534b Crete; Alaska's Tip of the Iceberg; Darwin Comes to Town

19:36Yes, yes. So you do have to plan for that, and it's not the fastest mode of transportation, but it is some of the most fantastic scenery you'll encounter. The sunsets, the sunrises, the wildlife, just really like old Alaska was or is. And on top of that, you get to mingle with the locals as this is a major means of transportation that they use.

20:04Rick Steves:So I would imagine for some of the remote towns there up north of Vancouver Island and so on, this is their lifeline to the rest of the world. That's exactly what it is. Vanessa, did you sleep in a room or were you one of the people who got a tent and slept on the deck outside, as some people do? We were not brave enough to sleep in tents, as some people did, or in a chair. We did get a stateroom. And, you know, the staterooms were quite nice. They were tiny and basic, but they were very clean bunk beds and showers. It was great. And then the cafeteria was great food. I mean, variety and, you know, it was nothing to complain about.

20:41And then, you know, it's not the entertainment that you would have on a cruise ship, but they did have a movie theater in which they would give you information about some of the little cities and building up the Alcan Highway. Just very informative information.

20:58Rick Steves:Nice. So it was wonderful. You know, Vanessa, I'm just, I live right here in Seattle, and it's just three days. It's probably much cheaper than a regular cruise. And as you said, you meet the locals, and you'll go to towns that are not inundated by the thousands of cruisers, but you'll go to towns where it's just really the milk run. Absolutely. Absolutely. It was great. And if we'd had more time, we probably would have taken it even farther, but we wanted to explore a little further inland. Did you have a rental car at some of the places then? Well, yes. What we did is we got off the ferry in Juneau, and then we flew from Juneau to Anchorage, and then we rented a car for the rest of Alaska, more of the inside area of Alaska.

21:44Rick Steves:All right. Well, thanks, Vanessa, for your report. Well, thank you, and I'm a big fan. I've used your books on two trips to Europe, and you have never let me down, but thank you very much for that. All right. Well, now you're inspiring me to go to Alaska, so happy travels. Thanks. Absolutely. Please do. Okay. Okay. So, Mark, Vanessa was talking about the ferry system. She rode the ferry from the lower 48 to the upper, and you can use that as a springboard to go even beyond, I suppose. Now, you took it from Juneau and went even further north, I understand. I did. I went north to Haynes and Skagway, and I went to Gustavus, which is the town at the lip of Glacier Bay National Park, which is absolutely phenomenal.

22:23You can take it to a little teeny tiny town called Yakutat, which is, by some reckoning, the most isolated town in America, certainly the most isolated coastal town in America, I would have to think. And then, if you want, you can take it across the Gulf of Alaska to towns like Cordova. Sounds just like an adventure. Yeah, Valdez. I mean, you can take it, like I said, all the way to the beginning of the Aleutian Islands if you want.

22:48Rick Steves:Mark Adams writes about what he found along the Alaska Marine Highway in his book, Tip of the Iceberg. We have a link to his website and his earlier visits with us about his hike to Machu Picchu and his search for Atlantis. You'll find it with this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. Your book, Tip of the Iceberg, it's retracing the historic route that Harriman did in 1899. Give us a quick little thumbnail of what he did and why, and why you wanted to redo it 120 years later. Well, you know, actually, this book started not far from where you are in Pioneer Square in Seattle, where there's a totem pole.

23:29And being the ace reporter I am, I asked the National Park Ranger in his smoky bear hat who was standing there, what is this totem pole for? And he said, you know, in 1899, the original pole was brought here by some businessmen who were inspired by the Harriman expedition. I said, what is that? He said, oh, you never heard of that? Because that was the railroad tycoon, Edward Harriman, brought together some of America's most important naturalists like John Muir and George Bird Grinnell, took them on a boat off to Alaska for the whole summer. And they came back and, you know, had basically mapped the entire coast of Alaska.

24:01And I thought to myself, wait a minute, John Muir, the nature druid who founded the Sierra Club, what was he doing on a boat with E.H. Harriman, who's probably most famous for being name-dropped in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the guy who's paying for them to be tracked down because he's got so much money. So the more I looked into it, the more I realized that this was one of the most important expeditions in conservation history. You know, the science they did, the discoveries they made were nice but nothing special. But the things they saw and documented and most importantly brought back to Washington, D.C.

