An artist-in-residence and a flux scientist share their perspectives on dryland ecology gleaned from environmental datasets and site visits. Hear the description of a flux-inspired art installation, and how wind ties together Indigenous culture and the meteorology of entire landscapes.
Transcript
Mallery: When I was approached by this project, it's totally a different field. It's, I mean, environment. It still has that aspect because I mean, I work in environmental health and ecology and this was my chance to reconnect to the places I’m very much more familiar with. I work in a place that's contaminated. But to be put into a different scenario quantifying what nature does, is like, very interesting to me. That really got me thinking about how art plays that role in quantification. I'm struggling with data visualization. That's an art in itself- data and how you show it to another scientist or to community or to whoever's funding your grant, you gotta show them the data, right? When I heard about climate science, I said, “what is all this?” I didn't know a thing about it ‘till I went to the Berkeley event that we had, the conference. It was a little overwhelming hearing how many things are monitored and what's being looked at. And my sense is like, “well, I just live in this environment.” I've never thought about what these numbers mean, what it could inform, how it can be purposed to talk about climate. I really had to think about that. But also, in the back of my head and my expertise in communicating science, I was thinking like, “well, how do I humanize this?” There's a lot of machinery going on, a lot of technology happening. How do I humanize this? So, I had to step into it, kind of in a clean slate. Like I know nothing, I don't know anything about climate science, but I know my climate, I know where I come from, I know the stories and I know the relations we have to the land, the plants, the animals, the sky and everything in between. I was very interested in where it was going to go.
Marci: Can you just describe your approach of when you walked up to each of these sites, like how you kind of took it all in?
Mallery: When we went to the grasslands, I could still hear the cars and the trucks going by on the 25. Out there in Sevilleta, all the plant matter that existed there, it's familiar. It's like, barren. Not barren in the sense that there's nothing alive. There's a lot of life there. But when I got there, I said, “okay, I need to figure out a perimeter”. It's kind of like what I do when I used to go wood hauling with my dad, or we go just out to the forest. You make sure you learn what's there, and you recognize these little landmarks. Being that it's such a vast area, I said, “well, maybe I can do concentric circles”. So as Jake was climbing his tower, tending to what needed to be done, I kind of walked this circle around the actual tower. I'm, you know, looking at all the gadgets and technology, but I was also looking at the complementary. A lot of neat things there, you know, I had a lot of questions. But I wanted to also see how the land was accepting of your machinery, how the land hugged any of it or was staying away from it, that interaction.
And so when I did these circles, I go and I pick a spot, and I would check, is this common here? What is this? I don't know this. What am I looking at? If I had cell service, I was doing the Google photo lens, like, trying to see what that plant was, like, oh, yeah, I know what that is. And then just kind of finding the familiar. At the Sevilleta site, I found something I thought I wasn't going to see out there. I found two items. One was hematite, iron oxide. It's a stone that we actually use for pigment in pottery. And I noticed it right away, made little scratches, and I saw the pigment come off. I'm like, yes, I might need to do pottery for this project! So I harvested that, and when I harvest something, traditionally, the community I come from, from Zuni Pueblo, we don't just take. We have to also give back. We also have to ask permission. Permission comes in a prayer, an exchange. I made a prayer and offering. I put cornmeal. I took a piece of my lunch, poured some water, and I took some of the rocks. I asked for thanks, so that there’d be more. And then that whatever I do with it brings me good luck and joy, that I am happy when I do this. And so I did that exchange, and I kept walking. And I found something kind of out of the ordinary at the very first site we went, which was a little cactus. Never seen this cactus before. And it had little red tunas like the prickly pear. And I said, what are these things? I've never seen this before. And again, Google lensing. And it didn't tell me what it was. But me being me, I harvested the fruits and I said, oh, let me just take some. It's red. It's like, the only thing with color out here. I'm an artist. I need to see color.
Marcy: It's pretty brown.
