How deserted places find a second life

Lots left vacant, offices full of equipment but devoid of people, entire villages literally left to the wolves--this hour, TED speakers share stories about bringing new life to abandoned places. Guests include evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, entrepreneur Garry Cooper, urban renewal expert Anika Goss, and conservationist Alysa McCall. (Original broadcast date: September 8, 2023) TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/ted http://plus.npr.org/ted For handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR’s Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub http://npr.org/podclub. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

• 1:06Speaker 01

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• 1:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  Challenge you.

• 1:09Speaker 01

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• 1:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR.

• 1:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, abandoned places.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  I remember walking through some villages where you look through the windows and there are still shoes near the door. There's still books next to the bed. There's still a child's toy on the floor. There's so many remnants of the lives that were left on very short notice.

• 1:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  For nearly four decades, ever since the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, the surrounding 30-kilometer radius known as the exclusion zone has mostly been empty of human life.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  It's kind of this odd mixture of very surreal, abandoned homes and abandoned lives.

• 2:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  But there are other inhabitants.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  You keep going, and then in this one house that is very vivid to me, I remember a nest of a family of boar that had made residence in the front porch of one of these houses. And it was very obvious that while humans, at one time decades ago, lived in this place, now the boar were living in this same structure, creating this place for their family and to safely bed at night.

• 2:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Cara Love. She's an integrative biologist and was visiting Chernobyl regularly to study the animals that are flourishing there.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  So if you're walking through the zone, you'll probably see Eurasian bison, Eurasian moose, all sorts of bird life. And, you know, we got really lucky one year and actually saw two Eurasian lynx just driving around to our wolf sites.

• 3:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wolf sites. Cara and her colleagues are specifically researching the area's apex predator, the gray wolf. These wolves have been thriving here despite constant and intense exposure to radiation.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Some of the wolves are exposed to upwards of, like, three chest X-rays a day worth of radiation per individual.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  On the most extreme, but still pretty significant for the long-term chronic exposure over an entire lifetime. You know, I had always had questions of what impacts the radiation might have on population dynamics. And Shane was just a perfect collaborator to bring on, to add that element of evolution and natural selection and ask these questions together.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  And I think that has made this collaboration so incredible.

• 4:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  Shane Campbell-Staten is an evolutionary biologist. And in 2019, Kara recruited him to help answer a big question. How have these wolves genetically adapted to survive all this radiation?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Because we know that the wolves in Chernobyl have been there at this point for about seven or eight generations. So they've been exposed their entire lives to this novel pressure. And by understanding how natural selection has gone about molding organisms to still be able to survive and reproduce, by studying that process, it may lead us to new insights.

• 4:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Shane has spent his entire career studying how species evolved to adapt to human behavior, including in Chernobyl, which is unlike anything he's ever seen before.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  A pup that's born in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, from day one, it's being exposed to radiation from the environment. And that pup will live half a decade or more, you know, and each day be continually exposed to that radiation. On top of that, these wolves, they're getting another dose of radiation from each meal that they eat. And a concentrated dose because they're apex predators. All right. So they're eating European bison that, you know, then ate grass and other vegetation that was infused with radiation. And we know that radiation causes lots of damage to the mammalian body.

• 6:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but are some of these wolves living with cancer?

• 6:07Speaker 03

  So that is one thing that we're exploring right now. What we do know is that when you look at their blood, and you look at the immune profiles of their blood, they show patterns that you would expect from a person with cancer. So now, all of a sudden, if you're interested in that specific question, how would a mammalian genome change in order to become more resistant or resilient to cancer? That's the kind of stage that you would want to set up in order to understand that. And as tragic, absolutely tragic, as the Chernobyl incident was, we do have an opportunity to learn something of potentially incredible value

• 6:52Speaker 03

  from the aftermath of it.

