A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

The process that those community members went through was just a process of like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck right. They tried everything that they could possibly think of to stop that injection well, and the thing that worked was granting legal personhood status to the river. And when I say worked, I mean that put a temporary pause. It’s been an ongoing legal battle for the last like six or seven years.

You’re listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Matern, your host, I’ve got a great program coming up. Got Matt Podolsky on the show. Matt is a co founder of wild lens collective, which is a nonprofit video production company he’s operated since 2011 he’s also an award winning director of Sea of Shadows, which he won award an award in 2019 at Sundance. He’s also a podcaster of common land and earth to humans. Matt, great to have you on the program. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me happy to be here. Tell us a little bit about your path, of how you ended up into the environmental space and what what drew you in this direction?

Gotcha. Yeah, sure, yeah, gosh. I mean, it’s kind of a tough question to answer, to kind of trace the roots of that interest back to its origin point. I mean, I definitely spent a lot of time outdoors when I was a kid. And, you know, by the time I got to college, I, you know, I was interested in pursuing environmental science. So in in undergrad, I did both an environmental science degree and also a film degree, a degree in cinema and photography. So I had these two, these two sort of parallel interests for a long time, but it took me.

It took me a long time to sort of figure out how to combine those interests. So after I graduated college, I I, I sort of dealt, dove into the world of field biology, and did some traveling, like working seasonal field biology jobs for a number of years, and I ultimately landed in northern Arizona working for the California condor recovery program, and that that was a full time permanent job working with the condors there.

And so I was sort of in one spot for more of an extended period of time. And after working that job for about a year, I started to, I started to sort of see the pieces of a really, what I thought was a really interesting and complex story about what was going on with the California condors in that population. And it sort of it inspired me to pick up a camera again and sort of figure out how to produce a documentary about this story that was sort of unfolding in front of me. So, yeah, you know, I really didn’t know what I was doing at all when I started that first project, that first wildlife documentary, I even though I had gone to film school, everything was so different.

Like, I actually took production classes working with 16 millimeter film when I was in film school. So by the time I reached this point where I was ready to, like, pick up a camera and produce my own documentary, I had to teach myself a lot of those steps, and it took me a number of years to to get that, to finish that documentary and to get it out. And I, you know, probably made every mistake that you possibly could make on a project like that, but, but, yeah, I you know that that project was what inspired me to start the wildlands collective, which you mentioned back in 2011 and we released that first film A couple years later, in 2013 and and, yeah, I’ve been, you know, producing documentaries about wildlife and conservation Issues ever since.

Tell us a little bit about the Sea of Shadows and what drove you to produce that, and the reception that you received at Sundance based upon the film.

Sure, so Sea of Shadows, it’s a feature documentary about the world’s most endangered marine mammal species. It’s the. This small species of porpoise called the vaquito. So porpoises are related to whales and dolphins. All whales, dolphins and porpoises fall under this group called cetaceans, and the Vaquita is actually the smallest of all cetaceans. So of all whales, dolphins and porpoises. The vaquita is the smallest of all those species. It’s about five feet in length. Truly unique and fascinating species that has a very restricted range. You can they live only in the very northernmost part of the Gulf of California in Northwest Mexico.

It’s a really unique ecosystem up in the very northernmost part of the Gulf of California, the water is really shallow. It’s very warm, and the water is very, very cloudy with really dramatic tides. So it’s kind of like an island ecosystem within the larger marine ecosystem. So I started this. I first found out about the Vaquita, I guess I’ll say back in 2014 one of the members of our film collective, one of our wildlands collective members, came to me with sort of an idea for a story, wondering if I had ever heard of the Vaquita, which I hadn’t at the time. And at at that moment, in 2014 and 2015 the population estimate for the species was about 100 individuals.

