7.9.25

Brink by Tristan mc connell near Mahmad. The palms survive largely because farmers use ground water extracted with individual solar pumps to irrigate their plots. They are cheap to run and make extracting water easy, but they are a short term fix. The brackish ground water increases the salinity of the soil, making growing crops even more difficult, and pulling straight from the aquifer can put it out of reach

of even the deepest palm tree roots. As long as people keep pumping ground water with solar they think there's no problem, says spy. But when you see solar you can very quickly kill the oasis. Abdul Kharim Banucci, a forty eight year old with a thick mustache, and dressed in a white tunic and turban. Has farmed in Mahmid all his life. When he was growing up, there were periods of drought that would decimate crops, he says, but the palms stayed strong. Now even they whither and date

yields are falling. The palm cover on his acre plot is scant, and the fruit trees are gone. Unable to rely on the river or rain for irrigation, uses ground water pumped from his own well at the far end of his land, and every three years he must dig it deeper. In nineteen ninety six, a twenty three foot well was enough. Now it reaches to fifty two feet. It is in God's hands, BENAUI says, But as I see it, there is no future for farming here because

of the water. In agriculture you always lose. He expects that eventually his three young sons, all of whom are under ten, will abandon farmining, abandoned farming and the oasis in a destructive feedback loop, migration pastins the oases surrender to the desert. The local population has fallen by a fifth in the past twenty years, and as mostly young people leave, it's harder for the aging population that remains

to maintain the palm trees and irrigation channels. There's nothing to do here because there's no rain, so people emigrate, says sixty one year old farmer ab De Lai Lachbo, whose three sons have left. There is nobody around, just us old people. In his long white jalava and purple scarf, Laboch takes meat to the sand filled irrigation channels and sand covered fields nearby. There's nobody here to help us work,

he says, shrugging. Neglected and abandoned plots. Let the desert in, and a few days of strong wind is all it takes to coat the earth with sand, starting the process of soiled degradation. As we walk around to Banao, one of Mohammad's satellite villages, Sabah tells me that of the two hundred families that used to live here, only five remain. The rest, he says, have seen their homes taken by

the desert. They are no longer enough residence to clear the sand clogged alleys and passages, nor to maintain and repair the rammed earth walls of the Kassar, which are crumbling and collapsing like a sand castle in a rising tide. One of the few still living here is sixty eight year old the Ala'id Ilaghnoi, a thick set farmer who once who long ago seated the ground floor of his mud walled house to the desert. From his perch up stairs, he used the flashlight on his phone to peer at

the sand filled hall below. If there is any chance of rescuing Mohammed and charting a path towards saving other oases across the world, it might come from a small two acre plot on the edge of town, where Sabai has constructed a laboratory of pilot projects aimed at holding back the desert and holding on to water. Acacia and tamarisk trees sprout from shallow, circular planters called water boxes that were designed by a Dutch horticulturist named Peter Hoff.

These planters reduce the amount of water young saplings need and act as a barrier against the desert. For years, Spy has worked with a Dutch foundation called Sahara Roots, planting hundreds of trees around Mahid to strengthen what he calls the natural system. To stop the sand. He has also introduced pipes for drip fed irrigation, which snake across vegetable beds and use far less water than the traditional method of flood irrigation that ceased to make sense when

the river stopped flowing. These solutions, though modest in scope, are all aimed at restoring and recalibrating the balance between the people of the oasis and the changing landscape in which they live. Take the solar pumps. Climate change has made them necessary, but when their private lyad owned, as most currently are, people take what they want regardless of the needs of others. Spy has been pushing local farmers and government agencies to reconsider how the pumps are used

in nomadic culture. He says, you need to share everything. Thanks in part to Spy's lobbying, Morocco's National Agency for the Development of Oasis Zones and Argonne Trees is working to install communities solar pumps and wells to replace private ones in Mahmied and elsewhere, so that water can once

again be managed communally and shared equitably. Of course, none of that will matter if the entire population of Mahmed leaves for better opportunities elsewhere, So in twenty sixteen, Spy co founded the Judour Sahira Music School with Thomas Duncan of the Playing for Change Foundation, a California nonprofit that uses music to bring communities together. We asked, what can you offer young people to make them stay so duncan. Their answer is to celebrate, share and preserve knowledge of