• 6:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  From a tragic event to a rare opportunity, when people move on, there is loss. But there is also a chance for renewal if we make the most of what gets left behind. On this episode, stories about abandoned places and ideas for transforming them into resilient economies, cities, and even a thriving species. So back to evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staten. He says the gray wolf's ability to withstand so much radiation is just one example of evolution unfolding at a breakneck pace. Here he is on the TED stage.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Now, when Charles Darwin, my man Chuck D, when he first proposed this theory, when he first proposed the theory of evolution, he imagined it as this slow, gradual process that played out over thousands or millions of years. But now, in the face of all the different changes that we are making to the planet, we're finding that evolution is rapidly altering species around our planet in order to live alongside us.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Many of these stories of rapid evolution are sad, but some also offer us hope for our own future on this planet. In nature's struggle to deal with all the nonsense that we're throwing at her in all these different ways, some of those solutions may lead us to novel insights that may help our bodies deal with things that we currently struggle with, that will allow us to survive all the different changes that we're making on this planet.

• 8:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  So Shane, the novel insights you're talking about here, you are looking into what is happening to these wolves genes and if they've evolved to resist cancer. What have you found?

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Okay, yes. So when we sequenced the genomes of the wolves in Chernobyl, we compared them to wolves, a wolf population right outside of the exclusion zone in Belarus, and also the wolf population in Yellowstone, which is really far away. All right, so we have these three populations. And the question was, like, if there's something special happening in Chernobyl, then whatever genes may help some individuals better deal with cancer than others, the hypothesis is that those regions

• 9:39Speaker 03

  should be changing in Chernobyl and only Chernobyl at a very fast rate. And we identified those patterns and identified those genes. And then you look at the function of those genes, and they're all related to some part of, to some aspect of cancer biology. And most of those genes have some known function in immunity or in the anti-tumor immune response or in immune phenotypes.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Now, we know a lot about the genes and mutations that are responsible for many cancers, or make an individual more predisposed to getting cancer. We know a lot less about potential genetic mutations or variation that may make an individual more resistant or more resilient to cancer. But perhaps, nature has already found this solution. And one of the things that our data are showing us is that the fastest-changing regions of the Chernobyl wolf genome occur in and around genes

• 10:58Speaker 03

  that we know are involved in cancer or in the mammalian anti-tumor immune response. We're now working with biomedical companies and cancer biologists to understand the physiological impacts of these mutations, with the hope that at least some of these changes may lead us to novel therapeutics that might result in new treatments for cancer in humans.

• 11:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, so let me see if I understand. The wolf genome in Chernobyl is mutating like crazy. And the parts of the genome that are mutating the fastest are the ones that show some kind of immunity to cancer. So is it like, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger?

• 11:44Speaker 03

  So, evolution and adaptation, they're not planning on anything. It's a reactive process. So, you get thrown some kind of a curveball, and whatever you have in hand is what you have to deal with it. And if you can come up with a solution that makes you slightly better, you know, then selection will run with it. In this case, the most likely scenario is that within Chernobyl, there's some degree of standing variation in these genes that affect the way that they interact with cancer formation, or cancer proliferation, or metastasis. And some of those mutations,

• 12:27Speaker 03

  you know, are better at dealing with those things than others in this particular environment, exposed to this novel pressure, and extreme pressure. Somehow, we see that the ability to deal with something biologically that maybe no other organism is able to deal with in the same way. We don't know enough yet to really understand, but it's clear that something special is happening.

• 12:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  Shane and his colleague Cara Love are hoping to get more data from the wolves. But the war in Ukraine has kept their teams from spending more time in the region and learning more about what the implications could be for humans.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Someday, hopefully, when we're able to gain access, or when my colleagues in Belarus are able to go back into the zone again, we'll be able to really fine tune that question a bit more. But unfortunately, it's still a question yet to be fully answered.

• 13:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  When we come back, from wolves to elephants. More with evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staten about how humans are speeding up evolution and how nature is responding. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

• 13:59Speaker 04

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• 15:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and on the show today, abandoned places. And we were just talking to evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staten about how animals can adapt when humans radically change their natural habitat.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  The one pretty much universal thing about humans is we don't know how to do anything a little bit. So whatever we do, we do to an absurd degree, which means that we're changing environments very quickly to an absurd degree in all of these different dimensions. And that rapid environmental change, if it affects the ability of the organisms that live in an environment to survive, function, and reproduce, that necessitates a pace of evolutionary change that can track the environment, or you risk extinction.