And we could see the trajectory of this, of the population decline. And so, you know, we we launched a project, a documentary project, back in 2015 focused on this issue, because we just saw, like it kind of just blew our minds that there was this, this really unique species that lived, you know, like, pretty close to us, here in the US, and we had never heard of it before, So we just kind of dove in really, not knowing much detail at all about what was going on down there in Mexico or what the cause of the Vaquitas decline was. And so initially, this was a very small scale project. We were fundraising, you know, we were crowdfunding for this film, and sending really small crews down to Mexico to shoot that initial footage. And we put together, before the feature length version of Sea of Shadows came into being, we, our small team, put together a short film, half hour documentary called souls of called souls of the vermilion sea.

And we are, our plan was to sort of use this short film to raise awareness about the issue and what was going on with the Vaquita, but also to generate interest for a larger feature length film. And so this was the summer of 2017 when we had finished that short film, the half hour documentary, and we were screening it at festivals, and we were reaching out to everybody we knew in the film industry and pitching this project like crazy. And right around that same time period, in the summer, spring, summer of 2017 Leonard DiCaprio started tweeting about the Vaquita. I don’t know where his interest in this topic, this endangered species, came from in particular, but eventually he saw our film, our short film, and we got connected in with his production company, and then we got connected in with another filmmaker whose name was Richard ladkoni, who had worked with DiCaprio in the past.

And very quickly, all of these sort of puzzle pieces started to fall into place. We got our producing partner, which put up almost all of the funding to produce Sea of Shadows called Terra Mater, based in Austria, came on board as soon as DiCaprio came on board. And we we had this part of what was happening in the summer 2017 was this big group of sort of governmental entities, and also NGOs focused on conservation of the Vaquita had come together and announced that they were going to do a capture effort. They were going to go out and try to capture all the last remaining Vaquitas that were in the wild, and all of these experts had sort of, sort of put forth this idea that this was the last chance the species had to survive.

If they didn’t successfully bring them into captivity, most likely the species would go extinct, was what, that’s what, basically all the experts thought at the time. So this capture. Were provided the opportunity to capture footage of the species in a way that had never happened before. This is a very, very elusive species, and really, really difficult to get footage of it, so this would provide that opportunity, which was part of where some of that interest was coming from. But we had to pull this project together with all these partners within a very short time period, because that capture effort was taking place in the fall of 2017 so we got the funding, we got the crew, we got the partners, and we sent a pretty large film crew.

I think we had maybe eight, eight to 10 people on our crew for that first shoot in the fall of 2017 when we were following and documenting the Vaquita capture effort. So, yeah, it’s, you know, the a lot of really dramatic things happen during the capture effort, the capture effort. I, you know, maybe this is a spoiler alert. I mean, I feel like the film has been out for long enough that I can say that the capture effort failed in dramatic fashion, and we were there to document exactly how it went down. And so that was one side of sort of, you know, what led to, I think, a really dramatic film. The other side of this story that we tell in sea of Shadows is is we delve into the cause of the Vaquitas decline. And it turns out that the cause of the Vaquitas decline was and still is bycatch from a fishery that is illegal. So there is a species of fish that is also only found in the northern part of the Gulf California, called the tituaba.

It’s about the same size as the Vaquita, so it’s a pretty large fish that can, you know, grow to five to six feet in length, and it’s considered endangered. But there is a market for the large swim bladders of these fish in parts of China and Southeast Asia. So in in this part of the world, and again in China and Southeast Asia, there are areas where these large toaba swim bladders are worth 10s of 1000s of dollars. So even though this is an illegal fishery, it’s a very lucrative fishery. And over the course of the past 20 years or so, the Mexican drug cartels have basically taken over this small town of San Felipe where the tewaba fishery is sort of most focused.

This is also the town closest to the epicenter of the Vaquitas range. So this overlap between the range of the toaba this fish and the range of the Vaquita is very unfortunate. They the fishermen these, they go out and set these really, really long gill nets. Some of these nets are almost a kilometer in length out in the ocean, and they just let them drift for for hours or days. And they’re not just they’re not only catching to tuava, they’re also catching an entangling vaquita. When the Vaquita get entangled in the net, they can’t come up to the surface, so they drown. But this whole, this whole issue, this whole conservation issue surrounding the Vaquita is basically driven by this illegal fishery for the tuaba and this illegal market for their swim bladders on the other side of the planet.

