Save What You Love with Mark Titus

00:00:00:17 - 00:00:26:22
Mark Titus
Welcome to Say what You love. I'm Mark Titus. Today, we're hanging out with Dr. Daniel Schindler from the University of Washington, Alaska's salmon program. I have been spending time with Dan Schindler since 2012 when we filmed The Breach and did an interview with him up at Lake Nerka, where he's got a cabin throughout the summer with the University of Washington doing research on the world's biggest, last, largest, fully intact salmon system that we have.

00:00:27:00 - 00:00:53:01
Mark Titus
And today, we dive into why this is the way it is. How do these salmon survive and thrive in this incredibly beautiful place? And what it really means to Dr. Schindler to be doing this work in the footsteps of his dad. If you're liking the podcast and you're listening on Apple Podcasts. Give us a rating. It really helps put lift under our wings and get this thing going so we can bring you more episodes down the line here.

00:00:53:03 - 00:00:59:13
Mark Titus
Enjoy this time with Dan Schindler from the University of Washington. We'll see you next week. Enjoy the show.

00:00:59:15 - 00:01:35:14
Music
How do you save what you love?
When the world is burning down?
How do you save what you love?
When pushes come to shove.
How do you say what you love when things are upside down? How do you say what you love?
When times are getting tough.

00:01:35:16 - 00:01:38:16
Mark Titus
Daniel Schindler, welcome.

00:01:38:18 - 00:01:42:15
Daniel Schindler
Thanks, Mark. Thanks for the invite to chat with you today.

00:01:42:16 - 00:02:11:18
Mark Titus
Absolutely. I'm so excited to have you on here today. We do get to chat from time to time and we have a lot of things in common. Mostly our love for Bristol Bay. And I know you spend your winters here in Seattle working for the University of Washington. But you've spent your summers for the last several decades in a very unique place in Alaska, the watershed of aforementioned Bristol Bay.

00:02:11:20 - 00:02:24:14
Mark Titus
I know you spent decades there. What? Why? How do you keep finding and firing your curiosity and your soul fire in that place? And can you paint a picture of what it's like for us?

00:02:24:15 - 00:03:16:19
Daniel Schindler
Yeah. So, yeah, I've been going up to Bristol Bay to work on those watersheds that support salmon since 1997. And the places, you know, the watersheds are remarkable. They are huge, they are diverse, they are remote, stunningly beautiful, and remarkably what we call productive, which means they just produce an incredible number of animals and plants. Even though it's in the subarctic, it's cold most of the year during that 3 to 4 month growing season, the whole place just explodes into this biological frenzy of activity.

00:03:16:20 - 00:03:44:09
Daniel Schindler
And of course, salmon, sockeye salmon in particular are really the the the core activity that catches people's attention. And what keeps me going back is the fact that, you know, as a scientist, we're typically driven by our curiosity. We get satisfaction out of figuring things out. But I can't really figure all of Bristol Bay out of Bristol Bay keeps surprising me.

00:03:44:11 - 00:04:10:15
Daniel Schindler
Every year, you know, you go back up to start a new field season and you think you're going to do something that's pretty routine and see the same things you see every other year and every year shows you something different. And it's either something that you've walked past before or steered your boat past before, or it's something that is simply hasn't happened before.

00:04:10:17 - 00:04:25:13
Daniel Schindler
So it's diverse and it continues to surprise us. It's fascinating scientifically. And of course, it's it's such an important place for producing salmon and all the fisheries they support.

00:04:25:15 - 00:04:59:15
Mark Titus
I had a conversation with a good friend over the weekend who is not a fisherman. I am. And he was ask any kind of give me some crap about it, you know, like why? Why do you torment these poor beings? And it's a good question, you know, but one of the reasons is that fascination with what's under the water that like you were intimating there about something different every time coming back, there's something that is mysterious and that is a draw that keeps me coming back.

00:04:59:15 - 00:05:30:11
Mark Titus
And, you know, I think I told you before the podcast here that we spent 20 years in a row up to Alaska and this this last year with COVID didn't get up. And I absolutely felt that. You mentioned salmon, of course, Bristol Bay. Why is this region such a Valhalla for salmon and sockeye salmon in particular?

00:05:30:13 - 00:06:01:17
Daniel Schindler
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, salmon are distributed throughout most of the North Pacific basin and salmon, even though we often paint them as these very fragile creatures are very robust, they're very good at colonizing and succeeding and all sorts of different habitat means, I think, that the same species of salmon that inhabits the Yukon River has also flourished in central California for thousands and thousands of years.

00:06:01:19 - 00:06:37:19
Daniel Schindler
Tells you something about how adaptable these this that species of these species are. But why is Bristol Bay so unique? And it really, I think, is a fluke of the geography. You have a region that whereas never the topography, the mountain ranges have been produced there over millions of years. And of course it's been heavily glaciated. So 20,000 years ago, Bristol Bay was under thousands of meters of ice.

00:06:37:21 - 00:07:12:04
Daniel Schindler
And as that ice moved back and forth and smoothed out those mountain valleys, deposited a huge layer of gravel everywhere, it basically generated the salmon habitat that we see now. So the watersheds have all these gravels in them. They have low gradient streams. The mountains aren't particularly high in Bristol Bay, so the rivers in the streams are pretty gradual, which means the water doesn't just rip through the gravel, it percolates through the gravel.

00:07:12:06 - 00:07:48:06
Daniel Schindler
And then you have all these big lakes. Those lakes were produced by the activity of glaciers. And in the case of sockeye salmon, most sockeye salmon spend 1 to 2 years in lakes before they head to the ocean. So you have these big, safe, stable lakes, stable from a biological standpoint, and then the rivers are pretty short. You know, the distance from the nursery lake to the Bering Sea is typically tens of kilometers.

