This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “Solutions to Global Issues in the Soil with Diana Wall.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.
Dr. Diana Wall: Why is this tiny little worm important to anybody else? Then you see, well, it’s working with a lot of other species in the ground to turn over carbon, to turn over nutrients to help store carbon and soils, so everything’s got a role.
Jocelyn Hittle: Hello, and welcome to CSU Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University’s Spur Campus in Denver, Colorado.
Dr. Diana Wall: People who manage lands who are interested in climate change in Washington or whatever the subject may be, dams, fish, agriculture, they all want to say, “This is based on science.”
Jocelyn Hittle: On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health, and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. Today, I’m joined by Dr. Diana Wall, the inaugural director of the School of Global Environmental Sustainability and a university distinguished professor at Colorado State. Dr. Wall has been recognized for her 25-year career conducting research on soil ecosystems and climate change in Antarctica and was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s also the 2013 Laureate of the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. Welcome, Dr. Wall.
Dr. Diana Wall: Thanks so much. I’m glad to be here.
Jocelyn Hittle: I’d love to start with your current work. It is various but has focused on climate in particular. You are a professor in the Department of Biology, a research scientist of longstanding, and director of the School of Global Environmental Sustainability. What does that combination of roles look like? What’s a day in the life for you?
Dr. Diana Wall: Well, number one, it’s always exciting, and it’s always multiple choices, I guess you’d say. It’s actually a very good career because in the biology lab I have a lab where I have people who are active daily in research that looks at global issues, primarily soil biodiversity, just related to all the species on earth. Then in the position I’m in as director of the School of Global Environmental Sustainability, it’s also kind of a multiple choice because there’s so many different ways people can contribute to sustaining life on earth and the use of natural resources. CSU is really strong in that, so it’s across all campus.
My day is pretty much a mixture of exciting on the ground action where we’re collecting data or looking at a proposal or talking about a new experiment that may have something to do with Antarctica, or it may have something to do with the grasslands here. Then from the perspective of being in the School of Global Environmental Sustainability, it’s exciting also because there are a lot of young, fresh minds mixing with some of us who’ve got some experience and looking at how we can strengthen what we do for tomorrow’s generations.
Jocelyn Hittle: Thank you. Can we focus a little on the research side? You have been focused on soil ecology for a long time. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the kinds of work your lab is doing right now and what are the questions you’re looking to answer and why.
Dr. Diana Wall: Yeah. I think very simply, if we look above ground at trees and our natural resources, going to the national park you see all this beautiful biodiversity that we’re crazy about in Colorado, but we’re missing about half of it… well, a quarter of it. Below ground are all these invertebrates that people don’t pay any attention to very much, and they say, “Oh, we don’t care about them because we can’t see them.” What my lab does is actually looks at some of these invertebrates and how they contribute to carbon cycles, nutrient cycles. It’s a mixture of looking through a microscope and discovering a brand new world of living animals slithering along, each with their own identity, some wearing funny little crowns on their head, I guess I would call them, and then having experiments in the field where we look either in Antarctica where it’s a very simple soil ecosystem.
It looks kind of like Mars, but there’s living things in the soil. In fact, that’s the only place. There’s nothing above ground to say this is a tree, a forest, or whatever. It’s just all hidden below ground, but it contributes a lot to the carbon cycle. It’s this mixture of creating experiments looking at how climate change affects those food webs below ground here versus there where we can observe it with warming climates.
Jocelyn Hittle: When you talk about a soil ecosystem, and you used the term invertebrates, can you say more about what that means? What are you actually looking at? Is it the bacterial systems, worms? When you say invertebrates, maybe define that for us.
Dr. Diana Wall: Yeah. Above soil, we know all sorts of invertebrates, ants, termites. We can identify those. I work on ones that are even smaller than that. They’re as thin as your eyelash, and if you held a glass of water up and you had 5 million tiny round worms in there that I had collected from soil, I could swirl that and you wouldn’t be able to see them. But under a microscope, they’re beautiful, and to me, these nematodes occupy every link in the food chain. It doesn’t matter if it’s bacteria that are decaying a leaf or if it’s a fungus decaying leaf, there’s a nematode group that’s got mouth parts ready to go and say, “That’s my favorite food. This is my favorite food.” Then they go all the way up until their predators on other smaller animals or eaten by something else, and that’s how they contribute to the food web.
Jocelyn Hittle: Got it. Nematodes are really everywhere around the world, right?
Dr. Diana Wall: Everywhere. They’re in the sediments of streams, and they’re in depths of oceans. They’re just different sizes and different species of them, so it’s much like having all the mammals on earth at the campus, only we see it in a soil sample.
Jocelyn Hittle: Got it. What you focus on in particular are microscopic nematodes in the soil in Antarctica and then comparing that to other soil…
Dr. Diana Wall: More diverse systems.
Jocelyn Hittle: … systems in other places. Can you talk a little bit about that Antarctic soil ecosystem? I think a lot of folks don’t think about Antarctic dirt or soil because they’re used to thinking of Antarctica as covered in ice and snow.
Dr. Diana Wall: Well, there’s an area of Antarctica, and it’s very near one of the US bases. We fly from here to Christchurch. Christchurch, it’s a long military flight to the Antarctic continent, and the continent’s bigger than the United States and Mexico, I guess. We then take helicopters into this area that’s the largest ice-free area on the whole continent. By ice-free, it means there’s no ice where we look. If somebody wants to say dirt, they could call it dirt, but it’s soil. If you just looked, you would say, “There’s not anything flying around. There’s no mosquitoes. There’s no nothing.” It’s a desert, and you have to take a soil sample. Then all of a sudden, you just see it teeming with these tiny nematodes, but what we see is fewer species.
What I mean by that is I can go in and we have, for a number of years, looked at how climate change over time is affecting the number of juveniles, the females, the males, how many are dying. We keep the demographics. It’s kind of like doing the demographics of LA. What happens every year? What’s your loss of species… or loss of nematodes, and what’s your increase? What’s happening once the soil warms?
Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, it’s a nematode census, essentially.
Dr. Diana Wall: Yes, absolutely. That’s a good way… I’ll remember that.
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s fascinating, and obviously it is telling you something about how climate is impacting this particular ecosystem. Then how do you think about how that might be extrapolated to other ecosystems or what it is telling us about climate change in general?
Dr. Diana Wall: I think what it’s telling us everywhere, and these are a lot of scientists that are looking at this, not only me, for more diverse sites like forest and grasslands and deserts that are warmer tropical systems, is that we are seeing that there are changes in the composition of the soil food webs. This is due directly or indirectly to climate change, warming, droughts, drying of the system like the drought that we’ve got in the West here. One of the things that we are trying to establish is, what is the baseline biodiversity in the United States? Then we want to monitor that, not just me, but a whole lot of scientists are volunteering around the world to monitor how the biodiversity below ground is changing for bacteria. Are they increasing or decreasing? Is that more food for the nematodes that feed on them? Then is that more food for the mites that feed on the nematodes and so on up to the predators in the soil system?
What does that mean for us? Well, soil fertility. These animals below ground and the microbes are working on making sure there’s enough carbon and nitrogen in a way that plants can absorb it, so it’s directly tied to plant growth. If we change this… If we change the species, I should say, the animals and the food webs, we’re also changing what happens with plant production. We’re changing maybe the amount or how nutritious it is. Also, we’ve got to think about earthworms are in the soil with these other animals, so we’re changing all of those bigger animals that create pores in soil and aerate the soil. Moisture comes through that soil. All the aggregates that are formed to make sticky little soil packed particles, all of these things that we depend on from soil and the storage of carbon in the soil is all due to food webs working together with what’s above ground.
Jocelyn Hittle: Just to distill a little of what you said into maybe a few points for our listeners to remember, the changing climate is changing the ecosystem in our soil, which has impacts on things like soil productivity for agriculture and also how much carbon could be stored in that soil or how much is released, which then has another impact on climate itself, right?
Dr. Diana Wall: Yes, yes.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah. It’s interesting because I think when people think about studying climate, studying soil is maybe not what comes to mind, but it is a critical link in the complex world that makes up climate change research.
Dr. Diana Wall: Absolutely, and there’s some really great people here at CSU who do work only on soil and carbon storage.
Jocelyn Hittle: Maybe we can go back to… You were describing how you get down to your research site in an Antarctica, and it sounds very dramatic. Maybe you can tell us a little bit, what is it like to go down and do research in Antarctica and what might be most surprising?
Dr. Diana Wall: I think number one is you have to build a lot of patience because it’s remote. You’re isolated. It’s cold. When you’re in the field, you may not know when you’re going to be picked up by a helicopter, and there’s no way to get back to the base. That was kind of surprising. I mean, I’d heard about it, and I knew it was so isolated, but that first season when I was… They drop you off with your… You were always in the field with somebody else because of the danger in the change in the weather, and it is a cold, windy environment. That helicopter goes away, and you have a radio. You radio the helicopter, “Well, when are you coming back?” Well, if he’s in another valley, they may not be back very soon, so you’ve got to be prepared to hunker down and use your survival gear. That’s the biggest surprise to me was that you really are remote, so depending on yourself and being prepared and being ready to wait and be warm, that’s the big deal.
Jocelyn Hittle: What was the longest you waited between being dropped off and picked up again?
Dr. Diana Wall: Well, one time, there were several of us, and we were at a New Zealand base and supposed to be there only for about three to four days. We ended up there two weeks. You couldn’t really travel to go see anything. We were near a penguin rookery. That was nice, except after so many days, penguins can get a little stinky, and they’re very curious. We have a US Antarctic Treaty. We’re not supposed to go pick up a penguin or, “Here, penguin. Here, penguin.” If they want to come towards you, that’s fine, but you can’t go chasing after a penguin. We were all very aware of that, but they just show up in the funniest places. That was kind of a fun trip. The other times, it has just been cold, and you’re just sitting and waiting and sitting and waiting. That’s maybe a day.
Jocelyn Hittle: You get this question a lot, I’m sure, but when you say it’s cold, how cold?
Dr. Diana Wall: Well, right now, I’ve heard from a colleague that’s in his tent, and he checked the temperature. It’s minus 20 right now, so it’s a little cold. It’s very dry, and your fingers crack. You get used to it.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah. You get used to it, but you also have to be committed to the work, it sounds like, to want to be down there.
Dr. Diana Wall: Yeah. It’s a beautiful place. I’m very, very fortunate.
Jocelyn Hittle: I know it’s on a lot of people’s list to hopefully someday be able to go to Antarctica in their lifetime, so we can all learn a little about how to be prepared for that from you. Although, I’m sure none of us will have quite as challenging a time. Okay. I’d like to ask a little bit about… I looked at your CV in advance of our conversation, and there’s a very long list of different positions and activities, a very long list of awards you’ve received. You even have a valley in Antarctica named after you. Can you tell us a little bit about which of those roles or which of those awards has been most meaningful for you and a little bit about why it has had that impact?
Dr. Diana Wall: Well, there’s several. I mean, I think to have your peers recognize you is just an amazing thing. I’ve been very, very lucky, but I think the two just right off the top that I think of is, one that’s from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. That’s all the Antarctic researchers around the world, and that was really a surprise and a shock for me that I got that award that year. That really was validation that looking at life in soil and doing this and finding how it’s tied to climate change really does add to the whole story of how the continent is changing, and if that continent is changing, what else are we seeing in soils around the world? That was very meaningful.
The other one, of course, is the Tyler Award for Environmental Achievement. I mean, when I looked at some of the people that have gotten that, I just kept thinking, “I really think they made a mistake,” because there’s Jane Goodall and some of these other people, Tom Lovejoy, all these people who’ve been studying biodiversity and really making the world aware of it. I just felt extremely grateful and humble about being in that kind of a crowd.
Jocelyn Hittle: Well, there’s no question that you absolutely deserve to be in that company. We are very fortunate to have you at CSU and contributing to the scientific body of work around climate change, around soil ecosystems, around everything that you’ve touched over the course of your career. It’s very, very impressive. Can you tell us a little bit more about the School of Global Environmental Sustainability, or what we call SoGES for short? Can you tell us about why it’s important to have a school like this, what inspired you to create it, and what is it doing right now?
Dr. Diana Wall: Well, I think one of the first things I would say is, I didn’t really create it. It’s kind of a wonderful thing that happened at CSU, that people from faculty from many disciplines, some deans, so it’s got administration in it, were involved in a task force to come up with this cross campus school that brings together many, many disciplines, many, many departments. It just creates an avenue for people to cross over into another field and say, “I really can’t understand this. In other words, I can’t see how we would sustain a forest unless I have information from the people over in this college.”
In many ways, what we do is look at grand challenges like climate change, pollution, the water issues. These are happening around the world, and the students want to be trained in these. We have expertise, and I think this is a strength of CSU. The strength of the school that was created was to have so many people around the campus that you can’t put them in one school center, whatever. We are kind of virtual, but people meet. It’s matchmaking on these grand challenges. Whether it’s economics, whether it’s society, environmental justice, whether it’s what you’re looking at in terms of 10 years, what will climate change be in this region for agriculture, all of us at CSU seem to be focused on that. I think that model, rather than creating a new building and a new college, which is also what a lot of universities are doing, is really unique and a real strength for CSU.
Jocelyn Hittle: Great. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. My background’s in ecology. You pull on one thread, and all of the other things are impacted. Having the opportunity to think about that, not only within, say, an ecosystem, but then thinking about it from a disciplinary perspective, that if you pull on one thing… that you can’t pull on the economic system and have it not impact the environmental system and have it not be impacted by the governmental system. I really appreciate that interdisciplinary approach, and it’s one of the things that we’re really focused on at Spur, as you know. We’re kind of thematically oriented rather than disciplinarily organized, so that is intentional in the same way that I think the SoGES organization is intentional on that.
I have a couple other questions for you, and then we’ll transition to how you got where you are. The first is really around science communication and scientific understanding. You’ve been a science advisor to a number of different groups, including on a working group for the president’s science advisory group in DC. What does a role like that mean, to be a science advisor? Why is it important, and what do you wish the general public understood about science better?
Dr. Diana Wall: Well, I think we all want to know that when we hear information it’s got some background behind it in terms of data and strength and it’s credible. I don’t want to go outside in the morning and hear somebody on the radio say, “Oh, it’s 75 degrees outside,” and walk out and it’s a blizzard. We want to build up that information and relate that to other people. In case of big decision-making, I think people who manage lands who are interested in climate change in Washington or whatever the subject may be, dams, fish, agriculture, they all want to say, “This is based on science.” What we try to do, I think this is true for almost every scientist, is here is some information just to help you make your decision easier on what the policy or the outcomes or the management may be of our lands in the US.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah. Obviously, having science informed policy is something that is uneven, so in the cases where you’re able to do that, I think that’s really important. I guess one of the things that comes to mind for me as well is having the general public be more scientifically literate tends to also push more policy decisions to be informed by science because people are looking at their constituents and their constituents are asking for scientifically informed decision-making.
Dr. Diana Wall: I think that’s really true, and I think that in the past scientists have been in their ivory tower and very happy because I think working in science is one of the most exciting things you could choose as a career. But I also think that we recognize, to a much greater extent than we did 20 years ago, that if we don’t communicate science to affect policy or to inform the public… If you’re sitting on an airplane and somebody says, “What do you used to… What do you do?” When I was younger, I would say, “Oh, I work at a university,” and I wouldn’t say whether I did teaching or research. Now when they say, “What do you do?” I say, “I’m a scientist,” and if the conversation doesn’t die, then I’ll say something about, “It really is gratifying.”
