Hydrology, the Lumbee Tribe, and Kombucha with Dr. Ryan Emanuel

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Ryan Emanuel,  about Hydrology, the Lumbee Tribe and Kombucha. Ryan is an associate professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and was formerly a professor in the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University.  He is a hydrologist who also studies environmental justice and Indigenous rights in North Carolina.  Emanuel is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe. 

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Showtimes:
1:54 Nic & Laura talk about integrating a planner
8:17  Interview with Dr. Ryan Emanuel Starts
11:25  Hydrology
16:57 The Lumbee Tribe
27:56  Kombucha

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This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Dr. Ryan Emanuel at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-emanuel-49957510/

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Chapters

• 1:54 Nic & Laura talk about integrating a planner
• 8:17 Interview with Dr. Ryan Emanuel Starts
• 11:25 Hydrology
• 16:57 The Lumbee Tribe
• 27:56 Kombucha

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-transcribed

[Intro]

Laura 
Hello and welcome to NPR with your favorite environmental nerds Nic and Laura. On today's episode, Nic and I discuss integrating a planner into your daily routine. We talked to Dr. Ryan Emanuel about hydrology, the Lumbee, tribe and kombucha. And finally there can be rivers and lakes in the ocean. Underwater lakes and rivers form on the bottom of the ocean. When sea water seeps up from the seafloor dissolves the saltwater layer around it and collects in the resulting depressions. Incredibly, these underwater lakes and rivers have shoreline surfaces and even waves.

Nic 
Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I saw this like on TV once and I'm like what is happening right now? So it's water in water. So it's like a underwater wave is the weirdest like they have shores and like the water will lap up on shores. Even though it's in water already. It's the weirdest thing in the world. So that is interesting. And I love that you saw it on TV One time. Yeah. The thing we're eating

[NAEP Event News]

Nic
NAEP  is still accepting abstracts for the 2023 annual conference and training symposium in Phoenix, Arizona from May 7 to 1020 23. showcase your work to an audience of national and Arizona environmental professionals that is 2023 conference. Abstracts can be submitted for oral presentations, posters, workshops, and special sessions of national and Arizona concern. Please check this out at www.naep.org.  We appreciate all of our sponsors and they will keep this show going. If you'd like to sponsor the show, please head on over to www.environmental professionalsradio.com. Check out the sponsor form for details. Let's get to our segment.

[Nic & Laura talk about integrating a planner]

Nic
well actually, I did I got your your planner mail. So thank you for sending that. I am officially gonna start using it the coming week because I wanted to get the birthday weekend. Yeah. And there's a few other things going on too. So I just like I'm like I want to get this done and give it the proper perspective deserve. So

Laura  
yes. does take a lot of people get it and they don't put any like you need like an hour at least delve into it and get started. Otherwise it just gonna stare at you.

Nic 
Right and that's so Okay. Well, I mean, that's kind of what I want to ask about. What are some tips like when you have a planner right when you have when you're working with something like that? Like you're trying to be better attacking the day so to speak. And you want to use a planner for that. What are some actual tips that you would give just off the bat like for anyone trying to do any kind of planning. You mentioned doing things the day before, which I think is a really good idea because it's the first thing in the morning I get is phone calls. I got woken up by phone call today. So yeah, whatever what other What other advice do you have?

Laura 
Yeah, definitely. The first one is planning with David day before it can change in the morning but at least you have something that you're like, Okay, I can start here. I mean, the other thing is really like if you're using a planner, is it the right one? For you? Someone may have given it to you. You may have just picked one off the shelf because you're like, oh, I need a planner. But not all planners are built the same and not everybody's brains work the same. So you really have to figure out what what works for you. The one I've designed is the process that works for me and I assume there's a handful of other people out there who will work for them to write. So the other ones that specific people have designed the same thing. They have built something that works for them, doesn't mean it's going to work for you. You know, your best friend can be like, Oh my god, this is the best thing ever. And you're like I don't understand it. So, you know, try different ones out try what works for you stick to whatever that is. But that's the other thing is sticking with it. It's a habit. It's not something I think people think like oh, I'm gonna start writing my stuff down and all of a sudden I'm gonna have magical results. It's habits. You have to keep working at it. You still have to put the energy and effort into it.

