Life Under A Microscope

[on hold music] Since the dawn of recorded history, our living Earth has been changed by everyone who spends time on it or in it, from the smallest bacteria that'll definitely outlast us to the largest animals.

But like the brain gut axis inside of us that we still barely understand, we've really never had the ability to see and document and even begin to ask questions about the smallest among us out in the world, in the soil, in the air, in the mud, and of course, all the different kinds of water on this very, very watery planet until recently. Thankfully, there are scientists and documentarians among us who can see and share and spark joy in a simple tablespoon of water.

Who can, with distribution, of course, help so many more of us who don't have access to those sort of things, see and understand what's around us every day, so we just go outside and enjoy it and take part and appreciate our relationships with it. An entire world we've missed all along. And as the world is changed so much faster than ever before, it is vital we support as much of this work as possible just when it is most possible.

Every week, thousands of people ask us the most important question in the world: What can I do? So every week, I turn around and ask someone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about the very same question. Someone who has already answered it for themselves, someone who's working on the front lines of the future, and sometimes that's with water bearers. I'm your host, Quinn Emmett, and my returning guest today is the great Ariel Waldman.

Ariel is a National Geographic explorer, a documentary filmmaker, an Antarctic researcher, a TED Main Stage speaker, NASA advisor, YouTube host, producer, and an author. Her solo expeditions and science exploration work have earned her global recognition for bridging adventure, storytelling, and cutting edge science.

I am so thankful for making all this, for coming back on the show today to share news about her wonderful new six-part series, Life Unearthed with Ariel Waldman, premiering in April on PBS. For questions or feedback, email us. Send them on over to questions@importantnotimportant.com Hope you enjoy this. [on hold music] Ariel Waldman, welcome back to the show, which is a different name.

Nothing has happened since the last time we talked. The world is still very much the same. Thank you for joining us from San Francisco, but clearly you've been everywhere. Yeah. No. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. I am sure I could search my email and find this, but when did you start self-shooting this? I started at the end of twenty twenty-two. It's wild. It flies by.

My wife is a screenwriter, and she just finished the whirlwind, like, four-year tour of the two Wicked movies she co-wrote. And that was sort of similar for everyone involved by the time you got to the end because people would say, "Well, what was it like on this day?" And they're like, "It was four and a half years ago. Like, I don't, I don't know what to tell you. Like, I have no idea." The timelines on these things are, are just nuts.

I am so much more used to, like, building a website and getting it out there the next month and getting people's reactions. And, yeah, no, you are so removed from when you filmed it by the time it comes out. Obviously, tardigrades are evergreen. They're not going anywhere, clearly. Two questions, I guess. The first is, will there ever be a day where you do not start a conversation with tardigrades?

Will you ever be like, "I can't do it anymore"? I mean, I've had a fairly eclectic career, as you know. Mm-hmm. So, you know, I used to work with NASA for so long, so it was all about space exploration and, you know, supernova, robotic spacecraft and everything. So, I mean, I, I love tardigrades. Who's gonna get tired of them?

But at the same time, I'm like, well, you know, if my career is anything to go off of, you know, I've moved from advertising to tech to NASA, now, you know, Antarctica and filmmaking. So, you know, who knows what's next? But that's fun. It's kind of, you know, my children who think they're old now-- I mean, they think I'm one thousand and on the edge, but they think they're old.

So they'll find old things of theirs even though they're 11, and they'll be like, "Oh gosh, remember my Ninjago phase?" And I'm like, "No, I do. It was two and a half years ago." But you, you truly have.

It's so amazing about your perspective in, in your career and why I was so excited to see this is y- you have obviously developed over this time such a unique perspective, which is to say, like, a lot of different perspectives, like a really long lens, a very wide lens, obviously, with, with your NASA stuff. And then obviously now, I mean, some of the stuff in this series is just so cool to see. It's awesome.

Do you feel like you could have done this stuff, even though it was twenty twenty-two, without the prior experience looking at the universe? I mean, parts of it, yes. Parts of it, no. You know, working, say, in design and advertising, how I started my career, I think really set me up to do a lot of the stuff that I do today.

So being able to communicate, you know, whether it be the, the cosmos or the microcosmos, I think a lot of it comes from that foundation. And then also self-shooting a documentary. Most of my skills for that came from dabbling in YouTube on and off over the years and prototyping my own YouTube videos, hosting a YouTube show. It gets you very used to shooting and editing and, and doing the whole thing yourself.