the cultural traditions of the desert and the oasis. Children attend weekly music classes in the traditional Ahidos, Guana, rockba Akalal, and Chamra styles. The school has since given rise to the Zaman Festival, which features hundreds of musical artists from across the Sahara and attracts thousands of visitors. The school's new home, the Jodur Sahira Cultural Center, was completed last year and consists of two modern rammed earth buildings designed

by Baraccan architect A Ziza Chahuni. One is a sunken amphitheater for musical performances, the other a classroom with a subterranean cistern. The two structures are connected by underground water pipes. Rainwater is collected and stored in the reservoir. Real resilience is saving every drop of rainwater, says by. A riad style building for visiting musicians is under construction near by.

The idea was to revive traditional materials that completely make sense in the area, says Chooni, to build pride in traditional architecture, not to just copy the past, but be innovative. Sabai often talks about the importance of nomadic culture, the need to live within the constraints of nature and the desert's tough environment, to share resources as a community, to not waste anything. He says these old ways are key to the restoration and survival of the oasis in the

face of climate change. Saba started as a tour operator before expanding into environmental and cultural activism. He still believes in the value of tourism to the oasis economy, but he wonders what kind of tourism the kind that builds with concrete, fills swimming pools with precious water, and tears up the dunes for gasoline fueled kicks, or something slower and simpler that treads more lightly on the land, exists in harmony with the landscape and draws on the rich

culture and history of the oasis. One cold clear evening, he reclines against a thick poof on a hand woven carpet laid out by a fire. One of his guests is a taureg desert blues guitarists visiting the music school from Mauritania, who carefully serves tea poured from a small painted teapot. Teapot heated in the fire's embers. A waxing moon shines bright above, and a thick stand of date

palms is silhouetted against the indigo sky. We have the stars, and a fire's spy says we are the luckiest people on earth. The oasis is fragile, it's future uncertain, but it is where Saby comes from and where he belongs, and he is determined to save it, the extraordinary oasis. For centuries, oases have been important cultural and ecological landmarks in Morocco, despite the fact that they receive fewer than

ten inches of rain each year. They've persisted thanks to clever human engineering that takes advantage of a delicate ecological balance, opportune geography in the rain shadow of the Atlas Mountains, water flows in intermittent streams and collects, and low lying aquifers, protective palms, date palm trees, a keystone species, are planted to provide fruit and protect smaller plants from harsh sun,

winds and sands. A fragile equilibrium under threat. Rising temperatures and changing rain patters due to climate change have exacerbated existing threats, which can have a ripple effect across the delicate oasis ecosystems. Drought less rainfall and increase drilling, lower water tables and rays, fire risks. Bayoude disease of fungal pathogen has killed significant portions of critical palm groves. Soil salinity salt from pumped ground water accumulates in the soil.

Migration ecological stress causes community caretakers to flee desertification. Vacated land returns to desert, sand pollutes water fields and towns. Next, are we sure Pluto isn't a planet? Nearly twenty years since it was downgraded to a dwarf planet, Pluto's bona fides still spark debate by Eric Ault. After its discovery in nineteen thirty, Pluto was declared the ninth planet in our Solar system and quickly garnered attention not typically afforded

to its galactic peers. This was thanks in part to the power of celebrity. The small, multi colored icy rock has long been associated with Bickey Mouse's pet dog, which which originally named Rover but most likely renamed after the planet in nineteen thirty one. Then in two thousand and five, Mike Brown, a professor of astronomy at Caltech, crashed the party upon discovering Eiras similar in size to Pluto and also in the Queper Belt, calling into question Pluto's classification.

As a result, in two thousand and six, the International Astronomical Union AU voted to adopt new requirements for planetary status, kicking Pluto out of the club and into the newly defined category of dwarf planet. Brown expanded on his reasoning in his aptly titled memoir How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It coming. In the years since, the worlds of science and pop culture have hotly debated Pluto's fate.

