SciChronicles

Excavations and Eco-Grief

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This episode of SciChronicles, hosted by Kayla Burgher, features the journeys of two scientists, Paige Madison and SciChronicles co-host Risa Aria Schnebly, who share stories about their understanding of what science looks like and who it's done by.

Paige Madison is an alumnus of Arizona State University's History of Science Ph.D. program, currently works as a media editor for the PBS show Eons, and is a contributing science writer for National Geographic. Paige recounts the story of how her visit to an archaeological dig site in Indonesia changed her view of who science is done by -- a realization that's changed the way she writes.

Risa Aria Schnebly, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Biology and Society program at Arizona State University, tells us about how they started their Ph.D. trying to make their research, and themselves, fit in with what they perceived academia to be. After recounting their journey to getting into a Ph.D., Risa recounts the moment they decided to switch their research subject to align closer to what they really care about.

If you have not already, please consider subscribing so you do not miss future episodes. Also, be sure to check out ASU's Ask a Biologist and its companion podcast, as well.

If you are interested in crafting a story to share on SciChronicles, please fill out this interest form to learn more and connect with the hosts, Risa and Kayla.

Kayla Burgher

Welcome to SciChronicles. My name is Kayla Burgher, and this is a podcast where scientists share stories about why they do science from the outside. Becoming a scientist might seem straightforward, right? You go to school for a long time, then start to work in a lab or the field, but as you listen to these stories from scientists at different stages of their careers, it becomes clear that pursuing this path is anything but straightforward. Our storytellers reveal pivotal moments in their lives that changed the course of their career. So whether you're considering pursuing science for yourself or just curious about who scientists are, take a listen. You might be surprised by what you discover.

Our first storyteller is Paige Madison, who received her PhD in the History of Science from Arizona State University and is now a science writer focusing on human evolution. Paige tells us how her experience at an archeology dig in Indonesia changed her view on how science is done and who its done by, which has influenced how she writes about science now.

Paige Madison

The sun finally dipped behind the mountains, casting the rice paddies surrounded by jungle in shadow.We wrapped up our dinner of spicy beef and rice and walked into the archeological site that was a giant limestone cave.

The site is known as Liang Bua, and it's on the Indonesian island of Flores, an oceanic island that has never been connected to any mainland. I was visiting the cave as a historian of science, interested in telling the story of how research at this important site had unfolded. The excavations at Liang Bua normally take place during the day, beginning about mid morning and continuing until 4pm.

But on this particular day, we decided to stick around after dark in order to conduct some geological sampling that was going to help us date some of the layers of the cave. For this particular type of sampling, the grains in the sediment couldn't see any kind of light because it might reset some sort of clock that is measured that shows the last moment that they were buried. And so they can't be collected until the sun is completely down and everything is pitch black. It was the first time I was seeing the cave at night, and the darkness was consuming. We even had to turn off our cell phones to make sure that not an ounce of light snuck through.

I was surrounded by almost a dozen people of an archeological team, and I couldn't help but wonder what they were doing there, what the purpose was. The work itself was going to be conducted by four people. They were split into groups of two, and each group would be in its own excavation pit, what we call the sector, probably about five meters below ground. And I couldn't quite work out why so many people were there to do work that seemed to me could be accomplished by only a few this vision of everyone scurrying around as we had the last bit of light once the sun was going down, was very different than how I had pictured science, even just a few weeks before.

Only two weeks earlier, before I had arrived at the cave for the first time, I had been doing research in South Africa when I had gotten the invitation to come to the big limestone cave on Flores. At that point, I was tracing the history of paleoanthropology, which is the study of human evolution, through fossils in a way that made sense to me and made sense to the way that I had been educated about science. I was looking at a fossil that had been discovered almost 100 years ago, and the story of its discovery was actually relatively straightforward: a block of rock had fallen into one man's hands, and he had taken it from there by himself. He carefully prepared it using knitting needles that he sharpened and spent the next few weeks describing it and illustrating it for a scientific publication. The publication came out just weeks later, claiming to find a significant human ancestor, a missing link in the story. He was the sole author on the paper. This is the version of science that I was most comfortable with, that I never really questioned. Raised in a relatively individualist society, it's so easy to think of big discoveries or even big ideas as something that happens to one person, this sort of flash of brilliance, and that science is something moved forward by individuals at different periods of time. 