But the part in which I would say, you know, I was very fortunate for the timing of filming myself is we're living just in a great era for consumer cameras, you know, drones, cameras, and macro lenses and, and three sixty cameras. I mean, if I had tried to shoot this all myself twenty years ago, say, equipment-wise, it would have been so much more challenging. And today, we live in such a great era.

We have just a lot of filmmaking tools, really high-quality filmmaking tools that are readily accessible. And so in that way-I feel like I could have not done it any other year. It was something that I didn't need to be set up for for the set. I just feel so fortunate that there's so m- so much accessible to us right now.

It's wild 'cause when you and I were growing up, the idea of, like, personal video camera was, you know, like the, the Ghostbusters set that, like, our parents would have on their shoulder, right? A way, a way to have a time, which is still what, you know, some of these incredible movies use, like an iMac camera. People-- young people look at those and go, "Oh my God. Can you imagine using..."

[chuckles] That's all we had. You couldn't shoot tardigrades with that. Yeah, or the small Handy Cams. The- Yeah... quality was just terrible. Yeah. Like, you couldn't shoot actual documentary with it. It was just awful quality, even if it was portable. When did you start to see some traction on someone wants to distribute this and when it could actually become more? 'Cause you didn't just stay in Antarctica. It coming to distribution was a even longer road.

When I went in 2022, what happened was I got a grant from the National Geographic Society to go to Antarctica, and I had proposed to film a, a docuseries there, a nature docuseries. And I said in my proposal, "Hey, I've got this chance to go to Antarctica to work on this research team. I would like to film a docuseries while I'm there. I'll also make it, like, a YouTube series."

And so I said both, and they said, "Okay, we'll fund you, but you know what? Just stick to what you know. You know YouTube. Just, just do a YouTube thing." And I was like, "No." I was like, "I've never shot a documentary before. I've never done this, but I want to try. Um, I don't wanna just stick with only YouTube."

Without knowing where this would ever go, just knowing that I wanted to make it with National Geographic, they're wonderful, but you don't get built-in distribution by getting a grant from them. I went there, you know, for two months to film a nature documentary and try to make it work. And when I landed in Antarctica after having proposed this, I just started freaking out. I was just like, "What,

what person put me up to this? This is so stupid." I was just like, "What the hell did I put myself up to? What [chuckles] did I say I was going to do?" No one shoots a documentary by themselves in Antarctica for two months. Like, I was freaking out, and I was just like, the whole time I, you know, I'm filming this thing, and I'm just like, "I don't know if I'm gonna have anything to work with after this."

I shot 40 hours of footage, but I didn't know if it was actually gonna come together or not. It's the first time I had done that, and it's-- I'm completely there without an assistant, without a film crew. You know, slowly but surely in the editing room started coming together. It became this series that's now going out on PBS. But PBS didn't come into the picture until after it was fully edited, fully created.

It was picture locked. Everything was done, and then that's when I started shopping it around to different distributors, and, and that's when PBS got interested. When you say everything was picture locked, ready to go, had you already done the, the prairies for the latter half of this, or was that after? Yeah. So prairies came about right after we hit picture lock with Antarctica. Okay.

So immediately I went from finishing Antarctica and then going on to pre-production for the prairies episode, and then a few months later I was filming in Northern Illinois and Kansas to film a similar sort of take of, like, looking at ecosystems from multiple orders of magnitude, looking at the microscopic features as much as we're looking at sort of the iconic creatures, the charismatic megafauna.

This time, though, it was great because while at the small film team, I had a film team. [chuckles] I didn't have to film it all by myself in the prairies. I had a director of photography there with me.

Still a very tiny team, but much better not having to film the whole thing yourself. That's amazing. When did you decide that the prairies was the place you were gonna go next? I was so excited about that because the prairies is, they seem so criminally ignored, especially within the context of, I mean, geographically, literally how central they have been to this continent and the many

large animals and people that have populated it for millions of years. But I guess why there? There's al- y- so many different places you, you could have gone. Prairies came about for a couple of different reasons. One is that, you know, I grew up in Kansas. Growing up, I admittedly thought it was kinda boring there and that there wasn't much to see.

But, you know, in filming Antarctica, a lot of people view Antarctica the same way, that- Mm-hmm... there's nothing there to see except for some penguins and some ice, and that's it. And I wanted to prove that you can do a whole, you know, nature documentary there outside of penguins and ice. And so I think the prairies has some similar challenges in that people sort of view it as, "Well, there's not much there," or, "It's kind of boring." I felt a connection there.

