Nature's Archive Podcast

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[0:00:00] Michael Hawk: All right, Dr. Gruber, thank you for joining me today.

[00:00:07] Dr. Anya Gruber: Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:00:09] Michael Hawk: So we’re here actually to talk about the Anthropocene, and just as a heads up, we were talking right before recording about, is it pronounced Anthropocene or Anthropocene or some variant in between?

[00:00:20] And I recognize that I probably have a little bit of a random generator, so I’ll probably flip back and forth between those pronunciations, but we’re talking about the same thing nonetheless. But you’re a paleoethnobotanist. Can you tell me what that is before we get into the conversation?

[00:00:37] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yes, definitely. So, I basically study old plants in the past. So, if you take the word paleoethnobotanist, break it up into its parts, you get paleo, old, ethno, human-related and botanist, so plants, so. Study of old plants. A pop culture example is, uh, Ellie Sattler from Jurassic Park. She’s a paleobotanist, so without the ethno. Of course, she’s studying dinosaurs, so before humans. But, that is what I do. So, I study plant remains from archeological excavations to understand the relationships between people and plants, historically.

[00:01:18] Michael Hawk: Can you give me a frame of reference for the timescale for the plants that you are looking at?

[00:01:22] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yes. So, I am also a historical archeologist. So that means I study the historic period, which is pretty much the last 400, 500 years. So the plants that I’m looking at are about 400 years old. So I work in Massachusetts and I focus on the 17th century. That’s my specific time period. I work in Plymouth, Massachusetts and Cape Cod. That’s what my dissertation was on.

[00:01:51] The plants that I’m looking at are only a couple hundred years old, but there are other paleoethnobotanists or paleobotanists that study plant remains that are millions of years old. So these kinds of methods can be used for a very wide time scale. The specific types of plant remains that I look at, so I actually study pollen. Pollen, as you kind of know, from spring hay fever, when it gets blown off of a, of a tree or a plant, it becomes incorporated in the air and over time it, it falls in what’s called pollen rain and becomes incorporated in the dirt. Um, so in archeological excavations, when you’re digging, you can recover pollen from the dirt that you’re excavating.

[00:02:35] And I also study phytoliths, basically, uh, the, the word means plant fossil. Plants, when they are growing, when they are absorbing water through their roots, they absorb not just the water, but dissolved minerals. They incorporate those dissolved minerals within their tissues, and basically they form little tiny rocks inside of their cells, and they are a perfect cast of those plant cells. When the plant dies and all the carbon-based organic parts of the plant decay, the silica remains because it’s inorganic. It’s basically a little rock.

[00:03:11] And same with the pollen that’s become incorporated with within the soil, and then you can use all kinds of chemical rinses, and scientific techniques to extract the phytoliths from the soil. And then you can look at what kinds of plants were growing in a certain area.

[00:03:26] And that can tell you a lot about like agricultural practices, what kind of plants people were growing as crops, you can find out about, like, what people were using to build their houses, what kind of plants people were cutting down for lumber, for other purposes. You can see like deforestation patterns.

[00:03:42] Uh, so there’s a lot that you can find out from these very tiny bits of plant life that you can recover from archeological sites.

[00:03:50] Michael Hawk: That’s super cool and I’m thinking of a, something that’s relatable to me. We have a lot of nettles around here, like stinging nettles and, as I understand it, the parts that sting people are like silica that has been drawn up through the plant, into like little glass sharp glass pointers.

[00:04:10] And there there’s more to that chemistry as well, for a stinging nettle. But I never thought that other plants have similar kinds of things going on, that’s just not in such a outwardly invasive way as a stinging nettle does it.

[00:04:22] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yes. Yeah. Not every plant has that process of incorporating silica into their cells, but a lot of them do. But, I know it is interesting that plants basically have these microscopic rocks inside of them, and that’s just not something necessarily that you think about.

[00:04:37] Michael Hawk: So I guess that’s interesting too because there’s a bit of a selection bias then. So some plants would, you would not be able to use the same method to discern whether those plants were being used or grown in an environment.

[00:04:49] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yeah, so some plants just do it more and the, the cells that produce these are more diverse. So they create like different shapes. So grasses, for example, just create a lot of phytoliths. They’re very abundant, and they produce them in lots of different like cells, like in their stems, in their leaves, and like the little leaf hinges.