00:07:48:08 - 00:08:27:02
Daniel Schindler
And those rivers are still pretty cool. And then they dump into an ocean that's incredibly productive from a biological standpoint. Sure, it's cold most of the year. But again, during the summer, the North Pacific, the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska all explodes into this intense season of biological growth. And all those plankton and the things the plankton feeds are caused become food for for salmon, juvenile salmon, and eventually the salmon as they get larger and fat enough to return to spawn.

00:08:27:04 - 00:08:52:17
Daniel Schindler
So it's really this I hate to use the word perfect storm, but it's really this perfect set of conditions with a productive, cool ocean heavily glaciated, gradual watersheds, lots of gravel. You put climate on top of that. It's not incredibly wet, but it's not a desert. So you get enough water to keep the landscape wet, keep the water, the water running across the landscape.

00:08:52:19 - 00:09:06:22
Daniel Schindler
And it's really that set of conditions that makes it so unique and so productive, as we call it, biologically, in terms of the number of fish that come out of these watersheds and keep coming out of these watersheds.

00:09:07:00 - 00:09:45:09
Mark Titus
I've had the great fortune of visiting you and your cohort where you work with the Alaska Fisheries Program through the University of Washington, up in Bristol Bay. And it is, as you mentioned, a series of lakes in the Wood Tick State Park. It's absolutely stunning, as you say. And in the summer 2018, if you recall, that was the summer came up and we were filming parts from the Wild and we had dinner with Mark Harmon, who came up to go check out the place and is, you know, part, part and parcel in the movie.

00:09:45:11 - 00:10:03:21
Mark Titus
But that summer, one of the Lakes Lake Beverly, which usually hosts modest spawning, unexpectedly filled with fish that summer, the lake counted for an estimated 13% of the global sockeye catch that year in the bay. What's all that about?

00:10:03:23 - 00:10:29:11
Daniel Schindler
Yeah, 2018 was a remarkable year for a bunch of reasons. Again, one of these surprises I mentioned earlier, you know, the number of sockeye salmon that returned to spawning Lake Beverly in 2018 could simply not have been imagined 20, 30 years ago. There was one of these surprises. So why a surprise? And again, we don't fully understand it.

00:10:29:11 - 00:10:59:18
Daniel Schindler
But, you know, our prevailing thought or prevailing theory about what salmon habitat looks like is a bit like the sandwich between the landform, which is the mountains and the gravels. And then on top of that is the climate. And some years are cold, some years are warm, some years are wet, some years are dry, etc. And of course the salmon are not encountering the climate directly.

00:10:59:20 - 00:11:41:21
Daniel Schindler
They're encountering the climate as it's filtered through local habitat conditions and a dry the region may be dry in one year. And what that might do is make some parts of the landscape particularly profitable for salmon and other parts of the landscape not very good. And then in a wet year, because there's this interaction between the weather or the climate and the landform and those other years, for instance, a wet year, different parts of the landscape will do better than others.

00:11:41:22 - 00:12:14:15
Daniel Schindler
And then on top of that is just the stochastic, the random, the random processes that are involved in any natural ecosystem. And what that means is there's a lot of lottery tickets that are bought out there. And if it's a piece of habitat that is tending to be more profitable in a given year, then it's more likely that a population that's spawning in that piece of habitat will draw a winning lottery ticket.

00:12:14:17 - 00:12:50:20
Daniel Schindler
So in the case of Lake Beverly, you know, really the best explanation that we have is that partially due to the interaction between the climate that year and the particular geological conditions in Lake Beverly and Hydrologic conditions, plus the fact that the population of a spider bite, a winning lottery ticket that year and survival was high, those they were, and thus survival all the way from eggs to juveniles to the smolts when they migrate from the lakes out into the ocean, survive a couple of years in the ocean and then come back.

00:12:50:20 - 00:13:22:14
Daniel Schindler
So they probably bought a couple of lottery tickets in that year and as a result they hit the jackpot, so to speak. And it just so happened it turned out to be a year when sockeye salmon in many other parts of the world just did not do very well. 2018 was coming off of a series of particularly hot years in the Gulf of Alaska and the North Pacific and many of the other populations of sockeye salmon throughout their global range just did really poorly that year.

00:13:22:16 - 00:13:47:15
Daniel Schindler
I think Beverly was one that did amazingly well and it picked up the slack for many of these other populations that seem to have busted that year. We can characterize what the statistical properties of salmon populations look like, and that is that they sort of boom and they passed and all the booms and busts are occurring in the same places in the same years.

00:13:47:17 - 00:14:22:21
Daniel Schindler
We aren't to the point where we can provide any reliable explanations for why one area blows up and one area doesn't do so well. So providing explanations are still tough. In fact, it involves a lot of B.S. and usually. But what we do know is that it's a phenomenon that characterizes a natural, properly functioning, functioning salmon ecosystem. Is this range of highs and lows across space and across time.

00:14:22:23 - 00:14:39:17
Mark Titus
So I know that this is a large portion of your work and it certainly a large portion of what you've been known for. And colloquially it's been called the portfolio effect. Could you explain kind of how you came up with that terminology?

00:14:39:19 - 00:15:19:13
Daniel Schindler
Yeah, it's it's a it's a term that we stole from the financial literature and we didn't actually steal it. People who had been wondering and concerned about loss of species diversity globally involve the portfolio effect as a reason for wanting to conserve species. And the idea there, as in a financial investment portfolio, is that if you can't really predict the future, which means there's risk associate with the future, one of the best strategies for dealing with that is to diversify across a bunch of different things that reduce the risks to the unknowns of the future.

00:15:19:15 - 00:15:46:04
Daniel Schindler
So that was also applied to the idea of loss of species. For instance, we see patterns of hundreds, if not thousands of species being lost in tropical rainforests as we cut and burn them, etc. And the concern there is how does that global ecosystem, or at least how is the tropical forest ecosystem going to function differently as you start losing species?

