Plant mass extinctions, and getting mental health help
In this episode
00:43 - Delivering mental health help
Delivering mental health help
Ben Miller, Stanford University
Rates of mental ill-health have surged in recent years; now whether that's because we're better at picking it up, or something has shifted in society that means more people are reaching breaking point, is actually irrelevant. What matters most is that affected individuals get the help they need promptly. So why, Stanford clinical psychologist Ben Miller is wondering, limit the availability of that care to a restricted set of places and practitioners? As he explains to Chris Smith, endowing others with the right skill sets could be transformative...
Ben - For the last 10 years, we've been watching a trend emerge here in the United States of people losing their lives to preventable causes. And when you unpack that, you begin to see that a lot of the reasons that people are not able to get help is that the help is just not there. We don't have a mental health workforce that is sufficient in supply to meet the ongoing demand of what our communities are lifting up as a problem. So the backdrop for our paper was that we wanted to create an approach that provided people in communities with skills to help each other. We call it community initiated care, as its care in community by community. And for community.
Chris - Cynics would say though that it ends up being "medicine on the cheap". We've replaced police officers with community support officers. In some places, for example, it's the same. You, you take a doctor and you downgrade them to someone with a bit of training and call them a therapist, and people say it's a sticking plaster, not a solution. Do you dispute that then you say that this is a valuable and sensible direction of travel?
Ben - Yeah. Let me, let me give you a couple of reasons why I do dispute that. Number one, when you look at the science behind effective psychological interventions, you'll find that close to 80% of what makes them effective is what we would call the therapeutic alliance or the relationship that you have with someone. Those relationships matter greatly in terms of having the outcomes that you would hope to see. So what we did is we reverse engineered that and we said, there are people in your community that you have relationships with all the time, that if they were just given the skills to be able to help, maybe they would, maybe they could and maybe it would actually benefit you. That's the first thing. The second thing is a lot of these folks that are in our communities are already seeing mental health problems all the time. It's happening in their day jobs. It's, it's what they're already having to face. And so by not equipping them with those skills, we're basically putting them at a disadvantage. We're putting them at a disadvantage to not be able to help those people in their lives. But we're also putting the people they're trying to help at a disadvantage because they're getting less than ideal interventional support. So our attempt here is to provide more of a blanket training for folks that are out there in communities that are already seeing these issues, that know how to respond to them when they're confronted with them.
Chris - What does your approach look like then? Could you sort of paint a picture of putting it in operation, what it involves, and how you can then measure whether or not it's any better than the status quo?
Ben - Yeah, so it, it begins with just this reframing of how we approach mental health. Not seeing it as just a disease or an illness to be treated, but really mental health is more foundational to overall health and wellbeing. So a recognition of that means that we don't have to wait till things are really bad or you've been given a diagnosis, is that we see mental health as something that could be intervened on every day. Secondly, this is really about democratising and empowering individuals to learn how to respond to problems when they're faced with them. As I mentioned already, the literature is very clear that there are certain things that we can give to people, skills that we can give to people that they can immediately use. They do not need fancy degrees. They do not need to go to, you know, multiple years of school. They can just be taught how to help someone else that might be going through some struggles in their life. And then, as I mentioned too, I think that this is a really key factor in solving some of the problems in our communities. When we are approached by someone in our life who is looking for support, we can change the trajectory of their life by being able to intervene in that moment. Very rarely do people open up and say, "I actually want to talk about all the issues that I'm facing." Very rarely do they say, "listen, I'm really struggling." Most of what happens is that you begin to notice subtle, subtle shifts. And in those subtle shifts, those are moments for opportunity for us to help. We just often don't know what to say. An example I use all the time is, is I ask folks, if your phone rang right now and it was a loved one and they said, I need help, would you know what to say? Would you know where to send them? Most people respond to, I don't know what to say and I don't know where to tell them to go. Our approach here and what we're trying to really instill within our community is that everyone should be able to know what to say and how to help someone.