Among Brown's good natured adversaries is Philip Metzger, a retired planetary physicist at Nassaus Kennedy Space Center, current associate scientist at the University of Central Florida, and avowed Pluto is a planet believer. To celebrate the ninety fifth anniversary of Pluto's discovery, we sat down with Brown and Metzger to

get some clarity. Are Brown and his cohorts correct in reducing Pluto's significance and instead focusing on new discoveries like the still unconfirmed planet nine or dou Metzger and others have a solid argument for the triumphant return of everyone's favorite little planet. Mike, how did you arrive at your conclusion that Pluto isn't a planet? And Philip, how did you wind up on the other side of the fence?

Mike Brown? Since I've been at Caltech, one of my main areas of interest has been the objects in the outer part of the Solar System and queeper belt, objects like Pluto. And one of the largest projects that I did back in the early two thousands was the first really wide scale search for other objects as large as Pluto, other dwarf planets before we called them dwarf planets, which by the way, is a stupid term. How so mb

because it's unnecessarily confusing. Before the IAU made up that term, we use the word planetoid to describe these things that are small but round, and it's a much better word because it's not as confusing. The only reason that Pluto was called a dwarf planet after its planet status was revoked is because that was snuck in there by the pro Pluto people in hopes they could get then get

a vote that dwarf planets are planets. The vote was then overwhelmingly rejected, but we are left with that stupid phrase. I blame the Pluto people for that, Philip Metzger. We would say that there are a lot of dwarf planets and that these dwarf planets are actually planets in the Queper Belt. But the thing is, we're not really arguing for Pluto to be reinstated because we think that the vote to downgrade it was irrelevant. The IAU didn't have a right to do that vote. They violated their own

by laws when they did it. Our claim is that it never stopped being a planet because taxonomy is part of science, and the taxonomy that matters is the one that the scientists are using and finding useful, whereas the public's astrological based taxonomy is not useful for science. It doesn't align with any theories, and that's unfortunately the one that the i a U adopted well, let's start there. What other criteria for planet status p M. In two thousand and six, the IAU decided number one that a

planet must orbit a star. Directly based on that, the Moon would not be a planet. It's what we call a secondary planet, whereas the Earth is a primary planet. The second thing they said is that a planet has to be large enough to pull itself into a round shape by its own gravity, what we call gravitational rounding. And then the third condition was, and this is the one designed to eliminate bodies like Pluto, it has to gravitationally dominate its orbit in order to clear the neighborhood

of its own orbit from other bodies. They didn't define what that they meant by that, they disfigured people would make it more concrete. Later. You can argue that Earth is not a planet because the Earth doesn't clear out its own neighborhood. What they really meant was a planet has to be gravitationally dominant, according to some unknown metric

that they hadn't created yet. Mike Brown. In nearly two thousands, digital cameras started to get much much better, and we could finally take pictures of the whole sky at once. We used that to discover these biggest, brightest dwarfest planets that are out there, including the one that really forced a discussion about Pluto. We discovered Eris, which is more massive than Pluto. And so suddenly something was going to

have to give. You were either going to have to add new planets or subtract things that are no longer planets. If Pluto were discovered to day, nobody would say it was a planet. Are we too hung up on the number nine? Have we just all grown up with nine planets and the thought of either eight or infinite numbers of planets makes us uneasy? Mike Brown, No, there's no magic number. It's not that Pluto had to be subtracted.

It's that astronomers were forced to acknowledge the reality that it didn't fit with what we know about planets now. The pro Pluto side tried to change the definition of a planet to be something. It's not because they were so desperate to keep Pluto a planet, but their definition would add two hundred more planets to our Solar system. The pro Pluto faction, by the way, is dominated by people who were involved in the nass omission to Pluto when they launched, Pluto was a planet. By the time

they got there, it wasn't. Philip Metzger. It's cultural, it's not scientific. What else in nature is like that. I mean, we don't say there have to be only nine mountains, nine rivers, nine types of beetles. In elementary school, we were told that there are nine planets. That's it. Should it be taught as more of an evolving concept, Philip Metzger. Yeah, Unfortunately, when we're taught that there are only eight planets and these planets rain in their orbits, we're harkening back to