So, you know, it’s, it was a really dramatic story. We, uh, story we we had basically an eight month period of really intensive shooting where I was spending a lot of my time down in Mexico and and, yeah, you know, we pulled this film together in time to submit it to Sundance in 2019 and the reception was the reception was amazing. I mean, we, you know, we had a sold out premier at Sundance, a whole bunch of screenings over the course of the festival, and we won the Audience Award at Sundance, which was really amazing. We sold, thanks. So we sold the film to National Geographic documentary films during Sundance. So, so National Geographic is our distributor, and you know, you can watch the film on Disney plus.

Well, it’s an amazing story. And, like I said, amazing work by you guys to pull that all together. It’s interesting. I interviewed Terry tamaman, who was who I think led Dean Leonardo. Caprios nonprofit for a period of years. And Terry was also Arnold Schwarzenegger’s EPA California EPA chief in Schwarzenegger’s first term, and I think maybe part of his second term. So and he now currently runs Alta Sea, which is here in Los Angeles, and runs out of the Port of LA, an organization that kind of focuses on the blue economy. So your your web of contacts over, over, you know, connects with some of the people that we’ve talked to, I’m curious as to whether the that dikito has survived the attempts to or whether the attempt to protect it ended up killing it off ironically, or how did that play out?

No, so that’s a great question. So, so back in 2019 when we were releasing Sea of Shadows, and I was, you know, myself and a number of the other members of our team and our characters feature in the film, were traveling around and attending screenings and going to Q and A sessions and answering questions that people had after watching the film. And you know, back back then, back in 2019 the population estimate was about 30 individuals. And one of those, you know, one of one, vaquita, had been killed as a part of the capture effort. One of the they captured two individuals, and one of them died in captivity, and that was what prompted them to shut the capture effort down. I you know, I guess so. I got this question all the time, of like, Is there hope for the species?

Can the Vaquita survive this extinction crisis? And at the time, you know, again, this was six years ago, I could, I, I was struggling to find hope, right? It was, it was a challenge for me to imagine a path forward for the species. And if you had asked me back then where the species would be in 2025 I would have said, extinct, almost certainly extinct. But they’re not extinct. They’re not there’s probably only 10 to 15 individuals in the entire world right now, but that minuscule population of 10 to 15 individuals is continuing to breed each year. So the scientists who go down there to survey the population each year, they’re seeing calves every year.

And you know, like, somehow, somehow this species plummet, absolutely plummeted, you know, they went from 1000 individuals to 30 in a few decades, right? And then they reached, you know, this population level of about 10 to 15 individuals, and the population plateaued. Nobody knows for sure, like why that has happened or what’s going on, but I could share a few of my ideas. And I think one of the most meaningful things that happened, this was happening. This started to happen while we were filming the documentary. And it continued and got more intensive of an effort after we finished filming.

And this was a campaign to remove what they call ghost nets all throughout the northern part of the Gulf of California, within the Vaquitas range. And so what happens with these nets? You know, these nets that are set for tutuava, or sometimes for other species of fish, they get set out somewhere, you know, way out in the Gulf, and then, because this is an illegal fishery like sometimes the fishermen don’t come back right?

Sometimes they get caught or intercepted by the authorities, and they’re not able to go back out and collect that net, or maybe they can’t find the net, right? Some of these fishermen, again, because it’s an illegal fishery, they come up with creative ways to mark the spot where the net is, because sometimes they don’t want to use buoys, because then their net, which again, is illegal, might be identified by the authorities.

So it’s just, I, you know, pretty common for nets to get abandoned out there in the Gulf. And these, you know, like, just because a net has been abandoned by the fishermen doesn’t mean it stops catching and entangling wildlife. So these ghost nets were a big problem. And. There was this big campaign that was led by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, along with a couple of Mexican organizations, including this group called Museo de la Museo de la Baena.