24:38and explained to people like Theodore Roosevelt were absolutely crucial in setting aside huge swaths of Alaska that are still preserved to this day as the Tongass National Forest.

24:49Rick Steves:On their expedition were the founders of – do I understand the founder of National Geographic and the founder of the Audubon Society plus John Muir? A few of the founders of the National Geographic Society were there. Fellow named Henry Gannett was there. You must have immersed yourself in Harriman's journals or whatever. Did he start out as an environmentalist or did it even have an impact on him? Because I can imagine back then you would have just been awestruck by the wonder and the grandeur of nature. No, he started out, in fact, wanting to go to Alaska. One, because Alaska had become fashionable, because John Muir had first gone up there 20 years earlier, written these beautiful travel dispatches that sort of set the west coast of the U.S.

25:28on fire, and companies started sending steamships up to look at the glaciers in the 1880s. So by 1899, when the Harriman expedition left Seattle, it had become a very fashionable thing for tourists to go up into the inside passage,

25:41Rick Steves:sort of the way it is now. When you think about what Harriman saw and then what you see today, the fragility and the preciousness of nature and the communities that live on it must have been quite impressive. What sort of impact did it have on you? What did you see that caused you to be more mindful of conservation and environmental concerns? The thing that struck me when I first started looking at the Harriman Exposition was that these guys like Muir and George Bird Grinnell had come back and said, you know, look, we think this is like a giant wilderness that is, you know, inexhaustible, but it's not.

26:17There are gold mining companies up there. There are, you know, fur seals being hunted to extinction. The salmon in Alaska, which Alaska is still famous for, are in, you know, grave danger of being hunted out because canning companies are up there just killing anything they can get their hands on.

26:32Rick Steves:In your book, you wrote about Shishmaref and this Alaska village. Yeah, yeah. So what I realized was that in 1899, they had had these ecological pending disasters. And in 2016, when I departed for Alaska, the pending ecological disaster was, of course, climate change because the Arctic is heating up twice as fast as the lower 48. I ended up in a town called Shishmaref. And the way it worked out, the day I was leaving for Shishmaref, I believe, they voted to become what was called the world's first climate refugees because Shishmaref is sort of a sandy barrier island up near Nome, near the Arctic Circle.

27:10And it's eroding. You know, the storms are getting worse every year. The ice pack that protects them from these storms coming off the Bering Sea is getting thinner every year. They can't hunt on the ice anymore. And they've basically realized, you know, look, we've got to leave our ancestral island where we've lived for centuries and relocate to the mainland because of climate change.

27:31Rick Steves:Now, another thing related, Mark, to the struggles of Shishmaref is the actual potential new business brought about by climate change. Because I guess while you were up there, the first luxury cruise ship through the ice-free Northwest Passage had just sailed. That's pretty historic that not just an icebreaker, but a luxury cruise ship sailing over the north end of North America. There was a ship called the Crystal Serenity, and they did. They planned the very first luxury cruise through the Northwest Passage going from Nome up above through the islands of Canada where 100 years ago, Roald Amundsen had needed to get through there with a dog sled in the summer.

28:13And they thought they were going to need an icebreaker to help them out just in case. They had no trouble whatsoever. And, you know, more ships. I think the first commercial ship just went through there. So, you know, the Northwest Passage that so many people died looking for in the 1700s and 1800s is on the verge of becoming a viable transportation possibility.

28:35Rick Steves:This is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been talking with Mark Adams. His book is Tip of the Iceberg, a fascinating story about a 3 ,000-mile journey around wild Alaska, the last great American frontier. When you were on your trip, what are some of the most rewarding sort of moments that you just think, yes, this is worth all the trouble and all the expense to get up here? Well, you know, probably the craziest moment, which in retrospect is usually one of those things that seems like a great idea, was when I woke up on an island in the middle of Glacier Bay National Park, and my guide and I were the only people probably within 20 miles at that moment.