But at this Indonesian cave, I could already tell that the experience was going to be extremely different. As the work began, and two of the geologists climbed into a pit to begin collecting sediment samples. I watched from above sitting on the cave floor. I could barely see them, because they were allowed the only sliver of light these red headlamps that barely cast a tiny glow that was not going to disrupt the sediment. So although they could barely see a foot in front of them, I could sit above and see a little bit of their movement and what they were working on, at least from a distance. But even though I couldn't see them very well, mostly beyond a silhouette and a small dot of red, I could hear them clearly as they worked.

Despite being from different countries and speaking different languages, the two men that I was observing, one Australian and one Indonesian, had worked together for almost two decades, and it was very apparent. There was, however, a language barrier, which was made extra Interesting by the fact that the Australian had a tendency to narrate everything he did out loud as he did it. It seemed as though he was having a discussion, but he was speaking to no one in particular, given that the Indonesian couldn't understand English. "Okay, so that sample is from T3 and now we're going to put it in a bag and label it so that we don't forget it's from T3 and seal it off with duct tape and place it in the bin." This move by move narration that he had a tendency to do continued for hours as the Indonesian sort of politely nodded at various intervals.

Watching them work together, I was struck by the companionship and the teamwork that was going on despite the language divide. Neither of them could have done this work in isolation. It was amazing to see just what could happen when these researchers came together to do this work, and just how easily they were able to pull it off. But I wasn't used to science looking this way, seeing two people involved in a singular task, working so closely together. It struck me the difference between what I was observing and what I had seen weeks earlier, looking through archives in South Africa. 

Eventually, I looked up from the pit, and I could barely make out the outline of a few palm trees in the mountains in the distance, in the glow of the moon, I slowly made my way out there, unable to see my feet in front of me, but moving carefully across the dirt floor of the cave. I went and joined a small group of others who were sitting on the pavement, on the road just outside the cave, waiting for the others to finish up. There wasn't really much for us to do. So they were kind of sitting there, twiddling their thumbs and making small talk. Nobody could even pull out their phone in fear that the light might accidentally mess up the collection. No one had an idea of what time it was. Nobody could send a text message. We were really just there in calm, patient, support.

I was still feeling a little confused as to why all of these people were hanging out at the cave this evening. They easily could have gone home to their local villages, joining their families for dinner and getting ready for an early bedtime. Instead, they had chosen to stay on late at night doing work that wouldn't wrap up until at least midnight at best. Now this is a culture where things happen really early in the day, particularly to avoid that sort of Equatorial heat. The markets are busiest around 5:30 in the morning, and as a result, lights are usually out by 9pm. We were already well beyond that time, and yet these people were still donating their time and effort to be part of the scientific endeavor at whatever cost. 

After chit chatting for a little while, mostly in Indonesian, suddenly, there was a disturbance on the pavement in which we sat, and somebody jumped up, screaming in English, "fire ants!" and everybody immediately scattered, swiping their pants as they ran. Some ran up the hill away from the cave, and some ran down trying to blindly avoid the broken pavement below us. It was commotion and in complete darkness. As I myself took off down the street trying to escape the bite of the fierce fire ant, I was shocked at the fact that the word had come in English. Not sure if it was for my benefit or if it was just the most appropriate word for the situation, even in a different culture, but it was incredibly helpful given the immediacy of the situation.

Once we calmed down and were assured that we had gotten the last of the ants off of our shoes and pants, we resettled, this time, on a bench near the entrance to the cave. Suddenly, I was glad that this group of people were there, even though I still wasn't quite sure why. We sat there for at least an hour longer. And finally, the work was done, all of the samples having been collected and safely kept away from light. The generator was then turned on, illuminating the few scattered light bulbs throughout the cave. Suddenly, everybody sprang into action again, cleaning up and packing up the equipment. People started loading up the multiple trucks that we had waiting out front so that they could be driven back to the temporary laboratory and ultimately back to Australia. The work probably would have taken hours if it was only a few people, but with more than a dozen, it took merely minutes. The work was complete, and everything was put away, and we could all go home.

