Episode 2 - Oct 29, 2020
Robert Waters and Dr. Rob Davies discuss the creation of "H2O", the second movement in Laura Kaminsky's string quartet Rising Tide, which is featured in the new film from The Crossroads Project. They are joined by the composer and Dr. Ben Abbott, Assistant Professor of Ecosystem Biology at BYU.
Learn more about Rising Tide and stream the movie at novaslc.org/crossroads.
Hosts:
Robert Waters, Fry Street Quartet violinist
Dr. Rob Davies, Utah State University Dept of Physics (Twitter @robsMast)
Guests:
Laura Kaminsky, composer (laurakaminsky.com)
Dr. Ben Abbott, BYU Assistant Professor of Ecosystem Biology (Twitter @thermokarst)
produced by Chris Myers (argylearts.com)
Copyright © 2020 NOVA Chamber Music Series. All rights reserved.
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to the NOVA Podcast.
Robert Waters:
Hello everyone. My name is Robert Waters, and I am a violinist with the Fry Street Quartet. My quartet serves as co-music directors for the NOVA Chamber Music Series in Salt Lake City, and as quartet in residence at Utah State University.
Welcome to this installment of The Crossroads Project Podcast. Just recently, my colleagues in the Fry Street Quartet and physicist Dr. Robert Davies premiered the film version of Rising Tide:The Crossroads Project, a multidisciplinary performance project addressing issues of global sustainability.
To talk a little bit more about this project, I'd like to introduce my cohost and colleague, Rob Davies.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Thank you Robert very much, and thank you to the NOVA Chamber Music Series for hosting us, and for hosting this podcast. As you've heard, I'm Rob Davies, I am a professor of physics at Utah State University. I focus on something called critical science communication. We'll come back to that in a minute. But more relevant for today, I am co-creator, as Robert told you, of The Crossroads Project, along with my friends, the Fry Street Quartet, who is well known of course to NOVA audiences, but perhaps not to all of our listeners. Just to plug for them, they are a professional string quartet in residence at Utah State University's Caine College of the Arts, and have been so for the last 18 years, if you can believe that.
We have really a genuinely fascinating conversation coming up today with our guests, who we'll introduce in a moment. But first I wanted to give a brief introduction for those of you not familiar with the performance we're discussing today, which as you've heard is called The Crossroads Project: Rising Tide.
The Crossroads Project is a performance science project on the topic of human sustainability and human vibrancy. And Rising Tide is a performance within that umbrella project that we have just premiered the film of with NOVA. And it's specifically a performance weaving together information and imagery and music to look at this intersection between human civilization, the human systems that we have built, things like food and energy and economy, to help us thrive, the intersection of that with the earth system that is there to allow us to survive. And that has made it possible for us to survive.
We wanted to do this performance in a way that doesn't just inform an audience, but really connect audiences to this information.
That's a little bit of the background. Now clearly this is a pretty big topic, dealing with complex systems, lots of nuance to explore, and of course this is the real challenge is distilling this story of human civilization and earth systems into a 70 minute performance experience.
NOVA has invited us to create these podcasts as a way to expand the story, give us a little bit more room to explore these topics in more detail than we can in the performance, and also explore the process of telling this story in this way. So to do that we've invited some additional scientific voices to join us, as well as our artistic collaborators, and we're going to introduce those two voices who are joining us today briefly, and then we'll get into our discussion and we'll have them introduce themselves a little more fully.
Robert, who do we got with us?
Robert Waters:
Well, we're so happy to have the great composer, Laura Kaminsky with us, who is also an incredibly dear friend, Laura, welcome to our podcast.
Laura Kaminsky:
It's a pleasure to be with everybody.
Robert Waters:
So Laura, just very briefly, in 2012 when the quartet and Rob was putting together what is the current version of Rising Tide, we had in previous versions stuck in some music of Beethoven and stuck in some music of Shostakovich, and clearly felt that we needed some original music for this podcast. So we contacted Laura after looking around and finding her music and being really compelled by it. Laura, do you want to talk a little bit about your first introduction to this project, and how that struck you?
Laura Kaminsky:
Oh, it was such an exciting day when I opened my email and there was a note from Rebecca McFaul, the second violinist of the quartet, saying that she'd heard that I often wrote music in response to social or political concerns, that I'm somewhat of an activist, and that she was developing a project around sustainability and climate change issues, and they were searching for some music. So I wrote back immediately and said, "I'd be very interested in having this conversation with you," and was thrilled to get this concept presented of a scientific lecture that was amplified and lightened by visual and musical images and sounds to heighten the experience for the audience member, hopefully, with that leading to a more impactful response and possibly a call to action.
That was our very beginning of connection, and it's just grown into, as you said Robert, just a friendship, a very profound, trusting friendship of creative and political engagement together.