00:15:46:06 - 00:16:21:06
Daniel Schindler
We simply took that term, this analogy of a portfolio and applied it to Bristol Bay sockeye salmon because they have some of the same structures as a financial portfolio, any given river system within Bristol Bay. So there's nine major rivers in Bristol Bay. Within each of those rivers is dozens, if not hundreds of individual populations. And each of those little populations, booms and busts sort of marches to the tick of their own drum.

00:16:21:08 - 00:16:48:16
Daniel Schindler
So those individual populations are a lot like individual stocks on the stock market. And then they aggregate up to the number of fish that return to an individual river, which might be like a mutual fund. And then all of the different rivers of Bristol Bay add up to a bigger number of fish that could be thought of, much like your your overall investment for your retirement and for instance.

00:16:48:18 - 00:17:25:10
Daniel Schindler
So it's an analogy that works because salmon populations are structured across this hierarchy from really fine scale genetic differentiation associated with individual pieces of habitat, those aggregate up into bigger pieces of stocks that return to individual rivers. And then rivers together produce and support The overall fisheries of Bristol Bay. So the portfolio effect is not a term that we we dreamt up, it's a term that we simply borrowed from finances and from other aspects of ecology.

00:17:25:12 - 00:17:54:14
Mark Titus
Well, it certainly works. And it it allows everyday people like me to get their brain around why diversification of species is important. And it's it's very clearly demonstrated in the salmon ecology in Bristol Bay. You know, if you spend any time there, you can certainly see it. And hopefully in our films, the Breach in the Wild, you get a taste of that as well.

00:17:54:15 - 00:18:00:18
Mark Titus
But how does the portfolio effect benefit people as well as salmon?

00:18:00:20 - 00:18:33:13
Daniel Schindler
Yeah, So so two things before we get to the people. I think there's one other observation that's worth thinking about and that is that and our long term data collection of Bristol Bay allows us to make this observation and therefore a conclusion, and that is that it's really easy to go to an individual small stream, for instance, and study that count the number of fish in it for two, three, four years, as you might do if you were to do an environmental risk assessment of a development project.

00:18:33:15 - 00:19:00:17
Daniel Schindler
And it's very likely that you'll see numbers of fish that are below average just because of the random chance of when you measure that. And what we've come to learn with our long term monitoring is that little pieces of habitat that don't do very much in terms of supporting fish for sometimes for decades, suddenly, suddenly the switch gets flipped on and they become remarkably again.

00:19:00:17 - 00:19:25:02
Daniel Schindler
We use the term productive. They produce an incredible amount of fish, and they may only be particularly productive for a handful of years before they sort of drop back down to their low productive state. So, again, just like your your investment portfolio, you know, a wise investor doesn't dump all their stocks that are doing particularly well right now.

00:19:25:04 - 00:19:56:04
Daniel Schindler
They hang on to those little pieces because they want to keep the possibility in the game that they may contribute in the future. And again, this analogy works for salmon habitat, because in Bristol Bay, the habitat still there, we don't see it in the lower 48 where we've messed up all the rivers simply because we've taken away many of these options for fish to really flourish when when they're when a lottery ticket presents itself.

00:19:56:06 - 00:20:16:11
Daniel Schindler
So in Bristol Bay, we still see all those little pieces and a lot of those little pieces don't do very much in many years. And then suddenly they are incredibly important and taking up the slack for some of their neighboring pieces of habitat that for whatever reason failed that year. To get to the question of why does it matter to people?

00:20:16:13 - 00:20:55:20
Daniel Schindler
I mean, it's certainly it's important to scientists because it adds all this complexity that we're trying to understand and we continue to struggle. And so it makes our jobs particularly fascinating. But from the perspective of fishing communities, the fishing industry, even individual fishers, reliability is something that has tangible social and economic value. So you can think of yourself that let's say you're offered a job where the the average annual salary was $100,000 and you're given two options.

00:20:55:20 - 00:21:50:22
Daniel Schindler
One is every year you get $100,000 salary or over the long term you'll get $100,000 per year. But some years it's going to be 10,000. Some years it's going to be 200,000, other years will be 30,000. So chances are a lot of people will pick the stable strategy, the one that they can count on. So in the case of fishing communities, having reliable returns from year to year actually has tangible value, because if you have to harvest enough fish to put food on the table to pay the loan on your fishing boat, to take your vacation somewhere fun, you ability to go up to the bay and make a living every year has has this

00:21:50:22 - 00:22:26:13
Daniel Schindler
tangible value to you. So what the portfolio effect does, it doesn't wipe out. It doesn't reduce all of the variability of how many salmon return to Bristol Bay and are available to fisheries, but it certainly reduces that variability and makes it a far more reliable system that people benefit from travel south and go to places like the Sacramento River and all of this diversity is not all of it, but a lot of this diversity has been stripped out of it.

00:22:26:15 - 00:22:47:07
Daniel Schindler
And you know, as a long term average, there's still a phenomenal number of Chinook salmon that return to the Sacramento River as an example. But it is boom or bust. Every now and then. There's a fishery that's open and there's big Chinook salmon everywhere. And then there are three or four or five years in between where there's so few fish that there's no fishery allowed at all.

00:22:47:09 - 00:23:19:07
Daniel Schindler
And then it blows up again and there's a big intense fishery. So this is something that we see again, we don't understand the specific mechanisms of it, but heavily humanized watersheds appear to lose their reliability in terms of how many fish they produce from year to year. And this seems to be a function of the loss of habitat diversity and the loss of genetic diversity in the salmon that return to those rivers.

00:23:19:09 - 00:23:27:13
Daniel Schindler
Bristol Bay still has the full complement of habitat diversity and genetic diversity that it that it's probably had for thousands of years.