Chris - And does it work?
Ben - It does. And I think when you look more broadly at the literature, we would call this task shifting or task sharing. And it's using evidence-based strategies in different ways. So it's translating those evidence-based strategies into places that we normally wouldn't use them, shifting them into places that people actually are. And the literature around task shifting for mental health is extremely strong. It's so strong that we've actually seen it adopted into certain strategies like the World Health Organisation. So I think that when we begin to look at what works, we have to say there's promise here now. And I will also say that we know what doesn't work and what doesn't work is asking people to wait weeks or months for help. What doesn't work is us being stuck on our heels, not knowing how to respond to someone who's in front of us that's in a crisis. Those things do not work and have led to some of the most egregious disparities in the mental health space, as well as outcomes that I think we've seen in our time.
Chris - Who will be recruited then? I mean, I'm not quite sure I understand who you would go after to recruit into this. Would this be, say, a person at work? Would it be anyone that wants to volunteer or are you actually seeking people out 'cause you think they'd be in an area that's, that's needy?
Ben - Well, we're, we're still in the middle of operationalising this, and I think your question is a good one, but when you begin to look at the people who have relationships with other people in communities, there are natural places where this this emerges, for example, our faith communities. Many of us, if we're looking for some guidance, we'll trust turn to a trusted person in our faith community because we know them. They, they give us guidance in other aspects of our spiritual life. There might be places that are less common, but also just as impactful. And because we have the trust there barbershops, or nail salons, places that you might go on a regular basis where you have a relationship with the person that's helping you imagine what would happen if these individuals had those skills so that when you were disclosing something that was difficult to talk about, you were talking, you're going through a, a stressful time in your life, they actually had the skills to be able to help you. So I think it's very open-ended in our article, we're very clear that community initiated care really should be for the masses, it should be for all of us. And who steps up and begins to say, well, this is something we want to prioritise, I think has got to be grounded by how you value mental health and how much you really want to equip your employees, the folks around you with those skills.
08:15 - Birds and plastic pollution
Birds and plastic pollution
Bethany Clark, Birdlife International
The world makes up to 400 million tonnes of plastics every year, and maybe as much as 10 per cent of that ends up in the world's oceans where it constitutes most of the marine debris found on the surface and in sediments. Seabirds are particularly vulnerable to the effects, and, as a result, are driving policy decisions, as, speaking with Chris Smith, Birdlife International's Bethany Clark explains...
Bethany - The main point of the work was to look at how seabirds are informing global policies on plastic pollution, how they can be used as monitors for plastic pollution, and also how we can conserve seabirds on a global scale.
Chris - Plastic is a massive problem, isn't it? I mean, the amounts that are out there are truly staggering.
Bethany - Yes. And we don't actually know how much is out there. It's been found in every ocean seabeds travel for thousands of kilometres and wherever they go, they seem to be able to pick up plastics somewhere.
Chris - Is that as in macro-plastic, big bits we can see or is it the microplastics that those big bits break down into, or is it both?
Bethany - It's both. So really large plastics can be a problem for entanglements. Microplastics are also a problem if they ingest them, they can carry toxic chemicals and cause physical scarring to the guts.
Chris - And how is this analysed then? So if you are using birds as, it's like a canary in the coal mine, but for plastic, isn't it slightly warped analogy, but how do you use the birds to keep tabs on what is happening with the plastic?
Bethany - A number of studies around the world have looked at the diets of seabirds, chemical contamination in their blood or feathers. And so that we can assess whether particular populations have a, a high or low plastic contamination. We can then combine that with where the birds travel and match that up to figure out which areas of the ocean are more or less contaminated.
Chris - But if the birds are themselves being impacted, is there a chance you can miss quite a lot of data? Because if the birds are already dead because it's so bad for them, or it's affecting their behaviour, you wouldn't know...
