ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
NPR science correspondent Nate Rott has a unique beat. As it says on our website, he covers, quote, "the natural world and humanity's relationship to it." Many people hear that and they immediately think he's a climate correspondent.
NATE ROTT, BYLINE: If we did a Venn diagram of, like, climate change and, like, biodiversity, the natural world, like, there's a lot of crossover, right?
FLORIDO: That's Nate explaining his beat to me.
ROTT: Like, you can't solve climate change without solving biodiversity, the loss of nature and vice versa. So I think that there's, like, less coverage of biodiversity.
FLORIDO: Nate often reports on how scientists and others are working to save species on the brink of extinction.
ROTT: I've really tried to carve out a role kind of more - yeah - looking at our relationship with nature and how that affects climate and how that affects creepy crawlies and charismatic megafauna and, you know, all the animals that we, you know, share this world with.
FLORIDO: What does this reporting look like on the ground? It means spending a lot of time in nature. So when we sat down for this week's Reporter's Notebook, I asked Nate if he ever had second thoughts about exposing himself to the elements far from the comforts of home.
ROTT: I mean, listen, the only time I've been like - why am I here? - was, like, covering permafrost loss in Alaska, where there was, like, so many mosquitoes that I couldn't take a breath without, like, ingesting, you know, like, a quarter-pound of them. But no, like, I love being out there, and I think that journalism is so much stronger and better when we take a person to a place and we can show them in real time what's happening in that place. You know, if I have to sleep in a tent for a couple of days to do it, heck yeah. Cool. Let's do it.
FLORIDO: You did this story about this scientist who created a tool to listen to sounds in a river. And the sound in that story was so good because you never think about how - why a scientist would want to cut through the river sounds to hear what's actually the sounds that little creatures are making in a streaming river. Can - tell us about that.
ROTT: Yeah, I mean, like, look, I - the coolest part about covering nature and covering - as an audio reporter chiefly - I mean, we have to do it all, as you well know, Adrian. But, like...
FLORIDO: Right.
ROTT: In the medium of radio, like, there is an opportunity to kind of let nature tell the story for you. And, like, in that specific story, like, yeah, like, I think all of us know that, like, pleasing, soothing sound of a river just kind of rolling by, right? And maybe, you know, you've jumped in a river, you've, you know, stuck your head in a bathtub. You know what it sounds like underwater.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER TRICKLING)
ROTT: For me, I didn't know fish make sounds. Like, I had no idea. And I love fishing. Like, I love fish, but I had no idea. And so yeah, this scientist is like, hey, you know, we need to find better ways to kind of, like, monitor the health of our ecosystems. We need to do a better job of understanding when a river is in trouble, and maybe a good way of doing that is by just doing acoustic monitoring. So if we could put something under the water that can kind of record the natural sound, and then we can kind of piecemeal out - like, they were using AI, essentially, to be able to essentially, like, figure out what are distinct sounds in there and then isolate them. So if you put something under the water and it's recording for 48 hours, you don't have to listen to 48 hours of audio.
(SOUNDBITE OF RIVER ANIMALS CHITTERING)
ROTT: And so they're able to pick up those sounds, and they can say, like, hey, we used to hear this thing a lot, and now we're not hearing it. Why? And they can send a biologist out there to figure it out. And so yeah, I just think the medium of radio is a really cool way to do it. Like, I'll give you one other example.
Like, a few years ago, I did a story about the drought in Lake Powell and how, like, Lake Powell was essentially down to this level where some people were advocating, like, let's get rid of the dam. Let's just, like, return it to its natural state. And there's a question of kind of, like, can this place recover after it's been inundated with water for decades.
And so we, like, walked up this draw to do that. And, you know, I purposely tried to get sound of, like, OK, we're down right next to the reservoir, so we're walking, and it's like, soupy. You can hear us, like, walking in the water. And then as we move up a little bit, it gets a little brushy, and so we're, like, walking through this tangled brush, and you can hear that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
ROTT: Before the drought, this whole area was underwater. A white bathtub ring stains the rock more than 100 feet overhead.
And then you'd get up further up, and then you'd hear, like, birds, and it's a little more open. So it's like, this place has already kind of returned to what it used to be, and I can show you that in sound as we're doing it, which I just think is a super cool way to bring people with us as we're trying to kind of figure out these things in our reporting.
FLORIDO: A lot of the people that you are talking to are driven by, like, an innate curiosity, but just, like, a passion to figure out problems to the - to sort of help the natural world overcome the problems that we as humans are basically subjecting it to.
ROTT: Yeah, I mean, I think it's so cool to, like - I get to - the coolest part about my job by far, Adrian, is, like, I get to talk to people who are, like, a billion times smarter than me. And I - you know, the challenge is, I sometimes have to get them to, like, make something - make this incredible tool that they're working on, like, understandable to somebody like me - right? - like, a member of the public, essentially. And - but yeah, there's, like, so many passionate people that are driven to try to - yeah - fix these problems that, in many cases, we've created. And they're coming up with really cool ways of doing it. They're trying to solve kind of today's problems in real time.
FLORIDO: You did the story about the technology that, like, now exists for scientists to genetically modify species - animals and plants - to make them more resilient to climate change, and the debate between scientists as to whether we should be doing this. Can you tell us a little bit about that debate?
ROTT: Yeah, I mean, that really gets at kind of the heart of a lot of the reporting I've been trying to do in this role, which is, like - there is a - there are some really thorny ethical questions that I think a lot of the scientific community - and frankly, like, the government community and the NGO community and the business community and just humanity at large - kind of need to wrestle with, and in some cases are, which is, like, how active do we want to be in preserving the natural world as we know it?
FLORIDO: Nate, we're under a federal administration right now that has been very vocally not very friendly to environmental concerns. And I wonder if that has made it harder for you to do your job - to speak with government experts on the environment, to get access to people you need access to help your - to help make sense of what's going on around us in the natural world.
ROTT: I've been covering the environment, like, not as a full-time beat, but, you know, here and there for, you know, almost 15 years. And over that period of time, it has been harder and harder and harder to get permission to talk to federal scientists. Like, any request I put in to the biologist working on something, it has to go through D.C., and it has to get approved, and that's just gotten more cumbersome over time.
Like, the last story I did, I really wanted to talk to these federal researchers because they've worked on - a lot of - they've done a lot of work to try to protect this really rare salamander that lives in the Southeast U.S. And all I got was, like, email responses to a question, and nobody was available to talk.
So, you know, I think that's definitely - it's definitely gotten harder. I mean, I definitely hear from scientists who I'm talking to that there's, like - you know, a lot of the funding for science has been cut. A lot of funding to universities, you know, academic institutions that do this work, a lot of funding to federal agencies that do this work, has been cut in the last, you know, year and a half. And so yeah, I think there's, you know - people are more cautious about their - what they're willing to say, I think, at times.
And I think there's just - yeah - a real concern that, like, you know - we're the kind of scientific leader. We've been the scientific leader in the world for a really long time, and I think there's a lot of concern that we are sort of handing that off. And yeah, and given the kind of - you know, the things that we've been talking about, just the scale of the change that the world is seeing and a lot of the challenges that we're facing, like, now isn't the time to be pulling back, is what I hear from a lot of scientists. And so there's a lot of concern.
FLORIDO: I've been speaking with NPR correspondent Nate Rott, who reports on humans' relationship with the natural world. Nate, thanks.
ROTT: Hey, Adrian, it's awesome talking to you, man.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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