Nic  
So it's kind of like starting a routine at the gym is what you're telling me. So there's my biggest fear with these with planners and I think maybe they just haven't found the right one yet is that's what happens. I'm really great at it for like, two weeks, three weeks, maybe even a little longer. And then it just you know, gets very busy and I'm like I didn't do it this day. I'll do it tomorrow. And that's how it starts with my with my ATD brain for example. So that's why

Laura  
you have to stick to the habit because and I always I have this stepwise process for making something a habit. The first thing you do is a thing. I picked up a planner, and I'm doing a thing and it's not it's not tied to anything. It's loosey goosey out there. The next step is making it part of a system so it's something you already do like brushing your teeth. Typically brushing your teeth is something you do after you wake up after you take your shower like whoever everyone has a different way but you do it in some sort of order because it just I just do it you don't have to think about when do I brush my teeth. So the planner has to be the same thing you have to do I do my planner at the end of the day before I close out and go home every day. Yeah, if you start falling off of that out it goes right know the one time that you forget to brush your teeth is because your routine changed, something happened. And so to make it stick, you've got to pull it in and integrate it with something else. So if it's you know 530 set alarm on your phone, maybe it's that maybe it's you know, before I check out with the office, whatever it is going to tie it to something

Nic 
Yeah, I mean that makes sense because that's kind of like one of the cores concepts for some you know, so I do have like the Add Bryant like I really genuinely have it and one of the core concepts for me is routine, like routine is extremely important. And so, like just even how I make coffee every morning I don't forget how to make coffee because I make it do it the same way. I'm like, I wake up I go downstairs, I I do it. That's like the first thing I do. Because it's kind of like excited. I'm like, oh, and then I do a next task because by the time I'm done with that, then the coffee's gonna be done and I could drink coffee and start working. Do you know that? That's the kind of stuff that basically tricked my brain into doing so I see where you're coming from there.

Laura  
Right. So there's something you already do daily tie it to that. So if it's making your coffee chat, read your read through your planner, whatever you wrote for you the night before, while you're making coffee, or once coffees finished, sit down and drink my coffee for sips of my coffee or with my planner, something like that.

Nic 
Okay. Makes sense. Yeah. and report back on I do but I always love the idea because it's good to be organized. And even when you have a process you have a way of doing things. There's always ways that you can you can say I don't think I'm disorganized. But I can always be a little bit more organized. You know, especially when the busy time of year like it is right now for me. For those that work on the federal calendar. This is probably the busiest time of year. And it's when you need it the most and it's also when it's the hardest to do. So it's kind of a really interesting juxtaposition. I wanted to start at last week I wanted to bring it up last week, but I was working so hard is like yeah, if you're gonna get a minute.

Laura 
It's really good to start when when you have the time because it's like anything else. If you decided tomorrow that you want to learn how to play the piano starting that is not going to be the best time is not going to be when you're in the throes of 1000 Other things you know because you want to get on with Yeah, with like running or something where it's so much of a habit that you miss it when you're not doing it. So like for me writing this planner every single day, a day I miss it. I skipped one of the monthly worksheets once and I was like oh my god, like it felt like no meat for me. It was more like OCD. I gotta go back and fill that out even though that was three months ago.

Nic 
Yeah, that's good. I like that. And yeah, I can say it's, it's you know, sometimes people were like, you know, when you commute, we used to, I guess put on my already commute anymore, but that was one right. If you're taking public transit, right. It's a great example of a great time to use to plan your rest of your day making lists or doing planners or whatever it is. So yeah, that was something that I liked doing back in the day, over 100 years ago when I was working in an office Yeah, that was pretty. I like doing that. But yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm excited to try. Yeah,

Laura 
I'm excited to see how it works out for you.

