Zac Unger: Looking Polar Bear Endangerment In The Eye (re-broadcast)

We have all seen the mournful image of an unhappy polar bear isolated on a melting ice floe. It conveys the doom of that one bear as well as his species, and implies that we are all headed in that direction if something is not done about global warming. Inspired by such images and his … Continue reading Zac Unger: Looking Polar Bear Endangerment In The Eye (re-broadcast) →

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We have all seen the mournful image of an unhappy polar bear isolated on a melting ice floe. It conveys the doom of that one bear as well as his species, and implies that we are all headed in that direction if something is not done about global warming. Inspired by such images and his commitment to ecological conservation, this week’s guest on Sea Change Radio, Zac Unger, ventured up to the great white north to check out the plight of polar bears himself, up close. What he found surprised him. Embedding himself with scientists, Unger learned about how the bears are adjusting their diet, fasting periods and even breeding behavior in response to the warmer, longer summers that climate change is bringing. These adaptations, in conjunction with hunting prohibitions instituted late in the 20th century, have allowed the polar bear population to flourish.

The picture that Unger paints of this robust, adaptable species stands in stark contrast to the impression most of us have of the endangered polar bear. While some climate change deniers are exploiting Unger’s work to make their case, it’s important to keep in mind that his book, Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye, also demonstrates that global warming is indeed happening, and that the only route to survival, for any of us, is adaptation. Unger’s journey and discoveries also raise questions about the eventual impact that the bear’s adaptations will have on polar ecosystems, and critically consider the changing role of scientists as advocates.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Zac Unger (ZU) | 00:22 – Polar bears are doing pretty well right now, but there is great potential for disaster in the future.

Narrator | 00:33 – We have all seen the mournful image of an unhappy polar bear isolated on a melting ice floe. It conveys the doom of that one bear as well as his species, and implies that we are all headed in that direction if something is not done about global warming. Inspired by such images and his commitment to ecological conservation, this week’s guest on Sea Change Radio, Zac Unger, ventured up to the great white north to check out the plight of polar bears himself, up close. What he found surprised him. Embedding himself with scientists, Unger learned about how the bears are adjusting their diet, fasting periods and even breeding behavior in response to the warmer, longer summers that climate change is bringing. These adaptations, in conjunction with hunting prohibitions instituted late in the 20th century, have allowed the polar bear population to flourish. The picture that Unger paints of this robust, adaptable species stands in stark contrast to the impression most of us have of the endangered polar bear. While some climate change deniers are exploiting Unger’s work to make their case, it’s important to keep in mind that his book, “Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye,” also demonstrates that global warming is indeed happening, and that the only route to survival, for any of us, is adaptation. Unger’s journey and discoveries also raise questions about the eventual impact that the bear’s adaptations will have on polar ecosystems, and critically consider the changing role of scientists as advocates.

Alex Wise (AW) | 02:15 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by author Zac Unger Zac. Welcome to Sea Change Radio.

Zac Unger (ZU) | 02:20 – Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Alex Wise (AW) | 02:21 – Your new book is “Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye, a family field trip to the Arctic’s Edge in Search of Adventure Truth and Many Marshmallows.” In the beginning of the book, you describe how finishing your environmental masters at, at Cal you became a firefighter. What led you to writing this book from that?

ZU | 02:39 – Well, you know, I went, I went through undergraduate and graduate school in environmental science, and I’m sort of your, your average, typical green lefty. And, uh, I was working towards a PhD and decided that, uh, I didn’t wanna spend the rest of my life counting grass. I have a master’s in range management and I got this job with the fire department. I thought I would do it for a couple of years and, and, uh, maybe, maybe come back to grad school after that. But once I, I got into the fire department, I was completely taken by that work and, and I love it. But, you know, after, after 10, 10 years in the fire department, I still have this feeling that I had, I was an environmentalist, you know, I was the sort of insufferable guy at the firehouse who would ride my bike everywhere and, and sort of hassle people when they, when they didn’t recycle. And I sort of felt like the environmental guy. But at the same time, I’d been years of preaching all of this environmental stuff and to be honest, with global warming, I wasn’t seeing it myself. You know, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and most days when I look out at the bay, the water level is the same level it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago when I was a kid. And the hills are still the color they’re supposed to be at the right times of year. And so I started feeling like I needed to reconvince myself of global warming, and I wanted a little payoff on all of this sort of, uh, global warming, Armageddons that I’d been preaching. And so I figured what better way to do it than by writing a book about polar bears and getting to know polar bears who are the iconic animal of the climate change debate.