Robert Waters:
Thank you Laura.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, we will come back very soon to Laura and expand this conversation. We also have with us Dr. Ben Abbott, professor of ecology at Brigham Young University joining us today. And I should say that ... The performance, for those of you who've seen it, you know, or the film also, that we've got it broken into these pieces of the earth system and then human systems. And the earth system, we first talk about water, and then we talk about the living bits of the planet, life, earth's biosphere, and in particular the fundamental rules by which nature has organized successful ecosystems. And then we talk about the very base of the biosphere, the food for everybody else. And then we talk about human systems.
That's the sequence, and we're going to look at a little bit more about that in a minute. But in today's podcast, we're going to focus, or start our focus at least on the water section. And this is one of the several reasons that I immediately wanted to invite Dr. Abbott to join us, because this is his specialty, his expertise is working with human water systems, and so I'm sure I haven't quite done that justice. So let me first ask, Ben, why don't you just tell us a little bit more about yourself and your work.
Dr. Ben Abbott:
Thank you so much, Rob. I'm very happy to be here. I am a global ecologist, and my specialty is global hydrology. My work tries to understand how the natural systems of water, land, oceans, climate interact with humankind. And more and more, as we have better understanding of how widespread human activity is and how influential we are on all aspects of the earth's system, we see that you no longer can understand water without including humans. So we have to take these two issues together. So I was really moved by the piece, and I'm excited and honored to be here talking with you.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, thank you so much for taking the time, Ben. I should say I follow Ben on Twitter, and for anyone who's interested in these topics, he's a great person to follow. So I'm sure if you Google Ben Abbott and Twitter, you'll come up with that.
Dr. Ben Abbott:
That's a dangerous recommendation.
Dr. Robert Davies:
I wanted to start the conversation, Ben, I just mentioned in the introduction that of course one of the reasons for this podcast, the main reason, is to expand the conversation, and it's a real challenge to distill these complex and very interesting topics into, in the case of the water section of the performance, about six or seven minutes of dialogue. And to figure out how to distill that well. So my first question to you is how did we do? What did you think? And what did you really feel you wanted to expand upon a bit as well?
Dr. Ben Abbott:
That's such a good question, because in any of these issues, we can't address the full breadth of the scientific or the human and artistic aspect of these issues. But I really liked the emphasis in this project of that interrelation, the dependency of humans on water. Sometimes when we think of environmental issues, it can be framed in terms of we need to save the earth. It's somehow altruistic. And we really know that it's exactly the opposite, that we would have no human life, we'd have no life at all without these natural cycles. We sometimes call them ecosystem services, and then from a more personal and indigenous view, they're often called gifts of the earth, and I really like that phrasing.
I thought that the, first the observation that all life directly depends on water, and then also that climate depends on water. So we are of course modifying some of these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The effect of those gases is amplified because of these physical feedbacks with water. I thought that that was an excellent emphasis of the piece.
One of the really important issues that we're dealing with water that wasn't as apparent is that water pollution still is this global issue. 1.8 million people die each year from water borne pathogens. And many of these issues, including emerging pollutants, things that, novel chemicals that we've created, pharmaceuticals that we give primarily to livestock, those are polluting the water, the surface water, the groundwater, and we even can find traces of these far out in the middle of the ocean.
That's another example of how when we have a negative interaction with the natural world, it very quickly comes back and affects our well being. So we need to take care of the earth from a self interested perspective, and then also because I believe it will lead us to greater happiness and meaning.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Wow, that's really well put. The pollution I think is a fabulous point to bring out, and of course there's some imagery that we present at the end of this movement that shows some polluted water. I focus on in particular heavy metals and oil. But of course no real data. This is a piece where you're saying, "Oh, that seems like it should be bad." But this number that you've given us, 1.8 million people a year dying, and of course they don't die from water pollution, that's not the way we hear about it. What we hear about is they've died from some disease, a cancer, a heart disease, a nerve condition, something like that. But of course, it can be traced back to these things, but we never heard them.
Dr. Ben Abbott:
That's right, and-
Dr. Robert Davies:
We don't hear about it that often.
Dr. Ben Abbott:
That's one of the key things. So many of these environmental issues are invisible. You don't see the cause and effect immediately in the same place or at the same time. So very rarely will it say on the death certificate, "This person died of water pollution." However when we look back and see what led to the condition that they had or the acute disease that they contracted, it was absolutely associated with our interaction with water.
However, as you point out, some of these things we can see. You can see an oil slick, or you can see an algae bloom that's caused by excess nutrients that we've put into the water, either from our wastewater or from our agriculture. Those things are visible. Now the challenge is how can we understand these scientific numbers that can sometimes feel faceless and sterilized, how can we humanize that?