Nic 
Alright, cool. Let's get to our interview.

Laura
Sounds good.

[Interview with Dr. Ryan Emanuel Starts]

Nic
Hello, and welcome back to EPR. Today we have Dr. Ryan Emanuel on the show. Ryan is an associate professor in the Nikolas School of the Environment at Duke University, and was formerly a professor in the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University. He is a hydrologist who also studies environmental justice and Indigenous Rights in North Carolina, and he is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe. welcome Ryan.

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Thanks happy to be here.

Nic 
So, in your bio, you said that you were proselytized into hydrology, and I'm really glad I said that which doesn't really conjure up quite an image in my head. It was pretty great story. Can you tell us how you got into hydrology this?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Yeah, I'm happy that you brought that up. And it is an entertaining and weird and interesting story. So when I was finishing my senior year of high school, I was kind of debating what what I wanted to do with my life or at least with the summer before I went to college, and sometime in the spring, a man knocked on my door one Sunday. Afternoon and he literally said do you want to be a hydrologist? Turns out this man was the Office Chief for the western North Carolina field headquarters of the US Geological Survey and on the side he managed rental properties. One of the rental properties that he managed was in my neighborhood. And he happened to read about me in the newspaper back when newspapers used to publish lists of scholars at different high schools and they would give your parents names and your home address and all your house or he recognized the address as a street where he managed a rental house. He was looking for some help for the summer. And he thought he would come pay me a visit and he did and I had no idea what hydrology was other than the literal translation of water science and I said sure, that sounds like fun. And so the Monday after I graduated from high school, I was being sworn in as a federal employee and immediately got to work washing bottles, learning how to stream gauge, collecting data, QA QC and all this stuff. And the rest is history.

Nic 
That's amazing. To figure out like how awesome or just for the summer, did you get to do it throughout college?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
I came back and work in the same office for three summers. So I had a lot of experience in that particular office and then I spent a semester during my undergraduate years working and then the North Carolina district headquarters and I think is now something like the South Atlantic Water Science Center in Raleigh, working for the lakes and estuaries unit, doing calibration of water quality instruments and assimilating data into the USGS database before all of that stuff was automated. So lots of different stuff.

[Hydrology]

Nic  
Yeah, you've seen quite a few changes, I guess in the in the hydrology world as a result, I guess how Yeah. How has data kind of influenced the way we do research in this field?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Yeah, that's a really good question. So because I started out my career working with the USGS, I learned the lesson early on that in water science, high quality data is of utmost importance. Right? And of course, I've learned since then lots of other things are terribly important. as well. But that that USGS athletic, we're gonna collect the highest quality data possible and for all of our resources into into excellent data collection and stewardship that is stuck with me. And so I I continue to use USGS data I have throughout my career in various ways. I use it in the classroom to teach students just the basics of things like stage discharge relationships for understanding string flow, but I also use it in my in my research, we analyze 1000s and 1000s of records to look for things like trends in streamflow because of climate change, or land use change and things like this. But for a lot of hydrologists, these high quality datasets are sort of those are the bedrock of everything that we do.

Nic 
And bedrock is no pun intended, right? Yeah. So you started in geology, you got a geology degree first and then hydrology. Was there a reason behind picking one over the other initially, I know they were kind of well together but why geology for

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
when I was an undergraduate, I think the University of Arizona was the only institution in the US that offered a degree in hydrology. So most of the hydrologists from my era were a whole degrees in something else. So geology was the closest thing at my institution to water science. In fact, my undergraduate mentor was a groundwater hydrologist. And he was based in the geology department. So it was basically a choice for me between geology or biology. And where I went to school at Duke most of the biology students were pretty mad. And so it was was not a good fit for me. But you know, in graduate school, I moved into an environmental sciences department at the University of Virginia. The Environmental Sciences comprise hydrology, geoscience, ecology and atmospheric science. And so that appealed to me because while there wasn't it wasn't a formal concentration in hydrology, hydrology was a focal area within the department, and I didn't have to go all the way to Arizona to get a degree called hydrology.

