Whitebark Pine | Chapter Five

Trees, fish, and ferrets—what is our relationship with nature?

The Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/ Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation: https://whitebarkfound.org/ Revive and Restore: https://reviverestore.org/ Pictures of whitebark pine: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWJ2S4F Ben Cosgrove Music: https://www.bencosgrove.com/

See more show notes on our website: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/photosmultimedia/headwaters-podcast.htm

Trees, fish, and ferrets—what is our relationship with nature?

The Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/ Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation: https://whitebarkfound.org/ Revive and Restore: https://reviverestore.org/ Pictures of whitebark pine: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWJ2S4F Ben Cosgrove Music: https://www.bencosgrove.com/

See more show notes on our website: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/photosmultimedia/headwaters-podcast.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

[upbeat music begins]

Peri: This season, I set out to learn about a tree, I started by meeting Illawye, the Great Great Grandparent Tree. And I learned how ShiNaasha Pete, a CSKT Tribal Forester, views that tree as an ancestor, with knowledge and power to share. I followed Clark's nutcrackers, red squirrels and grizzly bears and saw how everything in this place is tied to everything else. I cored a tree with Professor Diana Six, and she showed me what we have to lose, and how close we are to losing it. And I followed a whitebark pine seed on its journey through the park's restoration program. Witnessing the passion and dedication of the people trying to save this tree.

[Headwaters season two theme begins, somber piano music]

Peri: Now I want to explore how our relationship with nature has changed over time. To understand how we got here and how I might build a deeper relationship with the world around me. [theme plays, and ends]

Peri: Welcome to Headwaters, a podcast made in Glacier National Park, which is the traditional lands of many Native American tribes.

Andrew: That's our host, Peri, and I'm Andrew. This is Chapter Five, the last in the season.

Michael This season is called Whitebark Pine, a whole series about a special tree, but it's also the story of Glacier National Park and how we relate to this landscape, how we protect it and how we fit into the world around us.

Peri: I've grown up with this idea that people are bad for nature, that we are the scissors snipping apart the strands of the ecosystems around us. And then we have to keep people out of nature to protect it. [jaunty music begins] But where does that idea come from?

Michael We have spent all season with whitebark pine on top of mountains. But this story, Peri, takes us to the lowest elevations in the park—to the lakes, rivers, creeks and streams that fill our valley floors, and that make up much of the park's boundary. [music ends]

Michael: So I want to start off asking, are you much of an angler, are you good at fishing?

Peri: The last time I went fishing, I was five with my granddad and an alligator ate my bobber. [Michael laughing] I have not fished since.

Michael: Ok so, so no. And to be honest, me neither. I'm not very good at it, but I think the story of fish and fish management here in Glacier is interesting because it shows how we're always re-examining how much to intervene in natural processes. The park's mission has always been to preserve and protect this place. But how do you actually do that? What is our role here? [water rushing] Let’s start in the very first years of the park over 100 years ago, a scientist named Morton J. Elrod—who would later become a naturalist for the park—started the first aquatic research project here. And as he studied our lakes and streams, he saw a problem: not enough fish.

Peri: Not enough fish?

Michael: Not enough. So he took depth measurements, and samples of possible fish foods, to determine which lakes people could add fish to.

Peri: What?

Michael: Introduce them, to take them from somewhere else and stock them in lakes where they weren't previously found, or to add to an existing population. All with the goal of enhancing recreational or sport fishing opportunities.

Peri: Gotcha.

Michael: When Glacier was founded in 1910, virtually anyone could apply for a fish stocking permit with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. If they approved your application, the bureau would provide you with fish and the necessary permission to place them throughout the park.

Peri: So correct me if I'm wrong. But this wasn't unusual at the time, was it?

Michael: No, not at all. Fish stocking, with the intent of improving sport fishing, was extremely common in mountain lakes across the West. Stocked by state and local governments, individuals, even environmental groups like the Sierra Club. And Glacier, too, was fully on board with the practice. The park cooperatively managed the Glacier National Park Fish Hatchery with the Fish and Wildlife Service, which raised in captivity all the native and non-native species that would be introduced to park waters.

Peri: But doesn't this clash a bit with the whole preserve our national parks unimpaired idea?

