In Episode 4 of The Overstory, writer Boyce Upholt finds adventure—and a new sense of self—during a harrowing paddling trip on the Mississippi River. We also talk with Bernie Krause about his decades-long work to audio record the natural world, and we hear from a Virginia couple fighting a fracked gas compressor station. Plus: our advice columnist, Mr. Green, explains what a "fat-berg" is.

Transcript

The Mighty Mississippi features a thousand mile paddle by Boyce Upholt, an interview with Bernie Krause who provides soundscapes for The Overstory, and a conversation with John and Ruby Laurie about the Atlantic Coast Piplien and its impact in Virginia. As always, we also include a Mr. Green segment, this time focusing on how to clean our you pantry.

(1:49) Paddling down the Mississippi

Jason Mark: The mighty Mississippi River. It's one of the most storied bodies of water in the country.

Documentary voice over: Down the great belly, 2,500 miles from Minnesota. Carrying every rivulets in brooks, creeks, and drills. Carrying all the rivers that run down 2/3 of the continent, the Mississippi runs to the gold.

Jason Mark: The one time frontier is today a commercial and industrial Thoreau affair, and for some people, it's also a place of adventure. For writer Boyce Upholt, it was a wilderness to explore and escape into. When he hit the river for a six-week expedition, he found himself in desperate need for what Thoreau called, "The tonic of wildness.” Here's the story.

John Ruskey: [while paddling] One of the most important jobs of the captain is to look out for the... the crew and make sure that you're doing everything you can to make things as easy as possible for all of the paddlers in the boat.

Boyce Upholt: That's the voice of John Ruskey. He's one of the best-known river guides in America. We're sitting along with the rest of our expedition team and a 30-foot canoe that John built by hand as we float down the Mississippi. There's nothing around but willow trees in the complex surface of the water.

John Ruskey: [while paddling] So you look across the face of the water, you see the ripply, ripply, ripply, ripply, and then all the sudden it changes and there's a flat part.

Boyce Upholt: This was spring 2017 and we were on a thousand mile journey from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico.

John Ruskey: [while paddling] Whenever there's a change in water motion, pay attention to it.

Boyce Upholt: John founded the first ever guiding service on the lower Mississippi in 1998. He called it "The Quapaw Canoe Company." Now, almost 20 years later, he was celebrating another accomplishment.

John Ruskey: [while paddling] Looking down the stream, you see the change of water streams. Looks like he's on our side--

Boyce Upholt: He recently finished River Gator, his mile-by-mile paddlers guide to this waterway.

John Ruskey: [while paddling] Oh boy.

Boyce Upholt: [while paddling] What would you do?

John Ruskey: [while paddling] Let's just stay steady for now. At ease. Let's float and let him do his thing. Keep us steered now. Keep us steered. Oh, you see that boil pushing out?

Boyce Upholt: John talks about the Mississippi as "the wilderness within." That's because it's surrounded by cities and farmlands, but it remains lush and beautiful. White sand beaches, sycamores, and willow trees, deer, and coyote, and beaver, and eagles.

John Ruskey: [while paddling] Looks like he is going as fast as he can, he's… slow water movement.

Boyce Upholt: My father had died eight months before this trip. He was a traveler, a scientist, an environmentalist. He was always looking for meaning and for wonder. He was always trying to take better care of this world. For me, the trip was an attempt to live up to his example. I found the trip was hard, physically hard. My muscles strained. My hands turned numb from all those hours clutching the paddle.

It was mentally hard too. I found myself sour and short-tempered. Maybe that's because I was thinking too much about this river's history. We built up dikes and levees, laid down concrete, retainer walls, all with dyer consequences on the river's ecology. It's selfish. We tried to protect our land from flooding, but in doing so we make the river less of itself.

[sound of wind picks up] The weather didn't help me. That spring was wind-blasted. Again and again we were stuck on islands, unable to leave due to dangerous gusts. We'd stay in these storm camps, as we called them, for nights at a time. One afternoon in one of those storm camps, we heard a loud, creaking bang. A tree had fallen and landed on an empty tent. Had its occupant been inside he'd probably be dead, but we pressed down stream, long, hard 50-mile days trying to beat the weather, trying to get to our end goal, trying to reach the Gulf of Mexico.

