Programming For Earth Month

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Justin Glisan: I had never seen clouds this dark and I had never seen it get so dark so rapidly.

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Mike Naig: I've seen a lot of weariness. This is just something that we didn't need on top of an already difficult situation. The damage is widespread and the damage is real.

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Justin Glisan: I've storm chased, I've been in severe weather events. This was the first time that I had been very scared.

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Severe storms are a part of life in Iowa. However, the number and intensity of these events has been on the rise. Many of these catastrophic weather events have changed parts of Iowa forever. As the level of devastation across the Hawkeye state increases, there are questions about what the future might hold with Iowa's Wild Weather.

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Funding for this program was provided by Friends, the Iowa PBS Foundation, as well as generations of families and friends who feel passionate about the programs they watch on Iowa PBS.

Funding for this program was provided by the Gilchrist Foundation, founded by Jocelyn Gilchrist, furthering the philanthropic interests of the Gilchrist family in wildlife and conservation, the arts and public broadcasting and disaster relief.

And by, the Claude P. Small, Kathryn Small Cousins and William Carl Cousins Fund at the Quad Cities Community Foundation to support nature programming on Iowa PBS.

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Support for this program has been provided by the Strickler family, in loving memory of Lois Strickler, to support programs that highlight the importance of Iowa's natural resources on Iowa PBS.

(storm winds blowing)

In August of 2020, a collection of thunderstorms packing hurricane force winds, leveled large portions of landscape across eight Midwestern states. The widespread event set a record for the nation's most expensive thunderstorm, causing more than $12 billion in damage. Weather forecasters labeled the powerful storm a derecho.

The definition of derecho translates to straight or forward and describes particular wind patterns in supercell thunderstorms.

Before August 10, 2020, the weather term derecho was not a widely known term.

Mike Naig: No, I had never seen, frankly never heard of something like this happening. And again, that's saying something because we're used to dealing with weather in agriculture, and even severe weather from time to time. But this was something that was completely unheard of.

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After that warm August day, many Midwesterners would make derecho a household word, now synonymous with a complex of severe thunderstorms responsible for carving a path of destruction 770 miles long across the Midwest.

Mike Naig: What is so distinct about that storm is frankly the length of time that it was on the ground. I mean, you're talking from South Dakota to Ohio. You're talking about a swath across the center part of Iowa, basically the center third of Iowa from river to river saw damage of some kind, not all of it severe, but some damage. And then the intensity of the storm itself, the winds and then how long.

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Mike Naig: Those are things that make this really an unprecedented event.

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Described as a hurricane without an eye, the tempest did most of its damage in Iowa, wiping out millions of acres of row crops. According to the Iowa Department of Agriculture, the derecho inflicted damage in more than 60 counties, with 36 experiencing massive levels of destruction. In all, nearly one-quarter of the corn and soybean crops were damaged or destroyed.

Many farm families across Iowa faced gut-wrenching decisions after the storm. Storage for harvested commodities on Iowa farms took a big hit as the rare weather event crushed grain bins like aluminum soda cans.

State of Iowa officials estimate 57 million bushels of stored grain at co-ops across Iowa had been compromised. Millions of yet to be harvested bushels headed for on-farm storage were lying on the ground in need of a new home.

Mike Naig: The damage was so significant on some of these farms and you're looking at a crop that was damaged. Where do you even start to start to clean up and rebuild? And people just told me, well, we just got after it. And people helped and neighbors came and family came and those are some things that really stick with me. And yet, knowing that there was a pretty major effort that was still ahead of them to try to recover. And then of course, as the days went on then people really started to look at that crop that was in the field and say, what are we going to do? What do we have here? And will we have to go harvest? What is that going to look like? And I also remember visiting with farmers who had then gone about harvesting or attempting to harvest those crops and going one direction at mile, mile and a half per hour in the combine, being really hard on equipment in that process and just grinding through a harvest that just wouldn't end. It took forever.

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Justin Glisan: The serial derecho that moved through the state --

Dr. Justin Glisan is State Climatologist of Iowa. As a trained meteorologist, Glisan is responsible for extrapolating details in weather data and providing the results to policymakers. When August 10th began, Glisan and his colleagues from several states were in a meeting watching a small band of storms forming on the eastern edge of the Northern Plains. They had no idea how the day was about to unfold.

Justin Glisan: In the forefront of my mind during August of 2020 was the drought that was occurring in West Central Iowa, D2, D3 conditions, drought that we hadn't seen since 2012. And we're chatting as the Zoom is going on saying, I really want this line to stay together because the trajectory is basically west to east, it'll go through the drought region, we might get some significant rainfall. This line is starting to expand and we're severe warned as it is crossing the border from Nebraska into Iowa. It gets a little east of Carroll, Iowa right in the D3 region and it hits a very unstable, explosive atmosphere and the line intensifies rapidly. But I had never seen clouds this dark and I had never seen it get so dark so rapidly.

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Justin Glisan: I've storm chased, I've been in severe weather events. This was the first time that I had been very scared.

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The weather continued to intensify. By the time the line of storms arrived in Marshalltown, wind speeds reached 90 miles per hour. The storm spun off three tornadoes causing widespread damage to the Marshall County seat, surrounding farms and nearby small communities. The straight-line wind storm began to feed warm air back into itself, increasing its strength and becoming a derecho.

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State climatologists across the Midwest note, tornadoes, derechos and severe storms are changing. They bring stronger, longer lasting wind gusts, heavier rains and record amounts of precipitation. This unpredictability is increasing the difficulty for meteorologists to predict how storms will move across the countryside. Glisan says, a derecho is now forecast to hit Iowa about every two years with the trend starting in 2012.

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But a storm producing the strength of the August 10, 2020 system is calculated as being a once in a decade event by the National Weather Service.

Justin Glisan: Now, aloft in this system we had warm air that allowed the updrafts to tilt backwards. So, it was kind of a self-perpetuating line in that it couldn't shut itself off as a normal thunderstorm would. You think of an updraft up, a downdraft down, that downdraft kills all the warm air going into the storm, the storm dies. Well, with this derecho line it hit very unstable air. As those downdrafts are coming down they're hitting the surface with such ferocity, it's pushing out cold air in front of it, it forces up warm air in front of that initial line, you get new towers that form as the old towers die behind it and that line is able to perpetuate 770 miles over 15 hours.

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As the storm system continued its march eastward, sustained wind speeds climbed to over 120 miles per hour.

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The derecho reached its peak as it entered Linn County. Winds measuring the strength of a Category 3 hurricane pummeled Cedar Rapids and surrounding areas continuously for 45 minutes.

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The 133,000 people calling the county seat home were without power for two weeks and over 50% of the city's celebrated tree canopy was either damaged or destroyed.

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Emma Hannigan: I saw in my own back yard how the trees were reacting and I knew something serious was happening. I knew that we were going to have damage. I did not know until a couple of days later the extent of the damage because there was no communication, especially in that Cedar Rapids, Linn County area where it was so heavy.

Emma Hannigan is the Urban and Community Forester with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. Hannigan recalls the magnitude of destruction brought on by the storm. The devastation had her reaching out to forestry officials across the country for help in making sense of what had just hit the state.

Emma Hannigan: So, I was in contact with the U.S. Forest Service right away about the extent of what I knew and I also have coordinators throughout the country in other states and one of the things that I did was I reached out to areas that have hurricanes, that have large storms. For example, I was in contact with New York and how they responded to Sandy and some of those responses to help me figure out what were my next steps.

Within a month, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources teamed up with the Maryland Department of Agriculture to begin aerial surveys in order to assess the damage to Iowa's forests. The results of the survey showed the derecho had damaged or destroyed over 32,000 acres of urban canopy.

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Additional data from the U.S. Forest Service estimated more than 4 million trees in the storm's path were either damaged or destroyed in the 2020 event.

Emma Hannigan: So, some places where we did rapid assessments had over 50% damage. We did not measure over 50%. That is going to take decades to restore that canopy. It takes many, many years to establish a tree and the amount of planting that has to go into making our next forest is a lot of labor and intensive work to get them watered, to get them planted.

Rob Hogg: My home was affected in the derecho of 2020 on August 10, 2020. And in Cedar Rapids it is, it's an ongoing disaster.

Rob Hogg is an author, attorney and former state Senator from Cedar Rapids. In 2012, he introduced bipartisan legislation to help streamline disaster assistance across the state through the Flood Mitigation Act.

Rob Hogg: One of the things that has been so attractive about Cedar Rapids was the beautiful forests and trees in our city, a long-time commitment to trees and the canopy. And you still see a few blue tarps, homeowners who just never, didn't have the insurance or didn't have the ability to get it together. For me personally, it was a 16-month process to get my house put back together and that was with good insurance.

We're not here to plant trees, we are here to grow trees.

The city of Cedar Rapids has committed up to $1 million annually over the next decade for a massive urban replanting project.

The designers of this project have selected a variety of native trees they believe are genuinely able to stand up to extreme weather, disease and invasive species. The Iowa legislature also allocated money for the Derecho Community Forestry Grant Program, which provides matching funds for communities to replant trees.

Hannigan believes the time it will take to fully rebuild the forests and plant new urban canopies will be measured not in years, but in generations.

Emma Hannigan: So, we have diversity in a lot of different ways. One is through species diversity, which helps us with future impacts of pests and diseases, for example, like we have with Emerald Ash Borer. But also, we like to have stands that have different ages so that when we lose mature trees, we have new trees coming up. And that is really important to the health of urban forests.

As the new urban forests are being established, Iowans, from state foresters to city employees to regular citizens, will be on the lookout for trees weakened, but not destroyed, by the state's record wind event.

Emma Hannigan: And with those damaged trees there is a lot of secondary things that can happen. And we know when there's wounds in trees that secondary pests can come in and also, we can have decay, which shortens the life of a tree. That tree also may need more maintenance over time to keep it going as it deteriorates faster. Another thing that we see with damaged trees is they don't provide as many benefits.

The August 10th storm left no doubt how much damage was done to the 2020 corn crop. Before the derecho, the USDA Crop Conditions Report rated most of the state's corn crop in good shape and a week ahead of schedule. But after the storm, the estimated corn yield for 2020 was reduced by 254 million bushels.

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Mike Naig: You knew it looked tough, you could look at a crop from the road and know that there was significant damage. But when you got out and walked in fields and saw it. But then it's another thing to try to go out and harvest it. And again, the harvest is supposed to be this great time of year where you've put all of your effort and energy into this crop and now you get a chance to go out and see what it's like. And frankly, there were some really good-looking crops in the parts of the state that were damaged heavily. So, folks were excited about what this harvest season was going to bring.

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East of Marshalltown near Toledo, Iowa, farmers watched helplessly as a projected record crop was crushed in a matter of minutes.

Jacob Benda: Seeing all the corn just lying flat and it's just like, oh man. I mean, I had seen that back in 2011 when that derecho came through. That was in July. And that corn actually goosenecked back up. But with as late as this was, this corn was not, that plant was not growing anymore. It was all focused on filling out that ear. And I knew right away it's like, that's not going to be coming back. We got declared zero on all but about 10% of our farm. So, just shy of a hundred and some acres. And so, we combined that, disked the rest all underneath and talk about a sick feeling in your stomach just disking up corn. I never ever want to do that again.

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The magnitude of the August 10th derecho has made crop resiliency a top priority for many farmers. In the aftermath of the event, some corn producers and seed companies noticed newer varieties of short-stature plants fared better than taller stalks.

Mike Naig: You think about, what does it take for a crop to be more resilient in the face of variable weather? And so, absolutely. I think farmers are interested in looking at those traits, again provided that they still achieve the same kind of yields that they're looking for, but I think breeders and seed companies are absolutely recognizing that we've got to look at this to, again, be more resilient in the face of whatever the weather throws at us into the future.

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Iowa is not alone in dealing with evolving weather patterns and storms pushing wind speeds higher and rainfall amounts to record levels.

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In December of 2021, a severe line of storms produced an EF4 tornado in Mayfield, Kentucky. The twister was part of a much larger system that stretched over six states. The supercell thunderstorm spawned multiple tornadoes on its eight-hour, 350-mile journey through several Mid-Atlantic states.

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For Glisan, the significance of this storm wasn't just the system's severity, but the storm’s timing.