• 16:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  Shane has also been studying how some African elephants have adapted in response to poaching. Here he is again on the TED stage.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  In Mozambique, there was a civil war from 1977 to 1992. During this time, in Gorongosa National Park, elephants in particular were reduced by 90% because of the ivory trade being targeted for their trademark, tusks. Now, under most circumstances, African elephants have tusks. But there is a small number of females that carry a gene that prevents them from growing their tusks. But after the Mozambican civil war, one half of the surviving females, completely tuskless. Now, during a time where individuals are being hunted specifically for a trade,

• 17:14Speaker 03

  not having that trait puts you at a decided advantage in your ability to survive. Those surviving females then went on and passed that gene on to many of their daughters. That turnover of genes across generations, that is rapid evolution. In our short time on this planet, we have trimmed, trained, and reshuffled the tree of life at breakneck speed. Now, I've dedicated my life to trying to understand the lasting biological impacts of our human footprint. One of the things that I've learned along the way is that life is a paradox.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  It's simultaneously incredibly fragile and relentlessly resilient.

• 18:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  One of the things you say in your talk, this line really just stuck with me, which is that life is incredibly fragile, yet also simultaneously incredibly resilient.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, you know, we are just too much for most species to handle. And you see that fragility in, you know, the long list of extinctions that came along with the rise of humans. You know, so in that case, it's like, life is a paradox, right? It is fragile and it needs to be cared for. But at the same time, it does find all of these imaginative, innovative, completely surprising, quirky, weird ways to eke through, you know, when need be.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  I think it's easy to, you know, to see hope in these stories. And I think that's actually a good thing. But I think it is a mistake and shortsighted to then sort of shirk off responsibility. The world is going to be, from now on, what we make it. The story isn't over. And right now, we are the drivers of that story.

• 19:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Princeton professor and evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staten. He's also the host of a PBS documentary series called Human Footprint. You can see his full talk at ted.com. Many thanks to his colleague, integrative biologist Cara Love. On the show today, abandoned places, or in this case, abandoned stuff.

• 19:44Speaker 06

  So imagine a lab looking like a corridor of a hospital. So very sterile, very white. And amongst that corridor, there's going to be lots of freezer systems.

• 19:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Gary Cooper. In 2008, Gary was at Northwestern University, working in a research lab on a drug discovery program. And to do that work, Gary and his colleagues filled the banks and rows of freezers with all kinds of supplies.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  We would say have antibodies, probes that attach or recognize proteins, all the way to buffer systems, thousands of those things.

• 20:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  And because you can't just buy a single antibody or a few enzymes, they bought them in bulk.

• 20:32Speaker 06

  And then you so-called aliquot it out. So you kind of make separate vials of that. And so, and then you stick those aliquots in a freezer.

• 20:40Manoush Zomorodi?

  Alloquat is allocate in lab speak, divided up for different uses. And while some of the enzymes and proteins would get used, others would be put into storage and forgotten about.

• 20:54Speaker 06

  You leave the lab and no one knows that they're there. They're just these tubes. What are these tubes? They're just marked Alpha. No one even knows who these tubes are. And meanwhile, literally someone, probably in your same floor, is trying to buy that same aliquot or trying to getting an aliquot or trying to get a whole bottle of that antibody or that restriction enzyme or that buffer system. And so they're buying that new where literally the refrigerator across the hallway has what they're looking for. But because they don't know it's there, you have this double waste problem.

• 21:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  This really bothered Gary. Not only was all this waste, well wasteful, it was expensive.

• 21:31Speaker 06

  Meanwhile, I knew other students who were in labs that were smaller and less resourced and had less funding. And they were sometimes be looking for the things that we weren't even using or in fact that we were going to throw away. And so I thought that was absurd.

• 21:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  So one day.

• 21:49Speaker 06

  I literally just got a cart, put things that we weren't using on the cart. I would then push the cart around the floor.

• 21:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  Not antibodies in the cart, though.

• 21:58Speaker 06

  Well, actually, they were in the cart. So I would put them in dry ice. And I would say, hey, do you need an aliquot of, you know, whatever it is? And let me tell you, people would say, oh, my gosh, yes, we were about to buy. Oh, this is so thankful. Sometimes they would say things like, what can I give you? And when they said that, it made me think, oh, there's something more than sharing here, right? There's potentially a whole system of exchange, of sharing, of exchange of value, I'd say, that could be had if this was more than a cart. Right? We can't scale one person at a university on one floor. That's not a global scaling solution.

