Episode 3 - Nov 1, 2020
Ecologist John Shivik has spent his life studying predator-prey relationships. He and visual artist Rebecca Allan bond over their mutual love of gardening (and discuss how her art for Rising Tide explores humanity’s place in the intricate web of life on our planet).
Learn more about Rising Tide and stream the movie at novaslc.org/crossroads.
Hosts:
Bradley Ottesen, Fry Street Quartet violist
Dr. Rob Davies, Utah State University Dept of Physics (Twitter @robsMast)
Guests:
Rebecca Allan, visual artist (rebeccaallan.com)
John Shivik, author and applied ecologist
produced by Chris Myers (argylearts.com)
Copyright © 2020 NOVA Chamber Music Series. All rights reserved.
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to the NOVA Podcast.
Bradley Ottesen:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Crossroad Series Podcast. My name is Bradley Ottesen, and I'm the violist of the Fry Street Quartet. We are the co music directors at the NOVA Chamber Music Series in Salt Lake City, and the String Quartet in residence with the Caine College of the Arts at Utah State University. NOVA recently hosted the online film premiere of The Crossroads Project, a multidisciplinary performance exploring sustainability. Our partner in this collaboration is Dr. Rob Davies. Dr. Davies is here today. Please introduce yourself.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Hi, Brad. Thanks a bunch. Yes, I'm Rob Davies. I'm a professor of physics at Utah State University. I focus on global change and critical science communication. As Brad mentioned, I am co-creator of The Crossroads Project Rising Tide, along with my friends, the Fry Street Quartet. First, let me just thank the NOVA Chamber Music Series and Utah State University Caine College of the Arts for their major support in producing this film that NOVA is making available for free. There were a bunch of other folks we'll thank as well. We'll tag at the end of the show. Let's just start with a recap. As Brad said, the Crossroads Project is a performance science project, And if you've watched the film, you know it blends science and imagery and music exploring the wonders of how our island planet, as we call it, makes human civilization possible, and the structures of human civilization that are threatening our natural foundations.
If you haven't seen the film, you can watch it for free on YouTube, again thanks to NOVA, and we'll post the link for that. The performance we used together, these themes of water and life and food and people, and these podcasts are intended to give us some additional room to explore these stories in our own right, more room than we have in a 70-minute film, and also the telling of these stories in this way. So today what we're doing is delving into act two, which is bios, which looks at the foundational rules of Earth's living systems, the biosphere. To help us do that, we've invited both scientific and artistic voices to the conversation. Speaking of whom, let's introduce them now. Brad, who do we have with us?
Bradley Ottesen:
Well, our first guest is a good friend of the Fry Street Quartet. John Shivik is an applied ecologist based here in Logan, Utah. He's a rugged outdoorsman, but also a great lover of the arts. We regularly see him at concerts and other of our arts events here at USU. Welcome, John.
John Shivik:
Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Dr. Robert Davies:
We also have with us Rebecca Allan, a visual artist painter who has been also a great friend of The Crossroads Project and the Fry Street Quartet and myself, and has been with this project from its inception over eight years ago now. Welcome, Rebecca.
Rebecca Allan:
Hi, thank you so much.
Bradley Ottesen:
Well, thank you both for being here. John, we want to start with you. Would you be willing to tell us just a little bit more about yourself, your personal background, your work and your areas of interest and study?
John Shivik:
Yes. I guess I have a somewhat of a long history and varied history dipping myself into different aspects of biology as a wildlife management major. I started to get interested in wildlife and then realized all too quickly that the management of wildlife is largely about the management of people, and learned as I went that I wanted to try to live in that space between people and wildlife. So I became a researcher, worked at the university for about a decade and specialized in human wildlife conflict, especially between humans and predators, coyotes, bears, wolves, those kinds of things. Then I thought I was really in applied to colleges. I thought I was really applied. I moved into working for the state as a state biologist and as a federal land manager.
So I've done everything from living in the Ivory Towers to jumping right into the trenches and watching things actually happen. That's led me along this path, and I have to admit one of the brightest points has been the development of these kinds of collaborations, this Crossroads effort. The art that you guys have brought have really kept me afloat on some of those hard days. So I appreciate that. Thank you.
Bradley Ottesen:
You've written a couple of books, haven't you?
John Shivik:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I wanted to do as I went along is share this knowledge and get it out there. I wrote initial book called The Predator Paradox, which is exactly about how to live with predators and the relationship humans have with them. Then I also delved into a book on animal personality and individuality in animals as a way of getting that knowledge. Just one of the main themes of that book, and I think an important thing about probably some of our discussion today, is just how important personality individuality is and what each of brings as an individual into these types of conversations, and that's largely what that book's about. It's about animals.