Justin Glisan: Along that cold front, along that squall line and eventually what would become a derecho, by no means as devastating as the August 10th derecho, 63 tornadoes were spawned from that event. We're talking the middle of December. The largest tornado outbreak for December for the United States, in the United States' history, across Iowa, but also the largest outbreak of tornadoes for the state of Iowa for any month, in December. It blows your mind. It still blows my mind thinking about that.

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The conditions needed for storms to spawn multiple tornadoes, coupled with expanding and shifting storm fronts across the country, are among the conditions Glisan and other climatologists have been watching for several years.

Justin Glisan: The general summary there is we're seeing more outbreaks of tornadoes as opposed to one-off tornadic events. We're also seeing some semblance of a shift from the classic Tornado Alley, which is in Nebraska, Oklahoma, down into Texas and expands into parts of Iowa, it depends on what your definition of Tornado Alley is. We're seeing an increase in tornadoes in Dixie Alley, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi.

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Extreme weather events have continued to plague the Hawkeye State. In spring of 2022, a storm system composed of three supercell thunderstorms spawned 10 tornadoes. The most powerful twister an EF4, touched the counties of Madison, Warren, Polk and Jasper, packing 170 mile per hour winds as it made its 70-mile trek across the center of the state.

Justin Glisan: In terms of weather across the state, it is becoming more extreme, it will continue to be extreme whether it is drought, heat waves, flooding, all those severe weather events are going to become more extreme.

Glisan believes that climate change is playing a role in the severe weather trend being experienced by Iowans over the past decade. How much climate change may have influenced the conditions that launched the 2020 derecho may not have a simple answer.

Justin Glisan: So, when we talk about climate change impacting severe weather, winter weather, any kind of weather event that we talk about, we don't use one event to dictate a trend as a scientist. We need multiple data points that tell us in a direction that we're moving. Peer-reviewed studies that have shown that the days in which severe weather environments have increased, especially in March, April, May, April, May, June are due to a warmer climate. So definitely there are climate change fingerprints on the larger scale structure of the atmosphere. Now, for individual events, was the August 10th derecho supercharged because of climate change? We don't know yet.

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For most, the physical damage to the buildings and the landscape will eventually disappear, becoming a distant memory. For some, the emotional toll will always linger.

Mike Naig: I think the derecho of 2020 did wake a lot of folks up to say that this is something that, again, we had seen severe weather, we expect to have severe weather, but to see something of this magnitude, I do think it's got people thinking about what does the future hold for us?

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Funding for this program was provided by Friends, the Iowa PBS Foundation, as well as generations of families and friends who feel passionate about the programs they watch on Iowa PBS.

Funding for this program was provided by the Gilchrist Foundation, founded by Jocelyn Gilchrist, furthering the philanthropic interests of the Gilchrist family in wildlife and conservation, the arts and public broadcasting and disaster relief.

And by, the Claude P. Small, Kathryn Small Cousins and William Carl Cousins Fund at the Quad Cities Community Foundation to support nature programming on Iowa PBS.

(music)

Support for this program has been provided by the Strickler family, in loving memory of Lois Strickler, to support programs that highlight the importance of Iowa's natural resources on Iowa PBS.

