ANNOUNCER: On this episode of Ecosense... JESS: Cattle ranchers and wild horse advoc.. are often pitted against each other, and it's unfortunate because I think we're all "Team Horse."

CATHY SAKAS: When I talk to the students about climate change, I automatically just go right to, you're the hope.

You're the future.

EMILEE: First Nations are often presented or portrayed as just stewards, you know, people who care about the environment, where it's actually much more complicated and sophisticated than that.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: Wild horses have a special status in the U.S. that protects them, but their unique situation has also caused some unique challenges.

How did horses come to roam free in the west?

BRIAN YABLONSKI: They were actually brought by the Span.. in the 1500s when they were trying to colonize North America.

And in 1680 there was actually an indigenous revolt.

It was called the Pueblo Revolt.

And that essentially pushed the Spanish out of the southwest part of the United States, and it is estimated they left about 1,500 horses behind, that became the actual ancestors for the wild horse herds we know today.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: So, are the Mustangs that roam free now, are they a nuisance or do people support them?

BRIAN: Well, I would say they are the living symbol, the iconic symbol of the American West.

So, I think they pull at the heartstrings of most Americans, but for the land managers, that have to manage public land, specifically some of our federal lands, they can be hard on the ecosystem.

And for folks who live in the West, they can oftentimes be a nuisance as well too.

Horses and cattle are all hard on the landscape.

They tend to be trampling native vegetation.

In desert ecosystems, there's something called bio crust, which is that top layer of soil, super important to desert biodiversity that gets damaged in sagebrush systems.

And when we think about watering holes, the horses tend to claim ownership, which will keep elk, pronghorn, bighorn sheep away from the watering holes, which can be damaging to the herds.

JENNIE: So, how are they being managed?

BRIAN: They're being managed by the federal government.

The "wild horse" is actually a legal term, and "wild horse" comes from the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971.

When we talk about wild horses, we're really talking about the horses that roam on Bureau of Land Management Land and Forest Service land.

Those horses have a unique status.

They're almost in a league of their own.

They're not managed as livestock.

You can't sell 'em for commercial value.

They're not game, they can't be hunted.

They're not wildlife.

They don't fall under, for example, the Endangered Species Act when their populations crash.

And they're not pets either.

We don't allow euthanization of these horses as well.

So, it's really a class unto its own in how we manage this particular species in America.

JENNIE: Do you know how many wild horses there are?

BRIAN: The Bureau of Land Management has 177 herd management areas where the wild horses exist.

All in the west.

Seventy four thousand horses are on those 177 herd management areas, but there's also an additional 62,000 horses that have been rounded up and are on these off-range holding facilities, until they could be adopted or sold.

If a horse is not adopted, they're put in these off-range facilities and the federal government pays somewhere between $23,000 and $29,000 per horse, over the life of the horse.

So, if you can get a horse adopted, you're going to save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

So, in 2019, the Bureau of Land Management implemented a $1,000 adoption incentive program.

And as a result of the program, the average annual adoptions have more than doubled over the last five years.

JENNIE: Are they trying to get the numbers down on the wild horses?

BRIAN: The federal government has really three options that they can do with horses.

One, they can remove 'em from the lands.

Two, they can get the horses adopted, or three, they can apply fertility control treatments.

And the federal government's trying all these.

But the primary tool they're using right now are roundups to move them into the adoption program or into these offsite range pastures.

♪ ♪ JESS OLDHAM: My family's been involved in agriculture their whole life.

My father's a veterinarian and my mother comes from the Navajo people, which are a great horse people.

They've been around it their entire lives and as a result, so have us kids.

♪ ♪ The Wind River Wild Horse Sanctuary works in direct contract with the Bureau of Land Management.

We have what is known as a public off-range pasture contract, and so through that, we work with wild horses.

We don't own them, we don't have any rights to like, own them.

We just contract out our labor, our time, and our resources to take care of 'em throughout the year.

Our short-term horses are ones that are available for adoption.

We find homes for them throughout the United States, mostly here in the Rocky Mountain region, but where there's a will, there's a way, and then we've got long-term horses.

We've got 250 of them, and they're going to be here until the end of our contract with the Bureau of Land Management or until the end of their lives.

And those horses, we don't interact with too much.

All we do is make sure they're well fed in the wintertime.

We take tours out to see them in the summertime.

♪ ♪ We call mustangs, wild horses, feral horses, free roaming horses, whatever the nomenclature you choose to use, it all means the same thing.

Mustang is originally from the Spanish word mustango, which means stray horse.

They're kind of the mutts of the horse world.

They've been breeding, intermingling for generations now.

And so, it's kind of the survival of the fittest, which is pretty cool in my mind.

They're the ones that're the heartiest, the toughest, and the grittiest.

Mustangs come in all sorts of shapes, and sizes, and colors, and there are ones that are a little more adapted to their environments.

If you take the time to train a wild horse, it's going to do what you ask it .. And you truly build that bond with them, they're just as good, if not better, than horses that are registered.

Our short-term horses vary from having zero to about twenty at a time.

And as soon as we get 'em, we try to find homes for 'em, to put 'em into places where they are successful, that they're not brought back, and they're not turned back to the Bureau of Land Management, making sure that they're well t.. People understand that they're adopting an animal that requires a lot of needs.

When you adopt a wild mustang, you sign contracts that there's no mal intent, that you're not gonna send them to any neg.. or negligent situations, and those include not being sent to be processed and not being used recreationally to buck.

When we adopt wild horses out, they go to various lives, everything from companion animals that are just gonna live in the pasture the rest of their life and be what I like to call a pasture ornament, to individuals that then go to a ranch horse, they're going to work cows, they're gonna be roped off of, they're gonna be utilized as a companion in that capacity.

We also have horses that are going to hunting, pack trip people, so they take people up into the mountains and they get to have the dude ranch experience.

Cattle ranchers and wild horse advocates.. often pitted against each other, and it's unfortunate because I think we're all "Team Horse."

The idea is that the cattle ranchers want all the horses to be taken off from the range, so then that can be utilized as an agriculture resource.

Most of the cattle ranchers that I speak to, they want it to be balanced, and they want to incorporate agriculture into those public lands across the United States, but they don't necessarily want to get rid of all the horses.

You have to understand the horses are a part of our life, and we're connected to the horse in a way that not a lot of people are anymore.

There's an old cowboy poet named Baxter Black, and he says, "You'll look at a horse differently when they're on the payroll with you."

Even if you took all the cows off of the range, you never let another cow go out there.

You never let another sheep, another goat go out onto those spaces, you'd still have to manage the horse population.

Whether that be hormonal treatment, whether that be capture and re-homing, it doesn't matter.

The cows are a scapegoat for a bigger issue, and I think that's important to understand.

Horses are extremely good at what they do, and that's carrying people around, bonding in certain situations.

Every mounted national park ranger should be on a wild horse, mounted police officers, they should be on a wild horse.

Mounted border patrol, why aren't they on a wild horse?

Even the calvary that we have in the United States, we can utilize wild horses there.

It takes quite a bit of time to train a horse, takes that patience and it takes some funding to get 'em to that point, but we are already utilizing funds to do other options.

I think giving them a job, letting them fulfill a greater purpose, would be a great way to have some sustainable solutions for horses in the wild.

As a Native American, if you evaluate the history of indigenous people in this country and the history of wild horses in this country, we're bonded in resilience.

There was a time when we were not wanted here, but we still are.

And so, utilizing that as a connection, I think runs deep.

All those things play into our interactions with horses, my interaction with horses, and making sure they have a good experience, and so do I.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: For some students at the Savannah College of Art & Design, exploring nature is an eye-opening part of their education.

♪ ♪ SCOTT BOYLSTON: Biomimicry is the study of nature in a deep and scientific way, to learn more about how humans can improve their design solutions and their engineering solutions.

♪ ♪ CATHY: So, literally, we are mimicking biology.

The quickest example, and I think the one that almost everybody can relate to is Velcro.

Velcro is on your shoes, on your clothing, on most anything that you have at home that needs to stick to something, you're gonna use Velcro.

And where that comes from is the hairy like projections on burrs.

SCOTT: And that came from an exploration of a nuisance burr in a scientist's socks.

And he got so annoyed with those burrs, he started pulling at 'em and realized that there was something there for like a semi-permanent attachment that could be pulled apart when needed.

CATHY: When you look at Roman architecture, you look at the viaducts and you look at the bridges and you look at the arch.

Well, the arch comes from the shell of a turtle, the carapace is domed.

And that is one of the strongest structures in nature.

SCOTT: So, biomimicry classes are offered through the Design for Sustainability program, but sometimes up to 60% of the students are coming from different disciplines.

That'd be Industrial Design, Architecture, Fibers, Fashion, you name it.

They learn about design through a lot of different lenses.

And so, the biomimicry aspect just helps them imagine a new way of doing things completely.

CATHY: Scott Boyleston is the Professor of Design, and he brings the academic discipline and the academic acumen to the class.

