The Steady Stater
The Steady Stater
Wetlands, Kitchens, and Abalone: No Steady States in Sight (with Ann Vileisis)
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Ann Vileisis is an author and environmental historian, intrigued by stories of food, ecology, and the connections between the two. This week, Brian traverses his fond memories of Ann’s vivid wetlands book, Discovering the Unknown Landscape, as they discuss these often-misunderstood ecosystems. They also explore Ann’s other books on the loss of traditional food knowledge, and the iridescent wonders of California’s abalone shellfish. Get stuck in!
Ann's website: https://www.annvileisis.com/
From the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, this is the Steady Stater, a podcast dedicated to discussing limits to growth and the steady state economy.
Brian Czech:Welcome to the show! I'm your host, Brian Czech, and our guest today is Ann Vileisis, an environmental historian with a BA from Yale and a MA from Utah State. She's an award-winning author of three books on environmental history. Now, let me tell you, these aren't recklessly written books and doesn't jump around from social media to the blogosphere to the magazine rack even. Rather, she's a deep diver who chooses a topic, investigates it, and writes a bonafide book like no one else can, frankly. Her first title was Discovering the Unknown Landscape - A History of America's Wetlands. The next one was Kitchen Literacy. And the latest one published just last year was Abalone. I'm saving the subtitles on those last two just for a little suspense. But these are five-star books all the way. Ann Vileisis, welcome to the Steady Stater.
Ann Vileisis:Thank you so much, Brian, I'm delighted to be here talking with you today.
Brian Czech:We're delighted to have you, and sometimes we like to get to know our guests a little better before we even talk about their work. Now your husband, Tim Palmer, he's a pretty accomplished writer, as well -- writer and a photographer -- that must make for some pretty good conversation around your dinner table.
Ann Vileisis:Yeah, it's really fun to be married to a writer and photographer. And we have the wonderful opportunity to share our lives and our work in really great ways. We can talk about ideas, since he also writes about environmental topics. We can talk about writing on so many levels. And in fact, in our earlier lives, we did a lot of traveling together. And travel is essential to his photography and writing work. And it really enriched my historical research to travel and see places and meet people all around the country. So it's been a wonderful partnership.
Brian Czech:You guys are out somewhere on the Oregon Coast now, right?
Ann Vileisis:That's where we have settled. Yes, a wonderful-- the Oregon Coast is a beautiful place. We've got lots of small towns, right on the ocean, and we really love it here. It's a beautiful place and small communities. So it suits us very well.
Brian Czech:Sounds beautiful. Well, I'm a huge fan of yours. You know, when I was a postdoc studying the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, your book on wetlands hit my all-time list and remains there to this day. That book, of course, Discovering the Unknown Landscape - A History of America's Wetlands, won several prestigious awards. And for our listeners out there, if you ever only read one book on wetlands-- and you absolutely should -- make it this one. Don't let the 1999 copyright deter you. A good history book ages like wine, especially when the ingredients include natural history. Ann, can you give us an overview of discovering the unknown landscape?
Ann Vileisis:Yeah, Brian. First of all, I have to say I'm honored that you enjoyed the book so much and found it so useful. My premise in Discovering the Unknown Landscape was -- I was concerned that we -- I realized that we had lost so many wetlands. And I was also aware that in the past, people had really despised and disparaged wetlands. And that was, of course, the reason for so much destruction of them. But that in the late 20th century that we started to come to value them, and I wanted to trace how it was that we went from really despising wetlands to valuing them. And so the book really looks at that arc over 400 years of American history, our attitudes towards wetlands, how they changed, and how those changes and attitudes helped to inform new policies that resulted in greater conservation of wetlands. So anyway, that's the general premise and the general story. And I combined also -- I'll just say I wove together stories about culture and art and literature as well as policy and law and history of science. So it kind of weaves all these things together.