Bradley Ottesen:
John's a great writer. These books are very engaging, and the language is fun.
John Shivik:
Thanks, Brad.
Bradley Ottesen:
I want to go from that to another question about The Crossroads Project. You're based here in Logan, and you've been with The Crossroads Project from the beginning. You saw one of the very early versions before we even had original music written for The Crossroads Project, and then you saw the unveiling of Laura Kaminsky's wonderful score, which also pulled Rebecca Allan into the project. You saw the full unveiling of The Crossroads Project in 2012, and you've seen it evolve since then to the film version, which we just premiered in 2020. Could you just talk a little bit about your experience with The Crossroads Project through all of these manifestations?
John Shivik:
Well, the easiest thing is how lucky am I. Like I said, your art ... I've been a fan of the quartet for a number of years, and I really appreciated what you guys have done. Now this is a number of years ago. There was a lot of the aspects of the original that have changed, and it's been neat to see how it's progressed and how you've shaved things and added things, and really made it bigger in the artwork. Rebecca's art and some of the other artwork has really expanded it, the score. I love Kaminsky's score now, especially water. I love that first movement. It's wonderful. But some of the things that I remember in the original that you guys dropped out, and I think I even complained to Rob at one point about it, you had a little more ... I realized it's a difficult thing to do, but you did have a little more tried some humor or tried some levity in it.
Well, in that original performance, the music of course was beautiful. Rob, your delivery is great. But boy, I felt a real sense of despair coming out of it, and it's been nice. I love the way you really moved it along this time now and end with, you know what, John, you don't have to solve everything. We just all need to come to the table and bring something little, and between that element of it ... The humor thing, the part I really loved in the 2012 original version, do you remember this, Brad? It was about how we would work together, right? As a funny little segment of what happens in a quartet if the violinists decide that they're going to play aggressively whereas the Austin cellist play less aggressively, something along those lines. It was really subtle, somewhat comical, but also it just gave you a little bit of a gut punch of, yeah, we got to be on the same page. Even though you guys were playing the same music, just the emphasis really the way it played. It was amusing, but also instructional too.
Bradley Ottesen:
Yeah. We had some acting in that early.
John Shivik:
Yes. You were actors. That's right it was beautiful.
Bradley Ottesen:
We basically used the quartet as a living metaphor, which is something we often do at Chamber Music Workshops when we're teaching people how to play chamber music. Sometimes when we're teaching people who aren't musicians about chamber music, we have these series of scenario that we play out on stage was what happens if we're not working together? What happens if somebody tries to take control, absolute control of the situation? What happens if somebody is just completely ... It's a little silly. But we felt like there was something there to say.
John Shivik:
Yeah, I mean-
Bradley Ottesen:
Eventually that worked its way out of the performance.
John Shivik:
I know it did. But I mean, that's not a stretch. You guys are all coming with your own view of how it should be played, I'm sure, and you want more viola. But the other thing, I do have to say this, and I was hooked. Just even that first performance, like I said, I like how it's developed. But just as a scientist and as an applied scientist and wanting to reach out and really interesting things like diversity, I thought, Rob, it was so brilliant to bring art and science together that way to really try to meld these things. I often say that new science ... Advances in science come through innovation, and innovation is an artistic thing, not a scientific thing.
Rebecca Allan:
I love that.
John Shivik:
What you guys do is you bring other elements, you bring other personalities, right? You bring other people to the table to enlarge in that mixing box. So we get that diversity of thought and opinion and artistry and how to express it, right? So much of it is just how you're expressing these things. I was hooked just right at the beginning. I was like, "Oh, you guys are onto something," and it's just been lovely to watch this develop.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, I appreciate that, John. Yeah, these creative types are just really pesky. You bring them a project, and then they really want to do their thing.
John Shivik:
Yes.
Dr. Robert Davies:
They're just not doing what you tell them to. They're just...
John Shivik:
Yes.
Rebecca Allan:
Creative types.
John Shivik:
Types.
Rebecca Allan:
More like creative orientations.
John Shivik:
She's air cording, by the way.
Dr. Robert Davies:
I want to comment real quick, John. Brad, this is for you too, Brad. I've had a number of people tell me that they really missed that bit with the quartet where you were, ... Like you said, this living breathing metaphor for what goes wrong when you don't collaborate. I remember when we finally decided to jettison that bit, the quartet, you guys were all happy to lose ... Because acting I think is probably your least comfortable bit, although you've all become quite good in the project. But it's the scientists, interestingly, that have been the most interested in that bit and they really wanted to keep that. I got chewed up by more than a couple of people for pulling that out. Well, that's value. Let's shift over. Rebecca now also has been with the project from the beginning as an actual collaborator.