Michael: Well, they didn't think so. [pensive piano music begins] Our mission, the NPS mission, is to preserve and protect these places for future generations to enjoy. So the park wanted to make sure that if you came here hoping to catch a fish, you would! The thought was the more fish you and your kids hook while you're here, the more you'll enjoy and appreciate the park. And it's worth noting that this is the same time that the park was poisoning coyotes to ensure that the wildlife people like to see, like deer, would survive. So we were protecting the things about this place that people liked and that they could easily see on their visit.

Peri: Ok, I guess I see the logic in that. But couldn't I use that same logic to build a roller coaster at Logan past?

Michael: Hmm.

Peri: How does this all tie back to Whitebark Pine? Are you saying that planting nursery raised whitebark seedlings is the same as stocking hatchery raised fish?

Michael: Well, no. For one thing, whitebark pine is a native species that we're careful to only plant in areas that we know they used to grow, using seeds that come from this ecosystem. There was nothing at all careful about our fish stocking program. [Peri laughs] Native species, non-native species. It didn't matter. They put them all over the place, often into places that never had any trout at all. So by 1945, nearly 50 million fish had been introduced here, averaging more than a million fish a year every year since the park was founded. [music ends]

Peri: Wow.

Michael: This was massive in both scale and ambition, attempting to bend our fisheries to our will.

Peri: Well, we don't do that anymore. So what changed people's minds?

Michael: Well, the first reason people began to question this practice, was that from a sport fishery perspective, it wasn't really working.

Peri: Which was the whole reason they were doing it in the first place, right?

Michael: Yeah. Despite introducing millions of fish here, they had not created the recreational fishing utopia that they'd long dreamt of. But on top of that, there was a growing understanding that stocking was a harmful practice to native species, and that losing native fish could have negative consequences that extend far beyond our waterways. [water rushing] Glacier has 21 native fish species, and few are better known than the bull trout. Bull trout are listed under the Endangered Species Act as threatened—one step below endangered—because they've declined so dramatically over the past 100 years. In Glacier, the practice of stocking non-native fish is one of their biggest threats. Lake trout were stocked outside Glacier in Flathead Lake, and despite never being introduced directly into the park, they migrated here and have become bull trout’s enemy number one. They are bigger, the largest member of the salmonid family, and reliably out-compete bull trout for food and for space.

Peri: That kind of sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Michael: Yeah. And in the 1970s, the park began to realize that an iconic Montana fish, and an important link in our ecosystem, could disappear. So it prompted a bit of an identity crisis.

Peri: It sounds like we had to decide exactly what we're protecting here, native species or just things people enjoy.

Michael: Exactly. And the park decided that our sport fisheries, while important, couldn't take priority over our native biodiversity, let alone harm it. And in 1972, Glacier ended its fish stocking program, adopting a do no harm approach to our fisheries.

Peri: But they were stocking fish in the park for, what 60 years? Wasn't the damage kind of already done?

Michael: Yeah.

Peri: Cat out of the bag, the fish out of the net?

Michael: [laughing] Oh gosh. [somber piano music begins]

Michael: Well, biologists recognized at the time that these impacts from fish stocking would be hard to undo, and things continued to get worse for bull trout. By the 21st century, lake trout had found their way into well over half of the lakes were bull trout are found, which in the park, is only 17 to begin with. Nearly 40 years after ending the fish stocking program, it became clear that do no harm wasn't going to cut it if we wanted to preserve bull trout. So in yet another reexamination of our mission, the park decided that preserving this place required undoing the harm of our predecessors.

Peri: How do we go about doing that?

Michael: Well, just like whitebark pine, the effort to restore native fisheries goes way beyond Glacier's boundaries. Down in Yellowstone, in Flathead Lake, lots of other places, biologists are undertaking a years-long project to physically remove lake trout from waters where they threaten native species. Around here, Quartz Lake is kind of the prime example. Every year, with funding from the Glacier National Park Conservancy, the fisheries crew heads up to Quartz Lake in the North Fork, hops on a boat and lowers gill nets into the lake. If they catch a bull trout, they let it go. But if they catch a lake trout, they kill it.

Peri: And it seems like it's working.