[calm music] ♪ Man: We're in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, just over 11,000 feet, home to some of the oldest trees on planet Earth. The trees in this forest that are surrounding me right now are older than the pyramids in Egypt. They were alive when Jesus Christ was born. Some of these trees were already 4,000 years old when the United States was born. They go back further than almost all recorded history. ♪ When you're at a place like this, it changes your perspective because these trees are truly the great ancestors of life on Earth. They have been here for so long and will more than likely be here long after I'm gone. And it's very rare to be in a place where you have that sense of time. It changes your perspective on not only where we are and what we've done as a species on this planet, but where we might be able to go. Woman: Set one Ari, take one. Man: Name and describe yourself. What are you? Who are you? Ha ha! My name is Ari Wallach. I am a father, a husband, and during the day, when I'm not doing those two probably most important things, I am a futurist. [Grimes' "Oblivion" playing] ♪ Grimes: ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ I never walk about after dark ♪ ♪ It's my point of view ♪ ♪ 'Cause someone could break your neck ♪ ♪ Coming up behind you ♪ ♪ Always coming, an d you'd never have a clue ♪ ♪ I never look behind all the time ♪ ♪ I will wait forever ♪ ♪ Always looking straight ♪ ♪ Thinking, counting all the hours you wait ♪ Wallach: Growing up, I remember feeling so excited about the future, impatient, actually because I couldn't wait for it to arrive. [dramatic music] Beam me aboard. ["The Jetsons" theme song] Wallach: I watched movies and TV shows that told stories of what felt like inevitable human progress, filling me with a sense of hope and possibility. [engines roaring] And it wasn't just on TV. We were launching rockets. Markets were booming. And the Internet was coming online. Bill Clinton: Hope is back in America. We are on the right track to the 21st century. Dick Clark: 3, 2, 1. Happy 2000! William McRaven: The next generation and the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today. Wallach: I went to work as a futurist, helping governments and major companies around the world better think about and plan for the future, not working to predict the future, but looking at long-term trends and the impacts they were go ing to have across society. It was an exciting time. And it really did feel like we were on the brink of something extraordinary. New technology was poised to bring about unprecedented prosperity and connection. Less poverty, more peace, and shorter work weeks were all right around the corner. But then something happened, or didn't happen. And that future never really showed up. We are now working more, not less. We have become more technologically connected and yet more deeply divided. The consequences of long-overlooked environmental destruction are showing up in terrifying ways. And the stories we tell ourselves about tomorrow are now stories of dystopia where everything falls apart. Our feelings about tomorrow have shifted from excitement to dread. And the future has become something to avoid rather than to build. But over the years, my work has convinced me the future is not set in stone. We have the power to shape it. That's what's led me here to making this show. I'm looking for the people wh o are building better futures for themselves, for their kids, and for the world around them. Because the truth is, we have choices to make right now. And these choices are going to have major, long-lasting effects. So I'm headed out on a journey to meet the brilliant minds and brave pioneers changing our world and reinventing tomorrow, people who believe that we have everything we need to create better futures-- not perfect, but better-- and something each generation can build on, those challenging the status quo, expanding our ideas of what's at stake and what's still possible, from food to education, from the cities we live in to the ways in which we organize our societies, people using new tools and ancient wisdom to restore our relationship with each other, to ourselves, and to this be autiful place we call home, a journey to rediscover how far we've come, and where we could take this whole thing moving forward. What I'm really mo st interested in doing here is trying to find the people and the ideas that are going to kind of show us what futures could be and from there figure out which ones we want. Man: So this is great. So let's talk a little bit about the science of motivation. What do we think-- Wallach: As my journey begins, I'm interested in why, even with all these tools and technologies available, so many of us find it difficult to think about the future. That's brought me here to sit down with a behavioral psychologist named Hal Hershfield. Hershfield: Our future selves often feel like strangers to us. They feel like sort of different people altogether. One of the big findings in the early days of what's called "social neuroscience" is that the brain can tell what's me and what's not me, which makes sense in a way. If I'm sitting in a scanner, and I think about myself, I see more activity in what's called my medial prefrontal cortex and certain parts of the brain there than if I, say, think about you. Hershfield: I was more interested because I thought that that finding held the clue for maybe why we start thinking about our future selves as different, other people. In other words, if I can distinguish between me and you in my brain, would I see a same sort of disconnect between me and my future self in my brain? So here's what we did. We had our research participants go into the scanner. They see a little screen in front of them. It's a really boring, basic screen. And they see a word at the top. And the word represents a person they need to think about. So they say, "OK. Think about current self or think about your future self." And what we saw was that the brain activity from thinking about your future self was more similar to the brain activity when people thought about another person. Wallach: What are the implications of that? It suggests that on some deeper level, we really do think about our future selves as if they are other people. When you take that perspective, if our future self is some other person, then the consequences of my decisions right now are going to befall some other person. All right. So why don't you look at me? All right. That's good. All right. Now keep that face. All right. And let's try this one more time. We're going to do something funny here. All right. So let's pull these up here. And then here's the... Oh! older ver-- Wow. All right. So what do you think when you see that? I mean, I'm sure people have a somewhat similar reaction. That looks shockingly like my dad. Yeah. It seems like I don't totally know who that is. Right. Right. Right. But it also doesn't seem that far from now. Right. Which is, in a way, true to form, right? Like, when we think about our future selves, you know, they may not be that far from now. We don't totally know who they are, but-- When I first see that, like, it's jarring. And then now you think, "OK." Once you get over the initial kind of shock of where things could go, you think, like, "OK. "Well, like, if these are still the same individual, "like, how does this one now, "like, befriend and best-friend this one. And what would you do for a best friend?" I think that's, like, the exact right perspective there. Because they're not the same. Yeah. But it is that same sort of relationship of a best friend. In some ways, the work that you're doing, it's like a wormhole, right? It's like the "Star Trek" wormhole to the future and lets us kind of see ahead. But, like you said, it's not just about vision. It's actually about the emotions that pull us through. And I think this is a key insight here. This is really a conversation about empathy. This is a vision that's really hard to conjure up. I can't picture my grandkids. I can barely picture my own kids when they're older because I'm so stuck on what they look like right now. But I have a really easy time knowing how I want them to feel and knowing how I want their kids to feel and on and on and on. And so, like you said, that's the empathy through line. That's the sort of empathy freeway that we want to consider. Wallach: It's powerful to consider how we want life to be for the generations yet to be born. And it forces us to think beyond our own lifetime. Man: Today, we live in a world in which we're ill-adapted to inhabit. That wasn't the world, the space and time, the environment that we evolved in. So a natural consequence of that is some of our cognitive abilities aren't necessarily tuned for the world that we've miraculously managed to construct, a world in which we have a vast amount of information and an amazing ability to address future problems, to invest in the future. And that ability is something that perhaps we don't use to the extent that we would like. Woman: I like to think of the future as a story. It's really a set of ideas that we all engage in. And so in some sense, th e future is very malleable. And in other ways, it kind of doesn't exist. And so it's open terrain for lots of new ideas and new ways of being in the world. Wallach: So when most people ask me what's my story, I actually start back in 1922. Woman: This is the Holocaust Oral History Project interview of Rachmiel Wolochwianski, April 28, 1993. Wolochwianski: I am born in the city Baranowicze, East Poland. Wallach: 1922 was the year my father was born in a small town called Baranowicze in Poland. Around the time of his 18th birthday was when the Nazis invaded Poland. Narrator: These were the only pictures made in the city during the siege. Many of the middle-aged were sullen and angry. Youngsters were half-resentful, half-resigned, while their elders turned to prayer. Wallach: All the Jews were pushed into a small ghetto. Eventually, his mother and sister were sent to Auschwitz, and that's where they perished. Now, my father and his brother and dad were still in the ghetto. And at one point, they actually escaped. And in the kind of escape of leaving the ghetto, my grandfather wa s actually shot and killed. And soon thereafter, my father joined the Jewish underground, the resistance, and for several years, basically he lived in the forests of Poland fighting the Nazis day in and day out. When I thought about what I want to do with my life I decided to choose a path that would allow me to kind of apply the way I think we should be morally operating as a species, no t so much to just push back against the Nazis of today, wh ich is unbelievably important, but in many ways to think about what was happening in the late 1920s and late 1930s before the Nazis came to power, thinking about how the world was in so much flux, and why weren't there people around to help steer us towards a better path? In many ways, that greatly influences the work that I do. I'm thinking about where can we take this in a positive way, right? I'm not a futurist who's saying, "Look out for these different icebergs on the Titanic." I'm saying there are icebergs out there. We should navigate through them. But what is the harbor that we're trying to get to? ♪ There's a phrase called "cathedral thinking." And what that means is, how do we go about making decisions in the same ways that those who build ancient cathedrals thought? Because when they were building cathedrals, I mean, more often than not, the architect and the initial builders of the cathedral wouldn't even be around to see it actually completed. It wouldn't happen in their lifetime. So they had to make these decisions in a way where they were literally laying the cornerstone for something that they would never actually see completed, but they were doing it for the next generation. I came to Cordoba to see firsthand a project that has been many, many generations in the making. [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] Wallach: It's awe-inspiring to experience something that those who started never lived to see completed built as a gift to those yet to be born, a reminder that the future is being built on our actions right now. The future is a verb. It's something we do. We can become great ancestors. And that is what the future needs us to do right now, to think in a way that places us in their shoes. ♪ [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] [Speaking Spanish] ♪ Wallach: This idea of stepping back to see ourselves and the work we do in this moment as a piece of something larger is so powerful, and it has the potential to unlock bigger, better ideas worth working towards in the years to come. ♪ It's my first time in Morocco, and I've read about this massive solar power plant for a while now. And to be able to come and visit it is kind of like a dream come true. It's a little bit, you know, solar, alternative, renewable energy geek in me. But to see a plant kind of come up in the middle of the desert using the latest technology that can power a huge part of the country is amazing for me. So tell me, where are we right now? Wallach: So in this area right here just alone, how many of these mirrors are there? Two million? Two million. 2 million of these panels? Yeah, in NOOR I. Wallach: The complex here is the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world, generating enough power to supply a million homes in Morocco with renewable electricity. And in a country that doesn't ha ve a natural supply of oil, natural gas, or coal, they believe this is the start of something even bigger. Wallach: What is kind of your hope and your dream for Morocco in terms of the raw resources that are coming to your land from the sky? Wallach: What could an energy-independent future look like, not just here, but everywhere? What impact will it have on our politics, our health care, and the well-being of the natural world when we create a future independent from fossil fuels? Solar technology is just one piece of making that future a reality. But as large-scale facilities are popping up in countries all over the world, the goal of powering major cities and entire countries is getting closer every day. ♪ In Northern California, scientists are taking a similar approach by applying long-term thinking to the challenges facing us today, pursuing a long-held dream of limitless clean energy. Kritcher: I'm Annie Kritcher. I was a lead designer for the Ignition experiment. We are at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California. What we do here is, we take two atoms, and we smash them together, and we make a heavier atom. And that process releases energy. And so you're literally for 90 trillionths of a second creating a mini sun. That's correct. Kritcher: The reason that we ne ed to generate stars on Earth is to reach the extreme conditions that are required to get two atoms to fuse together. So you need tens of millions of degrees to do that. We have 192 laser beams which enter the ends of a hollow cylinder. And then they hit the hollow cylinder on the inside. And that creates an oven, a very hot X-ray oven, which is 3 million degrees. And inside of the cylinder sits a little, tiny capsule the size of a BB. Kritcher: And inside of that little, tiny BB sits the deuterium and tritium that we want to fuse together. And so this intense X-ray oven heats the outside of the capsule, ex plodes that material outward, and just like a rocket, where the rocket fuel goes out and that pushes a rocket up, we're squeezing the material down to half the size of a human hair from the size of a BB. Because of that outward expansion, we get an implosion. What is the goal of this work in the big picture? Nuclear fusion could provide clean, limitless, abundant energy for mankind. Fusion is really the Holy Grail of energy. Wallach: That dream reached a major milestone here recently as Annie's team led an experiment that successfully created ignition for the first time. This is the target bay. Here we have the target chamber, which is in blue. It's a spherical chamber. It's about 10 meters in diameter. And here, the laser beams come into the chamber. The laser beams are what drives our experiments. Wallach: If it's a 10-chapter book, what chapter are we in right now in this room? I'd say we're not in Chapter 1, because we've been working on this for quite a long while. And we just had the breakthrough. I guess, maybe Chapter 3. The person that came up with the concept to do this did so before I was born. So it is really a passing-the-torch, multi-generation problem, big-science problem. Wallach: How should we be thinking about challenges like this? Kritcher: I think it's really important to consider the long-term benefits and also the generations coming after us to create a clean world for them and to give them the necessary means to be able to generate energy in the future. So it's a really important grand challenge. And it's just so important for our future generations. Wallach: One of the most exciting things about this moment is that we have the tools and potential to shape the future in ways that have never been possible before. The choices we make around ho w we develop our technologies here and now will set a path for future generations to build on. In the great arc of human history, we are living in the midst of an extraordinary time. Neil Degrasse Tyson: Deep time, like, what is that? How could the universe have been here without us? What does it mean that we've only been around for the tiniest sliver of time relative to the universe? This is a humbling revelation. Buonomano: All animals have clocks in our brains, going back to a circadian clock, because it's very important to tell time and to predict what's going to happen. But humans have been obsessed with time, in many ways, throughout-- since the beginning of civilization. And if you go back through human history, it's been one long quest to measure time with more and more and more precision. E.G. Marshall: Time-- our story is about men who are attempting to defeat it. Time is their enemy in the search for the ultimate origins of man. Tyson: If you take a football field, 100 yards, and that's the timeline of the universe, cave dwellers to the present on a timeline that begins in one end zone and ends in the other, the thickness of a blade of grass at the end of that timeline is from present day back to cave paintings. Buonomano: In many ways, one of the cognitive abilities that makes Homo sapiens sapien--or wise, if you will-- is our ability to conceptualize time. And this ability to engage in mental time travel seems to be pretty unique to humans. Wallach: Over the years, I've worked to help various organizations think about and plan for the future. But recently, something strange has started to happen. Long-term plans that were 20 or 30 years out are now only focused on the next 6 months. As the pace of the world gets faster, our perspective is getting smaller. What does it take to step back and develop a long-term perspective? How does our past impact the future? And what can we learn from those who have faced moments like these before? [Men chanting in Kanienkeha] Wallach: I'm here to speak with someone who spent her life working to ensure her community holds on to the best parts of their past as they look towards the future. Woman: Hi, Ari. Do not get up. Oh, thank you. Thank you for your invitation. And thank you for joining us here. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. This is my husband Tom. Oh, hey. I'm just going to go around really fast. Yes. Grandson. Hey. Ari. Pleasure. Woman: My English name is Antonia Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook. When I go in the nation's house and I address the nation, I am Anpetu Luta Win. I'm called Red Day Woman. Wallach: Loretta's work began here with her own tribe, where she works to pass on the ancient ways of her people to the next generation. But that work quickly grew as leaders around the world recognized the wisdom that these ideas held for looking at today's challenges through a much wider lens. Wallach: When we think about the future, why is it so important that we remember the past? I think that the most important thing about that question is, we have to have interconnectedness. I have to know where I came from in order for me to teach my grandchildren so that we can move forward. This idea of time as an entity, how would you say it's separate than the way time is practiced today, kind of-- It's very different. Afraid: You practice time according to a schedule and according to, "Oh, I got to get over here. "I got to catch a plane. I got to do this. I got to do that." And it's very stressful. But if you were to set it up in that spirit time, OK, what are you setting it up for? There's definitive ways in wh ich you approach that time. If you're living in a spiritual way, then you have time to pay attention to the plants, the trees, the animals, the fish in the ocean. And when you're doing all of these things, you begin to steward what's around you. But that's not how we live today. Today we live by that time that's running on a clock, and how much money can we make, you know, doing this? So you put profit over people. Wallach: Spending time with Loretta and her family, it's obvious that these concepts are not just ideas, but rather principles that inform how she lives and works to pass on the ancient ways of their people to the next generation. For her, these ways are not just about the past, but about a way of being in the present that recognizes the impact that our lives will have on future generations. What is seventh-generation thinking, and why is it so important today? Do you have children? Yes. OK. So can you recount back to your beginning? I can probably go back two or three generations. OK. It's a concept. And it's a loving concept that we talk about to our loved ones. So you make it your business to know what it is about yourself that you're going to engage in so you can get to that seventh-generation thinking. So 7-generation thinking is making decisions as if you think about the impact they will have on 7 generations from now? Exactly. Every decision that I make in this moment, I should think about the impact that it will have 7 generations from now. But people are-- they love convenience. They don't want to think about, oh, 7 generations, you know? But we have so many social ills all over the nation, all over the country. And those are the things that we're trying our best, I think, in this generation, to make a difference. ♪ What's your hope for the future? That we can all si t together at a spiritual table and all of us be to gether truly. That's my prayer. That's my prayer. ♪ Tyson: When we saw Earth over our shoulders, having visited the moon, it was a firmware upgrade in our sense of awareness. Our first images from the moon were 1968, taken by astronauts. That was the first mission to the moon--Apollo 8. They went to the moon, orbited a dozen or so times, and then came back. One of those orbits, they lifted the Hasselblad, and there was Earth rising over the lunar landscape, just the way the moon rises over the Earth's landscape. Why do I call it a firmware upgrade? Because if you ask any one of those people, they're not consciously thinking, "I saw Earth from space," but they're feeling it. Psychoemotionally, they are reacting to a cosmic perspective. ♪ Wallach: Humans are at their be st when we're thinking bigger than just ourselves, when we look up and see beyond this moment to remember that we are part of everything that came before us and we're also laying the foundation for generations yet to come. ♪ But why do so many of the systems that govern our world today seem so locked into short-term thinking? I've come to Japan to meet an economist named Dr. Saijo who's challenging this way of thinking with remarkable results. So we know we have this problem of shortsightedness, and we want to kind of solve for intergenerational justice and how we think about time differently. Tell me about your work. Wallach: Rather than just writing about the problems with short-term thinking, Dr . Saijo started something here called the Future Design Center to test the impacts of long-term thinking in real-life situations, bringing together everyday people from the town to take part in creating the future of their community. [Speaking Japanese] [Speaking English] [Speaking Japanese] Wallach: Community members put on these robes to signify themselves as representatives of future generations. With this in mind, they work to address the needs of today, but bearing in mind the impact these actions will have on those yet to be born. The results have been incredible, like when they achieved together what traditional policymaking had failed to address for years, reaching an agreement to raise the community's water tax by 6% in order to address the town's decaying infrastructure. Today, more than 80% of the town's policies are created by citizens who ha ve become what they proudly refer to as future designers. I'm not even from Yahaba, but already I feel-- Quick. That's right. It's a quick shift. That's right. See in there. Wallach: The work that you've designed takes people from being kind of an individual by themselves but instead starts to make it like a chain. You see yourself as part of something that came. Saijo: Yeah. Wallach: Then you you're here. But then you're connected to something that will be. Saito: That's right. ♪ Wallach: This idea of taking a longer-term perspective to the challenges facing us today is beginning to take shape around the world, like in Wales, where they recently turned this thinking into actual legislation, appointing a new role known as the future generations commissioner. Howe: I'm Sophie Howe, and I was the first future generations commissioner for Wales and the first future generations commissioner in the world. Back in 2015, our national parliament passed a law called the Well-Being of Future Generations Act. What we need to do is take a systems approach to thinking about the impact of all of our actions, what impacts they have today, but crucially in the context of this bill, what impact they have in the future. Howe: They held a national conversation with the citizens of Wales where they posed the question, what's the Wales you want to leave behind to your children, your grandchildren, an d future generations to come? That dialogue led to the government identifying 7 long-term well-being goals, and all of our public institutions must set objectives which maximize their contribution to all 7 goals. Are you seeing sufficient scale and pace of progress? The guidance made no reference to the Future Generations Act at all. And this is part of the challenge that we're seeing. Howe: Built into ou r legislation, the government and our other public institutions have to take the advice of the commissioner or justify why not. And they have to justify that publicly. So in Wales, because we have this framework, we've completely transformed the way that we're thinking about transport planning, for example, building a new stretch of motorway to deal with the problem of congestion. It's what we've always done. But the commissioner's intervention really challenged the government because you've never shifted your investment to actually giving people other means of transportation--more walking, cycling, safe routes to those areas an d public transport investment to those areas. We'll start to see air pollution reducing. We'll start to see more people cycling, which is good for their health. The long-term impact, of course, is that we want to see an increase in life expectancy. So I think people are increasingly starting to see those connections. If we can embrace models like we have in Wales, that has the potential to have a real trickle-down effect. And imagine if we multiply that by every decision or every approach that a public institution or a government take to deciding how they're going to roll out policy and encourages them to-- well, not just encourages them, actually requires them to join the dots and think in a long-term way. ♪ Zaidi: We struggle a lot with long-term thinking, and we tend to default to short term-thinking quite often. And so we've kind of set up multiple aspects of society to work in a short-term capacity. One of the first questions I like to ask is, who's benefiting from the system being this way? Our systems are not really broken. That's a bit of a misconception to say that. I think our systems are designed to work exactly the way they are. They're just not necessarily designed to work for you and I. Narrator: Pollution is co ntamination of the environment that interferes with the processes of life. In seeking a better life on Earth, man in the 20th century has created a great technology at the expense of the environment essential to life. Tyson: We like identifying ourselves as an intelligent species. But who made that measurement? We did. We are polluting our environment. We are altering the very ecosystem that we need to survive. We're creating a next wave of extinction across the tree of life without knowing what the long-term consequences of that might be. I could define intelligence in such a way so that there is no sign of it here on Earth. My biggest fear is that, though we call ourselves intelligent, that we might not be wise enough to be the shepherds we need to be to assure the survival of generations yet to be born. Zaidi: Having anxiety about the future is not an unreasonable thing. It's actually very logical in some ways when you look at the data around what we're seeing in the world. But the important thing is that we have the opportunity to shape it. And the hopeful part of that is that we actually have all the solutions we need to address the problems. What we don't have is the context for those solutions to take hold. ♪ Wallach: I'm interested in exploring more of these new solutions and meeting the people who are creating them. That led me here to New Haven, where a former fisherman-turned-ocean-farmer named Bren Smith has become a catalyst fo r change in this community. So, Bren, I have no idea wh at a regenerative ocean farmer is. So both, I want you to tell me what it is and how you got into it. Sure. Smith: I was born and raised in Newfoundland, Canada, the edge of North America. All I wanted to be was a fisherman. That was my dream. I didn't want to be a politician, didn't want to be an astronaut. So I dropped out of high school when I was 14 and headed out to sea and fished the globe. Cod, crab, tuna-- you name it, I fished it. As I moved through, the problem was, I was fishing at the height of the industrial fishery tearing up whole ecosystems, you know, the things that we know now. But when I was in-- out in the Bering Sea, the cod stocks crashed in Newfoundland, Canada. And that was such a wake-up call because I thought environmentalism was about birds and bees and bears. And to see 30,000 people thrown out of work, fishermen walking the streets like hungry ghosts, an economy built up and a culture built up over hundreds of years around a fishery, you realize, like, "Oh, this isn't about the environment. "This is about the economies, the kitchen-table issue. This is that there will be no jobs on a dead ocean." ♪ Wallach: Bren's path led him to ocean farming, where he now grows kelp and trains hundreds of other fishermen just like him to look at the ocean in a whole new way. In a time of growing concern around land-based agriculture, he sees untapped potential here at sea. ♪ Smith: I might come in again here. Let's see, Ron. So I've been farming this patch of water for almost 20 years. And what you're looking here at is 10 acres of kelp farm. So we have anchors on the side of the farm and then just rows of crop. And the kelp is sitting about, you know, 6, 7 feet below the surface. And our job as farmers is just to get the right amount of sunlight and nutrients in order to grow. So we care about the depth and what time of year we're planting, what temperature. So it's just simple as can be. You know, I wish it was more complicated. I'd seem smarter. But the idea is, when you're working with the ocean, you need to be a willow, not an oak. And you need to be something that you can remove and rebuild real easily. Ron, now-- Hey, Ron, we got a lot of pressure right here. Here we go. Now let me clean it. All right. There we go. So what we're going to do is, you're just going to grab a clump with your hand here and cut along. But try to-- don't cut the rope. So I'd rather you go below. And just lift it on high. OK. OK. Do some more here. I'm just going to cut. Smith: The power of kelp is that it has so many uses. Like, yes, we can eat it, and we should eat it, and it's going to be the center of the plate, because it's going to be affordable. We can make it delicious. There's so much creativity in the food sector. You can use it for biostimulants and fertilizer and land-based ag for feed, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals. Bioplastics is a huge industry now. The idea is really to break down this sea wall between land and sea farming. Nutrients are in the waters--too much of it-- like phosphorus, nitrogen, carbon, all this sort of stuff. It's collected, use plants to do it, bring it back, and use it for fertilizers, biostimulants, things like that because there are all these micronutrients that apple orchards need, flower farms, all this sort of stuff, that it just is very accessible to the land-based plants. ♪ Wallach: The old story, in terms of humans and the sea is, we go out there, we take what we want. We take as much as we want as quickly as we want. And then go back to land, and we consume it. What's the new story? I think it's a great question. Like, we do need a story for the future, right? The biggest thing-- and I think this gets missed in the climate discussion a lot-- is that there needs to be a cultural transition. And you need to think about, like, what motivates people. What fills their soul and gets them up in the morning? This isn't necessarily about money. And that moment, when I was a kid, and, like, wanted to be a fisherman because they had self-directed lives and the pride of feeding their communities, that's what we need to tap into. That's what motivates folks. And as a kelp farmer, yeah, I've had to say good-bye to rogue waves and chasing fish. But what I can embrace-- I own my own boat. I succeed and fail on my own terms. I got to be, like, an engineer, a scientist, a farmer, all this sort of stuff at once. And I get to feed the folks around me. These are soul-filling jobs. And that's the discussion we have with fishermen. Like, yes, we all have to say good-bye to some things. But do we get the core of what makes us wake up every morning? And that's how you build an army of innovation at the end of the day, a blue-collar innovation. And quite honestly, you get the politics right. Like, if you can tap into that, where people see themselves as part of the solution, then the level of innovation and knowledge networks and sharing and stuff, I think that's where we transition to a better future. Because you just want millions of minds trying to figure this out. But you got to tap into the soul to do that. [Gulls squawking] Zaidi: Sometimes it can feel like what we do doesn't really amount to anything or doesn't add to the bigger picture that is unfolding or that we don't have the ability to enact change in the real world. But the fact is that every little action does add up. The desire to talk about these wonderful things in the future that like, oh, we'll have sustainability, we'll have equity, we'll have justice, we'll have all of these things, what we need to do is borrow those ideas from the future and think about, like, how we're going to implement them today. If you want a tree to grow 20 years from now, you have to plant a physical seed to get that tree. What sort of future do you want? And what's the action you can take right now to enable that future to become a reality? ♪ Wallach: This idea of planting seeds right now for better futures is an invitation to all of us, no matter where we are. Here in the jungles of northeast India, I came to meet someone who is doing just that, leading a conservation effort to challenge how his community thinks about the futures they are building. Wallach: For years, I read bout these extraordinary, natural-grown bridges, where ficus tree roots are trained to grow into living crossings, lasting for hundreds of years, connecting the villages throughout the jungle. Morningstar leads the effort to preserve these bridges, and with them, an ancient way of thinking about modern progress and the past. Khongthaw: Building a root bridge is, like, a 1,000-year-old traditional knowledge. Wallach: Mm-hmm. Wallach: So give me some facts about the root bridges. How many of them are there? What are the longest one? What are the highest ones? There are others who are coming in and saying, "That's nice, but we can make a bridge with concrete." What's the threat to you, your way of life, and really your way of thinking when these bridges kind of go up in your community? [All speaking Pynursia] How are you? Sit down, please. Please, sit down. Yes, please sit down. Wallach: In addition to his work on the bridges, Morningstar travels to speak with students in schools around the region, encouraging them to find and protect nature-based solutions to the problems facing the communities here today and in the years to come. ♪ There's so much we can learn from these traditions, as around the world, people are beginning to rediscover that natural solutions can have profound results. There are projects under way around New York City to restore oyster reefs that offset erosion along the shorelines. And in cities across China, there's work being done to enable mangroves to serve as natural seawalls, preventing flooding around major cities. This is not a quick fix. And the people who start these projects, these root bridges, know they are doing something that is not just for them, but it's going to be for their kids and even-- hundreds of years out. So we're, in many ways, saying to both of our communities, "We're going to be in this together for a while." ♪ Wallach: When we started this, I was thinking that so many of the conversations would somehow revolve around technology. And yet as I talk about what people are working on, what do they want to see happen in futures, they talk about being human again. And what's most surprising to me is the desire to kind of start making some decisions about what do we want to leave behind and what do we want to start creating more of that we've lost. ♪ What, right now, gives you hope? Hershfield: This is a wonderful question because it's so easy. It's so easy to only see doom and gloom out there. Even if we consider the doom and gloom, time still marches on. There's no stopping the progress of time. So it gives me hope to consider how we've done things in the past to make the present better and what we might be able to do now to make the future better, as well. Tyson: We are small in time and in space, participating in a great unfolding of cosmic events, a reminder that civilization is precious, life is precious. We should do everything we can to preserve it in this one moment we have to experience the glory of this universe. ♪ Nature give me hope because when you look at the things happening in the world, the legislative, the war, and the fighting, the clash, the rivalry, the protests, it's about, you know-- about human beings. So, for me, the most important thing about nature give me hope because the way you see nature, you know, it's a good thing to learn from nature. So just go to nature and sit there. See the animals. See the ants. See the birds. See the bees. Just learn from them, and then come back. It will change your life. Smith: You know, we can build something from the bottom up that we're proud of that's beautiful that we can, like, point to this moment being, like, "Yeah, we built something to hand to you. We started this for you. Now you continue it." Saijo: 10 centuries later, when we open up a kind of history book, imagine, then, are we the people who destroyed our entire Earth? That's the reason wh y, see, we are short of food, we are short of energy. We don't want to be that kind of ancestor, right? Wallach: Uh-huh. Saijo: Please think about embracing our future. That's my message. Wallach: For the first time in human history, we are now grappling with a set of issues, a set of decisions that we have to make that will have long-term consequences for Homo sapiens, for our species, and for this planet. If we want to think about where we might be able to go tomorrow, what could happen, and what do we want to see happen, it's important for us to be able to kind of look back and see ourselves as part of something much larger. If we really want to move forward, we have to be curious about what those different forwards and those futures could look like. ♪