And they just, they, they just took their boats and just did transects all throughout the northern part of the Gulf of California, within the range of the Vaquita, dragging these hooks that would pull up any nets that were left deep under the water. And they removed many, many, many nets. And I think without that effort, I would guess the species would be extinct right now.

Well, that’s amazing work, on behalf of all those people involved, to to pull out those nets, and we’ve certainly heard with other guests how these nets have decimated fisheries throughout the planet. We’ve had Captain Paul Watson, who formerly, I think he started Sea Shepherd until he kind of got ousted in a coup and started his own organization. But he has talked about the problems with these huge nets that go sometimes, I think, out in the open ocean, like 100 miles, or something insane like that.

Yeah, for sure, yeah, I had a chance to meet Paul Watson at one of our screenings. He’s a really interesting guy. You know, he wasn’t, he wasn’t featured in the film, but at the time that we were filming, he was still, he was still with Sea Shepherd. He had not been ousted at that time yet. So, yeah, really, really interesting guy.

So tell us about the work that you’re doing now. You’ve done a bunch of other short films, bluebird bands, the scavenger hunt, as well as your podcast, common land. Tell us about those efforts and and how those have played.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I mean, since, since we released Sea of Shadows back in 2019 I’ve been working on on a handful of other film projects and podcast projects. I produced a short documentary called hell bent that’s about the hell Bender salamander, which is North America’s largest salamander and rights of nature. That film is focused on this community, in this community in rural Pennsylvania, that granted legal personhood status to their river because it contained Hellbenders.

So that’s a great film that is out there and available for folks to watch on YouTube. It’s called hell bent. I am also producing a feature length documentary about bats and white nose syndrome that’s called the invisible mammal. We premiered that film in California at a festival called Docklands Documentary Film Festival back in the spring. We’ve got these two podcast series that we produce here at the wildlands collective. One of them is called Earth humans, which is a long running environmental interview series, you know, not that dissimilar to this show, but you know, not exclusively focused on climate change, sort of more broadly on environmental topics.

And then we have our series called common land. And common land is more of a documentary style series, and each season of the show, we is focused on one particular protected area, like a national park or a conservation area, and we sort of do a deep dive into the origin story of that particular patch of protected land. And so this season of the show is all about the Appalachian Trail. And so I threw like the Appalachian Trail with my mom a couple years ago, and took all my audio gear with me and sort of documented the journey.

And then since I finished the trip, I’ve been going back and recording interviews with sort of folks that are experts on the history of the trail, but also experts on like conservation topics that are relevant to the trail, and also just kind of treating the Appalachian Trail as an as A National Park, because, you know, the the the trail is a part of the the National Scenic Trails system. It is technically a very long, skinny National Park.

Well, that’s kind of a fascinating topic. I think those areas are, you know. Areas that the people certainly appreciate the wildlife and are very much connected to it, yet they have voted very much in favor of Donald Trump, which, generally speaking, hasn’t been the biggest proponent of environmental policy. So it’s kind of an interesting connection there. And I’m curious as to what your takeaways have been regarding that and kind of a connection to the other work that you had done.

You were saying, in rural Pennsylvania, they had designated a river with legal personhood status, which, on my understanding, rural Pennsylvania is pretty conservative as well, and that’s a pretty avant garde idea to give a river or Mountain or some, some natural contours personhood status, which those who are not in the legal community may not recognize what value that has to the environmental movement. If those rivers and streams had personhood status, they would have status to say, No, it’s not okay to pollute and damage the watershed. So I realized that it’s a lot of question to ask, but there you go.

