905 we really have a national fire suppression policy that happens in the western us. The southeast United States continues to debate longer. They have a much longer kind of connection to fire on land based on just immigrants and other things down there and they basically [00:11:00] didn't take the western line for a long time, but around 1905 we really do see an active fire suppression system and things like federal dollars from Congress actually having to be procured to states only. They actually adopted policy.Speaker 2: That's what's built up this incredible amount of fuel. And density of forest in North America that has created a real hazard for wildfire. But then you were saying that in the past 20 [00:11:30] or 30 years that's been rethought and now fire is allowed in areas and there's active management to try to remove fuel than that. You're starting to see the effects of thatSpeaker 3: currently actually has quite a history in this. There was a professor, Harold Vizquel Isabel came here in 1947 and he retired about 1972 so he was one of the earliest that basically started to ask those exact questions, is fire always the enemy? Can we use it actually for some purposes that actually would make sense? Do [00:12:00] we always want to exclude it? You know? So Harold had his career really during that time and there was massive debate and also a massive bias to fire me. Always the enemy. He had a thick skin. Yeah, he was basically, I'm beat up in political settings from comments and written comments, but he persisted and um, did a marvelous job and it has changed. It has changed. It's been slow. It's been really slow. You know, most areas in California, since we're in a Mediterranean climate, really [00:12:30] did have fire at really, really short intervals in the past, say maybe 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.Speaker 3: So we have a lot of places that used to burn with a lot of frequency, very, very common grasslands. You know, um, woodlands, the Savannah Woodlands, Oak Woodlands, many of the forests, mixed conifer, Ponderosa Pine, even wetlands from native American burning. So there was a great area of California that used to burn. Very, very common. And then there are other places in California, high elevation [00:13:00] forests, um, Alpine environments, deserts like the Mojave desert were fired, we think was actually a pretty minor factor maybe once in awhile, but maybe on a century scale. So we really had the gamut here. We had some that burned very, very frequently and others that had very, very little fire. And as you alluded to, the places that used to burn frequently, you take fire out for a hundred years. Those are the places that changed. And it's also past management such as harvesting the way we've harvested, forced partially cut force and left a lot of fuel on the ground that has also had [00:13:30] a profound impact.Speaker 2: And so is there within the community a bit of debate really just around the edges of the issue or are there some people that really have very different takes on, on how management should be done?Speaker 3: You know, there are apps, there are, there are. Both are absolutely both. Um, there are some, there's a debate going on in California right now about high severity fire. So the eye high severity simply means that you killed the majority of you overstory. So when a forest, you're killing maybe 75% [00:14:00] of the overstory or more to the fire, that causes great change. And interestingly, some people would argue that maybe there's too much high severity fire in California because of the fuel build up in the other things we alluded to, others actually may argue that they're sufficient or there's actually a deficit. That high severity fire working on our forest is not a bad thing. And it actually is something that maybe some people argue is an a low number. Science tries to come in and help inform that debate. And it's not [00:14:30] easy because we don't have a lot of good data to understand what high severity fire really did in most of our forests.Speaker 3: In California, we have a few places. Um, one is that Illinois at basin and Yosemite that's been working at least for the last 35 years with unabated fire in there, Brandon Collins led him to work at high severity fire at least in the last couple of decades. Brian, 15% of the landscape, so about 50% of it burning when it burns very frequently every 10 years. Every 15 years is really killing majority of trees. [00:15:00] But at what spatial scale? That's another good question. It's just not how much percentage, but how is it distributed? So the high severity fire there, most patches are less than say five acres in size with many on the order of one acre in size. And then there's a few, a few out there, maybe 200 acres, very few. Um, so the distribution of severity on that landscape is also incredibly important. And there's no doubt that when we look at some of our contemporary wildfires, like the moonlight fire and some others in California we've [00:15:30] had in the last seven decade or so, that the patches of high severity can be a thousand acres, can be maybe even a little larger.Speaker 3: And the patches down in that one acre realm are almost intimate because there just don't exist. So that's one area. It's great debate. The other great debate really is whether or not when forest service goes in to federal land and tries to reduce fire hazard, should they really just focus on fire hazards alone and then try to work with those? Or do they [00:16:00] also added maybe a commercial tree harvest that can supplement the costs of that, maybe make it then available over a larger land basis versus just getting money from Congress to do it. So that's another real real debate is whether or not federal lands in California of the forest service should they actually have an objective that maybe a second tier objective, the fire objective, maybe it's number one, but then maybe the second objective is also removing some green timber that could help pay for their treatments on them around.Speaker 3: That's [00:16:30] a, that's a fierce debate and how does that fit into the roads? No roads debate as well. That's a good question because the road, no road to me is also another one that exactly