[00:05:12] And the flowers in all different parts of the plant. So people who are studying phytoliths really love grasses. And grasses are great because those include a lot of important economic species or species that people use regularly, like crops, like maize, or corn is a grass, wheat’s a grass. A lot of those kind of important plants are grasses, so they create beautiful little phytoliths.

[00:05:35] Michael Hawk: Is there a similar selection bias, for lack of a better term, when it comes to pollen deposition, as well? Like, are some pollens more durable over time than others?

[00:05:46] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yes, some are more durable over others. And another thing that comes up a lot in pollen research is that trees produce way more pollen than a lot of, like, non-tree species. So for example, like pine produces, it’s like 2.5 million spores of pollen per anther or something like that, like some really high number.

[00:06:14] Whereas let’s say corn, for example, doesn’t produce nearly that much. And part of that is dispersal method. Trees are wind pollinated. So they rely on the wind to carry their pollen to other trees in order to reproduce and make more trees. Whereas other plants, a lot of flowers, for example, let’s say sunflowers, are insect pollinated, so they rely on bugs to pollinate those flowers to create new ones. , so that pollen tends to be very sticky. Uh, so like sunflower pollen actually has like a little stickiness on it, and it also has little spikes so that it can attach to, like, bee fur, and attach to their, legs so that they can pollinate it to other plants.

[00:07:06] , that can be a problem when you’re doing pollen analysis. If you have way more pine pollen than anything else, then that can create a statistical bias. And also, again, if you’re working at a specific site and you find tons of pine pollen, it’s hard to know whether that pine, those pine trees that were growing 200 years ago, were in that local area, or if they were miles, miles away because it can disperse so far.

[00:07:35] Michael Hawk: Mhm.

[00:07:35] Dr. Anya Gruber: So tho-, those are all kind of botanical, biological concepts that you had to be thinking about when doing this kind of analysis, because plants are complicated, and there’s a lot going on.

[00:07:47] Michael Hawk: Absolutely. I look forward to the day where I, this crazy thought that I have as a naturalist, but I will go out to my car in the morning sometimes and there’ll be a little coating of pollen on it.

[00:07:57] Dr. Anya Gruber: Mhm.

[00:07:58] Michael Hawk: And I look around, okay, what trees are the, is this pollen coming from? But to be able to take a little swab and do some kind of DNA analysis and recognize like, oh, some of this pollen is coming from the foothills 10 miles away, or whatever the case like that, that would be so cool to me to get to that point someday.

[00:08:13] Dr. Anya Gruber: Mhm. Also, one thing that I probably should mention that I didn’t mention. The way you identify pollen and phytoliths is based on their shape. So every different plant taxa produce differently shaped pollen, and different plants produce different shaped phytoliths. So you use keys, you use identification guides to say, okay, this grain of pollen, that I’m looking at under my microscope, is 20 microns across, and it’s a circle, and it has little spikes on it.

[00:08:47] So that tells me that’s probably in the sunflower family. Whereas, if it is really large, like 80 microns, and smooth, except it has, like, one little hole in it, then that tells me that’s probably corn. So that’s the way you identify pollen, or identify phytoliths, is under the microscope, and you match it to a known species or known genus or known family.

[00:09:13] Michael Hawk: So my DNA swabbing dream doesn’t sound like that’s anytime soon.

[00:09:18] Dr. Anya Gruber: So, it’s less complicated than that, really. Just need to put it, literally put it on a microscope slide and look at it, and you can identify what plant it’s from.

[00:09:27] Michael Hawk: So thank you for getting into some, some like the, I guess we barely scratched the surface of what you do as a paleoethnobotanist. But let’s back up a little bit, and I’d like to learn a little bit more about yourself and how you got interested in this field in the first place. So, have you always had an interest in nature?

[00:09:44] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yes, I always have had an interest in nature, for sure. My family are all nature appreciators. Not necessarily outdoorsy, but, my family all like, just have a, an appreciation for, , backyard nature. Like my grandmother is, is a birder. She runs, a bird feeding operation.

[00:10:04] I think she has like, eight bird feeders that she attends to every single day. So that’s kind of the environment I grew up with. My mom has stories of me trying to befriend bumblebees and like trying to catch them, and then of course they would sting me and I’d be very sad. But, I’ve always liked nature.

[00:10:23] I’ve always liked birds and bugs and dirt, and flowers. And when I was growing up, I always loved the humanities, but I also always loved the sciences, and I felt like I kind of had to choose one or the other. And that was really hard for me, because I loved history, I loved learning, I loved writing, I loved learning about people.