Bethany - Yes. And also if the seabirds are affected by other threats like climate change, fisheries or invasive species, then we are losing that ability of the birds to tell us about where plastic and other types of pollution are in the oceans.
Chris - How did you pursue this study?
Bethany - In this study we assessed all of the different global and quite a lot of regional policy mechanisms that we could find that were related to seabirds or plastics or both to try and find the linkages. So which treaties were signed by countries in forums like the UN that relate to environmental pollution and how seabirds are really used as monitors or seabird conservation as part of agreements to protect nature.
Chris - And what emerged?
Bethany - We found that quite a few of the treaties did mention seabirds or plastic, but there are quite a few opportunities for linking those more specifically. And there's an upcoming treaty on plastic pollution that's going to be negotiated in the next year or so. And a recent treaty that's just been signed for protection of biodiversity on the high seas, which is a lawless environment where a lot of things, including pollution exist, but there's very little collaborative conservation work out there. So we're trying to suggest areas where those gaps can be filled.
Chris - I'm glad you brought that up because one of the, the things about water is it covers three quarters of the surface of the planet in our oceans and it's everywhere. The plastic problem is everywhere. Marine conservation needs to be everywhere but isn't. So if we got gaps in what we do and don't know, are there, are there sort of known unknowns if you like?
Bethany - Yes, definitely. Some of those gaps have been filled in by tracking seabirds, using small devices to follow where they go around the world. But that research is more common in some places than others. And also the study of what the birds have ingested is more intensive in some places. So the Pacific has some of the biggest gaps. It's a really important place for seabirds, but there's less research.
Chris - So is this one of the things on your wishlist, one of the conclusions you draw that that we need to fill those gaps in?
Bethany - Yes. I think standardised monitoring globally is is a major gap that we'd like to fill in or suggest that anyone else joins with that.
Chris - And were there any other really obvious take home messages that emerged when you think these are things we absolutely need to dwell on once you began to look at this in this joined up way?
Bethany - Yeah, so I think a main issue that has come from this is that the seabirds don't they don't follow any kind of borders, jurisdictions. They travel all over the world, but so does plastic. So any plastic waste that comes from any particular country can travel all across the world in ocean currents. And so we really need this to be a global scale, international project to fix this because it can't be done by any single country or or region.
14:05 - Did plants go extinct alongside the dinosaurs?
Did plants go extinct alongside the dinosaurs?
Peter Wilf, Pennsylvania State University
If you ask almost anyone what “mass extinction” means to them, they’ll invariably talk about animals. But plants are certainly not immune and the signs are that many individual species have been wiped out by events like the meteor impact that did for the dinosaurs. Speaking with Chris Smith, Peter Wilf is at Penn State University…
Peter - Well, there's a really grand picture here, Chris, because we have the last great mass extinction that's famously known as the dinosaur extinction. An asteroid the size of San Francisco traveling 20 times the speed of a bullet crashed into the earth, crashed into Mexico, actually, 66 million years ago. And it caused the extinction of about 70% of species on the planet, both on the land and in the seas. One of the most dramatic events in all of earth history. And it set the stage for our modern world, the rise of mammal dominance and the rise of flowering plant dominance. What's much less understood is exactly how the plants responded to this, the plants that make the environment that we live in. Today, we're starting to understand how this event transformed life on earth forever.
Chris - What would it have been like? How would the environment have responded in the short term as well as longer term?
Peter - The asteroid would've excavated a hole in the earth's crest, maybe more than 10 kilometres deep. It would've ejected a plume high up into the atmosphere, maybe even into outer space. It would've generated massive shock waves, enormous tsunamis, some of the largest probably that ever occurred in earth history that swamped low lying areas around the world. But this was only the beginning of what went wrong at that time. The soot that was blood up into the high atmosphere blocked the sun and shut down photosynthesis and froze the planet so it would've frozen all of our lovely tropical plants. And for a period of six months to two years, there was no photosynthesis and it was freezing everywhere. Even in the tropics.