But it really came about because of collaboration with Dr. Wes Wingley, who's at Northern Illinois University, and he is an astrobiologist, and he and I had been keeping in touch for many years about wanting to work together. But in addition to his astrobiology work, which of course comes in through my NASA connection, he works in this prairie in Northern Illinois that's restored and 4,000 acres.

It's called the Nachusa Grasslands and owned and operated by The Nature Conservancy. He was like, "Well, why don't we, you know, do something here?" And I thought there was that sort of connection between overlooked ecosystems like Antarctica and like the prairies, and so I thought it was actually kind of a natural fit. And so we were able to put together a production for that and film there, and then we added on Kansas, the, the Konza Prairie operated by Kansas State University as well.

And so we were able to sort of look at these two really remarkable, both restored and, and protected ecosystems in, in the Midwest. And it's such a, on one hand, sad story because we've gotten rid of nearly all of the prairies that used to exist across North America.

But at the same time, there's a lot of hope both in the science that we talk about in the series, and also just seeing how delightful all the creatures are that live there and sort of showing that-It's not actually boring, but, you know, it does take taking an extra beat and, like, looking around in a prairie.

You're not going to see things immediately like you would in a rainforest. But that said, it has the biodiversity akin to a rainforest in a lot of areas, and so that's what I tried to show. You're always gonna have the ability to be like, "Ha-ha, let me show you what's in the water," and everybody will be excited no matter where you go in the world. But again, did you come in with any assumptions about the prairies besides, like, it might be boring that you were really surprised by?

I think I came in with those assumptions, yeah, again, from my childhood, and I was really wanting... When I was making these, these episodes, I was really wanting to sort of speak to my younger self as a way of trying to convince my very jaded younger self about the prairies. I mean, there were plenty of things that surprised me. One is that going from Antarctica, minimized ecosystem, so to speak, to the prairies just felt so overwhelming.

It was, you know, the fact that I'm going from an ecosystem in Antarctica that might have, I don't know, like, five, six different types of nematode to something where you're thousands of different species and hundreds of different species of birds and, and rodents and all sorts of things. It's like, where do you even begin? What creatures do you choose to write stories about, or that you can guarantee you're going to capture on camera?

That was way more challenging, of course, than, than Antarctica, and definitely overwhelming at first. To me, the most surprising thing that I love that shows up in, in episode five of the Life on Earth season is I learned of a crayfish that's called the Great Plains mud bug, which I found to be the most delightful name for a little crayfish. And I learned that it actually, you know, burrows into the mud rather than, you know, sitting around in the creek like most crayfish do.

And so we went on what can only be described as a wild, you know, goose hunt to go down these burrows searching for these crayfish and, and, you know, and trying and failing and not even knowing if, like, it's going to make it into the final series because we were so challenged to actually find them and capture them on, on camera. Thankfully, they did make it into the series, but it took, it took, like, an extra hiccup to actually get them in there.

But they're just these delightful creatures that, like, make their burrows in the mud and, and are able to protect themselves. And, and yeah, they're called the Great Plains mud bugs.

So, like, I'm now a super fan of them. I was hoping to keep this on track, but you said nematodes, and I have to talk about... I don't know if you should call her a lady, but she had the seven eggs inside of her, and you turn the lights on, and you could see them more clearly, and then they're like, "Oh, by the way, they're not just any old eggs," which, like, nothing you make is ever not surprising to me in some way or blows my mind.

But you're like, "They're clones. They're her. There's seven of them because that's the only way to make it." And also, there's other examples of this. I don't even know what question to ask besides, besides does that kind of stuff surprise you anymore? Like, obviously you have, like you said, such a, such a knowledge of Antarctica, which is both foreign for so many people and has obviously changed over the, you know, past few hundred million years, but at the same time, like, that's incredible.

That's what I love, and, and that's what I'm really trying to change with this series is, like, getting people familiar with the microscopic wildlife that live all around us, and they're just as weird and fascinating as, you know, all the regular wildlife that we're used to seeing. But yeah, in that case, that's a plectus nematode, and, and yeah, nematodes and rotifers, bunch of different creatures live by making clones of themselves. That how they are able to survive.

Some of them still mate in, you know, a traditional sense, but other ones actually create clones of themselves. And so you have this incredible diversity even with just types of animals at the microscopic level.