AW | 04:09 – And the image that you had in your mind of, of polar bears before you went to Churchill, how did that change as you wrote the book and researched it?

ZU | 04:19 – The plan for me, I was going to go up there, I was going to write this mournful elegy for the polar bears about how they’re all dying. I was going to be the second coming of Rachel Carson, the environmental community would hoist me up on their shoulders and carry me off and triumph. And, you know, it would be fantastic. That was the book I, I planned to write. But once I started getting into it, I realized that the plight of polar bears is a lot more complex than we’ve been led to believe by the, by the media and by the whole marketing apparatus around polar bears. And what I came to discover is that polar bears are doing better than I thought, which is not to say that they are, you know, invincible, but polar bears are doing quite a bit better than I than I had thought earlier. And that was a bit of an uncomfortable realization for me. It wasn’t the story that I’d set out to tell, but the reporting that I did led me down a very different road.

AW | 05:08 – And you kind of hint at this early in the book, when you say how polar bears function pretty regularly in the summertime when there’s massive ice melting, perhaps the polar bear is a more adaptable creature than we give credit for, right?

ZU | 05:21 – I mean, the thing to remember is that when we talk about ice free periods, we’re talking about ice free summers in the, in the high Arctic, and nobody’s really predicting ice free winters anytime soon. Now, in the southern range of, of the polar bears habitat, those polar bears have been living through ice free summers for as long as ever anyone can remember. In, in the town of Churchill, for example, there’s never ice in the summer. And the polar bears do go through a very long five, six month non eating period, a fasting period. So the idea is that perhaps the northern latitudes, those polar bears might end up having a life cycle. A lot like the southern polar bears and the southern polar bears survive. They have a different life strategy than the northern polar bears. But it’s not that if we have, uh, a slightly longer ice-free summer period, all polar bears are going to go away immediately. That’s the sort of line that I went up there believing, is that we’re 20 years away from total extinction. And that isn’t the case. Polar bears are probably, as one scientist put it to me, what’s a polar bear going to do? Just say, okay, I give up, I go away. I’m not going to adapt, I’m not going to change. I give up, put out a sign saying, you know, we’ll work for food. That’s not what’s going to happen. And so you already see polar bears changing their strategies in the southern ranges in, Churchill, Manitoba, for instance, polar bears do go for a a five month fasting period. And that’s a period where they conserve their energy, they lull about, they try to, um, expend as little energy as possible.

AW | 06:48 And they don’t hibernate?

ZU | 06:50 – They don’t hibernate. No.

AW | 06:52 – This is the equivalent of hibernation, right?

ZU | 06:53 – It’s sort of a walking hibernation. They’re still active, they’re still walking around. They just trying to,

AW | 06:58 It’s like their football season.

ZU | 06:59 – Yeah, exactly. <laugh>, that’s a good way to put it. But so the conventional wisdom is that polar bears just exist on seal blubber and that the only thing they eat is seals. They go out onto the ice, they eat seals. Now that’s quite true that seals are, are the majority of their, of their, uh, diet. But what one scientist I worked with, um, was suggesting is that there are perhaps other things that polar bears can eat in Hudson Bay. This, this sort of global warming period has coincided with this massive explosion in snow geese. So there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of nesting pairs of snow geese up in this area. And what the scientists found is that polar bears are eating snow geese, and they’re eating caribou, and they’re eating kelp and they’re eating starfish, and they’re eating all sorts of different items that while probably they couldn’t replace seals could certainly supplement their diet and possibly help extend the, the eating period by, by weeks or months.

AW | 07:56 – But they’re also eating each other.

ZU | 07:58 – This idea of polar bear cannibalism is huge. It got huge press. And we, there have been a couple of incidences over the last few years where polar bears were eating their young and not just, uh, these are, these are mostly male polar bears instances where they were stalking and killing other polar bears. Now this was not something that the scientists had seen in the past. And so that really alarmed them. These were hungry polar bears who were eating other polar bears in the den cubs, mothers in the den, which is really unusual polar bear behavior. So that was very alarming.

