Episode 1: Real and Present Danger

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken and Dr. Sarah Milton

When scientists Dr. Jeanette Wyneken and Dr. Sarah Milton unexpectedly confront climate change in their research, new questions emerge.

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Episode Transcript

Cameron Peters: This is the story of an unexpected discovery. A discovery so unexpected, it emerges right in front of you, in the most common of places, profoundly impacting the work that you do.

Imagine a familiar route – one you could follow with your eyes closed. It could be the road you take to work or school, a train or bus schedule, or simply the movements between your bed and the coffee maker. One day, you find that path is closed (the road is under construction, the transportation schedule drops your bus route, or your leg breaks making it nearly impossible to get to the coffee maker). You suddenly realize that you have never taken another route. You have never been faced with this situation. And, here, is the imaginative leap. That path, the one you are so familiar with, it is instinctual, is permanently closed. Your physical and personal landscape has just radically, irreversibly changed.

Welcome to New Climate Narratives a podcast investigating our changing climate through the voices that are seeing, imagining, and creating new ways forward. I’m your host, Cameron Peters.

In the beginning, I said today’s story is about an unexpected discovery. And, no, it is not a road closure, although that will come up.

This unexpected discovery does not go away, it can’t be ignored. Instead, it shapes the very questions that you ask. And, for the two women at the center of today’s episode, that’s a critical part of their job: to ask questions...really good ones.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: I mean, that's really how I got like I say, I got into this trying to understand what's normal, never knowing I was going to find what wasn't normal.

Cameron Peters: Could you start by introducing yourself, your name, and what you do?

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: My name is Jeanette Wyneken. I am a professor of biological sciences and I am the director of the FAU Marine Lab at Gumbo Limbo Environmental Complex.

Cameron Peters: While this was my first time meeting Dr. Wyneken, I have known about her research for years. It was a clear blue day when I met her at her lab in Gumbo Limbo. She was wearing a short-sleeved, Hawaiian shirt with large white flowers and a pair of red glasses with multicolored stripes.

As we walked into her lab, she instinctually wiped her shoes on what looked like a doormat but, as she explained, included a sanitizing liquid to protect the lab from what we might bring into it.

Dr. Wyneken has spent over three decades in the lab and field, studying the sea turtles that nest and hatch in Boca Raton and around South Florida.

Over the course of her career, she has studied generations of sea turtles.

But it wasn’t until the early 2000s when she began the development of a long-term study that she found herself unexpectedly recording a story of global environmental change: one playing out in the bodies of hatchling sea turtles.

But, before she became a premier sea turtle researcher, before she, by chance, ended up studying sea turtles, she was an 11-year-old whose imagination was captivated by these animals.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: I think the most clear memory I have of just understanding what a sea turtle is, is going to the Miami Sea Aquarium when I was about 11 or 12 and there was this little green turtle swimming up against the glass and it was beautiful. It was beautiful the way it moved. It was beautiful, just as an unusual turtle and it had flippers. Flippers are really cool. And I made my poor mother take a picture and she thought it was beautiful too, but she was the only one who had a camera.

Cameron Peters: And sea turtles stayed in the back of her mind, resurfacing, while she was at the University of Illinois, and developing a Ph.D. project on how turtles move. However, she soon ran into a problem.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: And after my first year and a half, turns out there was another person on earth who cared about how turtles moved. And it was a scientist who was the premier person in the field, not just turtles, in biomechanics. And so, there was not a lot left to do after that. After he published his work, at least he let me know he was working on it through a friend. And so, what I did was change topics and without going a direct route to sea turtles, I ended up on sea turtles and it obviously worked.