• 22:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Tell me about as you started to research on a broader scale, what the situation was in terms of wasted equipment or materials or products. Lay it out for us. Big picture, what did you find?

• 22:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, so something like forty five percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions is because of what we call a linear economy. So that's an economy where we take things out of the ground, we make something with them, and then when we're done with them, we throw them away. Right? If we did all the things that have to do with energy and gritting and food, there's still a forty five percent hole in closing the gap to net zero. And the only way we can get there is by structuring this thing called a circular economy, where the item that you're using doesn't start from new products. When you make products, you design them with the end of life and reuse in mind.

• 23:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  And so this is when you take a big leap, Gary. You decide to leave neuroscience and start a company.

• 23:40Speaker 06

  That's right. I knew exactly the pain points that someone would say if you said them to reuse something. On the other hand, I knew the benefits. And so in some ways, I was I was our customer and user number one. I knew exactly how the system should work in the working world and for it to have global importance scale. That's kind of how we started Reaply. Reaply, the company I founded and run, helps organizations identify and catalog the things they own, reuse them internally when they can, and distribute them to other organizations when they cannot. It's like a high-tech, scaled-up version of me with the pushcart at Northwestern, but with hundreds of organizations, from technology to manufacturing leaders, and millions of

• 24:25Speaker 06

  items available for sale and donation, all catalogued on a digital platform, stretching across partners in a local area, a city or state, creating connected networks of reuse. Reaply helps organizations reuse things like building materials and IT and industrial equipment and furniture.

• 24:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  Gary imagined a sort of Craigslist for business that could also keep track of where all the objects are.

• 24:53Speaker 06

  We need to know where every chair is. We need to know where every desk is. We need to know where every door is. Because if we know where those things are before they're, quote, "lost," we can plan for their next life.

• 25:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  This marketplace would show when and where a chair, or desk, or door is available, and then get the item from A to B.

• 25:11Speaker 06

  Whether they be a nonprofit next to you, whether it be your colleague on the floor beside you, I see that door. I see that couch. I see those chairs. I want them when they're available. Let's take a look at how it works for furniture. An investment bank in New York City had about 2,000 premium office chairs that they no longer could use. When they hired us, we sent a team to inventory that furniture on that floor. When it was determined that these items could no longer be useful internally, a notification was sent out through our platform to all of our partners, hundreds of them. I'm happy to report that all of these chairs found new homes in a local university, a community housing organization,

• 25:56Speaker 06

  and a local refurbishment company. In total, about 68,000 pounds of potential waste was diverted from landfill, and about $100,000 of value was recaptured and shared with these organizations. Not to mention the carbon savings. Making one of these office chairs, which weighs about 55 pounds, releases 245 pounds of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

• 26:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  Gary, I am having a hard time envisioning 2,000 chairs. What would have happened if this company, this bank, didn't have a service like yours to find new homes for all of them?

• 26:39Speaker 06

  Generally speaking, what they do with the old stuff is they liquidate it or they dispose of it. And the dispose word is just AKA for landfill or throw it away.

• 26:51Speaker 06

  When they liquidate it, I can tell you about 95% of the time, 5% of that stuff is resold, 95% of it is also disposed into a landfill.

• 27:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  So somebody comes along and buys the thousand chairs and is like, I'll take care of this for you.

• 27:04Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 27:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  Maybe they make a little bit of money.

• 27:06Speaker 06

  They're gonna make a little bit of money and then they're not gonna hold inventory that they can't sell in their warehouses. So they're gonna, they're gonna get rid of it as soon as possible. Let me tell you a different, more circular way of doing that versus the linear way we just described. We send these thousand chairs to a re-manufacturer who re-eposters them, who makes them look a little bit more befitting to maybe the designer's wishes, who's designing your new space. And then they send those chairs back to you. You've only paid for the updating of them, the re-manufacturing of them and the reshipment. But you're not having the carbon emissions that comes from the manufacturing of those items. So the whole part of the circular economy from a carbon emissions perspective

• 27:48Speaker 06

  is trying to reduce net new manufacturing. That's where the largest share of carbon emissions happens in the world is with through manufacturing. And so when you think on both the manufacturing side and on the disposition side, circularity or usage is such a better answer, even at the level of chairs.