 AW | 08:28 – But what kind of conclusions did you and, and some of the people that you learned about polar bears from draw?

ZU | 08:35 – The immediate conclusion to draw from that is polar bears are starving, they’re eating anything. But that could have been just a one year phenomenon. It could have been a phenomenon that happened to be that the scientists observed it that year. What happened was the media took this and ran with it to say, polar bears everywhere across their entire range are so hungry that they’re cannibalizing each other. And so what it was, was an isolated event that began to stand in for the whole. And what I realized as I, as I looked at the way the media was, was portraying these cannibalism events was it was so sensationalistic, so bloody, such a good story that it became the whole rather than just a standalone or a couple of standalone incidents.

AW | 09:14 – So the danger of anecdotal thinking can lead to bad policy in, in lots of other walks of life. But how does that play itself out when it comes to conservation because you think of, well, is that so bad if we’re sensationalizing the, the plight of the polar bear, these creatures need to be valued somehow. So is this a bad thing or a good thing in your mind?

ZU | 09:36 Well, the issue in my mind is that the credibility of scientists needs to be unimpeachable. And if scientists cross the line from science into advocacy, you’re going to run into problems with the public believing scientists on down the line. Now, there’s no doubt that polar bears need a good advocate, but my feeling is that the scientists need to give their data and then let other people, either advocacy organizations or politicians take up that data and then become advocates. You’ve got this problem now where scientists are enjoying the limelight, where scientists are liking the attention that they’re getting and they’re becoming outspoken as advocates. And what happens is that the science gets short shrift. You know, when I talked to one of these scientists in particular, when I spoke to him and, you know, I was well versed in the literature, he was a sort of model of scientific dispassion. And you know, he said there is a possibility that polar bears may or may not become extinct in this area between this period and that period, exactly the way you want a scientist to talk. But then when the television cameras who only have a couple of minutes to talk to him, he was much more apt to say, polar bears will be extinct by this date. Certain, and that’s a problem because what happens if 2050 rolls along, which is a, uh, a timeline that, that the scientist uses a lot to talk about extrication in one particular region. What happens when 2050 rolls around and polar bears are not extinct, but some other animal is in trouble? Then what will happen to the credibility of scientists? And then the public will say, oh, well, you know, we can’t trust scientists anymore because they didn’t tell us the straight scoop. And this actually happened during the first Bush administration. There was, uh, something called the teleco snail darter, which was, you know, a a small non charismatic animal that was, uh, getting in the way of, of some dam construction. And there was a big environmental to-do about it. What happened was that it turned out that the snail darter wasn’t nearly as endangered as the scientists had said. And the first Bush administration used that as an excuse to gut the Endangered Species Act because they said, well, you can’t trust these scientists anymore, even though the scientists were doing, you know, the best work that they could when the conclusions got politicized and the scientists sort of allowed their, allowed their work to, to stray away from science and into advocacy, you ended up actually hurting the cause of conservation.

AW | 11:58 – And that can be turned against it in things like the snail darter or, um, spotted owls or…

 ZU | 12:05 – Right. And what happened with the spotted owl was that when they had the, uh, the issue about whether to allow logging or not, they brought in population ecologists who couldn’t tell a spotted owl from a pelican, just people who knew the math. And they looked at the data and they went over the data to try and figure out whether the scientists who knew that data had done the right thing. When we were talking about polar bears, that didn’t happen quite as much. You had a core of scientists who did the research, then essentially peer reviewed each other’s work and their own work. And then they were the ones testifying about the validity of their own work. Whereas you should have brought in someone who didn’t know a polar bear from a pelican like they did during the spotted owl debate, to look at the science and to see whether the assumptions that these people had made in their population counts held up and matched with scientific norms in population dynamics.