[00:10:49] And, but I also really liked chemistry, and I liked botany, and that was kind of hard, for a long time, trying to figure out what I actually liked best and feeling like I had to choose either humanities or science. And it wasn’t until college, I started college thinking I wanted to be a writer, probably a journalist.

[00:11:08] I started to take classes and I went to a liberal arts school, so I took classes and everything. And I took a, an archeology class with a phenomenal professor, and I later took one of her classes called the Archeology of Food. And it was really there that I found a field that was equal parts humanities and sciences.

[00:11:33] So that’s where I learned about paleoethnobotany. Um, that’s where I learned that archeologists are scientists that use, kind of social science methods and bring them together in this, like, perfect mix of everything that I loved.

[00:11:48] So I, I ended up doing paleoethnobotany because I love plants, and I liked learning about plants, and I also like working in a laboratory and using my microscope while kind of having this anthropologically grounded way of analyzing this qualitative data.

[00:12:06] So like, how does this, how do these data that I’m collecting in my microscope actually, what does that mean for humans? It’s still appealing to me.

[00:12:17] Michael Hawk: Just thinking about myself personally, one of the things that I love about nature is the novelty. There’s always something to be discovered, and in ecology there’s like many mysteries all the time, like, what is this ant doing right here and why is it drawn to this one bud, but not the other bud?

[00:12:35] And figuring all that out. And it sounds like the field you’re in has that to a larger degree. Like you’re kind-, you’re solving mysteries all the time using interesting clues, scientific clues, anthropological clues. It’s a never ending world of novelty for you.

[00:12:52] Dr. Anya Gruber: Mhm. It really is. There’s just, I mean, there’s so much we don’t know, and I think a lot of scientific fields recognize that. I mean, that’s like why scientists do what we do is because we, there’s so much we don’t know. But yeah, that is definitely what drew me in a lot of ways, because it’s even more fascinating to understand our own place in the world, in the universe, in, , the actual, like cosmological universe as well as the universe of, our backyards and just the nature around us immediately.

[00:13:26] Michael Hawk: So the Anthropocene, let’s get into the main topic for today. I guess I probably first heard this term… It, it’s hard to say, but maybe five, six years ago. So maybe even longer ago. I don’t know. But it really started showing up more and more five or six years ago. And some people might know the term already from like a social or a political perspective, uh, in terms of representing human impact on the environment. But it’s actually, I think, a little bit more complicated than that. So if you had to define the Anthropocene to a friend or a family member, somebody unfamiliar with the concept, how would you go about doing that?

[00:14:06] Dr. Anya Gruber: I would define the an Anthropocene as the era of Earth history that is defined by human activity and impacts.

[00:14:14] Michael Hawk: I think that’s a great starting point. there’s a lot to unpack from activities and impacts of humans. So deep time is really hard, for me anyway, I think for most people to wrap their heads around. Can you help give me a little bit of a insight as to, how far back do human impacts start to show up in the geological record, or in an archeological record, or otherwise?

[00:14:42] Dr. Anya Gruber: Humans have been impacting the environment since we first appeared on the planet. And that’s not specific to humans. There are a lot of animals who alter their environments in some ways. It’s not just something that humans do, but humans have always had an impact on their surroundings. So the question of humans impacting the environment, I would say it’s not always a bad thing. Human impacts are not necessarily detrimental.

[00:15:18] Uh, there are all kinds of ways to alter the world around you and lots of different relationships that humans can have with the natural world. So I think that’s one kind of aspect of this is thinking about the breadth of ways that humans will interact with the environment, and recognizing that there are so many different, there are so many different ways to.

[00:15:44] Michael Hawk: I sometimes hear people get a little defensive when we start talking about humans impacting the environment. And I think it’s just a fact, and as you said, basically every animal impacts the environment at different scales. And I can think about a squirrel. You know, a squirrel might pick up some acorns and bury them somewhere and forget about them, and new trees are growing and suddenly a squirrel has created a new oak woodland, or you have deer coming by grazing, potentially keeping succession at bay in a certain environment.

[00:16:15] That’s an impact as well. I think just by the very nature of trying to survive in the landscape among a complex ecological system, there’s impacts going on all the time. It’s just inherent to life as a starting point. But now I think, I think us humans, we’ve maybe gone a little too far. We’ll, we’ll talk about that.

[00:16:34] Dr. Anya Gruber: I think you’re exactly right. I think it’s kind of impossible to not alter the environment in some way just by existing. But yeah, as you mentioned, the issue is with scale. So what’s the scale of human impacts and the scope of those alterations is sort of where we get into the more detrimental aspects.

