206: Does Anyone Care About Saving Fossil Creek? Learn How Your Writing Can Build Trust

Allison Langer  0:03  
I'm Andrea askowitz and I'm Alison Langer, and this is writing class radio. You'll hear true personal stories and learn how to write your own stories together, we produce this podcast, which is equal parts heart and art. By heart we mean the truth in a story, and by art, we mean the craft of writing no matter what's going on in our lives. Writing class is where we tell the truth. It's where we work out our shit. There's no place in the world like writing class, and we want to bring you

Andrea Askowitz  0:33  
in today. We bring you another story told live on stage at the Flagstaff festival of science in September 2024 this story is by Dr Jane marks. So three years ago, we were hired by Dr Jane marks and Dr Bruce Hungate, two famous ecologists from the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University. So they heard our podcast, and they were like, Ah, this is cool. Podcast is so good. Hey, I want to take classes with these lovely women. And so they started taking classes. And then they were like, Wait, these classes are so good. We should get our students to take these classes. So in the last three years, we've gone back and forth and done classes with them, with their scientists, and we are at this kind of troop that performs at the Flagstaff festival of science. We're in the midst of our third year right now. It's awesome. I've learned so many things because these scientists are brilliant, and they have opened up their hearts and shared of themselves in a way that made me interested in science.

Allison Langer  1:47  
Well, that's the whole point. The whole point was to have them tell their story in a way that people cared about climate change and believe them. Because people are like, maybe what they're saying is not true. Why do I need to not conserve or whatever? But once you hear their stories and evidence that they have seen and the changes over the many years, you can't distrust them. That's so

Andrea Askowitz  2:13  
true, and their like personal, passionate connection to these topics. So today we have Dr Jane marks, and her story is called Saving Fossil Creek. We'll be back with Jane story after the break.

Allison Langer  2:30  
We're back. I'm

Allison Langer, and this is writing class radio. Jane blew us off. She was supposed to be here busy. We have her story recorded anyway, from the, you know, the festival last year. So we're going to let you hear the live recording of Jane's story and and then we're going to hang out and discuss it.