29:10And I saw the sunrise of the Grand Pacific Glacier, which leads all the way back into Canada, of this huge white mass and the sort of rosy light starts to come down the sides of the fjord onto the green water, which is shimmering. And there are these, you know, sea otters there poking their heads above the water. And, you know, I'm sitting there with my copy of John Muir's Travels in Alaska and thinking, wow, what a moment this is. And then out of the corner of my eye, I see two brown bears and they're looking at me and I'm looking at them. And then they come a little bit closer, and then they come around, and they're going into our tents.

29:47And my guide says, I think we need to get the heck out of here now. Grab all of our stuff, throw it in the kayak, and we're paddling for our lives.

29:55Rick Steves:Oh, my goodness. What a great trip. And Mark, thanks for sharing it with your book. This has been a great conversation with Mark Adams, the author of Tip of the Iceberg. Just to finish off the discussion, when you think about Harriman, you must have been traveling sort of parallel with him. What was an experience that really had a huge impact on Harriman that that also had an impact on you, sort of a parallel experience that you both brought home as the takeaway for all of this exploration. I mean, the thing that really struck me was being in Glacier Bay, which had been literally put on the map by John Muir in 1879.

30:31There were no charts of Glacier Bay before that because the glacier was withdrawing so quickly at that time. Being on a boat and going past where John Muir and Harriman and the rest of the team had stopped to visit this little stone cabin that John Muir had built there in 1890 at the foot of what was called Muir Glacier, the most famous glacier in Glacier Bay in 1899. Right after they left, Muir Glacier started to retreat. And in the last few decades, it has retreated really fast. And if you look at pictures from the Harriman expedition, It is this massive 200-foot high, mile-wide wall of ice that is threatening to knock the ship over if too large of a chunk calves off.

31:15It doesn't even touch the water anymore. It's way up in the valley. It's just this little sliver of ice. And, you know, it's a reminder that these things are huge and they're majestic, but they are not by any means permanent.

31:27Rick Steves:And that's a poignant souvenir. Mark Adams, thanks so much and continued best wishes with your writing and happy travels. Thanks for having me. I said, hey, who's going nowhere on that great Alaska highway? You don't have to go to Alaska to be impressed by the natural world. In fact, evolutionary forces may be at work right now in your own backyard. Hear what biologists are noticing around the world next on Travel with Rick Steves. Hello, my name is Ilva. I live in Stockholm. I have a tongue twister for you. In the Swedish language we have a sound that sounds like this. And the tongue twister sounds like this.

32:14Sju sjøsjuka sjømen sköttes av sju sjøne sjuksjøterskor på det sjunkende skeppet Shanghai. Which means seven seasick sailors are nursed by seven beautiful nurses on the sinking ship of Shanghai. You can see it in the world all around you.

32:43Rick Steves:We humans are changing the wildlife and plants that share the spaces we inhabit. As an urban ecologist from the Netherlands, Menno Skelthausen has been noticing how such common things like the din of traffic, free-ranging cats and dogs, and especially our city's urban heat islands, are making crows, pigeons, blackbirds, and wrens, even lizards, moths, and spiders, have to adapt in some remarkable ways just to survive in the modern world. In his book, Darwin Comes to Town, Professor Skilthausen casts what some are calling a radical new light on the way we should think about evolution. He's here to tell us how it's happening, a lot faster than Charles Darwin ever expected, and often right before our eyes.

33:26Rick Steves:Menno Skilthausen, welcome to Travel with Rick Steed. Thank you, Rick. This book you've written, it seems the purpose is to open our eyes to the wonders of a term I had never encountered before. HIREC, H-I-R-E-C, standing for Human Induced Rapid Evolutionary Change. Can you explain this whole concept of HIREC to us? Yeah, it's basically the evolutionary adaptation. So really a genetic change in wild animals and plants that are adapting, evolving to adapt to a human-dominated environment, especially cities. And it turns out that this environment that we're creating and that animals and plants are living in in cities is so different from what they're used to in the wild that these changes are happening very quickly, and sometimes in a matter of years or sometimes decades, so that we can actually observe these evolutionary changes taking place, whereas for a long time people have thought that evolution was too slow a process to observe.

34:29Rick Steves:That's interesting because I was just thinking, I thought it would be over like scores of generations, but I'm thinking in terms of human generations, which would be decades long each, whereas when you think of a moth or a spider, their lifespans are so tiny. So you could have scores of generations in one or two years, couldn't you? Yeah, that's one of the reasons why many organisms can evolve so fast. This short generation time, which is basically sort of the evolutionary clock speed, you could say. It's that every generation you see the effect of the natural selection that took place in the generation before.