Chris - How did any plant survive that then, given the extreme conditions? Obviously there are some that are well adapted to extreme cold and they possibly would've fared better, but those tropical plants that you mentioned, why weren't they just wiped out completely?
Peter - Well, plants are just so much more resourceful than we give them credit for, and many species of plants were wiped out completely. But plants have a variety of mechanisms. They have seed banks, for example. They have underground components, roots, for example, to re-sprout. We know that this asteroid didn't kill everything because we're here today. We have a biodiverse world still today, and what we see is an incredible transformation of the types of forests before and after. So the effects were very profound. My co-author Mónica Carvalho put together a beautiful study published in Science a couple years ago now, where they looked at more than 45,000 fossil pollen grains and maybe 5,000 fossil leaves. And they showed that the birth of the tropical rainforest immediately followed the death of the dinosaurs. So the most diverse biome on earth didn't exist before this happened. And this is when we see flowering plants taking over the tropical rainforest, making large fruits, making large seeds, supporting arboreal life, arboreal mammals, all kinds of life driving terrestrial diversity. So even in the wake of the disaster, there were some big changes that led to the tropical rainforest being where most of the species on earth are located today. So we have both disaster and rebirth. It's quite a story
Chris - If one thinks about the tree of life and specifically plants on it, where you've got a stem and then branches and then twigs and, and eventually leaves, how far back down the tree of life did the asteroid prune?
Peter - That's a great question, and it really goes to the heart of some of the debates that we're having. They're very short answer is this extinction couldn't have pruned all the way down because as many of our colleagues have observed, maybe no plant families went extinct at this extinction. So that sounds like what kind of an extinction is that? But at the same time, everywhere we look, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, Argentina, Columbia, we see more than half of the species growing extinct. What this means is that there is a rediversification, if you like, from the stems that you're mentioning. Why can't you kill off a plant family? Well, it's very hard. By the end of the Cretaceous, the flowering plants were already very, very diverse. Each family had hundreds to thousands to 10 thousands of species in it. And those species had many, many, many individuals. So what we're showing here is that this discussion about well, no plant families went extinct. You, it sort of whistles past the graveyard of all those species that went extinct. And it's, you know, it's species that matter today that we're trying to conserve the if, if we're gonna estimate very rough ballpark that the dinosaur extinction killed 50% of the plant species. You know, that's about what we're looking at today. If you look at the estimates of how many species of plants are vulnerable to extinction right now, it's about 40%. It's a very comparable number. So one of the things that we're reviewing here is this aspect that contrasting this observation of plant families not going extinct with the reality that a large numbers of species go extinct and the species really do matter.
19:39 - Indigenous people and plastic pollution governance
Indigenous people and plastic pollution governance
Riley Cotter, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Calls for indigenous people to be more involved in the control and mitigation of plastic pollution are becoming increasingly common; the problem is that “participation” means different things to different people, and the literature contains a range of terms interpreted in a range of ways, as Riley Cotter, from Memorial University of Newfoundland explains…
Riley - One of our goals with the review was to be really scoping in the sense that we gather literature from the news, government reports, academia, blog posts, anywhere we can to try to capture an overarching sense of how indigenous peoples are being involved in plastic pollution governance across the globe.
Chris - Why did you go to such a diverse range of sources to try to get a handle on this?
Riley - I think one of the main reasons is that you can't really capture everything that's going on when you're talking about something as broad as governance if you just stick with academia. I think going to government reports and going to blogs is how you get everything there is, and it's even more crucial to look everywhere when you're dealing with something like indigenous rights and indigenous participation in something because it's a community that's been largely excluded from institutions like government and academia. So I think looking for independent efforts is kind of part and parcel for making sure you get the things you want to get in a review like this.
Chris - But how do you safeguard the integrity of the information? Because obviously if you get information from a science journal, there's an element of trustworthiness built into the source, isn't there? When one goes to a blog post, you don't know that the author of that blog post has the same obligations to the truth, let's say. So how do you make sure that what information you pull into this review is reliable?