[00:16:54] Michael Hawk: And the genus homo of which homosapiens, us, are part of, they, they have been on the landscape for how long? A million years, 2 million years? I, I’ve kinda lost track because it seems like there are often new discoveries of, of relatives that are, are being found.

[00:17:10] Dr. Anya Gruber: The genus homo has existed for about 2.8 million years. Uh, so that’s 2.8 million years of human impacts.

[00:17:20] Michael Hawk: So it’s really interesting to think about that timescale, so much longer than I think I, I keep in my working memory, that human species have been around for 2.8 million years. Now the impacts of humans show up in a variety of different ways, and I was reading an article recently that really was, was interesting and it, and it sounds like there’s some, some discussion still happening among the scientific community, but it was about the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis.

[00:17:49] That seems like maybe a starting point for our discussion. Can you tell me what the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis is?

[00:17:55] Dr. Anya Gruber: The Pleistocene overkill hypothesis postulates that, during the Pleistocene, which was the last ice age, so that was about 2 million to 11,700 or so years ago, that in North America, humans caused the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna, so very large animals, um, due to hunting. So that’s the hypothesis, um, that people basically caused the extinction of large animals in North America during the Pleistocene.

[00:18:30] This is based on paleontological evidence that shows there was a massive decrease in, um, species during this time. That’s the idea that people basically killed off all these animals, but other scientists have pointed out that it’s a little more complicated than that. This extinction event, it was probably not a hundred percent caused by humans.

[00:18:52] So when you’re thinking about any kind of massive change like this, it’s probably due to many different factors. So there was likely some climate component. So there was a warming period during this time, so it’s possible that some of these species didn’t adapt to that changing climate, and possibly with the human hunting that caused this extinction event.

[00:19:18] So it’s a good case study to think about. Definitely, there are human impacts here, and people were, based on the scientific evidence, people were definitely hunting these species. But it’s also good to think about what other factors are also going on, in addition to these human impacts, and how do all these factors create this sort of perfect storm for this massive extinction event?

[00:19:44] Michael Hawk: It’s a good point because, like, I could postulate several add-ons because these systems are so complicated, and I know that there’s been additional research that’s shown when humans arrived on the landscape and other lands, other continents, similar sorts of things happened around the same time.

[00:20:02] Megafauna going extinct at a large scale. But it might be that the humans arrived because of climate change that was occurring through other mechanisms that, you know, volcano eruption or natural change, or whatever the case might be. So humans arrive and they’re looking to, to make their living. And at the same time, this climate change is affecting the animals that are being hunted. It’s pretty easy to see how it’s a complicated thing to disentangle.

[00:20:28] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yes. Yeah. If there’s anything that archeologists and anthropologists are good at doing, it’s making everything really complicated and recognizing that things are very complex and there’s so many interrelated factors, and we’re only looking at a little bit of evidence. So we have to think about , these huge events and these huge ideas with, a lot of evidence, but in the scheme of things, just a little bit of evidence, like, just through one facet.

[00:20:59] Michael Hawk: So we have a strong indication of correlation, but not causation, in this case.

[00:21:06] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yes.

[00:21:06] Michael Hawk: And I, I guess the reason why I, I wanted to just jump into the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis is because we’re talking about the Anthropocene, and maybe, let’s even take another step back here for a moment. The term Anthropocene is, I think I found 23 years old. And it’s something that geologists who are used to working on timescales of millions or billions of years have actually taken seriously. So they’re looking at this from the standpoint of, human impacts are now seen in rocks essentially. It’s amazing to think that we’ve had that scale of impact. I guess the question then is, is when did the impact begin? And there actually, there’s a working group, and sorry if I’m stealing what you wanted to talk about, but, uh, uh, there’s a working group, , the Anthropocene working group, that’s actually part of a geological commission that is looking to make this definition and actually identify a representative location where they can point to the rocks and say, here’s where the Anthropocene began. So can you tell me a bit more about this effort underway on the geological side of the Anthropocene?

[00:22:21] Dr. Anya Gruber: So geologists have formed a, an Anthropocene working group to work through some of the, the scientific and geological questions and evidence for the Anthropocene. So there’s something called a golden spike in, in geology and Earth sciences, which is basically a specific reference point that points to a new stage or a change in Earth history. So it’s basically a concrete boundary between geological eras. For example, the Cambrian explosion is a golden spike. This like specific moment that you can point to that signals a change. So the working group has been working to find that for the Anthropocene, which is of course a, a big question and there are several points across the world, like there’s one in, there’s one in California, there’s like a peat bog in Poland, there’s somewhere in China, where scientists can point to chemical changes in the earth that have specifically been caused by humans.