Mallery: Yeah, everything's so brown. But this thing was very bright. And so, I collected some of the pears, or the fruits. Again, did a perimeter. I thought what I saw was clay, [it] wasn't clay, [I] got too excited. But that's kind of what I did. In every space I went and I saw the familiar, and I saw something that maybe I've never seen before and had questions. It was partially the equipment, too. Like, at the mixed conifer site, I said, “why is the padding torn off the trees? It looks like...” And he’s like, “the elk did that”. I'm like, mm, yeah, the elk. Yeah, that's nature again. Are they embracing this, or are they also curious? And it seemed like they were curious. That site specifically was just a joy to visit. Every single site, again, finding familiarity. But I felt more at home when we visited the pinyon juniper site. The smells, the air, I guess, the elevation, the colors, everything was very familiar. I felt like I was at home. We were in the east mountains. Again, did a perimeter and saw there was a lot of yucca there. And I said, “I know what to do with this”. Again, collecting and harvesting, saying thanks in exchange. I realized that, “oh, Marcy's work is all about exchange.”
Marcy: Oh, I love that.
Mallery: It’s about the carbon exchange that happens. And I said, ah, okay. I'm going to have to address that some way.
Marcy: Yeah, I love listening to the way that you approached going to all the sites. It's been really transformative for me because I feel like the way that I've approached these sites is from the numbers, right? For now, I'm going on 20 years with working in these sites, and I realize how when I'm going to the sites, it's gotten to the point where I'm really thinking about, okay, logistics, like, how do we fix everything, what's broken, how do we do things in the most efficient way? And I've forgotten to appreciate the landscape for more than telling me how much carbon it's taking on or how much water it's giving off. Like, thinking more about the landscape itself, the plants that are there, what they've meant for communities who've lived on these lands...Thinking about all the different ways that we really benefit from these landscapes in so many, so many different forms.
Mallery: Every science has, like, a human connection, even though you don't see it.
Marcy: Yeah.
Mallery: You could be in a lab and never see how humans interact with what you're looking at in the petri dish or under the microscope. It still has a human connection. Data means something to somebody, somewhere your data eventually informs. It's a network, a flux net. I wanted to see what you think your data provides for people within the region, to the state. You know, in the grand nature of things like, well, how do you see your data moving?
Marcy: Just knowing how much carbon is being stored in these areas in terms of offsetting the amount of carbon dioxide that we're putting into the atmosphere and how much these ecosystems are taking up. Because, I feel like that's a pathway to conserving them, too, and showing how valuable they are. Trying to inform management and policy [based on] how much water is being used in these areas, what role these plants and how they are placed on the landscape is playing in all of that. I was super excited about this opportunity to see how other people view these landscapes and these datasets.
Mallery: There's a way in which my community has thrived in this arid region. The harsh climate. It's really hot in the summer, triple digits, and it's really cold in the winter. We go below freezing a lot. Our people say all the time, well, what are the animals doing? How are the plants acting? We have to adapt to the way they are acting through the seasons, through the different climate changes. Before New Mexico was New Mexico, why did they pick this region? It's that adaptability. Everything you need is there. There's so many different species of yucca. The ones we saw were the shorter but wider spear one, and I don't know what they're called in, I guess, in English. In Zuni, it's just “howe” or “ho:ts'ana”.
My community is normally known for making baskets with them, or rope that was used to communicate to the different pueblo villages along the Rio Grande. They tied a yucca rope to send a message, and they'd unknot it every day that they got to a new village to count down to the revolt, the Pueblo revolt. Traditionally, I like to paint, and I'm an acrylic painter. I wanted to really keep this really nature focused. I said, “is it possible to make paper using yucca?” And it was. And primarily with the spears. I thought about how I was going to portray breathing in and out. The spears are probably the portion that releases that exchange. The roots also benefit from whatever it takes in. [I] looked up how to make paper. I did use soda ash and I boiled down the root first. And the root, traditionally, we use as soap. Me and my daughter got to play with it and chop it up, make shampoo with it. We were washing our hands. And yucca root, I dried that down, pounded it down by hand to loosen the fibers, boiled it. So, I made paper. I made paper with the yucca spears. That fruit that I mentioned earlier, it's from the Christmas cholla. I was wanting to extract its color. It's a nice red and it's actually hallucinogenic. Deer and rabbit are able to eat it without any effect. I kind of mashed the skins down, boiled it a little bit and got a little bit of color. I wanted to portray through pottery design the idea of the whirl log, the wind, and how wind helps disperse seeds. It has a purpose. And the wind carries and helps pollinate some of the plants that we need to survive.