Cameron Peters: In 1988, Dr. Wyneken received her Ph.D. And for the next fourteen years, she dove into her sea turtle research, publishing numerous articles every couple of years. In the world of science, this is an important process because she developed a body of research, and in doing so, built her reputation. Then, around 2002, in the midst of her studies, she started a new project.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: In 2002, I started out trying to understand what normal sex ratios were and that's because sea turtles, like most turtles, have environmentally determined sex. And the environmental component that we care about most is temperature. I did not think of that as a climate change study. That was probably naive, and I really thought I was only going to be doing that kind of work for about two years, three years and moving onto something else. But what happened was we got very different results from what our hypotheses were. Okay? Your data are your data. So, you look at them and go, Hmm, I'm not going to be able to describe a normal sex ratio in one year or two years or even three years. So, I went back to the drawing board with the demographers, ecological demographers, and basically said, well, how much data do you think I'm going to need? And they came back with about half a generation's worth minimally, and that half a generation in the sea turtle world is about 13 to 15 years.

Cameron Peters: 13-15 years. From what Dr. Wyneken thought would be a one- or two-year study. But this new understanding, this shift in her study’s time scale, proved critical because it created the possibility for building an extensive archive of sea turtle hatchling data. Information that she needed to study her question: how does temperature affect the sex of sea turtle hatchlings?

Early on her in research, Dr. Wyneken begins to notice something new and deeply troubling.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: The first heat stress turtle I ever saw was I had a technician back then named Jason Vaughn and he calls me up and he says, there's something wrong with the turtles we got in today. And I said, tell me more. He says they have red eyes. And I said sea turtles don't have red eyes. They have Brown eyes. And he says, no, these have red eyes. And he sent me a picture. I said, you know, this is before we would do texting of pictures. I said, send me a picture. So he took a picture and put it on email, sent it to me and with that I'm going, whoa. And that's not right. Well, it turns out that animals that get heat stress, one of the consequences is they bleed into their eyeball. And so they looked like little demons and so I of course called the veterinarians who work with us and said, I've never seen this before. What is it? And they knew what it was, not for turtles. But they say, well, we see this in dogs with heat stress and, and horses with heat stress. And it was like, oh, okay. And then we looked at the temperature of the nest and yep. It was a lot warmer than normal. And now we see them, I would say probably just about every year.

Cameron Peters: Dr. Wyneken was witnessing an anomaly, one related to rising sand temperatures. Noting this anomaly—an anomaly she would come to see again and again—was when she began documenting the relationship between climate change and sea turtles.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: They were coming out of the nest with heat stress. And after like probably about the third year of turtles coming out with heat stress in the middle of the summer, I started paying more and more attention and I never in my wildest dreams thought I was going to be documenting climatic change effects and that's, it was never our goal, but that's an outcome of a long-term study where you do the same thing year after year after year in the same way.

We used to just pay attention to temperature. Now we pay attention to rainfall, moisture effects. I just had two students finish their PhDs and who were really taking apart the effects of the relationship of temperature to moisture, one at the molecular level and another at the nest and sex ratio level from the beach.

Cameron Peters: Each year, during nesting season, Dr. Wyneken and her team travel to their research sites, where they place temperature sensors inside the sea turtle nests.

Using the data collected on the beaches, Dr. Wyneken develops a clearer picture of the variety of environmental conditions that affect the nest – like Florida’s weather.

In her lab, she is able to control for these variables, things that can’t be isolated in nature, but are important to answering her project’s questions.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: Well, in the lab you can control certain, let's say, let's go back to the effect of rainfall or moisture on incubation. You know, when you're in the field…you have some parts of the beach are rainy, some parts of the beach don't get rain. You've been in Florida, you know that sometimes it's raining in the front yard, not in the backyard, which is just bizarre in itself. But that means that some of your nests, you know, even if you have, you know, a hundred nets out there, they're not going to, they're going to be different depths. They're going to be one's going to have 120 eggs; one's going to have 88 eggs. And so, you have many variables that may impact the answer to your question.

Cameron Peters: So, while the field lets us ask the right questions, the lab lets us hone in on specific variables and see how they interact.

And it is this balance between these two research spaces, the field, and lab, that has allowed Dr. Wyneken’s research project to thrive.