I mean, I think these folks in Pennsylvania, this community that we feature in the documentary hell bent that you mentioned. I mean, these, these community members, they didn’t start out thinking like, oh yeah, we’re gonna find some obscure legal theory that, because we want our we want to think of our river as a as a fellow sentient being. Like, that’s not the story that we tell in the film, right? Like, what? What happened was, these folks who lived in this community in Pennsylvania, their drinking water was being threatened by an injection well, right? And so there was an oil company that you know, wanted to, that wanted to dump fracking wastewater into an old abandoned fracking well, right?

So they’re like, Oh, hey, you’ve got an old abandoned well here, like this looks like a great spot for us to just dump our wastewater full of contaminants that we aren’t even like required to disclose what they all are to the community. And so the process that that those community members went through was just a process of like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck right. They tried everything that they could possibly think of to stop that injection well. And the thing that worked was granting legal personhood status to the river. And when I say worked, I mean that initially, like that put a temporary pause on the injection well, dumping the wastewater in the injection well.

And there’s still, currently, it’s been an ongoing legal battle for the last, like, six or seven years, right? And there’s, they’re still in that legal battle. And, you know, every once in a while, there’s, you know, there’s, there’s been positive and negative sort of legal determinations on that, but the injection, well, has still not gone in. So we see that as a win. I think there’s, like, I don’t know. I mean, I definitely had, you know, for me hiking the Appalachian Trail.

I mean, I grew up in the northeast, so, you know, like rural parts of like Massachusetts and Vermont and Maine are, it’s not the same, right as rural parts, like rural areas in other parts of the country, but the rural south is, is different, right and and hiking the Appalachian Trail was the first time I’d ever spent any significant amount of time in the south, certainly in these rural areas that the trail passes through. And I did, you know, I didn’t really know what to expect, having never been to that part of the country. And to be honest, like the number one thing that I noticed is that, like, people are a lot friendlier they are in the Northeast.

And I think part of it is like, when you’re on the Appalachian Trail, even when you’re in the south, you’re still in this a little bit of a bubble, right? And the Appalachian Trail is, is like. All up and down the trail is sort of buffered by this, like community of people that are connected to the trail in some way, even if they’re not folks that regularly go out and hike on the trail. There’s enough people. It draws enough people to to those areas that there’s, like, all of these towns adjacent to the trail have, like, uh, like their local economies are intertwined with the Appalachian Trail.

So, like, you know, you get to some tiny, little town that’s a regular stopover spot for folks that you know, Appalachian Trail through hikers. And maybe that’s also a spot where, like, you know, day hikers will travel to as, like a jumping off point to do some hikes on the Appalachian Trail, or other trails that are, you know, interconnected to that system of trails. And there’s all these, you know, shops and, like, amenities that are geared towards the hiking community, you know. So, like, you know, there were definitely moments, you know, in my in in my podcast, you know, there’s like, a point where I sort of talk a little bit about some of the moments where I didn’t feel super comfortable, right?

And but they were really small, subtle things, right? Like, every time I walked into a convenience store, I would notice the little souvenir Confederate flags for sale at the register. And you don’t like, that’s not like it was, I didn’t experience anything direct, directly negative. But I, you know, you see things like that that are sort of a reminder that, like, Oh, I’m a little outside of my comfort zone, you know. So, yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I there’s, you know, there’s definitely, like, folks that are on the Appalachian Trail, there’s, there’s a little bit of, like, a stigma against talking politics when you’re on the trail.

But that’s not like I, I talked politics with a number of folks that I met on the trail, right, and had some really interesting political conversations with folks that you know were from very different backgrounds. And I, I feel like, like the setting of the trail actually does, to an extent, kind of provide a safe space to like, have those kinds of conversations that I think are really important.

Yeah, that’s an interesting point of just having this kind of envelope to have this conversation in, in the woods or adjacent to it is, is kind of a space where tensions are reduced, and everybody can agree that the woods are amazing and the mountains and should be protected to at least some extent, because it is a place that draws everybody to them.