Just days after that tree, we turned on the radio to hear a grim sounding warning.

Emergency Warning: Exercise extreme precaution when outdoors to rein in such strong winds, and be especially aware of older trees. Hold onto ground, lightning is occurring with this storm. Lightning can strike 10 miles away from a thunderstorm. Seek a safe shelter inside a buildings.

Boyce Upholt: That night, the storms continued. At some point, while we would sleep, I heard someone calling out to John. "Bring a knife," the boy said. Another tree had fallen on top another tent, and this time someone was inside. The occupant was trapped and needed to be cut free, but she wasn't hurt. I lay on my back, watching the flare of lightning and listening to the smashing rain.

A bit later I heard voices returning to camp and received reassurance that everyone was fine, but the next morning John had sharp words for me. His voice was thin and angry, a tone I've never heard before. "Where were you last night?" he asked. "Why didn't you get up and help?" I didn't have a good answer. When he spoke to our whole crew he was gentler and in a more contemplative mood.

John Ruskey: I believe death was in our midst last night, and we narrowly avoided it ... by inches. That's a great gift, to be able to stand on that edge and look on the other side, and wake up the next morning and continue life as you know it.

Boyce Upholt: So we ended the trip. It was a hard ending. The weather had been a test, our last test, and a test that I failed. It turns out that I was just as selfish as the rest of America. I chose my own security over that of my crew.

When I got home, I thought a lot about wildness. I had figured it worked like a magic potion, just walk out into it and you become your best self. I learned though that this medicine works differently. The river showed me who I was. It was up to me to become that better self. That made me think about my father too. To follow in his footsteps required more than going on an adventure. It required real work.

John Ruskey: [while paddling] On three. One, two, three. One, two, three.

Boyce Upholt: Six months later when John re-launched another journey from that point where we had given up, I made sure I was there, a part of this new crew. It turned out to be beautiful autumn week, sunny and warm with no rain and little wind.

Finally, we made it. We reached the edge of the continent. But as I stood there looking at the breaking waves, I realized the real accomplishment had happened long before. I had already found the wilderness within.

For The Overstory, I'm Boyce Upholt.

Jason Mark: To read Boyce's full article, go to our website sierramagazine.org.

Folk music: It's a mighty long river that my poor body settled. Into the western wind, my raw hands have paddled. Now the color right with the shoes I was blown. I followed these waters wherever they may flow.

(9:55) Mr. Green on Cleaning Out Your Pantry

Jason Mark: Now, some advice on sustainable living from our own advice columnist, Mr. Green. Today, Tom in San Francisco asked about the most eco-friendly way to clean out your pantry.

Mr. Green: Hello. It's Mr. Green here in all his glory.

Tom: Hello, Mr. Green, this is Tom calling from San Francisco.

Mr. Green: Good to hear from you.

Tom: Good to hear from you. All right, I've got a question for you. I'm a professional organizer, and my clients, they're often asking me to purge the expired food items from their pantry, canned goods, bottles and stuff in jars.

(10:32) Tom: I was wondering, what's the most eco-friendly way of disposing of these items?

Tom: I know I can’t leave them unopened, and if I do that I can't throw them in the recycling bin. I think about pouring things down the drain, but I can't clog up our sewer systems and stuff like that. If I put them in the regular trash bin, things that are recyclable don't get recycled, so I'm kind of in a dilemma of what the best thing is for the situation.

Mr. Green: You're a professional organizer. What exactly do you do on this job? That sounds interesting.

Tom: Well, in many cases I'm helping people clear out their houses because they're preparing for a move, or perhaps, unfortunately if someone has passed away and just everything has to come out of the house.

Mr. Green: Oh, I see.

Tom: I am in this situation a lot where I have to get rid of items and I don't know where to put them.

Mr. Green: Well, I would recommend opening the can, dumping the stuff out into a compost bin or some other place where that food matter can get recycled, and then recycle the cans in your regular recycling bin. Now, a problem that I see here is the expiration date that appears on the cans.

Tom:  Yeah.

Mr. Green: You can actually exceed that expiration date. In other words, if it says January 1st, 1979, that's probably a little too late, but if it's a couple years from now you can probably still use the food. Something like 20 percent of the waste in this country is food, food that's just tossed out, and it's often tossed out either before its expiration date or not that long thereafter when it's still quite edible. I think anything you can do to work with that problem would be very good.

