VXNews shares an excerpt from "Ten Across Conversations," a podcast series hosted by Duke Reiter which engages environmental reporter Rosanna Xia, delving into the urgent challenges facing California's coastline. The episode addresses the unique threats of massive waves battering the West Coast, emphasizing the pressing need for the state to prepare for significant sea level rise within the next 30 years. Xia, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, draws from her on-the-ground experiences and her book, "California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline." The conversation navigates the complexities of terms like "managed retreat" and explores the philosophical debate between prioritizing property value and life safety in the context of climate change.
Duke Reiter
Welcome to Ten Across Conversations. I'm Duke Reiter. Last month, the Washington Post reported that almost everyone in the contiguous United States would be experiencing extreme weather conditions. These events included a snowstorm on the East Coast, severe storms and tornadoes in the Gulf, heavy snows in the Sierras and throughout the Midwest, and flooding across the east. For today's conversation, we're focused on the massive waves currently battering California's coast.
With slow moving climate events such as sea level rise, it can be extremely difficult for communities to maintain a necessary sense of urgency between periodic events, such as this month's wave surge. For California, this has been particularly difficult. Whereas historically inundated places such as Miami or New Orleans have more advanced defenses to intruding waters out of necessity, California has enjoyed relatively little land loss over the last century, with the sea rising only nine inches in that time. For comparison, Louisiana has lost over 2000 square miles of land, equivalent to the size of Delaware, since 1930.
However, the situation in California is quickly changing. According to our guest today, California communities, which until now enjoy a consistent coastline, have less than 30 years to prepare for three and a half feet or more of sea level rise. Though it's natural for humans to think in shorter time increments: the next election, the length of your mortgage, or your children's lives, climate change forces us to think differently. If we can predict using scientific data how our natural world will change, can we respond accordingly and make the necessary adaptations to our built environment, our economies and cultural philosophy to thrive under even the most uncertain conditions?
Someone who spent a lot of time on the ground witnessing these coastal events and translating them into a more nuanced understanding of a landscape constantly in flux is our guest today, Rosanna Xia. Rosanna is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, specializing in stories about the coast and the ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting, and her work has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing Anthology. Last fall, she released her first book, California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline. I hope you will enjoy this discussion with Rosanna about the timeliness of her new book, and how it came together for her as a writer and observer of climate change. Thank you for listening.
So, Rosanna, welcome to Ten Across Conversations, it's a pleasure to have you with us today.
Rosanna Xia
Hi, thank you. It's good to be here.
Duke Reiter
And it's good to see you again. Thank you again, for coming to the Ten Across Summit in Los Angeles last month, you made some great contributions on the journalist panel.
Rosanna Xia
Thank you. I was really inspired by questions that were asked at that conference that day, and because there were so many people really willing to engage on these really tough questions. I know that conversation that you started in Los Angeles has continued, and I look forward to seeing where we go from here.
Duke Reiter
That's really great to hear. One of the hallmarks of our 10 Across Summits is that we try to get people together who may not know each other. That panel of journalists is invariably one of the most exciting ones and the most collegial, because you're all in it together to some degree. I'm glad to hear that there's been some sharing.
Speaking of journalism, your topic is in the news. This interview could not be better timed. It sort of reminds me of when we were talking to Jeff Goodell last summer about his book, The Heat Will Kill You First, when we were experiencing, unfortunately threatening temperatures at exactly the time of the release of his book. We're talking about your book, California Against the Sea, at a time when people are turning on the news or hearing about what's going on in the Coast right now, there's sort of unprecedented waves and erosion and other things. Tell us a little bit about what you're witnessing, and how are people responding to the fact that they're actually seeing what you've been talking about.
Rosanna Xia
You know, as a reporter who covers this topic as my full-time job...To keep up with these disasters is actually a really sobering reflection of how much we are living presently in this ongoing disaster. And so, you know, the cover of my book features these set of homes, colorful homes, in Capitola by the sea, in Santa Cruz County. And we set that design for the cover in the summer of 2022. And then in January of 2023, the homes completely got smashed by waves, debris, like littered across the entire street and Capitola underwater became the iconic image of that season of sea level rise in California. And the book was already at the printer. And now once again, I'm seeing these images and coverage and just news reports of the damage caused by, you know, people being surprised by the ocean moving inland. It is a repeating story and there is no end to it. And I think as someone in the climate change communication space, sea level rise, in particular, is something I find that people are able to more easily write it off as a closer to end of century kind of issue. It feels more abstract, we worry more about wildfires and drought and heat waves even. And what happens in California is the waves roll in, the damages happen, and then the sun comes out the next day. And then we once again forget and move on until the cycle happens again.
