Wired: As Above, So Below

means little bear. And if you look up in the night sky, as the little girl instructed, you'll see ursa minor, the little bear with the North Star at the tip of its tail, a star that, no matter where you are in the world or who you are in the world, has always hung above, guiding us. Hi. Hi. My name is Julie Douglas, and this is the stuff of life.

Each of us is connected to each other, relies on one another, gives and takes, consciously or unconsciously, weaving the web of support that it takes to make a society. In a sense, we're all just broken fragments of the whole, guiding ourselves back to each other. My name is ah As, I said. I'm originally from Turkey, but I have been living in this country for past four years and on my retired neurologist I'm Sully, I from Thailand, but I've

lived in the US since nine three. My name is Kathy, and I actually lived in this area and worked for the federal government for thirty years. A Muslim, a Catholic, an elapsed Buddhist walk into a march. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it's Aisha, Suli and Kathy. We met them at the Women's March in d C, historic day when more than half a million people joined together in despair, anger, and hope about our collective existence. I hope people will begin to talk, both on a

macro level and on a micro level. I think you have to do a lot of one on one um with your families and with your friends. And I think one of the issues that is happening today people don't talk to each other. They do want to yell at each other and scream at each other, and they want you to believe what they believe. And we all believe different things, and we all have the right to believe what we want to believe. That's what our country is

all about. The trick is to find common ground, and quite literally, that's something we all have available to us right under our feet. Something we know as children but forget as adults. Young Ferdinand the Bowl, Um, you know, he doesn't want to be bucking heads at the other bulls. Instead, he'd rather lay under the trees and smell the flowers, and um, you know, that's what he wanted to do.

His mother was concerned that he wasn't doing these things, but then she decides that Ferdinand is sort of content as he is, and she left him alone. That's Charles Burnbaum, the founder, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, talking about an influential childhood book, Ferdinand the Bull. We met Charles on a sidewalk in Washington, d at the Women's March. He told us about his work at the Foundation and the way in which landscapes are democratizing and

even healing. And I've looked back on this recently, Um, you know, thinking about this book and this idea of um smelling the flowers. What's so interesting to me is how often I am moving through a place and people aren't looking. They're on their phones, they're looking down. The mission of the Cultural Landscape Foundation is to connect people

to places. By doing that, they teach people how to see what Charles calls the invisible hand of the landscape architect, or how to value nature and culture on equal footing. Escapes are incredibly personal. There's a reason why gardening in golf for America's favorite hobbies. I asked Charles what kind of landscape is his favorite, and he told me it's a kind of borrowed scenery. I think for me the

idea of sky and guideline. And perhaps it's because I'm born and raised in New York City and that open space was a very precious commodity. Charles's memories of working alongside his grandparents became foundational to his understanding of time in history. I had grandparents who lived in New London, Connecticut,

and they were My grandmother in particular, was a great gardener. Um. I remember the sweeps of Black Eyed Susan's and but the formative moment that I remember was being in the vegetable garden planting tomatoes with my grandfather and tilling the soil. And one of the things we unearthed was an old Moxie pop bottle. And you know, as a kid, I had never heard of moxipop. Um. I knew coke and pepsi,

but not moxie. And this was a bottle that probably he had been in the ground for I don't know years, and it was the first time I think, as as is even a young person, to think about the idea that the landscape is embedded with stories and our challenges to unlock those and to discover those, and I just remember thinking how remarkable it was, and um, you know, I think as a young person, I even remember thinking about, you know, the dinosaurs and that that they too were

um part of this palam sest, this layer and layer upon layer of landscape history that were tethered to the land through time. In history is most evident with something called witness trees. One of the things about wenz ape is that when you have something that is living like a tree, and the tree was there for an event, it becomes a portal or a life way. Yes. One of the most tangible witness trees, if you will, that I can think about is um the memorial at the

World Trade Center in Manhattan. There is this incredible Bradford pear tree that survives that day and it was moved off site in a protected environment during the work that then ensued for a number of years, and it was brought back and there's a wonderfully beautifully simply designed railing around it, and literally people line up for upwards of thirty minutes, as I've witnessed, to be photographed in front of this tree and um. To have that tangible connection

with something that survived that day, it's incredibly powerful. It's easy to see how landscapes, borrows, scenery, and public spaces can become bound up what Charles calls the messy, emotional, and provocative aspects of history. We've seen this recently with the executive order signed by President Trump that could reshape twenty four national monuments, including Bear's Ears Monument. You know, this is a landscape that is imbued with um, not

just a treasure trove of resources. I mean, I've read that there's over a hundred thousand archaeological sites and wall etchings that are unrivaled, but it also has Um Navajo and Hopie Um and um. You know a great number of five I think it's five local tribes, native peoples who are you know, have their stories embedded in these places. You know, when you remove the politics that you have to begin with saying what is the significance of this place?