Brian Czech:It sure did. Another thing I remember was Zane Grey, like descriptions of the environment. I guess I'm aging myself, there greying myself so to speak. But you know, Zane Grey could put you out in the desert as if you're riding right through that Purple Sage. And I'd say, Ann Vileisis, you can put the reader so far into a wetland, your legs will feel wet if you're not wearing hip boots. You must spend a lot of time in wetlands, and I have to ask what type of wetland is your favorite?
Ann Vileisis:Well, I did spend a lot of time in wetlands and part of the reason I really wanted to go out into them and understand them is I really needed to understand people's writings about them -- the historical writings about them. I realized I had not ever been in wetlands like salt marshes or Quaking Bogs or Prairie Potholes or Cypress Swamps. And it's a hard question to ask, which is my favorite, but I have to say I really loved canoeing through Cypress Swamps with big giant old trees in the Southeast. But I also love the Quaking Bog and walking on the edge of it -- you're not really supposed to walk on them -- but I kind of tried gently out to get that sense of what is a bog -- like, what is the quaking bog like, so. Really fascinating landscapes that I thought very few people really experienced. So part of what I had to do in my book was to help people understand them better.
Brian Czech:Well, on the matter of favorites, that must depend a little bit on the time of the year too. You know, those Northern bogs are a far different place in the mosquito clouds of summer than they are in the icy beauty of winter.
Ann Vileisis:Oh, my gosh, yes. Just not that long ago, we traveled to some wetlands up on the Upper Peninsula in the UP of Michigan, and I never experienced more mosquitoes in my life than up there. So, absolutely.
Brian Czech:They borrowed some of them from Wisconsin, I think. Well, you know, one of my papers during that postdoc year I spent was about the causes of species endangerment. And I settled upon 18 categories of causes, and one of them was wetland draining or filling, and it was lumped in with aquifer depletion. One thing I came away from your book, though, was that by the time species were even being listed pursuant to the Endangered Species Act, a lot of water had already gone under the bridge. If they'd started listing species back in, let's say, the 1930s, wetland draining and filling would have been one of the very top causes of impairment, I think. Can you give us a few examples of species that hit the skids due to wetland loss?
Ann Vileisis:Well, that's a great question, Brian. I'd say one of the first endangered species that was really put at risk by wetland loss was the American alligator, which experienced loss of habitat, but also was threatened by hunting. So that was one species. But you know, there were lots more all across the country, maybe some that were less well-known. In San Francisco, for example, there was the clapper rail, some small fish that were part of the bay habitat that were at risk. There were some desert fish, you know, that were endangered species that were also very wetland-dependent. So these are things that with the passage of the Endangered Species Act. It really gave greater attention to those animals and also the importance of their habitat and keeping them conserved into the future. I would think, too, that there's plenty of amphibians, water-dependent species like that, that are also really affected, but may not be as well-known.
Brian Czech:Well, and more recently, but starting decades ago, but more newsworthy, I suppose recently, I rebuild woodpecker. That's basically a bald cypress swamp species, right? I don't know a lot about the ivory-billed, but seems to me that's a pretty crucial element in their habitat.
Ann Vileisis:Yes, I think you're absolutely right, Brian. Those birds, I believe, were -- are thought to have been cavity-nesting birds that once nested in those massive bald cypress forests of the Southeast. And you know, that landscape, I think, is one of the ones I was most intrigued to learn about, because that landscape was literally destroyed, most all of it was cut over leaving nothing behind. I wrote about an interesting little, you know, anecdote in my book about how the city of New Orleans at one point when they were redeveloping, they found the old stumps, you know. And the people that lived in the city, at that time, had no idea that there had once been vast forest. And so it's a case where I think we really forgot what was there in the past and the values that were lost. And the ivory-billed, I think is an excellent example of that. So thank you for bringing that up.
Brian Czech:And then the migratory birds, of course, were even though some of them or most of them may not have wound up on federal list of threatened or endangered, they all plummeted dramatically.