00:23:27:15 - 00:24:03:16
Mark Titus
So there's an £800 gorilla in the room, and that is the Pebble Mine. This is something that you know very well you've been intimately involved in. I have as well. And certainly the people of Bristol Bay and in particular the indigenous community that has been there for over 4000 years has been struggling with this proposition of what would be North America's largest open pit gold and copper mine in the headwaters of this incredible fishery that we've been talking about.

00:24:03:18 - 00:24:39:17
Mark Titus
You to kind of boil things down, what we know is that in order for this project to be successful, it would have to be large. It would have to be massive. And I just wanted to bring up a little something here on this show. We look at people working to save the things they love big or small. And in a Science magazine article from 2019, Warren Cornwall writes, Schindler's work was the most influential research in terms of how we approached Bristol Bay, says Phil North, an aquatic ecologist who headed EPA's Bristol Bay work before leaving the agency in 2013.

00:24:39:19 - 00:25:17:05
Mark Titus
In other words, small things matter. So what I find really interesting is we talk about the vastness of Alaska, the vastness of Bristol Bay. It's lakes, it's huge rivers. And then we get down into the that the tiny things like the tiny creeks that are productive one summer, like possibly Tilbrook Creek up in the area where the proposed Pebble Mine would would go why can small things be just as powerful as big things in a place like Bristol Bay?

00:25:17:07 - 00:25:35:22
Mark Titus
And I mean, even going one step further, like a really small thing. Some of your work most recently has been with a very small thing inside of the heads of salmon, and it's meant something really big. Can you talk about that a bit?

00:25:36:00 - 00:26:14:06
Daniel Schindler
Yeah. The the question of why the details matter is it's a tough question, but to use another metaphor, think about looking at a Renaissance painting and you're standing 20 feet away from that Renaissance painting and you see the landscape, you see the people, you see the scene, and then you take a few steps forward and you look at the same painting from ten feet away and you start to see some of the intermediate scale details.

00:26:14:12 - 00:26:59:11
Daniel Schindler
You know what the artist would have painted with a smaller brush and you start to see more, more detail starts to reveal itself and you start to get a better and more enriched image of what that painting is actually showing. And then you walk up to within two feet of that painting and you realize that some of the brushes that were used to finish the details of the painting were only a couple of Harris wide and superimposed on the big scale landscape and the intermediate scale images of people and trees and these sort of things are the details of people's eyes and what jewelry they're wearing, etc. So the whole image is really produced by

00:26:59:11 - 00:27:23:12
Daniel Schindler
a whole bunch of different sizes of paint brushes and chances are that if you took one of those paintings and eliminated all the details that were applied by the tiniest of the brushes, you'd have a fundamentally different painting. You might still see the landscape and the people that were lying around having a picnic or whatever it might be.

00:27:23:14 - 00:27:49:12
Daniel Schindler
And as you start eliminating the details that the image fundamentally changes. So the same I like to think of the same analogy with salmon habitat where, yeah, you could put a lot of pebble mines in Bristol Bay and you'd still have the mountains in the same places that they are. They may have a few chunks torn out of them from from mining pits and these sort of things.

00:27:49:14 - 00:28:20:00
Daniel Schindler
But the basic mountain ranges would still be in their same locations. The big rivers would probably still flow in the places that they do and out to the ocean. But as you got to the finer scale details, it's those finer scale details that are most at risk of being severely degraded or in fact eliminated from building roads, from digging open pits, from laying down pipelines.

00:28:20:01 - 00:28:52:22
Daniel Schindler
You name it. Certainly something like Pebble Mine has the potential for large scale contamination of the watershed. For instance, if one of these periodic tailings ponds that would have to be there for centuries after the mine was closed. If one of those if one of the dams collapsed and discharged all that mining waste, you would certainly have potential impacts that would extend for tens, if not more of kilometers downstream.

00:28:53:00 - 00:29:26:09
Daniel Schindler
But we can't forget about all these little details. The little Taylor Creek, the little Lake Beverly, for instance, that if you eliminate them from the landscape, you start to lose this complexity of the overall ecosystem. And it's that complex city that provides both this incredible productivity of the ecosystem, but also this reliability. And the reliability is the fact that diversity stabilizes the overall returns to the ecosystem.

00:29:26:11 - 00:30:00:08
Daniel Schindler
So the expectation is that industrial activity of the scale of Pebble Mine could in fact eliminate fish habitat in a few small tributaries, and they're small when you scale them up to all of Bristol Bay. But as we've seen from studies of places elsewhere, small places can produce really big numbers of fish in certain years. And by degrading and eliminating and rubbing out all that complexity, even at small scales, the systems just function in a less reliable way.

00:30:00:10 - 00:30:38:13
Daniel Schindler
The other thing that's important is that we've learned the hard way in places like the Columbia River, in places like coastal Oregon and California, that once you lose that, that raw material of habitat complex city and its associated genetic complexity, it's really expensive to even make a serious attempt to get it back. And even if you pour literally tens of millions of dollars into some of these restoration efforts, you never get it back to what it was historically.

00:30:38:15 - 00:30:50:23
Daniel Schindler
So those fine scale dirty details add up to a important ecological service, if you want to call it that. We see at the watershed scale. And once it's gone, it's kind of a one way trip.

00:30:51:01 - 00:31:35:03
Mark Titus
I've been reading Robert Michael Pyle's book Wintergreen, and had it's about the Willapa Bay Area here in Washington State and which was heavily logged and speaks to what you're talking about. Once something is changed, once it has been altered significantly, whether that's a giant clear cut or a giant open pit copper mine or a dam that fundamentally blocks all of the salmon kids from returning to their traditional spawning grounds, it's really hard to replace that or bring it back to its productivity that it was at prior to that work being done.

