SXSW Scientists Explain How They’re Trying to Save the Planet

As South by Southwest’s Can Science Safeguard Earth’s Wildlife panel began on Tuesday,  Nadine Lamberski, chief conservation and wildlife health officer at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, raised a question that put the Earth’s current conditions into perspective: “How many of you remember nature differently than your experience today?”

Whether it be the decreasing amount of butterflies and bees buzzing around, spaces where foliage used to be abundant, or streaming bodies of water that have since dried up, the environment around us is changing at a significant pace, the panelists said. “The decline of species is occurring faster than any other time in our history,” Lamberski said. “And in fact, there are estimated to be a million species, that’s plants and animals, that are threatened with extinction.”

How we adapt to and mitigate our planet’s issues today will set the table for what the next 10, 50, 100 years will look like. They said that ethical uses of cutting-edge technologies will play a large role in reducing the risks of losing the planet. 

“We need tools in our toolbox to get ahead of this crisis,” Lamberski said. “We need an edge. We need more than traditional science. But we also need to protect nature.”

It would be easy for fear to creep in while listening to the four panelists list off significant, large-scale issues throughout the hourlong conversation, however, the work they are conducting to counteract this impending doom offers a sense of hope for the future of the planet. One of the several problems that Jack Gilbert, deputy director of research at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and Department of Pediatrics professor, is taking head on is preserving the Earth’s soil. “It’s estimated [that] by 2050, some parts of the world will be devoid of all productive topsoil,” he said.

Through the implementation of bacteria, fungi, and viruses, which Gilbert called microbial solutions, he and his team are helping regenerate productive soil. “We think we can regrow solid and regrow the productivity of our agricultural soils with inside six months to one year,” Gilbert said.

Christian Walzer, executive director of health at Wildlife Conservation Society, said that examining and addressing pathogenic impacts on communities was a process that used to take months due to permitting regulations and long wait times for results. Currently working to mitigate the ebola virus’ effects on gorilla populations in 600 communities across Congo, Walzer said this process has become much more efficient with the use of  polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing. 

“Now, we have little PCR machines, which are literally the size of my phone, and in 30 minutes, we are testing for the presence of ebola virus, testing for the presence of anthrax virus,” he said. “That’s important. That’s an early warning system [that] protects wildlife, protects the human population as well.”

And the panelists’ work goes far beyond working to help maintain the existing species; Lamberski and others at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance are preserving extinct species in what they call a “frozen zoo,” which she referred to as “an insurance policy for nature.”

With over 11,000 samples from more than 1,600 species, Lamberski said that it is the largest bank of its kind in the world. She told the audience about the significant loss of kelp forests on the California coast, which has been caused by an uptick in sea urchins, who are “voracious eaters of kelp.”

Like a natural domino effect, sea otters and sunflower sea stars, the predators that regulate sea urchins in the environment, have been declining due to warming oceans and human activities, along with a sea star wasting disease. To rebalance the biodiversity in the area, Lamberski and her team have frozen and thawed sperm from sunflower sea stars, now having harvested 170 vials of baby sea stars, each containing between 100-200 sea stars. They have since distributed the larvae across the state where they will be cultivated to adulthood and reinstated on the coast. 

“I just read that over five billion sea stars have succumbed to this disease alone,” she said. “We’re working to bring back the sea stars so that we can recover that kelp ecosystem.”

This is a slight glimpse into just one portion of the work that these scientists are taking head on to help preserve the plant. Panel moderator Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, wildlife ecologist and co-host of NBC’s Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild, said that scientists around the world know what needs to be done to help maintain our planet’s health. But obtaining the resources is out of their hands.

“Whether or not policymakers, and governments, and economists are able to make that happen or choose to make that happen is really the issue, but we know what to do,” Wynn-Grant said.

Gilbert put it plain and simple when discussing why policymakers, investors, and the everyday individual should be interested and willing to help execute these difficult tasks: “If you don’t care about anything else, care about the future of your species, because that’s the thing [that] is probably the most important to most humanity.”

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