Given that it was nearly midnight, the time saved was much appreciated as everyone sleepily crawled back into the vans and ascended back to base camp for the first time, I really saw the importance of this sort of team oriented research, and just how helpful it was to have more than just the four people collecting the samples there that night. And in that moment, my vision of how science is done completely shifted. It suddenly made more sense that things could be accomplished with more people working together than a single person with a set of knitting needles working by himself to analyze, illustrate, prepare and understand a fossil. Here's this group of people who sacrificed their night to accomplish the goal of collecting these very small pieces of sediment in order to better understand the timeline of things that happened 10s of 1000s of years ago. And with that larger group, it was easy to envision the research questions being able to cover much more distance in a much shorter amount of time than a sole individual working by themselves. The team effort couldn't have been further from the single individual studying a fossil I was used to. As a historian of science, covering the story of the discoveries from this cave and the research that's come out of it, I immediately knew that the words I was going to use to tell these stories were forever altered. Moving forward, it became important to me that I acknowledged just how many people were involved in the archeological work. When I write science now and tell these stories, I try to make sure to honor everybody that was present, no matter what role they played. I think that we can get a lot more done as scientists by working together rather than working separately. And never again will I fully buy the myth that any discovery is made by a single individual. 

Kayla Burgher

On last month’s episode, I had the chance to tell my own story. Today, my co-host, Risa Aria Schnebly, will get to share theirs. Risa is currently a PhD candidate in the Biology and Society program, but for a long time, they weren’t actually sure they wanted to do a PhD at all. Risa takes us through the story of how they ended up in graduate school in the first place, and their journey to embracing their research after discovering what they really care about.

Risa Aria Schnebly

“Have you heard of de-extinction?”

I asked the question sitting at a wooden desk with a dark-haired pre-med student, each of us with a microphone before us. My interviewee shook her head, vaguely disinterested.

“It’s a new conservation technology that claims to bring extinct species back to life,” I explained.

Her eyes lit up a little, and I continued: “It works by basically recreating the genome of extinct species. In the case of a woolly mammoth, for example, scientists can edit the genome of the Asian elephant – the mammoth’s closest living relative– to put in genes that make it more “mammoth-like:” like having long hair and more fat to survive in the cold. That should create a sort of mammoth-elephant hybrid that should look and act like a woolly mammoth.” 

That was the tenth time I explained de-extinction to an undergraduate last year, which I was doing as a pilot study for my PhD. I was curious about whether the idea of de-extinction would make people care less about preventing extinction: if we could just bring extinct species back to life, then why should we bother to protect species from extinction in the first place? 

I chose to study de-extinction in large part because I felt like my research had to be about something “science-y:” a topic loaded with ethical questions and cutting-edge biotechnology. But  I was also drawn to it because of how it changed the nature of what it meant to lose a species, and I thought studying it could be a way into studying people’s relationship to the nature of loss itself. Loss is something I think about constantly. Our world is full of it, from mass extinction and wildfires to school shootings and the genocide that’s still ongoing in Gaza. Living a privileged life here in the US, it’s horrifyingly easy to become desensitized to it, or just ignore it altogether. It doesn’t help that culturally, we’re encouraged to suppress any remotely negative emotions. We operate as though all of these crises aren’t happening. In my mind, de-extinction represented yet another move by rich White American men to erase the memory of a loss in the name of forward progress. With my research, I hoped to show how that could push people further into apathy.

