How eagles, bears and salmon keep Alaska wild

0:00Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Salmon are mind-blowing. They do so many things that are just so awe-inspiring and incredible. I just kind of have to believe that salmon are going to persevere.

0:31Chris Bentley:Take a hike with us in Alaska to a wild place where salmon run free.

0:46Chris Bentley:it's monday september 7th and this is here and now anytime from npr and wbur i'm chris bentley today on the show it is labor day the unofficial end of summer and the perfect time to enjoy the great outdoors. We've got three stories about spectacular places and things that make us feel alive and why we should not take them for granted. We'll ask, are we loving America's national parks to death? While they are extraordinary, they often have some very ordinary needs and things like roads and bridges when you have that many visitors coming each year. And we'll find out how ice swimming in frozen lakes brings some people euphoria and community.

1:31Chris Bentley:Just don't stay in too long. Brain fog is setting in, your muscles are literally freezing, you're going to start to sink, you're not going to be able to feel your fingers. And so in total, for most humans, you have about an hour. But first, I recently got back from a reporting trip to Alaska with Peter O'Dowd. We were in Juneau covering glacial floods and landslides. These are big problems in Alaska and in many places around the world because of climate change. And you'll hear those stories soon. Click the follow button right now in your podcast app so you don't miss it. But today we wanted to share with you a trip that we took into the wild.

2:12Chris Bentley:Peter O'Dowd gets us started. We went to a place called Eagle Beach where the eagle in Herbert Rivers are fed by melting glaciers of the same names, breathing plumes of silty water into the ocean.

2:27What a place. Blue herons. Bald eagles. Soaring above the spruce coming down to the shore.

2:40Chris Bentley:Hey bear. Hey bear. I came to this spot hiking through the bramble along the riverside with John Hudson and a few of his friends. Oh my God, there's just bear crap everywhere. Where's the bear? How many are there? Hudson is mostly unbothered by the carnivores. He's a naturalist with a passion for bugs. With a net slung over his shoulder, it looks like he belongs in a fairy tale. Oh, you've got a dragonfly. Look at that. Oh my gosh. This is a female paddle-tailed darner. And it's one of seven mosaic darners that are found in Alaska. Can you hear the vibration? Those wings are vibrating pretty rapidly.

3:30Oh, wow.

3:34Hudson lets the little creature go. On much larger wings, a few bald eagles soar in tight circles. overhead. They're surfing thermals rising up on twisting columns of warm air. Over the years, Hudson's friend Bob Armstrong has written and photographed all kinds of books about Alaska's wildlife. One of the funniest things I've ever observed in filming a bald eagle nest was the parent brought a human's hat in there and laid it down. There were two kids in the nest and they spent a huge amount of time playing with the hat, turning it over and looking at it and giving it from one kid to the other.

4:19Fascinating what goes on in the minds of creatures other than humans. Armstrong moved to Alaska in 1960, the year after it became a state. He remembers fishing off the coast for halibut and king salmon. I thought I was in heaven. It was a wonderful experience. And then the people came. Now he's in his 90s. He takes his time in the wilderness, walks slowly. Quietly, without talking. So that he can stop and observe. Listen, he says. It's an armada of blowflies swarming a mound of bear poop.

5:05as with everything in life mixed in with all the beauty is so much rot everything in this ecosystem is connected and chris i know that's something that you got to see up close to yes indeed it is

5:19Chris Bentley:and peter you know you can actually learn a lot from bear poop this bear poop it has strawberry seeds in it the other stuff we're seeing back there was like more dark blue with the blueberry seeds. So the bears down here are eating well. These bears are eating the strawberries and salmon. Those ones are having blueberries and salmon. Lindsay Bloom is a commercial fisherman and works for the non-profit Salmon State. She walks these riverside trails all the time with her dogs, picking some of those same wild berries that the bears seek out and marveling at the odyssey undertaken by Alaska's wild salmon.

5:54Chris Bentley:They swim hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to spawn. They're really beautiful in their life cycle in that they'll come up these rivers and once they spawn they die and then it's the nutrients from the parents that support all the life that the the smolt and young salmon are going to live off of next spring. And those young salmon will be born here in the freshwater stream go out to sea to the salt water and spend most of their lives out there getting big, right? That's right. They'll be out in the ocean for maybe four or five years getting really fat and full of omega-3s and ocean nutrients, which is why they're so tasty for us as humans to eat.

6:37Some of them are going to go hundreds of miles inland and then deposit those marine nutrients up in the streams. So it's pretty cool.

6:44Chris Bentley:And that gets absorbed into the ecosystems upstream too. So you end up having nutrients from the ocean transported. Way up there. Way up there. And you can see just standing here, the trees that are closer to the river are, to me they look a little bit greener, but they're just bigger. Bloom says salmon DNA is in the trees. In their last act, the fish fertilized the forest, their decaying bodies releasing nutrients back into the soil along the rivers where they were born. We come across a pair of dead chum salmon flopped on the riverbank. The brilliant tiger stripe spawning patterns of their scales are starting to fade as they decompose.