Ann Vileisis:Yeah, I would say that the group of species that were most greatly affected were migratory birds, the waterfowl, the geese, the wading birds, all of those species, all of those creatures that really depended on wetlands for food and for restover stops and breeding spots. They were really the most affected.
Brian Czech:Yeah, I remember when I signed on with the US Fish and Wildlife Service back in 1999, seems to me they gave us a historical book -- I think it was called Flyways. And it was all about the migratory bird and wetland as habitats, concerns that really kicked off the need for and the development of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, in particular, the Office of Migratory Birds and the National Wildlife Refuge System where I worked. These were originally, basically all about migratory bird conservation. And as you alluded to it with the alligator, but definitely with migratory birds as well, you know, it was both hunting. But then as the decades went by, the early decades of the 20th century, it was much more so a matter of that habitat loss.
Ann Vileisis:Yeah, and I think that recognizing as the habitat loss is accrued, recognizing that there were fewer birds, fewer waterfowl, the group that really recognized that were hunters and sportsmen, at that time, and really put a lot of pressure to figure out a way to conserve habitat. And the initial ways that people tried to do that were setting aside wetland refuges. That was, at a time when we really didn't think about regulating private property. We were hoping that we could just set aside refuges for waterfowl, ducks and geese and such. But that wasn't really enough, because the magnitude of wetlands destruction was so great that just having little refuges here and there, you know, weren't enough. It's certainly an important system. Don't get me wrong, but it just wasn't enough to really, you know, conserve our waterfall into the future.
Brian Czech:Absolutely not. As long as the overriding domestic policy goal is GDP growth, the establishment of some refuges here and there is not going to cut it, and even those refuges are going to be compromised at some point. But you know, that's kind of our our bag at CASSE. But you know, even a fairly seasoned wildlife ecologist like myself -- I worked as a biologist and about five states before reading your book -- but even I was astounded at the magnitude of loss you described. And as I recall, some of the states that really stood out to me at least were Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, the contiguous eyes, as it were.
Ann Vileisis:Yeah.
Brian Czech:What might we have seen, Ann, say, back in the 1860s, if we'd been able to fly over those half 1000 miles from, say, Fort Wayne out to Des Moines?
Ann Vileisis:Yeah, that was another remarkable thing to discover, which was the wetlands in that region were vast inland marshes. And there were rivers that meandered, you know, big broad meanders and flooded regularly into these grassland, floodplains, probably with pockets of forest and cops as well. And so there were these incredibly rich wetland landscapes that were habitat for all sorts of wild animals and birds. But anyway, yeah, and what happened, of course, is this settlement moved west, people started to drain those wetlands for agriculture. So what we have today is so entirely different, you know, we have the monoculture of corn crops or soy beans in a place that was once incredibly rich with all sorts of consequences.
Brian Czech:Yeah, that's why it takes so much coffee to drive across Illinois. Well, I want to mention now, that discovering the unknown landscape won awards from the American Historical Association and the American Society for Environmental History. That's quite a way to kick off your career as a book author, Ann!
Ann Vileisis:I know. I was truly honored to receive those big national awards in my field-- it was a total honor. One of the other things I just wanted to say is, in my books, I really try to write to reach out to a broader audience so that they're not strictly academic or argument-based, but that they really explore through stories. So I hope people enjoy reading them and learn as they go. That's kind of the way I like to do it.
Brian Czech:Absolutely, and your next book was Kitchen Literacy - How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get it Back. But actually, I think we need to cook up a short non-commercial break with James Lamont. Take it away James!
James Lamont:Hello, listeners! We hope you're enjoying the show. If you enjoy learning, you might be interested to know that CASSE is seeking applicants for our Spring Internship Program. We seek students or recent graduates with relevant coursework and experience. Open positions include accounting, administration, communications, editorial, economic modeling and mathematics, economic policy, environmental studies, IT, nonprofit management, political science, statistics, and video production. The program is a great career building opportunity. In fact, we've hired numerous past interns, including our internship coordinator, Elise. To apply, email a resume to eliseminer@steadystate.org. If you're a student, you can also find CASSE at joinhandshake.com. We'll be accepting applications through the end of the year. And now, back to the show.