But rather than watching my interviewees grapple with their understanding of extinction or with questions about permanence and loss, I got a lot of blank expressions and forced responses. Many of the biology students I was interviewing knew little about conservation, and had no idea about the severity of environmental issues like climate change, pollution, and the ongoing mass extinction of species. Many of those who did know just didn’t care about environmental issues much, because they didn’t feel the effects in their own lives. De-extinction wasn’t going to make the general public care less about preventing ecological loss, I realized, because most people already don’t care about it much at all. So rather than propelling my work forward, the interviews left me feeling like my work was pointless. I didn’t care enough about de-extinction as a topic of its own – I was always in it for the more existential stuff, and this research clearly wasn’t getting me there. I either had to switch directions with my research – find something I cared about again – or recognize that this PhD wasn’t for me, and find somewhere else to be. 

I’d already spent a lot of my PhD feeling intense imposter syndrome. That started pretty immediately: I remember being surrounded by other young people in my orientation week who seemed to know exactly what they were doing: they had already published research papers, had relationships with communities or organizations they were going to work with, or won prestigious fellowships. I didn’t even know what a fellowship was, or what research even looked like for that matter. While they had spent the last few years working in research labs or doing internships, I had been working in places like Red Lobster and Chipotle, feeling like a winner because I got free food.

Mentally, I was also in a pretty bad place when I started my PhD. Just three years before, I lost my mother Patricia. Like all of us, she wasn’t perfect, but she lived loudly and loved so, so  deeply. A lot of people might think that I should have gotten over my mom’s death by that point, but grief doesn’t work like that. It’s been seven years since I lost her as I tell you this, and I’m grieving her still.

My mother was also my whole world. After my parents divorced when I was thirteen, she and I moved from sunny southern California to rainy Oregon together with our two little dogs. Having no friends or community there, we came to depend on each other completely. That only increased when she got her first cancer diagnosis: stage 2 melanoma. She had a surgery that left her unable to walk, and I did the best I could as a clueless fifteen year old to take care of her: I’d dress her wounds, walk to the pharmacy or grocery store to pick up medicine and groceries, do my best to cook for her – though she took over that one again pretty quickly, because I’m a God awful cook. 

After a few months, things seemed to be getting better. She was walking again, could go back to work. And then one day, she walked into my room, in tears, but with this huge smile on her face. “It’s over,” she said, laughing with disbelief, “I’m cured.” We cried together, hugging on the couch for a while. We went out to our favorite Indian restaurant down the street to “celebrate life,” as she said. But of course, it wasn’t actually over. She progressed to stage four when I was in my first year of college. I dropped out and moved back to her hometown in Mexico with her to spend whatever time we had left with her family there. We only had two more months together before she died.  

It still feels impossible to communicate how much it hurt to lose her. It didn’t just feel like losing a parent, though that’s already hard enough – it felt like losing myself. I didn’t feel like there was a point of existing without her, because without her I was nothing, and I had no one. 

I stayed in Mexico for a while longer, delaying a return to real life. Not having a real relationship with my dad at that point, I moved in with an aunt I had in Arizona. Unsure about going back to school and feeling pressed to save money, I overworked myself with customer service jobs to try and distract myself from the grief. But the grief found me anyway. I’d have breakdowns in storage closets or produce fridges, hyperventilating behind boxes of onions and lettuce before going back out to the cash register, praying that customers would ignore my puffy eyes. After a year and a half of that, I finally decided I needed to find something else to do with my life. 

With in-state residency, I finished my bachelor’s in ASU’s Biology and Society program. I graduated during COVID, thinking that I’d have to go back to customer service afterwards. But instead, amazingly, a mentor offered me the chance to work as a science writing instructor if I continued into graduate school. So, I signed up to do a PhD, thinking very little about what that actually might entail beyond teaching.  

To my dismay, I quickly learned that a rather important part of doing a PhD is the whole “research” thing. I had done some writing about de-extinction as an undergraduate, and decided to stick with it as my research topic. it felt like the safe route: like something I could disguise my real interest in studying loss behind, because I thought it didn’t belong in a science program. So I tried to blend in with the other academics, stay quiet about my depression and my grief even though I spent so many nights spiraling. And I tried to figure out what it meant to do good, objective research that would contribute to an academic field or whatever.  