And you know, a national monument doesn't have a although it is something that the president makes happen, it is based on an incredible amount of research and documentation. While documentation is incredibly important, there are less tangible facets to a landscape. You know, when we talk about our connectivity to a place, UM, there's emotional connectivity. UM. For example, that might be UM, you know we were talking about

national monuments with Bear's ears. Uh you think about Stonewall National Monument in New York City that you know, you have the tavern, but the park that's across the streets, which is called Christopher Park, which is part of that National Monument designation, and it's a city park. Um, you know where these um riots or rallies played out over time. UM. That landscape boy rehabilitated by a landscape architect in the nineteen eighties named Phil Winslow who died of AIDS. And

so for people that um, we're in New York. Then for people that make the pilgrimage who are UM, gay or transgender, UM, this could be this is a very powerful emotional connection when you stand there and you know, we talked about the visual connections the borrowed scenery. Imagine you know, being on the terrorists at built more the estate in North Carolina in Asheville, and if you didn't have that view, which is preserved, it would be a

very different experience. But you know, I think the other thing that we don't talk about are the less tangible things we experience, Charles says. The National Register of Historic Places has something called the seven Aspects of integrity when evaluating a property for historic designation. The last two aspects are called feeling and association. How do we wrap our

heads around that? Think about the sound of birds, you know, those are called biophonic sounds, um, rushing water on a grand scale Niagara falls, or it could be a cascade in your neighborhood park, or you know, if you live in the Lower South, it might be Spanish moss blowing in the wind. Those are geophonic sounds and those contribute to our experiences. And then there are man made sounds, and some of those can be happy or or not

so happy sounds. I mean, think about going to a ball game and the sound of a bat making contact with a ball, that cracking sound, and the rush that you have when you hear that, or the roar of the crowd, is that they give us pleasure, but we may not be aware of them. And I think that's all part of experience a landscape are those emotional, visual, and sensory sounds and experiences that we have. So with all that's tangible and intangible, I asked Charles what it

means to be a good steward of the land. There's there's two different kinds of stewardship that happens. There's stewardship that happens in your heart, which is basically I mean if you own a resource or you know, it's almost like being a parent. You know, how will you care for this place? Um? Will you manage change in a way that is sensitive to these systems that we both

have alluded to. And the systems can be cultural life ways, they can be at the hand of a designer, They can be um ecology and all of its manifestations, UM watershed um you know insect and bird populations, you know the use of um natives and not exotics. All of that is stewardship. But the stewardship is also acting with knowledge. And this knowledge can be known or just waiting to be unearthed, which all comes down to those Moxie bottles

of stories hidden in the land. How do we begin to really unlock these stories and to make people inquisitive, invite them to fall into that portal and um, and to take the time to do it, to open their heart, to open their eyes, to open their ears. An excerpt from When I'm Among the Trees by Mary Oliver. When I am among the tree, especially the willows and the honey locust, especially the beach, the oaks, and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost

say that they saved me. And daily around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, stay awhile the light flows from their branches, and they call me again. It's simple, they say, you too, have come into the world to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine part of the Before my first daughter was born, before I could even imagine her existence, I had a dream that I was walking at the edge of the world. Everything around me was frozen and the night sky hung low.

A little girl appeared at my side and pointed into tiny clusters of light. Misha, Misha, she insisted. In Hebrew. Misha is a name that can also mean a question. The question, who is like God? Perhaps no one or perhaps all of us. Imagine if you inherited a trunk from your ancestors that's full of heirlooms, and the trunk has a set size, so you won't get heirlooms from everybody because you have a lot, a lot of ancestors.

But you can imagine you can kind of rifle through there and pick up various pieces, uh, and they'll represent different ancestral lines for you. My name is Jake Burns, and I'm a manager of population Genomics at Ancestry DNA, and I would describe having spent my career examining DNA to understand sort of how the evolutionary process works at a fundamental level, how does it change your DNA over time.

Jake had always been steeped in mathematics and biology, but when he learned that with DNA he could dive into the past I nearly any organism and discover something hidden about their histories, he was hooked. And the idea is, over time, DNA through the copying process, it isn't perfect when you pass it on generation to generations, so you acquire mutations and you can actually think of those mutations as a ticking clock, and each mutation is a tick

um because they're roughly evenly spaced through time. You can start to date various events in time by looking at kind of the number of mutations or differences that separate two different organisms. Combine those molecular clocks with that trunk from your ancestors, and a fuller picture of the United