♪ UMA THURMAN: Life. The closer you look... ..the more mysterious it seems. We can't see the invisible forces at work. But what if we could? It's time to look at our home... ..in a whole new way. Imagine carbon cycling through nature. It's one of the building blocks of life... ..and it's stored in our forests... ..oceans... ..and grasslands on an incredible scale. But we've released too much of it into the atmosphere, risking our future. We can halt emissions and draw the carbon back down. And our best ally for that is nature. Restoring it to abundance is the biggest challenge of our time. But we CAN do it. If the future of nature looked brighter, so could the future for us all. Our ocean. It's the greatest ecosystem on the planet. ♪ DAVE: Standing by. COMMS: There might be a group going left to right. - They just dove. - Roger that. Thanks. UMA: Understanding how it works has never been so important. - Over on the other side. - Right by that black boat? - Yeah, I can see dorsals. - Yeah. UMA: Because it's changing under the pressure of climate change. It's getting hotter and hotter, without a doubt. UMA: And life within the ocean affects the whole planet. Humpback whales are ocean nomads. It's estimated they can migrate over half a million miles in a lifetime. (WHALES CALL) Each summer, Atlantic populations come to feed in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, where marine biologist Dr Dave Wiley and his team are ready to meet them. There's a lot of activity, both commercial whale-watching boats and recreational boats. So we have to work around them, but we're looking for a group of two or three. UMA: Dave's team wants to know how climate change is affecting the humpbacks' feeding behavior. To find out, they need to get much nearer to the whales. You can't try to rush any of it. That's why it takes sometimes, you know, long periods of time before we actually get close enough. UMA: It's a waiting game. There's going to be a lot of this during this trip. After looking for whales and working on whales, eating is probably the next most common thing I do. Such a good sandwich. We're out here for like eight to ten hours at a time. Of course, everybody gets hungry. But we've noticed as soon as you start to snack, that's when the whales pop up. (WHALE CALLS) - Oh! - Look at that! Whales coming up. UMA: The scientists want to attach sensors to the whales to collect important data. It's not an easy task to put tags on every animal in a group, but we've done it before and we're going to try to do it again. Looks like the group's coming up over there at our one o'clock. ♪ I have 403 here. The tags we're using are called DTAGs. They're a really sophisticated tag that goes on with suction cups so it doesn't hurt the animals at all. So basically with these tags, we know what the animals are doing with their body and we know any sounds they make or anything they're hearing. And they're also equipped with GPS so when they come to the surface, they give us location. So it's really a full suite of data. (INDISTINCT DIRECTIONS) DAVE: OK. Mike's ready to tag, everybody. Hold on. TAMMY: Here we go. (THEY CHEER) That was good. That worked well. It all comes together, it's perfect. UMA: Some of the tags are fitted with cameras to see what the whales are doing. DAVE: So we've got this great backlog of data that shows us what the ocean was like over the past 20 years, how it's changing right at this very minute. And then as this project continues into the future, we'll know how the animals are behaving in an ocean that's going to be really quite different than the one they've been used to for the last... ..hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years. UMA: And by deploying almost 300 tags since 2004, they've built a picture of their feeding behavior. This gives the scientists an important reference, allowing them to see if anything unusual is happening. Since the study began, the whales' feeding habits stayed fairly consistent... ..until this year, when Dave and his team noticed something different going on. DAVE: The main prey item for almost everything in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, and humpback whales in particular, are a little fish called sand lance. They're maybe six inches long, as big around as your thumb, and they're here in really big numbers. UMA: Sand lance normally stay at the surface, but this year they are keeping to the sea floor. Dave thinks that rising ocean temperatures are causing the fish to hibernate early. We haven't seen this before, so this is already a sign that the ocean is changing rapidly and in many ways drastically. ♪ UMA: What happens to whales matters, as they play an important role in the ocean. So these animals are going down and they're feeding on the bottom, but they defecate at the surface. They spread huge amounts of fertilizer all over the surface of the ocean, where the sunlight is also, so you get this combination of fertilizer and sunlight. UMA: This creates the perfect conditions for a microscopic organism to flourish. Phytoplankton. Just like plants, they photosynthesize, absorbing carbon dioxide. And when conditions are right, their numbers explode. Carbon is now locked inside these giant blooms instead of in the atmosphere. They can become so huge they are visible from space. The more whales you have, the healthier the ocean is. One of the really great things about humpback whales is how successful they've been in making a comeback from commercial whaling. UMA: Some populations have recovered by as much as 90%. If all the whales came back to fill the ocean, the future would be brighter. DAVE: They're fertilizing the entire system so there's more life here that can hold lots more carbon and draw down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere where we don't want it, and into this ecological world that we're looking at, which is exactly where we do want it. UMA: But there's more to phytoplankton and the role they play in the carbon drawdown story. ♪ STEPHANIE: I wish more people knew about phytoplankton cos they really are the unsung heroes of life on our planet. Dr Stephanie Henson is a phytoplankton expert at the National Oceanography Centre in England. Hiya. Here's a little sample. Thank you. So the bucket that we collected this morning of water probably contains more phytoplankton than the population of London or New York. There's plenty of phytoplankton and zooplankton in there. Oh, nice. That's really great. Oh, there's all sorts of stuff in there. - Yeah. - Really nice. Great. But of course, they're feeding the whole ocean, effectively. They're the base of the marine food chain, and everything else in the ocean depends on them. ♪ UMA: Phytoplankton are eaten by tiny creatures called zooplankton. And they in turn are eaten by larger predators. STEPHANIE: If there weren't phytoplankton in the oceans, the marine food chain as we know it today would completely collapse. UMA: As species eat each other, the carbon goes all the way to the top. It's part of a process that scientists call the biological pump. To understand its significance, we need to measure how much life there is in the ocean. And that takes innovative thinking. Marine ecologist Gael Mariani is crunching the numbers. I know this code might look pretty boring, but in fact it reveals something really fascinating about fish, something we didn't even know about three or four years ago in science. And this research reveals really new information about the role fish can play in transporting carbon into a safe place. ♪ So fish are able to store the carbon they eat in their own bodies. And you might say, hang on, it's not a lot compared to a large species like some whales. But it's biomass that matters. How many fish there are. UMA: By gathering data from the fisheries around the world, Gael's results give an astonishing picture of how ocean life helps us in the fight against climate change. GAEL: So we've made some calculations, and we found out fish of commercial interest are able to draw down the equivalent to the annual emission of 50 million American citizens. It's massive. UMA: Fish numbers are far lower than they could be. By taking them out of our ocean, we are reducing the power of the biological pump. We can also work out how much carbon we've lost through fishing globally, and the numbers are quite remarkable. We calculate industrial fisheries has reduced the carbon drawdown potential of fish of commercial interest by 50%. UMA: As well as their carbon value, fish have a market value... ..and 60 million people around the world depend on the fishing industry. (CONVERSATION IN FRENCH) So we really have to move toward a future where we change how we value fish. Like this place just behind me, who really cares about how they source their produce. ♪ UMA: Most of the life we know in the ocean inhabits the surface layers. It draws the carbon in. But the deeper the carbon goes, the better it is for the planet. The twilight zone is a vast part of the ocean. It extends around the globe, from pole to pole, anywhere that the water's deep enough. If you go into the ocean twilight zone, one of the most amazing things you'll see is the incredible what we call marine snowfall. These tiny particles - microscopic organisms, debris of animals and plankton that have died and are drifting down slowly through the ocean. And as it's falling, it's helping the ocean to draw that carbon away from the atmosphere. ♪ UMA: These deep, dark waters may seem lifeless. But there are creatures here that look like they're from an alien world. HEIDI: There are types of organisms that just look completely different than those species that we're used to seeing in the upper ocean. Many are luminescent, so they sparkle like fireflies. After many years of scientists slowly learning about the ocean twilight zone, we thought we had a pretty good idea how many fish might live there. But recent methods using sonar have suggested that we may have been way off, and there may be ten times more fish than we previously thought. ♪ UMA: Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are on a mission to recover an instrument that's been moored 1,800 feet down in the deep ocean. Winch left. Bottom depth is 2802. UMA: It's been gathering information for the past two years, so should be full of scientific revelation. ANDONE: So there's always a chance that something can go wrong during the recovery. UMA: The research is led by oceanographer Dr Andone Lavery. ANDONE: This is the mooring that's been out for two years. We are looking at the acoustic sonars that are on the top of the...of the mooring. There's a little bit of slime on it, but not a lot considering it's been down there for two years, so, uh, pretty exciting. UMA: This giant acoustic ball sends pulses of sound through the water to paint a picture of what's happening in the dark. ANDONE: We're interested in the fishes in the ocean twilight zone, and their migration from the deep waters down at about 600 or 700m of depth. And as they come up to the surface at night to feed, we're interested in how much carbon they basically consume and draw down when they migrate back down to the deep ocean during the daylight hours. We think that this is probably the largest migration on Earth, the largest movement of animals on this planet, which happens daily in this big wave around the ocean. ♪ UMA: We're only just discovering the secrets of the twilight zone... ..and its role in drawing carbon into the deep. ♪ I'm in a really slick area. You got it? Yeah. OK. ZHAOZHONG: Finally get the data. UMA: A simple USB stick holds the precious files. ZHAOZHONG: All the data is here. This is awesome. 6,000 files. ANDONE: Could you put them up on the big screen? ZHAOZHONG: Yeah. ANDONE: The reason we use acoustics in the ocean to look at fishes instead of using cameras, is that you can see quite a long way with acoustics. With a camera, you can only see fishes that are very close by. And we use that sound and that really strong signal to count how many fish we're seeing, and to characterize what kinds of fishes they are. ♪ UMA: Studying this movement of life is a formidable task... ..but the team is making headway. What we've learned about the Twilight Zone suggests that it may help the ocean draw down billions of metric tonnes of carbon every year. As much as six times the carbon dioxide emitted by automobiles worldwide may be drawn down by the ocean with the Twilight Zone's help. But it's very hard to study, and there's a lot of things that we still don't know about it. UMA: The race is on to improve our understanding of the ocean. But it's huge. It covers 70% of our planet. There's only one way to get a truly global picture of how it works. ♪ DR LAURA LORENZONI: The ocean is a challenging environment, which is one of the reasons why we don't know as much as we probably should about it. UMA: Dr Laura Lorenzoni is a NASA scientist. She's preparing for a historical rocket launch. A mission that aims to see the ocean in a way that's impossible from Earth. So important, the world will be watching. LAURA: Right now, I'm getting ready because I'm going to be part of that broadcast tonight for our mission that we're launching to space. This mission that we're launching is really going to help us understand that connection between the atmosphere and the ocean and that carbon drawdown. What do I do? Just stick it in my ear? As this is my first broadcast, I am obviously a little nervous. What time do we start? JASMINE: You are looking live at Space Launch Complex-40 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It is such an honor to be here with all of you near and far and witness history in the making. JASMINE: NASA has studied Earth's atmosphere in the past. What is it that you hope to learn that you didn't already know? LAURA: That is an excellent question. So this mission is really going to be critical to nail down some of the gaps of information that we have in terms of carbon cycling. We have a decent grasp on the physics of this carbon drawdown, but the one thing that we're not really 100% sure on is the biological part which is carried out by phytoplankton. ♪ This mission is going to be able to tell us what kind of plankton and what species, and some species are really important and can sequester a lot more carbon faster than other species. LAUNCH COMMENTARY: Many on the PACE spacecraft team now going outside to watch this