Tom: Yeah, I agree.

(12:17) Tom: I sometimes have a situation where I have excessive amount of oils, greases, baking grease and stuff like that, and I'm wondering what I should do in situations like with these kinds of materials.

Mr. Green: I would think that you would have to take the grease to a specific recycler that handles that sort of material. I would certainly not pour it down drain because that can really mess up a septic system or a sewer system quite badly, so you don't want to pour it in there. If you need any incentive to prevent doing that just think of this fatberg in London. I believe in it was 130 tons of fat that was trapped under the city of London in one of their ancient sewers.

Tom: I saw a picture of it online and I didn't want to come anywhere near that thing.

Mr. Green: Yeah, I would definitely contact the recycling folks in San Francisco and find out what you can do with the excess oil and grease. The last thing I would like to see is a fatberg in San Francisco, and it would be awful to hold you responsible for that fatberg.

Tom: Yeah.

Mr. Green: Thanks a lot, Tom.

Tom: Thank you, I've been reading your column for years. That's really great perspective and for me to talk to you.

Mr. Green: Send me another question some time.

Tom: I will, I got a hundred for you.

Mr. Green: Okay, great.

Tom: Well, thank you. Bye.

Mr. Green: Bye.

Jason Mark: That was Bob Sheldon, our own Mr. Green, our advice column for sustainable living. To ask your question, go online sierramagazine.org.

(12:48) The New Compressor Station in Virginia

Jason Mark: John and Ruby Laurie live in Buckingham County, Virginia in a town called Union Hill. It's a predominantly African-American community where Dominion Energy plans to build something called "the compressor station" as part of the proposed Atlantic Coastline. A compressor station is basically this giant engine that pumps gas through these really long natural gas pipelines.

In this case, the proposed pipeline would have only three compressor stations: one on each end and one in the middle where Ruby and John live. In January of 2019, the state of Virginia's Air Pollution Control Board approved construction of the compressor station. In this interview, which was recorded before that decision, Ruby and John talk about why they think their community was chosen for this station and what it means to them.

Ruby Laurie: My name is Ruby Laurie. I live in the beautiful town of Buckingham. Green when we have rain, very quiet, that's what I like. I'm originally from California, and I came here with my husband back in 2003.

John Laurie: My name is John W. Laurie, and I'm originally from here. Laurie Lane, less than a thousand yards from here, that's where I grew up. We knew all the neighbors, and we spent a lot of time in the woods walking and scouting. We knew where a lot of the creeks and the springs were. We were adventurous in a way. I still think about it now, and that's why I don't want to see our little creeks and our springs destroyed by this proposed compressor station.

It was back in the latter part of 2014 when we found out about it. Since that time, we were found more and more information as to the effect that they have on the communities and the people that's living close by. We're dealing with environmentally injustice because, here in Union Hill the community’s predominantly Black. They anticipated choosing this one in a predominantly Black area because they anticipate least resistance, but they have received more resistance than they had anticipated.

Ruby Laurie: I'm not just gonna sit down, and just roll over, and let them walk over us. You've worked all your lives, especially the people that live here, have worked all their lives to have this property to hand it down to their children and to their grandchildren. We have a heritage here also. We have African-American graves, we have-

John Laurie: Slave graves around, and not too long ago we found one that was a slave cemetery, probably about a mile and a half away. I look at those grave sites and I can imagine the hell those people went through to make someone else rich, slave labor. Through our life I always been some questions unanswered in my mind and I always pondered things. Why is this condition like this? Why do some think that they're so superior and others so inferior?

Jason Mark: Although the compressor station was approved, the pipeline's not a done deal yet. A federal court has put on hold all construction on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. John, Ruby, and the others their in Union Hill, they're still fighting.

(17:59) Exploring the Sounds of Nature

Jason Mark: Back in the 1960s, Bernie Krause spent most of his time in music recording studios working as an electronic musician and an audio engineer for bands. You probably heard of some of him, The Stones, The Doors, Van Morrison. Then one day, Bernie went into Muir Woods National Monument with his recorder, and he kinda never left.

Bernie Krause: When I turned on that recorder and heard the sound it changed my life, and I decided right then and there that was what I was gonna do if I could figure out a way to do it.