It's just really cool, and I think, yeah, I think a lot of people don't know about this because I remember the first time when I learned about all of this, and I think that's what's really important when making a nature series is to think back to the first time you learned about these facts and, and remember those. No, it doesn't stop surprising me. I think, I think it's really fascinating to learn about these things, and the microscopic world is just... I don't know.

It's just there's so much there, and I think to me the, the most delightful aspect is you see these things on screen, but you don't have to travel to Antarctica to see them. You know, they're right outside your front door. They're in sidewalk cracks. They're in your backyard. Thinking about, you know, when you walk out your front door every day that you're actually walking by, you know, thousands of little animals and, and literally animals, not even bacteria, but animals. Mm-hmm.

I think it's just a really delightful thought that more people should have. Perspective. On the one hand, like, n-no one for a thousand different reasons wants to find sea life on Europa more than I do, and hopefully it's crazy. I'm trying to keep my expectations in check. But on the other hand, it is such a disservice not to look around. The octopus is the easy example, right?

To be like, "No, we look fully evolved twice," and there's a lot of examples, and some of them even more than one time to develop all these features. My kids have really gotten into... Ed Yong put out a young reader version of his An Immense World book, and it's just so great, and we just keep it in the back of the car for when we're driving around.

And they're in the back like the, you know the Jerry Maguire kid, "Do you know the human head weighs ten pounds?" That's them just, like, reading Ed Yong facts to me. Right. Nice. And even if we're not, like, directly interacting with Antarctica or the nature directly outside our door, just the awareness that those things are there, which we didn't always know, right?

And now we know, and like you said, like, you have this ability like The Matrix to see any piece of soil or, or water and go, "There's so much more happening than you think." I'm so excited about this series and things like this because it's a foot in the door for, for kids at least, if not adults, right? [upbeat music] Climate change isn't a distant threat. It's reshaping California right now. So what's happening? Who's impacted?

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[upbeat music] That's the hope, really, is I-- You know, regardless of where this series goes and how successful or not it is, it's really meant to just push the boundaries of nature documentaries, so I sincerely hope it, it acts as a catalyst to have these different scales of, you know, both our search for life, you know, in, in our solar system and beyond, but also the microcosmos, getting those perspectives included in nature documentaries so that we, we really have the full picture.

For me, it's something that I think is really important, and so I'm trying to do that with this series. But equally, if it just influences other series to do the same, that would be delightful. There's a new one that came out that I added to my queue or something that's just-- It's literally just, like, baby wildlife. And I was like, "Great. Put it on. I'm in. I'll do, I'll do them all."

Because, one, it's very soothing. It is, like, my safe place, all of these things, just like your tardigrades are and, and this lady with her clones. I was like, "Good for her," you know? Just d-do your, do your thing. But I feel like the more we know and the more we share about at least this snapshot in time right now, hey, look at what's happening all around us right now that we can see, I hope that one of the benefits is

appreciation and gratitude, right? Because again, like, I can't wait to find out what's on Europa or out there or the-- This week, they're like, "Maybe there's a, on the exoplanet dark moons." I was like, "Great. I'm in." But it's here, and I feel like we-- this idea of what is finite and changeable for, for better or usually worse,

but how we need to at least passively appreciate, if not proactively be grateful for, for these things that don't just live in isolation, right? These are a fundamental piece of the, of the whole puzzle. I remember, if I do nothing else, I was on, like, a sixteen-minute phone call with the folks from Sesame Street a couple years ago, and, and Sesame Street has gone through a lot of their own changes because of greedy people.

It's still the greatest place in the world. And ten, fifteen years ago, they, they shifted it from, like, four to five-year-olds to, like, three to four-year-olds, something like that, a little younger. And there's this question which is understandable, and I think I was on the phone again for a very small amount of time because at the time I had three kids under four years old, which was like, how do we, Sesame Street,

help kids with-- who are very young, with a longer, more fundamental appreciation for these things? And, and a lot of what we talked about is, is relationships, right? Is relationships not just with, with people who can give you access and with the things around you, but with these things that are living in the same place as you every day, even if you're not conscious, because they are a piece of the puzzle.

How do you take something as, I guess, unknowable or as abstract as, like, tardigrades and all these amazing other animals we see under the microscope and help people understand these are a part, a necessary, a fundamental part of this world we share? Can start with just getting a microscope, you know, getting a kid's microscope.