[00:23:40] Michael Hawk: Right, so, they’re looking at atmospheric chemistry, in a way, that can be detected in the rocks, in the sedimentation.

[00:23:51] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yea, in the rocks, in the sedimentation, in, um, lake beds, in these places where you can point to it and say, this change in chemistry is directly because of humans, is directly because of industry, is directly because of the atomic bomb. That signals a geologic change in the earth.

[00:24:17] Michael Hawk: Yea, and that just blows my mind that, that we have the geologists doing this because, like we were saying, the Earth is what, four and a half billion years old, and all of these huge, large scale processes have happened over the course of that timescale. Yet in just a mere few thousand years, we’re at a point where evidence of human impact is showing up in sedimentation. To the degree that, I mean geologists aren’t really environmentalists, yet it’s caused them to sit up and take note.

[00:24:52] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yeah.

[00:24:53] Michael Hawk: So, we have this one train of thought where they’re looking for the golden spike location, the location that’s most representative. But I think there’s probably a lot of debate there as to, you know, slowly over time, like maybe you see carbon dioxide increasing, and that gets represented in, in the fossil record or in sedimentation. You might see plant communities changing. You might see other things happening. Can you tell me about some of the considerations that they have in terms of pinpointing the time, like the location, the specifics as to when the Anthropocene starts?

[00:25:26] Dr. Anya Gruber: There are a few kind of proposed starts to the an Anthropocene. What I have seen most often is either the Industrial Revolution, so the 19th century, and I’ve seen others say 1945 with the dropping of the atomic bomb. So those are two of sort of the main times where I see people propose the beginning of the Anthropocene. That to me kind of raises a couple questions. I think it’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment for, say, this is exactly when humans started to make a detrimental impact on their environment. Just because, geographically, it’s so varied in how people have related to the natural world, where some places, people have made much more detrimental impact on their surroundings whether that’s by pollution or by extinction, or by over hunting, deforestation. And there are other places where people have been kind of gentler with the natural world. So it’s, I feel like it’s hard to say this is the moment when humans did the bad things. I think that is kind of oversimplifying it, but the golden spike, having that location where chemically there are these changes, I think centering the Industrial Revolution is like super Eurocentric, only recognizing one history, which is basically, like, England and the US, and I don’t think that’s necessarily something that we want to do. But I also want to recognize like the golden spike is a scientifically grounded technique, as well.

[00:27:09] So if you have these chemical changes, that is a golden spike and that’s important to recognize.

[00:27:16] Michael Hawk: Yeah. I guess one aspect of it is these changes have to be at a global scale, really, to show up consistently and, and historically when we’ve moved into different time periods geologically, it’s been some kind of global event that’s happened. And maybe, like for me, I think where I sometimes struggle with it is I have this vision of the golden spike and it’s so precise and it’s at this specific year and we’re talking about things like 1945 or 19th century or whatever the case might be.

[00:27:44] But on a geologic time scale, the things that trigger these changes, like a cataclysmic event, might occur at a specific point in time, but the impacts and the change take, you know, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years to actually manifest. And I guess we’re in that weird unique state right now where we we’re in the middle of one of these events that’s taking decades, centuries, or more to really fully manifest.

[00:28:12] Dr. Anya Gruber: Right. Yeah. It’s hard to study yourself, really. Geologic time kind of requires your perspective that, by definition, we don’t have in the an Anthropocene because we’re in it. All that being said, I think the Anthropocene is a really important rhetorical device.

[00:28:30] I think that it is, obviously, undeniable that humans have caused massive, massive changes. We have created a climate crisis, we’ve created extinction events, and so I think the Anthropocene is really valuable as a term to emphasize the impacts that humans have made on the environment and the problems associated with that.

[00:28:59] Michael Hawk: Yea, I agree. It’s, it’s a double-edged sword in a way. It’s a shorthand to represent the impacts that we’re making and the fact that they have made it into the geological record, which hopefully we can turn into a motivating factor to make some changes. And at least for me, that’s how I look at it.