Marcy: Using the tower-based instruments and the whole technique we use depends on the wind. So, we can't even use data that the instruments produce when it's extremely calm. The ecology and the plants that are there have evolved and have so many different ways that they've adapted to deal with the conditions- like really, really hot, dry summers, very cold winters. Things like how durable and how deep their roots are have allowed them to really be able to survive by pulling water up from different parts of the soil profile. Their leaves being so thick can store water and reduce chances of desiccation. All of these allow them to really thrive in these dryland environments. Every single plant that's out there has its own unique way of doing those things.
Mallery: Not too far from Sevilleta, there's some ruin sites. Further south, there was a cave that they actually found piles of sandals made with yucca. They were used, they were worn down. People were going from north to south, south to north into Mexico and the Central America area. People were utilizing what they saw around them. The yucca was really important because in my culture, when a child is born, their paternal grandmother and their paternal aunties, their dad’s sisters, welcome the baby on the fourth day of its birth. They do a ceremony, kind of like a baptism. They wash with yucca soap. Those same people will also be the final people to wash your body before moving your soul onto the next place.
Marcy: Interesting.
Mallery: And that's like a full circle moment with yucca. There's uncertainty to our lives. The health of what's around us also reflects the health of us. The health of trees, the health of forests, the health of the grasslands reflects what the health of the people would be.
Marcy: What is your consensus? How does the land, how is it responding to our instruments there?
Mallery: I think that, um, nature will overtake anything. Leave a building alone for years, it starts growing weeds through concrete. I think it was in the pinyon juniper site, plants were moving into your equipment, and of course, the animals are being curious. Birds have a place to perch. The elk seemed very interested. The deer were a little hesitant also, because you could see in the Sevilleta area, they ate all the fruit around the perimeter of where the towers were, but the ones that were within eyesight of the tower, they didn't. They probably heard the buzzing and like some of the clicking of the machinery. How do you choose a space?
Marcy: The technique that we use, it was developed in agricultural fields. So, flat and homogenous, everything the same. And when you take that out now in these natural ecosystems, it gets kind of complicated. Thinking about the winds, that's super important. What direction is the wind coming from? Because we orient our instruments to be able to capture as much of that as possible. And a large space, because sometimes instruments are seeing the influence of land that's anywhere from half a kilometer to a kilometer away. Yeah, how flat it is is a very big criteria. How easy it is to access, all of those things.
Mallery: Easy?
Marcy: Yeah. You wouldn't agree that we've done that successfully? Yeah. Some of our sites are easier than others.
Mallery: Yeah.
Marcy: It's a nice way to study the landscape.
Mallery: Have you guys caught anything interesting on the trail cams you have there?
Marcy: We've seen a lot. Up in the higher elevation one, we've definitely seen black bear, coyotes, elk, bobcats. We have to think about what's happening on the landscape that's happening on a really, really short timescale. We're recording 10 times a second how much carbon dioxide, how much water vapor is being moved in these parcels of air. We're recording all of that on much faster time scales than we can even really think about, because we're really trying measure in a single parcel of air what the wind velocity is and how much carbon dioxide it's carrying.
Mallery: You're having to sense and I guess, you know, that whole idea of remote sensing, what we as people can feel, hear, smell. In the beginning, when we were looking at some of your graphs. I'm an artist, so I'm always finding patterns in nature. I'll see a pattern, I'll see a design, and it always relates to something. So I said, “oh, those look like pottery designs!” Maybe I can use pottery designs. The pottery idea kept coming in. When I really sat down, I realized you could actually feel the grains of the yucca. The yucca has a certain smell. I wanted to see how I could introduce another sense. And so, the wind chime that I created was using the NEE for all three sites, each little teardrop representing the rain or the water and the wind that needs to make that happen. And I'm really happy that it's a really light sound. It's really calm. It's like those subtleties your machinery is able to pickup. That wind chime kind of reflects that.
Marcy: As you know, drylands are so, so important. They've been overlooked for a variety of reasons. Even though the total amount of activity, biological activity, physical activity that's happening in every square meter is small compared to some other ecosystems, because they cover such vast areas of Earth, they make a really, really big difference. The importance of making these measurements over such a long time period is they are so variable. Water availability is everything. How much water, what type of water, how it's packaged, if it's in the winter or the spring or the summer, which plants are able to use the water that arrives in different times. We've seen some of our woody species, like pinyon and juniper, passively redistribute the water from higher parts in the soil profile to lower parts if it's wetter on top versus the bottom, and vice versa. Quantifying all of that and telling these stories is really, really important for people to be able to use, to be able to manage, the land more effectively and really preserve these ecosystems.