Brian Czech:Welcome back, folks. We're talking with Ann Vileisis. And we've talked about her first book Discovering the Unknown Landscape, all about wetlands. And we introduced the next book. And actually the conversation, Ann, that we were having right before the non-commercial break was a great segue because waterfowl, one of the reasons that there was such concern over the drop was they weren't only wonderful to look at, they were a key food for many families, especially families into the four main flyways of the US. Was your book on wetlands sort of a natural way into the book about kitchen Literacy?
Ann Vileisis:Absolutely, Brian. What happened is, when I was researching my wetlands book, I really had kind of an epiphany, which was the tremendous impacts of our food system, both agriculture, and otherwise, on wetlands and the environment in general. And I just had a feeling that people didn't get that the food how foods are produced have such a tremendous impact. You know, we've already discussed how the impact on wetlands because of the conversion of wetlands into farmland. You've just described sort of a another part of it, which is that people depended on some wild foods. And those wild foods were actually subjected to also overfishing or overhunting. So that was another part of it. And then as the food system became industrialized, and we had to grow more and more to supply growing and growing cities, we had to turn to new technologies like pesticides and herbicides that polluted the water, and also to things like industrial agriculture, which have a lot of pollution. So I just had a feeling that people didn't get any of that. Because when you go into the supermarket to shop, you just end up seeing, you know, all these familiar products that have characters like Tony the Tiger and Aunt Jemima and such -- don't really think about the real stories of our food. So that's really what inspired me to get into this book to try to figure out how we lost knowledge of those real stories.
Brian Czech:I'm glad you did. And that book was ahead of the time of, you know, a number of other books that came out subsequent to that. Let me share a little hypothesis and see if it fits with your findings. You know, everybody talks about how much better grandma's food was, and surely it was good! My Polish grandma was a heck of a cook. But it strikes me that an overlooked reason grandma's cooking was so great was those ingredients came fresh from the farm and not from some genetically modified phosphate-filled factory field or some hydroponic hang out in the middle of Houston. Do you think that was grandma's secret, those homegrown ingredients?
Ann Vileisis:Absolutely! I think that was definitely one part of it, Brian. I mean, we all know the difference between eating. Well, we don't all know, but that there's a tremendous difference between eating a homegrown tomato, or one even that you can get at a farmers market versus the ones you get in a supermarket. And that's something that many people are having more experience with as the opportunities to eat more local foods has actually rebounded again more recently. Not for everybody, but more and more people are having that opportunity. I think you're totally right.
Brian Czech:Well, that's one of the few encouraging things that there are received pockets appearing here and there, where the local production and consumption of food is coming back. And yeah, makes for some better, better grub.
Ann Vileisis:It's not only taste, it's also, you know, there is increasing research about that local foods can be more nutritious, you know, the antioxidants are preserved longer and such like that. So there's more that's being learned all the time about how we can make our agriculture not only taste better, and be more nutritious, but also be more sustainable. And that's something actually that even since I wrote my book, I think there's more attention with the climate crisis into looking at how can we manage our soils to be more productive, more sequestering of carbon, even at the same time as we're making our foods more nutritious. So I think getting people to think about where their foods come from, and that connection helps to lead us to all these other good things.
Brian Czech:Well, going back long before grandma, even what were some of the foodstuffs that surprised you from the 1800s?
Ann Vileisis:Well, one of the things that really surprised me more than anything, I think perhaps, is just how -- just the intimacy that people had with the animals that became the meats that they would eat. If you think about it, most people at that time were eating animals that either came from their own backyards or from farms that were nearby. So the kind of knowledge they had about animals was very different, you know. They wanted to know where the animal came from that was treated well, the kinds of food it ate, or there might be different recipes for young animals, or male or female, or animals of different ages. So I found that to be really interesting.