connected to it because some would argue that we need these roads to access these forests to then somehow do a treatment to then reduce their hazard. My answer to that is somewhat is that there are so many wroted acres in California, millions and millions and millions of acres that are rooted already and many of those millions of vast majority, probably 90% of [00:17:00] the treatment. So I think where the roads are, yes. You think about maybe some of those treatments like mechanical prescribed, burning, chipping makes a lot of sense, but I can't imagine myself saying we need to road areas that are unroasted so then we can do the mechanical work when we have such a base already that needs to be worked and we can't even touch it. I think the unroasted areas, if they're remote, we should basically allow more managed wildfire to work those landscapes.Speaker 4: [00:17:30] [inaudible] you are listening to Spec a l x Berkeley.Speaker 3: In your research, are you actively seekingSpeaker 2: new technologies and capabilities to extend your understanding of what's going on in the forest?Speaker 3: We do use a lot of different technologies to try to help us understand [00:18:00] the forest and one is spatial data, so the idea of you're getting data over large areas like we alluded to, maybe a 15,000 acre area, you know that's a big area at 20,000 acres. It's just impossible to go out there and do some sort of field sampling that you're going to be able to get some information over such an extent. But you can go out certainly and do some field sampling with a stratification maybe based on forest type or aspect or slope. And then use things like a geographic information system or remotely sense data from satellites [00:18:30] and space than to try to use your field data and combine it with that remotely sense data. It actually create a map, like a spatial map of the area that we're interested in. So that spatial data, you know, the remote sensing technology to work on spatial data, just critical, critically important. And even the technology of just instruments we use in the field nowadays to measure things like heights, diameters, um, reflectance of vegetation, things of that nature. All of that is just incredibly useful. So the technology continues [00:19:00] to help us try to make assessments at broad scales and also try to answer questions sometimes that aren't easy.Speaker 2: Are you using a quantitative modeling? To some extent,Speaker 3: we sure do. And then the models are just critical in some ways. The fire models are ahead of things like ecosystem models. You know, fire is really a physical process. It really is about combustion oxidation. Fire modeling really began in earnest in this country in the early seventies mostly Missoula, Montana, [00:19:30] and has certainly been able to kind of change over time and we're continuing to try to make it better. But the fire models we have today actually do a pretty good job, not perfect job, but a pretty good job of actually forecasting on a gis landscape work. Fire's gonna move in a landscape. How fast is it going to move? Maybe what kind of flame lights might you expect so that those modeling systems are really used a great deal in our research to try to understand that probability of fire occurrence. What happens to that probability?Speaker 3: Let's say if you treat 20% [00:20:00] of the watershed and reduce the hazard, what happens to the probability of the areas that are treated? What about the 80% that are untreated? It turns out they can also have a reduction in probability. The ecosystem models are so much more challenging than you're asking what happens to the soil? What happens to water, what happens to wildlife habitat. So those become much more challenging that basically, um, generate and also tests. So the fire modeling in some ways is well ahead of those because I think it's more of a physical known system even though there's great [00:20:30] research to try to make it better. But the firewall that we have today a pretty good,Speaker 2: and then there's also the idea that the forests in the equator equatorial area are much more valuable than the, the forest north and south of that area. What sort of feeling do you have about that?Speaker 3: I think that's Friday and that and the carbon debate, that's a really interesting, um, separation because people have shown really conclusively that, you know, removing forest in the equator area is that dramatic [00:21:00] reduction in carbon sequestration. Also the sustainability of those sports. So I think the carbon question when we look at the equator is really clear about trying to keep forced, forced to keep forest alive. Right? Keep that force there and let it allow it to sequester carbon, hold it. But then when we move away from the kind of the equator, we go up into places that are more temporary. Like California. Here we have fire that works on landscapes, fireworks on landscape, just done in the past. It continues [00:21:30] today, fires different, but it's still a big issue. So there I think the debate becomes not just trying to keep Forrest at forested, but also what kind of forest have the ability to hold onto carbon.Speaker 3: It's a question for the long term and then you go to the boreal and my goodness, the boreal forest and now been shown like in northern Canada and Russia, some of the biggest carbon stocks in the planet. These are huge, enormous areas. And actually we know this year Russia had one the biggest fire years in [00:22:00] his history. So talk about, you know, the context of fire and climate is profound and fire force and boreal is going to be the most sensitive to climate change. People have already forecasted that. I think it's already been seen. Temperatures are up even more severely in the boreal regions versus down here and the temporary. So those places should probably be even more important to understand in terms of the dynamics of carbon and fire and forest and even we are a, so how did you get started in science? What was it that got you interested in [00:22:30] becoming a scientist?Speaker 3: It's a great question. It's one that's hard to answer. I mean my background has always been kind of curious about scientific things. I actually had my undergrad degree and masters degree