Mallery: How did you come about climate science? How did you get into it?
Marcy: In my PhD work, I latched onto emissions from plants, so volatile organic compound emissions, because I really liked that plants were influencing the atmosphere, they were influencing the air we breathe, the composition of the atmosphere that affects how much sunlight gets in. Doing that at a landscape scale is kind of how I got into making these measurements using eddy covariance technology, where we could just monitor continuously. Most of the work I did as a graduate student was looking at individual leaves and only happened when I would go up and make the measurement. So, I love the idea of being able to monitor the whole ecosystem continuously - 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and get a handle on all of the different ways that these ecosystems are responding. But it's the same kind of idea of thinking about how plants and the microbes are impacting the atmosphere and the composition of the atmosphere, and how that in turn then alters the air we breathe, the temperatures we experience, the climate.
Mallery: When you think about some of the plants – yucca, cactus - they're protective of themselves, but we don't realize that they're also protecting us, in a sense. Is your work also able to quantify or measure whether or not, like in my work, we look at abandoned sites with...heavy metal contaminants? Would your work ever be able to talk to one another about how plants are able to absorb things in the air, like at the nanoparticle level, maybe, and how it could affect climate or how it could affect being a bioremediator?
Marcy: It's a super interesting field of research. Rather than these rare earth minerals or these minerals who shouldn't actually...uranium was there naturally, right? But extracting it. What's interesting to me about the work that at least we've done so far is trying to capture what the undisturbed landscape is doing. It's hard to work in the Southwest without thinking about disturbance, but more what I focus on is more natural disturbance- things like fire. Fire is increasing. I'm really interested in understanding what impact that has had on how the ecosystem can take up carbon, use water, exchange energy. Same thing for these bark beetles. I'm interested in these natural disturbances that happen to be increasing because our climate is changing so much and trying to quantify how the ecosystem is responding and what that means for much carbon they can sequester, how much water they use, how much water is getting into groundwater, all of those things.
It's been such a really strong reminder to think about all the different perspectives that I can use to think about the landscape. Taking in the plants, how they're moving with the wind, and not just thinking about the wind in terms of if it's making my instruments work, or thinking about just breathing in, taking in the landscape and thinking about all the different ways the plants that are on the landscape have been used by so many communities for centuries. Remembering that when we're thinking about how to tell the stories of these landscapes.
Mallery: It's also a reminder for me to remember to breathe. That's why I titled the art pieces in that sense, it's to both breathe and appreciate. Yanhaku, it means to breathe in and to yeh’ch, it means to appreciate breathing in. It could be, “found a dollar on the ground, yay, it's mine!” But to be in this vast system that, they all communicate, our ecosystems all communicate, plants and everything. To be in its presence, to see how it's protecting the landscape itself and providing for some of us - it's also that appreciation of thank you for the bounties and for the different purposes of these plants we harvest. Appreciating. Also in Zuni, when our kiva members, our medicine people, and again, when we're giving the blessing to bringing in a child into this world or sending off a relative who's passed on and they return to the Earth, they're joining that cycle. That's who we pray to in our culture, and we ask for continued life, for harmony, for balance. We ask for what's called [pinnantelio]. That's part of the other piece that I created, and that is asking for more breath: pi'nan-e. Air, wind, more of it. We like the land to bless us with more, knowing that that is where nourishment comes from. It's from the plants, the animals, the air.
It gives me that scientific lens into what that really all entails. When I grew up being told, this is what we pray for, for the balance and for the harmony, it really helps me appreciate where I come from, because on the scientific end, it's telling us what is going on in the soil and the plant and how it's breathing in and out for us to be able to even live on the surface of this planet. With the hustle and bustle of our work and our research that we're both involved in at UNM, I have to remember to go out there and appreciate. I work in a place where we're looking at contaminated soils and communities are suffering. I have to remember, be appreciative of everything that's around us. This really helped me take a dive into climate science that I never really thought about and how it does inform what I currently do. It solidifies all the things I was taught growing up.