35:04So if those generations are short, the evolutionary changes can also succeed each other very quickly. like insects and many weeds, which have multiple generations per year, they can evolve pretty fast.

35:15Rick Steves:So if my thumb is going to get more use because I have a smartphone and my grandmother didn't have a smartphone, and I use my thumb all the time with my smartphone, over 50 generations I'll get a bigger and more adept thumb. Is that kind of how evolution works? Is it on the way to getting bigger and better? No, not necessarily. Well, it's going to get bigger and better under the circumstances and only if you're using your smartphone better will help you survive better than your grandmother or make you have more children. Oh, I see. Which may be true, but of course you need some weight for this to translate.

35:49Okay. Then that gene needs to spread in the population and it can only spread if having that particular type of thumb makes you survive or makes you reproduce more successfully than other people.

35:58Rick Steves:So an animal in the jungle that has good peripheral vision is less likely to be captured by its predator and therefore because of evolution they'll get a better peripheral vision. That's the essence of evolution and to go on on that example in a city this may actually not always be the case because a lot of birds for example die at the moment because they hit windows, glass windows for which peripheral vision is not so important but rather being able to focus straight ahead and there are some birds which have very good peripheral vision but very poor straight ahead vision and those are the ones that are dying against glass windows So you could even imagine that vision is something that would evolve differently in cities compared to jungles.

36:40Rick Steves:Now, the classic example of a species adapting to a changing environment is something I remember reading about back when I was in college. These moths back in England in the 19th century during the Industrial Revolution, as the pollution made the terrain more covered with soot or whatever, the moths became darker. Is that right? And then when England got over its pollution, those same moths evolved in the other direction to go white again? Yeah, and that's a classic textbook case of rapid evolution. Even though it involved only a single gene, there was just a single factor on these moth chromosomes that made their wings turn dark.

37:20But that single gene spread throughout this species across England, across mainland Europe, as pollution in the 19th century became prevalent. And indeed, as you say, in the 1950s, 1960s, these regulations for cleaner air were introduced and the pollution disappeared. And then the white moths had an advantage again because the trees on which they rest became lighter colored again and they were better camouflaged again on this lighter color. In the same way that the dark winged ones were better camouflaged against the sooty trees during the height of the Industrial Revolution. All over the world in cities and other human altered environments.

38:01Animals and plants are evolving all the time. They can evolve back and forth as conditions change or can evolve in a different direction. It's also not true that evolution will necessarily always continue to work in the same direction. It works one generation at a time. So if the conditions change, it can go into a different direction again. That's the nice thing about evolution. It's such a dynamic process.

38:24Rick Steves:That's kind of the breakthrough of your study is that it's happening faster than we realize. and we can actually shape the direction that things are evolving if we do it thoughtfully. Yeah, in theory. That's one of the things I say in my book, that we could change the way cities are planned. We could generate green spaces in the city in such a way that we can actually enhance this process of animals and plants adapting to cities. Menno Skilthausen is a professor of evolutionary biology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He explores how humans are influencing natural selection in his book, Darwin Comes to Town, How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution.

39:08Rick Steves:His latest title is The Urban Naturalist, How to Make the City Your Scientific Playground, and it's published by MIT Press. We have more with Menno with this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. Menno, in your book, you make it really clear that human beings are not just another species. We are the super species. It's like no other single species has ever been anywhere near so dominant. Yeah, like you say, it's really, we tend to be very depressed about the impact that humans have on the Earth at the moment. But in a more objective way, it's also a very exciting time because we're really living in a very historic moment of the history of life on Earth.

39:50It's never before has a single species been able to dominate the Earth's environment so drastically as we are.

39:57Rick Steves:Now, when I've flown across vast spaces and looked down at the world from an airplane, the environmentalist in me kind of goes, well, thank goodness these urban landscapes are just a little rash, breaking out in a few spots here and there. But in your book, you wrote that by 2030, 10 % of the land mass will be urbanized and much more will be affected by humans if you consider farmland and pasture. I mean, that's remarkable, isn't it, that such a substantial percent of the land on this planet will actually be covered in concrete or fenced by human beings. Yeah, yeah. Cities are no longer just a small, marginal, biologically uninteresting part of the world.