You can see tardigrades with a kid's microscope, showcasing that moment of discovery where that you can kind of go on, like, a safari, you know, right outside your front door. You can pick up some moss or pick up or get a sample of, you know, if you've got a birdbath or something in your backyard that's been overlooked for a while, there's probably a lot of rotifers in there. You can, you know, get a sample of water, and you can put that under a microscope, and you can see them.

And I think it does make a big difference to actually be able to see them, you know, with your own eyes and see how easily you can find all these creatures that are there all the time.

Another thing that I had built during my first Antarctic expedition to, to help with that and take away some of the, the challenge of using a microscope is I built a website called lifeundertheice.org, and it gives you the effect of having a Petri dish underneath the microscope, and you get to drag around in this webpage looking for, you know, different creatures and zooming in and out of them and, you know, it tells you which creature is what.

And the whole purpose of that website is to give you the feel of having a, a Petri dish of curiosity that you're able to explore at your own pace. I've always wanted, though, to go to Alaska, and that's obviously a pretty broad stroke. But last year, my kids were finally old enough. We felt it was okay to, to do that kind of travel, and so I said, "We're, we're gonna do this mostly for me, but I think you're old enough to appreciate and experience."

So we did a seven-day trip on a small boat in Glacier Bay, which obviously, again, like, very southern part of, of Alaska. Like, it's like saying New York is in New York, but just an incredible collection of ecosystems in itself on a day-to-day basis, but also, and this is where I wanna kinda talk about change, Glacier Bay has changed so much in the past few hundred years.

You can learn about the European explorers who tried to, you know, find a way across the continent by going in and out of the, all the Alaskan tributaries and, and, and never finding them basically before winter set in. All the places that are almostPermanently tundra, whatever it might be, semi-permanently. But Glacier Bay is so interesting because everything you see here was covered in ice a couple hundred years ago.

So none of those explorers were new this place at all. And even the indigenous period, there's a long gap of people living in this place. Not even knowing that fully, I mostly wanted to go because it's changing so quickly. There's a lot of trips that my kids and I could be lucky enough to go on when they're in their twenties or thirties.

But these snapshots are, are changing very quickly up there. Besides, this is the phase of your life now from advertising to NASA to this. Do you feel after this first season of the series more of an existential urge at all like I do to document these places now as they are being changed? I think documentation is really important.

I think especially, I mean, it's one of the things that drives me to document things at the microscopic level because they are so poorly documented, and so it does mean we have these entire, you know, scales of our ecosystem that we might not know what we're losing if we don't document them in time.

And so I, I definitely feel motivated by that. But at the same time, I don't necessarily let it eat away at me. Like, I think it's an important mission, but also there's so much hope in terms of some of the science of...

For instance, in the prairies, I mentioned Wes Swingley. His lab was able to s- see that in prairie restoration soils, a lot of the microbial ecosystems that exist there, if you start restoring a field back into sort of a, a native, you know, trying to restore it into something that is akin to a native prairie land, you can get like eighty, ninety percent of the way there on the microscopic level in terms of restoring the ecosystem within five to ten years.

And that was incredibly encouraging because- Wow... it used to be believed for a long time that, okay, you can re-restore prairies, but it's gonna take decades. You're not going to see differences. You know, it'll be hard to see differences in our lifetime. But there's a lot of research that shows instances where things actually do bounce back very quickly.

And I know this happens at more than just the microscopic scale. There's been instances of, you know, re- moving dams from rivers and, and the fish coming back almost immediately.

You know, these things I find really encouraging and really encouraging to be exposed to humans who are doing awesome stuff in this area. And so it is important to document. It is important to, you know, get involved in some way, whether it's a citizen science project or, or just honestly meeting the people who do the work is, is a good first step, even if you don't have time yourself.

These things I find help balance out, you know, the, the fact that I'm on this mission to try and document things before they change. We might not be able to affect all the change that we want to be able to, but we should really have gratitude for what we're living with on Earth right now together in this time, and, and that might change in our lifetime or beyond our lifetime.

But appreciating what exists now, meeting people who are doing amazing work in this area, it fills your soul a bit, you know, for lack of a better way of putting it. I love that. Thank, thank you for sharing that. Talk to me a little bit about outside of the series, your work alongside just knowing Wes, again, an astrobiologist who, who also works in, in restoration.

Indigenous folks are given land back or permitted to do so many of these practices that they're aware of that helps take care of their land. There's a lot of conversations of, you know, conservation versus preservation versus something like rewilding. What has exposure to that been like for you? Because Antarctica is a bit of a different conversation.