7:24And that is a male and a female together, so they probably spawned.

7:28Chris Bentley:Wow, like Romeo and Juliet, now they're dead together. The water is murky with silt scoured off the mountains by glaciers. But every once in a while, a flash of silvery scales breaks through, and we're reminded that underneath the surface is a frenzy of mating fish. I hear it and I smell it, but I don't see it. You can smell it. Well, I'm just smelling the ones that have already died, I think. Yeah, fair enough. Not an unpleasant scent, though, among everything else. The fresh air and the little whiff of salt. Yeah, if you're out here, it's all right. When your dog rolls in it, it's not so good.

8:01Chris Bentley:In a few hours, the tide will come in and quite literally raise the roof on this salmon spawning party. When it goes out again, it'll leave this meadow strewn with more salmon carcasses, basically ringing the dinner bell for bears lurking in the woods. Of course, in Juneau, bears do not have to stake out a tidal stream to find a feast. I had one enter my garage the other day and actually open my freezer and it had a buffet to choose from. We had salmon, halibut, black cod, deer meat, moose meat, and the bear took all my strawberries that I had just picked. Did it leave all the meat and just took the berries?

8:37Yeah, it just took out the tray of berries. Looks like it ate them on the floor of the garage and then let itself out.

8:43Chris Bentley:Like it was invited in for a dinner party. But it wasn't. It was not. How are salmon doing now? Because we talked about this buffet for the birds and the fact that we just walked up to the stream and saw two probably spawning just a minute ago. Seems like an abundance of life, but they're having to contend with a lot of environmental threats as well. Climate change, potential for overfishing, pollution. What sort of state are salmon in, in the salmon state? I know. Well, that's such a good question. I mean, I think first and foremost, fundamentally, It's like food security and what so many people live off of, especially in rural communities in Alaska that aren't connected to a road system where groceries are getting, you know, trucked in and out.

9:27Having wild salmon is critical, actually, to just getting through the winter. And then the quality of life and the recreational values and then the jobs and the economies that is created by our ability to still commercial fish. So I think as a state, Alaska has done an incredible job ensuring that we interact sustainably with salmon as human beings. But we are, you know, on a global planet. And so, as you mentioned, climate change is having a really big impact on the ocean environment as well as in freshwater habitats where some of the salmon now, you know, like in the Yukon and the Kuskokwim where we're really having a crisis.

10:10Chris Bentley:Two other rivers northwest of here in Alaska. Yeah, of low returns, some of what we're seeing is that the fresh water is just too warm for the spawning adults to actually make it up to spawn or young salmon to survive and thrive. On the other hand, melting glaciers are opening up new streams and salmon habitat farther north. Wild runs like this used to be common from New England to California. Their demise is a long story of industrialization, pollution, and overfishing. Alaska is not immune from any of that. But here, at least so far, humans have not crowded out the salmon. Can that hold, though, with global changes beyond the control of any one person, let alone a fish?

10:53Chris Bentley:Are Alaska's salmon going to make it? Well, that just feels like kind of a mindset choice, you know what I mean? Like, I choose to just have some faith because salmon are mind-blowing. They do so many things that are just so awe-inspiring and incredible. I just kind of have to believe that salmon are going to persevere. Here, it's community. It's the way that salmon bring Alaskans together and get us outside and just, you know, sustain us in so many ways. They're part of Alaska, quite literally, when you're talking about how their DNA has been found in the trees. Their DNA is in the trees. It's in the bears.

11:32It's in the people. It's absolutely part of Alaska. and I really hope to never see that change.

11:44Well, you know, Chris, we heard that a lot in Alaska. People can see the natural world changing before their eyes and under their feet. And we'll be hearing a lot more about that in the weeks ahead. We've got stories of floods and landslides. We're going to get a dizzying perspective from the edge of a giant melting glacier.

12:02Chris Bentley:and no in case you're wondering we did not see a bear no we did not somehow but i always felt like one was right around the corner also right around the corner are those other stories we were talking about so follow here and now anytime so you don't miss them in a few weeks coming up next on today's show though the national park service marks its 110th year But it's dealing with the loss of a federal fund meant for repair and maintenance. What impact is that having on the parks? More in a minute.

12:51Chris Bentley:Did your summer vacation include a visit to one of our national parks? Counting things like National Historic Sites and the wonderful National Seashores like Assateague, there are more than 400 sites in the system. Every year, more than 320 million visitors explore parks like Yosemite in California or the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Acadia on the coast of Maine. This year, I got a glimpse of Glacier Bay in Alaska. That is part of our Alaska series that Peter and I were just talking about. There are spectacular sites all over the country. but some of them are suffering from a lack of funding for maintenance.

13:30Chris Bentley:So says Jeff Reinbold. He's president and CEO of the National Park Foundation. Last fall, Congress let the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund expire. Reinbold told Scott Tong why that money is so badly needed. While they are extraordinary, they often have some very ordinary needs. And things like roads and bridges, when you have that many visitors coming each year, really take their toll after a while. I'll give you a perfect example. I was with the Park Service for over 30 years, and I was the superintendent on the National Mall, and people come to visit the monuments and the memorials, and there's a tidal basin, a seawall that surrounds the tidal basin near the Jefferson and FDR memorials, and it's over 100 years old, and it was failing, and because of the Legacy Restoration Fund, we were not only able to fund it, but do it at a considerably lower rate than we would have if we were doing that over time like the Park Service normally has to.