Michael: It has been. While in Quartz lake they haven't removed Lake Trout entirely, they have successfully suppressed their numbers, which has allowed bull trout populations to stay steady, where before they started this, they were collapsing. But to me, perhaps the most interesting technique to restore bull trout is taking fish from one place and adding them to places where they weren't found before.

Peri: We're fish stocking again?

Michael: Well, almost? Glacier and the USGS have worked together to conduct what's called conservation introductions, so kind of stocking by another name. Conservation introductions take the same premise, moving fish to a new place, but instead of enhancing a sport fishery, the goal is to create a safe haven for a threatened native species.

[uplifting music begins]

Michael: The NPS even made a video about these efforts this year, following a crew monitoring one of these introductions.

NPS Video: [birds chirping] We are headed up to Grace Lake, which is upstream of logging lake, protected by a barrier falls to sample some bull trout that were introduced in 2014 as part of a conservation introduction.

Michael: There's a natural barrier, a waterfall between Grace and Logging lakes, so they know the bull trout they introduced there won't have to compete with lake trout.

NPS Video: [music continues] We’ve seen nothing but benefits from this project. To see big fish that we're seeing in different age classes that we're seeing, that we know we put here and that are doing really well. And it feels good knowing that we're doing good.

Michael: And this is important because like whitebark pine, bull trout are threatened by more than just invasive species. They are also faced with climate change.

Peri: Of course.

Michael: Bull trout require cold water, but climate change is altering our watersheds, and our lakes and streams are slowly warming up. This isn't great for bull trout, and we know that if they have any chance of adapting to these changes, it's in a place where they're not also fighting with lake trout to survive. Because I get so excited about this stuff, I was invited even to be a part of this NPS video.

Michael, on the NPS Video: The goal of this is to provide a refugia. Knowing the threats that these species face: warming waters, decreasing runoff or changes to our peak runoff times. The lakes that were selected to place these fish, they were deliberately chosen, carefully chosen for where they sit, what influences them and the risks posed by non-native species.

Peri: Look at you, your film debut.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, I wish I'd trimmed my beard a little bit, but—I think the big takeaway for me from the story of bull trout and what connects this to the rest of our series is that it is a story of us deciding what the National Park Service is really here to do. We have always had the mission of preserving and protecting this place for future generations, but how we interpret it has changed over time. That used to mean introducing millions of fish so that anglers who visit Glacier would leave happy, and it meant focusing on recreation. But today that means saving a native species like bull trout, even whitebark pine, and undoing the harm we have done in the past. Fighting to save entire ecosystems at risk.

Peri: So the park isn't working from a list of rules set in stone. It's actively deciding what it means to protect these million acres.

Michael: Exactly.

[pensive music begins]

Peri: I guess in one way, this story seems like a lesson about how messy it can get when we meddle in the ecosystems around us and how much work it takes to undo that. So it's easy to see where I got this idea that people are bad for nature. When we started interfering with the fisheries here and introducing new kinds of fish, things went totally awry. This story about fish looks at the past and how we got to where we are today, but what's next? Where might the future lead?

[music ends]

Andrew: There are about half a dozen species native to Glacier National Park, including bull trout, that are currently listed under the Endangered Species Act or ESA. Lynx, grizzly bears and meltwater stoneflies are other examples,

Peri: And whitebark could possibly join that list.

Andrew: Now, every species listed under the ESA gets a recovery plan, and the goal of every recovery plan is the same: save the species from extinction. But how you actually go about doing that can vary wildly depending on the species. By looking to other restoration efforts, I hoped I could better understand what the future has in store for whitebark pine, and for conservation more broadly.

Ben: My name is Ben Novak.

Andrew: Ben is the lead scientist for a conservation nonprofit called Revive and Restore, and I called to ask him about ferrets.

[somber music begins]

Ben: She was 21 days old. She only even opened up her eyes. Yeah, that's really the only time where you can hold them without them tearing your flesh off. Because they're small, but they're ferocious little predators,

Andrew: Not just any ferrets. Black-footed ferrets.

[black-footed ferret chattering]

Andrew: Up to two feet long with black feet and a cream-colored body, they look somewhat similar to domestic ferrets that people might have as pets. But the Black-footed Ferret is the only one actually native to North America.