Jason Mark: From that moment on, Bernie ditched the studio and the synthesizer, and started making recordings and music from wild nature. First, for sound design in movies like Apocalypse Now, and then for musical compositions, and for a growing archive that's preserving the natural sounds of places that are quickly changing or even becoming extinct.

 [Bird sounds] Bernie's a fascinating guy. He's like this walking encyclopedia of the sounds of wild nature. He's recorded wild nature in places all around the world, from Costa Rica to California to Kenya. It was really amazing to get to go to his home in Northern California and spend a morning talking to him. Here's a little bit of our conversation.

(19:09) Jason Mark: Did you grow up spending time outside?

Bernie Krause: No.

(19:12) Jason Mark: Where did you grow up?

Bernie Krause: I grew up in Detroit and New York. My parents were terrified of animals. We never had one. We had a goldfish once, didn't last very long. I grew up terrified of the natural world and animals in general. I decided when I went into Muir Woods that day that I survived just fine, and dedicated the rest of my life to doing that. Also, natural soundscape, more than anything, has had a healing component to my life that I don't think I could've gotten otherwise, much more than music.

I have a terrible case of ADHD. Well, I could only hold still for one minute at first without making a lot of noise, scratching myself, or moving around, or shuffling my feet, or poking at insects and stuff like that. So, I didn't have a way of calming down until I realized that I was making a lot of noise on these tapes, and I had spent a lot of time editing the noise out. So I started out with maybe one minute of silence. Then I could do two, and then I moved up to five, and then ten, and then a whole reel of tape. I could hold still for a whole reel of tape. That was amazing to me.

(20:28) Jason Mark: So it started out it sounds as sort of a personal endeavor, an artistic endeavor, but then eventually becomes a real scientific endeavor.

Bernie Krause: When recording of natural sounds first started in Germany, the model was always based on single individual sounds. There's a library at Cornell, a very large library based on that model. You can go out onto the field, and abstract these birds from the context of the sound around them and just get single, individual birds, and get these large libraries of individual sounds decontextualized. Well, when you fragment the natural world that way you can never put it back together again, 'cause the birds have different dialects for each habitat that they're in. I mean, if you hear a White-crowned Sparrow from Alaska it's very different from the White-crowned Sparrow here in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. As a musician, I was hearing this thing as a whole orchestra rather than individual sounds taken out of context.

[soundscape]

Bernie Krause: When I went out to record an after cut, I heard these organizations of sound. The frogs were in one niche, the birds were in another, the hyenas were in another, the elephants in another. Each of them had established their own frequency niche. When one stopped vocalizing, another would come in and fill in that part of frequency spectrum. It's really pretty remarkable.

[soundscape]

(22:06) Jason Mark: This is the biophony, and the biophony is?

Bernie Krause:The biophony is the collective sound that's created by all vocal organisms in the given habitat of one time. These natural sounds. I exclude humans because, humans who created our own signal chorus, which I call "the anthropathany", human-created sound.This is a recording that I made in the Amazon just north of Manaus.

[soundscape]

Bernie Krause: I was recording the biophony when a military jet flew very low overhead.

[soundscape]

Bernie Krause: It caused the insects and the frogs that were vocalizing as part of that biophony, to become still.

(23:14) Jason Mark: So we're really, with our constant racket, we're really crowding out some of the noises of the natural world.

Bernie Krause: Yes, and we're doing it in many ways. Not only with the noise that we generate, but also with issues around global warming, habitat destruction. These habitats are gone. No longer can you hear any of the sounds in these habitats. Altogether silent, where they've been so radically changed by human endeavor that the soundscape, the biophony can no longer be heard at any of its original form.

Jason Mark: So you've been doing this basically now fifty years. You're gathering all these hours, but then also, you start to create enough of a library, enough of a companion, you kind of then have a baseline. You have, really, before and after.

(24:10) Jason Mark: How many of the places you started recording fifty years ago have changed?

Bernie Krause: I have 5,000 hours of material, different habitats, marine and terrestrial, from all over the world, and fully, 50 percent of that now comes from habitats that no longer exist. We're not talking about individual animals now.

Jason Mark: Sure, but places.