40:39If ecosystems and biodiversity want to survive, they're going to have to live in cities because it's going to be a major natural habitat in its own right. I mean, we don't think of it as a natural habitat, but it is a place where humans concentrate food and all kinds of other resources, which could be an opportunity for many animals and plants to find a new niche in this new environment.

41:01Rick Steves:You talk about cities having their own climate and their own environment, these urban heat islands and so on. What are some of the things in a city that are causing this evolution? Of course, not every species can live in cities, but the ones that do, they often find a lot of food. Humans bring in a lot of food and a lot of opportunity into their cities, And there are animals and plants that benefit from this, but they need to adapt because the conditions, it's really an extreme environment. The conditions in cities are very different from natural environments. Like you say, the urban heat island, the heat gets trapped in big cities.

41:39The concrete and the steel and the glass, they absorb solar radiation and then slowly radiate it out at night. So it can be more than 10 degrees centigrade hotter in the city center. and to adapt to those higher temperatures is one thing that you see happening in urban species.

41:57Rick Steves:There's a fun example in your book about mosquitoes. And if I'm a mosquito, you know, and my grandma was living on bird blood, I find myself in London and it's warmer down in the underground and in the metro. And I realize, oh, it's just full of human beings walking banquets if you like to suck on human blood. and an actual new species of mosquito would inhabit the London Underground. Yeah, and that's exactly what's happened. This is the London Underground mosquito, Culex molestus, which has evolved not only in the London Underground, but in cellars and subway tubes and basements all over the world.

42:33And it has branched off. It has descended from, and probably quite recently in the last few hundred years and maybe a few thousand years, but at least during the time that people have been building these structures, has descended from an ancestral species of mosquito that lived above ground and that was feeding on birds. And this underground mosquito that feeds on humans is very different, not only in the fact that it feeds on human blood, but also in the way it mates and the way its life cycle is constructed, as you say, underground in subways. It's warm the year round, there's food the year round, so that those underground mosquitoes have evolved into a separate species, thanks to us.

43:10Rick Steves:What's another example of a creature that has adapted to a city? Well, one of my favorite examples is, because it's one of the most striking ones, is the European blackbird, which is not related to the American blackbird. It's actually closely related to the American robin. So the European blackbird was one of the first birds to colonize cities already very early in the 19th century. It started colonizing Rome and some cities in Germany, even though it was normally a very shy forest bird. It set up camp in the cities, and it has been doing that ever since. So now you find them in cities all over Europe and even in Asia and in islands on the Atlantic.

43:53And because they have started colonizing cities so early on, this is a process that's been going on for more than 200 years, they have evolved in all kinds of ways, probably in many different places of their chromosomes. there are differences now. For example, they have shorter beaks, probably because they feed on human food. They don't have to probe deep into the grass to get worms. They sing at a higher pitch because of the traffic noise that they have to rise above. And for the same reason, they sing very early in the morning, in the middle of the night, whereas a forest blackbird would never do that.

44:24They don't migrate anymore because there's food available the year round. They are less stressed. And all these differences are genetic. We have found genes that are responsible for all those differences.

44:36Rick Steves:This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Menno Skilthausen. His book is Darwin Comes to Town, How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution. And Menno, when I was reading your book, you're a biologist. A biologist, you'd think, would not really like urban blight. But you wrote that what you enjoy about the urban situation is not the well-organized part, but the grimy, organic fabric of the city, revealed in forgotten corners where the threadbare carpet of culture gives way, the city's underbelly, where the artificial and the natural meet and engage in ecological relations. What do you mean by ecological relations?

45:14Rick Steves:It just sounds exciting. Like I said, the city provides a lot of food and opportunities for wildlife, and at the same time, that wildlife itself comes from all over the world. For example, when you're walking on the streets in a city, you might see some city pigeons, which are originally from southern Europe. You might see some growth snails which are originally from northern Europe. You might see species from Asia. You might see species from different parts of North America. These are all brought in by things like garden centers and the pet trade and simply accidentally introduced. You even write how a fungus spreads to the bathrooms around the world by the toiletry kits of tourists?