00:31:35:05 - 00:31:55:13
Mark Titus
And what we tend to do, I think, is people think we're going to make it better with our technology and make it more efficient. And that ends up being like we're going to plant one kind of tree to make it more efficient. And this sort of flies in the face of this idea of diversification that you've been talking about here.

00:31:55:15 - 00:32:18:05
Mark Titus
And I know another part of your work has also been dealing with diversification of geography, that where these salmon go in Bristol Bay. And part of that is come out of a tiny little thing called an odorless. Can you tell me what an odorless is and tell us why that's important to this conversation about Bristol Bay?

00:32:18:08 - 00:32:48:05
Daniel Schindler
Sir, before I get there, Mark, I want to say one other thing. In response to what you started with. It is true that human activities can cause changes to watersheds that affect how many salmon they produce and the types of salmon and how reliable those returns are. But there's a bit of a paradox here, and that a naturally functioning salmon ecosystem is continuously changing.

00:32:48:07 - 00:33:22:09
Daniel Schindler
You know, salmon are very good. You know, it's one of the hallmarks of salmon biology is they thrive in landscapes that are continuously changing. And what's changing is the geo morphology, the fact that running water causes erosion and deposition of gravels. So a properly functioning floodplain river is not static by any stretch of the imagination. It's continuously changing through time.

00:33:22:09 - 00:33:53:17
Daniel Schindler
And this continual renewal of the habitat as a natural process is what we need to think about maintaining as we protect habitat. That's one of the problems with infrastructure, with big mines is that we put human infrastructure, human structures in watersheds to try to prevent this erosion and deposition of gravels. If you spend $10 million buying a road, the last thing in the world you want to do is have the river wash it out, which of course happens from now and then.

00:33:53:19 - 00:34:25:13
Daniel Schindler
But if you're going to protect your investment of a road, you're going to bolster that thing up so the river can't wash it out. Similarly, if you build a pipeline to deliver all the natural gas to a big electrical power stations around the mine, you're going to make sure that thing is as stable as possible. And by imposing stability on the landscape, you take away these dynamic processes that produce this renewal of salmon habitat.

00:34:25:15 - 00:35:02:22
Daniel Schindler
And again, that's something that sounds abstract when we consider how do these ecosystems actually work? But this is exactly how salmon ecosystems work. They are far from static, They are continuously changing, they're dynamic and one of the things we have to do if we want to keep salmon around for people in the future is allow these ecosystems to be dynamic and change with floods, with forest fires, in some cases, the natural processes that provide renewal to these ecosystems.

00:35:02:23 - 00:35:40:09
Mark Titus
That poses a problem for people wanting to build or, you know, increase population in areas that are dynamic. And I think, you know, that's very clear. And we've seen it here in Washington State in the lower 48 and our salmon runs down here. And one other thought on that is, you know, we have thought down here of white Euro-American colonists who came out here thought they could never fully tame the landscape, that the forests were too vast, that the salmon numbers were too big, the rivers were too powerful.

00:35:40:11 - 00:36:11:21
Mark Titus
But we have learned in under 200 years that we were wrong about that, that people were wrong about that. And yet there are still folks in Alaska and and others that say, well, the landscape is just too vast. We couldn't ever really make a dent in it. But what I'm hearing from you is that even if you don't in one fell swoop, damage the entire landscape with a massive catastrophic, say, tailings dam failure from a giant open pit copper mine.

00:36:11:22 - 00:36:24:01
Mark Titus
You are still, by virtue of trying to control the erosion, control the land management quote, land management, and that is deleterious in and of itself.

00:36:24:03 - 00:36:52:15
Daniel Schindler
Yeah, I agree with that statement. You know, the the I think the right way to think about a big development project is to think about what it does to the the risk profile of the salmon stocks. And you know, in their purely natural condition, there's a lot of risk in how many fish return to Bristol Bay every year.

00:36:52:17 - 00:37:16:17
Daniel Schindler
There's highs, there's lows. These are a function of diseases and population dynamics of the salmon. So whether in the climate that they encounter, so there's risk associated with it, with how many fish come back to these watersheds every year. What we need to think about when we assess a development project is how much does it change the risk profile?

00:37:16:19 - 00:37:39:01
Daniel Schindler
Because it is very possible that the Pebble Mine could go in and for the next 500 years everything is hunky dory and the same number of salmon come back to Bristol Bay. That's a possibility, but that's not the right way to look at it. The right way to look at it is Ask does put in a huge project on the landscape.

00:37:39:03 - 00:38:15:23
Daniel Schindler
Make the probability of a catastrophic collapse more likely? Does it change the risk profile to the ecosystem. And that's where we start looking at various threats from sulfides to roads, changing erosional patterns to de-watering streams, and you start adding up all those new risks and it quickly becomes apparent that a project the size of Pebble distinctly changes the risk profile of bad things happening to the salmon stock.

00:38:16:01 - 00:38:21:03
Daniel Schindler
I'm not sure how I got on that tangent, but there you go.

00:38:21:05 - 00:38:42:20
Mark Titus
That's a good tangent. We we're in this moment where there is a bit of pause. People that have been working on the Safe Bristol Bay Project for a long time, most notably the indigenous people that get up every day and face the prospect of a giant open pit copper mine in their headwaters have worked on it for decades.

00:38:42:22 - 00:39:11:13
Mark Titus
And right now the US Army Corps of Engineers back in November put denied a proposed permit for the dredge infill operation that is critical for the Pebble Mine. They have appealed this decision and we are now in a moment with the new administration and there is still once again some question the immediate and the intermediate future for Bristol Bay.

00:39:11:15 - 00:39:33:02
Mark Titus
Now the folks that would build the mine contend over and over again that a a mine and a fishery can coexist. What is your contention with that statement and where do you see the way forward for Bristol Bay from in the immediate and in the intermediate?