Each season hundreds of hatchings are raised in the lab so that their sex can eventually be determined and recorded before they are released offshore. However, this process has led to a public misconception about her research: an idea that her lab is trying to help the hatchlings sidestep the treacherous journey from their nest to the ocean. This goal of “head-starting” is what is considered a “halfway technology.” “A halfway technology” doesn’t solve the root problem that we are making the oceans warmer. Rather, it sidesteps that fact.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: The goal is not head-starting. It's just that we have to get them bigger to do our work and then they get a free ride offshore…We can talk about the idea of making sure that we're not succumbing to halfway technology. And this is a concept that's been around for a lot of years. It started in medicine, I think. And you know, the idea in medicine is halfway technology is we know how to measure that your cholesterol is high or that you're too fat or you know, you're not getting enough exercise and we can give people a pill for that. Or we can fix clogged arteries. That’s the technology part. But it's only halfway because we're not fixing the problem. So if you're taking little turtles and saying, we're going to make them big and make sure that we are putting out lots of little sea turtles, when those turtles grow up the environment's still going to be too hot, and too hot is scary because too hot is really hard to get over. That too hot will kill you.

I can give it to you in centigrade. We started seeing anomalies at 34…What’s 34 Fahrenheit? 93. So if they get up near our body temperatures, that's really bad.

Cameron Peters: There is another important component to Dr. Wykenen’s research that we haven’t talked about. She mentions that her lab is stationed at Gumbo Limbo, a marine and coastal nature center in Boca Raton, Florida. Situated on a barrier island located between the intercoastal waterway and the Atlantic, Gumbo Limbo gives community members and seasonal visitors the opportunity to view her lab from an upstairs gallery, creating the space to learn about their environment.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: Oh, I mean if they come in here and see sea turtles, they, first of all, a lot of people come because they can see sea turtles. That's really cool. They are cool animals. The conversation starter part is that if we talk about nest getting too hot and we've been able to document this by accident, then regardless of your politics or your background, it's a very understandable story. The nests are getting too hot and we're seeing this anomaly and that anomaly. I mean, we've documented about six different anomalies so far that are associated with incubating too hot. And this, you know, when you and I get too hot, we can go move out of the sun or we can drink water or we can go swimming but if you're an egg down in the sand with nobody doing anything to cool you down, which they, you know, no turtles there to take care of the nest, the eggs, and the embryos can't go away and they can't do anything about that heat.

Cameron Peters: There is side to science that we don’t always have the opportunity to witness because it is deeply immersed in the very structure of the scientific process: a process that requires carefully crafted questions, the development of a hypothesis, the detail-focused design of a study created to tests one’s predictions, the data collection, and then you repeat those tests, again, and again.

Through spending their careers studying a specific niche, scientists can build a layer of deep attention to a space. Year after year. Question after question. Study after study.

Because of her work in Boca Raton, Dr. Wyneken has watched the beaches and studied the turtles that come to nest here and the hatchlings that emerge. As a result, she sees her work, and the climate change she has documented, as a one-piece within a larger web of stories.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: Well, it made me pay attention. That's the first thing. The second thing is for the, you know, it's very real. It’s not just the sea turtles that tell us that story. You know, the insects are telling us that same story. The birds are telling us that story. The plants are telling us that story. And how often beaches are renourished are telling us that story. I mean, it's just. And I live in a wooden house and whenever we have a hurricane, you know, how many years I'm nervous every summer when we get hurricanes or fall. It’s getting a little more frequent. So, yeah. So from that standpoint, it's a big deal.

Cameron Peters: For decades now, climate change is a force that has been shaping Dr. Wyneken’s research.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: So part of what is the idea of climate change and particularly in the understanding of global warming has done for me is look for ways to talk about it. Cause it's, you know, a lot of people think because we have lots of turtles here that we're raising turtles up and that's to help fix problems. We’re raising turtles up so we can get the data to help fix problems and or identify the problems. I mean, that's really how I got like I say, I got into this trying to understand what's normal, never knowing I was going to find what wasn't normal.