It’s wonderful to see the students who are coming today not only want to know their discipline and what they’re majoring in, but also say, “How is this going to affect me, this particular challenge? How is fracking going to…? How is agriculture in a drought situation…? How is no water in the dam going to help us?” They want to know these answers, so I think scientists have to communicate, “This is what we know up to this point,” with a number of other scientists from other disciplines, this multidisciplinary interdisciplinary approach, and give that information clearly to the public.
Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely. Easier said than done, particularly in communicating really complicated things, but very, very important.
Dr. Diana Wall: Yes. I think you can see that just from the… They’re having the climate conference meetings in Egypt this week, and a number of people from CSU have gone. I think looking at the… One of the things they remarked about is how different it was this year with the number of people, the emphasis on all the students coming, the young people coming to say, “How can we work on changes together?” This unification of what we know, what’s evident, and where we have to go and the new ideas is really a part of this trying to communicate to the public.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, absolutely. Can we talk a little bit about climate change, specifically? Especially given the timing and the conversations that are happening in Egypt right now, what do you think is most important for the general public or our audience to understand about what we’re learning about climate change right now? What is it you’re most worried about, and what gives you the most hope?
Dr. Diana Wall: Yeah. What’s happening right now is I think there’s no doubt that the climates are is changing and that it’s having effect on us, whether it’s weather patterns, whether it’s getting the same food and the same crops in the same place, or seeing vegetation and animals move with a better climate. I think climate change is… To me, and I think it’s to most of these people, climate change is occurring, and what can we do about it? How can we adapt to it? What kind of solutions can we find? How innovative we’re going to be about it? I think this looks at the areas of decarbonization. How can we take that CO2 out of the atmosphere? Then there is, how are we going to live with it? Are we all going to start walking around with umbrellas, or are we going to start walking around in our flip flops all year?
When we start to look at this, we can use data to build models to say what’s going to happen in Fort Collins and give us some, I’d say it’s less fear of what we might do to adapt to this, while we’re also trying to solve how much carbon we’ve got in the air. It is kind of frightening, and I think you can see it with people who’ve had floods this year, had the fires, all these things that are happening with more frequency. Someone said, “Oh, you mean the once in 500 year type floods that are now happening twice a year?” It’s that kind of a situation that I think is worrisome from people, but I think we also have a lot of strength in knowing that we can make changes now to still have actions that, whether they’re national or individual, we can all make changes and do things to reduce the carbon in the air.
Jocelyn Hittle: There is still time if we act, right?
Dr. Diana Wall: I think that’s very true.
Jocelyn Hittle: All right. I’d like to turn now to focus a little on how you got where you are, so as you know, one of the roles that we want the Spur campus to play is to introduce people to careers they might not have considered if they’re young people just starting out and to kind of take some of the mystery out of some of the career paths for our lifelong learners who might be there at Spur. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started on this path you’re on now?
Dr. Diana Wall: Sure. I think it is part of a lot of things. It’s serendipity. I wasn’t somebody who started out saying, “Oh, boy. I can’t wait to work in soils and look at nematodes.” It was not in my mind. What I did when I was growing up was being outdoors, being with people who liked the outdoors, learning about the outdoors. Then when I was in college, I was just undecided for maybe three years. I flip-flopped between history and microbiology, and then I met a professor who said, “You ought to go into parasitology.” I started looking at animal parasites, and I could tell real fast that wasn’t my thing.
I met another professor who said, “Oh, if you want to look at parasites, there are parasites of plants, and they’re almost invisible,” and I thought, “Hmm.” It kind of tied in with… I did like microbiology, so it tied in with that. I ended up getting a TA in botany, meaning I was a teaching associate in graduate school in botany, looking at plants and thinking about plant roots and then looking at these tiny little nematodes that parasitized the plants and caused all sorts of economic damage. It was kind of hard to tell my parents and my grandmother what I did, but my uncle who had a farm was the greatest person to talk to because he knew.
Jocelyn Hittle: He got it right away.
Dr. Diana Wall: He got it right away. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re doing such and such, and have you seen the difference between this disease and that disease that they cause?” I was pretty well hooked. Then in a postdoc, I went to the University of California, Riverside. There are two nematology departments out there, one at Davis and one at Riverside. I started working in deserts, and that was a brand new thing, very different ecosystems, very different crops. I kept moving more and more into the ecology of soils.