Ben: Which lived on the Great Plains from North Dakota, Kansas and those areas out west to the foothills of the Rockies, including the Blackfeet Nation, right next door in Glacier National Park.

Andrew: And they're specialized predators of prairie dogs, who make up 90 percent of their diet.

Ben: They preyed on prairie dogs, they were ubiquitous across the Great Plains.

Andrew: But in the middle of the century, things started to change for the black-footed ferret.

Ben: By the 1950s, due to agricultural land conversion, predator control and a government campaign to eradicate prairie dogs, had dwindled to virtually nothing, and it was thought they were extinct.

Andrew: In 1964, there was a small glimmer of hope when a population was discovered in South Dakota, and they even made the first endangered species list in 1967. But none of these individuals that were discovered ultimately survived.

Peri: Why not?

Andrew: Well, just like with whitebark pine, Black-footed ferrets are faced with a non-native disease called sylvatic plague, on top of all this external pressure like habitat loss. Scientists even tried to take a few into captivity and raise them there, but it just didn't work.

Ben: And so the world thought again, that was it. No more black footed ferrets.

Andrew: But in 1981, a Wyoming game and fish biologist got a call that a ranch dog named Shep had found one.

Ben: And fish and game biologist got out to the area near Meeteetse, Wyoming. And over the course of several months found about 100 Black-footed ferrets, 100 of an animal that was supposedly extinct. And that really was the final stand for black footed ferrets, that was the last population in the world.

Peri: All thanks to Shep.

Andrew: This time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was ready. They founded the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center, and started a captive breeding program in 1987 that has been wildly successful.

Ben: They have bred, since '87, over ten thousand, five hundred Black-footed ferrets, over the course of thirty generations. And they have reintroduced nearly 5000 into the wild.

Andrew: Today, if you visit Badlands or Wind Cave National Parks in South Dakota—and if you happen to be nocturnal while you're there—you can see these ferrets for yourself. These reintroductions have established new black-footed ferret colonies across the Great Plains, in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and across many tribal nations as well. The captive breeding program got its start with just 18 ferrets, of which only 16 successfully reproduced. And when you trace back the heritage of those 16 ferrets, looking at their family trees, they're all descendants of just seven individuals.

Peri: Wait, wait. But Ben said that today in total, they've bred over ten thousand Black-footed ferrets, and they all traced back to just those seven ancestors?

Andrew: Just seven. Which means that even if the species can overcome the threats of the sylvatic plague and habitat loss, they've got a very limited gene pool.

Ben: If we can overcome plague, this species has absolutely every reason to recover in the wild. But it has that tiny gene pool and that could become something very difficult long term as this species starts adapting to changes in its environment.

[somber music begins]

Andrew: Normally, this is where you bring in members of an outside population to try to introduce new genetic diversity. But these ferrets are the last of their kind anywhere on the planet, which is where Ben and his colleagues at Revive and Restore came in.

Ben: Well with Black-footed ferrets, they're all descended from just seven individuals, there's no other naturally occurring population, there's nowhere to go but back to the past to try and get some, some new blood into this population.

Andrew: The answer to increasing genetic diversity wasn't to introduce a new ferret. It was to reintroduce an old one. In the 1980s when they found the world's last ferrets in Wyoming, they did everything they could think of to protect and preserve the species. That meant starting the captive breeding program to keep the species alive. But it also meant taking tissue samples, just some skin cells, and sending them off to a lab, as a sort of genetic record of the time. One of those tissue samples came from a ferret named Willa. Willa died over 30 years ago. She has no living descendants today, and is 20 generations removed from our modern ferrets. So think about if you went back and met your 20th great-grandparent, which for humans means going back about 500 years. You probably wouldn't have that much in common with that person. And genetically, the two of you would share less than one percent of your DNA, which means that Willa's genes could introduce new and valuable diversity into the existing population, making the entire species more resilient in the face of disease and climate change.

Peri: OK, but how? She's been dead for 30 years.

Andrew: In the form of a ferret named Elizabeth Ann.

[serious music begins]

Ben: Elizabeth Ann has 10 times as many unique, diverse alleles as any other living Black-footed Ferret. So she is, she's incredibly valuable.