Jane Marks (Narrator)  3:02  
You My story is I'm usually the shortest person in the room. I first fell in love with Fossil Creek about 25 years ago. I just moved to Flagstaff and was a started a position in the biology department, and I needed a study site. I'd heard that a bunch of environmental groups were lobbying APS, our largest utility company, to take down a hydropower dam. I was intrigued. So one Saturday, my husband, Bruce and I went to check it out. We're in Arizona. New to Arizona, hiking through the desert. It's dry, it's hot, there's pinions and junipers. I'm looking at the map, and there's no sign of a river. I tried to hand the map to Bruce, and said, Where's the river? And he said, Jane, you're the stream ecologist, and you know, I can't read a map, so we kept hiking, and sure enough, out of nowhere, water gushed out of the ground, forming a big, wide river with beautiful turquoise water, deep pools, steep waterfalls, white caps, and suddenly the temperature dropped many degrees of a school. The vegetation was lush, and we kept hiking another 20 minutes or so, and then we hit the large concrete barrier in the river, the hydropower dam, where most of the water of Fossil Creek was diverted for hydropower production. Below the dam, the water was just a trickle and the river was muddy. I'm not an Earth firster, but I have to confess that I have a four. Folder on my desktop of pictures of dams blowing up. We've destroyed so many of our rivers by building dams and diverting water. So I stood on the bank seeing a beautiful river upstream and a damaged river downstream, and saw so much potential and wanted Fossil Creek to be my study site, so I joined a coalition of groups working to restore Fossil Creek, and we went monthly for about three years. What was amazing was it was groups of people that normally fight and hate each other were working together. There were tensions. The environmentalists wanted to turn the area into wilderness area, remove all the infrastructure, the roads, no ATVs. Then forest managers, the government agencies, wanted to make it a multi use area with cattle grazing ATVs, high use, recreation, maybe even groundwater extraction. But everybody was willing to compromise, everybody except one person, Robin, silver Robin. He was an Earth firster. He was with the Center for biodiversity, the most radical groups I rarely weighed in my role was as a scientist. My goal was to study, can we turn a sick River into a healthy river? Even as a graduate student, I was warned by my advisors that if I was perceived too much of this environmentalist, I wouldn't be treated seriously as a scientist, and tenure was on the line. I did speak up once the Arizona Historical Society was lobbying to preserve some of the really cool old buildings that were part of the the the utility companies hydropower production and turn it into a museum and a visitor center. And I sided with them and said, Well, maybe we could turn one of the buildings into a research station. And Robin bulldozed me. He was wearing he would come to these meetings dressed in a really clean cut way, with a military haircut, super serious. And as I put forward my idea, he said, Jane, we don't need more science. We need more activism. What an asshole, I thought. But I wasn't up for the fight. I really saw my role as trying to collaborate and work with everybody and not speak up. Restoring rivers takes a surprising amount of destruction, things you would expect, like blowing up the dam or dismantling buildings, but the worst for me was removing the non native fish, poisoning the river the literally the chemotherapy of river restoration. But one of the challenges is that in Fossil Creek, there were both native fish and non native fish. So in the weeks before the poisoning, our team went in and captured as many native fish as we could, and we would do this with big nets or minnow traps, and would look at the fish and would put the native fish in barrels and the non native fish back in the river to ultimately be killed, but the native fish in the barrels were taken by helicopter out of the valley to Safe Place the ride of their life while the river was being poisoned, and Then dozens of government employees dressed in our Army, Army gear and steel toe boots, carrying backpacks filled with poison that they were spraying. The River, it was like a combat zone, and within hours, there were dead fish everywhere, dead fish floating in the water, dead fish on the banks, dead fish tangled in the vegetation. And I was there with my group to study the aquatic insects to see if they would also be damaged. And we're in there with these things we call drift nets, capturing them. And I've got four bandanas around my nose, and I feel nauseous and sad for all the dead fish and wonder if what we were doing was wrong. They let the chemical flush through the river, and then loaded the fish back into their barrels, back onto the helicopter, back into the site, and we released the native fish to. And as we watched them swim away, we cheered. It took a few years, but eventually they got Robin, mostly got his way, and they removed that. They blew up the dam. They removed all the buildings, the bridges, and the river was gorgeous. Everything worked. The native fish came back. The insects recovered from the poison, birds, tadpoles, everything. It was beautiful. In the media ate it up. We recovered. In every local, regional newspaper, even the Wall Street Journal, and with some colleagues, we wrote a grant to the National Science Foundation to produce a documentary called a river reborn that Ted Danson narrated. I got tenure, and I felt like a science celebrity. And then people came to see the river, and more and more people came to see the river, and the forest service wasn't putting the resources into managing the visitors. They didn't have porta potties, they didn't have sufficient trash cans, they didn't have clearly marked trails, so all the groups that had worked on the restoration kept meeting and trying to convince the Forest Service to manage visitation, and they said they didn't have the resources that they were doing their best. And I was still in my polite mode and tried to work with the Forest Service, and they kept not doing what they needed to do, and people kept coming to see the river, and more and more people kept coming to see the river. And then one day, I was down there with my graduate students sampling, and there was trash everywhere. All of the bins were overflowing, the vegetation was trampled. All the signs were riddled with bullet holes. There was feces and toilet paper on the banks of the river. And when we were trying to drive out as the sun was setting, a drive that should normally take about 20 minutes on this dirt road, took two and a half hours because there was gridlock down in the Fossil Creek Valley, and we could hear done gunshots as the sun was setting, and I felt horrible we were Loving our river to death, and I felt guilty because I was behind a lot of the publicity. I thrived on the publicity. I felt like I pimped out my river. And Robin's words rang true. We don't need more science, we need more activism.

And that later that night, I called Robin, and I said, I want to join your fight. I want to speak up. And Robin and many of us worked together, and Robin became a friend, and I even invited him to my house for a dinner party. And when I introduced him to my other friends, I said, meet Robin. He's an asshole, but he's our asshole. And a few weeks later, we were at a meeting, and the head of the Forest Service came in uniform, and you know when they come in uniform that they're not going to budge. And people were asking, put in trails, put in porta potties, develop a permit system, manage visitation. And she kept saying, We're doing everything we can. We're doing everything we can. And I interrupted her, and I said, bullshit, do your job. And Robin was quiet. And so I called him later and said, Why were you quiet? And he said, Jane, you were doing such a great job. And for once, I didn't have to be the asshole. Recently, I went back to Fossil Creek, and you could see a lot of, oh, the the movement. The movement then started to build so many people working so hard to save Fossil Creek that eventually, one Sunday, the Arizona Republic, our largest newspaper in Arizona, ran a front page editorial saying the Forest Service was ruining Arizona's crown jewel, and so they had to act. And recently I visited Fossil Creek, and we saw and saw so many of the things that we fought for. There were Rangers at the entrance. There's a permit system that limits visitation. There were trash cans and toilets and closed. Clearly marked trails and interpretive signs, and the rivers gorgeous again. And I learned that the science is important, the work that we did is being used to guide river restoration projects around the world. And I also learned that if we're serious about saving rivers, sometimes we also need to be activists.