in engineering. I grew up really in a forestry family, my grandfather and my dad and uncles working around forest. But I think for me being so close to it for a while, not for my whole life, but while young childhood life who was so close and I really enjoyed it, but it was also something that I took for granted, right? That just didn't think it was something they wanted [00:23:00] to study and pursue. And somehow I was interested in kind of technology engineering, still got into engineering field. Then I started actually contemplating doing a phd. Then this realize what discussions with my wife, Mary and others that I was so much more interested in the natural world.Speaker 3: So once I started to actually study that, which actually happened at UC Davis in 1988, it just lit a fire. I mean, I didn't, at that time I wasn't really gonna study fire, but it lit a fire and me just a curiosity. This idea of um, natural [00:23:30] systems on soils and plants. I'd never studied any of that in my previous career. It was just, it was just fascinating to me. Then I just decided, um, I thought I'd come down and meet a couple of faculty here at Berkeley at the time, Bob Martin, um, learned that he actually had a bs degree in physics. So in some ways we had some similarities and they just realized that the kind of the quantitative engineering world had some real connections to the natural scientists. And it was really where my heart was. There's no doubt about it. Great. Well thanks very much. [00:24:00] You're welcome.Speaker 4: [inaudible]Speaker 5: special thanks to Gretchen Sanders before editorial assistants, one occurred during the show is from a low star David Alpha and titled Folk and Acoustic. It's made available [00:24:30] via creative Commons license 3.0 Patrick. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We're happy to hear from our listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot Cadillacs had yahoo.comSpeaker 4: [00:25:00] [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

How will the combined forces of global change (climate, demographic shifts and economic trends) impact urban health in the 21st century? This symposium is intended to spark cross-pollination of new perspectives to enable UC Berkeley researchers and their research partners worldwide to develop and implement more effective global health interventions in the coming decades. Faculty from the School of Public Health, Urban Planning, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Environmental Science Policy and Management will participate in three interlinked panel discussions to develop cross-cutting strategies to prevent or mitigate contemporary urban health challenges. Participants will have an opportunity to share their own experiences and lessons learned during a moderated lunchtime discussion. Faculty panelists and moderators include Kirk Smith, Eva Harris, Jim Hunt, Lee Riley, Malcolm Potts, Jason Colburn, Inez Fung, Ndola Prata, Xochitl Castaneda, Michael Hanemann, Art Reingold, Wayne Getz, and Tomas Aragon. http://globalhealth.berkeley.edu/cgph/

How will the combined forces of global change (climate, demographic shifts and economic trends) impact urban health in the 21st century? This symposium is intended to spark cross-pollination of new perspectives to enable UC Berkeley researchers and their research partners worldwide to develop and implement more effective global health interventions in the coming decades. Faculty from the School of Public Health, Urban Planning, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Environmental Science Policy and Management will participate in three interlinked panel discussions to develop cross-cutting strategies to prevent or mitigate contemporary urban health challenges. Participants will have an opportunity to share their own experiences and lessons learned during a moderated lunchtime discussion. Faculty panelists and moderators include Kirk Smith, Eva Harris, Jim Hunt, Lee Riley, Malcolm Potts, Jason Colburn, Inez Fung, Ndola Prata, Xochitl Castaneda, Michael Hanemann, Art Reingold, Wayne Getz, and Tomas Aragon. http://globalhealth.berkeley.edu/cgph/

How will the combined forces of global change (climate, demographic shifts and economic trends) impact urban health in the 21st century? This symposium is intended to spark cross-pollination of new perspectives to enable UC Berkeley researchers and their research partners worldwide to develop and implement more effective global health interventions in the coming decades. Faculty from the School of Public Health, Urban Planning, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Environmental Science Policy and Management will participate in three interlinked panel discussions to develop cross-cutting strategies to prevent or mitigate contemporary urban health challenges. Participants will have an opportunity to share their own experiences and lessons learned during a moderated lunchtime discussion. Faculty panelists and moderators include Kirk Smith, Eva Harris, Jim Hunt, Lee Riley, Malcolm Potts, Jason Colburn, Inez Fung, Ndola Prata, Xochitl Castaneda, Michael Hanemann, Art Reingold, Wayne Getz, and Tomas Aragon. http://globalhealth.berkeley.edu/cgph/

How will the combined forces of global change (climate, demographic shifts and economic trends) impact urban health in the 21st century? This symposium is intended to spark cross-pollination of new perspectives to enable UC Berkeley researchers and their research partners worldwide to develop and implement more effective global health interventions in the coming decades. Faculty from the School of Public Health, Urban Planning, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Environmental Science Policy and Management will participate in three interlinked panel discussions to develop cross-cutting strategies to prevent or mitigate contemporary urban health challenges. Participants will have an opportunity to share their own experiences and lessons learned during a moderated lunchtime discussion. Faculty panelists and moderators include Kirk Smith, Eva Harris, Jim Hunt, Lee Riley, Malcolm Potts, Jason Colburn, Inez Fung, Ndola Prata, Xochitl Castaneda, Michael Hanemann, Art Reingold, Wayne Getz, and Tomas Aragon. http://globalhealth.berkeley.edu/cgph/