Nic  
Yeah, and I think it's served you pretty well, obviously. So you've been in academia for quite some time. Is that the direction you thought you go when you start accounts?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Now, when I started college, I had very little direction when I started other than knowing I wanted to do something related to science. I did not see a lot of role models other than the folks that I worked with at the USGS so I was imprinted early on with a hydrology bug. Not only was I interested in science, but I wanted to do something that got me outdoors. I did not want to work in a laboratory, because I knew myself well enough to know that that would not be a good fit. And indeed, when I took organic chemistry I ended up going to the hospital and getting stitches. We know I've heard that story. I always knew that wanted to be on the field. And so from the get go, my experience in hydrology taught me that this is a place where you can go out and work in the field, but you also can do some computational work and sort of exercise both of those interests.

Nic 
Yeah, and, you know, working for the Nikolas school, the environments one of the most prestigious environmental schools in the country. So what are you working on and what do you like about the work that you're doing? Yeah, I'm

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
really excited. About being in the Nicklaus school because it's a place to cultivate a diverse interests that I have. I'm still really interested in basic questions and hydrologic science. So right now my group is using stable isotopes of water to look at patterns of water storage inside of trees. Yeah, we know that trees store lots of water and that has implications for the water cycle in various places, and at different times, but a lot of numerical and conceptual models treat that water in the tree sort of as a black box and so we're trying to unpack the black box and understand how long water spins in different tree tissues at different times of the year. And what are the implications not only for tree health, but also for the evapo transpiration and the broader water cycle. So that's one of the newer projects that I'm working on at Duke and that's in the side of my work that kind of lives in the Duke River Center, which is a laboratory facility that I share with other faculty members in the Nicholas skull and in the department of biology, but the cool thing about Duke is that I'm also able to work on some of the other issues that are really important to me. I'm interested in questions around environmental justice and indigenous rights and how they intersect with places like Eastern North Carolina, where we have large American Indian populations. And a lot of the issues related to pollution and environmental degradation.

[The Lumbee Tribe]

Laura 
But you were talking about a year work with social justice and the tribes and you're a member of the Lumbee Tribe, which shares the name with the Lumbee River in North Carolina. How has that shaped your career?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel  
Yeah, so thanks for bringing that up. One of the things that I heard throughout my childhood and youth and I know people who come from tight knit communities hear this as well. But in the Lumbee community, there's a strong ethic of your purpose is to go off and get a good education so that you can come back and help your people. And so my educational path and my career paths, while they might not have been wholly shaped by that, I think they were certainly informed by didactic and so when I thought about pursuing an academic career, one of the considerations that I had to make was how is this going to help Lumbee people how's it gonna help other tribal nations, other indigenous peoples? And so I'd say that, perhaps above anything else that sort of influence my decisions around what I study, what kind of career I pursued and sort of how that how I envision the impact of my work.