That's where this collaboration I think is so interesting, because not only does it present the data and the information, but it gives you a chance through the artistic interpretation to feel what it means. Because simply saying 1.8 million people at least for me is really hard to understand. But when you can look at those images, when you can hear the music, which isn't literal, it's very emotive and interpretive, that gives a crucial complement to these numbers that we now know because of global science.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well that's a perfect, I think, segue to take us over to the other side, the artistic presentation of this. What do you think, Robert?
Robert Waters:
Yeah, you know one of the things that I know all of us in the quartet loved so much about Laura's four movement piece, but particularly the water movement, is that it does such an amazing job of highlighting, and perhaps in an abstract and more emotional way, some of the things that Rob talks about in the water speech that he gives, which are on the one hand the wonder of water and the electricity and the sparks that you get midway through the movement. But at the beginning, there's a sense of real foreboding and darkness to that. And I wondered, Laura, if you could talk a little bit about how you decided to take this notion of water into your process.
Laura Kaminsky:
I think early on in our conversations about the structure of the piece, Rob talked about water as being the source of life, and that really struck me that everything comes from there. So I wanted the piece to come out of the depths, in a way. And I had recently been in Armenia, in Yerevan, and seen the big Lake Sevan and thinking about this ancient culture, and the sense of the water sustaining for thousands of years this evolution of this culture, and the landscape, and the whole environment in which this water fed early civilization and life as we know it.
I kind of turned to early Armenian chant as a kind of percolating from the depths of the earth and the depths of our soul. And that's sort of the darkness I think that you're referring to, Rob. But it starts to flow. It starts to break out and to flow. And that's the movement and the joy and the life and the light sparkling on the water as it flows and gives life.
Those are the different kinds of visual images that were percolating in response to what I thought Rob's lecture was going to comprise of. And then the music starts to take on its own life. And as I went into the movement of water, I was thinking of the different kinds of energies that would be captured by changing how the music flowed. That's kind of how it got written.
Robert Waters:
This might be a good time to throw up the graph that you were handed at the very beginning of this process when, Rob, you want to talk a little bit about this?
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, of course, I'm a physicist, and if you can take something and plot it on a graph, you know we're going to do it. When I sat down to try to figure out a structure for this performance, there's lots of things to consider. Well the two main things ... So, what's the information that we want to present? How long is it going to take? And also, early on someone said, "You know, you really need to consider the emotional arc that you want the audience to follow."
I'll briefly explain this graph. Starting on the left at the bottom, you've got these chunks of squares. There's a black one and a blue one and then a gold one. Those are the different bits. The first one on the left is the prologue that introduces us. The next one is where we're at right now, this water movement, that blue one. And you see the blue one has a little white line through it. So that delineates the first part of the blue one moving from left to right is me speaking and showing some imagery, and then the second part of the blue one after that little white line, that divider, is the music. So I was trying to just divide this up and say okay, this is going to be roughly half speaking and then roughly half music.
And this is a good point to mention to the audience that deliberately the idea was for them to be presented with some information in that first part of the blue square, have that information amplified by some compelling imagery, which I show along with it. We'll look at a clip in a moment so you get a sense of that. And then have the music form a contemplative space for the audience to just sit with the information that they had. So that's what that graph is, and I'll take you one more up.
If you go above that first line to the second, the upper line of chunks there, and you see those little, the black lines that start at the bottom and then jump up, that was me trying to think of the emotional arc of the audience, and I think I've got that flipped. The idea with water was that we talk about interesting things that are fun and interesting and that's an emotional high, and then I end the talk with just a little bit of foreboding, which you'll see in the clip in a moment. And then the music comes in. And that's the conversation that I had with Laura was what I was looking for in the emotional arc, and what the information was going to be, and of course we did that for the remaining vignettes as well.
That's what Laura was presented with, and you started with. What did you think when you got this graph, Laura?
Laura Kaminsky:
I thought it was beautiful.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Or do you even remember it? I'm not sure.
Laura Kaminsky:
When you said you were going to put up the graph, it's like okay, what graph is that? But now that I see it of course I remembered that you had come up with that. I think what I saw when you shared that, and of course we met in conversation with the whole quartet, and we already knew that there was going to be scientific data and charts and numbers and facts and figures, and then moving from that, that each section of the piece, and this is what I took away from understanding your graph, and as we develop the structure for the whole, that it had to have a through line narrative. And each section had to have its own through line narrative within the bigger arc of the piece.
One of the things that I loved right at the beginning was that you said, "I need four movements of a string quartet," which is great, because so many of the classical standard repertoire string quartets are in four movements. So in a way that already presented me with a structure for the music before I even knew what your talk was going to be, and there's a kind of a plan in most quartets that the first movement is sort of presentational and strong and has some strong ideas, and the second movement can be slower and more inward looking, and the third is often a dance music type of movement, and then the fourth is grand and culminates everything.