launch. Getting down to the final seconds. LAUNCH COMMENTARY: 15 seconds. LAURA: This mission has been in the works for about two decades. It has gone through the hands of many hundreds of scientists and engineers, enabling us to see the ocean in brand-new ways that we hadn't before. LAUNCH COMMENTARY: Minus 10. LAUNCH COMMENTARY: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Booster ignition, full power engines and liftoff of the Falcon 9 and PACE, helping keep pace with our ever-changing ocean and atmosphere. ♪ LAUNCH COMMENTARY: Stage one propulsion is now go. UMA: With every orbit, this satellite will scan 30 million square miles of the Earth's surface... ..identifying different types of phytoplankton... ..and where the most carbon-rich expanses of ocean exist. LAURA: This mission is really going to move us forwards. Because of the new measurements that this mission is bringing, we have a lot of opportunities at our fingertips to try to mitigate some of the changes that our presence, our human presence, has induced on the planet. LAUNCH COMMENTARY: We're about 10 seconds from the engine cut off. ♪ UMA: We can establish which parts of our ocean are most important for carbon drawdown. ♪ But they are often the most sensitive to climate change. In the Southern Ocean, warming temperatures are affecting a very different kind of carbon system... ..one so important it's studied by scientists across the world. ♪ My name is Peter. I'm a research director at the Flanders Marine Institute. I'm an oceanographer. ♪ So the Southern Ocean is the most remote ocean of our planet. Now, you can think about the Southern Ocean as a big lung. It breathes in and breathes out carbon dioxide. UMA: Atmospheric pressure pushes carbon dioxide into the ocean surface, a process called "the physical pump". When it dissolves into the cold Antarctic waters, it sinks down deep... ..where it can be stored for thousands of years. ♪ We know today that the Southern Ocean is one of the most important carbon sinks on this planet, slowing down the rate of global warming this way, but what we do not really know is how this is changing, how this heat and this carbon uptake are changing over time, how variable they might be, and as climate change progresses, what we can expect in the near and far future. UMA: There are few places on Earth more difficult to study than the Southern Ocean. It's not for the faint-hearted. But Peter knows someone who's always up for a challenge. ♪ Yeah, yeah, OK. Let's go. UMA: Boris Herrmann is a professional yachtsman. Woohoo! Yeah, yeah. Pause. Yeah, I obviously love sailing and racing on the ocean. That is my passion since my childhood, and it became my job. I really feel at home on the ocean. OK, let's have a look outside. Sea state is OK. And full main! Scientists need precise data about the exact CO2 concentration in the ocean surface. This you cannot measure by satellites. You need to go with some sort of vessel. And there are no commercial ships here, no cruise ships, etc. Here in the Southern Ocean, us racing sailors, we are the only ones. UMA: Boris's boat gathers data as it sails. BORIS: Here's the ocean lab. So, basically, there's a big pump here. I can... If I put my hand on it, it's warm, I can feel it pumping and I can hear the water flowing through these tubes. It comes from the keel, it goes through here and then goes back out into the sea. So it permanently tracks water temperature, water salinity and, most importantly, the CO2 concentration. UMA: With Boris's help, scientists will be able to assess how the Southern Ocean is changing. And what's really remarkable about the data that Boris has collected is that he has collected data in places where we haven't... ..we've never, ever collected carbon dioxide measurements before. I think the biggest gratitude for Boris might be that his data will be used for a very long time. So every measurement that is taken today will not only be used tomorrow or in the next years, it will be actually used indefinitely. BORIS: I'm very happy that we can use the attention we get around this sport to make people speak about climate solutions and hopefully inspire people around this topic and hopefully have a positive influence with this because we have no choice. It's a race we must win. ♪ PETER: We shouldn't take it for granted, because if we don't protect those natural carbon sinks, may they be on land or in the ocean, we will not have this service in the future and will be a much bigger problem. We want to keep a close eye on the climate system, how it behaves, how it changes, because there are so many things that we may not know, and so many changes that we might otherwise overlook, and so we want to understand our future we're heading to. ♪ UMA: Across the seas of the world, signs of what's in store are becoming more frequent. ♪ DR GIULIO BOCCALETTI: One of the great advantages of being here is that the Mediterranean is a laboratory for the world. So the Mediterranean is undergoing remarkable changes. Its temperature has never been hotter. The last few years we've had extreme marine heat waves. And so what we see when we look at the Mediterranean is a glimpse of the future for the rest of the planet. ♪ If we don't figure out how to stop the climate from changing more, if we don't figure out a way of drawing down carbon, if we don't find a way of working with nature, I don't know exactly what the future will look like, but this is the place where we will find out first. UMA: The ocean draws down one-quarter of the 11 billion tonnes of carbon that we emit each year. ♪ Extreme temperatures are compromising this critical system. Giulio's work models these effects to help us avoid the worst, and prepare for what is coming. GIULIO: I actually think that nature has been trying really hard to help us. Now, it can't do that by itself. It can't solve all of our problems by itself. We have to stop emitting, and we have to help nature do what it does. ♪ So the quest here is, can we transform that nature? Can we power it up so that, while we stop emitting, it then helps us draw back down the stuff that we put up in the atmosphere in the first place? ♪ UMA: Restoring life in our ocean is a huge task. It takes collaboration... ..determination... ..and innovation... ..and some brilliant projects are already under way. 40% of us live along the coastline...for good reason. UMA: On this small island in Kenya, nature is still abundant. ♪ It's a favorite spot for local fisher Hassan Shee Yusuf. What makes the catch so good here is the surrounding mangrove forest... ..an ecosystem of tangled roots that only exists where the land meets the sea. UMA: Working alongside local fishers is marine biologist Mwanarusi Mwafrica. What I love much about the mangrove forest is because this is an ecosystem that actually provided me with a job. Like my daily bread, yeah! Mangrove roots are very essential because they provide a safe haven for juvenile fish from being carried away by strong waves. So the fact of having more trees, this means you're going to have more fish, more fish in the future. ♪ UMA: Mangrove forests grow along many tropical coastlines. And when it comes to harnessing carbon dioxide, they are a superpower. These are very magical trees because the services that they provide are quite diverse. Mangroves are very efficient at drawing down carbon. When we look at the capacity, it's almost seven to ten times compared to other terrestrial trees. ♪ UMA: The interaction between the trees, the tide and the mud creates a unique environment... ..that not only means mangroves can store more carbon per acre than any other type of forest on Earth... ..they keep it locked up for millennia. ♪ But many mangroves have been lost to deforestation and coastal development... ..including here in Kenya. But the community here is now turning things around... ..through a new business venture. MWANARUSI: So Vanga Blue Forest is part of a carbon-offsetting scheme. So what happens is that individuals, companies, businesses come to offset with the project, in the essence that they are promoting conservation efforts as much as they are offsetting their own carbon emissions. ♪ UMA: If we fund nature now, these ecosystems will continue to draw down carbon long after our emissions have ceased. Since the project started, over 4,000 mangrove seedlings have been planted. MWANARUSI: Carbon drawdowns of Vanga mangrove forest are at 6,000 tonnes a year. UMA: Carbon sales are also enriching the community. The local school now has a science lab, and better facilities have helped its first student get to university. MWANARUSI: What makes me to be very proud working at Vanga Blue Forest is the fact that I'm at the focal point of a change, the focal point of a movement that is growing globally, and that movement is changing the narrative of reversing climate change. ♪ UMA: Pioneering projects like this show how we can boost nature and carbon drawdown. But to really transform our ocean, we need to work at scale, which requires even more investment. ♪ I'm Julie Robinson and I'm the Belize Program Director for the Nature Conservancy. This story does not start in nature, it actually starts in a boardroom. Belize had a long history of being indebted. That actually became worse during the COVID-19 pandemic, and tourism came to a screeching halt. And so, essentially, we were in an economic crisis, and we also had a debt payment looming. UMA: But Julie and her team were working on a plan that was about to turn this crisis into an opportunity to invest in nature. But I've spent way too much time in boardrooms like this looking over Excel sheets and on computer. What I'd really like to do is take you out on the ocean and show you exactly what we're protecting. ♪ So right now we're in San Pedro, which is a really popular tourist destination. It is a biodiversity hotspot, great for diving, great for snorkeling. It was actually my childhood out here that led me to be where I am today... Right over here looks good. ..and at six years old, I pretty much decided that I was going to dedicate my life to saving the animals in the water. ♪ UMA: In today's warming ocean, this beautiful reef needs all the help it can get. But conservation at this scale is expensive. Hard to prioritize when you've got a large national debt. But Belize had a plan. JULIE: We call it Blue Bonds for ocean conservation. You could think of it as refinancing or remortgaging a home, whereby a bank is able to provide better terms and reduce the overall payments, and then the savings from that reduced payment is what goes towards conservation. In this case, that was a figure of $180 million US to be rolled out over a 20-year period. When you borrow money for your home, it's an investment, right? You renovate, you look after it, and over time, it adds value. The challenge was really coordinating all the various players, all the partners, because something of this scale had just never been done before. UMA: A big team effort was needed for this ground-breaking deal to protect mile after mile of ocean. And for its part of the bargain, Belize had to commit to some serious goals. Protecting 30% of waters would allow nature to thrive... ..and better management would support the people who rely on a healthy ocean. JULIE: And look at it. When it's working, it is absolutely paradise. Once the decision had been made to move the deal forwards, it took only 18 months to get everything in order, and now there's a model for other countries. UMA: Around the world, more projects like this are in the works, thanks to the success of this inspirational deal. JULIE: During a time during climate crisis, we need things like this more than ever before. When nature wins, we win, and so does the carbon drawdown. ♪ UMA: But two-thirds of our ocean, known as the high seas, fall outside of national laws. Without governance, fishing can be a free-for-all. To protect nature in these unmanaged waters takes international collaboration... ♪ ..based on accurate scientific information. Ecologist Tristan Rouyer is hoping to spot one of the world's most valuable fish from the sky. Buckle up and let's go. ♪ UMA: Tristan is joining Scientific Angler, a fleet of recreational fishers competing to catch a tuna for science. UMA: The Mediterranean Sea is home to one of the most important Atlantic bluefin tuna fisheries in the world... ..making it a prime spot to monitor numbers. UMA: Demand for bluefin surged in the 1990s, which led to their rapid demise. But against the odds, these highly prized fish are making a comeback. Fabien! UMA: The competition is on! Small tuna like this are the optimum size for tagging. The tag has been programmed to last for over four years. It will show Tristan exactly where the tuna goes as it heads out to unprotected waters. (CHEERING) TRISTAN: Perfect. UMA: The resurgence of bluefin tuna can't be taken for granted. Keeping their numbers up requires collaboration. And Tristan's data feeds into an international coalition of over 50 countries and governments committed to preventing overexploitation in the future. UMA: If Atlantic bluefin tuna can come back from the brink, surely there's hope we can return even more nature to abundance. In an ocean bursting with life, carbon can be drawn away from the atmosphere. DAVE: Carbon is it... It's the... It's the thing of our time, right? It's the challenge that all of us have to face. Climate change - it's something that we have done, but it's also something that we can fix. UMA: No matter where we live, the nature that surrounds us can be restored. As a project lead, it gives me the boost to always look forward to every morning waking up with an open heart, because it gives me the determination that whatever I'm doing brings change. UMA: But it's not just down to you and me. The world needs to act and boost our entire living planet. It's a race against time to find solutions for climate change. UMA: We have a choice to build the world we want to live in. So if we can find a way of investing in nature, of working with nature... ..I think we'll be able to overcome even this, which is the greatest challenge of this century. ♪ The future I want is a future where this sanctuary is filled with whales and filled with sea birds and fish and just life, and so I want to make sure that this sanctuary stays this way. I want this place to be like this, you know, for ever. UMA: And for ever depends on the future of nature. ♪ ♪