Laura 
Awesome. And we were talking before we started about your involvement with the tribe in how far does your involvement go with the tribe? Do you sit on a advisory committee or anything like that?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel  
Right now, today, I don't have any formal responsibilities in the Lumbee Tribe. The tribe has a constitutionally organized government, and they're sort of three branches of government modeled after the ones that we're all familiar with. And so I i have no formal role. I'm not a tribal leader and not elected to any office, but I am, I am called on occasionally by people who are in those roles. If they have questions about specific environmental issues, pollution, climate change, development, things like this. I do get called on regularly to answer these kinds of questions. And that I think that one of my duties as a London citizen is to be as responsive as possible. And so I do try to make myself available to answer to meet with tribal leaders and with community members, and to discuss the questions that they have and I can't always offer answers, because I'll just be honest with you, like rarely do the questions. Focus on the exact topics that I study, right. I don't think I've never had a question to date that focuses on tree water storage or evapo transpiration. I think one of the privileges of being in academia is one I have the freedom to move into those areas if I can make scholarly connections to my work, but also I'm around so many people who work on these topics and it's really easy for me to say, You know what, I know somebody who works on that. And I think they may have the answer to this question. And so that those are fun conversations, because I want to know the answer to that question as well. And being in a place like Duke and formerly at a place like NC State, I had access to people who knew a lot about a lot of these different topics. And so that was really rewarding for me. And I hope that it was sort of a bridge and that's one way that see myself today as sort of a bridge between all of these resources that the university has and some of the needs that our tribal communities have.

Laura 
That's nice. That's great. That you can do that. You mentioned to before that you didn't really have role models in the space when you were looking to get into this so much. How does that impact how you operate?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Yeah, so today, I'm cognizant of my own experience and I work with groups like the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, which is a national group on mentoring programs specifically for American Indian and Alaska Native and indigenous students who want to pursue careers in sciences or even want to go into academia. So we have programs that are dedicated to mentoring and those spaces, and so I participate in those. We also do things that do like bring high school students up to visit during the summer and show them what it looks like to be a hydrologist or an environmental scientist just so that students know that these careers are are available and there's something out there besides being a physician or being an attorney. These are incredibly important careers, right. And we need lots of physicians and attorneys, but we also need environmental scientists.

Laura  
Yeah, and we also need people doing environmental justice work and you're doing that too. So can you talk a little bit about what you do in that area?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Yeah, so several years ago, the North Carolina commission of immunotherapy, which is a statewide body made up of representatives from all of the tribes in North Carolina, as well as some other indigenous organizations formed an environmental justice committee, and they invited me to come alongside and advise that committee, I'm not on the commission. Again, it's made up of elected tribal leaders and other officials, but they also have the ability to pull in outside experts and so they invited me to come alongside and together we learned about environmental justice principles and concepts. And we even had opportunities to speak in to specific issues, large environmental impact statements and implications for tribes to point out things like procedural injustice is which are really important in Indian country. A lot of tribes have statutory rights to consultation with the federal government, but state recognized tribes and tribes like the Lumbee that are governed by 1950s era federal legislation they don't have those statutory rights. And so it's important to remind and remind decision makers that even though there's no legal obligation for you to engage with these tribes in the decision making process, it's still incredibly important and these are all the reasons why. And so a lot of my environmental justice work is kind of laying out the reasons why, and thinking about ways to get over the barriers of what happens when tribes are not engaged in these important decisions about their lands and waters and communities.

Laura 
Yeah, I think that's important. It's interesting, you know, as you were talking about the naming of the Lumbee River and where it started, and it's almost like, that was the 1800s version of now. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, it's like we're trying to figure out like, what is the real story, and how do we be inclusive, but it just has, it's the same sort of same problem.

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Yeah. And a lot of the issues that we commonly classifies environmental justice issues, and if we want to unpack that it's sort of racial and socio economic disparities in the distribution of pollution, environmental harms, but also in the distribution of amenities like urban green space and things like this. So these issues are tightly coupled to a long chain of historical processes that at some point in the not too distant past, are bound up with issues of institutionalized racial discrimination, genocide against indigenous peoples, and lots of other practices that are oppressive and marginalizing for people. So even though we aspire to do better, we still have to reckon with the fact that a lot of the ways that hazards are distributed today are kind of based on these these very racist principles that were applied for a long time.