I had that in mind, and it actually fit with what your content was going to be. But one of the things that I think evolved early for all of us was the notion that each segment needed its own pride of place, that the images weren't merely there to make Rob look pretty, or to be background for the quartet, but that the images had their own narrative, and that the music, while it supported some of the images during the transitional moments coming out of talking to imagery to music, that the music had to have its own place and wasn't background to a movie.
The respect for all of the segments to make a cohesive whole was an important part of the original, and I think that's a little bit what I got from that first chart that you shared with me.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Yeah, that's well put. We definitely did not want the music to be any kind of a score. We wanted to to have its really own voice in telling the story. Yeah.
Robert Waters:
I'm guessing that's the first and last time you've ever gotten a graph as part of a commission.
Laura Kaminsky:
That may be so. And in fact, I now spent the last number of years writing a number of operas, and in a way that graph is similar to how I approach writing an opera, because the libretto is the narrative, and each of the scenes have their own arc, and then they have to all add up to each other, and they relate to each other. So I actually make color coded charts now when I receive my libretto. And I guess, Rob, you have more influence on the creative musical process than you know. Because it's actually informed how I create big pieces now that are an hour to two hours long.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Wow.
Laura Kaminsky:
So thank you.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, thank you. It's just been an amazing piece of music, I think we all agree. Robert, I'm wondering if maybe this is a good time for us to ... We have a short clip that maybe helps people, if you haven't seen the film or our performance, get a sense of how these things are melded together and blended together in the performance. Should we show that?
Robert Waters:
Yeah, I think that's great.
Laura Kaminsky:
Before we do, could I just jump in and ask Robert, if you wouldn't mind, just saying a little bit about when we first started working together and I brought sketches, and it wasn't done, and we sat and workshopped the piece, what that process was like. Because I think that's a close up of what the whole building of the entire Crossroads Project performance is. But this is just the pure musical subsection, and-
Robert Waters:
Well I think, I mean it was an amazing moment that afternoon, our first working together. It's always an exciting moment to crack open a brand new piece of music, especially with the composer right there, and this was no exception. But this was a particularly unusual project. I mean, I think all of us in the room, you've certainly written plenty of music for performers, and all four of us in the quartet have premiered and learned brand new works. But in the context of creating this performance piece, which has so many moving parts and has an ambitious agenda to it, we really had no idea what we were in for. It was daunting. I mean, we clearly knew that we didn't want Beethoven or Shostakovich. But what it was that we wanted or were going to get was just so incredibly mysterious.
So digging into the music that you had written, and the sketches that you had written, and then even more so the process of working with you, again asking you questions about what you had in mind about a particular spot, and then trying out different things. That's always one of the most amazing things for us as classical music performers who often do a lot of performing with people who are no longer with us sometimes, centuries ago these pieces come from. It'd be really great to call up Beethoven on the phone and say, "What did you mean by this marking?" But we can't do that.
So not only asking questions but even trying, "Well what if we, if the goal is this, then what if we actually alter what you've written just a tiny bit to turn the corner in a different way?" And that was maybe the most exciting part of the process, which has always been there, I know, between our quartet and you, Laura, this feeling of co-birthing a new work of art, which was fantastic.
Laura Kaminsky:
Yeah. I mean, for me, it was the sense of collaborative, shared creativity. And it's an interdependent ecosystem, which isn't complete until there's an audience.
Robert Waters:
Yeah.
Laura Kaminsky:
That makes it whole.
Robert Waters:
Yeah, let's see that clip, and get a little more context.
Dr. Robert Davies:
... assembled and sustained a living structure made animate. In water, simple life begins, and in water, complex life evolves. This then, chemistry and climate, we know is why all life needs water.
Well, thank goodness there's so much of it. Ah ah. Not so fast. Water seems plentiful on the water planet, but only a trickle flows fresh, and just a trickle of that flows within our grasp. And when all the drops are counted, when all accounting concludes, just one drop in 10,000 is ours to sip. So this too we know about water. That it is precious. And we know a little more.
You see, from water purity to water supply, all is not well with humanity's water.
It gets me every time.
Robert Waters:
So for anyone who's interested in seeing a little bit more of that, you can find this on the NOVA, Salt Lake City NOVA website at www.novaslc.org/crossroads. And that'll take you directly to the full film, which is about a little over 70 minutes of more of what you just saw.