Duke Reiter
It's also interesting when you see what's happening right now on the coast, as opposed to a fire. I think there's one response to that, and that's: get out of the way. But when you see the large waves, you see erosion, you see damage to communities, but you also see surfers, as if this thing had another side to it that was obviously not threatening to some of those folks. It's just a different kind of situation.
But you did bring up the idea of how often this happens. The first thing I want to say about your book is, it seems so often to be about time, and different kinds of time. Whether it's the geological time that produced the coast that we see today, and now we're talking about thousands of years, if not millennia, but you go back about 7000 years. Then there's the last century, where there was erosion, but not really as accelerated as what we're now seeing.
So, let's start with the first time, the big geologic time. The coastline has been many different things over time. Why did you think it was important for us to understand geologic time in the book and sort of set the stage?
Rosanna Xia
...(T)he coast inherently is a dynamic process where land meets ocean, and there's this constant tension and back and forth between land and sea. And this process has been going on for hundreds of thousands of millions of years. And the only thing that has changed in the last 200 or so years, 150 years, is that we settled the coastline, and we decided to start imposing permanence onto what is inherently an impermanent space. So if you go out to the beach and stand there for an afternoon, and really just slow down to pay attention to the tide line for example, every time the waves wash ashore, that line in the sand is different. But then you look behind you and see Pacific Coast Highway, you look at the railroad, you look at the entire neighborhoods and rows of homes that we've built literally right on the sand, and you see this disconnect between what the coastline has always been naturally for time immemorial, versus what it is that we expect now of our built environment and the way we felt the coast. And that is truly the point of tension here.
As you know, with sea level rise, the ocean is now moving inland at greater speeds and with greater intensity, and it's threatening these lines in the sand that we have decided to hold on to. And truly, what does that mean to change and what does it mean to acknowledge that the coast itself is not static, that we perhaps should move with the ocean as it moves inland? Those are kind of the core questions that are challenging philosophically, the way we have wrapped our minds around what we expect out of the coastline today.
Duke Reiter
That's what I was getting at. What we're seeing today, which is “the coast” and even the definition of a coastline, is just a point in time. And if you look at the timescale that you suggested at the beginning, it's very temporary. It's very provisional. But as you also pointed out, we've got thousands of years being described there, and then we have 30-year mortgages, or election cycles, as you bring up, four years, six years, whatever it might be. So we're taking something that is big, slow moving, hugely important, and trying to reduce it to the way that we think about the world in smaller increments. And obviously, there can be a misfit when it's your house and your 30-year mortgage, and you're losing land, and you can actually see in real time what's happening. And I think, as you just pointed out, you sort of don't want to believe that's the case that, “Hey, I came to the coast, it should be permanent. Least it is in my mind's eye.” But clearly, it's not.
Rosanna Xia
Two thoughts there. As an environmental reporter mostly reporting in California, what's fascinating to me is most people that I talk to in California, I don't really run into “climate deniers” anymore. I don't think anyone is really questioning whether or not climate change is happening, with the wildfires or with the drought that we're constantly in. The denial and the debate in California is about time. How much time do we have? Some people truly think that this is a premature issue to start talking about, saying we have another 100 years, we have another 75 years, this is not for our generation. And then there are people who say that we should have started decades ago, that the conversations we're having today feel indulgent, and something we could have had time to do in the 70s if they started then. But now we don't have time to debate all the costs and tradeoffs and how to move forward in these slower, more democratic ways.
It's interesting that time is truly the flashpoint. There is a point of denial that I almost sense when it comes to climate change in California. I'm so glad you made the point about the 30-year mortgage and election cycles, because it's so surreal to sit down and think about the somewhat arbitrary timescales we are forced to think in and to make decisions based on in modern society.