Laura 
Right. Well, thank you for doing that work. And you've won some awards for doing that type of work, including 2019, nice D wing, International Environmental Justice Award. Are there any others that stand out as ones that you're pretty proud of?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Oh, thanks for that. I was excited to also get an award from the United Tribes of North Carolina, which is a it's an organization of all the tribes for service to Indian education, because I'm an educator first and foremost, a lot of the framing for my work is around education. So while I do research on environmental justice, and I do advocacy work around environmental justice, mean, you could you could categorize a lot of what I do is is education, formal and informal education, because a lot of the communities that I work with, whether they're Lumbee communities or other tribal communities or non Indigenous communities, they know that something is wrong. But they don't they don't have the policy language or the lingo or they don't speak the regulatory speak. And so a lot of my work is education around that. Yes. What this is a valid is a real experience. We all know this. But these are policy tools that are designed to step into that space and to assist and to help you articulate your concerns in ways that regulators and bureaucrats can understand. So I was happy about that award. And then two years ago, I spent a year at the National Humanities Center, which was an amazing, incredible experience, even though it was mostly virtual. It was a sabbatical fellowship, where I had the freedom to work on a book length project, justice and indigenous rights in eastern North Carolina.

Nic 
Yeah, that's really cool. And I guess, are there challenges with doing that? I imagine it's not as simple as just walking up to the you know, someone in Congress and be like, Hey, this is what you should be doing. And then you're done. Right? It's got to be a little more challenging than that. Yeah.
_______
Nic 
As just walking up to someone in Congress and be like, Hey, this is what you should be doing. And then you're done. Right? It's got to be a little more challenging than that. Yeah.

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Yeah. Because I come from a natural science background. I walked into this completely naive thinking that yeah, that's what we do you identify, identify the problem. I did this numerical analysis that shows the disparity exists. Here you go fix it. The actual problems come into play when you have to decide among all of these competing factors, right for making decisions, making decisions. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve a boil down to questions of equity. We all know this. And so I spend now a lot of time kind of thinking about what kind of communication efforts have to accompany that data analysis and all of these other kind of wonky things that I won't say that I'm good at it, but I do read in this area, and I've looked at people who are doing work and related areas like climate communication. There's very important scholarship that's happening in there about ways people behave and altering our behavior and things like that. So I'm cognizant of all that.

[Kombucha]

Laura 
Well, that's awesome. It's really great to have you doing that kind of work. We're going to switch gears a little bit though and ask you about you and things you do for fun. So you have a hobby that is different than ones we've had on before which is great. And so I we love asking this question. You make kombucha, so I'm curious when you started doing that, I know you've been up to lots and lots of it so far, and then when did you receive your first kombucha baby and I forget what that thing is called.

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
I am a kombucha big Shinato and the backstory is that years and years ago, I had a soft drink addiction and then I cut it cold turkey. And several years ago, I learned that there was this effervescent injury you know, I didn't have high fructose corn syrup and and it purportedly had some health benefits. I just liked the taste of it. I don't really know anything about purported health benefits. But several years ago now, maybe four or five years ago, a postdoc at NC State gave me my first SCOBY and sent me some directions on an internet website about how to brew kombucha. And so I started then and it really ramped up during the pandemic, probably around the same time that everyone was making sourdough and all. The early days of the pandemic, I decided that that kombucha was going to be my thing, and so it continued little by little I had a little logbook that was kind of it was my pandemic diary. You know, in the early days, I was like this is for posterity because, you know, it's gonna be a global catastrophe and somebody will find this someday. Morbid, morbid thought, but over time, it morphed. Into a fairly systematic kombucha recipe law. I would tweak things and make notes and all of this and so I really liked making kombucha out of locally sourced ingredients. And my friends, the CO Harry tribe, have given my wife in the cons and tons of elderberries. My wife bless her is an awesome Cook, and she boil a bunch of those elderberries down into lots of syrup. And so for a long time, we had elderberry syrup to make kombucha and then the supply switch from elderberries to muscadine grapes and we make muscadine grape kombucha. I've even tried making tea with poplar bark that goes that's a that's a culturally important medicinal plant the inner bark of tulip poplar. So I I never made the tea strong enough that you could actually taste a difference and say this is popular bar but you know I've got some I will have label bottles sometimes that say this one's poplar bark.