I kind of want to go back to the legal personhood status of the river, because it raises a really interesting questions, if small towns can do this and it doesn’t immediately get quashed by kind of federalism, and the fact that, you know, the federal government can claim, hey, they’ve, They’ve preempt any regulation of the environment because of the, you know, their status as the as the sovereign, then that actually may allow local communities to protect their environment more effectively, given that The Trump administration doesn’t seem too concerned about companies polluting the environment,

Yeah, for sure. I mean, there’s a lot of really interesting examples.

I realize you’re not an attorney, but I’m going to have you weigh in, since you seem to be in.

Sure, yeah, of course. And yeah, I mean, I guess I’ll say that there, there. There are a lot of really interesting examples from all around the world of folks taking this approach of granting legal personhood status to to waterways or to national parks and other protected areas. And there’s some great success stories. Most of those success stories are not from the United States. And I think again, yeah, as you said, I’m not an attorney, but I think it. More challenging to do within the confines of the US legal system than it is in other areas.

I think, I mean, I know that the story that we tell in the film hellbent, that they, these folks that we feature in the film, were able to, they were able to grant legal personhood status to their river through a sort of loophole that they found in the Pennsylvania constitution. So the Pennsylvania Constitution allows these types of actions. I mean, it allows certain types of communities to develop what they call the Home Rule charter.

So it’s basically like they could the town, the township itself found a pathway to basically write their write their own mini constitution, right? But that’s not a pathway that’s open to like anybody who lives anywhere in the United States. Unfortunately, it’s sort of a product of like the legal framework specifically in Pennsylvania. And I’m not sure if anybody’s tried doing something similar in any other states, or if there are similar sort of legal pathways to get to that point in other states.

I mean, I know that in the state of Florida, there was a ballot proposition that passed that granted legal, legal personhood status to all of the waterways. I want to say it was Orange County, Florida, and the role, like, like, the implications of that, I think we’re still trying to figure out what that I think folks are still trying to figure out what that means, right? And, you know, with with what happens in Pennsylvania and what we featured, the story we featured in hellbent, it’s like there was a very specific mission, like we’re putting this language in our home rule charter specifically to stop this injection well. And like I said, it it, it did temporary.

It did put a block on what was happening with the injection well. But I mean this, these, you know, administrators and leaders in this tiny, little rural community in Pennsylvania, of like, less than 1000 people are feeling the full weight of the federal legal system, and have been for, you know, many years, right? So it’s, it’s like, on the one hand, like, yes, they stopped the injection, well, through this novel pathway, but on the other hand, it’s like they’ve been fighting an eight year legal battle and it’s not over.

Well, the fact that they’re in the game at all after eight years, to me, is a win, and definitely a David versus Goliath story and and heartening to hear that they’re fending off these oil companies from injecting pollutants into their water. And any way that you can fend that off is a win. So I wanted to kind of turn to your latest documentary, The bats the invisible mammal, and tell us a bit about what drew you to that story, and what kind of what’s the story that you’re telling with the documentary?

Sure, absolutely. So yeah, the invisible mammal is, again, I’m producing the film. And just similar to the Vaquita story that I was telling you about, this is a project that one of our members in the wildlands collective, because we the wildlands Collective is a nonprofit media production company, as you mentioned up at the front, and we’ve got about 50 members spread out all around the globe and all of our you know, all of our members are folks that are deeply passionate, conservation focused storytellers, and so we have a pathway for our members to pitch stories to our leadership team and stories that we think have a lot of potential To be really impactful. Will jump on board and CO produce those projects.

And so that’s how the invisible mammal came into being as well. One of our members and and the director of the film, Kristin tiesh, came to me with this story, idea of producing a feature doc about. About bat conservation, but specifically focused on white nose syndrome. So White Nose Syndrome is a fungal infection that was introduced to North America around 2006 It was first identified in a cave in upstate New York. So this is a fungal infection that you know, sort of CO evolved with bats in the old world, in Europe and Asia, and so it doesn’t affect them in the same way.