Andrew: Using DNA from her now 30 year old skin cell sample, Ben and other scientists working with Fish and Wildlife, created a clone of Willa—born to a surrogate mother—who they named Elizabeth Ann. And Ben even got to hold her.

Ben: You know, as a scientist, it's just a geek out moment to think this is a living, breathing animal that was not created by sperm and egg cells. She was created by, from SKIN! From 33 years ago. Like, I was a year old when Willa's cells were frozen at the frozen zoo. And now I'm holding this baby made from them.

Andrew: Elizabeth Ann is the first ever clone of a United States endangered mammal.

Peri: Wow. I guess I had never even thought that was a possibility.

Andrew: Yeah, it's a new frontier in the field of conservation genetics, and Elizabeth Ann is a breakthrough. But she's also an animal. She's an adorable, ferocious little scientific achievement. The agency tasked with upholding the Endangered Species Act is the Fish and Wildlife Service, and Elizabeth Ann was their idea. They reached out to Ben and his team at Revive and Restore, along with other partner organizations, and started a process that ultimately took seven years. They went through all the steps required for any environmental project—getting a permit, going through a public review period—and ultimately it worked.

Ben: And the Black-footed Ferret was the first real click where people were like: Oh. This isn't just cloning to clone and see if it can, you can do it. [pensive music begins] You know, this animal was cloned for a very specific purpose, and it's going to help this species. And it was it just really connected dots for people and people.

Andrew: And Ben believes that this breakthrough, this use of biotechnology, could help not only the conservation of endangered species, but maybe even the revival of extinct ones. Which raises the question Where does our duty as conservationists end? What tools can, or should we use to help preserve threatened species?

Peri: The ferret story illustrates what makes this whitebark problem so difficult. Twenty generations of black footed ferrets is thirty years. Twenty generations for humans is five hundred. And twenty generations of whitebark pine is 1200 years. We're trying to save a species that operates on an entirely different timescale than us.

Andrew: Right, this is still a very new field. We talked in the last episode about how a simple genetic test might help us identify blister rust resistant trees.

Peri: Right? And that seems straightforward enough.

Andrew: But conservation genetics is a fast growing field, and the possibilities are both promising and provocative. Biotechnology could revolutionize our efforts to restore whitebark pine, or it could create new problems.

Peri: Well, so what do we do? [pensive music begins] How do we proceed given all this uncertainty?

Andrew: Experts say we should proceed cautiously.

Peri: Yeah, I mean, we still don't know everything, and it will take generations to understand our impacts.

Andrew: We wouldn't have to save bull trout, black-footed ferrets or even whitebark pine if our interference hadn't put them in jeopardy in the first place.

Peri: So when we choose to intervene, that means balancing these uncertainties, knowing we can't completely understand how far reaching our actions might be, but also recognizing that if we don't do anything, these species will probably disappear. As an indecisive person to begin with. These choices can feel paralyzing. Either path seems fraught, and it's easy to default to what seems like the safest option. Just letting nature take its course.

[music ends]

Rosalyn: So as a young child, we would have to climb down a cliff to, like, look for a particular plant. The adults would be like, just go down there and get that, you know, [laughing] we would be expected to like, Oh, OK.

Peri: People have been here for thousands of years, before this was a national park, which is why I called Roslyn. [upbeat music begins]

Rosalyn: My name is Rosalyn Lapier, and I'm an associate professor at the University of Montana in environmental studies. I'm also a traditionally trained ethnobotanist. I'm Blackfeet on my mother's side and metis on my father's side.

Peri: Talking with her offered a glimpse of what it would be like to have a connection with a place that stretches back for a thousand generations.

Rosalyn: When we think about traditional ecological knowledge, this is women's knowledge.

Peri: Like Rosalyn is today. Her grandmother was also a teacher, and a keeper of ethnobotanical knowledge.

Rosalyn: My grandmother's name is Annie Mad Plume. Because she was raised by these two other grandmothers, she was very knowledgeable about plants and the traditional ecological knowledge of the Blackfeet.

Peri: Rosalyn was taught practical and cultural uses of native plants.