14:28So an infusion of funding like this makes so many more projects possible, and that's everything from roads and trails, water and sewer systems, that basic infrastructure that supports the amazing visits that we have every year.

14:41Chris Bentley:Yeah, now this fund that we're talking about, and the money for it, you know, began in 2021. So how did national parks pay for this maintenance before that? Yeah, it's largely every year through annual appropriations. And just to give you an idea of the scale, in a typical year, the line item construction money, which is set aside for projects like this, is only about$130 million. And if you stretch that out over more than 400 sites, you can imagine it takes a long time to make a dent in these. And a lot of these big projects, there is just an economy of scale that is gained and they can be done so much more quickly when there is an infusion of money up front and you're doing a$100 million project at once and not$10 million a year for 10 years.

15:31Chris Bentley:Yeah. Well, as you know, the country is in a conversation about the deficit and the accumulated debt that the country faces. It's showing up in the bond market and the interest rates that we pay. How do you make at this moment the case to Congress that more money needs to be put into this fund? Yeah, this is one of the areas that the Legacy Restoration Fund, it's proven it's worked over the last five years. There's six and a half billion dollars that have gone into over 400 park projects. And the beauty of this is this is oil and gas revenues that are reinvested in the country and have supported over 70 ,000 jobs, about$5 billion in labor income, and contributed almost$8 billion to the GDP.

16:20So this isn't only an investment in our history and in the places that define us as a country, but it's a huge economic generator in those communities that surround the parks.

16:32Chris Bentley:Well, I guess speaking of these parks or these economic generators you're talking about, under this Congress, under this administration, funding for the budget has been cut. Staffing has been slashed. We're talking about rangers, scientists, workers at the parks. How is that playing out in this moment? Are you seeing, say, understaffed parks around the country, overcrowding? Yeah, I think, you know, in any given year, parks have a variety of needs, and staffing has gotten a lot of attention. But, you know, we also need the infrastructure, there to be able to support these visits. And that's a challenge that parks have faced forever.

17:13And I think that's one of the great things. This doesn't have to be an either or. This is an opportunity to be able to make a federal investment in the legacy of these parks and what supports the visits to them.

17:25Chris Bentley:Jeff Reinbold is president and CEO of the National Park Foundation. Jeff, thanks very much. Great. Thank you.

17:34Chris Bentley:coming up here's one way to let the power of nature overwhelm you take an ice plunge yes there are those who swear by swimming up to a mile in water below 41 degrees fahrenheit they say it's not just physically restorative but psychologically even spiritually invigorating Robin Young takes a deep dive into the growing sport of ice swimming. Well, not literally. We'll be right back.

18:11And now a few minutes on a sport whose motto is, that sounds like a terrible idea. What time? It's ice swimming. Not to be confused with those New Year's Day polar bear dips or ice baths. Thousands of people, most of them not elite athletes, swim in icy water 25 meters or a mile, sometimes in pools cut out of frozen lakes or in the ocean. They say it leaves them euphoric. It heals them or saves them. Chris Ballard is a Sports Illustrated writer who spent three years reporting on and then taking the ice swimming plunge himself. His new book is The Plunge. Chris Ballard, welcome. Thank you for having me on.

18:48And we want to start with the many caveats because we don't want people wandering off into an ice bath without hearing them. You know, some of the competitions you covered and then participated in, there's something like an 18-page medical form you have to fill out. How cold are we talking about? Sure. So most swimming pools are around 78 to 82 degrees. If you go jump in a lake on a spring day, it might be, you know, 62 to 65, and you get that a little bit of like your breath taken away. The ice swimming is 41 degrees Fahrenheit or lower. So this is the level that maybe an athlete goes into for an ice bath, but actually swimming in it.

19:27This swimming that you're talking about, in most events, there's an ambulance nearby. You have to have a second, someone able to discern if you need to be pulled out and then able to go into the water and pull you out. But what's the science? What does ice swimming do that gives people this euphoria they describe? Your body's essentially going into a fight-or-flight situation. It sees this as a threat, as one might imagine. When they get in, their body's going to vasoconstrict, so all that blood's going to go right to the core. You're also going to be simultaneously flooded with these neurochemicals.

20:01Dopamine and adrenaline are the two big ones. This is where people call it like a high, and it can act on some of the same receptors in your brain as opioids. And that's basically your body saying, oh, here's a threat. I need to become very alert and very focused to deal with this threat. Okay, so those two things are happening. But isn't your body also being flooded with a kind of repair system that you described? Yes, and the first time, this is a negative shock to your body, as one might imagine. But if you do it repeatedly, it's just the same as lifting weights, right? It's a small stressor that your body will then repair to prepare for the next time.