Cameron Peters: And there is another force that Dr. Wyneken thinks is crucial to understanding the relationship between climate change and sea turtles: people.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: We are responsible for the impact.

Cameron Peters: Climate Change can be statistically documented in so many ways: such as in the relationship between sand temperatures and the ratio of male and female sea turtles born over time. But climate change is also a lived experience. We feel climate change in the small and large ways it permeates our lives.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: In my daily life when it rains and my driveway now fills up and there was a lot of floods my husband's car, he does not drive an SUV. Yeah. So, the water runoff is not running off as readily as it used to. Now, part of that is because I grew up, I live in an area that used to have a lot of fields with cows in it and now it's all concrete and asphalt.

The second part is that things that I used to see that I don't see anymore. You know, I used to see a lot more you know, blue buttons, these little jellyfish-like animals. I don't see those very often anymore. But I used to find periods where there would be thousands of these little tiny jellyfish about the size of my fingernail on the beach. And those were thimble jellies. Don't see those very often anymore. So there are things that I used to see more often. The other side of that coin is that we now see large quantities of Sargassum in the summer in very large quantities.

Cameron Peters: The environment continues to change. South Florida will feel some of the most severe consequences of sea-level rise. One of my final questions to Dr. Wyneken was, does she see hope?

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: Well, let's see. First of all, these animals have been around for the case of sea turtles, we’re talking about, water backs have been around for about 110 to 115 million years, Loggerhead turtles and rain turtles have been around for somewhere around 60 million years…So from that standpoint, I guess I have a lot… of trust in the variation, the value of variation among individuals and natural selection. And natural selection obviously has been working far longer than we were even you know, on earth. So, I think from that standpoint, my optimism comes from the evolutionary history of the animals.

Cameron Peters: At this point, Dr. Wyneken turned the tables on me.

Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: So what do you think is the most important question…the most important question about climate change and science?

Cameron Peters: I'm really interested in the translation of research to the public: How do we make that bridge between the language of science and the incredible research that you're doing and how do we make that engaging and riveting and compelling? Because it already is. What is the story that we're telling?

Cameron Peters: What is the story that we are telling?

Recently, I heard conservation photographer Cristina Mittermeier say that “photographing climate change is like photographing a slow-moving tsunami.”

And, this image stood out. It is like Dr. Wyneken’s research. For a while, the tsunami is out there. You may have heard of it, you may even have seen it from far away: in other colleagues’ research, or on the news, or maybe in the slow accumulation of water in your neighborhood that doesn’t drain quite as quickly as before. But there is still a sense of normalcy.

Dr. Wyneken saw it in the brown eyes of a sea turtle, eyes on the body of an animal that mesmerized her as an 11-year-old. Then, all of a sudden, it’s right in front of you: the change in a sea turtle’s eye color to red. The tsunami hits.

And, I wonder too, if this is my challenge in creating this podcast. I am collecting stories, lived experiences, for something that for so long, in mainstream society, has been, yes, abstract: something so large in scale that our minds often can’t wrap themselves around the numbers. But also, climate change is something we don’t want to know about fully because it will mean recognizing the way we are living is violently disconnected with the natural world.

But, perhaps, this challenge— how do we tell that story of the “slow-moving tsunami” – is also where the possibility lies. Let’s listen to another story, another experience that can offer a blueprint for seeing, hearing, and maybe feeling our way forward.

[South Florida King Tide Weather Reports]

Dr. Sarah Milton: I'm Dr. Sarah Milton. I am a professor here at Florida Atlantic University and my area of research is comparative physiology and in particular sea turtle physiology.

Cameron Peters: After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Miami in 1994, Dr. Milton began her career studying the bodies of sea turtles and how they function. I spoke with her a few days after my meeting with Dr. Wyneken. Dr. Milton wore an FAU marine laboratory long sleeve tee shirt, her auburn hair pulled back in a low ponytail. Unlike my meeting with Dr. Wyneken, the weather had changed, and storm clouds were rolling, threatening rain.