But once it was introduced to North America, it started it caused a catastrophic decline of bat populations. And so the disease specifically impacts hibernating bats. And when bats go into hibernation in the winter, this fungus kind of takes over their body and and it it causes them to wake up before the winter is over. And so all these bats start waking up, but it’s cold and there’s no food available, and so they die. And so this has caused, like a cataclysmic wave of bat declines. So like bat populations all across the eastern part of North America have crashed like 90 to 95% declines throughout all of the eastern part of the continent for hibernating bat populations. So it’s a big deal.

The disease is has been spreading west across the continent. You know, since around 2006 it has so white nose syndrome has been identified in, I guess I should say the disease that causes white nose syndrome, because white nose syndrome is like, what we say is the like, the expression of the disease, like, symptomatically, but the the actual disease itself, which has like a long scientific name, has been identified on the West Coast, in in in Oregon and California and in Idaho, where I live, but they haven’t actually seen symptomatic bats yet, but we know that’s coming within the next couple of years, because the disease has been identified through testing.

So it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a huge concern. We you know, there’s a lot of folks working on trying to slow down the spread of the disease and mitigate the effects of the disease for populations that haven’t yet been exposed. But there is a certain amount of inevitability to this. There really is no way to stop the spread of white nose. It will inevitably reach every bat on the continent. It’s just a matter of when and how severe the impact will be. So we decided to focus our film, the story in our film on a group of researchers that are trying to figure out how to help bat populations recover after these catastrophic 90 to 95% declines.

And so we’re focused on this team of researchers from Bat Conservation International, led by this amazing scientist, whose name is Dr Winifred Frick. And they developed this strategy, basically they, you know, learned through some research that, you know, they’re basically trying to figure out like that 10, five to 10% of bats that survive, like why do they survive? What is it about those bats that allows them to survive the winter, even if they live in an area infected with white nose syndrome? And one of the key answers is, is how fat these bats are before they go into hibernation.

So the fatter the bat is when it starts hibernation, the more likely it is to survive. And so this Dr Frick and her team developed this theory that maybe they could set up light lures at the entrances to hibernation caves in the fall, just before hibernation, and also in the spring, when bats are first coming out from hibernation that would attract insects to that immediate area and allow them to fatten up more quickly. And so that’s the research project that we followed in the film. And we sort of track this, this research project, as it goes. And covid happens right in the middle of it.

So there’s kind of like a big, oh my gosh, what do we do? Because we’re not allowed to handle bats. This sort of happens in the middle, and we see the team sort of figure out how to deal with that problem and get past it. And you know, see the results that some hope for, results that they get from. The research, and then we sort of have like a, like a secondary story that we follow in the film focused on a bat rehabber. So we see, like one individual bat get rescued from from a parking garage, actually, and then get sort of like rehabbed, and reach a point where that bat can be released back into the wild. So we see this kind of this, this journey that this one individual bat has to getting back out into the wild.

So what are the consequences? It seems like this throws off so many things, because the bats are voracious insect eaters. What? What happens when the bat is no longer there to do that, and we’re talking about all bat species, species in North America, or just certain ones. And so,

Yeah, yeah. Great questions. I mean, so first I’ll say that this white nose syndrome affects all hibernating bat species. So not all bats hibernate, some bats migrate. So there are species of bats. The Mexican free tailed bat is a great example. The Mexican free tailed bat migrates to South America during the winter instead of hibernating. So Mexican free tail bats are not those populations are not going to get wiped out, and they’re not going to face those really catastrophic declines like hibernating bat species have been. However, there is a concern that the Mexican free tail bats, these migrating bats could spread the disease from one cave to another.

So even though they’re not going to die from white nose syndrome, they could spread white nose syndrome from one cave to another cave where there are hibernating bats that could die from the disease. And your question about you know, the effects is a really important one, and that’s something that, you know, we were focused on a lot in the film, because, I don’t know, you know, it’s like, it’s bats are invisible to a lot of people, I think. And that’s, you know, why we sort of chose that title for our film. People don’t see bats, and so they’re not necessarily aware of the benefits that bat populations provide to society, until you remove those bats, right? And so what we’ve seen, there’s a number, a couple of really important societal consequences that I’ll mention to these catastrophic bat declines.