00:39:33:04 - 00:40:09:02
Daniel Schindler
So yeah, I don't think the question is whether a mine and a fishery can coexist at a mine and a fishery can coexist, but that statement cannot be taken out of context. The question is what kind of fishery can coexist? And the question is really whether the mine or any other mine or any other development activity compromises the fishery that exists now, and that has persisted there as a commercial fishery for 120 years.

00:40:09:04 - 00:40:43:16
Daniel Schindler
There will be a Bristol Bay fishery, even if there's a pebble mine. Ugashik River isn't in a totally different watershed. There's no reason why Pebble would affect that salmon run. But at the scale of Bristol Bay, the question is whether the fishery would be different and whether the mine would have negative impacts on it. And again, this is something that we can't really predict with high precision, but we need to ask whether this project poses significant risks to fish, fisheries and people.

00:40:43:18 - 00:41:05:11
Daniel Schindler
And two things. First of all, everything in life has a risk associated with it. So as soon as someone tells you that we can do this massive project that's going to look like this and we can conclude with full certainty that there's no risk, well, they've got to be both. And there's just no way that there's no risks.

00:41:05:13 - 00:41:32:21
Daniel Schindler
As a scientist, it's not my role to say what an acceptable level of risk is. It's the people of Bristol Bay, the people who rely on this resource and their decision makers to really decide, All right, how much risk is too much? This is where the scientists can help illuminate how different, how big these risks of a mine might be.

00:41:32:21 - 00:41:56:19
Daniel Schindler
But it's not our it's not our role to decide what's acceptable or not. I personally and professionally, I get my hackles up when I see what is supposed to be a proper risk assessment that leads to the conclusion that there is zero tangible risk to the to the fisheries and to the habitat that supports those fisheries, because that's simply not a logical outcome.

00:41:56:19 - 00:42:26:11
Daniel Schindler
If you are, admit that you're going to drain dozens of miles of streams and you have the requirement that you store millions of tons of toxic waste, you know, you start adding these things up and you've quickly realized it's absurd to say there's no risk to fisheries. So something is going on and this is that this is where we need to challenge.

00:42:26:11 - 00:42:34:20
Daniel Schindler
That's something because right now it's the logical conclusions just simply aren't adding up.

00:42:34:22 - 00:43:03:10
Mark Titus
I love that you come from a scientific background. Your dad worked on water issues in Canada and learned recently that he actually worked as an advisor to Neil Young on a on tour at one point. And I know you grew up around science and and the outdoors and the natural world, and that obviously had to have a large effect on you.

00:43:03:10 - 00:43:22:13
Mark Titus
But in looking as subjectively as you can back, how much nurture and how much nature was affecting your choice to be a scientist and especially one that works with water and salmon issues?

00:43:22:15 - 00:43:56:11
Daniel Schindler
Well, that's a tough question. I mean, clearly, if you get a side by side, there's a lot of nature there in terms of how we look and how we are conserve things. There's a lot of nurture, too, and it's it's really about, you know, what I was exposed to in terms of opportunity, in terms of getting outside, in terms of, you know, being interested in people's welfare.

00:43:56:13 - 00:44:19:11
Daniel Schindler
It's yeah, he's he was a great role model. I never really wanted to be a scientist until I went off to college and fumbled around for a few years and realized, wow, this is a potential career that can be interesting, can be fun, and can be important. So it took me a while to get there. I mean, what teenage boy wants to be like his dad?

00:44:19:12 - 00:44:42:00
Daniel Schindler
A lot of them don't, and I was one of them. Sure. But in retrospect, I you know, I grew up loving to be outside. I grew up curious about how the world worked. And those things had a huge, obviously lasting impression on me.

00:44:42:02 - 00:45:09:12
Mark Titus
I love scientists. I love hanging around you guys. I look forward to it every time I get to visit. I'm hoping we can visit this summer, you know, depending on things, COVID, etc.. I find comfort in your direct observation and the order of things as they are in the physical world and the enumeration of those things. But I wanted to kind of get on this human track a little bit with you, because guess what?

00:45:09:12 - 00:45:38:15
Mark Titus
You are a human being. You're capable of love and grief and wonder and all those human things that we all are capable of. And I know you've been criticized by the folks that are mine proponents in Bristol Bay for your active ism in science, as they have defined it. I suppose with this idea that science needs to be detached and completely clinical.

00:45:38:17 - 00:45:57:12
Mark Titus
But you've been outspoken, outspoken about Bristol Bay and what's at stake there. Why have you spoken out to save Bristol Bay the way that it is in your work, through your work? And why have you been vocal?

00:45:57:14 - 00:46:32:17
Daniel Schindler
Yeah, it's a good question as well, Mark. And you know, as I said earlier, I, I believe it's not our role as scientists to make decisions. You know, decisions need to be made by elected officials who represent the people that voted for them. I believe the role of scientists is to provide the knowledge that educates decision makers so they can make good decisions that are based on something rather than a knee jerk reaction.

00:46:32:19 - 00:47:11:17
Daniel Schindler
I believe that's up to scientists to help educate the public so they understand what they have at stake, both in terms of opportunities, but also what they may lose if a certain decision is made. We, you know, we all have passions. So I certainly have passion for Bristol Bay because I love the place and I enjoy being out there and I consider myself one of the lucky few who does get to call it home for part of the year and to to to pursue my science there.

00:47:11:19 - 00:47:46:08
Daniel Schindler
So I have passion for Bristol Bay in that sense with my and with my advocacy. You know, what I have really tried to stick to is advocating for good science. Certainly the science that I have produced does is not particularly favorable to a mine. But what's important to me is that if there is going to be a science based decision about whether to permit this or not, that the best available science is brought to the table.