[00:29:18] Now, the downside of it is it is so complex and I think it’s pretty easy to get lost in the weeds of, of all of these impacts. And maybe just as an example, we can talk a little bit about what the Anthropocene means from your perspective, from an environmental archeologist perspective.

[00:29:41] Dr. Anya Gruber: So from my perspective, like I said, I think it’s a very valuable rhetorical device. I think that we need to have a term to be able to show that humans have created this mess and it’s kind of up to us to figure it out because we caused it. But to me, some of the drawbacks or some of the critiques that I see, one big thing is, I think sometimes the Anthropocene, it ends up kind of flattening a lot of nuance in the causes of the climate crisis.

[00:30:14] So I think by calling it the Anthropocene, you’re kind of equally blaming all humans. And I don’t think that’s necessarily fair or scientifically grounded because some individuals and corporations have created significantly more carbon emissions and much more pollution than the vast majority of individual people.

[00:30:37] Is it fair to say all humans have equally caused this, this is humans’ fault? I think that erases a lot of stewardship practices that people have maintained for, in some cases thousands of years, that, that impact the environment, but not in a negative way. So I think that sometimes the Anthropocene, or at least dialogues about the an Anthropocene, don’t recognize that there are ways to exist harmoniously with the environment, or at least in a healthier way. And just my, my worry with that is blaming all people equally doesn’t quite sit right with me.

[00:31:16] Michael Hawk: Those are excellent points. And it’s, it’s so complicated because every culture that has existed has a different relationship with the environment, a different way of looking at what sustainable means. And at the same time, as I say often on the podcast, like everything we do has a tradeoff, so there’s always an impact regardless. But in, in your work in Massachusetts and looking over the last several hundred years, I know you’ve seen some of these differences in, in the social or cultural dimensions. Can you tell me a little bit about some of your observations?

[00:31:47] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yes, definitely. So, um, as I said, I work in 17th century Massachusetts, or I work in Massachusetts and I study the 17th century. I wish I could’ve worked in 17th century Massachusetts.

[00:31:58] Michael Hawk: Yea, that’s another episode to learn about your time travelling.

[00:32:01] Dr. Anya Gruber: My time travel.

[00:32:03] So, , I study kind of two main groups of people. The colonial English, people, so what we popularly call the pilgrims, and the Wampanoag people, the Indigenous people of the area. So these kind of groups of people have very different ways of thinking about the natural world. So for the colonists in the 1600s, they mostly saw nature as something to be used. Um, so they were drawing their worldviews from biblical sources.

[00:32:39] They kind of, their whole lives are centered around, , their religion, which was Puritanism or Separatism. And so they saw the natural world and animals and plants around them as something that God gave them to be used for their own purposes and to be shaped in a way that they saw as productive.

[00:33:03] They saw, for example, like there are a lot of marshes and wetlands in coastal Massachusetts where I work. So they saw those kinds of landscapes as wastelands or as wild, as something to be tamed. So that really informed the way that they treated the land, so they cut down a lot of trees, , to use in ship building or to use in their houses.

[00:33:27] They drained a lot of swamps to make it into productive farmland. They made a lot of changes to the landscape in order to make it more useful to them. And that’s different from how the Wampanoag viewed the landscape, which was more fluid between the human world and the natural world.

[00:33:46] There was less of a separation. Nature was not something to be tamed or to be overcome, it was. There’s like kind of this more holistic view of seeing the natural world. , to me what it kind of comes down to is, , for, at least for, for colonists, and this is kind of something that I think is still present in sort of mainstream American culture, is the separation between kind of capital N nature and capital C culture.

[00:34:13] , that humans are separate from nature. We are our own thing and nature is kind of over there. And these are just kind of two examples of how to see the world and how to exist within it, , in relationship to plants and animals and weather and all these dynamics around us.

[00:34:31] Michael Hawk: One of the things I sometimes think about, you know in that era, in the colonial era, this concept of owning land was, you know, entirely new to the Indigenous cultures in North America. And the echoes still, continue today of this approach. I guess another thing that I think about in this whole like social and cultural aspect is, if I take a couple steps back and like, I imagine myself as an alien, that who’s, you know, looking at what’s going on on Earth and what we do to make a living is going against the natural systems almost all the time. It’s, uh, terraforming land, essentially. It’s converting it to a different use. And it’s silly from that perspective, like from the alien observation perspective, to say, well, why don’t you work with the land and work with the things that’s providing you already, instead of trying to convert it into some other thing all the time. It just doesn’t even sound very efficient to me. And it’s funny, just a, a side note, but that’s where my mind often goes in this discussion.