One is for agriculture. So bats are really, really important pest control for agriculture. And you know, we in the film, in the invisible mammal, one of one of our minor characters is a rice farmer, and he farms a large area of rice outside Sacramento, right alongside a very large population of bats. So the Yolo causeway is this, you know, long bridge that, you know, connects Sacramento to Davis, and there’s this huge floodplain underneath the causeway.

And that huge area of that floodplain is is planted and farmed for rice, and this farmer talks about how his colleagues who farm rice and all these other parts of California and other parts of the West, he talks about how much money they have to spend on pest control, but because there’s this really large population of bats that roost Under the causeway, he has never had to treat for these.

These army worms are like the biggest problem for rice farmers in that area. And he’s never had to treat in all the decades that he’s been farming that area, farming that area, area for rice. So I mean bats. Bats are worth billions of dollars to the agriculture industry, and there absolutely have been very significant effects for farmers where VAT populations have declined catastrophically. But it’s not just about the money, it’s also about human health.

And so another one of the characters who we feature in the invisible mammal is a researcher whose name is Isle Frank, and he published a paper pretty recently where he shows that as bat populations declined due to. White Nose Syndrome, farmers were forced to use significantly higher levels of pesticides, and he shows a connection between that increased pesticide use, which is happening because of the loss of bats. He showed a connection to that increased pesticide use to infant mortality, so we lose bats and infant mortality, human infant mortality rates increase.

That is really shocking. And you know, one of the reasons why extinction makes a difference to all of us, and sometimes I think we humans, think we can do without a certain species. It’s not going to affect us. But the reality is, we’re all interconnected, and you take one piece of the puzzle out, it affects so many other pieces adversely.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Well, tell us a little bit about you know, what you’re looking at doing in the future, and where people who are listening in could can support the stuff that you’re doing. I would imagine they can check out the podcast common land or earth humans, or check out the wild lens collective and donate to to the wild lens collective. And follow all those things on social media and support you. Anything else that you know they can do to support the work that you’re doing,

I think you’ve covered the bases. Yeah, I think you’ve covered the bases there. Yeah, the Wild Lens Collective, we are 501, c3, nonprofit. So we are, you know, almost everything we do comes from individual donations. That’s how we fund all our film projects. It’s how we fund our podcast work. So yeah, our website is wild lens, I n c.org, wild lens inc.org, and yeah, you can find out more about our projects there. And there’s a Donate button that you can click to give us some support.

You can search for a common land in any anywhere where you find podcasts, or you can go to common land podcast.com to check out those episodes. And then, yeah, we’re hosting screenings of the invisible mammal, our bat film. If you want that film to come screen at a place near where you live, you can send us a message. You can check out, I mean, you can find those resources on our website for wild lens, for the wild lens collective, but you can also go to the invisible mammal.com and there’s a button there that you can click to indicate that you’re interested in hosting a screening or bringing the film to your community, and if you fill out that form, that one of us will reach out and, you know, have a conversation about how we could organize a screening near you.

Well, that’s great. Well, thank you, Matt, so much for being on the show and pleasure, you know, getting to meet you and hear about all the great work that you’re doing and fascinating stuff that I had never heard about, like the vaquito down in the Gulf of California, which is not too far from where I live, or, you know, the bats all over the world.

You know, so important work telling these stories and and letting us all know the impacts of these policies and and and and what we can do to help help save them and protect the environment. So kudos to you for this great work that you’re doing. Thanks.

Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity to come on the show and share a little bit about the work that we do. Yeah, it’s been a great conversation.

To learn more about our work at a conference, A Climate Change, and how you can help us reach our goal planting 30,000 trees in the Amazon this year. Visit aclimatechange.com, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. See you next time.