Jocelyn Hittle: What took you to Antarctica the first time?
Dr. Diana Wall: I had been working in deserts with a bunch of collaborations. I do a lot of team research, and with some people that are just so knowledgeable, it’s so fun. You just learn and learn and learn. They learned how to spell nematode too. We had a number of grants in looking at deserts in the Western US, and there are just too many species of nematodes. We could not say whether this climate change factor… Say we cut back water in the desert, even made it a more severe drought, what was that doing below ground? Or we gave it more rain than it should have had in an experiment. What did it have to do below ground? Because there were so many, you couldn’t tell it at the species level what was happening. There may have been a hundred species of nematodes in the ground, and we couldn’t tell, well, was it affecting all of them or just one.
A colleague of mine said, “Well, you really ought to go to a desert where there’s no plants.” I thought, “The Sahara, that’s too sandy. It blows. It moves.” I started looking into big deserts. This colleague of mine worked in Antarctica, and I said, “Do they have nematodes in the valley?” Started looking at the literature, the science, and I couldn’t find people who had done much with them. He said, “Oh, I’m going down next season. I’ll just send you a soil sample, and you can extract it.” That’s kind of the way it started. I’m still working with the colleague that I was working with way back then.
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s great. That leads me pretty much directly into my next question was around if there were particular people or moments that really were pivotal in shaping where you are.
Dr. Diana Wall: Definitely, there are. Definitely, there are. There are people who encouraged me to take classes that I didn’t want to take, and it turned out that was smart. I may have made a C in it, but it really helped me understand where I was going. Then there are people that say, “Do you want to work on deserts rather than in agriculture?” I would, “Well, I’d never thought about it, but why not?” I think it’s taking advantage of a lot of those and then, to me, seeing how what I worked on fit into the bigger picture of the whole ecosystem we see outdoors as you look out your window. Why is this tiny little worm important to anybody else? Then you see, well, it’s working with a lot of other species in the ground to turn over carbon, to turn over nutrients to help store carbon and soils, so everything’s got to a role. I think opportunities are… It’s just making a decision, do you want to take a leap and go that way or not.
Jocelyn Hittle: The ones that stick in your head are the ones that obviously shaped your path. There were probably a few you did say no to, but I think one of the pretty consistent themes that I hear from people as I ask that question is that there are opportunities that come up. Part of that is about serendipity and luck and being in the right place at the right time, and then part of it is stepping through whatever door opens.
Dr. Diana Wall: Yeah. I think in some cases, as I look back on it, it certainly was going to Antarctica. There weren’t a lot of women down there when I went, so you really get the feeling of double isolation. If I hadn’t been going with good colleagues that I trusted, I think that would… I can just say that whether you’re there, wherever you are, there’s some things you really have to make a decision. Am I going to leap over this? Am I going to fight for this? Am I going to just hunker down and do my own thing? That just happens along your career.
Jocelyn Hittle: Are there more women in Arctic doing research now? I’m assuming the answer to that is yes, but I’m…
Dr. Diana Wall: Oh, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. They actually kept a chart on it in town, on how many people on base, how many women, how many going to the deep field. When I was in McMurdo, when I was walking by I’d always look at that. I was also lucky that after about six or seven years that I’d been going with this one colleague, I joined a long-term ecological research study there from the NSF, and there was another woman. That really helped having at least two on our LTR of 13 people.
Jocelyn Hittle: Can you talk a little bit about McMurdo? I think a lot of people hear about. It’s an international space, right? Can you talk a little bit about the collaboration that happens?
Dr. Diana Wall: Yeah. The US has three stations, and McMurdo is the largest. It’s kind of the gateway to the continent. There’s a south pole that we hear a lot about, but McMurdo is just this massive construction train center where instead of trains, you got planes going everywhere, all types of planes. There’s a lab there. The lab facilities are fantastic. One of the things we have to do with nematodes is to bring them back from the field. They’re in soils, and we have to wash them out of the soils so we have to have good lab facilities.