But my feelings of imposter syndrome got worse and worse. Being on campus at all felt awful – I felt like I was constantly hiding who I really was, putting on a happy face to make myself palatable, to make the people around me think I knew what I was doing, and that I belonged. Interviewing all those students about de-extinction felt like the last straw: I felt like a total fraud. Like I was a bad researcher doing unimportant work, and that I didn’t deserve to be here. 

Something had to change. If I was going to stay here, I had to find a way to stop feeling like I was hiding all the time. And I had to figure out how to feel like I was doing work that mattered – even if it was only to me. 

Six months later, I was sitting with my computer open to Zoom in the midst of another view – but this time, I was interviewing a very different group of people.

“Have you heard of the term ecological grief?” The woman on my screen shook her head, but looked curious. 

I continued: “It’s similar to the grief that you feel when you lose someone important to you, except you feel it in response to ecological loss, like animals dying or the destruction of a landscape." The woman nods with a huge exhale, eyes-wide: “Yes, I’ve felt that a lot,” she tells me.

 That was nearly the thirtieth time I’d asked an endangered species conservationist about ecological grief, the topic I pivoted to after leaving de-extinction behind. Unlike the students I’d interviewed the year before, my interviewee, like many of the other conservationists I talked to, cares deeply about extinction: her whole career is dedicated to preventing it. And she, like many others, does feel grief for both the species she worked with and the state of the world at large, recognizing that we’re living in an era of Earth’s history where loss is ever-present, and only increasing. 

 After all my interviews with disinterested students, I decided to make loss the center of my work. To do that, I pivoted my research to talking about extinction with people who actually care about it, and maybe even grieve in the wake of it. I had a lot of friends in conservation, and there hadn’t been a lot of research done on ecological grief in conservation work, soI decided to start there. I wasn’t sure any of these people would want to talk to me at first, but sure enough, one person after the next answered my emails, referred me to their friends, and had incredibly vulnerable and profound conversations with me about the nature of grief, extinction, and what it means try to keep other species alive at a time when loss seems inescapable.

 I’ve talked to conservationists working with all sorts of creatures across North America, from biologists reintroducing Mexican wolves in Sonora to conservationists working to keep some of the last Hawaiian snails from disappearing. Witnessing loss is part of their job, and a lot of them feel grief almost constantly. But they don’t have the chance to really talk about it with anyone, because most people would think grief for another species is ridiculous. And beyond that, again we live in a culture where we’re told to hide our pain. Grief is something we’re supposed to move on from, not share. That’s true for anyone, but especially scientists, who are expected to remain emotionless and objective above all. But that’s impossible – at the end of the day, every scientist is just a human, too.

 I know other researchers might think that I’m doing “bad science” because I’m centering emotion and bringing my whole self into my work – I’m even writing my dissertation in creative nonfiction and incorporating memoir writing. But honestly? I don’t care. 

 I study grief because I know how much it hurts to bury it, and because I’m tired of pretending that these crises – both the ones on a global scale and the ones in our personal lives – aren’t happening. My work isn’t preventing or slowing the losses that surround us, but at least I feel like I’m finally finding a small way to just start acknowledging how much it hurts to be alive in this world sometimes, to stop isolating ourselves with that pain, and to create space to share it with other people who are hurting, too. 

Kayla Burgher

Thanks for tuning in to SciChronicles. This podcast is recorded at Arizona State University, which sits on the ancestral homelands of the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh peoples without whose care in keeping we would not be here today. We would like to thank the School of Life Sciences, the Center for Biology and Society, and Ask A Biologist for helping us make these stories into a podcast.

This podcast was developed by me, Kayla Burgher, and my co-host Risa Aria Schnebly. We put a lot of effort into making this podcast. The two of us work with every storyteller to create and write each of the stories you hear. By the way, if you might be interested in telling a story for this podcast, please fill out the interest form linked in our show notes. Kayla and I also edit the audio ourselves, and I developed the original music that you hear between the stories. Thank you so much for listening, and if you have not already, please subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss future episodes.