Dr. Sarah Milton: I actually commute up here to Boca Raton from Miami. So I have over an hour drive each way…So about six years ago maybe, you know, you're driving and they do the morning traffic report of, oh, there's an accident here, there's a traffic jam here or whatever. So about six years ago in a September was the first time where I heard road closures being announced because of the King tides. So, the roads in Miami beach were so badly flooded that you could not drive on them and they were putting them on the daily traffic report of this road is closed, this road is closed, this road is closed for flooding. And that was the first time in the 20 years that I'd been living down here that there were road closures because of the King tide flooding, which is directly related to sea-level rise and now it's our regular thing.

Cameron Peters: Dr. Milton’s story quickly converges with Dr. Wyneken’s because her lab is also at Gumbo Limbo. When both began their work as researchers, climate change was not even a piece of the work they envisioned themselves doing, or even documenting. As colleagues, they both referred to each other’s work throughout our interviews, something I made a conscious decision to edit out, so that each one could tell their piece of the story. However, like Dr. Wyneken, Dr. Milton’s passion for her work can be traced to her childhood. The question that we ask children almost subconsciously: what do you want to do when you grow up?

Dr. Sarah Milton: I always loved the outdoors. So, for years and years, I wanted to be a forest ranger. I grew up in upstate New York. And then at some point, I found out that there were only 12 forest Rangers in all of New York State and realized that that sounded like a dead-end job. So, for some reason, I picked Marine biology instead. I don't know why other than like everyone else who's 12, I wanted to play with dolphins. So, since about the age of 12, I wanted to be a Marine biologist and just basically worked towards that goal. I got a biology degree for my undergraduate, took a couple of Marine science courses just to make sure I really did like it, and then it came down to Miami to get my Ph.D.

Cameron Peters: And her research career took off.

Dr. Sarah Milton: I actually do two sorts of research. So, from the diving sea turtles, I actually got interested in stroke research, how the brains survive without oxygen. And so, for many years I did that and sort of did sea turtle research on the side. But with climate change, I think it is such a sort of an existential threat that the work that we're doing with endangered species and climate change and how we might ameliorate some of the damage is I think more critical than even the stroke research. There's lots of people doing stroke research. So, I've switched more to focusing on the impacts of climate change on these endangered species.

Cameron Peters: When we reflect on our past, we find ourselves seeing a clear through-line. But what is so fascinating about science is that it is a process: with one question leading to the next project to then the next question, and so on.

Dr. Sarah Milton: …[T]hat's sort of the joy of science, right? You think of one thing and you answer that question, you address it, you do experiments, and then, okay, maybe that question is addressed, but three more questions then get asked, you know? So, we went from the temperature effects on the nest to whether or not that affects the physiology of them to that affects the cognition of them. So, it's more of a steady progression of looking at things. It's not really like one big aha, I'm going to change my whole area of research.

Cameron Peters: And, this brings us back to sea-level rise and the way it is currently affecting Dr. Milton’s research.

Dr. Sarah Milton: For one thing, it makes it really obvious that it's happening now. It's not a future thing. So we've seen the effects… [T]he hatching success is declined quite drastically, the beaches in Boca Raton. So we went from, we used to have maybe 75 to 80% of the hatchlings would emerge from the nest, which is what hatching success is, and then it's gone down 60%, 50% even lower some years. It's not always that low if we have a slightly cooler year or a really rainy year, then that's enough to cool the nest down so that we have higher hatching success again. But it's, you know, it's very clear just in the past few years how much of an impact this is having.

…This is not something that's happening in the distant future. It is a real and present danger to the wildlife, but wildlife is sort of the Canary in a coal mine. So, what is a danger to them is also going to be a danger to us.

Cameron Peters: And, this is something she is currently studying.