the old geocentric concept. This outdated idea is just the simple, orderly monocentric and these planets are like gods. They rain in their orbit. We're arguing, need to teach that it's a dynamic cosmos. Things change, things evolve, planets can change

their orbit. Scientists have hypothesized that there might be a replacement for Pluto, so called planet nine, but that's not just because they want a replacement for Pluto, right Mike Brown, Right now, the existence of planet nine is a very good hypothesis to explain a lot of things we're seeing out there that we have no other explanation for but until the day that we point a telescope at it and see it and say, ah, there it is. It

is just the best hypothesis to explain these phenomena. In the end, Why do you think people have such an attachment to Pluto and a resistance to Planet nine or other possible replacements, Philip Metzger. All I can say is when the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, it was amazing. I was at Johns Hopkins University where they had the control center when they put up the pictures for the first time. It was just so bread taking and geologically diverse.

I mean, there are mountains as tall as the Rocky Mountains, and there are glaciers flowing, and there's a layered atmosphere, and there's probably an underground ocean, and there's organic material the building blocks of life all over the surface of the planet. Not only is Pluto a planet, but it's also more of another Earth than any other. It's the most planet like planet. Mike Brown, I have an attachment to Pluto. When I was growing up. It was this weird,

mysterious thing at the edge of the Solar System. Who would not think it's kind of weird and small and cute, and now we've seen pictures of it. It is kind of a cool looking thing. It's a cool place. Next, what can we learn from the genius of beavers? By Ben Goldfarb. First there were peals, then pests, but now they are emerging as something else, climate heroes. The East Troublesome Fire erupt it on October twenty u Wine twenty twenty.

Whipped by strong winds and fueled by drought parched forests, the fire roared through northern Colorado's spruce and fir woods. It leaped roads and rivers and the Continental Divide, scaling mountain passes above tree line. It incinerated historic buildings in Rocky Mountain National Park and homes in Grand County, killing two people. Ultimately, it torched nearly two hundred thousand acres,

making it the second largest fire in Colorado's history. In the end, just about the only thing the East Troublesome didn't consume was beaver ponds. This was not entirely surprising. Beavers, of course built dams that store water, and water, as you may know, doesn't burn. But the benefit the semi

aquatic rodents provide goes further than that. In a study published weeks before the East Troublesome blew up, Emily Fairfax and eco hydrologists now at the University of Minnesota, found that beaver ponds and canals irrigate the landscape so thoroughly that they turned crisp of flammable plants into lush, fireproof ones, forming green refuges in which wildlife and livestock can retreat. In a nod to another firefighting icon, Fairfax and her

co author titled their paper Smokey the Beaver. Fairfax studied five fires between two thousand twenty eighteen to reach her conclusions, but the East Troublesome was far bigger than most of those places, and a harbinger of the kind of conflagration

worth seeing more and more. Although fire has long been a natural force of regeneration on North American landscapes, the so called megafires that plague the ever drier West are a different matter, stoked by climate change into exclusive infernos that burn so big and hot that ecosystems don't always

readily recover. Fairfax doubted whether beavers could still fireproof large tracts of the landscape under those conditions, But when she visited the charred forests left behind by the Ear Troublesome and one other megafire, she discovered that the oases beavers created with their ponds had endured. There are entire rivers that are basically unaffected by the fire because it's just beaver dams the whole way, she said. Everything is full of life. The reeds are growing, the pine needles are

still on the trees. The ponds aren't merely helpful before a fire. They can also protect ecosystems from the effects that come right after a blaze, capturing the ash and debris that run off hill slopes and shielding downstream fish and drinking water. In a twenty twenty four paper describing their findings, Fairfax and her collaborators concluded that beavers can be part of a comprehensive fire mitigation strategy. Once hunted to near extinction for their pelts and later villainized as

a nuisance, beavers have rebounded. There are now ten to fifteen million swimming and waddling across most of North America, and they're ready for their third act us in an improbable roll. Ecological saviors to a climate change ravaged world, and fire mitigation is just the start. By building dams that slow stream flow, they create reservoirs that help combat drought.

By sculpting wetlands, they furnish habitat for other animals. Nowhere is their return more necessary than in the climate stressed American West, where beaver restoration is unfolding to some extent in every state. But beaver's tireless meddlers with a penchant for running a foul of human infrastructure aren't yet universally welcome.

