What do you do when you find the last individual of a species previously thought to be extinct? The two rarest plants on earth both live in the Presidio of San Francisco, they’re both in the same genus, and there’s only one left of each. Is there a future for these species, and if so, what does it look like? And what can species on the brink tell us about ourselves and the future of our ecosystems?

Find show notes for this episode at www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe1-3-the-loneliest-plants

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Adam Huggins 0:00

Hey, Mendel.

Mendel Skulski 0:00

Hey, Adam.

Adam Huggins 0:02

I was wondering... You've hiked with me before.

Mendel Skulski 0:05

Yes, this is true.

Adam Huggins 0:08

Could you describe to our audience what taking a hike with me is like?

Mendel Skulski 0:14

Well, uh... It's about the quality not the distance covered. It's - I mean, there's plants everywhere! And every single one of them needs to be carefully explored and photographed and named. So... I love it!

Adam Huggins 0:32

I'm glad. I've-I've learned that for most people. It's a uh... It's an acquired taste.

Mendel Skulski 0:40

I mean, I do much the same whenever there's mushrooms out, so. I can't blame you.

Adam Huggins 0:44

So maybe, like, we're a little bit biased on this, right?

Mendel Skulski 0:46

Yeah.

Adam Huggins 0:47

Yeah. I'm gonna introduce you to somebody. And he has got a story that I think is going to make my habit of stopping every few feet... that much worse.

Dan Gluesenkamp 1:01

Yeah, hi, I'm Dan Gluesenkamp. I'm currently the Executive Director of the California Native Plant Society. I grew up in California. I escaped the South to the North. And I've been here ever since.

Adam Huggins 1:13

I-I... also escaped from the South to the North. It's just that I escaped from Northern California to [laughing] British Columbia.

Mendel Skulski 1:21

Wow.

Adam Huggins 1:22

So we have that in common.

Mendel Skulski 1:23

Does he remind you of you in other ways?

Adam Huggins 1:26

In some particular ways, yeah.

Mendel Skulski 1:28

Okay.

Adam Huggins 1:31

And he's got the best drive-by botany story I know of.

Mendel Skulski 1:34

Wow wow wow.

Dan Gluesenkamp 1:35

I found myself driving home from a climate change conference where I had given a talk in the midst of a whole bunch of folks talking about crazy actions we could do to save the world from climate change. I made a pitch that the first quick thing we should do - the most cost effective and the most careful and productive and no regrets strategy would be, first, to find everything that's rare. And then second, take care to not destroy them. And I really believe that that's kind of the first thing that we should do for climate change. In the end, the science is very clear that, you know, to deal with climate change, first you do basic conservation, and it'd be nice for us to start doing that.

Dan Gluesenkamp 2:10

I had that in my head as I was driving home to San Francisco from a climate change conference in Sonoma, and looked out the window at a site just off the Golden Gate Bridge, when you get off the bridge, there was a little teardrop island in the middle of all these lanes of freeway traffic, and I looked over there - they had recently trimmed some bushes back in preparation for rebuilding that off ramp. And I saw something that looked a little bit like a Manzanita but it's hard to tell when you're zooming by at sixty miles an hour. And so I kind of made a mental note and the next time I drove by a week later or so, I-I really made a point of slowing down as much as I could and leaning over, looking out the window to see if I could get a look at it. But you know... on that off ramp coming off the Golden Gate Bridge with all these commuters and everything you can't slow down.

Dan Gluesenkamp 2:51

There were horns honked. And so I-I still thought, huh, it looks a little bit like a Manzanita. And it piqued my interest a little bit more. The most important part of that is that... You know, this is an interesting site. It's very close to what I knew to be the location of the last remaining individual of the Raven's Manzanita. That's a plant called, sometimes called 'the loneliest plant'. It was discovered by the great botanist Peter Raven when he was 13, of course, prowling around the dunes of the Presidio, discovered the last individual that species. When I saw something that looked like a Manzanita growing somewhere near the site of that plant, I thought, well, you know, it's a one in a million but what if? So, that third time I drove past the plant, I went all out. I slowed down as much as I could, people honked their horns, I leaned over still doing, you know, 45 or something, leaned over with my camera, and tried to take a snap of it, as I - as I as I drove by. I quickly looked at it and it was just a blurry mess. You couldn't see anything. And so I got on the phone-

Dan Gluesenkamp 3:50

-and I called Lou Stringer, a friend of mine who is a great ecologist and like all great ecologists would much rather go out looking for a plant than sitting at his computer. So I-I didn't reach Lou, I left a message on his answering machine.