For example, with a 30-year mortgage, I'm hearing in some spaces people talking about whether or not they can refinance their homes, whether or not they can get insurance. They're trying to figure out the 30-year mortgage, which is such a fixture of American homeownership. And then on the other hand, I'm speaking in the science and policy spaces. Folks today in California have come together, the planners, the scientists, the coastal management agencies, they're like, “Okay, what does the science say? By 2050, we should prepare every single community in California, as much as possible, for three and a half feet of sea level rise.” That's the current consensus among science and policy folks in California: three and a half feet of sea level rise by 2050. 2050 is less than 30 years away. So on one hand, I'm hearing people in one silo, talking about 30-year mortgages, and another silo talking about all the things we need to radically change with our infrastructure and our built landscape in less than 30 years. Where it's interesting, as a reporter, you inhabit all these different spaces where you're like, Oh, these are where the dots are not connecting. And this is where the conflict is happening.”
Duke Reiter
I think the subject of time, and you've summed it up very nicely, is at the core of the whole Ten Across project. I hope you caught that. By looking at an area of the country from California to Florida, and obviously, that includes places that you mentioned, I want to talk about that. Places like New Orleans and other environments experiencing sea level rise and water related issues. It's always a question of: Do we have to move now? How much time do we have? As you say very clearly in the book, we are always thinking we can put it off another day, which we often can, a day, but sometimes not months, not years. And we must wrestle with that. And we're really bad as human beings of only dealing with the future that we can see in front of us, if it's just a little bit beyond our ability to imagine it in a quite serious way.
So, with time, and the need to move, comes the notion of managed retreat, which as you point out, some might say it's too early to start thinking about that. Surely this house that I bought, this place I want to retire in or live in, I don't have to start thinking about moving now. Why does managed retreat create some of the friction that you described in the book, and do other terminologies like adaptation strategies do a little bit better at getting at what we need to pay attention to? Talk about language and what it provokes.
Rosanna Xia
I lean away from superlative statements, but managed retreat is probably the most fraught term in the coastal planning sea level rise adaptation space in California based on the conversations that I've had with folks from every corner of this conversation. On a surface level, I would just say the term “managed retreat” is poor branding. It's very, very technical, it's jargony.
The approach to sea level rise planning six or seven years ago was that a local city government or agency would hire a third-party consultant to do the vulnerability assessment, and then basically drop a 900 page report with all these appendices at a city council meeting, and provide public comment and 10 days for the community to process everything.
To use terms like manage retreat, “retreat” in the American psyche feels like failure, or surrender, and no one wants to be managed. Those two words combined trigger an emotional response that I have witnessed over and over and over again in so many different communities. Someone also told me that managed retreat, in some ways, feels like a slogan more than an actual conversation that we're having. There are anti-managed retreat banners, and people saying that we need to be pro-managed retreat. But what does it actually mean proceed with managed retreat? It really is just about acknowledging that the coast is moving, it's supposed to move, and we're supposed to move with it as the ocean moves inland.
The other disconnect with language is the way we talk about sea level rise, adaptation, climate adaptation. So often, I still feel like people are approaching these conversations Like they're these big, one-time actions that you need to take, rather than an ongoing process and a commitment to a different vision and a future that we're taking incremental steps toward. In discussing managed retreat, it's like Yay, or Nay on managed retreat. It's still being treated like this one-time decision, this one vote at the Coastal Commission meeting or a city council meeting. But instead, it is a conversation about what do we actually want to move towards? How do we start planning proactively before the disaster hits? I think managed retreat is probably not the right wording for that. I've heard a lot of wonky replacements for it, like “community-led relocation” and “planned relocation” and “proactive disaster aversion”. Ultimately, I think it's a notion of recognizing that adapting to climate change and sea level rise is a process, not a one-time action.
Duke Reiter
Well, I think you said something interesting. “Retreat sounds like failure. We're Americans, we don't do that.” You said nobody wants to be managed. I think for some people, the word they are hearing is “forced,” and that if it's being managed, it is probably by a third party or somebody else. It's not me making that decision; somebody else is guiding that decision. And you're really forcing this on me.
On the other hand, I think we expect government or public officials to look out for our best interests. But at a time where institutions are being questioned, I think we both understand why it's a difficult moment, or as you said, a fraught term. But it's just fascinating what people hear about that term. And then when the reason for needing to retreat comes to your literal doorstep, certainly people are turning to those who are trying to conduct manage retreat, and looking for support. We all want it both ways, right? We don't want to be managed, but we would like to have the manager on call, so to speak.
Rosanna Xia
...One more thought on terminology. I did talk to some local leaders and communities who were more able to see the bigger picture. One local mayor told me, “Managed retreat is just marching in a different direction.” So that is one way of thinking about it. I think what you just said is just reminding me of all these thoughts and conversations I've had for years with folks and all these different sides of the equation.