00:47:46:10 - 00:48:16:11
Daniel Schindler
And my passion gets flared up even more when I see people rolling out what they claim is the world's best science to associate risks. And you don't have to look at it for more than a couple minutes and realize it's not legitimate science, it's not transparent, it's not rigorous. And that's where, again, I have become outspoken. And it's not really the challenge to mine.

00:48:16:11 - 00:48:45:16
Daniel Schindler
It's the challenge to the science that's being pushed to support a particular decision. It's clear that there will be some individuals, some of them are Bristol Bay residents that would benefit from this mine. But those views absolutely have to be balanced against the other people out there who stand to distinctly lose from a project like this. And I don't envy the policymaker who has to decide whether it's a yes or whether it's a no.

00:48:45:18 - 00:49:16:09
Daniel Schindler
But if I were that policymaker, I would want to do everything in my power to arm myself with the best information about the pros and the cons about making this decision. And this is where I believe responsible scientists operate, is by informing people of what these tradeoffs look like. Yeah, I'm fiery. Sometimes my emotions get the best of me and I'll yell at someone who is saying something stupid.

00:49:16:09 - 00:49:33:08
Daniel Schindler
But yeah, I'm not sure to make the decision and I shouldn't be neither. Neither should any other scientist. Someone else has to make those decisions. If they're smart about it, then they better demand the best information possible.

00:49:33:09 - 00:50:03:21
Mark Titus
Well, we have a new potential head of the EPA, and we have a new administration in the White House. And I know that there is discussion about the need for a veto from the EPA using the 404c Clean Water Act. And also on the table. The way forward for Bristol Bay is through permanent protection, through a National Fisheries Act, as it's being called potentially right now.

00:50:03:23 - 00:50:29:01
Mark Titus
That would be called the Jay and Bella National Fisheries area, I believe. Do you feel like this is realistic and in its possibility of being achieved? And firstly, and secondly, do you feel like this is adequate protection for a place like Bristol Bay moving into the more long term?

00:50:29:03 - 00:51:08:10
Daniel Schindler
I can't really speak to the to the realities of the politics of this. It's easy to recognize that this they are to provide permanent protection to Bristol Bay is a huge ask it's a checkerboard of landownership, different different state, federal and private jurisdictions. It's going to take an immense amount of coordination to provide protection to water and fish and people across this really huge area.

00:51:08:12 - 00:51:40:15
Daniel Schindler
Should we do it? You know, that's a place where we can start. And I think the infamous thing that should be used to inform that question is the reality that Bristol Bay is is truly a unique ecosystem at a global scale. There's no other Bristol Bay. There are places that resemble it in terms of being productive, in terms of fish, in terms of having a working ecosystem.

00:51:40:15 - 00:52:32:07
Daniel Schindler
It's not like it's a national park where people peer in through the fences to see the wild people out there on the landscape, fishing, observing, wildlife, harvesting these fish. People have been killing fish here for thousands of years. So when we talk about protection, it's about keeping people in the game here. So I think those are the motivations are part of the motivations we should use to think about trying to achieve what at this point like a would be a monumental feat for or for sea, where it certainly is certainly a more tangible short term or medium term solution to protect some of the watershed.

00:52:32:09 - 00:53:11:18
Daniel Schindler
But we have learned over and over and over again throughout the United States, throughout Canada, throughout every other part of the world that we're developing, is that it's easy to fundamentally change these places and then literally never get them back anyway. So Alaska and the United States in this case, are in this truly unique situation where they still have the opportunity to keep this landscape functioning the way it probably has for thousands of years.

00:53:11:20 - 00:53:45:09
Daniel Schindler
You often hear the argument, well, we can't afford to do that. It's going to cost too much. You know, we need development out there, these sort of things. And that's true there are certainly limited economic opportunities for people in Bristol Bay, but as an economic engine, Bristol Bay is also remarkable. You know, every year there might be currently there may be, you could argue up to say $10,000 that go into science management, conservation, etc., of salmon.

00:53:45:11 - 00:54:20:13
Daniel Schindler
And as you know well, the fishery produces probably over $1,000,000,000 of economic activity that extends far beyond Bristol Bay every year. So if you think about return on your investment, you invest a few million bucks a year and you get upwards of a billion. That's a pretty good return on the investment. Compare that to the Columbia River. The Columbia River actually still supports some quite valuable fisheries, both tribal fisheries and sport fisheries that generates hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue every year.

00:54:20:15 - 00:54:46:06
Daniel Schindler
But management, restoration and rehabilitation, all of these things cost the taxpayer or the ratepayer hundreds of millions of dollars every year. So the return on the investment on a river like the Columbia is probably less than one more goes into propping up those fish and trying to restore the habitat and those fish generate in terms of economic revenues.

00:54:46:08 - 00:55:20:07
Daniel Schindler
So decision makers like talking about jobs, they like talking about economic activity. And we simply can't forget about how remarkably valuable the current state of the situation is in Bristol Bay. And it's you know, it's supported by a naturally functioning ecosystem. There's certainly lots of room for improvement to improve equity, of access to the fishery and equity of the distribution of resources.

00:55:20:09 - 00:55:47:03
Daniel Schindler
So it's not to say that the fishery is perfect because there are still a lot of people who have a difficult time getting into that fishery and benefiting from it. So there are things we can invest in to improve the current situation, but it's a massive economic engine in its own right at the present and that also should be recognized as we talk about protecting this landscape.

00:55:47:03 - 00:56:38:06
Daniel Schindler
It's not just about protecting it for the sake of it being there. It's much more than that. It employs tens of thousands of people, at least that many more depend on it for nutritional and cultural values. As the list of benefits of what the current system supports is really long and and very impressive. So any action or I just to just finish the your question is just any effort to protect and provide permanent protection needs to think about the fact that it's not just about protecting water and fish, it's about protecting water, fish, people, livelihoods, cultures and economies.