Allison Langer  15:40  
So we didn't mention that, of all the people reading their stories, Jane actually stood up and told her story like it was awesome. So that's why she like, like, at the end was like, Oh, wait, which was super effective, because it feels like you're talking to somebody and they're like, oh, wait, wait, I forgot to tell you this. Which is awesome.

Andrea Askowitz  15:58  
Jane will tell you that she learned that. She learned that if you forget something, you just say like, Oh, hold on, wait, wait, wait, I forgot to tell you, and that totally works in storytelling. One thing that I noticed before we start talking about our story is something else that works so well in storytelling. I didn't remember that she did this, but we heard her like fumbly, fumbly, fumbly with the mic, and something that I've been taught to do, to start any conversation when, when you're on stage, like to start your story or your what your presentation is, to mention something that everyone in the room is experiencing. And Jane did that with that little move. She said, Oh, my story is about how I'm always the shortest person in the room. So everybody was watching. They understood what's happening. She was like, lowering the mic. It took a while, fumble, fumble, and then she, like, made a joke of it. And we were all brought in. In that moment. We're all here together, experiences, one thing together. Very effective live storytelling device. Love it. Should we talk about her process? God, I wish she was here. Jane, you're in trouble. Or should we just talk about the story?

Allison Langer  17:09  
Let's talk about the story first, and then maybe the process. This

Andrea Askowitz  17:13  
story is super complicated in that it has two climaxes, and denouements. I spoke French right there, but like the river falls apart twice and then this narrator saves it twice. I just wanted to mention that because it's a long story, and it's a hard story to tell because of that, but in the telling of that we do, and I do think that Jane did a really good job showing her evolution. So not just the evolution of the river, which, like, failed twice, but her yearning to, like, this is so goofy to say, but like, find her voice, and she ultimately did. That's the personal journey that really gets me. I'm interested in this narrator's personal journey, and then by watching her, like, gain her voice and become an activist, you know, she said this really interesting thing, which is, when you're a scientist, you are not as respected as an academic or if you become an activist. So she had that tension throughout. She wanted to, she wanted to maintain her like status as a scientist, but she also wanted to save the river. So it was like this slow progression. So she married the two like she was this scientist who now can be an activist, boom.

Allison Langer  18:45  
So in this case, we know Jane because she's been writing with us for a while, and we've heard, you know, since heard stories and what's interesting, and it might be true for many women scientists, or many women period, or maybe everyone is that it appears as if Jane has struggled to speak up in many aspects of her career. It comes through in this really clearly, the tension that she feels, and how does she deal with it? And I wonder if in academia, specifically, there's a huge because it's such an institution, if you have to kind of toe the line. And maybe all institutions are like this, I don't know, but it's like, you want to be able to speak out, but you don't want to lose your job, and you don't want to piss people off, and you're a part of a team. And she really struggled with that in in this, and comes to terms with it by the end, which is cool, yeah,

Andrea Askowitz  19:41  
I'm trying to answer your question about whether or not it's like a woman thing, but it feels very universal. And maybe it just feels universal because of how specific this narrator brought us into her world, her specific conflict with not wanting to be a loud mouth. I. And she wanted to be a loud mouth. Yeah, yeah. Women talk about this a lot. Men don't typically talk about feeling like they need to find their voice, but

Allison Langer  20:10  
we don't talk to a lot of men, and so we don't know maybe they do, so I don't want to man hate All right, so let's talk a little bit about her process, because we know she's worked on this story for a while, and we've seen many iterations of the story, and so what do you think helped get it to where it

Andrea Askowitz  20:29  
is? Kudos to Jane for being a hard, hard worker. First of all, she works really hard on getting the story where she wants it. I talked earlier about how hard this story was because of all the ups and downs. So she gets the story, she edits, she cuts, and she and this was a year ago, and I think she's even gotten better since then. Of just being diligent, like killing your darlings, it's hard to do. There might be a darling or two here. She could have killed maybe.

Allison Langer  20:58  
But when you're telling it on stage, you can throw in a couple because it's, it's more personality,

Andrea Askowitz  21:03  
true, true. So what I know about Jane is that she memorizes, but she memorizes in a way that I think sounds very natural. And so, don't you?