(Music Break) | 13:01

AW | 14:04 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio. I’m speaking to author and firefighter Zac Unger. His new book is “Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye.” Zac, you, you brought your whole family up there for this trip to Manitoba. Can you explain the title a little bit more? Never look a polar bear in the eye. Never,

 ZU | 14:20 – Never look a polar bear in the eye. Well, you know, I brought my entire family up to the Canadian Arctic because, you know, they’re my kids and they didn’t have a choice. So I, I brought them with me. I I, I made four trips to, to Canada Total. And, and the long one was about two and a half months, um, where my family came with me. But the, uh, the idea never look a polar bear in the eyes. My son Mack was just obsessed with polar bears. And this small town has polar bears literally walking through town. I mean, it’s October and November in the fall. The town is overrun with polar bears and you can be looking out your window and see a polar bear just walking down Main Street.

AW | 14:54 – And, and it’s a big tourist destination, right?

ZU | 14:57 – It’s a huge tourist destination. And you know, people come there to see polar bears and, and you know, the town sort of plays up this thrill of you could get eaten, you know, at any, at any moment. ’cause there’s polar bears everywhere and all,

AW | 15:07 – All the polar bear crossing signs are great photo ops, I’m sure.

ZU | 15:10 – Exactly. And from a six-year-old, I mean, what could be better than the idea of being eaten by a polar bear?

AW | 15:15 – This is like going to Jurassic Park or something.

ZU | 15:16 – Right. And you know, he would always ask me like, dad, dad, do you think you could fight a polar bear? I was like, well, I don’t think it’s dad. Do you think I could fight a polar bear? You know, so you’ve got to train your children that you shouldn’t fight polar bears. It’s, it’s, um, but anyhow, so one bit of advice we got from, uh, another six year old up there whose dad was a, a park ranger and a polar bear expert was never look a polar bear in the eye that if the polar bear is coming, coming at you, you need to sort of turn away your head deferentially and not look a polar bear in the eye and then hightail in the other direction. And so that’s, that’s where the, the main thrust of the title comes from. But also the idea of everyone is looking at polar bears from a different direction. You’ve got the left, the right, the scientists, the hunters, the tour guides, everyone is sort of dining out on the polar bear. And what the polar bears, what’s actually happening to the polar bear sometimes becomes less important than what you can do with a polar bear from a marketing perspective. So that’s, that’s the other meaning of the title is that no, no one’s looking at a polar bear straight on.

AW | 16:14 – Zac, we talked about polar bears living on how they’re terrific hunters and how they’re also interacting with human populations for better, for worse. But how do we know that they’re living off of more than just seals and from these anecdotal cannibalistic stories?

ZU | 16:27 – Right. Well, I spent a, a couple of weeks out at this very remote bush camp with a couple of scientists who have been studying polar bears for years. And they have this very unique method. They have a dog, which they have trained to sniff out polar bear scat. This is, this dog comes from a long line of police dogs and they’ve trained it to sniff polar bear feces. And so what they do is they get, we would get, go out into the bush, we’d get dropped off in the middle of nowhere by a helicopter, a couple of us, and this dog and the, the, the woman with a PhD, it was her project. She would tell the dog to go find it and the dog would run out and stop on a pile of polar bear poop. And then we would collect the polar bear poop and you could pick through it and you would find bird feathers and you would find starfish and you would find caribou bones and all these sorts of things. And this dog would find, could find a thousand samples, uh, a season just poop after poop after poop that then would take back to the lab and analyze. And by finding all of this stuff in a polar bear scat, you could see that the bears are empirically eating a lot more than seals. And, and I love this method. I mean, the, the woman who, uh, who owns this dog actually lives in New York City, and she told me that she would get polar bear poop from zookeepers in New York and hide it around New York City in various parks so that the dog, you know, wouldn’t go soft in the off season. And she would train the dog to, uh, to look for, look for polar bear poop, you know, in and around, uh, queens or or wherever in New York City.

AW | 17:52 – So you didn’t have enough time to really have a relationship with a few animals like some of the people that you worked alongside with or, or even a zookeeper who just really gets to know that polar bear in the zoo. But tell us about the relationships that the, uh, people that you were working alongside had built with some of these animals and how that rubbed off on you.

ZU | 18:10 – Right. Well that was, that was the idea is that I, but you know, what my agent said is that you should go up there and you should, you know, get to know one polar bear and follow it around and, and you know, you really, you have that sort of like, you know, free willy kind of connection, but that’s not how polar bears are. Polar bears roam around over very long distances and you can’t get to know one of them.

AW | 18:27 – The agent was thinking movie rights – exactly!