The notion was, in my mind, is the reason we want to bring the artists into it is because they're master storytellers. You're not just giving information. You're setting a mood, you're opening a space for people to take it in a very visceral and emotional level, how we really connect with information. Of course the project, for those who've seen the film, there are many photographs in the presentation and many of them are quite extraordinary photographs and very artistic in their own right. But they're also ... It's explicit information. We're showing a picture of tar sands or a picture of a polar bear, lots of wildlife, et cetera. So it's clear what role such an imagery would play in a project like this. But we specifically wanted you to bring in your artistic, your paintings, which are not explicit, they're abstract. I'm wondering if you might describe what role those bring to the performance, and also how you approached curating from your work for these different segments of the performance.
Rebecca Allan:
Yeah, sure. Sure. Well, I'm just talking about that. Well, I just want to start with the word abstract or abstraction, because the etymology of that word has to do with drawing something out, an essence, drawing out an essence or extracting or pulling out the deepest flavor of, let's say, a plant material in order to make a spice. So in painting with an abstract gesture, you are doing the same thing. My source material is as clear as a photograph of a mountain that Garth Lenz might take. The original subject that I'm thinking about might be a mountain or a river in the Pacific Northwest. But if I'm working with an abstract language, what I'm trying to do, and it's not always a clear line from A to B, but what I'm trying to do is pull out and find the most meaningful colors, forms, textures, and shapes that would allow you as a viewer to experience something of the essence of that place landscape subject.
I think in relation to what we've been trying to do with the work of The Crossroads Project, and that was really catalyzed by Rob Davies intention around it, is to invite our audiences to find a pathway into this difficult reality of climate change. I remember conversations that centered on how far do you go with presenting images or material that is troubling and difficult to swallow? So abstract language provides a cushion for entering into this difficult subject matter, and it's not just subject matter that's out there. It's our own sense of dread, disempowerment, guilt, concern for the devastation that we see around us as a result of environmental damages.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Thank you. Rebecca, that was a fabulous description. Since we're focusing on this bio section, so we had a water section, this is this bit talking about life. When you curated from your paintings for this section, you picked this series of tondos, one of which you're wearing on your sweater, or an example of which I should say. Another example which is hanging on your wall behind you. So could you tell us a little bit about what a tondo is and why it is you ... with this vignette, this bios vignette, why you went that direction?
Rebecca Allan:
The tondo as a form in painting goes back centuries, but it was used in the early Renaissance as a shape of a plate, as a birth plate in the late medieval times and early Renaissance. Women would receive these beautiful ceramic plates that were in the shape of a tondo that were a kind of marker of the anticipation of the birth of a child. They have this wonderful reference to Italian Renaissance culture. Also in the high Renaissance, we see the tondo form used often in Raphael's paintings and some of Michael Angelo's paintings. When I went to Italy and I saw the Pantheon in ... John, in fact might know this building. The ceiling of the Pantheon is a dome with an oculus, which is open to the sky. So you can sit under the oculus and get rained on and you can perceive the movement of the sky as it moves across the building.
I thought that would be a wonderful shape to explore as a painting ground. In fact, in some of my work, that has become both the earth as seen from space and the ground. But there's no horizon line. It presents interesting challenges in terms of thinking about issues of orientation, the earth, where we live, what we see and what we can never see, and also it presents ideas about disorientation and immobility, because you don't have a horizon line that's anchoring you and you could go on and spin forever. I think, Rob, when we were figuring some of these early sequences out about the bios movement, we did center on those tondos, and many of them had either elements of water and plant material embedded, not physically literally embedded in them, but conceptually embedded in them.
I felt like it was a magical moment that we found that way of working together, and because of the elements of soil, water, plants, and sky and weather that are embedded conceptually in those paintings. I mean, we've been thinking about these things all of us separately before we came together. So that circle brought us together too.
Dr. Robert Davies:
What a fabulous way to put it. Yeah.
Rebecca Allan:
Came together.
Bradley Ottesen:
It's really wonderful that we can see an example of one of the paintings right behind. In the performance or in the film, they take on a whole nother form and they changed the whole atmosphere of the room. But in those cases, we're talking about a digital projection, sometimes 10 times the original size, extremely luminous, projected onto a 30 foot screen. What is it like to see one of your paintings, which is conceived in one form, and see it's transformed and used in another setting like that?
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, before you answer that, Rebecca, I just wondered-
Rebecca Allan:
Go ahead.
Dr. Robert Davies:
No, this is a great question, and I just wondered if maybe we've got some images that we can throw up.
John Shivik:
Just got to take it off the peg. Rebecca, she's pulled it off the wall.
Dr. Robert Davies:
She's pulled it off the wall.
John Shivik:
It's performance. This is wonderful.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, we've got some images from the performance that we can throw up, just so ... For those who haven't seen the performance and are watching this visually, we can just throw up some of these up. Here's an example. I think of what, Brad, that you're talking about. This is one of those tondos, and it's much bigger than the original and it's also being ... In the performance, it actually gets built in bit by bit. You don't see it all at once. Here's another one, and this is in the process of this very slow dissolve between that image and some lichen on a tree, and if we freeze this image for just a second, you can see the .. I mean, the lichen in the background image dissolving away is really adding some extra texture to the painting. Then if we go forward one more, what struck me about this is I expected that when that background image went away, the texture would go away. But in fact, doesn't. It's to my eye really highlighted. This is an example of what Brad was saying. Brad, your question was ... Well, maybe repeat your question.
Bradley Ottesen:
Well, what is it like to see something that you conceived one way transformed in such a dramatic fashion? In more ways than one, it also turns out tangentially that a tondo is the perfect shape for a CD. That's also what our CD, what our album looks like. It's the artwork of one of your tondos. Yeah.
John Shivik:
I've got a signed copy of one of those.
Rebecca Allan:
Well, I feel like ... Again, the use of that lichen photograph that emerges in and out of the image of the painting, I got excited about that because I felt like it helps audiences make that more direct connection to the observed world that they might know. I mean, in John's world of what animals see when they walk around the forest and they're looking down at moss. They could even help us understand what animals see that's between the human and other species. This thing that you did is an interspatial work in a way, and it's okay with me. I have to make a painting that's going to stand up on its own as an artist, if I'm working by myself and I want to please myself and be consistent with my own ambition. But if I'm collaborating with you, then that's a whole other game.
I feel that it works. It just works in that way. I'd like to talk more about that as we talk with audiences after the film and how they perceive that. One thing that I felt like was multiplied in the film version that really surprised me is when the image is across the whole screen and the filmmaker gets close to the musician and you see the musicians face right against the canvas like this. That does something even better because that sets the musician, the artist into an environment, or you into the environment much more directly. It's almost like a set design. It's more of a set ... It becomes a kind of set design.
Dr. Robert Davies:
It is something you don't get in a live performance. That happens in the film. What if you could roll the second clip that we had keyed up? Which is a really good illustration of what Rebecca was just saying.
Dr. Robert Davies (in video):
As we stand before this great complex and adaptive biosystem, who among us identifies the pieces that are not needed?
Bradley Ottesen:
Okay, that was-
Rebecca Allan:
Yeah. Just one thought that popped up is that last summer ... No, not last summer. This is a couple of years ago. I started working with a Kentucky Natural Lands Trust as an advisor, and the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust is working to preserve the Pine Mountain, Greenway. That blended image reminded me of the lichens and the slime mold that you find in some of the most diversity ecosystem in the world on Pine Mountain in Southeastern Kentucky. It's like, is it abstract or is it completely realistic? It's both.
John Shivik:
That's such a great example of how everything melded. Like you were saying, Rebecca, too, with nature and art. But also, I got to tell you, just listening to that clip and watching that clip, I'm feeling my heart elevate as you are really leading into it and then going calm. I love the earthiness of those instruments, Brad.
Rebecca Allan:
Oh my God, Brad.
John Shivik:
Sounds so wonderful. Then those soft final notes and the visual bleeds perfectly in ith the music. So the editing, everything was done just really well, and I ended up calm. You know what I mean? It starts, you get an angsted and then you're, breathe, and it was really nice. Well done.
Bradley Ottesen:
Yeah. I'm glad you talked about that. I was going to ask you because for those who are listening and not watching, that the music is just standing alone in this case. I wanted to ask you your reaction. I mean, that movement has quite an arc to it. It starts very mysterious at the beginning, very quiet, and you can imagine these disparate elements, molecules, and amoebas starting to come together and form something greater. Then it builds and it builds. To me, it gave some tension also. You can almost sense the competition-
John Shivik:
Absolutely.
Bradley Ottesen:
... for resources. Like, there's a desperation, a magnificent desperation towards the top and then it sort of breaks, and then we get this sort of resolution and resolve towards the end of the movement.
Dr. Robert Davies:
And of course-
Bradley Ottesen:
That's what the movement says to me.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Of course, all of this, what you just articulated, John and Brad and Rebecca, is the actual heart of the conception of telling this story this way. Rather than just a science lecture, adding these additional elements that affect us all quite deeply. So maybe this is a good place to transition, and say that okay. But also at its heart in this performance is delivering some information. Yeah. Much of the information is just wondrous and fascinating. Some of it is also very difficult, emotionally. But at the heart it's information that we need to take in and demands a response really, or should demand a response, and that's maybe the purpose of the performance is to get that from us. We've been talking about the music and the paintings. Let's go back to the information. I want to roll our second clip, John, and it's delivering science, but distilled, highly distilled. Then the question, of course is, well, how did we do?
Dr. Robert Davies (in video):
Planet earth, planet water. Planet water, planet life. So much life ancient, diverse, everywhere. More than a million species we know about, millions upon millions we really don't. The sheer variety. This biodiversity is breathtaking, woven into tapestries of living systems, ecosystems, life and environment interacting, interdependent, inseparable. It is the essence of life on our island planet. Earth species not separate from their environment or each other, but arising from their environment together. They self assemble like a snowflake, reform their environment and are themselves reformed, evolved through environmental selection. Evolution know not millions of separate species, but co-evolution of millions of connected components of a vast self-assembling, self-repairing self-governing, complex and adaptive biosystem.
Unknowing as we are of most of its components and how they're connected, we understand this biosystem but a little. Of the millions of things to understand, or we understand, approximately five because these are life's most basic operating principles, nature's paradigms and they are clear and visible everywhere. Number one.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, if you want to know the five, you got to watch the film. John is a scientist though, taking in that monologue, yeah, what do you think?
John Shivik:
Well, in the context of that monologue and the one before it you had mentioned, I remembered ... I don't remember the Leopold quote exactly, but regarding when you're tinkering with complex mechanisms, the first rule is to keep all the pieces, right? You really almost paraphrased and just built on that. I thought it was a wonderful point to make, and I'd bring it home. I love that language with the snowflake.
Rebecca Allan:
Yeah, me too.
John Shivik:
Yeah. Wasn't that a great image?
Rebecca Allan:
Yeah.
John Shivik:
It was really neat. The science part though, this is interesting. This is if there's anything I'm conflicted a little bit in the science is that one of the difficulties as I've had in my whole career is this degree ... is this acceptance of uncertainty, this embracing of uncertainty. A lot of it, whether it's a scientific article or this project, you come across that we've got this many million species out there. But then there's flip numbers and we're losing all these animals. But then there's a certain element of ... I don't know, maybe this is more about me in my approach to science, and saying upfront that there's a lot we don't know. By saying what we don't know, it doesn't mean we shouldn't care, right? Ignorance is no excuse for complacency, and if anything, it presents a little more urgency and practicalness that there's a lot out there, it's a complicated thing.
I do like how you mentioned this is a self-assembling self-fixing thing, and the irony here that maybe doesn't come home to a lot of folks is that, and I hope I don't offend anybody by saying this, but I mean earth doesn't care if we're on it or not. If we shake ourselves off of our own, only one ... It's not 1.7 planets, right? It's our one planet. If we shake ourselves off of it, the world doesn't care. It's tragic, it's terrible, it's all those things. But there's a certain element of ... I don't know, it's even bigger as much as you're trying to address in this. I think a lot of the questions are still even bigger of who are we, why are we here, how are we going to stay here, and how are we going to live with ourselves as we stay here?
Rebecca Allan:
Wow. That really hits me.
John Shivik:
I hope in a good way.
Rebecca Allan:
Yeah. Yeah.
Bradley Ottesen:
In your introduction, John, you talked a little bit about your work and exploring the borders about living in that zone between man's world and nature's world. The Crossroads Project is interesting. It explores the borders between and then-
John Shivik:
That's why I love it.
Bradley Ottesen:
... between art and science. That's an interesting connection. But as somebody who really spends a lot of time in between worlds, is there anything that you'd like above all to communicate that you wish everyone would know?
John Shivik:
Okay, here...
Bradley Ottesen:
Think about more in their daily life or their conception of the-
John Shivik:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's great. It's a wonderful question. Here's the thing. I think a lot of it, I usually explain this it's because maybe I'm a middle child or something, and I just want us all to get along and find that place, right? But Rebecca, you know that this is, in a lot of your other work that you do too with gardening.
Rebecca Allan:
Yeah.
John Shivik:
We were talking earlier about my garden, how proud I am of having my garden. Not to be so utilitarian about the earth, but it's our garden, right? For me, going out, getting my hands dirty, hurting my back, bending over, holding up, I put ... What did I put? I put up my plums and pears. I had like 80 pounds of tomatoes this year. It was wonderful.
Rebecca Allan:
Wow.
John Shivik:
I know, right? It's a lot of work.
Rebecca Allan:
Amazing.
John Shivik:
But that's all I get. You could either look at this is a sacrifice, oh no, we've got to save the planet, it's going to be so hard. Or you can look at it, we're gardening, right?
Rebecca Allan:
Oh my gosh. Yes.
John Shivik:
I was hoping that resonated with you a little bit, Rebecca, coming because that's your-
Rebecca Allan:
Oh my God.
John Shivik:
... making landscapes. We're deciding where we want to go and it's work.
Rebecca Allan:
Oh yeah. It's work. Gardening is not for sissies. I mean, it is for sissies-
John Shivik:
That's right.
Rebecca Allan:
... too. I'm a sissy, and I also would like to be known, as Brad described you, as a rugged visual artist. But there's nothing like planting tomatoes or growing apple trees that brings you in direct contact with the plant and animal and insect kingdom so directly, and you feel its strength and its power and its capacity to shake you off the earth, and you also feel the capacity to cooperate with it. I mean, I know Brad is also ... and Rob and Rebecca are avid gardener. So we're all sort of involved in this practice. But it's funny because when you were talking about ... John, you were talking about the fact that there are these a lot of bigger questions out there that have to do with our relationship to what we're doing here and admitting to ourselves that the earth doesn't care if we stay here.
Then if that's the case, what are we going to do with our one little life? These relationships, these friendships have really catalyzed my decision to go back to school for horticulture. I've never felt more hopeful when I am doing the kinds of things that you just described in the garden, mulching, turning the soil. Because there's something maybe you can explain this, you scientists. There's actually something that's biochemical that happens when you smell the soil, and it works on your nervous system in your brain. I think there's something about the question you ask, the bigger question of who are we, what are we doing here, that's answered in that nonverbal experience on that transmission of information from the soil and from the air. I'm trying to think more about that. I'm thinking more about that.
John Shivik:
No, that's wonderful. Good. I'm glad...
Bradley Ottesen:
Yeah, it's sort of The Crossroads Project right in front of you. It's water and it's bios and it's forage, and it's even societal. I consider my garden as both a form of peaceful protest-
Rebecca Allan:
I love that.
Bradley Ottesen:
... and therapy. So here we are in Logan. I live in a pretty suburban, like a manicured neighborhood on the foothills of these rugged mountains. So the norm in my neighborhood is to have a green, all American golf course lawn, and what I've focused on is tearing all of that out and putting in water-wise landscaping because we do have an addiction to residential water usage here in Utah. We overuse the water. We use more than we should. There aren't that many people in my neighborhood that have gone this route. So people are really curious about it. They stop all the time and want to talk about it. It opens up a conversation, and I always talk about the reason. The reason why I do this is to save water and to provide forage and habitat for species who need it a little more than they have. Yeah. I've also become a gardener, sort of a reluctant gardener at first but it turned out that it was something I needed. I didn't even know. I didn't even know that I needed it.
Rebecca Allan:
Wow.
John Shivik:
I love how you said it that way too, where it's like we're living ... What you're doing is you're choosing things that you can grow. I've got friends and colleagues who drive by and say, "Oh, that's John's house. He's the one with the big sagebrush in the front yard." We're just working with what we have. Again, it's not ... It is nice, isn't it? I planted it shortly after I moved in, probably 18 years ago or so. But we're working with what we have. Again, it doesn't mean everything. I've got to water, I still got to do some other things. We're living in ... We're in Northern Utah here and it's pretty dry. But it's that medium place. Again, it's the way that this project, this Crossroads, is a little more hopeful, is that you can ... We don't have to tear down my house and put in what would be just a sagebrush field in order to still contribute something, right?
And I'll still be a part of it in order to still get back to understand what you like about nature. So you don't have to live in a loincloth to be part of nature. Rebecca, like what you're saying, just getting your ... Gosh, bending over, getting your hands dirty, and it's okay. My point though, I think what I really want to get to is, I mean, it's okay to hurt, right? Practice hurts, Brad. Like, there's days I bet you wouldn't want to pick that instrument up and do it or pick up the paintbrush or whatever it is or gosh, say, "Oh gosh, another math lab," whatever it is.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Oh yeah. I pick up my mechanical pencil.
John Shivik:
Exactly. But it's worth it. I mean, that's the thing. It's really worth it. We can contribute through little things and there's a real sense of moving towards why it's worth it than falling into ... as I talked about the early Crossroads Project. You can either walk out with despair or you can walk out with hope, and realizing hope needs some work, right? Set apart hope, right?
Rebecca Allan:
Yeah.
John Shivik:
It's what you do with it. I'm going to apply to colleges and apply to hopeful for something.
Bradley Ottesen:
John, I know you've worked in a number of different capacities since I've known you, but you really do live in that sort of border between worlds. I mean, your job is hard sometimes. I remember once you told me that if everybody was a little bit mad at you, then you were doing your job pretty well, you thought. Because you have real policy issues and land use.
John Shivik:
Right.
Rebecca Allan:
Can I ask? I know there's lots of burning questions. But John, maybe you've asked to talk about this a lot the last few months, but what is your sense of ... How do you explain your understanding of the relationship between the coronavirus and animal land and people land? Is that something that you've been asked? Because I've been thinking about it as you talk about these boundaries between the-
John Shivik:
Yeah. Not so much directly, but a lot of the discussion has been more about this interface between humans and animals and how we're living with them and how we're intermixing with them. So many of these diseases, they do ... they jump, right? Zoonotics.They'll jump from animals to people, and how we are interacting with these animals is something that we need to pay a lot of attention to. So there's been a lot of discussion about that. Then frankly, there's also been a lot of concern about bats. Bats are some of the coolest animals out there, and the last thing you want people doing is, "Oh, bats, they're terrible. They harbor diseases that are going to kill us," and have a backlash against that. Most of the discussion is just still forming now about how we manage this part of our relationship with us in the natural world, and then worried about backlash towards these animals.
Rebecca Allan:
Thank you, John.
Dr. Robert Davies:
A number of things have just come up I think that play right into the story of course we're trying to tell, which is that everything's connected, and we have these very large emerging crises, climate crisis, biodiversity crisis, and social crises as well, massive accelerating inequity of the distribution of our wealth and resources as a society, a massive unsustainability in the way that we conduct ourselves. As I was listening to Brad talk about his interactions with his neighbors ... Rebecca McFaul and I, in our home have similar experiences with our neighbors because we're also doing something similar in our yard as Brad, you and Denise are. So people talk and they want to talk about it. I think a lot of times these examples of ... There are around town. I think we all know where the cool yards are.
Or what we think of as the cool yards, then actually get people's imaginations going, and John, you mentioned early this notion of sacrifice and what is sacrifice versus just change. I think oftentimes the notion of sacrifice ... We've used something as a sacrifice because it's a change. It's not something we're used to. John and your work with predators too I think, and we're speaking on a day, by the way, in which just yesterday wolves were taken off the endangered species list, and now I mean this is going to have, I'd imagine, potentially huge impact on this apex predator in a number of ecosystems. That we have these attitudes towards, let's say, predators for a particular reason, a big piece of which is the food system that we've built up. Right?
Here in the West, we have conflicts between say ranchers and predators, coyotes and wolves in particular. I imagine bears as well. You can work on that on one level, assuming that nothing else is going to change, assuming that public attitude isn't going to change, assuming that our food system isn't going to change. But if you actually start working on more systems ... Eisenhower had this great quote, "If a problem is too big to be solved, make it bigger." What he meant was you're probably not including enough pieces. It might be interesting to know what that conversation in our society would be about predators if we were also moving away from a very meat intensive food system, which of course lots and lots of research in terms of human sustainability says we need to do because the current way we do it is just not sustainable.
All of these things that we're working on, whether it's our yards in our suburban neighborhoods or our relationship to nature, often are hamstrung I think by our thought that these systems can't change. I don't know. I'm going to throw that out there. I'll just let that... I'll let that flop. Did that stimulate any thinking among you and ...
Rebecca Allan:
Well, one example of something that's challenging that entrenched feeling is ... I mean, a place like New York Botanical Garden has this wonderful new program called The Edible Academy, which is a large physical area in the garden that is an outdoor classroom to teach young people and all people about growing food, even in an urban environment. It's so successful and it's such a magnet, and I think these are the kinds of things that started to come out of the seed saving efforts of indigenous peoples in the United States that have been going on for hundreds of years, that translated over to edible school yard programs and things like that. But for me, that's a ray of hope.
John Shivik:
You might be flopping into the next segment there on what you start with your carrot. I thought you were going to say what's up doc to start. I was very surprised. No, but I think what you say there, and this is a really important point, Rebecca, is knowing where your food comes from. Again, oh gosh, if there's any comes. I don't want to seem wishy-washy about it, but I'm really not going to be hardcore black and white, my way highway, you know what I mean? Even if you don't ... You don't have to garden all your food to get an appreciation for food, right?
Rebecca Allan:
Yeah.
John Shivik:
But frankly you just can't buy a tomato like you can grow. That's one of the cardinal rules, I think of life.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Except at the Gardener's Market.
John Shivik:
Yeah, the Gardener's Market. Yeah, perhaps. But then the other thing is too, I think of things like ... You talked about meat and meat production. I don't want to be black and white and say I mean we'd be better off as Americans eating less meat. I think that's the case, but I want to go on and say you can't have any meat ever, right? But I would like to ... My own philosophy on that is, garden or meat, it's how you're getting it. I'd much rather be responsible, if I'm going to eat meat, then I've got to be the one to go harvest that meat. It's going to hurt. You got to draw it out. You got to work. It's really intense emotionally and physically to go through that process. But there's nothing better than, boy, an animal, free range animal, no antibiotics, none of that stuff, none of the rest of the complex that we have in the US where we're creating fertilizers to ...
You're trucking fertilizers with fossil fuels to grow plants, to truck to Florida, to feed into feedlot. There's all these series of steps that are creating inefficiencies that we don't have to have happen, and I think that's what a lot of the discussion is about, is it's not just yes or no, you can or you can't do this, but I think it's more the process of how we're doing these things and how we can do them more efficiently and more sustainably, and I hope in a way that we're more still connected with our environment and with our food. We live off of this planet using the planet. How do we ... It's so dangerous when we become so disconnected that we don't know where food comes from. That's maybe one of my biggest concerns.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, and certainly it's a point we make in the script.
John Shivik:
Yes, mmhmm.
Dr. Robert Davies:
This system is embedded in this larger natural world. It has to work. It has to. One example, of course, that gets used a lot that I think is really instructive is roughly 30% of our food is pollinated by pollinators. Of course, there's kind of a ... Not kind of, there's a definite crisis in pollinators, not just here in the United States, but around the world. So here we find this human system of food production embedded within this much larger natural system, and ultimately they will have to work ... Ultimately they will work together, right? We're headed towards a sustainable state, whether we like it or not. I mean, humanity will at some point be sustainable by definition. But most of the sustainable states we can imagine aren't particularly pleasant.
John Shivik:
Yeah.
Dr. Robert Davies:
So we need to find our way to one that is a food system. For example, in this case that we're talking ... that's embedded in this natural system that's going to give us the food we want and enjoy, and there's no reason it can't.
John Shivik:
Right. It comes down to the question we're talking about, it's what do you want your garden to look like? Right? This is our garden, this is where we live. What do we want it to look like? Hopefully, we can all agree that we want it a little prettier.
Rebecca Allan:
Yes.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, I think we're running into our the end of our time. John and Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us. I think that's a lovely line to leave it with, what do we want our garden, our-
Rebecca Allan:
To look like.
Dr. Robert Davies:
... to look like? Yeah. Thank you both so much for joining us and for being a part of this project. John, your thoughts are embedded in the current iteration of this performance because you've spoken to us over the years and we take those things in and we make it ... And the same with Rebecca. Not just your paintings, but also your feedback.
John Shivik:
Well, we thank you. You guys did all the work thanks for sharing it and just bringing some great emotions and intellectual application here. It's wonderful to be a part of it and to experience.
Rebecca Allan:
I echo everybody's sentiments, and I just want to say thank you to everybody. Also just to mention that my tondo pin with the eyes was made by an artist named Ken Crow Ken. It's not mine, but Ken's.
Bradley Ottesen:
Lovely. It is great that we've rounded the corner into the next topic for the next podcast. That'll be on forage, and will be out out soon. So keep an eye open for that. Thank you once more to Rebecca and John for joining us.
John Shivik:
Thank you.
Rebecca Allan:
Thank you.
Bradley Ottesen:
I had a great conversation. If you want to know more about The Crossroads Project or if you want to watch the full length film, visit www.novaslc.org. That's the webpage of the NOVA Chamber Music Series. You can also donate if you appreciate the work that NOVA has done to make the Crossroads film available to the public, and it will be up for viewing through the end of the year. You can donate at that website, you can learn more about NOVA'S unique programming and find the full film and also the individual podcast episodes, which we are halfway through now. We would definitely like to thank our season sponsors, the Utah Legislature and the Utah Division of Arts and Museums, the Lawrence T. & Janet T. Dee Foundation, Salt Lake County Zoo 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, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. It takes a village. So thank you everybody, and we'll see you for the next step.
Announcer:
This has been the NOVA podcast. Our hosts were Rob Davies and Bradley Ottesen. Our guests were John Shivik and Rebecca Allan. 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. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Send an email to info@novaslc.org. Well, we've talked about water, we've talked about life. On the next episode, it's time to talk about dinner. The menu includes agroecology and sustainable food prepared by farmer Chris Smaje and composer Gabriela Lena Frank. We hope you enjoyed listening to today's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and share the NOVA Podcast with your friends. We'll see you next time.