States unfolds. The US is you know, I think particularly exceptional in having drawn immigrant populations from all over the world in very recent time, in the last you know, four or five years kind of since the birth of the country. And um that you know, influx of culture, language, worldview, and DNA from around the world creates this great mixture

within the US. What's exciting from genetics point of view is, UH, there are enough subtle differences between these different groups that we can you know, attempt to assign kind of originating uh points in time and space UH and and kind of tell this very complicated story of how people have arrived and assimilated in some cases or not in other cases, uh into the broader population within the US. Point of

origination arrival simulation. These words stick out because they underscore a deeply entrenched pattern in humans, the idea that our genes have criss crossed the globe and that we're actually far more connected to one another than we know. But to truly understand, we're going to need some eminem's in a few jars. You imagine, uh, a giant glass bowl and you fill it with eminem's. But imagine that we have thousands and thousands of eminem's in this giant bowl,

and imagine that they are hundreds of different colors. Now we can imagine this bowl kind of represents one generation of people in history, where each eminem is a person and their colors tell you something about kind of the DNA that they carry. Now imagine that, Uh, to construct a new generation, we're going to sort of take a sample from that first bowl and move it into a second bowl. And that's how we're going to create a

new generation. When you do your sampling in a in a sort of typical population that isn't undergoing a bottleneck, you would imagine kind of individually picking out one eminem at a time and maybe then dropping it in the new bowl and replacing it in the original bowl. So what you end up within the second bowl if you sample again thousands of em and m's into the second bowl is roughly the same representation of colors and kind of roughly the same proportions of colors in the second bowl.

So that's kind of a typical population generation. This is a stable population of eminem's pouring in and out day after day. But what if something disrupts it, something catastrophic, creating a bottleneck. The hand of God, so to speak, digging into the bowl, simply reaching that big, that big first bowl with a hand and select a single handful of eminem's and throw them into the new bowl, and

then imagine that that little handful expanded over time. That handful effectively represents the genetic bottleneck, where you've taken a very small sample of the original population in the original diversity, and you've seated a new population. Which you can imagine happens is in that small handful, you've got probably no representatives of some colors, and in some cases you may have gotten way more eminem's of a particular color than

you would expect by chance. We humans take our position in the food chain of life for granted, but there have been moments in time like around fifty to sixty thousand years ago, when humans were far from dominating the world. In fact, the population had whittled down significantly to a bottleneck. The handful of Eminem's plut from the jar, so to speak,

and from this handful we are all descended. To see this idea illustrated in a mathematical constellation, Jake and his team constructed a network of seven hundred thousand ancestry dot com customers. Here's what they found. And if you imagine each one uh as a point in a large graph, we'll draw an edge between any pair of individuals if they share enough genetic material to be fairly recently related. What was surprising is that almost that entire graph is

very highly connected. So among those seven hundred thousand people, we had to draw over five hundred million lines to connect them all, and yet we still gather into mental tribes. It's a tough time, right. Um. You know, there's a I think a wave of nationalism across the world, but in response also to the dangers of globalism. Right, So it's you know, that's a very tough conversation. I think, Um, each person has to sort of um figure out where

they fall. Um. But I think genetics and family history have surprisingly a little part to play in that story. One of the most important take home messages is is exactly this connectivity of of humanity UM. You know, we have a tremendous tendency on the surface to um to be tribal, right, to support those in our community are close community. And part of the way we kind of create this social bond is by treating those who are next door, just across the street or across the political

boundary as the enemy. And you know, one of the really powerful things about what we see in genetic data is, you know, those close neighbors typically are very close relatives of yours uh in fairly recent history. And so you know, it might be very optimistic that I have high hopes for sort of the transformational power of getting this information in a broader audience's hands where they can UM kind of sit back and sort of recognize how closely related

we all are. Humans are a collection of genes scattered across time as we know it on Earth. But we owe our true beginnings to the tumble weed of cosmic matter, matter that originated with time itself. The chemical elements that we see in the mirror in the Morn, England. We look at ourselves. So those were all atoms that were inside stars hundreds of millions of years ago to billions of years ago. And so this is a pretty astonishing

story just to begin with about the atoms. We're all connected in a very deep way, and yet we all forget that. I'm John Mather. I work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and I'm the senior project scientist for the James web Space Telescope. John's work has helped confirmed the Big Bang theory the very moment time began when our universe came into existence, and he's done this with

extraordinary accuracy. John leads the team for the James Webb Space Telescope, telescope designed to peer far back into time. Committee was formed, of course, to write a report to say what do we do next, and they said, please build us an even bigger, more powerful telescope that could see further back in time to see those first galaxies growing. That's what's become the James Web Space Telescope. And this way, the telescope acts as night vision goggles, observing longer infrared wavelengths.