Katavi's drought imprisons all who stay.

Even when rain arrives, relief is short-lived.

The waters flood Katavi and pose new threats.

Will these hunters survive until salvation comes?

[Birds chirping] ♪ ♪ Sanjayan: There's no place that in my mind signifies climate change and the perils of climate change like California. ♪ Particularly in the last couple of years, it's been in the news. ♪ [Sirens] Woman: It's devastating. We are all walking around kind of in a trance. Welcome to hell. Sanjayan: I travel around to so many places, and it's hard not to always have this sense--this impending sense of doom. [Helicopter whirring] ♪ A small bucket for a big fire. As I'm speaking, there are wildfires. I can see the smoke behind me. I can hear the helicopters. Climate change is very much here. ♪ ♪ Sanjayan voice-over: The health of our planet is at a pivotal moment. ♪ Without action, the world we cherish will transform beyond all recognition. Man: Because the glacier is vanishing, we get more frequent volcanic eruptions. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: But instead of running away, some people are confronting this global crisis head on. Woman: As we're starting to see the decline in zoo plankton, we'll be able to monitor these changes. Sanjayan, voice-over: This is the beginning of a 7-year project that promises not just hope, but paths forward. We will be tracking change across 6 of our planet's most iconic ecosystems and highlighting how individuals can have an impact. ♪ We'll look at projects from the African savannah to the American West, the Amazon and Southeast Asia to the Arctic... ♪ Woman: The drone is ready to fly through the breath of the whale. Sanjayan, voice-over: building relationships with an army of inspiring people taking up the challenge... Huge tusks, huge. [Indistinct] Sanjayan, voice-over: and charting the progress of game-changing environmental projects. ♪ If we can put back the planet, put all the pieces back, create more resilience, resilience in the natural world could give us the opportunity to withstand the worst that is still to come. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: In 7 years, we will better understand what the stakes are for all of us and what we can do to make an impact here on our changing planet. ♪ ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: It's interesting that my journey starts with the Yurok Tribe who've been on this land for millennia. ♪ Systematically discriminated against across two centuries, driven off their land, banned from fishing in their own river... ♪ the Yurok never stop fighting for their ancestral birthright. ♪ Today, the 5 and a half thousand members of California's largest Native American tribe are proving how indigenous knowledge can transform their landscape. ♪ This year, new laws have given back to the Yurok control over one of the most destructive forces in their territory-- fire. Since the 1930s, the State of California had banned all traditional burning, and federal policy was to fight any fire as soon as it started. The aim was to protect property and the timber industry. Margo and Liz-Anne are leading the way in traditional stewardship of the forest. We have been managing the space for thousands of years. How can they think they know better? Yeah. Fire is meant to be part of the ecosystem. The more fire we can get on the land, the less destruction will be created by wildfires, because if a wildfire is coming through here and reaches this, it's not going to continue to spread. This place was purposefully burned. You can tell that because the trees are still here, they're still healthy. And most of the brush is gone from the forest floor. And so the sun can reach down in here to help these bear grass plants grow. There is plenty of room for large animals like deer and elk. Fire keeps everything balanced physically and spiritually. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: Some one-third of California's hundred million acres is covered in forest, and not much of it is inhabited. ♪ Before Margo and Liz-Anne started the Cultural Fire Management Council, there hadn't been any traditional controlled burns here for many years. Where we live, it's like extreme fire danger, and we was worried our elders might not be able to escape. Sanjayan, voice-over: Deliberately starting a fire like this requires an intimate knowledge of wind patterns and a deep understanding of the way plants and surfaces act as fuel for fire. We got people trained up in our community to have firefighter qualifications, which is what you need to do. And we did our first burn and have continued to burn since then. Sanjayan, voice-over: Today people come from all across the world to learn traditional fire management techniques from Margo and Liz-Anne. Protect all of these people who have come here from all over the country to help us burn and to restore our land. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: They teach how to integrate these highly-effective techniques into standard management of the land. Tribes who have lost this traditional wisdom learn alongside members of the U.S. Forest Service. Liz-Anne: They have all of the degrees, they have the education, they've gone to school for their fire suppression, but they have absolutely no clue how to be a fire lighter. And that's what we do. We train fire lighters. Oh, I love that. We don't train firefighters. We don't fight family. We work with family. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: This is personal. When Margo became a grandmother, she wanted to keep an ancient Yurok custom. ♪ Margo: I was determined that my grandbabies would be carried in traditional baby baskets. In order to have basket materials, we need to have fire to burn the hazel to get the nice bear grass that grows here. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: 7 years ago wildfires burned for more than a hundred days on thousands of acres of ancestral land. You can still see the scars. Margo: Traditionally, this land would have had a regular cycle of fire purposefully put on the land, and so even had a lightning strike hit, it would not have created this devastation because there would not be so much fuel on the ground to feed it. Liz-Anne: It's our responsibility, every human's responsibility, not just the indigenous people. We just care for it more. This will not regenerate in my lifetime. It will not come back to what it was. Margo: You always hear people saying how climate change is affecting the wildfires. I think the opposite is equally true, that wildfires are really contributing to climate change. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: The U.S. is losing something like 7 million acres of land every year to wildfire. ♪ And in 2020, wildfires cost Brazil more than 17 million acres of rainforest. ♪ There's no question that a changing climate is fueling all of this. It's exactly what climate change is. In a delicately balanced ecosystem, a small rise in average temperature brings drier conditions that are longer and more intense. ♪ Over the coming 7 years, I'll keep coming back here to learn from the Yurok how indigenous practices are uniquely placed to confront a planet in crisis. The answer to our changing planet is partly here. And I feel that collective wisdom that the indigenous peoples have might have the answers to save us all. But then when we went to that big burn, both Margo and Liz-Anne expressed that sense of doubt that that isn't something they have seen before. Maybe what's coming down the pike is bigger than any of us. And that's the part that makes me-- makes me really scared. So it's this balancing act between that sense of optimism and also thinking that the forces against us are so big. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: I really want to be an optimist here, but there are places on Earth where decisive climate action just can't wait. Failure to act is just no longer an option. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: In Iceland, global warming is more evident to me on every visit. ♪ Temperatures in the Arctic are increasing up to 3 times faster than the rest of the planet, melting the ice like never before. ♪ And the consequences will be felt not just here, but across the world. ♪ In August 2019, a funeral was held for Ok glacier. ♪ Now I want to go down and see if I can find any remnants of Ok glacier and listen carefully whether I can hear it whisper the last sentences that it remembers from its history. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: All that remains is a bronze plaque on a gray rock with a dire warning. "In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path." ♪ Created over centuries from compacted snow, glaciers store twice as much water as all the rivers and lakes on the planet in the form of ice. ♪ Many ecosystems rely on their summer melt for moisture and temperature control. ♪ But Earth's thermostat is failing. ♪ Luckily, there are people dedicating their lives to doing something about it. As a teenage mountaineer, Snaevarr Gudmundsson became obsessed with glaciers. Today, he's one of Iceland's pre-eminent glaciologists. Snaevarr: If we were here in 1932, we would have been here under about 70 meters thick ice. ♪ There was this famous Icelandic scientist who asked the farmer if he could measure the position of the edge of the glacier. They erected a pile of boulders that was a reference for them, and then they measured the distance with a cord to the edge of the ice. And this they actually did once a year for several decades. And in the end, they had this long series of markers. At the beginning of the 20th century, this glacier was only retreating about 10 to 50 meters per year. But now it's retreating about 250 meters. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: In the next one to two hundred years, Iceland could be a land without ice. ♪ Like 90% of glaciers in Iceland, this one is rapidly disappearing, and it's dramatically changing the landscape. ♪ This glacier is turning into a lake. In fact, it's now the deepest lake in Iceland. ♪ Snaevarr: When people think about climate changes, they think about sea level rising, and of course that's a huge threat, but there are other implications. Because the glacier is vanishing, we get less pressure on the earth crust, which leads to more frequent Volcanic eruptions. Sanjayan, voice-over: Volcanic activity on this scale is upsetting the delicate balance of climate in the Arctic. You may remember several years ago when an eruption in Iceland closed European airspace and stranded an estimated 7 million passengers around the world. Our poles, the Arctic and the Antarctic, act like giant air conditioners, keeping our planet relatively cool. But they are not working as efficiently as they once did. Meltwater simply isn't as good as solid ice at keeping global temperatures down. ♪ What we learn here over the next 7 years with Snaevarr and other polar scientists will paint a much clearer picture of what's happening in this rapidly changing ecosystem and its wider impact. ♪ It's very possible that we will be attending another funeral for a glacier. ♪ In California, catastrophic change is happening before my eyes in my own lifetime. This is exactly what this landscape shouldn't look like. Sanjayan, voice-over: And now we see how people like Margo and Liz-Anne are trying to stop it. But this doesn't have to be the end of the story. ♪ 120 miles upriver from the sea, I encounter a landscape that has been completely trashed for commercial gain. But now, mile by mile, that process is being reversed. The Klamath-Trinity River system stretches 450 miles from southern Oregon to California. The Yurok is the biggest of the 3 local tribes that for generations have looked upon this land as their own. Since the time of the Gold Rush, waste from mining has piled high on either side of the river, blocking its seasonal movement. Man: These are all old mining tailings. When the gold miners came in, they turned the entire river upside down to create kind of a very narrow channel. Now, that's bad enough on its own, and then put dams in that lock that into place. Sanjayan, voice-over: My guide Frankie Myers explains how the Yurok are leading the project to unlock the river system and bring back the salmon that once filled the river. ♪ I mean, we do right around a mile a year, a mile of restoration-- A mile every year? Every year a mile. We are taking the river and giving it space for it to live again. ♪ Frankie: If the river had a chance to move back and forth, it would have left these little side channels, little shoots from the river that would fill up during high water and create a flood plain, and then that's great habitat for juvenile salmonids and invertebrates and all kinds of stuff. Sanjayan, voice-over: The majority of the work is carried out by Yurok Tribe members like excavator operator Josh Meyer. Frankie: He's guaranteeing that his children and their children will always be able to harvest salmon. It's more than a paycheck, right? Yeah. Josh: Where I'm from, we believe in this fish. Like, I'm all the way at the mouth of this river, born and raised, and this fish is like part of who we are, part of everybody who lives on this river. Sanjayan: You're a tribal member? Josh: Yes. Do you have any kids? I have 4 kids. They know I'm over here trying to help the fish. And it's an amazing feeling. Frankie: One of our operators, you know, two years ago was working on a project towards the end of the year, and they were finished making a section for spawning adult who had a spawning adult in the tracks of an excavator. It happens like that. [Snaps] Instantly it happens. Sanjayan: Why are they taking all these logs down here? We are trying to biomimic the river system. And in order to do that, in naturally occurring systems, the trees fall into the river and they create habitats. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: The Yurok are using logjams and rocks the size of SUVs to vary the flow and restore a more natural spawning habitat for salmon. Sanjayan Wow, look at that. ♪ Frankie: I think there is a long-held belief in many cultures in America that humans are separate from the world around them. ♪ With that thought process, you're able to do all kinds of things. You're able to extract every ounce of gold out of the ground, you're able to cut down every redwood tree you see. If you're not a part of it, you can exploit all of it. And if you're not a part of it, then what happens to it doesn't matter to you. ♪ [Frankie chanting] ♪ All right, I'll try another song. That one's not getting it. I have a feeling it's not the song. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: Thus far, the Yurok have already restored 20 miles of the Trinity-Klamath River system. In the next two years, they will participate in the removal of 4 of the 6 dams upriver. ♪ It's the largest dam removal in U.S. history, opening up more than 400 miles of habitat for the salmon between Oregon and California. Over the course of this project, we hope to track their success in bringing back the salmon, and their old way of life, seeing how it may benefit the local economies that depend on a healthy river. Sanjayan: Their restoration goal is big. It's bigger than this river. But even that, on the scale of California, on the scale of the planet, is a blip. What we need is really millions of these projects, communities everywhere doing this with this intensity of purpose, not because someone's paying you to do it, but because it's the right thing to do, because you're built to do it. You're born to do it. Sanjayan, voice-over: We're traveling next to the Indian Ocean where marine biologists are piloting innovative techniques to restore the entire reef. ♪ You may have heard of the Maldives as a tropical paradise of white sand and crystal blue sea. [Horn honking] But a quarter of a million people live here in its capital city, which is not much bigger than Central Park. That makes this tiny island one of the most densely populated places on Earth. I was born on the edge of the Indian Ocean, just east of here in Sri Lanka, so it shocks me that this crowded city could be under water within the next 30 years. ♪ Right now, coral islands like this are increasingly at risk from climate change. Their fate hangs in the balance. ♪ The Maldives exist because of coral, and climate stress is damaging the reef, a process called bleaching. ♪ Ali Shareef is on the sustainability team at one of the resorts, keeping a watchful eye on the health of the reef. So we have had two bleaching events in the Maldives, one in 1998, which killed off about 80% of the corals and took about a decade to recover and come back to how it was before. And then again in 2016 coral here bleached and died. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: Coral reefs protect the islands from increasingly destructive waves. And its towns, it's hotels, schools are literally built on coral. Just one degree of change of temperature threatens the reef's reproductive health, putting it at risk from starvation and disease. ♪ Ali: We're going to go to an area where we've been monitoring for the past year, fracture some of the coral colonies, look for reproductive cells in them, and see what stages they are, and to look for any signs if they're ready to spawn. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: Understanding how corals reproduce is key. Coral is made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny, delicate animals. Ali's goal is to breed coral with greater resilience to temperature change. He breaks off a piece of coral, takes a look inside. The presence of reproductive cells will tell him if this coral is ready to spawn. He can now replace the broken fragment, and it will continue to grow. ♪ Ali: Once we understand when they spawn, we can use that information to rear them in a tank and then put them back on the reef to restore it. My long-term plan is to learn as much as I can here and take what I learn here to my home island and try to implement it there, make some positive changes, and, you know, create a culture that is with the environment, that is actively trying to find solutions that would make things better in our changing climate. Sanjayan, voice-over: In the coming years, I honestly can't wait to find out if Ali and his team can successfully breed coral that can withstand higher temperatures. Perhaps then, large-scale farming of coral in tanks could be what saves the Maldives. Coral reefs provide food for one quarter of all marine life. But these rising sea temperatures are also killing the tiny lifeforms that coral itself eats--plankton. Tracking down these microscopic creatures is made much easier by following some much bigger plankton-feeders, manta rays. ♪ This boat is a floating base for the Manta Trust, pioneering the study of this magnificent creature for more than a decade. So we're going to swim beside the manta rays and actually collect some of the food that they're feeding on. Sanjayan, voice-over: Hannah Moloney is leading a study of the plankton that could halt the decline of the endangered manta population that feeds on it. Hannah: In temperate regions across the globe, with a small incline in sea temperatures, zoo plankton is expected to decline by approximately 10%. However, it's bad news here for the tropics. It's expected to decline by more than 50%. Sanjayan, voice-over: At certain times of the year, mantas are drawn to the large plankton blooms in a mass feeding event. ♪ It's a perfect opportunity to study how mantas forage for food. Hannah: Manta rays are solitary animals. However, they can be seen feeding with friends. And this is a strategy to be able to get the most amount of plankton in the shortest amount of time. So basically lazy feeding. They're going to be jumping in each other's slipstream. And it also concentrates the plankton. We don't know so much about how the decline in the zooplankton biomass will affect manta rays, but simply put it, manta rays need lots of zooplankton to feed on. If there's less zooplankton, they're not going to have as much food. As we're starting to see the decline in zooplankton, we'll be able to monitor these changes. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: The Manta Trust has currently identified over 4,900 individual reef mantas. ♪ They can be huge, up to 15 feet long and weigh more than a family car. They have the biggest brain-to-body mass ratio of any fish, making them particularly skilled at problem solving and communicating. ♪ They can be playful and curious, exhibiting a remarkable sense of self-awareness. ♪ But if the manta population declines, it will impact the entire ecosystem. ♪ ♪ Niv Froman is leading a study to understand how these majestic creatures breed. Niv: Understanding what factors are affecting their ability to reproduce will allow us to put in place maybe conservation measures targeted to reduce those threats and allow the species to thrive. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: Niv is kind of a manta gynecologist. ♪ He's using the world's first contactless underwater handheld ultrasound scanner on pregnant mantas. ♪ Mantas are slow breeders, usually giving birth to only a single pup every 2 to 3 years. ♪ Discovering a baby manta is a cause for real celebration. ♪ Niv: With manta rays already reproducing very rarely, the added impact climate change will have can really put populations and the entire species at threat of disappearing from our planet. By using mantas and understanding how well the populations are doing, how often they're reproducing, we can then determine how well our reefs are also. Sanjayan, voice-over: The Trust's mission includes equipping the next generation with the passion and skills to protect the future of mantas. Yaniu's local knowledge and expertise is key to this expedition. Yaniu: When I was growing up, I didn't feel, you know, this could be a career. But I always wanted to be somewhere on the sea. So I did a divemaster so that I can be bringing people into the sea and show them how beautiful it is. And once I was working like that, I saw how damaged the reefs are, coral bleaching, and I looked around to see what I can do to help. ♪ I feel very lucky to be here helping the research and swimming with mantas. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: These graceful creatures contribute massively to the economy of the Maldives. But the health of the manta population affects the health of the ocean. Like elephant dung fertilizing the savannah, mantas fertilize the reef with nutrients they gather from all across the ocean. If the reefs lose their fertilizer, then the entire ecosystem suffers. ♪ The Indian Ocean is changing faster than ever, so efforts to protect it are critical. Giving us the tools to accurately predict these changes may guarantee the mantas' future survival. ♪ In the coming years, we'll be keeping a close eye on these reefs and their majestic mantas, along with the experts fighting to save them. ♪ My Californian journey takes me to 60 miles from the forest to the mouth of the Klamath River where it meets the Pacific Ocean. I join Yurok Tribe member Barry McCovey. A landmark Supreme Court decision affirming the Yurok's rights to fish in their ancestral waters means that Barry can teach his kids the vital skills they need to catch wild salmon. ♪ The end of the fall fishing season is approaching when the last fish are coming in from the ocean to spawn. Barry: This year, the run size was predicted to be around, I think, 65,000 fish. There's been years when the run size is 250,000 fish. Sanjayan, voice-over: Each tribe member is allowed to catch a certain number of fish to eat, depending on the size of the run. 2017, like, we weren't allowed to catch any fish. That's how-- that's how bad it was. So in 2017, if a Yurok tribal member wanted fish-- Yeah. they were getting it at the supermarket. Exactly. At Costco. Yeah. This year, you know, we say we did OK, we say we did good, but that's relative to the previous years. Last year we caught 5 fish, right? You're kidding? The year before was even worse. It was brutal. And I'm trying to teach my kids how to fish, and I'm trying to provide for them and provide for the family and provide for other folks. We know that climate change is real. We know that the world is changing. We can see it happening in front of us. And your entire identity and the entire reason the tribe inhabits this land is because of this river and this fish? Yeah, that's who we are. [Birds squawking] Sanjayan, voice-over: Barry and his kids aren't the only ones hoping for a catch. [Birds squawking] Barry: The sea lions are pretty aggressive here, and they're smart, and sometimes they'll actually chase the fish. Sanjayan: No! Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Are you kidding me? Well, done. Oh, my goodness. That was co-operative hunting if I ever saw. Like that. Sanjayan: It's like 10 pounds. Barry: Yeah, it's a 10 pound. That's a fall chinook. This is what it's about. OK, what one of you boys wants to pop the gill? Boy: I will! OK, come on. Sanjayan: Love the volunteer. [Indistinct] Got it. Good job. I'm so thankful to that fish, you know? You know, it went out to the ocean and it got all that marine-derived nutrients and all that energy from the ocean, and it's bringing it back into the river, and it's going to go to deposit it either by spawning and dying, and then its body's going to rot in the river and all those marine-derived nutrients are going to be deposited into the upstream environment and help with that ecosystem. And that's what it's about. ♪ Sanjayan: Barry defines himself and defines the Yurok as a salmon people, and for him, that salmon that we caught was not about food alone. It was far deeper than that. It was his own identity, it was the identity of the tribe intermingled with the salmon. Once the salmon are gone, the people cease to exist. Sanjayan, voice-over: If we don't fix the environment, it won't be just Barry and his sons who can't catch their salmon. You might not be able to buy wild Pacific salmon in your supermarket. What Barry shows us is that it's not inevitable. Now that gives you that sense of hope, and I think that is what makes many indigenous communities so exquisitely tuned to a changing planet. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: The work the Yurok are doing to re-balance their natural environment shows us that when people focus on their own place and their neighborhoods and their own backyards, just working towards restoring that, it sort of generates its own positive energy, right? ♪ We turn next to East Africa and another local solution to a desperate global problem-- drought. ♪ I grew up in Africa, and I have been coming back here my entire life. To me, there's no question about the effects of climate change. Since I was a kid, the average temperature in Kenya has gone up every decade, and rainfall less predictable every year. ♪ It's now been 9 months since there's been a useful downpour of rain for this parched landscape. Along with 22 million other Kenyans making their living as farmers, Jannet and James don't need a lecture to be told that there's a crisis. Water is the biggest problem, and the main problem causing these water to discuss is the climate change. James: We expect the rain so that we can get something to eat. No other activity for getting food on the table. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: Drought has meant the arrival of some unwelcome guests-- elephants from the nearby national park. Jannet: They just come to search for water and search for food because if there it's so dry, it means there is no food. Sanjayan, voice-over: They sometimes have to sleep out in the open simply to protect their crops from hungry, thirsty elephants. We used to sleep here, burning fire till morning to--we can chase the elephants. Initially, there was not this electrical fence. Sanjayan, voice-over: Jannet and James pray that this new 40-mile barrier will help bring an end to this human-wildlife conflict that is increasingly plaguing this community because of the drought. James: In the future, if areas are dry, there will be more conflict between the people and the animal. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: Folks like Jannet and James, in farming communities like this, well, they don't hate elephants. They've been peacefully co-existing with each other for thousands of years. But now the pressure is on, and it's up to them to come up with the right solution. They have to adapt, because if they don't have the answer, well, who has? ♪ Not far from here is a very clear example of the way a community can empower themselves, transforming the landscape and their own lives. A dam across the river can store water in sand, turning this parched soil into fertile and productive farmland. The idea of a sand dam is not new. There's evidence of their use during Roman times. A decade of worsening drought conditions has driven this remote community to revive a forgotten solution. When the river dries up, they need a cheap and reliable alternative supply of water. Every year, the levels of water are going down. The rivers which were flowing are reducing, and that means there is the challenge of water within those areas. And the best solution we are able to see within the area is the sand dams. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: A sand dam is a concrete wall built across a seasonal river. In the rainy season, wet silt and sand washed along by the river gets stuck behind the wall. During the dry season, people can extract the water trapped by the sand behind the wall. ♪ Andrew: So the community will provide the sand, the rocks, and labor for the construction of the dam, while us as an organization and our partners who come in and support with the hardware materials. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: Some sand dams can store more than 10 million gallons of water at a time. It's a vital resource for thousands of households that need it. Women and girls, who would spend 8 hours a day collecting water, can now spend time on other things. Young girls will not be forced to go to get water for their families. And that means they can have enough time to concentrate on education. Woman: This sand dam, when it will be complete, we will be happy because we'll get enough water for our domestic and for irrigation. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: There are hundreds of sand dams being constructed across Africa like this one at Kibwezi. It's a grassroots solution that is guaranteeing food security and providing jobs. ♪ Andrew: So in 2011, we came here to see the site where the community wanted to do a dam, and this place was totally dry. 9 years later, water is flowing in the dam. ♪ It's the end of the dry period in Kenya, which we have gone for more than 9 months without rains here. But this river has enough water and still flowing. ♪ We are living in a changing planet where the call should be now focused on rainwater harvesting and sand dams being one of the best and cheapest technology in rainwater harvesting. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: People across Kenya, across Africa, are having to work fast because climate change isn't just coming, it's here. ♪ And tackling that problem can be as simple as rediscovering an ancient solution. It's not always going to be about waving some future high tech magic wand. ♪ Here in Northern California, I'm pretty blown away by the Yurok belief in the power of tradition. But I'm also astonished to find out they're the second biggest employer of scientists and fisheries biologists in the entire state. The 10.5 million acres of the Klamath Basin was so exhausted by the decades of gold mining and damming of its rivers that in 2017, it was actually declared a food desert. In other words, it could not provide any fresh food with many households living hours away from a grocery store until the Yurok said, "Enough." ♪ They began a huge engineering program to restore the flow of the Klamath River system. ♪ If the river flows right, the salmon get cool water that they need to spawn. If the river doesn't flow, the water gets warm and disease spreads. So what we want is eventually these will be in strips that will hang up in the smokehouse. How long does it take you to do a fish? A few minutes. Rather quickly. Sanjayan, voice-over: Jamie has been tracking the health of the river by catching fish and checking them for parasites. Fish from her project ends up at the smokehouse at Weitchpec, 30 miles from the mouth of the river. Did you fall in love with fish first and then become kind of a biologist, or did you become a biologist and then fall in love with fish? Jamie: So I think being born a Yurok, I kind of had no choice but to really love the fish. We were subsistence people. I remember growing up wondering if we could have something besides fish and deer meat, but you know. In 2002, we had a massive fish kill on the lower portion of the river that was caused by an Ich outbreak. We lost-- An Ich is like a parasite that fish get? You get it in your fish tanks. Absolutely. Yep. Exactly, the same thing. We didn't know that anything like that could happen on that large of a scale. It'd never happened before. In 2003, we started what we call the Ich Project, which is where these fish will come from, and it sort of does double duty. We're able to gillnet these fish out of the river. We have to take them because I have to read the gill, the top arch of the gill, which is where the parasite resides. But since you have to take the gill, you've killed the fish. So the by-product of that is now elder's fish. So instead of taking the elder fish out of a subsistence quota for the whole tribe, it now comes out of our scientific take. It's kind of amazing. We've been up and down this river, like, literally hundreds of miles apart, meeting different people, doing different things-- Barry in the mouth of the river, catching fish or the restoration work or this-- it's all a jigsaw. Yeah. Absolutely. We all know that we're working for the river and for the fish. I think as Yurok people that's the faith that we have in it is that this river will provide for us if we continue to fight for it. ♪ Jamie: So this is roughly 7 salmon hanging. ♪ Woman: You're just slowly curing the fish with the smoke. I guess the spiritual part of it, you know, you're just connecting with the smoke, the fire, you know, all these little beautiful pieces like a painting or something, you know. And I've got a piece here. Oh, yeah, lucky you. I mean, that, honestly, it tastes really amazing. It's magical. It's amazing. Yeah. Nothing like you would ever buy. ♪ ♪ Sanjayan: Do you think what you're doing is enough? Jamie: I think that we can do our part. Our fish don't just belong to us. You know, once these babies leave the system and head into the ocean, you know, they now belong to the world. There's different people that rely on these fish and a healthy system for them to return to. So I think it's in everybody's best interest to really try. ♪ Sanjayan: You cannot spend time with the Yurok people without leaving with a sense of optimism. They see themselves as rebalancers, as restorers. So when I look at the world and I see all of the broken pieces, they see work, they see opportunity, they see a chance to give back. And the thing that I was surprised at, the thing that maybe surprised me the most is that there isn't a chip on their shoulder. As the way one person put it to me is that no, it's not a chip on my shoulder, it's a burden on my shoulder. And that burden is a sense of obligation, an obligation to do what I was put here to do, which is to rebalance the planet. ♪ Sanjayan, voice-over: Climate action failure is our number one threat. There's not a moment to lose. This is nothing something we can outsource. We've got to work together, learn together. ♪ And in that collective reservoir of knowledge must be the key that can save us all. ♪ Changing Planet is available on Amazon Prime Video. ♪ ♪