But ultimately, a question that emerges is: What is the purpose of government? Is the purpose of government to hold back the ocean indefinitely to preserve property value? Because that is what a lot of these conversations come down to. Are we fighting to protect property value or life safety? It's interesting that with wildfires, I think a life safety element feels more present. But so much of what's dominating some of these anti-managed retreat or pro-managed retreat conversations still comes down to the question of property value. The fact that in California, which is very different from the Gulf Coast, and a lot of the other communities that Ten Across also dives deep into, but in California, our coastal property is some of the most expensive, most valuable property in the country and in the world. So as one of the former executive directors of the Coastal Commission told me, he's like, “When you're talking about real estate that is this valuable and this sought after, it ultimately not a science issue, it's a political issue.” For me, I really see this conversation of managed retreat also at its heart being a question of the role of government, who has the most influence within politics. It's a complicated, multifaceted debate and issue.
Duke Reiter
I want to talk about something else that you mentioned. I spent 10 years of my life in New Orleans. I often characterize it as a place where a city had to be at the mouth of the Mississippi River for commerce, defense, all kinds of things. And it’s a place where a city probably shouldn't be. It's swampy, hurricanes come, the ground is unstable, etc. Yet, it's a magical place. Maybe it's magical, in part because it probably shouldn't be the way it is or where it is located. But yet, we humans decided we're going to be there. And we’re going to make the best of it.
San Francisco is another engineered city, which as you point out again, may not be the best place. But how are you going to give up on San Francisco Bay and everything else about it? So we're going to figure out how to engineer a city, whether it's in the swamplands of Louisiana, or on the coast of California or San Francisco. In both cases, I think you use the phrase that their existence is a defiance against nature.
Once you've decided to dig in and have a city like that, in terms of cost because of this valuable real estate, where do you stop? I don't think you do. Once you've made that kind of commitment to a major metropolis, you're in it for the long haul. How do people you talk to balance what they know they now need to do, and the difficulties they are in?
Rosanna Xia
Where do you stop, and also, who's going to pay for it, and who's willing to pay for a seawall in perpetuity as the ocean continues to rise? Those are the tough questions that are being asked right now. I love how you just compared New Orleans with San Francisco, because it is true, like along the California coast, there are conversations in places where managed retreat does seem like it will probably be the wisest decision and approach forward in terms of protecting life safety, and just also cost efficiency. But with San Francisco, no one is talking about giving San Francisco back to the water. I'm not as familiar with New Orleans’ land use history, but similarly, I would say San Francisco was largely built on a marsh. Embarcadero is a gigantic sea wall that runs for miles and holds back the bay. The area between Embarcadero and the Financial District is filled-in marshland. Now the water is trying to move back into where it used to be.
Duke Reiter
I think people forget that in part because when they think of San Francisco, they think of hills. They think the city is built on a mountain of sorts, or at least on a very large hill. And so water shouldn't be a problem. But when it comes down to where the city does meet the water, you're right, the Embarcadero begins to approximate other swampy, marshy, unstable soil conditions. I'm not sure everybody knows that that's so true, because they just don't see it in the same way.
Rosanna Xia
Go out to the Ferry Building every time there's a high tide. Embarcadero is a very sobering reminder of how we have truly forced these lines into the sand and took land from the water. Now the water wants it back. Embarcadero was built a century ago. It is not only not strong enough for the rising water that is inevitably coming, but also for earthquakes there's a seismic issue, because again, that side of San Francisco was built on filled in marshland. And so there are a lot of liquefaction issues and risks if an earthquake hits. The city has committed to fortifying the seawall, and the numbers continue to grow every time someone does another cost assessment, and it is in the billions at this point. There is this longer-term visioning process that's starting to happen led by the Port of San Francisco on what does it mean to elevate the Ferry Building? What does it mean to terrace some of the major roads and the critical infrastructure and to elevate it, because again, no one is talking about letting go of San Francisco, but there are tough conversations now happening recognizing San Francisco as it exists today will likely have to change at some point in the near future due to the rising water.