Dr. Sarah Milton: We actually are doing some research there as well. So, I had some undergraduate students, in this case, looking at for instance the effects of flooding on the nest. So that's what we're seeing now. The sea-level rise isn't enough like that. The beach has disappeared, but whenever there's a storm, which are happening more often, and they're bigger storms, the beach floods, we now have what in South Florida we call King tides, which are more properly spring tides, right? The highest high tides. So those used to only occur with bad flooding in September, maybe October, and now it starts in August and September and October and November. So, there's more and more chances. I mean, obviously, in November, there's no longer sea turtles nesting on the beach, but in August there's a lot of nests on the beach. So those nests end up getting flooded. So, I had students looking to see, both actually an undergrad and a graduate student, looking to see what those effects would have because sea turtle nests are occasionally going to get flooded. That doesn't mean they're going to die. So, she the grad student was looking at the effects of frequent flooding and how many days. So essentially if they flooded more, I don't remember the exact results, but if they flooded more than four or five times over the course of the nesting season, then the hatch success went down. And if they flooded more than a day, so if they were flooded for two or three days in a row, the hatching success also went down. So that's the effects that we're seeing with climate change now. We're also seeing a lot more things like just beach erosion. So, nests get washed out. It makes scarps, which are sort of walls of sand on the beach because it erodes away the soft sand in front and it leaves a wall. And turtles are not known for their jumping ability. So, if you get a very high scarp then the turtles can't get up onto the beach to nest. So, there's all sorts of effects from climate change already. So, I'm actually working with another faculty member in the department of geosciences. So, she's looking at essentially beach erosion and accretion. And then we're looking at how that affects the sea turtle nests as far as how likely they are to survive.

Cameron Peters: The very idea of “climate change” doesn’t always feel concrete because there are many invisible consequences around us. In the case of South Florida, two of the most visible consequences are the red tides and what has been named “Sunny Day Flooding.” Just because consequences are invisible doesn’t mean they’re not there. It just means we might not be able to see them yet. For Dr. Milton, it is much more tangible. She is able to see the relationship between sea turtles and us in a unique way.

Dr. Sarah Milton: It's hard to describe. What I see is, again, sort of an existential threat because I can see it happening now I have maybe a different view of the future than other people who don't live here. And work on the beach and work with the turtles have, right. So again, you can see it happening now. And so, it's not just some distant thing that we'll worry about sometime in the future. Oh, it's not a big deal. It's, you know, just a political thing. No, it's not. It's here, it's happening. You can see it. And it makes me worry about the response to it. So that's part of one of the things that we're looking at, the physiology and the effects of climate on the turtles, the effects of climate change on the beaches themselves. Because the human response is going to be to protect the humans, right? So, when we have massive erosion from storms and sea-level rise, people are going to want to start protecting their houses. They want to put up sea walls, they want to put up rip rap and that essentially as soon as you put up a sea wall, the beach erodes away in front of it. Almost immediately. It's very rapid, obviously not instantaneous, you know, but over the course of a season or two, the beach erodes away and then there's no place left for the sea turtles to nest. Right. So, it concerns me about this interaction of trying to balance the needs of the natural environment and the needs of the human-built environment. It didn't use to matter. I mean, the sea levels have risen before and beaches erode, and beaches accrete, but we didn't use to have it backed with roads and houses. So, if the beach eroded away, there was just more beach behind it that the sea turtles could go to. If you put up a wall, that's not true.

Cameron Peters: And, perhaps most importantly, sea turtles are just one species telling this story.

Dr. Sarah Milton: Some of the other impacts that I'm seeing? I mean, just things I didn't mention before as far as climate change goes. I mentioned for instance, the red tides and how those are happening more often. So, if anyone was paying attention to the news in Florida last year or the year before, actually I guess technically, in the summertime and is massive algae blooms. Right? So again, related to pollution related to climate change in the sense that these just happen faster when the ocean is warmer. But that sort of thing, for instance, shades the ocean bottom. So, in some of the lagoons, there's been massive die-offs of seagrass beds. So that can affect the whole food chain, right? You don't have all the little shrimp and the baby fish that live down there. You don't have the seagrass beds for the sea turtles to eat. You don't have the shrimps for fish to eat that then grow into bigger fish that people like to catch. So, there's impacts that are less obvious or maybe that take a little bit longer. I mean, it's obvious when you have a red tide, for instance, that releases the toxins and there's just tons of fish literally washing up on the beach. but the fact that you have an algae bloom in a lagoon that kills all the seagrass, it may take a couple of years before you notice, Oh, there's no snook, you know, for the fishermen to catch. So, some of the impacts are very immediate and some of them are more delayed and a little less obvious and therefore harder to tell people about.