• 28:09Speaker 06

  So we know how to create a circular economy with a microscope on a push cart like me at Northwestern. And we know how to do so inside and outside of a building with either its building materials or things like IT infrastructure on a digital platform like Repli. But how do we get to the scale of a city? And why? Well, cities occupy about 3% of global landmass, but house over 50% of the global population, which commands over 75% of all global resources.

• 28:47Speaker 06

  Cities are perfect tractable fronts for us to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and create a lot of jobs by building local circular economies. Now, to transition any city's linear economy to a circular one, we're going to, at the very least, have to do three things. First, we have to build a digital infrastructure to connect every citizen and every company to everything in their city. Next, we're gonna have to build the operational infrastructure to make reuse and recycling and remanufacturing easy and universally acceptable. Next, we're gonna have to incentivize every person and business to participate in their

• 29:32Speaker 06

  local circular economy.

• 29:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  So you are actually working with the city of San Francisco right now on a pilot project?

• 29:40Speaker 06

  Absolutely, absolutely. So in San Francisco, we have launched, and it's exactly, all these things are operating in San Francisco. So we have the digital infrastructure, we have operational capacity and infrastructure that's provided by the city and a few partners. We have about 200 different businesses on the platform, and San Francisco has passed a set of ordinances that either require or strongly encourage people to participate in their local reuse platform. If we can get 1,000 cities to circularity by 2040, we can reduce global greenhouse

• 30:19Speaker 06

  gas emissions by 63% and get us back on track for meeting the 1.5 target set out the Paris Accords. And if we can't do that, it's gonna be maybe impossible.

• 30:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  I'm guessing that the only person listening to this who might think that this is a bad idea is the chair manufacturer, who's like, "Well, wait a second, what about my business?"

• 30:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I have good news for them. They should be participating too. They have all the upside. So for instance, your iPhone. Somewhere between 50 and 60% of the materials in your iPhone are re-harvested by Apple. I'm able to upcycle materials that were in that old phone into a new phone, so that my costs for new manufacturing go way down. If you think about the recommerce market, the recommerce market is growing about 16 times faster than the global apparel market.

• 31:14Speaker 06

  If you look at companies like Patagonia and REI comparatively to their market counterparts, they have operationalized circularity, they've operationalized these environments or principles, and they're honestly crushing their competition in the market. It's a better system, it's a better system for a manufacturer to lease or to rent something as a service than to sell it. They make way more money, they control their reverse supply chain. I was just talking about the iPhone scenario. And it's just more predictable business. The problem, I would say, having friends in the manufacturing world is how do we go from where we are to there? How do we go from what we're doing today to a new system? And I think there's some good questions and good people working on those answers.

• 32:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  Gary, this was so exciting and it's making me, you know, I live in Brooklyn where there's like a stoop economy, but it just is one way, you know, where you clean it out, you put it out and it's disappeared by the next day. And also, right? And my neighbor who is the textile recycling guy, everybody knows it's easier to take your textiles and dump it at the farmer's market on Sunday than put it in your garbage.

• 32:25Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 32:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, and there's an opportunity because he has turned it into his livelihood. Like this is what he does.

• 32:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, just on that front, I think compared to landfill and incineration, in one of these circular cities, it can create millions actually of green jobs. I think 6X more recycling jobs than current and 50X more reuse jobs because of what you're just saying, because people will start remanufacturing businesses, they will start repair businesses, they will start what I'll call reverse Uber businesses, right? I gotta take this item to you. So that's going to create these local jobs that don't need college education, in some cases don't even need a apprenticeship. They just need someone to care and someone to say, I'm gonna be their local remanufacturing chairs or furniture or desk or whatever it is. These assets do not belong to landfill. They don't deserve them.

• 33:17Speaker 06

  When we say these are assets, they're valued, then the question is, what do we do with them? How can we make money off of them? And the circular economy has the answer.

• 33:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  Gary Cooper is the CEO and co-founder of Repli. You can find his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, abandoned places. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 33:54Speaker 04

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• 33:58Speaker 05

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• 34:30Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 35:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, abandoned places, stories of desertion and renewal. And a while back, I went to TED's climate conference in Detroit. Detroit, of course, is the once wealthy Motor City, but it hit on incredibly hard times when manufacturers and locals left in droves. One speaker, a woman named Anika Goss, is working to build a new future for Detroit, one abandoned lot at a time.