My job is to provide the science.

Now, most of the students are non-science majors, but they're basing their projects on strategies in nature.

So, it's my job to help them make that connection.

SCOTT: Sapelo Island is one of a dozen amazing barrier islands on the coast of Georgia, and surprisingly untouched.

Cathy, as a biologist who knows those islands can describe not just everything, but every relationship.

And that's key.

So, we take them out there so they can get out and away from human made spaces and experience nature on nature's terms.

CATHY: When we took the field trip to Sapelo I.. it was a rather blustery overcast day.

However, it wasn't predicted to come in a howling gale, which it eventually did.

So, when we got in the flatbed truck, we went over this little bridge that crossed this salt marsh creek.

Coastal Georgia has only about a hundred miles of coastline, but our 378,000 acres of salt marsh is almost the same amount of salt marsh that Florida has with 2,000 miles of coastline.

After that, we went through the maritime forest.

And while we were going through that forest, I was like, stop.

And we got to look at epiphytes, and we're talking a maritime forest that's in a subtropical environment.

So, there is Spanish moss, there's lichens, there's resurrection fern, and we pulled out some little hand microscopes and we were able to look at the intricacies of the Spanish moss.

And Spanish moss is the first cousin to the pineapple, but they would never know that unless they looked very closely through these 20 power little handheld microscopes.

One of the other things that we pointed out were the different fibers that you see from the trees.

You look at the bark of the tree, you compare a palm tree bark to that of a live oak, and it's quite different.

The palm tree bark looks almost like woven fibers, and it is, it really is.

But that provides an insulating quality so that the tree becomes literally fire resistant.

SCOTT: And hopefully, as humans observing nature closely, we can learn something about adaptation, about how despite the changes, we can thrive and we can adapt, and we can do so with everybody else in mind.

CATHY: When I talk to the students about climate change, I automatically just go right to, "You're the hope.

You're the future.

You're going to correct all of the screw ups that we did in my generation and the generations before."

And I am extremely hopeful when they come up with these projects and I know that we're sending them out into the world, they're going to make a huge difference.

And no matter what discipline they are, they're going to carry what they've learned in biomimicry with them.

You know, geologically and globally, because of the way our planet wobbles, we go through warming periods, and we go through cold periods.

The problem comes when sea level rise, and therefore global warming is exacerbated by what we as humans are doing to the climate.

When warming takes place more quickly than it's supposed to, then the flora and the fauna, plants and the animals don't have enough time to adapt.

That's the problem.

SCOTT: And the students, they're not designing, you k.. coffee machines for people working in an office, which is a relatively simple environment.

They're taking on a challenge of designing for people who are in the middle of some major struggles in life and living.

LUSIANA MORALES: Our trip to Sapelo, we experienced heavy rain and that is one of the targets that we were addressing with our design solution was the monsoon season.

Using that rain, we wanted to collect that water, and in our advantage, use it to distribute through the system and at the same time collect it to make the system cycle efficiently.

VIRAJ GAPCHOOP: I think all the site visits, which we did, just intrigued us to ask questions and to dig deeper, to know the roots of the cause.

So in the process of researching for the New Delhi scenario, we started thinking about how systems are currently working and how can we change them.

We try to incorporate five different systems in just one building.

So, how can we create a closed loop so that system becomes self-sustainable?

OLIVIA BUSHY: With our project, we were designing for unhoused people, specifically in Blizzard Valley, which is an area in central United States of America, where a ton of blizzards happen every year and they're only getting worse with climate change.

Obviously, the Sapelo Island trip, we didn't experience a blizzard, but we did experience a torrential downpour and had to seek shelter.

And that experience definitely lended itself to the urgency with which we were designing for the people.

CHETNA CHAUHAN: So, there's this particular incident that happened when we were going in the Sapelo.

There was this bird that was sitting on the river and then when we were coming out, we had faced a low key hurricane.

We faced the rain, we were very, like, tired, everything was damaged, our umbrellas were flying.

But this bird, even after hours, was sitting right there in the exact position.

SCOTT: Edward Abey once said, "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."

And if you have a sense that, you know, your surroundi.. are under some sort of challenge and the world is not going, hopefully, the way it would be going, to just not do anything can actually be devastating.

So, designers have an opportunity to do something.

And so, I think our students come into a class like this and our program with a desire to do something, but with a lot of questions about how to do it.

And biomimicry is one very concrete process to explore building that bridge between feelings and action.