ZU | 18:30 – <laugh>. But what I found is that people who know polar bears and people who live up there, they get to relate to polar bears in a different way. It’s not just, oh, here’s this fantastic thing that I’m going to see once in my life, but here is an animal that I’m living with and interacting with and afraid of and proud of. And all of these things wrapped up in one. And people like the father of, of this six year old who was, who was giving us the information on how to interact with polar bears. He spends his life out on the land working with polar bears. And he has this incredible respect for them. He believes that he doesn’t know how polar bears act and that you can never underestimate a polar bear. He has some ideas about polar bear behavior, born of years of, of long interaction with them. But he knows that you can never get complacent around a polar bear. And as much as he loves bears, he carries a gun and is willing to destroy a polar bear if that’s the last resort. And so there’s this, this, uh, understanding that polar bears are what’s special and what’s wonderful about being up there, but that also it’s this incredible danger that you have to live with at all times.

AW | 19:35 – One of the pictures that you had was, uh, that told a lot about the way this town must really interact with these animals are the, the welcome mats. Describe those.

 ZU | 19:45 – Well, they, they, you know, it’s called a Churchill welcome mat. Basically what it is, is it’s a piece of plywood that you lay down in front of your door with nails sticking up out of it, hundreds of nails and, and people lean them up against their, their front doors as well, just hundreds of nails sticking out so that when the polar bear, you know, pads up to your front porch because he smells you cooking beef stew inside, he’ll get a, you know, a paw full of a paw full of nails and run off.

AW | 20:05 – Do they, do they limit themselves to the doors though? That’s what I thought when I saw that <laugh> and welcome that. It’s like they probably don’t need a door to get exactly.

ZU | 20:13 – Somebody told me a story about a polar bear just reaching through, uh, uh, you know, the, the siding of their house to grab a, a piece of meat that was defrosting on top of a refrigerator. So, wow. You know, I mean, these are massive animals. I mean, male polar bears can be up to 1500 pounds and they are incredibly fast and they can move equally well over land and water and you have no chance if you’re near a polar bear. So it’s, it’s about avoidance and it’s about knowing where to go and where not to go.

AW | 20:39 – Talk about the interaction between the human diet and polar bears.

ZU | 20:44 – One thing that, uh, has been suggested is that as polar bear numbers go down, people are seeing more polar bears because polar bears are more apt to come into town, to scavenge. And so you have this tension between people who live up there who say, I’m seeing more polar bears than I’ve ever seen in my life. And the scientists say, well, that’s because there are fewer polar bears, which is kind of a hard sell to people who live up there intuitively. It makes sense.

AW | 21:06 – Practically, it’s difficult to, to deal with, I imagine.

ZU | 21:09 – Yes, it is. And in Churchill they have, uh, what they call the polar bear alert program, which is because bears are in town all the time and they don’t want people just taking pot shots at bears. So they have, uh, a group of conservation rangers whose job it is to drive around town 24 7, scaring the polar bears out of town, tranquilizing them, trapping them if need be. They even have a polar bear jail in Churchill where they take the sort of most, uh, incorrigible bears to, to sit out the, uh, the freeze up period.

AW | 21:36 – I’ve read that in a children’s book about Irving and Muktuk. They go to a jail for eating too many blueberry muffins and then they get sent to Bayonne, New Jersey, the blueberry muffin capital.

 ZU | 21:47 – That’s just the worst thing possible for a polar bear <laugh>.

AW | 21:50 – Exactly. And can you tell us a little bit about the polar bear population interacting with other bears?

ZU | 21:58 – Well, this is interesting. I mean, as climate change progresses, you find that the northern edge of the grizzly bear range is actually moving up. So you have grizzly bears moving up north, and there have been many instances now of polar bear grizzly hybrids, they’re grower bears or sizzly bears.

AW | 22:19 – So they can mate?

 ZU | 22:20 – They can, I mean, they’re technically two animals that that can’t mate. That’s the definition of a species. But polar bears and grizzlies speciated off from each other recently enough that they can still mate. So it, it’s unclear whether you can even call them separate species. They’re clearly separate species, sort of by our visual perspective, but from a genetic perspective, they’re still closely enough connected that they, that they can mate. And who knows, we might see more and more grizzlies and polar bears interacting. Now, this is a little bit tricky because grizzly bears have a much more varied diet than polar bears. And grizzly bears can eat a lot more different things more easily than polar bears. And so the worry is that maybe grizzly bear ranges will spread into polar bear ranges where they will then out-compete polar bears.