[00:35:38] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yeah. No, I, I think you’re totally right and I, I really think, at least in, in the US, I think a lot of that is colonial legacies. I think we’ve really held onto a lot of ideas that were prevalent among colonists in the 1600s, and I really see a lot of that as these legacies that still continue today and really inform even like policy and legislature. And I still think that kind of controlling land is still controlling and taming and owning.

[00:36:12] Those are all really kind of colonial concepts, and I mean that’s still how we center conversations around, around the natural world today, in a lot of cases. I mean that’s a broad generalization, but I do definitely think that those kinds of ideas are very much prevalent in today’s society.

[00:36:33] Michael Hawk: So this is just such a big topic and so much, so many components to it, so many reasons for it. What can we do to maybe turn this into a motivating topic for people?

[00:36:47] Dr. Anya Gruber: It is, it is such a huge concept. But I think it can be really useful as a motivating force to show that, yes, humans have made huge, huge impacts on the planet. We’ve created this climate crisis, we’ve created these huge issues and it can feel really overwhelming.

[00:37:10] It can feel hopeless a lot of the times, and I think this concept really kind of shows the scope of what humans have done. But I think also at the same time, recognizing that there have been so many ways that humans have existed and coexisted with the natural world, that I hope that maybe we can center on that a little bit more and it can give people a little bit of, of hope in the face of this huge crisis.

[00:37:40] And I know it’s so frustrating. I get really frustrated knowing that, it’s corporations and it’s, just like a few who are contributing most to this crisis. And I know as an individual it can often feel really hard. It’s like what’s the point of me trying to be a better environmentalist when I’m not the one who’s making a huge contribution to pollution or something like that, which I totally get.

[00:38:08] But also at the same time, I think remembering these different ways of knowing and existing can also, at least for me, help motivate me to try and do my part to, to help the planet or to not, , negatively impact the planet more. So I think the Anthropocene does have its place. It’s a useful way of understanding what’s going on in our modern world and can be an entry point into, like I said, understanding how we can exist on this planet more gently.

[00:38:39] Michael Hawk: Yeah, it’s, it’s like a, a wake up call in a way. It’s another wake up call. We’ve already had plenty of wake up calls.

[00:38:44] Dr. Anya Gruber: We’ve had so many wake up calls, but this is another, it’s another good one. It’s another, it’s another complicated one.

[00:38:51] Michael Hawk: Maybe it resonates with people and starts them on the path of, of looking into this. And at the risk of getting on a bit of a soapbox myself, like this is one of the reasons why I started Jumpstart Nature, which is the new environmental conservation organization that Nature’s Archive is part of, to help people who are feeling hopeless or feeling like this is just too big of a problem to take those first steps. And you’re exactly right. As individuals, there’s not much we can do by ourselves. But as a collective, you know, we can start to make the change that’s necessary, demonstrate that there’s a market for people who want to make these changes and influence policy and elections and everything else that has to happen systematically. So I hope that, for anyone who is feeling a bit overwhelmed by the breadth and scope of the Anthropocene that they check out Jumpstart Nature, as a sales pitch. They check out Jumpstart Nature, because that’s, we’re working to help people take those first steps or take additional steps.

[00:39:52] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yeah, definitely.

[00:39:54] Michael Hawk: Thank you for your very thoughtful review of the Anthropocene, and I’m sure that there’s so many things, like there could be a whole podcast series looking into different elements of this.

[00:40:05] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yeah, easily.

[00:40:08] Michael Hawk: And I want to give you, speaking of that, I know that you are busy working in many different aspects of communicating your work.

[00:40:17] , so I’ll give you an opportunity to, to highlight some of those, but. I’m gonna make you hold on for just a moment, and I want to ask you some of my standard wrap up questions. So, this question gives some of the, the most thoughtful responses. I, I just, I love it. But if you could magically impart one ecological concept to help the public see the world as you see it, what would that be?

[00:40:41] Dr. Anya Gruber: I feel like I’ve heard some of your guests give a similar answer, but I really truly believe this, we are all interconnected. And I mentioned this a couple times during, uh, during our conversation, but I just think it’s really important to, to not separate humans and nature. I think we are all so connected in this huge community with other humans and with animals and with plants.

[00:41:10] And I think that recognizing that and to try and not fight and separate ourselves as a species from every other species, I think that would make a better world. I really would. And I think that, especially in the United States, I think the mainstream idea is, when you go out to nature, you go to a place, you go to like a national park, you go to a somewhere that is in nature.