You know, with Antarctica, you don't have anyone who's ever lived there permanently around, and it is very different. Like anywhere else, there's a lot of nuance to it. So in the Nachusa Grasslands that we filmed at in Northern Illinois, I mentioned that's, that's run by The Nature Conservancy, and a lot of what they've been doing there is, like, buying back fields that farmers don't need anymore or, or they're willing to sell. And a lot of that area was kind of more of a transit zone.

So there wasn't, like, permanent settlements, but there was, you know, but it was a place where people, like, walked through a lot of, you know, different nations and such. Whereas in the Konza Prairie, you know, the Konza Prairie is named after the Konza people, and they were forcibly removed from that area of Kansas and forcibly moved down to Oklahoma and other areas. And, you know, you have a land that has their ancestors literally buried there.

And it is a really tough dynamic that I don't think is fully resolved, and, and we talk about this briefly in the series about, you know, the need for rematriation of these lands to their people and, and the nations. I mean, they're literally named after them, and yet they don't own them.

So I think that is challenging, and I think it's something that in the series we try to come at maybe not in a direct way because we're not talking about human stories as much in, in the series, so much as focusing on the wildlife, but it shows up in terms of, you know, how you're thinking about how the land was managed and how the prairies never have known a time without people. Mm-hmm.

So when we talk about, you know, prescribed burns being good for the prairies and, and the way, you know, what native plants were there, what native animals were there, and, and why they thrive off of certain conditions, they didn't know a time. The prairie literally did not exist without people. Before the prairies were the prairies, as you were saying, they're, they were glaciers. A lot of them were totally covered under layers of ice.

And as the ice retreated and the prairies as we know them today started forming, you know, ten, twelve thousand years ago, people were living there. You know, Native Americans were living there and managing the land. And so when we talk about the prairies having an intrinsic, you know, need for human management and prescribed burns, it's not because it's some ancient ecosystem. It's actually a really new ecosystem. Mm-hmm.

And it never knew a time without humans.And so those are the sort of stories that I try and get across when talking about nature and wildlife. So while again, we're not like featuring humans and human stories and, and we're focusing mostly on wildlife, there is a discussion about, well, why, why do-- why does this ecosystem exist the way it does? And in this case, unlike Antarctica, where it's, wow, look at this ecosystem that's never been touched by humans, this is the exact opposite.

Look at this ecosystem that only exists because of humans for thousands of years. And, and I find those stories really fascinating, and I think they're not necessarily fully taught that way, or at least I didn't learn them that way in school. No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, I, I feel like I remember hearing crazy stories about the great western ocean and not believing that that was real because I didn't understand time. I still don't really understand time.

Even as a kid, it's really hard to wrap your head around even, like you said, twelve, fifteen thousand years. You know, we keep discovering more and more about how and when and folks came over. Like you said, that's not a long time ago in the grand scheme of probably some of the ice cores you've seen, you know, and some of these, like you said, even though they're animals, but also, I mean, some of this bacteria obviously, stuff's gonna outlast us, right?

Here before us, gonna outlast us. In working sort of in those areas, do you find that the work itself, the series and, and all your other work, is actionable enough for you in the sense that this is what I'm doing about this thing? Or do you feel any sort of new or revived, whatever it might be, urge to go beyond, like a series about specific rewilding?

You know, there's a lot going on in, in the northern parts of Russia and parts of... I'm curious, like if you feel the need to be more intentional about that in any way.

I think, you know, I, I like being exploratory, considering doing a series that, for instance, in Antarctica, you know, the research group that I was there with, which is not featured on camera in the, in the series, I am considering going back down there to feature them in a series and actually focus on, on the human stories of what it takes to study like an area of Antarctica for over thirty years and create a long-term ecological record.

Generally, I'm kind of satisfied with the, with, you know, this current series with Life on Earth because I think again, a lot of it goes back to remembering the first time I learned things, and I think while it's great to go further in depth and, and document like activism- Yeah... I think for me, I like to catch people at a stage where they don't even know that they're yet interested in something.

And because so much of that speaks to my own personal history of very unexpectedly got a job at NASA after working in advertising and design. There is nothing that could have identified me as like a space geek or a science geek or, you know, someone who, who just wanted to work at NASA 'cause I didn't. I didn't even know that was a thing. And it was, it was literally a document-- watching a documentary about NASA that made me excited about them.