Sorry, I got a quick question for Ben. Rob is one of the few scientists that I've really talked with in depth about his work, and particularly his work in communicating the findings of science to the public. And he's often said that in talking with people in the public that he feels like they can understand certain aspects of the science, he can lead them through it really well, but making them take it any deeper is a little bit of the challenge. So I'm wondering if you've encountered that too, and what sorts of avenues you've gone through in order to overcome that.
Dr. Ben Abbott:
Yeah, thank you for that question, Robert. One model of making science accessible is to dumb it down, right? And I hate that language, first of all. It feels really condescending. And I like the way that Rob phrased it, which is to try to distill the science down. And in reality, to make science accessible and to get those crucial ideas across requires a deeper understanding of the subject matter so that you're not removing some of those crucial components that make it understandable.
But I find that people are incredibly interested in science. They want to know this. It's a part of our, the reason why we as a species have been so successful. We're curious. And what we know from science communication and also psychology is that there has to be a relationship there. It's not enough ... All the science in the world is available on the internet. It's in textbooks that you can find. But most of us aren't accessing it. The times that we're learning things is when there's some kind of relationship. There's some kind of interest that's been piqued.
So projects like this that are transdisciplinary, that are bringing people together around different areas of interest, are really crucial. And then a lot of my work has shifted towards what we call citizen science, or participatory science, where typically if I needed to collect a couple hundred water samples, I would hire some technicians or work with some graduate students to help me do that. And recently in the Utah Lake watershed, we've been collaborating with citizens of Utah Valley who go out and collect these water samples with us. They help us identify the places that they've seen changes in the flow or the quality of that water. And this has ended up being really transformative, and it hasn't been a one way exchange. It's not just that I'm giving information to the community. I have learned about new places, I've learned about springs that I didn't know about, discharges from wastewater treatment plants or factories or agricultural fields. That is what we need more of to achieve one of the goals of this project.
I was not involved in the creation at all, but I've watched it and was very moved by it. And that phrase of we need to believe what we know, it's not enough just to have the information, we have to believe it and put it into action. And when we are a part of generating that understanding, I feel that it's incredibly empowering, and we also understand it on a different level. So that kind of participatory work that's going to take many different forms depending on what the questions are is really important.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Ben, I'm wondering if, I want to continue on this a little bit, this notion of distilling, and come at it from ... Something I was concerned about in writing the script, and I know you had a little experience with this that was really interesting to me when I first heard about it.
The problem is we as scientists are trained really well how to communicate our science with each other and to tell each other everything that's wrong with what we did, all the uncertainty, all the stuff we don't know yet. And of course that's how science progresses. But of course that's not the way to help the public or policy makers or laypeople who aren't experts in that science understand what's important about it, and where the real critical pieces are in something like say climate change.
So of course we distill it, we can't include every last little detail that we would as scientists. I always worry about getting pushback from scientists. Like, "Oh, you've left this out and you've left that out and that isn't quite correct." And I know that you published a paper fairly recently on the global water crisis, and in the process of getting it published ... Not only are we distilling it, but also if it's important, there are challenges, even dangers, certainly climate change rising to the level of an emergency, associated with it. And again you get this pushback from a scientist saying, "Well, let's think about this and let's think about that."
But I know you published this paper and had an experience of that in the scientific community, and tell us about that experience a little bit.
Yeah, last year we had a paper coming out that was kind of an update about what do we know about water on earth. What are the different kinds of human water uses, how is climate change affecting the water cycle, and then how has the land use, the agriculture, the urbanization, the modifications that we've made to the surfaces of the earth, and now even the subsurfaces through oil extraction and fracking, how is that altering water? And whenever you address a big question, you have to go beyond the discipline that you're working in.
Necessarily, the paper spanned out, we looked at science education and visualizations, how are people drawing the water cycle. And we ended up submitting this I think to five different journals before it finally got accepted. The long story is it got accepted at the very first journal that we submitted to. But we found the right editor, who actually invited us to resubmit the paper once they caught the vision.
But there is this sense that we can sometimes get in the public of these scientists are such alarmists. They're always talking about these problems. The world's not that bad. But if you actually look at the track record of science, we are biased, but it's in a conservative direction. We tend to not want to call something an emergency or a crisis until there is ample evidence. We're more than 95% sure that it must be the thing that we're saying it is.
So we got pushback of people saying there's not even a water crisis at all, that's kind of alarmist language. And we had to take some steps back and pitch it to the scientific community and explain. We've disrupted the flows of water through our atmosphere. They're called rivers in the sky. Right now, if you live in northern India, the monsoonal cycle transporting water from the ocean to where you live has been weakened by deforestation in southern India. If you live in the Midwestern United States, you're actually experiencing more precipitation, 10 to 20% more rain than you used to during the growing season because of the groundwater that we're extracting from the Oglala and then returning to the atmosphere via transpiration.
We have disrupted and restructured water on earth, and at the same time, as I mentioned before, nearly two million people a year, that's almost one in 10 deaths is associated with the pollution that we're putting into water. So from a human perspective, there's no question here. And eventually, we were able to reconcile those different, very skeptical scientific views with that human side as well.
But it's one of the challenges. There are cultural differences, not only between political parties and different cultures and races. But there are cultural differences between disciplines and careers. Those can be obstacles to making progress.
Robert Waters:
It's frustrating to deal with skepticism of that sort, not just in let's say a political arena or from industry, but from your own community of scientists. I can only imagine.
Dr. Ben Abbott:
You know, it can be frustrating, but it also, thankfully, you have these amazing relationships of people that you're working with, and you're not going through it alone. If you look at the number of authors on an average paper in science, that has been growing more and more and more, and that's not just, "Oh, hey, you're my friend, I'll put you on my paper." But as science has grown, and as the breadth of our knowledge has grown, you have to have experts from different fields with different suites of expertise collaborate together.
That's really the wonderful and uplifting part of science.
Laura Kaminsky:
Ben, may I ask, because that's the collaborative that you're speaking about, and like with The Crossroads Project, it really was birthed and Rob Davies's mind, that as a scientist giving talks about this subject matter, he wanted to reach people in a different way that went beyond just the purely intellectual but to the deeply emotional, so that it might spark new ways of being and thinking.
But to me, and maybe Robert Waters, you may disagree, but even though, I'm a composer, so my job is to work with my quartet, I felt like I was beholden always to Robert Davies' vision. When you work transdisciplinarily amongst scientists in other disciplines, is it clear who the lead is, or might that change as a paper starts to reveal different information or a different way of thinking about all the information that you collectively are bringing together? Because even though Rob Davies was always the god of our project, there were in fact moments where each of us with our different secondary supporting roles owned the conversation.
Dr. Ben Abbott:
Yeah.
Laura Kaminsky:
But in the end, we had to find our way to an agreement that worked for Rob. How does that work amongst different disciplines in the sciences when you begin to question something and fill in what you need, and it goes off?
Dr. Ben Abbott:
Yeah, I think that it's analogous, but different, in that as scientific discovery moves forward, there's a dictator, and it's none of the participants who are trying to discover, but it's the evidence. So what you find can fundamentally change the director of your project. For example, with this water cycle paper, the methodology that we used as we analyzed 600 diagrams of the water cycle from different disciplines, including high school textbooks all the way up to the top papers in the top scientific journals. And we really expected the main finding to be that the up arrows, the evapotranspiration, wouldn't equal the down arrows. Really gripping science, right? For a hydrologist, that was exciting.
But-
Laura Kaminsky:
Sorry.
Dr. Ben Abbott:
All of you are rolling your eyes. We didn't find that. Part of the motivation of the study was a few diagrams that we looked at. What we found was 85% of the diagrams showed no humans. It was natural landscapes with no human land use, no individual humans. So it was depictions of a water cycle that no longer exists.
There was a discussion in the group of well, our paper is no longer about evapotranspiration and precipitation, it's about how somehow we've gone down this disciplinary path of focusing on the water, and we forgot that we can't understand the water without the people. And then the whole project changed directions.
Laura Kaminsky:
Right.
Dr. Robert Davies:
I want to bring it back, Ben, to another point that prior to the podcast you and I were discussing, that you brought up that I thought was great. I think Robert and Laura are going to be very interested in this, because this is a critique that we had very early in, I think it was the second performance, it's the performance, Laura and Robert, if you remember, we gave it in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles Convention Center to about 1,500 sustainability educators. Ben, it's the AASHE conference is where we gave this, American Association of Sustainability and Higher Education.
It was your critique, and you were a little bit worried, Ben, about sharing it with me, and I encouraged you to. Do you remember what it was?
Dr. Ben Abbott:
I do, yeah, because so far we've talked about two kind of ways of knowing, scientific and artistic. But there are of course other ways of knowing. So one of the really important points that this film makes is that we have a situation of nonlinear growth, where we're very rapidly expanding. The rate of population growth is actually decreasing very rapidly, but what is continuing to skyrocket is consumption. So we're in this cycle of hyper consumption. And we're generating more and more information, more than we've ever had before. But then there's a conclusion that's made early on in the film that says, "We know more now, the last two centuries have been more important than the 2,000 that followed it," talking about the whole arc of human existence.
The thing that right away jumped to my mind was well wait a minute, the ways of being, the understanding, the relationship with nature that those 2,000 generations had before, are the only reason why we are here. That wisdom, that cultural understanding, that indigenous knowledge, that religious belief, those are, the ways of knowing have allowed science and art to make such amazing progress in the recent history.
The way that I see it is it's not that we need a new invention. We don't need to create a new way of understanding and being. We need to rediscover and reconnect with those indigenous ways. And all of us, whether we come from a Judeo Christian, or Islamic, or any other background, if you go back far enough we have roots in our own cultures that were sustainable, that truly interacted in a reciprocal way with the natural world.
That's why I loved the final, I think it's the final one about reimagining. I like the "re" in that. It's nothing new, but it's reconnecting to these traditional ways of being that have allowed our species to be so amazingly and astoundingly successful.
Dr. Robert Davies:
It's that, yeah, the line you're referring to is in the prologue of the whole performance where I say, "Nearly everything we know about our island planet we learned in just the last 200 years." And you're not the first one to notice that, well what about all this indigenous knowledge that, as you perfectly put, has gotten us to where, allowed us to survive this long, and thrive. And it's been a real challenge to ... Because the point of that line was to say we're going to go forward and we're going to talk about here's what we know and we need to believe what we know. And it was noting that science is telling us these things.
We were going to try to emphasize the science, and I could never find a way to talk about the indigenous knowledge in a way that didn't take us down a tangent for a little too long. But what you've just said, and this is interesting, we've talked about how the performance gets written and rewritten. Laura, you've seen so many, and Robert, iterations. Particularly the last segment, the reimagine. Is it just in that conversation I was having with Ben, it just hit me, this is where that needs to be dealt with. I need to explicitly revisit that statement in the reimagine section at the very end.
Laura Kaminsky:
if I could jump in.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Yeah.
Laura Kaminsky:
Ben, I really appreciated that you found that sentence challenging or challenge worthy, because after watching the film the other night, it hit me again that that's just not quite right yet. It's in my very short list of things, whereas I think reimagine is phenomenally strong now, and really gives us gravitas but hope at the same time, and I think we need both. But that sentence actually sparked a conversation in our household.
I think maybe in our next iteration we'll grapple with that yet again.
Robert Waters:
And I remember early on, just a few minutes ago Ben, you mentioned something about the indigenous point of view or the indigenous mindset about water as being a gift. I can't remember how you phrased it. But really a gift from the world and from the gods. And Rob, you talk in reimagine about a certain kind of mindset that we need to find as a society to be able to move forward. Well, what a wonderful mindset. This is a gift that we have, we really need to appreciate it and treat it as such, and not treat it so casually or as if it's ever renewable.
Yeah, I do just have to say, that idea comes straight from Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is this incredible plant ecologist and indigenous woman, Potawatomi Indian who reframes the scientific term as an ecosystem service, which really is so focused on the economy and survival, and a gift of course first of all implies gratitude, but second of all there's a responsibility there. There's a relationship there. And I really do love that choice of descriptor.
Laura Kaminsky:
Yeah, and I think again to your point Ben, and back to specific words in your talk Rob, it came up in the post show conversation the other night that we, particularly in the post industrial technologically driven age that we live in, our first response often to saving the planet is what do we have to sacrifice? And I posed the thought that maybe we need to think about what it is that we need to offer to sustain us better rather than think of it as a sacrifice, and that that includes us as opposed to puts us in opposition to the thing that we're actually trying to save. And I think that these kinds of refinements in language, I mean it's been how many years have we been working on this?
In a way, I'm lucky. My job's done. But the quartet, I have to say, your playing gets deeper and better and more beautiful with each performance. I was knocked out. It was phenomenally, awesomely beautiful. So your job is never done either. But the images and the words, I think are going to never be done, because I think this is an ongoing conversation that we have with our planet and with ourselves as human beings on it.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, indeed. And the thing that's changed the most in the script over eight years, Laura, is the ending. Part of that's just because that's the hardest bit, where do you leave the audience? But the other part of it is that over eight years, the audience has changed. Has evolved in their understanding of these topics.
If you'll remember the very first performance had a really hard hitting ending. Do you remember the machine?
Laura Kaminsky:
The machine.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Yes. I won't go into it for our audience here, let's just say that it was pretty heavy. But we had conversations about that and felt that it was just necessary. But about five years ago, I think we had another conversation, said, "You know, we don't think that's necessary anymore." So we took it out. And I think that was the right decision.
Laura Kaminsky:
I think this is going to continue to evolve and change as what's happening changes, and as people's understanding changes.
Robert Waters:
That's certainly already been the case with the project, the public view, especially here in Utah but really across the country, in 2012, just the public awareness and relationship to the topic was totally different. And of course also the science was different, what we knew then is different than what we know now. So both of those have had a big impact on how the project has evolved, and as you say will continue to do so. Neither of those things are static.
Dr. Robert Davies:
We're wondering, I guess we're coming up to the end of our time, and I just wanted to maybe throw it open to both of you, maybe we'll start with Ben, and just anything that struck you about the performance or about these issues or even things that it raised in your mind as we're going that you haven't had a chance to articulate just yet.
Dr. Ben Abbott:
Well I love the way that Laura mentioned the musical and artistic side at some level is more done. I just found the music so moving, and the combination of visuals and music, and even the science in an artistic way. I mean you have the shape of the curves that you show, but also the importance of those numbers. And for me it brought me closer to that goal. When we can really think deeply about these global numbers, you can feel a sense of community with the people all around the world. It no longer is 1.8 million people, it's all the billions of people that are working together. We can choose to live differently. It was extremely moving to me.
The flip side of the ramping, accelerating consumption is that there are so many good things that are also growing exponentially. It sometimes can be very ... I just forgot the word. Not disconcerting, but discouraging, there we are. It can be very discouraging when you see all of the dashboard of the world, and the list of all the problems. But there also are really, really good indicators of how we're changing, including decreasing water footprints on a per capita and overall basis. So we're able to have more people have the food they need with less water. That's a change that's already going in the right direction. The amount of sewage that's being dumped into our waterways is plummeting, going down.
There are these good things that take awhile to get momentum, but really are moving forward. I thought that you hit the final tone of the film spot on for me. It actually aligns with me personally and is motivating, but it also aligns with what I see from a scientific view of the status of the system. We certainly can't be complacent, but we should not be despondent.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well said. Laura?
Laura Kaminsky:
Oh dear, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say at this point.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Let me ask you this. You've seen the performance many times, but now it's finally on film. Anything that struck you as interesting or unique, or I don't know, it's a different way to view it.
Laura Kaminsky:
Actually one of the things I loved about the film was the way in which the members of the quartet became active as actors with the close ups, speaking. That was really theatrical and dramatic that was never quite been able to be achieved when they're sitting in their seats with their stands in performance. This was much more stark and powerful, and it actually deepened for me that we're all in this together, like they're making this beautiful music with this incredible skill, and communication amongst themselves, to express the behind, everything that you're talking about.
But then they're just people waking up and looking at the audience, and that was particularly cinematic, that was different than in a live theater. I actually started spinning out to, okay, now there's the movie movie, not just the filmed performance that's more filmic than live performance, because I can see even more potential. So I was thrilled. I mean, Rebecca, who's the visual artist, full disclosure, and is my wife, of many of the paintings that were used, was just jumping up and down.
Dr. Robert Davies:
And who we will feature in our next podcast, actually.
Laura Kaminsky:
Right. And like you, her career has changed as a result, in some way, of this project, because she's now working as a sustainable landscape designer. But we were just ecstatic with where we've gone on this, where you've taken this into its next level. And selfishly, it made me want to write another quartet for the incredible Fry Street Quartet, which I've wanted to do for so long, but hearing them again was like ... Just a love affair all over again.
Those are my takeaways aside from all the important messaging of the piece.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Wow. Well thank you both for joining us. And I know Robert, maybe you will take us out of here.
Robert Waters:
Yes, and thank you for that, Laura. We would so welcome the chance to work with you yet again on another project, and keep our fingers crossed for that.
We want to thank everyone for joining us. This has really been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Before we go, we'd like to let you know that you can donate if you enjoyed this program, and others similar to it, you can donate to the NOVA Chamber Music Society that is helping us present this. You can donate at www.novaslc.org, which is also the same website where you can find the premiere of the film, as well as more podcast episodes like this, www.novaslc.org/crossroads.
We'd like to thank our sponsors, which are NOVA's season sponsors are the Utah Legislature, the Utah Divisions of Arts and Museums, the Lawrence T. And Janet T. Dee Foundation, the Salt Lake County Zoo and Arts and Parks, George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation, iZotope, Salt Lake City Arts Council, the Cultural Vision Fund, Dominion Energy, Rocky Mountain Power Foundation, Alice M. Diston Fund of Columbia University, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
Laura, Ben, thank you so much, and Rob as my cohost, thank you always. And thank you to all of us for joining, and we hope that we'll see you again for our next episode.
Laura Kaminsky:
Thank you.
Dr. Ben Abbott:
Yes, thank you.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Thank you so much.
Announcer:
This has been the NOVA Podcast. Our hosts were Rob Davies and Robert Waters. Our guests were Laura Kaminsky and Ben Abbott. This episode was produced by Chris Myers. The NOVA Podcast is funded by listeners like you. You can donate to support NOVA's programming at novaslc.org. We love hearing from our listeners. If you have any questions or comments, please email info@novaslc.org.
Next time, artist Rebecca Allen and predator biologist John Shivik explore the ways in which humanity interacts with the intricate webs of life on our planet.
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