[00:41:39] But I kind of think that the spider in the corner of your living room or your ladybug or like your houseplant, like I have a pot of strawberries on, on my kitchen table. That is also nature. We are constantly surrounded by nature. We are nature. I really think that if we kind of had that as our sort of everyday mindset, I think that would be beneficial.

[00:42:03] Michael Hawk: For sure, for sure. That’s, yeah, certainly something I try to stress as well. And you mentioned the concept of scale. You know, scale is one of the reasons why we’re in the Anthropocene, and when you think about the scale of all of our personal, properties, all of the roadways, all of the railways, you know, all of this that is taking away from nature. Doesn’t have to, in all cases, like our backyards, for example. That really drives home the point.

[00:42:31] You can do the math and you can see that, oh, golf courses and lawns are about roughly equivalent to the state of Nevada in the United States. Things like that really drive home that point.

[00:42:42] Dr. Anya Gruber: Every time I see a golf course, I’m like, ugh, that could be a wildflower meadow.

[00:42:47] Michael Hawk: It could be both.

[00:42:49] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yeah, it could be both. Probably could be both.

[00:42:52] Michael Hawk: Yeah, absolutely could be. Hey, we don’t need to, to take away all of those things to improve things. You have a lot on your plate, I know, from the discussion that we’ve been having over the last few weeks. So can you tell me about some of your upcoming projects that you’d like to highlight?

[00:43:09] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yes, definitely. I actually recently had a written piece, published on sapiens.org, , SAPIENS Anthropology Magazine, about a colleague of mine who is doing this huge project to, preserve historic headstones in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Uh, so I have an article about her and her work. I also wrote and hosted a podcast episode through Sapiens called Finding Mrs. Jackson, which is about a cache of objects that was buried by a widow also in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the Victorian era, and kind of the process of the archeologist finding that, and, , learning about this woman, Mrs. Jackson. So those are two, , that have come out recently. I also have an article coming out in Atlas Obscura about the queer history of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[00:44:05] , hopefully I’ll have some more articles coming out soon. I’ve been doing the science writing thing for not very long. I’m just kinda starting out, but I’m hoping to do some more also in the future.

[00:44:18] Michael Hawk: And I just, I listened to the Finding Mrs. Jackson episode. Like what an amazing place to do your research. You know, Plymouth, Massachusetts, like from an American history sort of perspective.

[00:44:29] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yeah, that’s a part of the reason I got into science communication, is because of how many people would come up to us during excavations in Plymouth saying like, what are you doing? Because of course, Plymouth, we would be digging in in June. Huge tourist destination, and a lot of the locals are also really invested in the history.

[00:44:48] So huge component of the site is telling people about what we’re finding. And also one of the sites is right next to a cemetery and we are not digging human remains. We don’t touch those. So a huge part of it is saying to people, they’re like, oh, are you digging up skeletons? And we’re like, we are not digging up skeletons.

[00:45:09] We’re looking at like house foundations and artifacts and communicating to people like what archeology is kind of through that, and that’s part of how I realized I really like talking to people about science. So yes, I share your point saying it’s a cool site, it’s a very cool site.

[00:45:25] Michael Hawk: Yeah, sounds, sounds like a lot of fun and a very, uh, vigorous location.

[00:45:30] Dr. Anya Gruber: Oh yes.

[00:45:30] Michael Hawk: The Sapiens podcast as well. I’ll make sure to link to that in the show notes. There’s a lot of other really interesting topics that have been produced through that podcast. It, it’s well done. It’s a well done podcast.

[00:45:41] , if people want to follow you or your work, is there anywhere they can go, websites or social media accounts or anything like that?

[00:45:48] Dr. Anya Gruber: Yes, I do have an Instagram. It’s @anyagruber and I do have a website also. I’m kind of building a website right now, , which is anyaegruber.com, and there I have links to all the pieces that I’ve written, my contact information and all of that.

[00:46:07] Michael Hawk: So Anya, thank you so much for this look at the Anthropocene. Your perspective is super unique and I might just have to ask you to come back at some point to talk more about the paleoethnobotany side too. It’s, that’s really fascinating as well. So thank you so much for your time and for the work that you’re doing. I appreciate you.

[00:46:27] Dr. Anya Gruber: Thank you so much and yes, I would be thrilled to come back anytime to talk more about paleoethnobotany. I can talk your ear off for hours about that. So thank you so much.