Brian Czech:Yeah, that is so much nuance in that.
Ann Vileisis:Also, it really struck me the tremendous amount of knowledge that people had to have in order to raise their own food and orchestrate their eating. That was really fascinating to me -- when I tried to, you know, consider it in contrast to the way we think about foods today, you know, just run to the supermarket, run to a restaurant -- most people don't have that degree of knowledge. That knowledge is really connects us to the larger natural world and helps us to understand things like limits and constraints as well as possibilities, so it was interesting to think about those things.
Brian Czech:That's a really good point. Well, I think steady staters have a good sense of how we lost the knowledge of where food comes from. But were there any surprises you stumbled upon? Let's see pertaining to supply genes, or labeling, or even the changes in agricultural geography over these decades of global heating?
Ann Vileisis:Well, one thing that's, of course, very interesting and often commented upon is just how much the distance between a farms and plates have increased through time, you know, that food is just come from farther and farther away. And that's something I think we generally know. But, you know, it's clear that that's part of the disconnect, and also part of what creates problems with supply chains requiring more fuel, more steps along the way, more packaging, more need for advertising and communication that can be -- perhaps, you know-- not true. Another thing that I found really fascinating is that at the time that America's food system was industrializing, people really did not like those changes. You know, I think we've been told that, oh, everybody wanted convenience foods. Convenience is the best thing that any of us could want in food. But really to go back and study the history of the food system, I learned that people resisted those changes. And we really needed advertising to convince us of the new criteria, that should be regarded as favorable. And that was a really interesting thing to trace how-- what we thought was important about food change through time, and how much the advertising industry helped to shape that.
Brian Czech:That is really an important part of the whole picture, isn't it? And you had-- was it one chapter that was pretty much devoted to that?
Ann Vileisis:Yeah, it was really interesting, because the food system, basically the industrialized food system was coming to age, basically, at the same time that advertising was becoming a big part of American culture in the early part of the 20th century. So both were kind of new and cutting their teeth at the same time. So if you can imagine living in a world where you don't have advertising, and then all of a sudden you have it, that kind of promotional writing, promotional images, and all those things, people had to learn how to digest it, so to speak -- pardon the pun. Because they weren't used to promotional writing. And so I think that was a very interesting thing to go back and learn about and, you know, it helps us to reflect on our own understanding right now of the world. You know, why do we think that calories are so important, as opposed to where food comes from? Or why do we think, you know, one thing or another is more important? Convenience is more important than stewardship of the land that the food comes from, or the treatment of workers were that are growing the food? So these are all things that I found really interesting to study through time.
Brian Czech:Alright, let's go to your most recent book, Abalone - The Remarkable History and Uncertain Future of California's Iconic Shellfish. And, for starters, what is Abalone?
Ann Vileisis:So, an abalone is a really unique shellfish, a mollusk. It grows and lives all around the world. But in the North America, it's was predominantly an animal that lived on the West Coast in California and became hugely important for cultural reasons, because it has a brilliant iridescent shell that is just stunning and captivating, as well as a big meaty foot that people loved as a seafood. As you might imagine, because this animal was so loved and cherished -- it was sort of cherished and loved, but because it was loved for ways we could use it -- over time it really hit some hard times and ultimately has become very imperiled.
Brian Czech:Yeah, kind of got loved to death. And you mentioned the shell and they are just profoundly gorgeous. And it strikes me the family is haliotidae maybe some of the circular patterns in those shells like little halos. You think that's the origin of that, and the genus is haliotis, I guess.