This allowed scientists to see things that had never been detected before, the locations of thousands of other planets orbiting other stars with conditions that could be similar to Earth have been isolated. We'd like to find the one that's just just the right temperature, the right size, has the right amount of gravity, the roughly the right chemistry to be like home. This kind of curiosity was a feature

of John's childhood. I grew up in very rural northern New Jersey, and so it was really country and really far away from town, and it was dark at night and you could see the stars. It was a really interesting place scientifically to grow up because geology was happening all around. This is uh where the Appelachians cut across Jersey, and so the glaciers had come across and brought in all kinds of interesting stones and rocks, and there were

fossils lying by the road. We went down to the Museum and Natural History in New York City and we saw the planetarium show, and we saw the bones displayed the dinosaurs, and the and the evolution displays. You can see how the fish turned into bigger fish and got more complicated over the zillions of years. So anyway, it was a fascinating time to be a kid, just having a sense of everything was open to be discovered, and everything was fascinating. But what draws John the most are

the mysteries embedded in the stars. Immediately, I'm connected with the story that we tell about where did we come from? How did we get here? Um? And I know from studying and thinking about it that the the universe is truly immense and gigantic, and then the stars are really far away. And then the part that we can get from personal experiences so tiny by coming Earth and you know, um, human lifespans about a hundred years, and that's about as

much as we can remember. We talked to our grandparents, and that's about as far back as anybody remembers in person. And then we go on to say, well, we sidis have figured out what's happened over billions of years, and it's way beyond personal experience, but it's still mysterious and wonderful. And so I say, what a miraculous thing could be appreciative of? Say, well, out of this enormous universe, here we are looking up at the great mysteries of the

sky and the mysteries of our own history. So what does all of this look like to John who's looked deep into space and time through the telescope, returning again and again home to Earth. Because the Earth special even in the Solar System, we're the only ones that have liquid ocean on the surface. We have continents and oceans, just enough water to fill up the ocean, but not

all the way over the top of the mountain. So um, we can imagine that life on another planet that had water might exist, but without continents, I wouldn't have people. Virtually all the astronauts said look back at the Earth, either from the space station or from the Apollo. They all report some kind of mystic experience about this. Seeing the Earth as small and fragile and as our only home. People come back realizing that our Earth is very special.

We might need to protect it as well as we can, both from natural disasters and from the kinds of disasters that we could cause for ourselves, so we might be the only ones for long, long distance around. For chilling all of this heavy stuff is actually very grounding. It does give you a sense of humility and awe at the power of creation. Whatever creation story we may have us as no matter how you tell it, it's astonishing,

so um gratitude for for the opportunity to be here. UM. I think Jim Lovell, astronaut who went to the moon uh said basically, UM, this is heaven right here. When you're born, you are in heaven. I think this is a wonderful perspective to think about. Um, this is a very special spot, a special spot that we all somehow made it too. Before my first daughter was born, before I could even imagine her existence, I had a dream that I was walking at the edge of the world.

Everything around me was frozen, and the night sky hung low. A little girl appeared at my side, and she pointed into tiny clusters of light Misha. A year later, my daughter, Sayed was born. She grew strong, she pulled sticks across the dirt, and she learned the names of the stars. Seven years later I woke up. I was thirty six weeks pregnant, and I knew something was wrong. Soon I bore a second child, a girl who fought her way

into the world. We named her Sky, and one spring day, her sister said whispered to her, I love you, Sky. I wished on the North Star for you. If you were to connect dots from Sky to each person responsible for her existence. Today, you would see a kind of infinity spiraling out from her, moving back and forth through time. The very same is true for each of us. That we are separate from everyone and everything around us is a myth. We see water from a faucet and think

of it as distinctly ours. Food is delivered from the ground to our shelves and it becomes ours. We see our hand outstretched in front of us, and we think that is me. But the fact is the constituent parts of our body were ripped from the mesh of the universe, molecule by molecule. Even the oxygen we breathe is on loan from every breath of every human being who has ever lived, and whose breath rippled out into the atmosphere before us. We are wired together by forces seen and unseen.

Thank you for joining forces with us this season. We'll be back soon for season three. Many thanks to Jake Byurne's at ancestry DNA for helping us to better understand that we're all from the same pond. Ancestry dot Com provided several kits for staff, and we are all now discovering thousands of third and fourth cousins we never knew we had. And thank you to Charles Burnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a foundation which can be found at t c LF dot org is accepting nominations for at

risk landscapes. And finally, thank you to Nobel Laurea John c Mother of NASA, for sharing personal stories of his youth and how those stories led him to look further into the universe and by extension, give all of us a view into the cosmos. The Stuff of Life is written and executive produced by me and Julie Douglas and co produced by Noel Brown. Editorial oversight is provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagan and Head of Production Jerry Rowland.

Original music is by Noel Brown. The song Cylinder five is by Chris Sabriovsky. You can find more of his music at Chris Sabriovsky dot com. This episode also featured music by Dylan Fagan, Tristan McNeil and Aaron Grubbs also included our songs by Breathers. Find more of their work at Breathers dot band camp dot com. And you can find the Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email at the Stuff of Life at House of Works dot com MHM