Nic 
There were there were old ends you will still have your Recipe Book for others to find I love That's

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
right. And I'm closing in on 1000 pints bottled so far.

Nic 
That's really impressive.

Laura 
That's pretty good enough to like, you gotta keep it going. Right? Because you have to. I don't know how it works exactly. But yeah, yeah.

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
If you want to say the SCOBYs you you just gotta keep making us like sourdough. These keep multiply. So I'm always looking for people to gift SCOBYs to or they go in the compost.

Nic 
You mentioned that you you were at NC State and then Duke so this is the most important question the interviewer who do you work for during basketball season? Like Wait, where do your loyalties lie here?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
That's an easy question. I did my undergraduate I do. So I I am Deep Blue in theory.

Nic 
Oh, so you worked at NC State as the Blue Devil? I did. Yeah. Oh, man. That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, yeah, gosh, this is basketball country. So that's a that's a dangerous game you played?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
It is and now I've got a kid in school at Chapel Hill. So I have sort of peripheral ties to the three ACC scores in the triangle.

Nic 
That's great, man. Yeah, the last tournament the last game coach cat, man, what a what a way to go. Well, you

Laura 
also have some pretty important events coming up in the next couple of weeks that commemorate the environmental justice movement in Warren County. So do you want to tell us about some of those?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Yeah, so I don't know if your subscribers and listeners all know this. But the modern environmental justice movement has a birthplace in eastern North Carolina, in Warren County, and it was some events back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That culminated in the creation of a landfill to dispose of PCB contaminated soils and predominantly African American community of Afton which is outside of Warren to North Carolina, and September 17 2022 will be the major commemoration of the 40th anniversary of protest and social movements that happen near the entrance of this PCB landfill. And so they're gathering people who are part of that movement, and they're inviting the next generation of environmental justice folks to come out. They're going to hold this and Warrington in Warren County, North Carolina on Saturday, the 17th of September.

Nic  
That's really cool. Do you have a role there as well? Are you going to be able to go

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
I'm planning to attend I have no formal role in organizing or carrying out the activities Duke has a commemoration as well. I think it's the Thursday before on September 15. Duke Chapel is hosting Reverend Ben Chavis, who was involved in the movement 40 years ago, and Katherine Coleman flowers, who works on environmental justice and received a MacArthur Genius Award. The two of them will be in conversation at the chapel on the evening of September 15.

Nic 
Wow, that's really cool. Yeah, I'm glad to get to experience that and yeah, like I say, I think it's good for a lot of people to know that and, yeah, the more the merrier. I'm assuming that others can go out and just show up. So you are in the area. Please do stop by and, you know, it's interesting, like I think, you know, we were talking earlier about hydrology and you know, in plants and you know, I've seen this in southern Texas for example, like the Muskie that's there, right is a very water heavy plant. And when they go through droughts, it's actually a really scary thing, because there's the stream beds have the most water, and that's where the mosquito and then those mosquitoes take all the water away. So even when rain comes back, the streams are gone. And that really influences communities down there, including low income minority communities as well. Do you see that in other areas, Zach, some of what the research looks at to or is it simply is it more data intensive?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Yeah, so I'm familiar that phenomenon I don't think we see we don't see the same thing in the southeast because as you know, the water balances is much different year but there are all these sort of interactions between people and the water cycle and plants that I will just say I I wasn't taught about the hidden dimensions of these interactions in school. And so when you bring that up, that's a really good example of an important connection between humans in the environment and specifically between humans and water that I think we do need more of, and so I tried to bring examples like that into teaching now, even in my hydrology class, which which normally doesn't have anything to do with environmental justice. I at least want my students to know that you can't study these things in a vacuum, and it always matters to somebody.