Riley - Yeah, well, I think one of the main things that we tried to get with the literature view is that non-academic sources are equally and if not more valid in this case, when you're talking about indigenous participation in plastic pollution governance. One of the things we tried not to do is essentialise academia or the academic process as validating knowledge. Academia as a whole hasn't really in the past done a great service when it comes to capturing indigenous voices and validating indigenous perspectives. So I think looking outside that is how you get the real scope of what's going on. And I think without that we wouldn't have gotten the vast majority of the things we have compiled in the literature review, and I don't think we would've gotten a true sense of what's happening on the community level, which is really what, what we wanted to get at.
Chris - So what were your terms of reference and how did you approach this?
Riley - We went through several rounds of looking for things in different databases on Google and Google Scholar. We looked at all kinds of different terms indigenous, plastic, plastic pollution, governance, government, compared to other literature views of larger subjects. One of the things we noticed was that it was relatively scarce in explicit articulations of indigenous participation in plastic pollution governance. I mean, when you're talking about something as specific as plastic pollution governance, the literature tends to thin out a little bit. But the trends that we saw emerging were things like how participation was enacted in the literature. So based on the authorship, whether the authors or the power holders in the initiative were indigenous or non-indigenous, they enacted participation and talked about participation in inherently different ways, which is the real striking thing we noticed at the onset of the literature review and is really what we kind of ran with, with the entirety of the paper because it informs how we look at indigenous participation in pollution governance in the future. To consider that the type of actors involved in positions of power impact greatly how power, how participation is discussed and enacted.
Chris - How much material did you end up with to start with?
Riley - Probably about 35 to 40 pieces when you consider everything. And then through second and third trials through all the databases and then through expanding literature views where we noticed things getting cited in certain articles or things we already knew of in passing before that didn't come up in the literature view. We ended up with about 70 pieces.
Chris - And what geography is covered. Is this global or is it one particular part of the world?
Riley - It was global. We didn't enact any specific guidelines for what parts of the world we were looking at, but, but we tended to notice that we had a significant bias towards Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, because they talk about indigeneity in the way that we're used to, whereas places like Africa have a totally different conception of indigeneity. So it was hard to get into the depth of certain places in the world.
Chris - And what messages emerged or what floated to the top a bit like the plastic? What were the, the key take homes when you started to sift through all this literature?
Riley - Well, the really key take homes were that first and foremost, who is acting in positions of power when it comes to indigenous involvement in plastic pollution inherently affect how we talk about and how we enact indigenous participation in plastics pollution governance. So when indigenous people are involved in positions of power, you'll see rights and sovereignty approaches to indigenous participation where indigenous people are at the bases and within the fabric of the methodology, versus when there are settler authors at positions of power that often just enact discursive types of inclusion that tend to tokenise. And even within the methods of the efforts, marginalise indigenous people.
25:47 - Disturbing findings from coastal science fieldwork survey
Disturbing findings from coastal science fieldwork survey
Sarah Hamylton, University of Wollongong
New research published in Cambridge Prisms: Coastal Futures looking at the experiences of women working in coastal sciences worldwide has unearthed what have been described as "important and disturbing findings". As she explains to Chris Smith, they're the result of a survey carried out by Wollongong University's Sarah Hamylton and her colleagues...
Sarah - A group of us set up something that we call WICGE, which is the women in Coastal Geosciences and Engineering Network, which was a group of female academics, largely based in Australia, but we've grown into much more of an international network. And one of the first things we did as a network was to set up an online survey to try and work out what the status of the discipline was in terms of coastal geosciences and engineering. So we put out this online survey, had a few questions in it, which people are publishing in journals, whether or not people were represented on editorial boards, in conferences as keynote speakers, that kind of things. Have you experienced or witnessed any gender discrimination? We did it kind of as a paper survey at a conference, and then we followed it up as an online survey and we got I think 314 responses. Responses to that open-ended question about whether or not people had experienced gender discrimination focused quite overwhelmingly on field work. So something that was an unexpected finding from that survey was that people's behavior and the experiences that people have when they go to the field, if they get to the field, can often give rise to various forms of discrimination.