That I think is really powerful, especially when talking about, you know, I'm watching a documentary about people in the 1960s, and it's the, I don't know, whatever it was, like early 2010s or before that something. For a girl to be able to watch that so many decades later and get excited about it without even knowing she was excited about it in the first place, I think is, is really key.

So I really like being that initial catalyst to get people excited about things that they didn't know that they were excited about. And I think a lot of that begins with just building familiarity with the creatures, with the stories of the landscapes, and starting there. I absolutely encourage people to get, you know, more in depth and, and become more active in these areas. But I think, you know, you've also gotta work on the top of the funnel of- Hundred percent...

people who just didn't know that they thought these things were really cool, and, and now hopefully after this series comes out on PBS, they will. I, I love that because again, you know, in this, you know, we try so hard to help people answer this question, "What can I do?" And, and it might be something you're directly working on like you have in, in so many different things, and I'm sure there are people who've gotten into space because of your work, you know?

And now they're like, "She's doing what? With who?" You are delivering a, in a world where, where, quote unquote, nature, unless, you know, it's, it's not directly something you can be exposed to outside your door, accessibility is, is increasingly difficult for, for a lot of folks for a lot of reasons. And you're delivering a version of that, that again, like there's a million nature docume-documentaries, and I will watch all of them, and obviously nature is, is, is, is a broad paintbrush.

But this is a perspective that even if you do have access to these things, you might not even know to look for, right? And that's what's so incredible about it is I always love the idea of once you have s-seen or heard something, you can't undo it. It's like my, my kid, I wrote a whole piece about how when he was 10, we were sitting at the beach, and he was like, "I wanna watch Jaws tonight."

I was like, "You do not wanna watch Jaws tonight 'cause you love the ocean, and it's an incredible movie about a thousand different things, but I would like to not hear you complain about not going in the ocean tomorrow. So we will watch it to be clear, but you can't, I can't undo it. I won't have a time machine."

But that's what's so beautiful about this work of yours is a-and what's so great at the end is, you know, in, in, in conversations like these where you're like, you can get these tools. The kids, you know, microscope and, and go out or if you're a parent you can do that or get them for somebody's classrooms. This is the part where I plug Donors Choose, which is one of the greatest organizations.

Just go on there, and you can buy chairs or microscopes, whatever, for these incredible classrooms and teachers who just wanna provide something like that for their students. What would you suggest for folks who do watch this and go, "Fuck yeah, that was awesome." Besides watching more of this, besides supporting your work in other ways.What is a, what is a logical next step for, for folks after they experience the series?

I'm always a, a big advocate of citizen science projects 'cause again, it's, it's a way to meet people and also get involved and, and do something. And, and a lot of the cases, for instance, in the prairies, you know, it's an excuse to go outside. Mm-hmm. So one of the citizen science projects we feature in episode five is the Riverwatch program. Mm-hmm.

And it's a bunch of people who go to different creeks and rivers all over the country, and they take nets and they dig up all these little, you know, creepy crawlies in the, in these creeks and rivers, and they count them.

And so you get to look at weird forms of, you know, you get to wade into a creek, look at weird forms of life, count them, and that specifically speaks to the health of different rivers and ecosystems because different creatures will show up and, and tell you whether or not that river or creek is polluted by their abundance. So for instance, crayfish are incredibly sensitive to pollution, so if you don't see a lot of crayfish, that says something about the health of that river or creek.

So that's just one example, but I think, you know, looking up citizen science projects are great and, you know, I think they're also incredibly flexible. I think a lot of times people get a little bit nervous about getting involved in something 'cause, you know, their schedules change or they might be available one month and not the next. And I think the majority of citizen science projects are incredibly flexible that way.

You know, you-- if you're able to go out a couple of weeks and then you can't the rest of the year, you know, you've still contributed and you've helped- Mm-hmm... and, and you don't have to worry about commitment phobia as much. I know I suffer from that, about always worrying about over-committing to something. So that's certainly one way to go.

Other ways, you know, are, you know, there's been a movement to plant more native plants in your garden. And while some people will say, "Oh, does that make really that big of a difference or not?" It does to some pollinators. So one of the topics we talk about in the, the prairie ecosystem is the fact that, you know, honeybees are not native to North America.

And there's been a big push in popularity of honeybees and supporting honeybees, but that's really about supporting agriculture and a non-native species that can sometimes has been shown to crowd out actually native bees like bumblebees and others. So planting native flowers and plants wherever you live inherently will help sort of support those pollinators because a lot of times they're the only ones that can pollinate those flowers.