00:56:38:08 - 00:56:52:19
Daniel Schindler
It's the whole ball of wax. And as a result, if you think about the pros and cons of providing some protection to these systems, now again, it might change the answer that different decision makers may arrive at.

00:56:52:21 - 00:57:12:22
Mark Titus
Well, I think it's an excellent place to park the conversation about Bristol Bay for today. I would love to reserve the right to meet up again down the trail, if we can, down the street. And the idea on the stream is even better. And I know that, you know, we've talked many times about there is that ore body is going anywhere.

00:57:13:03 - 00:57:33:14
Mark Titus
There's always going to be a discussion about this place. And so I'm going to wrap with with this just a kind of a little rapid fire. A couple of questions for you. In a way, this is a fantastical scenario now, mind you. But if your house were burning down or your cabin, God forbid, and let's knock on wood, it's not going to happen.

00:57:33:14 - 00:57:48:04
Mark Titus
But what's the one physical thing you would save out of that, that blaze if you could if you could grab one thing before your other, then your loved ones, of course, that's those folks are and critters are our first.

00:57:48:06 - 00:57:55:12
Daniel Schindler
I don't know. Most of what I care about is outside my house. So I'm not sure I have a good answer for it.

00:57:55:13 - 00:57:58:00
Mark Titus
You just gave me one.

00:57:58:01 - 00:58:00:13
Daniel Schindler
Okay, well, that's my answer then.

00:58:00:15 - 00:58:17:13
Mark Titus
Perfect. Well, and if you had two metaphysical things about your life, your integrity, your work, your work, your spirit, what would those be that you could rescue from a blaze?

00:58:17:14 - 00:58:36:10
Daniel Schindler
Well, I think we need to you know, we need to be confident and humans to do the right thing. I mean, humans show over and over the ability to do the wrong thing and make bad decisions that harm other people, that harm the natural world. But we also show immense capacity for learning and for doing the right thing.

00:58:36:12 - 00:58:52:20
Daniel Schindler
And that's why I have hope and optimism for protecting a place like Bristol Bay. We have the capacity to do the right thing here, and I think we should all be optimistic that we can actually pull the trigger and do it.

00:58:52:22 - 00:58:56:17
Mark Titus
That's one that's that's hope. That sounds like hope to me.

00:58:56:19 - 00:59:24:11
Daniel Schindler
It's hope. And we also should be able to learn from our mistakes. We're often stubborn and are unwilling to learn from our mistakes, but we have made a lot of mistakes with with waterways, with natural ecosystems elsewhere, and We are in this incredibly luxurious position now of asking, Do we want to make all those ridiculous mistakes from which we've never recovered elsewhere and do it again here?

00:59:24:13 - 00:59:41:08
Daniel Schindler
And it's not just Bristol Bay. It's a lot of Western Alaska, it's a lot of Alaska, period. In fact, it's a lot of the north in northern Canada, even northern Russia. There's still a lot of opportunities out there to make decisions that we have made poorly in other places.

00:59:41:10 - 00:59:53:09
Mark Titus
Lastly, Daniel, is there anything that you would leave in a blaze, whether that's part of your nature or human nature or a physical thing that you would want to see purify food or gone.

00:59:53:11 - 01:00:02:17
Daniel Schindler
Besides dirty dishes? Not a dish, man. I'm not sure.

01:00:02:19 - 01:00:28:01
Mark Titus
All right. Well, that's also valid. And so to close this out here for now, I just want to thank you for jumping on. It is always a pleasure to talk to you. I learned so much and you have such a clear way of demonstrating what's at stake in a place like Bristol Bay, using terms that I can understand that that our listeners can understand.

01:00:28:03 - 01:00:40:18
Mark Titus
So I thank you for that. Dr. Daniel Schindler. If folks want to get involved with your work or see what's going on with the work that you do through the University of Washington, where can people go to follow along?

01:00:40:20 - 01:00:59:06
Daniel Schindler
Probably the best way is to Google Alaska Salmon Program at the University of Washington. And we have a website that highlights a little bit of what we do and has individual contacts for myself and our staff and other faculty that are usually followed up on.

01:00:59:08 - 01:01:23:04
Mark Titus
Great. And folks, you can always follow along with information in the links to this show in our show notes. Also at EVAs wild dot com and of course Daniel is in the Wild, the feature documentary most recently about Bristol Bay that we together. Daniel, thank you again for showing up today. Appreciate it so much and hope to see you this summer.

01:01:23:06 - 01:01:29:20
Daniel Schindler
Thanks a lot, Mark. It's a great idea you're pursuing here and yeah, you're making a huge mark yourself.

01:01:29:22 - 01:01:32:05
Mark Titus
Thank you, sir. All right. Till next time.

01:01:32:07 - 01:01:41:19
Daniel Schindler
Adios. How do you say the words you love?

01:01:41:21 - 01:01:49:01
Music
How do you say what you.

01:01:49:03 - 01:02:15:02
Mark Titus
Thank you for listening to Save What You Love. If you like what you're hearing, you can help keep these conversations coming your way by giving us a rating on Apple Podcasts. You can check out photos and links from this episode at evaswild.com. While there, you can join our growing community by subscribing to our newsletter. You'll get exclusive offers on wild salmon shipped to your door and notifications about upcoming guests and more great content on the way.

01:02:15:04 - 01:02:54:04
Mark Titus
That's it. evaswild.com. That's the word save spelled backwards Wild dot com. This episode was produced by Tyler Wight and edited by Patrick Troll Original music was created by Whiskey Class. This podcast is a collaboration between Ava's Wild Stories and Salmon Nation and was recorded on the homelands of the duo Amish people. We'd like to recognize these lands and waters and their significance for the people who lived and continue to live in this region whose practices and spiritualities were are tied to the land in the water, and whose lives continue to enrich and develop in relationship to the land waters and other inhabitants today.