♪ ♪ CHETNA: There's like so much to learn from nature, we don't really need to even make new things, we just need to, like, open our mind and just listen to what nature is telling us.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: The Great Bear rainforest in Northwest Canada is home to the iconic "Spirit Bear."

But there's much more to honor there, including the first nation communities, who go back over 500 generations.

♪ ♪ EMILEE GILPIN: First Nations are often presented or portrayed as just stewards, you know, people who care about the environment, where it's actually much more complicated and sophisticated than that.

We like to share stories not just of culture and stewardship, but also of, you know, title rights and governance, which is an essential part of it all.

When some people think about the so-called Great Bear rainforest here on the North Pacific coast, they think of spirit bears because they've seen these unique white bears that aren't albino bears.

They're a white bear that is made from a recessive gene in a black bear that are unique to this part of the world.

Of the nine communities, the spirit bears are found in two of the communities, the Gitga'at and the Kitasoo/Xai'xais people.

They're a part of the community's oral history, and they're also now a part of the community's economy.

So, you know, there are spirit bear tours that people can, you know, engage in and participate in, which is really essential when you're thinking about the shift from extractive industries to ecosystem based tourism and conservation based economies.

I think the spirit bears have played an important role in getting people to think of a pretty majestic, powerful being and connect it to a region and then have an emotional reason to want to protect that region.

There's been a ban on hunting black bears because, of course, you need to ban hunting black bears in order to also protect these unique spirit bears as well.

Back in the days of the fur trade, the people who lived with spirit bears wouldn't talk about them in order to protect them and make sure that people didn't go after them.

Commercial fishing was unfettered for decades as well as logging.

And a lot of this industrial extractive activity went on without the consent of the communities, of course, who were most affected by this kind of activity.

So, how can we shift away from this extractive industrial industry into something that's more sustainable?

And ecotourism is a great way to do that.

PAUL KARIYA: We all talk about tourism and as a policy person, sure, it's one of the pillars, it's fish, and fisheries, and forestry, and tourism.

What it doesn't mean is boatloads of people getting off of cruise ships who want access to the villages and the nations.

What it does mean is a light touch approach to introducing foreigners, people coming in, willing to spend some money to learn the marvelous wonders of the north and central coast of Haida Gwaii.

JON MCCORMACK: A lot of the time, getting to a wildlife population to photograph often isn't that hard.

Whereas with a spirit bear, it's a logistical challenge.

All of my photographs of spirit bears have been on an island called Gribble Island, which is right in the middle of the Great Bear rainforest.

And they really are heavily dependent on salmon.

♪ ♪ Obviously, climate change is starting to change the salmon spawning numbers in the British Columbia streams.

But also, if you remember back to the Keystone pipeline, there was this whole idea of putting an oil pipeline right through the middle of the Great Bear Rainforest.

Now, that all of a sudden, you would've ended up with oil tankers coming in and out, or pipelines going through this old growth forest.

And one spill would've taken all of that out.

♪ ♪ Probably one day out of every three I've seen a spirit bear.

It involves waiting, it involves being uncomfortable and it is absolutely worth the wait.

Of all of the wildlife experiences that I've ever had, few have come close to watching this ghost bear emerge from the green and walk towards you.

♪ ♪ PAUL: Something that maybe that's our nature to romanticize particularly indigenous people and the work that they're doing.

It is tremendous, but jobs are important, economic development is important.

And so, the mission is, one, protect the environment for sure.

But the second part of it is to enable a sustainable economy.

And now, with the land and the forest protected previously, we're adding what we call the Great Bear Sea, which is a network of marine protected areas of equal size from northern Vancouver Island to the Alaska panhandle.

So, you've got 6 million hectares of land, 6 million hectares of marine environment that are together.

That in a global context is huge.

♪ ♪ THUNDER WOMAN DANCER: I think what's beautiful about our culture is when you're born Haida or you have a Haida parent, you're given a responsibility of being stewards of the land, and the seafood, and the air, and our song and dance.

And so, any formal environmentalist I've never worked with, but I have three sons who are environmentalists, my parents are environmentalists and everybody on Haida Gwaii, I feel like are "environmentalists," but really all we are doing is protecting and sustaining our own territory.

♪ ♪ EMILEE: So, I just want to hold my hands up and give a lot of thanks to all of those people who are right now in their territories, who are, you know, sipping their hot coffee, monitoring their lands and waters, who are counting salmon, who are, you know, preparing for the long, harsh, cold winters on the coast.

People who are working hard in their communities, far from the public eye to make sure that everything continues to function and is healthy for generations to come.

So, I just want to give thanks for that.

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