Nic 
Yeah. So what are the things that you see in the East Coast? Like what are the issues we see with water?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel  
So because the water balance is much different, our landscape is dominated by wetlands and because of that there are major issues with sort of wetland preservation or Clean Water Act, but also there's a robust wetland mitigation banking system here to compensate for all of the wetlands that are damaged and destroy the development and road construction etc. And so one of the things that we face in this part of the state is that some of those wetlands have extreme cultural importance to indigenous peoples, and that cultural importance isn't represented and sort of the system of compensatory mitigation, right? How do you trade cultural values when you're thinking when you're thinking about what we usually call ecosystem services, right. And so one of the challenges in North Carolina is not a physical hydrology or a physical water balance challenge is the challenge of educating regulators and decision makers around those cultural aspects of water. And so you know, just one example to give you from my tribe. The Lumbee River is a black water stream. It has these really wide beautiful bald cypress dominated floodplain wetlands. It has a number of tributaries and the tributaries of these lovely floodplain swamps as well. A number of those swamps have its historical significance to Lumbee communities, dating all the way back to the 18th century. But there are some very specific events that happen in the mid 19th century during and after the Civil War with one of our cultural heroes Henry Barry Lowry, he led resistance against the Confederacy during the Civil War, and then later on he led a guerrilla war against the Reconstructionist government who happened to be the same people just sort of wearing different hats. But Henry Barry Lowery's band was based out of very specific swamps in our territory, and Lowry himself was never captured. or killed, and there's an entire history and even mythology around what happened to Lowry. And it's all tied up in these swamps and very specific geographies, and so the preservation of those landscapes, and those waterways are incredibly important to Lumbee people for our collective sense of identity. And that sense of identity can be eroded or can be destroyed, just like wetland acreage can be nibbled away. And we haven't yet figured out a good way to talk about what it looks like or what it means to protect and preserve those spaces in this era of wetland mitigation, where wetlands are interchangeable.

Nic 
Wow, that is, yeah, that's really incredible story. So when

Laura  
I was in North Carolina, visiting, I stopped by the History Museum, if you go in there, there's a whole section of history of North Carolina and then all that stuff about Lumbee Tribe is there. So reading all this about Ryan is like, Oh, I'm having flashbacks. Pretty cool.

Nic 
Yeah, it's really good. Do you think it's gotten better over time? Do you think we've gotten better at understanding that there's cultural value to the site?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
We're starting to understand at large that these cultural values exist, where some of the friction and the hard work is today is translating that understanding into actionable policy and regulations. And so that's, that's kind of where we are. We're approaching the same page and understanding that these are important. And now the question is, what do we do?

Nic 
Are you optimistic about the future how we're going to handle it going forward?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
I am and one of the things that gives me hope is that the Lumbee Tribe has just created a Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources that as that department stands up, I hope they will be able to take responsibility for things like consultation and engagement with state and federal regulators. So that there actually is a point person or at least a point office within the tribe for these kinds of things. And I know that in other tribes, these offices and these positions, get bogged down with lots and lots of requests. But I think having a having a dedicated office and a position for the environmental engagement with decision makers is a critical first step.

Nic 
And I couldn't agree more. I hate to say it, but we're almost out of time. So is there anything else you want to discuss before we let you go?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
No, thank you so much for such a wide ranging conversation and I really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely.

Nic 
And before we let you go, you leave. Where can people reach out to you if they want to get in touch?

Dr. Ryan Emanuel 
Well, on Twitter probably a little more than I should be but my handle is at water potential. And then you can find other contact information and a little more information about me on the labs website. It's called Duke river. center.org.

Nic 
Okay, perfect. Well, thank you so much for being here, Ryan. Thanks.

[Outro]

Laura  
Thanks, Ryan. That's our show. Thank you, Ryan for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. While you're at it, subscribe, rate and review. Bye.

Nic
See you everybody.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai