19th-Century Surveyor, News Roundup, Eagles' Nests. July 6, 2018, Part 1

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🗓️ 6 July 2018

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

In the 19th century, the American West was an arid climate yet to be fully explored. But surveyors like geologist John Wesley Powell, the second director of the United States Geological Society, would chart out the natural wonders that lied beyond the Mississippi. While at the USGS, Powell would lead a project to create the first map of the country to integrate geographical features and some of the first survey expeditions along the snaking Colorado River and Grand Canyon. But he also proposed radical ideas about developing the West that took the climate and ecology into account. One of Powell’s theories stated that the U.S. was divided down the middle along the “100th Meridian”—between the dry West region and moist East. In two recent studies, climatologist Richard Seager and his team confirmed this dividing line. Seager joins Ira to explain how this ecological division has changed due to climate change. Shortly after the Declaration of Independence was signed, Congress chose the bald eagle—a symbol of freedom—as the national bird. There were an estimated 100,000 eagles at that time. But the birds were nearly driven to extinction in the 1960s, with only with only 487 breeding pairs out in the wild. After the endangered species list was created and targeted conservation efforts began, eagle populations recovered. Researchers have found that one of the keys to recovery is protecting the nest of breeding pairs of eagles.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. Later this hour, a 19th century
0:06.4	pioneering climate scientists who envisioned the water woes of the West. But first, this week, of
0:12.7	course, was the 4th of July. Hope you enjoyed it. And that prompted lots of looking back on
0:17.4	significant moments from our nation's history. Now, many of us have some sense of
0:21.3	pride in the contributions of our own states to the national storyline, but is that historic pride
0:26.8	overstated? Joining me now to talk about that and other selected short subjects in science is Sarah Kaplan.
0:32.4	She's a science reporter at The Washington Post and joins me from Washington. Welcome back to the show.
0:39.2	Thanks, John. Good to be here.
0:40.8	Well, first of all, tell us about this study.
0:42.5	Does this mean we've got an overstated idea of our own place in history in our states?
0:48.2	Yeah. So a lot of Americans, it turns out, think that they're pretty important and their state is pretty important.
0:54.8	There's this pair of studies that some psychologists conducted asking Americans how
1:00.5	essential their state was to the history of the nation and also looking at how essentially
1:05.3	I think the country is to the history of the world.
1:07.5	And they found that basically everyone thinks they're more important than maybe they actually are. The worst offenders were Virginia, Massachusetts, and Delaware. If you ask a
1:16.6	person in Virginia, you know, how much of American history is Virginia responsible for? They will say
1:22.3	41%. And they actually found that even after they forced participants to take a quiz that emphasizes, like, the breadth of U.S. history, the fact that there are 50 states, that had no effect on the outcome.
1:35.5	It turns out that, you know, they still think they're really important.
1:39.4	And the same thing goes for the rest of the world, actually.
1:41.8	It turns out Americans are not actually the worst about this.
1:47.8	If you ask Russians, how important Russia is to world history, they will say they are responsible for nearly 60% of the history of the entire globe. So meanwhile, the U.S. is only
1:53.9	at 29.6. So, you know, we're actually relatively modest. Now, it may be true that Russia is
	...

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