• 36:01Speaker 07

  Welcome to Detroit, all of you here. This is fantastic. We are so excited to see all of you here, that TED is here. This is amazing.

• 36:16Speaker 07

  I'm a third-generation Detroiter. My grandmother moved to Detroit in 1936 during the Great Migration and brought all of her Southern ways with her. She owned a home on Mendota Street and knew that homeownership would create wealth and opportunity for her growing family. My family story is not an unusual Detroit story. And up until the late 1950s, Detroit was a haven for middle-class families living in neighborhoods where there was green space and community connectivity and opportunity.

• 37:01Speaker 07

  But my grandmother's Detroit is not the Detroit that I live in today. In 75 years, our city went from a peak population of 1.8 million down to a population of 620,000 in 2022. All of those sites where there was manufacturing and industrial sites that led to our economic boom, many of those industrial sites stand vacant and abandoned. We now have about 19 square miles of vacant land in Detroit.

• 37:38Speaker 07

  These industrial sites have led to dangerous contamination, both to our land and our water and our air.

• 37:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  After Anika gave her talk, she and I got together at a local coffee shop so I could learn more about her organization, Detroit Future City, and why having fewer people means rethinking Detroit's economy and landscape.

• 38:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, it sounds like the things that made Detroit so livable then, those have changed. Can you just sort of draw a picture of now?

• 38:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I think what's really changed, the population loss has had a pretty dramatic effect in ways that I think people aren't necessarily focused on. When you think of population loss, you think of just less people.

• 38:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Speaker 07

  But in fact, population loss also means fewer dollars for infrastructure. And when I say "infrastructure," I mean like there's fewer dollars to fix streetlights and repair water mains and take care of parks and trees, right?

• 39:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  The basics.

• 39:00Speaker 07

  The basics, that's what that is. So all of that puts the people who are living in those communities at risk for climate impacts first. Poor air quality, contaminated water, heat island impact. And I think people are thinking that it's all equal across the board. But these people who have been living here, who live near a factory, an operating factory or a vacant factory, are definitely at the most risk for climate change impact.

• 39:40Manoush Zomorodi?

  So here we are, a city that really thrived by being entrenched in its ways. But those ways aren't working anymore. And that's where you come in. Tell me about what you're trying to do.

• 39:54Speaker 07

  Yeah. We began to see at Detroit Future City that we have to do something in those neighborhoods right away. And that's what we really call a resilient neighborhood model. This idea of planting urban tree canopy, so an urban forest, planting intentional food gardens, but also sustainable gardens. When you think of gardens, you're thinking of kale and carrots. But sustainable gardens is what brings bees back. It's what brings butterflies back. It attracts birds. It cleans the air and the soil,

• 40:36Speaker 07

  and which actually supports clean water. So planting sustainable gardens alongside food gardens in neighborhoods that are also vulnerable for economic inequity is critically important.

• 40:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  Anika took me to visit several abandoned lots that have been given radical makeovers.

• 41:03Speaker 07

  This is so beautiful.

• 41:05Speaker 08

  It's gorgeous.

• 41:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  We strolled through a wooded area. What was once six vacant lots is now covered with trees, gardens, a fire pit, and a stage.

• 41:15Speaker 07

  So we've done about 55 vacant lots in Detroit. We've spent well over $1 million throughout the city.

• 41:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  To help residents envision what they can do with these vacant lots, Anika and Detroit Future City have a kind of catalog of options, like a choose-your-own adventure for landscaping.

• 41:37Speaker 07

  So, yeah, we provided the landscape design for them. And we worked together with the community for the design, for the kinds of trees that they wanted to see planted.

• 41:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  This neighborhood picked an urban forest design. Another, a meditation garden.

• 41:54Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 41:55Speaker 08

  This must have been a ton of work. Unbelievable.

• 41:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  I was particularly partial to the friendly fence design, which helps neighbors turn an empty lot between them into a rain garden that looks pretty and manages storm runoff with an optional pond.

• 42:10Speaker 08

  Look at your fish.

• 42:12Speaker 09

  Yeah, there's a lot of fish in here.

• 42:13Speaker 08

  So nice.

• 42:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  If you come from a city that has a lot of green spaces, Maybe creating community gardens doesn't seem like a big deal to you. But for these neighborhoods, it is transformative and reminiscent of better times.