Chris - And so that was what inspired you to then follow up, was it; that initial survey?
Sarah - Yes. That finding of the fact that a lot of people brought up field work as an issue. So field work is something that is really critical to the careers of people who are doing work in the environmental sciences. It gives people an opportunity to collect data, to collaborate with people to start analyzing that data and to write it up in the form of research papers to apply for grants to, to get out into the field in the first place. And so we realized that if there was, if there was a commonality to people's responses who are highlighting field work as an issue, this in turn would be quite a big issue for people's careers.
Chris - What sorts of difficulties did people say they ran into?
Sarah - Actually getting into the field in the first place was quite an issue for a lot of women. This was brought up by several of our respondents and the reasons it was hard to get into the field in the first place, sometimes people are quite selective if they dream up a field trip and they've got a few aims and objectives and they send out the invitations to their probably established team of collaborators - and often that's something that can be quite exclusive - women don't receive invitations. Another thing that prevents women from going into the field is that they tend to have a lot of responsibilities within their profession. They might take on governance roles as well, sitting on committees that run universities. So women often have quite a disproportionate share of those other tasks that sit alongside research. And then outside of a work environment, women often take on a disproportionate share of caring responsibilities either for their children or for elderly parents. And we found also that when they get into the field, they face discrimination around expectations of what they physically might be able to achieve in the field. And then if you are outside of your typical day-to-day work environment, so outside of say, an office on a on a university campus people's behaviour starts to change. And if you are not necessarily bound to any sort of code of conduct, then people can start to act in ways that influence women unfairly. So things like microaggressions, bullying often comes up in the field; if you're working in a field camp or on a boat, your sleeping situation might be quite different to what it is normally, and women can be exposed to things like sexual harassment.
Chris - To what extent, Sarah, do you think there might be a, a recall bias here or one has to be conscious of the fact that this is a survey which was voluntary for people to participate in and therefore might it be a subset of people not withstanding the fact that the things they're saying are very important, but could it be that the vast majority of people are not having this problem and these tend to be the tip of the iceberg that are particularly problematic? What's being highlighted. Or do you think this is more general?
Sarah - So we've done a breakdown of our respondents. There was quite a few male respondents. We also looked at the different sort of institutions that people are working at. And we had a breakdown by sort of level of seniority. So we've got a good spread between sort of other scientific institutions, be they government departments or consultancies or university sector. And then be they fairly early career versus mid or more senior people. There's a fairly diverse range of respondents. And then I suppose thinking more broad broadly about people who've encountered, I suppose more sort of serious discriminatory offenses such as sexual harassment, I'd imagine that statistics seem to, to show that actually people who have had those experiences in their lives often don't talk about it. So if anything, I'd expect that some of those more extreme circumstances would be under sampling them.
Chris - And what do you think could be done to change things then? Because I'm also conscious that this is historical data and that since you gathered this data, we've had quite a lot of change. We've had things like "Me Too" and that kind of thing, which I think has focused minds quite a bit. To what extent do you think that this does not reflect the present? And also assuming that some of it still will, what could be done to improve things?
Sarah - Yeah, I mean, I wish I could say that things had improved since we did that survey work. We're working on a follow-up survey to try and answer that question more precisely. If we can try to publicise female role models in the field. Get things like magazines, social media pictures of, of women lifting heavy equipment out in the field. And that is quite effective at shaping the people's personal views. One paper looks at the fact that often, you know, this isn't just men having expectations about women in the field. This is also, you know, at at school level age girls often believe that they sort of lesser able to carry out physical tasks in the field. So this is something that starts early for a lot of women. And it would be good to try and subvert that by reshaping those public views.
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