When you go to eat in town, is what we call it… You live in dorms there. You don’t live in tents. They’ve got dorms. They’ve got laboratory facilities. That’s where you pick up all your gear, your tents and all that sort of stuff, and get it ready to go to the field or where you ship and pack everything to come off the continent. When you go to breakfast or lunch in the galley, you never know who you’re going to sit down and talk with. You may be sitting down with somebody who is a geologist, just got in from deep field. You can talk to him about, were they a paleontologist? Or it could be an astronomer or somebody who’s been working with the astronomers, or a student that came from CSU that’s now behind the counter in the galley saying, “We got freshy food today, Diana. What do you want?” That’s always a boon.
It’s always very interesting, and I think it builds this idea of we’re all looking how things fit together. We’re looking at the science very carefully before we communicate what we found. It’s really quite an amazing place, and it’s cold.
Jocelyn Hittle: And it’s cold. That’s the tagline to everything you say about your experience in Antarctica, and I can only imagine that there’s good reason. Is there anything else that we have not talked about so far that you think would be of interest to our listeners, either about your journey or about what a day in the life is like for you?
Dr. Diana Wall: I don’t know if there’s anything in particular, but I do think this is a time where we are seeing so many discoveries and so many changes that I think will help us if we work as a unit on various problems to understand what’s happening in a faster manner. I think particularly, many of the boards I sit on are now run by very young people who are wanting to make changes in the world, and I think every single step along our careers, we’ve got a place to be involved. I would say that this idea of we can do something to be a more sustainable world really can happen.
Jocelyn Hittle: What do you do on a daily basis yourself around sustainability? What’s important to you?
Dr. Diana Wall: Well, I think it’s just a habit we all get into of, “Oh, do I want to use that plastic bag? Oh, do I really want to get a bicycle, electric car? What am I getting into this morning?” Now I even see myself saying, “Ooh, how many plane trips do I want to take? It’s miles versus burning carbon.” I think it’s important just to do something. Whether it’s putting compost on your garden or picking up trash every day, there’s something that we can do.
Jocelyn Hittle: Great. Those are words to live by indeed. Is there a place where people can find more information about your work or about the School of Global Environmental Sustainability that we should point people to?
Dr. Diana Wall: Yeah. I think for my lab, you could Google, “Wall lab at CSU,” and that’ll bring up all the research and everybody who’s been in my lab and what they’re doing now. I think right now for the school, it’s just Sustainability.ColoState.edu.
Jocelyn Hittle: Great, thank you. All right, for my last question, our Spur of the Moment question, this is one that is very particular to you. You would go to Antarctica and spend three months, is that right, at a time, roughly?
Dr. Diana Wall: About two, yeah.
Jocelyn Hittle: About two. Okay. There were many things that you did not have access to. What did you miss the most, whether it was-
Dr. Diana Wall: Fruit.
Jocelyn Hittle: Fruit. Okay, that was so easy.
Dr. Diana Wall: That is so easy. I have to explain this. We don’t get freshies, is what we call them, vegetables very often. Christmas is good. What happens is you kind of watch the log of what the C-130 is bringing down. It’ll say so many packs, passengers, and then it’ll say something that indicates that there’s going to be fresh fruit. The next morning in the galley, after they’ve offloaded it, you can see people walking out with apples stuck in every pocket, or a banana is like heaven. I think I kept an orange in front of me for about four days before I finally said, “Okay. Now I’m eating my orange.” I don’t know when I’ll get another one, so I’m going to eat that orange. We covet those things, and fruit is number one.
Jocelyn Hittle: Number one. That answer came so easily. Thank you for sharing a little bit of that and a little glimpse into Antarctic research life. Thanks so much for your time, Diana. Really appreciate it.
Dr. Diana Wall: Oh, thank you for inviting me. Appreciate it.
Jocelyn Hittle: The CSU Spur of the Moment Podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson, and our theme music is by Ketsa. Please visit the show notes for links mentioned in this episode. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.