Cameron Peters: And again, we are brought back to the process of science. As she speaks with the public and has her students engaging with the public at Gumbo Limbo—a space uniquely designed to cultivate these interactions—Dr. Milton has noticed a gap between the language of science and the way this language is understood.

Dr. Sarah Milton: I think one of the main things that's missing is people don't understand how science works because they toss around words like theory. Oh, I have a theory about this. You know, it's just a theory of evolution. A scientific theory is not the same thing as somebody has a theory about “whodunnit” on the latest TV show, right? A scientific theory is you have a hypothesis, you do a lot of experiments, you make a lot of observations and a theory is the best evidence that we have for how something works supported by the best body of evidence. And it's something that can be tested, added into parts of it disproven, parts of it changed and it evolves. So, when people say, oh, something like evolution is just a theory, like, okay, yes, but you know, so is gravity is just a theory too. But if you choose not to believe in gravity, you don't float away. Right? It's like it doesn't make it not real just because you say, I don't believe in it. So, you know, when people are saying, oh, there's some controversy about climate change. Well, no, really there's not. Most, huge, vast majority of the scientists are in agreement that it's here. And I'm not a climate change scientist. I'm a sea turtle biologist. But I can tell you climate change is here because I see it in the biology of the sea turtles. So, it's not something there's no evidence for that we’re just sort of making up that we're modeling and don't really have support for it. It's happening all over in many different aspects of things and it can be seen in many places. And this is what leads to the science, the body of the science.

Cameron Peters: As we reached the end of the interview, I asked Dr. Milton about hope. She spoke about the possibility of natural responses:

Dr. Sarah Milton: So for instance, I don't know if you saw it, but we had the earliest leatherback nests on record this year. So nested in early February. Normally, the start of leatherback nesting season is considered to be March 1st. There's always, you know, the past couple of years has been one or two in February, but this year they've started early in February. So, there's hope that as the sea temperatures increase, that that will drive the turtles to nest earlier because presumably what they're detecting is spring, and nesting season is how warm the water is that they're swimming in.

Cameron Peters: So. How does hope move into action?

Dr. Sarah Milton: The most important work I do as a scientist is actually training more scientists. So, you know, I have at the moment, six students in my lab, six graduate students, and then usually I have a few undergraduates as well. So that's always the thing that's important is training more people to go out and continue the work. As far as sort of the specifics of what I'm doing, I'm hoping that the data that we generate will impact essentially managers, right? So no, you don't want to do that on your beach because it's going to have this effect. Yes, we have to do something about the temperatures because it's having this effect. So various, you know, specific things as far as sea turtle conservation and management go.

Cameron Peters: Examining the past and creating predictions for the future is critical because it can help us see more clearly in the present.

I think there is something necessary and life-giving in the choice to be present: in actively feeling our way through this moment together. And that is my hope for this podcast as we move through the first season. That it can provide a space for a plethora of voices, and questions, and stories: to submerge ourselves in the beautiful complexity of the spaces we call home.

New Climate Narratives is produced, edited, and hosted by Cameron Peters. Sound Design and music by Miles Shebar. Special thanks to Dr. Sarah Milton, Dr. Jeanette Wyneken, and Emily Turla, and Professor Sarah Heidt.

You can write to us at newclimatenarratives@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram @newclimatenarratives, on Twitter @ncnarratives, and on Facebook @newclimatenarrarives. As always you can be the first to know when a new episode drops by subscribing wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Resources

Recommendations by Dr. Jeanette Wyneken: