Conversation with "Dr. Scott"

The UMNH team has been preparing for our colleague and friend's lecture in Salt Lake City this evening. Scott D. Sampson, paleontologist and UMNH research curator, is launching his new book, Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life, in Salt Lake City tonight! This public event kicks off of over six months of visits, lectures, signings, special appearances and more across the continent. Not the lost one, but the one we currently know as North America!

Reading through the first hundred pages of Scott's book -- and working on the communications materials for Scott's visit -- has been great fun because we can see how Scott's ideas, research topics, themes, and, quite frankly, passion that we know from working with him have come together into a new, bold, and very public forum. For Scott, it's not just about dinosaurs (although, he does love them!). It is about how we, the human species, can learn from dinosaurs -- the way they lived, the way they lived together, the ways in which they went extinct or evolved into species alive today -- a deeper understanding of our own intricate relationship with the natural world.

Scott and I have been conversing electronically over these past several weeks, and we'd like to bring you into the conversation:

JF: Scott, as a dinosaur paleontologist who often thinks in terms of millions of years of deep time, your work tends to unfold at a relatively slow pace. How is all that going for you these days?
SS: 2009 has been an action-packed year both for the study of dinosaurs and for me personally, with plenty of new discoveries and projects. Dinosaur Train, an animated kids show produced by the Jim Henson Company and now airing daily on PBS, premiered on Labor Day following an intense year of production. As the science advisor and on-air host of the series, "Dr. Scott", I have had great fun with this project, and those of us involved have been overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response received both from children and parents. Two days before the show first aired, I had the pleasure of kicking off this national series for an audience of families right here in Salt Lake City at the Utah Museum of Natural History.

This month, my book, Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life, will finally be published, the culmination of several years of work.

JF: I am enjoying working my way through the opening pages of your book. Can you give us an overview of the story you've set out to tell?
SS: This book describes both the ancient world of dinosaurs and the present-day world of paleontology. It represents the first attempt to provide a general audience summary of the entire field of dinosaur paleontology in about a generation—a generation that has witnessed more discoveries of “new” dinosaurs than in all prior history combined. More important, at least from my perspective, the book utilizes these amazing creatures as a window into understanding not just the ancient Earth of the Mesozoic, but today’s changing world as well.

It is perhaps ironic that long-extinct animals like dinosaurs can inform our present-day situation, but that is exactly my contention. Dinosaurs lived in a hothouse world characterized by climates that far exceed the most dire present day climate predictions. They suffered the last major extinction endured by our biosphere, although we may now be in the middle of another such event. And, through their living descendants, the birds, dinosaurs help anchor us into the story of everything, from the Big Bang to us, a story that needs to be communicated today more than ever before.

JF: I can't believe that after, what 150 or so years, paleontologists are still discovering new dinosaurs! And, in listening to the UMNH paleo team, it seems that what we know about them, even how they are drawn or portrayed in museums, is changing!
SS: One of the key points I try to make in the book is that the body of scientific knowledge is always changing. This does not mean that all scientific ideas are tentative or prone to easy dismissal. But new findings are made all the time that cause us to re-evaluate long-held assumptions.

In the realm of dinosaur paleontology, Utah is an exemplar in the realm of shifting ideas. Research conducted over the past decade by our group from the University of Utah -- through the Utah Museum of Natural History and the Department of Geology and Geophysics -- has unearthed a previously unknown assemblage of dinosaurs, from ornate horned herbivores to giant tyrannosaur meat-eaters. Many of these beasts are so new that they have yet to be given names.

Most of these discoveries are being made in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah; this fall, UMNH crews working in a single quarry unearthed the nearly complete skull of a giant duck-billed dinosaur (to go with the skeleton found previously), the skull and partial skeleton of an huge armored dinosaur, a nearly complete turtle and crocodile, and some other strange bones that may turn out to belong to some sort of flying reptile.

JF: Where does the "lost continent" come into the story?
SS: Well, around 75 million years ago, near the end of the Cretaceous Period, these dinosaurs and many others lived on an island continent of sorts, formed by the flooding of the central region of North America, from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. The marooned western landmass, today known as Laramidia, witnessed what is arguably the greatest known florescence of dinosaurs.

All of these finds and more are causing us to question some long held ideas about the world of dinosaurs. Why did so many different and wondrous varieties of dinosaurs evolve here? How were so many giants able to co-exist on a chunk of land less than one-fifth the size of present day North America? Why should we care about animals that disappeared so long ago? Those are the questions that I've started to address in my book, and, in my lectures will try to answer.

JF: You have been working with these themes and ideas over the past decade of your involvement with the Museum. Now that the book is released, what happens next?
SS: Well, in support of the book, I will be conducting a North American speaking tour that will include at least 15 cities in the US and Canada. I am very excited to be launching this tour in the same locale that the book found its origins - Salt Lake City, Utah! So, if folks want to learn more about Utah’s pivotal role in the world of dinosaur paleontology, please join us for the event or one that will happen in another city.


And we are, too! We hope you can join us with Scott this evening and continue to follow the development of his ideas and research in the months ahead! Event details, including location and times, can be found at www.umnh.utah.edu/dinos.

The UMNH Book Group will be discussion Dinosaur Odyssey both at the Museum and online in January 2010. Follow the blog or join our mailing list to be notified of details!

Scott D. Sampson is research curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, adjunct associate professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah, author of several articles and books including Dinosaur Odyssey, scientific advisor and on-air host of Jim Henson's Dinosaur Train, and much more!

You can follow Scott's book tour and blog at www.scottsampson.net. And we'll check in on him from time to time on this blog as well!

The Gift of Good Land

The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural is again available in paperback, published by Counterpoint (Berkeley, CA). I've finally begun to weave through these essays by Wendell Berry, written mostly between 1979 and 1981, when the collection was originally released.

Through these essays, most of which were originally published in magazines, Berry questions the true value and costs of economies of scale, the basis of the Cold War era United States Department of Agriculture ethic of "Get Big or Get Out". With my professional background in wholesale distribution sales and marketing, I've always put great faith in economies of scale and the benefits of driving the costs out of distribution, out of the supply change. However, based upon the UMNH Book Club reading, I have come to question our current industrial food system, and the viability of the small farmer. Have the economies of scale gone too far? Are we losing from land fertility, biodiversity, economic sustainability and community culture more that we are gaining?

These are issues Berry raised 30 years ago, and yet it seems that only in the past five years have they started to hit the national dialogue. What has caused our national community to be so slow to respond to Berry's call for small farming and the protection of biodiversity as well as the health of humans, animals, and soil? Does the “fault” lay within our "get big or get out" culture? Is it a lack of understanding on the part of especially urban and metropolitan citizens? Is it because of the strength of special interest and agribusiness on policy? And what are the land-use policies within our own state? Are they supportive of small-scale farming and sustainable agriculture??

Our partner in the Wendell Berry discussion is the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment, an excellent program within the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. The Stegner Center brought Wendell Berry to Utah this past March as part of the Stegner Symposium, which celebrated the centennial of Wallace Stegner's birth and explored his legacy in the West.

The last time we partnered with the Stegner Center, we discussed Robert Keiter's book, Keeping Faith with Nature: Ecosystems, Democracy, and America's Public Lands. Keiter himself participated in our book club discussion. I was struck by his perspective, as a lawyer, on how Congress takes a long view of local resolution on conservation, preservation, and land-use issues, before establishing federal policy, perhaps 30 or more years. Is that the same case with small farming practices and agricultural land-use policies? Are there examples of local communities taking back some of the small farming practices and land-use allocations toward a more diverse and sustainable agriculture and food system?

Joining our discussion of Berry's essays on Monday, September 21, will be Amy Wildermuth, an environmental law professor and Wendell Berry aficionado, representing the Stegner Center. Amy has invited her brother, Todd Wildermuth, to join the conversation as well. Todd's areas of expertise include land use and agricultural policy, plus he's a Berry fan as well. I'd love to be a guest at their family gathering table, but, in lieu of that, we look forward to talking with Amy and Todd over the next couple of weeks both at the book club and here on the blog.

With the harvest and more farmer's markets than ever in full-swing, it is a good time to join the community conversation on agricultural land use. There are several initiatives percolating and I invite anyone involved in land use, small farming practices and local food production to join the conversation. I understand that a group, working in conjunction with the Salt Lake City Mayor's Office, has formed to (re) establish a Food Policy Council along the Wasatch Front. Slow Food Utah is hosting Time for Lunch Campaign on Monday, September 7, to inspire locals to take a stand on improving children's health. And just last month, the Salt Lake Tribune ran two interesting articles relating to these issues:

• On 8/13/09, Dawn House wrote in the Business Section on the challenges of finding available land for small, local farming.

• On 8/18/09, Jeremiah Stettler wrote on plans to increase urban farming in Salt Lake County.

It's a good time for a community discussion on The Gift of Good Land. Join us!

Summer Reading!

Hope that you have had many opportunities for good summer reading this year! Here are some updates on books, authors, and more relating to the UMNH Book Club!

1. We had a spirited conversation on July 13 about Paul Roberts' The End of Food. People, at least the ones who attend book clubs on food books, have strong opinions about what is acceptable and unacceptable in the food-supply. It was great having Christi Paulson of Slow Food Utah leading the discussion.

It struck me as we were debating organic vs. non-organic produce, and regaining the lost arts of jam and condiment making, that we are lucky to be having that conversation. Perhaps organic vs. non-organic is a bit splitting hairs as long as we agree to avoid the rows and rows of boxed and processed food that lies between the produce and the dairy section. Hmmm.

2. Due mostly to publishing release dates, we've ended up with two food-related books in a row, much to the chagrin of some members. Our next book to discuss is The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays on Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry. We selected this book at the recommendation of Anne Holman of The King's English Bookshop before Mr. Berry's visit to Utah in March for the Stegner Symposium. Our partner in this discussion, scheduled for Monday, September 21, is the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, the University of Utah.

I've just talked with the booksellers at the King's English, and the new edition of The Gift of Good Land is now in! I'm on my way to pick up my copy and will strive to post a few times before the 9/21/09 discussion. Join me!

3. The authors, scientists and thought-leaders we encounter at the Museum -- through the Nature of Things lecture series and the UMNH Book Club -- are busy folk. Here are some updates on past and future authors:

• E.O. Wilson, inaugural keynote speaker in 2007, is returning to Utah this Saturday, August 15, to participate in the lovely Sundance Author Series. We've heard this morning that tickets are still available at www.sundanceresort.com/create and click on Events. Tickets are $95 and include brunch in the award-winning Tree Room, plus a signed copy of a new edition of Wilson's book, On Human Nature.
• Michael Pollan, whose Omnivore's Delimma was the UMNH Book Club's July 2006 selection, and who delivered the Nature of Things 2008 keynote lecture, has been all the buzz this summer with the release of the film Food, Inc. Last week, UMNH heard that the Salt Lake Film Society had extended screenings of the film at the Broadway Theater in Salt Lake City for a week or two, due to strong community support.
• Gary Hirshberg, president of Stonyfield Yogurt, is also featured in Food, Inc., as indication of how business can be financially successful while integrating the company’s social, environmental, and financial missions. UMNH is in the process of finalizing a date for Hirshberg to participate in the Nature of Things lecture series in March 2010. The complete series line-up will be announced this fall, and subscribers to this blog will be among the first to know!

4. We are still waiting for Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom #1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum to be delivered in paperback. The King's English tells us September. We'll cross our fingers and hope we have time to delight in Fortey's great stories of the people, places and adventures that make up THE Natural History Museum in London. Some UMNH staff members are dying to share their stories as well at the November discussion.

5. And, it's time again to look for books to read in the coming year and for interesting people to read them with! The Utah Society of Environmental Education is interested in reading Stephen Trimble and Gary Nabhan's The Geography of Childhood with us next spring, a great way to discuss how to reconnect our children and our families with nature.

I would like to explore some of the science behind climate change and am looking for recommendations.

I'm intrigued by The Superorganism: The beauty, elegance and strangeness of insect societies by Bert Holldobler and E.O.Wilson, however it's size and cost are a bit daunting. Please send me your thoughts for natural science and environmental books to explore next year.

Enjoy the rest of your reading summer!

The End of Food

The UMNH Book Club will meet to discuss The End of Food by Paul Roberts on Monday, July 13, 2009, at 6:30 p.m. This book was recommended to us by Slow Food Utah, who will be contributing to the Book Club discussion next week.

I'm just getting started on Roberts' book, but immediately realized that the title is more daunting and discouraging than the text. The book is a very interesting read!

As I personally have been exploring our industrialized food supply (starting with Omnivore's Dilemma in this Book Club two years ago), I have continually asked myself, "How did we get here? How did we just hand over our food system to the interests of chemical fertilizers and bottom-line profits?"

The first chapter of this book, "Starving for Progress", lays out "how we got here" over the past three million years, starting with Australopithecus, "a diminutive ancestor who lived in the prehistoric African forest and ate mainly what could be found there -- fruits, leaves, larvae and bugs." Over the next 20 pages or so, the author recaps how the quest for food and survival drove the development of modern humans, civilization and, ultimately, a global society and food supply. The chapter illustrates the intricate relationship between humans being, the ever-changing environments and climates in which they live, and the desire to create predictability in their resources. It is like a speed-read through several anthropology and political science courses in one sitting!

But the reading challenges my organic leanings as being symptomatic of luxury. The fact is, predictability in food and other natural resources is a good thing. It creates opportunity for individuals and civilizations to do more things that hunt for and produce food. Was there a moment in time when this desire for predictability and "enough" went to far? Was it in the mid-twentieth century when we added chemical fertilizers and carbon-based machinery in an attempt to be masters over nature, thereby changing the very thing we call food? Or was in 3500 B.C., when Egyptian wheat farmers were "routinely producing more grain than they could eat themselves, and these surpluses" let to trade and the first accumulate wealth? Agriculture itself is a mastery over nature. Yet, did human society cross a line in 1957, when, according to Roberts, "Ray Goldberg, the Harvard economist, and his colleague, John Davis, proposed that term "agriculture" be replaced with a new, more fitting one: "agribusiness."

Food is the fundamental way in which we as humans -- as living beings -- interact with the natural world. Food, or energy from which to live, creates the "place of humans" within the natural world, referring to the Museum's mission statement. So far, this book and others I've read provide data to the balance between calories produced by the earth and calories needed -- and how that balance changes over time. The questions are popping in my mind. Join the Museum and Slow Food Utah for a discussion of this book, and will raise your own questions and comments here or at the discussion on 7/13/09!

For more information on the meeting, visit us at www.umnh.utah.edu/bookclub.

Onto Chapter 2: "It's So Easy Now"....

It's all Connected

We started out organizing these entries by the title of the book we were discussing. But we've realized, that is not going to work. This discussion, the themes and memes covered in these readings, are to intertwined. Just as in our Book Club meetings, in which we refer back to past discussions to enrich the current book, these conversations sort of weave into a larger tapestry of thought. A larger discussion on the place of humans in the natural world.

For me this year, it all started in early March listening to Terry Tempest-Williams presenting at the Wallace Stegner Center of Land, Resources and the Environment's annual symposium. As this year marks the 100th anniversary of Stegner's birth, the symposium was dedicated to Stegner's life and legacy. Terry reflected on Stegner's advice to her and Charles Wilkinson in their work to protect wilderness lands in Southern Utah. Stegner's advice? Be bold! Saving wilderness is protecting the place in which our humanity has a place to breathe. I asked myself: What in my life is worth fighting to save?