• 42:29Speaker 10

  My relation to this neighborhood goes way back.

• 42:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Katrina Watkins. She grew up in the historically black area called Black Bottom.

• 42:38Speaker 10

  My family has been in this neighborhood since 1946. I grew up hearing the stories about Black Bottom and Paradise Valley from my dad. And he was like, blacks had businesses and, and people looked out for each other. And it was those type of stories that made me say, wow, we just really need to, to bring, you know, that back.

• 42:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Just a few years ago, Katrina and her dad took it upon themselves to mow all the vacant lots around them and try and spruce up the neighborhood.

• 43:07Speaker 10

  We just would go and start cutting down the overgrowth.

• 43:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  But then Katrina realized that more grants were becoming available. And with help from places like Detroit Future City, she could begin to strategically revitalize the neighborhood.

• 43:21Speaker 10

  And it just grew from, from there.

• 43:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  Katrina founded the Bailey Park Neighborhood Development Corporation, where she is now the CEO. The neighborhood's new centerpiece includes a playground and concert area.

• 43:35Speaker 10

  It is just a really green, chill environment where people feel safe to bring their children and families. We do live music events on the weekend where they can come and just enjoy it and, and feel the neighborhood.

• 43:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  There are now some 250 more trees in the park and all around, native plants at the edges.

• 43:54Speaker 10

  When you see the park and the, the greenery makes such a difference in the trees.

• 43:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 10

  And I had someone just tell me yesterday, you know, wow, that's in this neighborhood. I mean, people often feel that way.

• 44:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  And it's about more than beauty. Katrina recruits her neighbors to work on these projects by explaining how tree roots anchor the soil, helping to protect their homes from climate events like the massive floods that hit a couple of years ago.

• 44:21Speaker 10

  It's about educating residents on the importance of trees and native plants and how it clean, you know, makes the air cleaner.

• 44:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  It looks really good, actually. Back at the café. Anika explained to me that this slow but steady approach will help revitalize the city as a whole. All right, what's going to happen? Give me your short-term vision for Detroit.

• 44:45Speaker 07

  My short-term vision for Detroit is that we're going to see a lot more younger, middle-class, black and brown families that are moving into these neighborhoods. And these neighborhoods are going to have amazing green space, tree canopy, urban forest. It's going to look like a city that you just wouldn't expect. And not just in the nine-mile radius around downtown, but it's 139 square miles.

• 45:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is a short term. Like, how short term are we talking?

• 45:26Speaker 07

  I think you should come back. Give me five years.

• 45:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  OK.

• 45:30Speaker 07

  I think we'll have something to show you.

• 45:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  Anika Goss is the CEO of Detroit Future City. To see her full talk, go to ted.com. Many thanks to Katrina Watkins, CEO of the Bailey Park Neighborhood Development Corporation, too. To wrap up our show, we want to talk about an animal that's being forced to abandon its home. Polar bears, as you've likely heard, are leaving the Arctic Circle because of climate change and melting terrain. Conservationist Alyssa McCall explains that as the bears head south, that means that people need to learn what to do if a polar bear turns up in their backyard. Here she is on the TED stage.

• 46:18Speaker 11

  So what happens when ice bears start losing their ice? They get stuck on land and they get hungry. Polar bears use the frozen ocean for traveling, mating, and hunting their main prey, seals, specifically, high-calorie seal blubber. Polar bears can't outswim seals, so they use the sea ice to sneak up on unsuspecting prey. Polar bears need sea ice for sustenance and survival. Period. Polar bears want and need blubber, but they're still bears, so they will follow their noses to fill their tummies, whatever that takes. But it takes a lot. Just one polar bear needs a lot of seals, and just one seal is equal to about 74 snow geese,

• 47:02Speaker 11

  or 216 snow goose eggs. It's a big omelet. Or 3 million crowberries. This amount of food doesn't exist on the tundra in quantities great enough to sustain a population of blubber-hunting ice bears. So, when polar bears can't find good food to eat, just like people, they'll fill up on junk food. And for polar bears, junk food is human food. And for a hungry bear, the best late-night fast-food takeout can be their northern neighborhood's trash. But we have a saying in conservation: "A fed bear is a dead bear." And this has major implications for coexistence. This is a rising safety concern for humans, who are always the number-one priority.