45:53Yeah, yeah, or obosidium. Those are those orange moles that you can sometimes find in bathrooms. That's a single species that lives all over the world now.

46:00Rick Steves:Brought by travelers with their toiletry kits. Yeah, we're always, often people try to persuade me and other people to attach some sort of value to what's happening. And I just, to me, whether, you know, it's an exotic species or a native species, to me, doesn't really matter too much. If it's doing its ecological job, then that's good enough for me. And when you see a bird nest made out of cigarette butts or plastic strips, what do you think? I think those are the successful birds. Those are the ones that have been able to adapt to local conditions where maybe there are no twigs available, but there are cigarette butts which actually have insecticide which help make their nests be much more healthy because it kills the mites and the fleas.

46:44Or a bird that has just chosen some plastic instead of twigs. To us it seems very sad and unnatural, but as long as those birds can raise their young in those artificial nests, to them it's fine, it's success.

46:56Rick Steves:So what is your summation here? You've gained an understanding of the power of evolution and the relentless adaptability of the living world. So what? Well, I think it's very important for us to be aware of this. because it is such a crucial natural process that we often think is something that's happening far away over long periods of time. We don't see evolution as something that you can observe in your backyard, but you can, and it goes fast, and it happens everywhere and all the time. And we can actually, as non-biologists, even participate in studying this process. There are such wonderful citizen science projects nowadays where you can upload pictures, and scientists can use those images to see how species are evolving in different cities all over the world.

47:45So that's really my vision for the future of having ordinary people who are doing citizen science simply because they enjoy it, really contributing to scientific research.

47:55Rick Steves:So are you saying that we could be considering that our urban spaces are also homes for animals and designing our future cities with that in mind? Is that actually something you could envision? Yeah, there are different ways in which we could design our cities to help biodiversity and to help it evolve. For example, that's often in cities, there's a tendency to create corridors between different parks. And this may be good for large animals, but for small animals, actually, it might be better to keep them isolated because we see that in cities. There's a lot of sort of local adaptation going on that the animals in parks are adapting to the local conditions of that specific park.

48:35and if you connect those parks, then you may lose that process of local adaptation. That's one of the advices I give.

48:42Rick Steves:This is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been talking with Menno Skilthausen. His book is Darwin Comes to Town, How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution. Menno, when I think about how humankind intersects with nature and the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, I'm thinking climate change, I'm thinking invasive species, I'm thinking new diseases born by insects that are showing up where they're not supposed to show up. There's a lot of negative challenges that come with, you know, this super species on the planet. With your teaching, I suppose some people could say, well, you're not blowing any whistle that we have any responsibility on this planet.

49:21Rick Steves:You're just saying, this is an exciting ride. Let's know where it's going and ride it smartly. How do you answer that? Yeah, I am saying that, But at the same time, I'm not saying that all biodiversity can survive in cities and that everything can adapt. The examples I'm giving in my book are success stories of animals and plants that have been able to survive in cities. But in addition, of course, there are many species which simply go extinct because they cannot adapt. And for those species, we still need these pristine areas. So, for example, I'm also another sort of citizen science project that I'm doing is called Taxon Expeditions.

50:00and we take non-biologists into the jungle and discover new species with them. And those are species which you can only really find in those pristine forests and in places where the human influence is minimal. And those species will not be able to survive in cities. So I think at the same time we're still going to need a protected network of areas where the human influence is still very minimal.

50:24Rick Steves:Menno Skilthausen, author of Darwin Comes to Town, How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution. Thank you so much for your work and sharing it so eloquently in your book. My pleasure, Rick. Thank you very much.

50:59Rick Steves:Hey, I'm Rick Steves. Every year, over 30 ,000 people join our expert guides on a Rick Steves Europe bus tour. And about half of our tour members are return travelers. Details for each of our 40 itineraries, including departure dates and prices, are at ricksteves.com. And for a candid and fun-loving insight into each itinerary, don't miss our archive of hundreds of tour scrapbooks created by tour alums competing in our annual contest to win a free tour. And independent travelers can also learn from the day-to-day descriptions of our smartly-designed tour itineraries. All of that is at ricksteves.com.