Duke Reiter
Nobody's going to let New Orleans go, however, and you talk a lot in your book about equity and race and other things, it may not be an earthquake, but when a hurricane comes, like it did with Katrina 2005, and you saw who was impacted on your television. So we're not prepared to give up New Orleans, but things like that test us. Earthquakes, and other things that require massive reinvestment in places that maybe ideally shouldn't have been built that way, but they are. Those are where the really difficult decisions come. I think in places like New Orleans and San Francisco, two of the most amazing cities in this country, we're not going to give up on them. But we are going to have to make, like what you just described, very hard decisions about what we keep and what we can't keep.
Rosanna Xia
What you just described, about the heartbreaking tragedies and chaos after a disaster like Katrina, is what managed retreat is trying to manage ahead of time. If you look at the hurricanes that swept through Houston for example, a couple of years ago, and in Florida, if we wait until the disaster hits, it's this idea of even trying to respond equitably and to make everyone feel whole, is just that's completely out the window once the disaster hits. It's every person for themselves, and it's a matter of survival.
And truly, the people who get to leave and maybe come back or rebuild, or the people who are able to go somewhere else and to survive, that's where you really see the stark inequities in our society. You start to see it sharpen into focus. Managed retreat is supposed to be, from the technical perspective, a process that tries to avert these disasters, and to begin this process of transitioning away from high-risk places in a way that feels fair and equitable, and to make sure that no one gets left behind. Because after a disaster, people do get left behind.
Duke Reiter
And yet, you have this stunning quote in your book, by Hop Hopkins, describing what you and I are talking about right now. In saying, when you're addressing climate change, sometimes the solutions are made possible by valuing some communities over others. You can't have climate change without sacrifice zones. You can't have sacrificed zones without disposable people. And you can't have disposable people without racism. This is a quote from someone working to address these issues, putting it in pretty stark terms, which are probably accurate based on what we saw during Katrina: People without means who can't build enormous sea walls or escape a city like New Orleans during a hurricane or flood, They're the ones who are on the frontlines of the difficulties that result from climate change. I think he describes it there in terms I've never quite seen so bold.
Rosanna Xia
That quote really stuck with me as well. This notion of sacrifice zones… Applying it to the California coast, for example. This is where I'm really grateful for the indie publisher I ended up publishing this book with because so often the way we talk about California and coastal towns and your images of what the California coast is: it's Santa Monica, Malibu, Santa Barbara, San Francisco. But between all those iconic cities, the California coast stands 1200 miles from the Oregon border all the way to Mexico. There are so many towns that aren't Malibu, that aren't Laguna Beach, that got sacrificed for the sake of our industrial needs. We have towns that are situated where the power plants are and where the wastewater treatment plants are. We have a lot of critical infrastructure that we do rely on and needs to be situated on the coast. And those communities often get lost in the conversation about California and the coast.
So, for me, if I wrote a big kind of mass market book on sea level rise, California would have ended up being like one chapter, and that chapter would have inevitably ended up just in San Francisco, or Santa Monica, or Malibu. It was great to be able to dedicate an entire book on all the different communities in California allowing me to go to places like Marin City and East Oakland, and to really think about the places that we have willingly sacrificed. They have been designated as not worthy of investment for tourism or for green space. To really see how sea level rise for those communities is also a very pressing issue when it comes to whether or not the rising water will re-mobilized toxic chemicals. Superfund sites that never got fully cleaned up. Where do those people go when they get displaced? To your point in Katrina. It is really important to make sure that everyone who belongs in this conversation is actually in this conversation about sea level rise adaptation, because for so long, it was a coastal elite copper position in California. It really isn't, but so many communities up and down the coast have just not had their voices heard or their stories highlighted in these spaces in these discussions.
...There are places and along the coast that do receive a lot of investment in taking care of the community in tourism. The more the property value is worth, the more the property taxes are, which allows the city to continue to beautify and gentrify their communities. And then there are communities that are so disinvested and so overlooked, that they just don't even have the opportunity to nurture and build and clean up their communities.
...Part of my hope for this book was to really expand our notion of what California is, and then to think beyond the coasts as this place for the mega rich and the elite, because there is just so much more nuance along the coast. There are so many lessons. Someone at first glance might look at this book and think, “Oh, I live in New Orleans, and I don't think this is a book for me.” But there are so many stories in this book, and communities that do reflect, for example, what a lot of New Orleans is experiencing. Whether it is a community built on marshland, or the socioeconomic disparities, literally just next door to each other within communities.