Rosalyn: So one particular plant, sometimes called saskatoon berries, sometimes called june berries, sometimes called serviceberry. That particular plant has lots of uses. It is used as a tool. Historically, people used it for making bows and arrows out of, making different types of household products, you can use the bark as medicine, you can use, um the berries for food, and it's used in religion and religious practice.

Peri: But on top of learning ways to use these plants, she also learned how to use this ecological knowledge to shape the world around her.

Rosalyn: The Blackfeet didn't rely on it just in the natural world. So one of the things they did do with this particular plant is they cultivated it, right? They moved it. They would transplant it, [chuckles] if they knew that they were traveling to a certain place every single year, they would either cultivate the area so that it grew in abundance or they would transplant it, move it there.

[upbeat music begins]

Peri: The idea that indigenous people lived in harmony with nature, just foraging as they went, treading lightly, changing nothing, is a persistent myth.

Rosalyn: You know, the Blackfeet didn't think they needed to “adapt to the world". They changed the world, all the time. They changed nature.

Peri: So you could say the field of study that we know today as conservation actually began millennia ago with the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous communities like the Blackfeet.

Rosalyn: So the common definition of traditional ecological knowledge is that it includes three things: knowledge, practice, and belief. So knowledge is just understanding, you know, the natural world. And that knowledge usually comes from observation. Practice, then, is how you use that knowledge. Right? How you hunt in a certain way. But then also, practice includes things like cultivation, right? And management, land management. And then the third part of traditional ecological knowledge is belief. Is the cosmology of that particular indigenous group, and how they understand the natural world is connected to the supernatural realm. [swelling music begins] Scholars are increasingly beginning to understand that there's not really any place within historic Blackfeet territory that was not utilized somehow, that was not managed and or that was not cultivated. And so when Americans use the word Wilderness, to describe certain areas as, you know, kind of untrammeled by man, is definitely not true. It's a cultivated space, and it's been cultivated for thousands of years.

Peri: People have been managing this land for millennia, having an impact and shaping the world around them. So just leaving things alone isn't necessarily a more natural course of action. You might even call it a major departure. We've always had a relationship with the natural world, and we always will. So the question is what kind of relationship will that be? [music ends]

Melissa: [ski lift humming] We are at whitefish mountain resort, going up the gondola.

Peri: I started this journey outside the park, visiting Illawye the Great Great Grandparent Tree, and I'm ending it outside the park too. [uplifting music begins] Trees don't really recognize park borders, and this restoration effort is a hugely collaborative project.

Melissa: [lift humming continues] Going up to 6800 feet. Whitebark pine in this area typically starts around...

Peri: And I'm joined by Melissa Jenkins.

Melissa: My name is Melissa Jenkins

Peri: Who's a bit of a legend in the world of Whitebark Pine. Some even call her the Lorax of Whitebark. Melissa supposedly retired from the Forest Service last year, but apparently she's finding it tough to leave whitebark behind.

Peri: [in the field] And what are you doing now?

Melissa: Working too much. [Peri and Melissa laugh]

All: [laughs].

Peri: We're at the resort today for a very fitting capstone to our season. A collaborative, interagency restoration project. The Forest Service is planting trees here in partnership with the resort, which put in years of work to be certified as the first whitebark pine friendly ski area in the country.

Karl: In the truck, we're going to be showing all that to the top over here. That little knob over there where the towers are at, when we get to the site, that's what you'll need your hard hats and such.

Peri: It didn't fit on the gondola, but they're bringing a grill up to the top to make food for everyone, and it feels like a celebration. And Melissa is the perfect person to be here with, since she knows everyone and seems to know everything. She's leading the effort to put together our local piece of the whitebark pine restoration plan, and her enthusiasm is contagious.

Melissa: There are so many amazing, amazing whitebark [upbeat music begins] that are huge, and you can tell, you know, they're like stalwart soldiers standing against the elements. And and they're big and they're gnarly, and those are really big old trees are my favorite. But then the young trees are hope for the future too, so.

Peri: It took people like Melissa to convince me that whitebark pine could be a hopeful story, and I asked her if she'd always felt this way.

Melissa: [wind blowing] There was a point where I would have said there's a good possibility that whitebark won't be able to survive far into the future.