The San Pedro River snakes across Arizona's border with Mexico through the sun blasted Sonoran Desert, though the arid land seems better suited for rattlesnakes than for semi aquatic rodents.

Frontiersmen once knew the San Pedro as the Beaver River, before nineteenth century trappers stripped it clean anywhere there were perennial waters there, or probably beaver's lisas by Spypeck, the director of a non prophet called the Watershed Management Group, told me one fall day along the San Pedro's cobble strewn banks in nineteen ninety nine, in hopes of enhancing the area's Wildlife habitat the Federal Bureau of Land Management

restocked the San Pedro with sixteen beavers, whose offspring dispersed throughout the river, including into Mexico. Since twenty twenty twenty, Spypeck, along with Mexican biologists and legions of volunteers, has been scouring the river to estimate their population. I joined her team for a day of surveying the San Pedro's shady

cottonwood galleries for beavers. Shue marks, treks and lodges. Along the trunk of one downed cottonwood, beavers had chiseled away the bark to expose cream colored heartwood and whittled limbs to blunt points. Pale chips littered the bank. They were probably here within the last few weeks. Spypeck half whispered cezy to emphaths empathize with beaver. Like many of us, they live in nuclear families. A typical colony consists of a breeding pear and their offspring, which stick around until

the age of two. On land, beavers are clumsy morsels for cougars, wolves, and bears, but their balletic swimmers endowed with transparent eyelids and webbed hind feet, Their keratins, scaled tails serve as fat storage units, and rudders. Their iron reinforced teeth scrape away the inner bark that provides the bulk of their herbivorous diet. By building dams and filling ponds around their woody lodges, beavers expand and defend their

aquatic domains like feudal lords with moats around castles. Like humans, too, beavers are survivors, just as Homo sapiens are the last and a long line of hominins. The world's two beaver species, Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, and Castor fiber its Eurasian cousin, are vestiges of a diverse family. They are now extend Relatives include castory Days ohioensis, which grew nearly

as large as black bears. Although it's tempting to imagine the custory Days constructing hoover dam side walls, these species likely didn't dam at all and died out during drier conditions. Modern beavers may have endured precisely because they could modify nature on a warming climate. As beavers proliferated, they shaped the land. At one time, as many as four hundred million of them roamed North America and constructed up to

two hundred fifty million ponds. Those beaver built bodies of water, bolstered amphibian and salmon populations, supported mammals from muskrat to moose, and aided songbirds, which perch in coppiced willows and eat aquatic insects. Indigenous peoples have long understood beaver's importance. The Blackfeet environmental historian Rosalind Lapierre notes that the tribe believes beavers are divine animals that can talk with humans and

venerates them for the ecological oases they create. But colonists didn't share that respect, and the fifteen hundreds beaver pelts came into vogue in Europe. They were used for elegant hats, which milliners felted from beavers velcrow like underfur. To meet the demand, fur, trappers and traders purged beavers from practically every waterway on the continent. As the animal vanished, wetlands dried up, and streams eroded, a cataclysm akin to an

aquatic dust bowl. Yet beavers weren't finished. In the early nineteen hundreds, many states enacted trapping restrictions and reintroduced beavers from places like Canada and Yellowstone National Park. Some land managers got creative. In nineteen forty eight, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game packed beavers into crates and dropped

them by parachute into the wilderness. Two years later, the Journal of Wildlife man Management reported that beavers had built dams, constructed houses, stored up food, and were well on their way to producing colonies. As beavers have slowly returned to the West over the past several decades, their helpfulness has

grown more appreciated. Just as our climate woes have multiplied, their ponds store and gradually release rainfall in snow melt, compensating for dwindling snowpack by allowing water to seep into floodplains. They also hydrate soils and recharge aquifers. Two study that tracked relocated beavers in Washington State found that the average pond stored more than a quarter million gallons of surface

water and over six hundred thousand gallons of groundwater. Beavers are slowing the flow, holding on to water longer and mimicking the function of the depleted snowpack, says Joe Wheaton. A geomorphologist at Utah State University. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening, and have a great day.