(Music Break) | 23:16

AW | 24:06 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio. I’m speaking to author and firefighter Zac Unger. Can you give us any stats, an idea of global populations and local populations where you were viewing polar bears?

ZU | 24:19 – Well, this is really interesting. There’s general agreement that there’s about 20 to 25,000 polar bears alive today across the five arctic nations. That’s it.

AW | 24:28 – 25,000.

 ZU | 24:29 – About 25,000. But here’s the incredible part. 40 years ago when I was born, there were probably 10,000 polar bears across the entire world. Now, that’s not the conventional wisdom that I went up there understanding, and it’s not the conventional wisdom that is understood in the mainstream, that there are clearly more polar bears alive today than there were 40 years ago. Now the reason for that is that in 1973, there was a global hunting ban treaty. So hunting went way, way down, and the polar bear population exploded.

AW | 24:59 – What was it like in 80 years

ZU | 25:01 – Ago? You know, I don’t know the data, you know, polar bears are, I

AW | 25:03 – Mean, at their peak, were there hundreds of thousands of polar bears or not?

ZU | 25:07 – I mean, who knows, even, the data from 40 years ago is, is much debated and, and disagreed on. But there is general agreement that the polar bear populations have gone up since the, since the hunting ban. Polar bears are incredibly difficult to study. The places where they live, there’s not convenient Starbucks and hotels, and so researchers have, are not able to spend a huge amount of time out there. There are 19 polar bear populations worldwide, distinct polar bear populations. Now there’s some overlap. Polar bears go from population to population, but, but the researchers recognize 19 different polar bear populations. Now the interesting thing about that is that about a third of those populations are decreasing. About a third of those populations are increasing, and the remaining third are data deficient. There’s just not enough data to know. So here we have an instance where there are more polar bears than there were 40 years ago. We have what seems to be a stable or close to stable polar bear population worldwide, even if not in individual locations, but a narrative of total disaster.

AW | 26:08 – From pictures of polar bears sitting on an ice flow in the middle of nowhere. Right.

ZU | 26:12 – And, you know, you know, I think about that a lot. You know, I think it was on the cover of Time or Newsweek. It’s a picture of, of a polar bear sitting on this little ice flow. You know, it’s an Al Gore’s movie. That’s the most sort of resonant moment in the movie is this polar bear sitting on an ice flow? Well, that happens every year in every polar bear population since before there were people.

AW | 26:31 – And they’re incredible swimmers.

ZU | 26:32 They’re incredible swimmers. I mean, there’s, there was a recent paper that had polar bear swimming that had one tagged polar bear swimming 650 kilometers. You know, this is not great for them. They, there’s a lot of opportunity cost to, to swimming, but they can swim huge distances. And every year when, when summer comes on, the ice melts and the polar bears swim to shore. So just showing a picture of a polar bear on a small piece of ice makes you think that’s the la last piece of ice on earth. And, and once that, that last drip happens, he’s done. But that’s not really the case. Have

AW | 27:01 – You left this project feeling more hopeful about the future of polar bears and, and how they’ll adapt to a changing climate or not?

ZU | 27:09 – Well, here’s the thing. What one scientist said to me, which I, which I think is really, really important, is that polar bears are doing pretty well right now, but there is great potential for disaster in the future. And so I am left a little more hopeful. I think polar bears are doing a lot better than, than I had thought they were doing before I went into this. But I also think that the long-term prognosis of global warming continues to go as it does, is probably not good for them. What I’m was very surprised at is how chicken little the narrative is at this point when the numbers don’t necessarily bear that out. I think it’s fair to say that there are negative trends in the future, but I don’t think that the current state of catastrophism, uh, is warranted.

 AW | 27:55 – Well, it’s a terrific read and I recommend our listeners check it out. It’s called “Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye.” Zac Unger, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

ZU | 28:03 – Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Mike Marshall, Lyle Lovett and Randy Newman. Check out our website at SeaChange Radio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast, visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawkin, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.

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