The next week, Thomas Friedman was in town. He discussed the "Americum", the measure of people in the world living the "American lifestyle" in terms of consumption. It struck me that it is our moral responsibility as Americans to redefine the "American Dream" so that it can be protected, so that it can expand and more people in this world can live with basic food security, clean water, healthcare, education, justice, and opportunity; but so that the balance of life on this planet can be sustained -- including places of wilderness, I would guess. And in his discussion, and especially in the reading of his book, it was evident that the market has been heavily changed by the lobbying of oil companies and auto manufacturers who have ensured that carbon fuel was cheap, easy to attain, and guzzled up by large "American Made" automobiles.
what is worth protecting? I want people across the world to have the same basics that I have. Am I willing to give up on the intense excess, recalibrate the American dream, so that more people can live with safety, security, and peace? What portion of "the American lifestyle" is worth fighting for, worth saving?

A couple of weeks later, a group of local community members formed a discussion group on the Northwest Earth Institute's "Menu for the Future". Together, all of us women living in Salt Lake City with school-aged children, we have spent the past six weeks exploring issues of the food supply. Corporate agriculture, fossil fuels in the food supply chain, pesticides and additives in our food supply, explotation and effects from pesticide exposure of agriculture workers. All while Michelle Obama is taking heat for choosing organic growing practices on the White House lawn. And what is our largest concern is as mothers is the time and cost of restoring nature -- faith -- in our families' food. We start to ask ourselves, "we've placed such a value on convenience because we are so busy. Why are we so busy?" What is worth protecting?? Isn't the health of our families, and the time we can spend together growing, sourcing, cooking, sharing food worth protecting??

Then Tyrone Hayes comes to Salt Lake to finish up the Nature of Things 2009. He talks about the effects of the agricultural pesticide Atrazine in frog populations. And there it is again: 80 million pounds of Atrazine used in American agriculture each year, corporate reaction to research indicating that Atrazine is causing hormonal change in frog populations living in waters with agricultural run off, documentation that when the company realized that Atrazine was contributing to hormonal changes that stimulated some cancers, they then established a new division to create a pharmaceutical that can reduce the hormonal changes -- rather than removing the Atrazine from the market, they are now selling the pesticide to the agriculture industry and the cancer-treatment pharmeceutal through the healthcare treatment. Tyrone's final call? Get politically active to call for better testing, integrative evaluation of pesticides so that the real story can be told. The future is in your hands. Is that worth fighting for?

It starts to feel that we are living in a society in which the basics have traded out for convience, profit, predictablity.

Wendell Berry: where we are headed....

Speaking of Poetry

Heard this piece yesterday morning on NPR's Morning Edition program and wanted to pass it on to our discussion group: Can Poetry Save the Earth?

Stanford University professor John Felstiner writes in his new book, Can Poetry Save the Earth?: "If poems touch our full humanness, can they quicken awareness and bolster respect for this ravaged resilient earth we live on?"

Listen to the entire piece on the NPR Website.

Felstiner was asked to pick just one poem that could save the world, if everyone were to read it. He chose:

The Well Rising
by William Stafford

The well rising without sound,
the spring on a hillside,
the plowshare brimming through the deep ground
everywhere in the field —

The sharp swallows in their swerve
flaring and hesitating
hunting for the final curve
coming closer and closer —

The swallow heart from wing beat to wing beat
counseling decision, decision:
thunderous examples. I place my feet
with care in such a world.


Hope you get a chance to appreciate "such a world" today.

Wendell Berry: Dramatized Poems

Since Wendell Berry's recent visit to Utah for the Stegner Symposium, I seem to be finding him everywhere! A couple of weeks ago, there was a nice piece on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Saturday about an group in Kentucky who has brought Berry's poems to the stage.

As NPR reporter Elizabeth Kramer explained: "Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-based agrarian philosopher, has been described as our era's heir to Emerson and Thoreau — a writer concerned with the importance of community, and with the lessons we can learn from the natural world. Now, the Actors Theatre of Louisville is putting his ideas on stage."

You can listen to the entire piece at the NPR Website.

Kramer continues: "And though some were published decades ago, the poems feel surprisingly current. One in particular — about a stock market crash — feels particularly timely:

When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, "Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!" I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.
My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
Though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing."

The UMNH Community Book Discussion will be delving into Berry's essays in "The Gift of Good Land" later this year. Until then, where are you discovering Berry these days??