Duke Reiter
I'm saying this not just to be self-congratulatory, but that is the point of Ten Across. When we brought people from the arid Southwest together with people in the Gulf region to talk about issues related to water, whether too much or too little of it. People found so much common purpose around their situations being comparable to others, which they had to imagine the policy issues, the community issues, the histories. And so that's part of what we're doing.
One of the things that also comes up, and I think you have a deep respect for Indigenous peoples, and how they approached the land and the 30x30 notion as to how we should think about the coasts. We've done the same thing around fire, as you probably know. Other reporters at the LA Times have spoken about trying to understand how people long before we arrived in this part of the country dealt with the issue of fire. What's your hope for that kind of orientation, given where we are in society, what we've already built. We've so overwhelmed the land. You describe in the book, very poetically, what it must be like for someone to look out over a place where their ancestors once lived, and now it’s in Los Angeles, with not a shred of evidence of what had been there before. What's your hope for how we might approach this differently given how far we are into the 21st century?
Rosanna Xia
I'll just put it bluntly: We can't reverse colonization. But we can truly see it, acknowledge it and recognize that we do not need to continue perpetuating some of the systems that got us here in the first place. For me writing a book, I realized it's not just about the intellectual journey of the reader, there's also a philosophical journey. As a reporter, I'm always thinking about the facts and the data and translating the science and the policies. I’m so in Intellectual Land. But to shift into the philosophical: The indigenous perspective was what really grounded me and guided me and made me really think more deeply about what exactly got us here in the first place. As a reporter, as a writer, and as a storyteller, I'm constantly thinking about how, when you choose to quote someone, you give them power. When you choose to tell their stories and center their perspectives, you give that perspective power. I'll just speak for the California coast. So many coastal tribes and Indigenous nations were erased from the coast and then priced out. There are no federally recognized tribes, for example, in Los Angeles. But just because they are no longer right on the coast does not mean that they don't belong in the conversation.
The more you look at Indigenous ways of relating to the coast, acknowledging that this is a constantly moving landscape that we're supposed to move with, and to live in harmony with, it really starts to shift the way we think about how we manage our infrastructure and how we have chosen instead to hold the line for the last 150 years along these arbitrary boundaries. Maybe this is the most radical thing I'll say today: What is it that we're actually fighting for? Property values, as we talked about earlier, but also property lines and jurisdictional boundaries, all of these boundaries don't matter to the ocean. If you bring in these non-western ways of relating to nature, and looking at landscapes… It's also the way we structure our agencies. If I want to talk about water, I have to go to this water agency, if I want to talk about the coast, I have to go talk to this coastal agency. I have to talk to two different cities to figure out one beach because their jurisdictional boundaries end in the middle of it. None of that matters when you de-westernize some of the ways we think about land and think about in between land and oceans spaces. The coast in itself is like sometimes underwater and sometimes above water, and we've lost sight of that as well.
My last point about Indigenous perspectives is that I see a lot in planning and environmental spaces, which has been really encouraging and inspiring to see how much we have in the last few years in California, bringing in Indigenous knowledge and perspectives in these conversations. It's so important to remember that we should not only be talking about Indigenous knowledge. It is something that is overly romanticized about the past, but Indigenous perspectives also belong in the present. They are absolutely critical in the way we reframe, and rethink and reimagine going into the future.
For this book I wanted to bridge Western science and Indigenous knowledge and build them off of each other, rather than have an either or, which I see in policy and science in the climate space. There is a section in a 300-page report on traditional ecological knowledge, but it's not interwoven throughout the entire approach. I think that's the next step.
We've started to acknowledge it, to amplify and bring these perspectives to the table, which is really inspiring. But going forward, how do you actually allow this perspective to be a through line that is in conversation with Western scientific approaches and our Western forms of land management? It's a hard conversation to have. It's tricky. But I think that is the hard work that needs to be done going forward. These perspectives are invaluable and critical to the way we move into the future.
Duke Reiter
You anticipated how I was going to bring this conversation to a close. I thought your commentary at the Summit in LA was striking. In your final thoughts to the audience, you said, “I encourage all of you to think about the emotional journey of the conversations that you're having, and ultimately the philosophical journeys, because truly, we can't science our way out of this problem.” I'm not sure people expected that.
Rosanna Xia
Duke, thank you. I'm just in awe and so inspired by the conversations that you have guided and the space that you create for us to go deeper on these much-needed conversations. So, thank you for bringing me on to the podcast today.