Bernie Krause: In 1988, I was recording in the Sierras in Lincoln Meadow up near Yuba pass, and we were told that there would be no environmental impact from the new model that there were using called "selective-logging", taking out a tree here and there. As I went, I said, "Fine, let me record, if you don't mind," and, "I just want to record before and after," and they said, "No problem. There won't be any issue."

In 1988, in June of 1988, I went up and recorded in Lincoln Meadow and captured the soundscape at that particular spot in time.

Jason Mark: All right, this is now. Here's the before.

Bernie Krause: Here's the before.

[soundscape with lots of birds]

Bernie Krause: A year later, I came back and recorded in the same spot, same time of year. To the eye, you couldn't see a tree or a stick out of place. Here's what it sounded like a year later.

[soundscape with limited birds and hammering]

Bernie Krause: What I found later was that the logging company did a sneaky thing, which they do often, that what is visible to the human eye, in other words, about 200 yards of trees were left standing. Beyond that 200 yards, they clear cut it.

Jason Mark: Yeah.

(26:04) Jason Mark: You mentioned that it takes longer today to capture the same amount of biophony as it used to, I don't know, let's say 30, 40 years. Why is that? Is it, again, because there's more human noises?

Bernie Krause:  When I first began in 1968, it used to take me 10 hours to get one hour of usable material for a program. Now, it takes me at least a thousand hours, and in many cases twice that, to get one hour of usable material because of all the human noise, because habitats are not as rich sounding. They're not as dense and diverse as they were, and if I want to get the recording of a habitat I have to spend a lot of time there.

(26:47) Jason Mark: Do you think we're, just as sort of a society, becoming deaf to the natural world?

Bernie Krause: I think we're tone deaf. We're a visual culture. Almost all the language that we have to describe the world around us, the physical world around us, comes from a visual perspective. It's almost none that comes from an acoustic perspective, and I'm trying to change that.

(27:15) Jason Mark: I love your line, you say, you point out, again, “Everybody says, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’ but a soundscape's worth a thousand pictures."

Bernie Krause: Sure.

Jason Mark: What does that mean?

Bernie Krause: Sound gives us a sense of place, if it's recorded right, that nothing else can. No picture is going to remind you of a place as much as a soundscape does. When I listen to these soundscapes, and I've got over a thousand of them, the soundscape of the desert is so different from the soundscape of say, Alaska, or a marine environment, or a place in Africa where we recorded mountain gorillas, or something else. They all stand out as being really unique, and you always hear something different. It always takes you back to that place, and you're always experiencing another part of that place that you never heard before every time you hear it because, physically you're different. You're emotionally different, your state is different, and so you perceive different things out of that sound that you never would've got from a picture. I just think that that's a really good analogy why sound is so important.

(28:29) Jason Mark: For someone who's listening to The Overstory right now who's not an audio engineer, who's not a bioacoustician, there are ways right now with our phone, right?

Jason Mark: I mean, what would you recommend for someone say, wanted to capture the soundscape of their backyard bird feeder or the national or regional park that they love? Presumably, lots of people can do this now.

Bernie Krause: Do it, and what you'll find is, you'll find out how much noise there is in your environment, because when I go out and work with kids in schools I give them an assignment to go out and record an American Robin. Sure enough, there's a lawnmower in the background, or a motorcycle going by, or a bus or car, plane flying overhead. I say, "That's a really nice recording, but I also hear these other sounds and they really disturb me. I just wanna hear a robin." When they get how much noise, they begin to tune their ears differently to the world around them, and that's what I try to get people to do. That's the whole objective of this work.

Jason Mark: That's not just tuning your ears, that's really tuning your whole perspective.

Bernie Krause: No question about it, yeah.

Jason Mark: Bernie Krause, thank you so much for talking to us. I really appreciate it.

Bernie Krause: My pleasure.

Jason Mark: That was Bernie Krause. You can listen to more of Bernie's soundscapes at wildsanctuary.com. Now we'll leave you with one final filled recording. This is Sugarloaf Mountain in Napa County, California.

[soundscape]

Notes and Thank Yous

The Overstory is produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects Media with help from Danielle Roth. Our theme music is by Jeff Brodsky. Allison Kagle has been our editorial fellow. We're really gonna miss her and we wish her all the best. The clip you heard from John and Ruby Laurie was recorded as part of a storytelling project produced here at the Sierra Club called "The Land I Trust."