[music ends]

Peri: But she said that started to change when the trees and their nursery successfully produced baby pine cones.

Melissa: That was almost a 20-year process, just to get to that point. And that little conelet, to me, represented all that work that had come before, and all of the people and the dedication and the effort that they had put in to getting to that point. And I cried a little.

Peri: The plan for today is to plant 400 little seedlings, which have come from the nursery in Idaho. Everyone grabs a couple dozen seedlings and a tool and spreads out to get to work.

Melissa: [scraping in the dirt] I’m thinking we'll go ahead and try and plant it here.

Peri: And after watching Melissa plant a few trees, Michael and Andrew announced that I was going to plant the next one.

Andrew: So Peri, what do you what do you see about this site? Why are you picking it?

[upbeat music playing]

Peri: [in the field] So there's plenty of sun here.

Peri: The first step is to scrape the vegetation clear from a small site.

Peri: [in the field] I've never done this before. [scraping sound continues] This is not as easy as Melissa made it look. Any suggestions on my technique?

Melissa: [chuckling] You could swing a little a little more aggressively. Looking, looking good.

Peri: [in the field] Good. Not great.

Melissa: It's it's looking fantastic.

Peri: [in the field] It's very generous of you.

Melissa: OK, now I'm going to step to one side.

Peri: Now that I had my site prepared, I was ready to plant my seedling.

Melissa: You want to plant it right back up to the same level of the soil on the plug.

Peri: [in the field] So what do we think?

Melissa: I think it's beautiful. I think you did a great job.

Peri: [in the field] Thank you. My very first whitebark seedling. Can you take a picture me of me with it?

Peri: Being involved with a project like this that's generations long, it definitely makes me think on a bigger time scale. Several hundred years from now, when everything I know is long gone, that tree that I planted could still be here, with nutcrackers cawing in its branches. Aldo Leopold, the famous conservationist, once wrote "Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither God nor poet. One need only own a shovel."

Michael: Does it feel like you're leaving this behind? It doesn't really seem like you have actually retired yet, but retiring from being one of like, the leading people in the field?

Melissa: [birds chirping] Well, that's part of the reason that I'm leading this effort to do the restoration plan for the crown of the continent ecosystem, because it's going to set up the people that are coming in after me for success. And I can feel confident that when I leave, they have a clear path forward with what needs to be done to restore the species, and they won't need me. [pensive music begins] That’s the best thing you can give to the people who come after you in your work is the fact that they don't need you anymore.

Melissa: [birds continue chirping] There’s a, Nelson Henderson has a, I have a quote from him on my desk that says “the true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not plan to sit.

Peri: [in the field] This kind of this whole project of like, we won't really see this. Like, how does that feel to know that? None. I mean, none of us will see the fruits of these labors, really.

Melissa: I can picture it, though. I can picture what they're going to look like. [birds continue chirping]

Peri: If Melissa says she can picture it. So can I.

Melissa: Yeah. These trees are these trees are going to be just fine. We hope so. Yeah.

[music ends]

Peri: [upbeat music begins] Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park with support from our partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Glacier is the traditional lands of several Native American tribes, including the Aamsskáápipikani, Kootenai, Séliš, and Ql̓ispé people. Headwaters was created by Daniel Lombardi. Andrew Smith, Peri Sasnett and Michael Faist produced, edited and hosted the show. Ben Cosgrove wrote and performed our music, and Claire Emery let us use her woodcut piece titled Wind Poem for this season's cover art. Special thanks this episode to Bill Hayden, Rosalyn Lapier, Ben Novak, Melissa Jenkins, Karl Anderson, Dawn LaFleur, everyone with Glacier's native plant program, the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, and so many others. If you enjoyed the show, share it with the person you'd most like to bring with you on your visit to Glacier.

Lacy: This is like for the end?

Daniel: This is in it, yeah. You saying that, that's going to be in it.

Michael: [laughs]

Lacy: The Glacier Conservancy is the official fundraising partner of Glacier National Park. To learn more, visit glacier.org.

Peri: I think that's the best one you've done yet.

Lacy: OK. Do I need to get one more time?

Michael: I think we're good.

Peri: Yeah, I think that's good.