So it's like citizen science stuff, planting, but then, you know, donating to places like The Nature Conservancy. And then, you know, one thing that I think is important in our current stage is starting to learn how to, you know, talk to congressional staffers.

So there's a lot of, you know, effort around, you know, obviously you complain to your congresspeople as you should, but also a lot of times just getting the ear of staffers and saying, "Hey, I really think we should be, you know, funding the Antarctic program more in the US," and/or, you know, "I think we should be protecting, you know, this prairie restoration from further development," or something like that.

It doesn't always have to be something where it's like, vote yes or no on this thing. It can also be like a, "I'm one of your constituents. This is a topic I care about, and here's why I think it's really important," and actually targeting congressional staffers rather than congresspeople themselves, that can help build a relationship that then, you know, is, "Oh, you know, we have people in our district who are concerned about these topics."

In doing that, that's one thing you can do, and I know a few years ago I wrote on my Patreon instructions for how you can do that. So hopefully if you Google my name and, like, congressional staffers or how to talk to Congress or something, hopefully that post will come up. I just remembered I need to grab something 'cause I need to show it to you.

Don't go anywhere. Hold on. Was this you? Yeah. That's me. That's my Voyager pillow. These guys. I made a, I made a- I've got an orange one too that is... I don't remember which one the orange one is, but it's in my kids' room. Yeah. We've had them for- That's awesome... however long since you pulled them out. Yes. They've made it across the coast. Yes.

That's from the Space Probes website I made, which was a lot of fun. But it's totally a perfect example of I made a website and I put it out there and I was able to see what people thought of it much quicker than a film. So, but yeah. There's pros and cons to both certainly. You know, payoffs, time spent, things you can learn when you're, when you're living with, you know, reels and reels and reels of tardigrades for years trying to get somebody to show them.

But obviously, like you said, it's also nice to be like, "Here's a pillow." How are you spending your time now besides getting ready to launch the show? I mean, it mostly, yeah, working on launching the show. So I'm-- While I had wonderful team that helped me through post-production with, like, music and sound and editing and, and everything like that, I'm a one-woman team at this stage where I am both delivering the files to broadcast and trying to promote the show single-handedly.

So it's, it's, it's quite a tall order. So I'm going to, you know, be going on a screening tour over the next few weeks to New York and Boulder and Kansas and Illinois, just trying to get the word out about, about "Life on Earth" on PBS. And of course, I will simultaneously be trying to fundraise for season two. I've been pitching and, and trying to build up collaborators for a couple of d- of different locations.

One is Madagascar, so that would be, you know, the, the further afield- Mm-hmm... uh, from the US location. I've got some great collaborators there, and I think featuring a rainforest would be a great next ecosystem. But also have been pitching, like, the southwest deserts of the US because there's a lot of extreme creatures in the deserts- Mm-hmm... that I think would be great to feature. I'm gonna get this completely wrong.

Didn't we find some creature in organism of some kind in the southwest sometime in the past 10 years that, like, live, that, that's like its basis was arsenic or something like that? Thank you. So there was, like, a big announcement from NASA, like, yeah, quite a while ago about something that was living off of arsenic, but unfortunately it was proven not, above and beyond. Come on.

It became a huge, huge hubbub. But anyway- But anyway, move on... I mean, that was-- I, I mean, it points, it points to something exciting though, where it's just, like, the fact that we're open and, and ready to hear about discovering new forms of life, I think speaks a lot to sort of where science has taken us in that we are making, like, legit- legitimate discoveries that, you know, really change the boundaries of where life can live on this planet.

So while that one was, uh, didn't quite work out as [chuckles] I think the researchers had hoped, I think it points to a larger trend. When's the show come out? So yeah, "Life on Earth with Ariel Waldman" comes out on PBS on April 1st. That's when episode one drops, and each episode comes out a week after that.

And yeah, you can watch it on PBS streaming, PBS app on your Apple TV, App- Apple TV, and Amazon Prime, or just on PBS broadcast and check your local listing for that. You're the best. Thank you for doing this work. It's so cool. It's, it's- Yeah. Thanks for having me on... I'm really excited to share it, and I'm so excited that this pillow is you. This whole time I've been like, "I think it's Ariel."

I d- I was like, "But the tardigrades, I'm pretty sure she did the space thing before." It's a whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. That's it. You can read our critically acclaimed newsletter and get notified about new podcast conversations at importantnotimportant.com. Thanks so much for listening, and thanks for giving a shit. [outro music]