• 47:47Speaker 11

  It's also a concern for the bears, because when a polar bear has a negative encounter with a human, it risks being taken out of the population in a defense kill, which is the legal killing of an animal to defend life or property. Luckily, non-lethal tools are available, and more are being developed, particularly in Canada, which is home to 2/3 of the world's polar bears. And one of the best testing grounds for tools is in the self-proclaimed polar bear capital of the world, Churchill, Manitoba. Churchill is home to the Western Hudson Bay population, some of the best-studied and most southern polar bears in the world. In this region, the ice-free season is lengthening, meaning these bears are on land longer and have less access to calories compared to their grandparents.

• 48:33Speaker 11

  This does not mean all the bears are starving to death. It means the females are having a harder time having cubs. The cubs are having a harder time becoming adults. And some bears have just moved elsewhere in search of better conditions. As a result, this population has declined from about 1,200 bears in the 1980s to just over 600 today. Almost 50%. Churchill is also home to about 900 people, but grows by thousands during tourist season. Polar bears are an economic keystone in Churchill, driving tourism and creating jobs. It's important Churchill protects them and their people, which they do through a wide variety of efforts. But one of the most interesting and effective is their waste management.

• 49:17Speaker 11

  Unsurprisingly, Churchill's garbage dump used to be outdoors, which was fine until it became a popular polar bear buffet. So this is a problem for the bears' health, but also because when they're on their way to the snack bar, they risk bumping into people. Polar bears are no more likely to actively hunt and kill people than black bears, but they are more likely to attack near towns, especially when food is nearby. So Churchill did the smart thing and they've just moved their garbage dump indoors. Now the bears can't even get to it. They also installed residential bear-resistant bins, so no polar bear with late-night munchies in this town gets any rotten food rewards. Churchill continues to evolve their waste management because it's key in coexistence, but not everywhere can do what Churchill's done, so we need more options.

• 50:02Speaker 11

  Just one example: GPS tracking. It can tell us where, when, and why polar bears move. It's critical data, but we've only successfully collared adult females. Adult males have these like pylon heads with necks thicker than their skulls, and they just pull collars right off. And then the subadults are still growing. And this is really too bad because the subadults or the teenagers often cause the most trouble. Big surprise.

• 50:28Speaker 11

  So we've started working with 3M, the sticky stuff company that makes Post-it notes. And they're helping us figure out how to stick a tracker to any bear's fur. These bur-on fur tags could be a conservation game changer, letting us temporarily tag any bear that comes too close to a community. And upon relocation, we can track that bear and intercept it before it gets too close. This could help reduce dumpster diving and reduce negative human bear encounters, keeping both species safer. So there's different coexistence tools being worked on for different needs across the North, but we can't talk about conservation without mentioning one of the most important tools of all: education. If you are going into bear country, polar or otherwise, please get bear aware.

• 51:12Speaker 11

  Stay together, secure your snacks, and carry a deterrent like flares or bangers or bear spray. Bear spray works, even in the cold and the wind. But finally, the number one most important coexistence tool we have is our willingness to cut carbon emissions and stop trapping so much heat in our atmosphere. But on that note, I have some optimism. Sea ice is very responsive to atmospheric temperatures. We can keep this habitat in the Arctic, but it will mean drastically reducing our emissions and eventually getting them to zero. Polar bears are fat, white, hairy canaries in the coal mine. Warning us to act now. The faster we switch to cleaner energies,

• 51:56Speaker 11

  the better we can protect future generations of polar bears and people. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried, but action is the best antidote to anxiety, and I'm working to ensure climate change doesn't separate our species for good. But until then, it's bringing us too close together. Coexistence is the only option. Let's make it safe for all. Thank you.

• 52:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's Alyssa McCall. She's the Director of Conservation Outreach at the nonprofit Polar Bears International. You can see her full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our episode, Abandoned Places. It was produced by Hersha Nahada, James Delahoussaye, Matthew Cloutier, and Wayne Kaplan-Levinson. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkempur, James Delahoussaye, Rachel Faulkner-White, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Katie Monteleone and Fiona Giran. Our audio engineers were Josephine Neonai, Neil Teavolt, Josh Newell, Gilli Moon, and Ted Meebain. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei.

• 53:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  Our partners at TED are Chrissy Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezho. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 53:16Speaker 05

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