Ann Vileisis:Yeah, it actually, haliotis actually means "sea ear." And it came from -- it was named by Aristotle, because the abalone of the Mediterranean are smaller and sort of the size and shape of a human ear. So that's where it comes from -- sea ear, you know. I came to writing about abalone in some ways, it was the thread went from wetlands, where I actually learned initially about shellfish in estuaries that were destroyed. When wetlands were destroyed, I became interested in that food environment connection there, wrote about that connection in Kitchen Literacy. But I realized in Kitchen Literacy that animals that are wild foods are really particularly vulnerable for that reason -- that we can love them to death. And so to get back to your earlier question, this is now actually an endangered species too, several of them are endangered species. There are seven species on the West Coast.
Brian Czech:Right. Well, in those uses that were one of the reasons abalone was loved to death, what would you say is the most prominent uses? Food, tools, ornaments?
Ann Vileisis:Well, through time, you know, indigenous people are thought to have come to the West Coast at least 13- to 15,000 years ago. And so, at least 6,000 years ago, or more they would, the shells were used as tools and ornaments and for ceremonial purposes -- really a wonderful cultural use of an animal and material in ways that we can barely, you know, imagine. It was really interesting to learn about that. But they were also used for subsistence, and they became one of the West Coast first global commodities in the mid-19th century, at the time of the Gold Rush. When immigrants from Asia came over across the Pacific and discovered so many abundant abalone, it kickstarted a global trade for this animal, and its meat and shells.
Brian Czech:Did you find evidence that it was essentially a form of proto money like wampum in the for the Eastern tribes, prior to the European settlement out there?
Ann Vileisis:Yeah, you know, it's very interesting that you asked that question. Because there's a lot of interesting writing about shell money, and abalone was definitely used for exchange, but it had a special and different kind of meaning because of that brilliant, unique iridescence. And the fact that it was actually probably somewhat rare of an animal at different times through history. It was cherished and held in very high esteem. And so rather than just using it as like, you know, currency, it had a deeper meaning. It was used, for example, to resolve big conflicts or was used to symbolize larger meanings in a gift exchange. So it's a little bit different, I think, than just currency.
Brian Czech:Right. Well, I'm dying to ask you, Ann, what's your next book about?
Ann Vileisis:Oh, my gosh, brand. I don't have a good answer for that yet, because I'm still out and about talking about my Abalone book and getting it out into the world. But I do have some ideas. I'm interested in maybe doing some writing about the salmon of the Pacific Northwest, which is where I live and that have a similar story to abalone in terms of being an animal that is very cherished and cared about and yet is really facing difficult times. I find myself being fascinated to write and study about wildlife and the challenges we have in trying to help conserve these animals and our kindred creatures into the future, especially in the face of climate crisis challenges.
Brian Czech:What about sort of some of the ancient and -- well not ancient entirely, I mean, some of the Pacific Northwest tribes still have a bit of a Potlatch culture and so on that interface with food production and distribution is -- maybe not really -- the highlight of Potlatch culture, but you take an interest in sort of the the cultural aspects of food production in the Northwest.
Ann Vileisis:You know, I have not researched that extensively yet myself, but I do know we have a pretty vibrant and growing interest, I think, on the West Coast in general, understanding the need to restore indigenous food systems as a way of helping to restore cultural justice and such things with tribal nations. So, I think those are things that are very interesting, and I look forward to learning more about them.
Brian Czech:Well, whatever that next book is about, I'm really looking forward to it. And Ann, it's been a great pleasure talking with you today, and we'll look forward to having you back on the show for a deeper dive into one or two or three or four of these books.
Ann Vileisis:Thank you so much, Brian. It would be fun to talk more with you about, you know, the steady stater perspective on some of these stories that I've written about. So thanks so much for the opportunity to talk with you today.
Brian Czech:Well folks, that about wraps 'er up. We've been talking with Ann Vileisis, environmental historian and impeccable author. If you asked me, she set the standard for crystally clear, flawlessly logical, policy-relevant and yet entertaining environmental non-fiction. Go get one of her books. I'm going to recommend, Discovering the Unknown Landscape to start with, and I'm guessing you want to read the other two as well. I'm Brian Czech, and you've been listening to The Steady Stater podcast. See you next time!