Allison Langer  21:14  
Yeah, I think it's pretty natural. Listen, I don't do this. I don't get up on stage and, like, go from memory because I, my memory is shit, so it's I just, I, yeah, you could

Andrea Askowitz  21:24  
do it. But anyway, but the way, the reason she's successful is that she practices and practices, and she just gets comfortable and so she knows her story. So at the very end that you mentioned how she missed a beat, she recognizes she was like, Oh, wait, first I have to tell you, what was it that, or, know that something. And then she and then she got to the air, yeah. So, yeah. Oh, I have a question that's, like, completely off base. Why didn't they? I need to call Jane now and ask her this. Why didn't they capture the non native fish, since they were all gonna die and, like, send them to market,

Allison Langer  22:04  
maybe they weren't edible or marketable. Really, I don't know what the fish was. We're I know

Andrea Askowitz  22:10  
that's what I that's why I want to ask Jane, because there were a lot of dead fish, and I don't know, we could have fried those up better than dying on the banks and smelling like dead fish for bandanas, like she really painted this picture of like it was gross.

Allison Langer  22:29  
I feel like some forethought went into it, so I don't think it was like, oh my god, we didn't think about that. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, no, I'm sure there was a there was a reason. We just don't know what it was. It's not in the story.

Andrea Askowitz  22:42  
I wish that that they would have saved the fish. That's all I'm saying. I love the use of Robin, silver Robin. He, like, represented the activists. Yeah, the opposition, the activist. Yeah. So, yeah. So it was the narrator's, like, emotional target, like, not at first, but he became the person she wanted to become, and then she did, yeah, that's cool. She did a great job. And then she's super funny about the way she describes everybody. He's an asshole. He's our asshole. And she did a great job delivering that line. She would just like, here meet Robin. He's an asshole. And then she, like, waited before she said that people laugh, but he's our asshole. She's very natural. She's also very funny, and she's very funny. She did another thing at the beginning. So this audience knows her and knows her husband, Bruce Hungate, so at the very beginning, she's like she's talking about when she first met the river, and she and her husband were, like, walking down looking for it, like, where's this river versus river? And so she hands the map to her husband, and he's like, you're the stream ecologist. And, you know, I can't read a map. And that was just the clever thing to do for that specific audience, because that was, like, a subtle, funny, cute dig against her husband in in a sweet way, which

Allison Langer  24:01  
is funny, because we know Bruce, and I'm a little bit like not believing that he can't read a map, because the guy's brilliant.

Andrea Askowitz  24:08  
That's true. So nice try. Maybe he's just, um, maybe he just knows everything, just by feel clairvoyant. Yeah, whatever Bruce did, the same thing. He was in the same show, and remember he said that he was knee deep in Jane's riffle

Allison Langer  24:23  
episode 174, okay,

clairvoyant,

Andrea Askowitz  24:30  
that's a great technique is to call out people who other people know in the audience.

Allison Langer  24:34  
Yeah, if you can nice, shall we? Yeah. Thanks you guys for listening, and thank you, Jane marks for sharing your story.

Andrea Askowitz  24:44  
Jane marks is a conservation ecologist and professor of aquatic ecology at Northern Arizona University. She was featured as the lead scientist in the PBS documentary a river reborn the restoration of Fossil Creek, which was narrated by Ted. Dancing. That's the movie I have to watch to find out about the fish. She also CO produced the video documentary parched, the art of water in the southwest. Also

Allison Langer  25:10  
just check out her previous episodes on the podcast, because she's funny as shit, and her stories are awesome. So

Andrea Askowitz  25:15  
listen to Jane on episode 149 which is called How to make your writing more personal in any field. Or listen to episode 167 even though I'm judging you, don't judge me for being a chopper mom. Oh, that's a funny even though I'm judging you, that's funny. Okay. Writing class radio is hosted by me Andrea askowitz and me Alison Langer. Audio production is by Matt Cundill, Evan serminsky and a dick glassy at the sound off media company. Theme music is by Justina Chandler. There's more writing class on our website, including stories we study, editing resources, video classes, writing retreats and live online classes, if you want to write with us every week, or if you're a business owner, community activist group that needs healing. Entrepreneur scientists. Check out everything we offer, all the classes we offer on our website, writing class radio.com or you can just email Allison at writing class radio.com to hire us.

Allison Langer  26:15  
A new episode will drop first Wednesday of the month. There is absolutely no better way to understand ourselves and each other than by writing and sharing our stories. Everyone's got a story. What's yours?

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  26:30  
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