Dan Gluesenkamp 4:00

[Dan's voice with answering machine playback sound effect] "Hey Lou, sorry, this is wild goose chase, but... You know, there's something that looks a little bit like a Manzanita - I'm sure it's not so I'm sorry. But you know, wouldn't that be cool if it were? A mate for Raven's Manzanita? Wouldn't that-that be cool? Okay. Bye-"

Dan Gluesenkamp 4:12

And then I got cut off by the beep of the machine. And so when I got home 5, 10 minutes later, I called Lou again. And he picked up the phone this time - he said, I can't talk, we're loading up, we're gonna go out and look for it.

Michael Chassé 4:22

My name is Michael Chassé. And I work for the Division of Natural Resource Management and Science here at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Dan Gluesenkamp 4:32

So he and Mark Frey went out, they drove past once, they said, ahh, nah, it's just a weedy leptospermum bush. And then they circled around and they drove by again and they looked at it and said, ah, nah, it's just an acacia, looks like an acacia. And then they drove by and they went, yeah, it's either a leptospurmum, acacia, it's definitely a weed. I don't know why but they, they-they pulled over. They parked kind of off the freeway on a side road.

Michael Chassé 4:55

And so there was no way to walk to it - without crossing the highway [laughing]. Risking your life.

Dan Gluesenkamp 5:03

Michael Chassé 5:22

And we - it was a Manzanita! You know, you don't have to be an expert in Manzanitas to know it's generally a Manzanita.

Dan Gluesenkamp 5:28

I'm good at spotting weird things. But I usually don't know what I'm seeing.

Michael Chassé 5:32

The question was, what is this? And how is it here and not discovered?

Dan Gluesenkamp 5:37

It wasn't the Raven's Manzanita. It wasn't a mate to the loneliest plant. It was a survivor of the Franciscan Manzanita. The-the plant that we all knew had been driven extinct.

Michael Chassé 5:48

It's not often it happens where you-you find a presumed extinct plant and have a chance to, to save it. And so that became our second-last of its kind Manzanita here in the Presidio.

Mendel Skulski 6:00

Wow. Talk about winning the plant lottery.

Adam Huggins 6:04

I know right? I'm so jealous.

Mendel Skulski 6:08

[Laughing]

Adam Huggins 6:08

Now whenever I drive or bike anywhere - and it was already bad before this, but now? I'm constantly, constantly stopping and looking.

Mendel Skulski 6:18

Yeah, you never know when a presumed extinct species might be just over the next lane.

Adam Huggins 6:22

You never know.

Introduction voiceover 6:29

Broadcasting from Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. This is Future Ecologies. Where your hosts, Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski, explore the future of human habitation on planet Earth through ecology, design and sound.

Adam Huggins 6:59

So this tiny piece of land on the tip of a peninsula in one of the densest urban areas in the world - literally the gateway to the west, the Golden Gate - is home to two of the rarest plants on Earth. In fact, the two rarest plants on Earth.

Mendel Skulski 7:14

Ah, at least as far as we know.

Adam Huggins 7:16

Yeah, that we know of. And their predicament poses two very different existential questions, depending on your perspective.

Mendel Skulski 7:24

So, I guess the first one is: do species like this have any kind of future in the world that - that we're creating?

Adam Huggins 7:33

Totally. And that's a question that's being asked more and more often, and which was recently posed quite bluntly in a New York Times Magazine story called 'Should some species be allowed to die out?'

Mendel Skulski 7:45

Woof! Ah... Okay, what's - what's the other question?

Adam Huggins 7:49

That question goes something like this: in this new world that humans are creating, does any species - at least any species that we know of or are able to recognize - does any species need to go extinct? Like, ever?

Mendel Skulski 8:17

Okay, before we go any further, what is a Manzanita? Refresh my memory.

Adam Huggins 8:24

Well, I'm a pretty big fan. And so my description would probably just be, like, incoherent swooning [laughing]. So I'm going to defer to Michael.

Michael Chassé 8:32

Manzanitas are... They're evergreen flowering shrubs of various sizes that grow throughout California. And there are also manzanitas that grow throughout the northern part of the United States and even in Europe and in some places in Mexico. But here in California, we have this amazing diversity of manzanitas: manzanitas that are treelike, manzanitas that are very low growing and flat to the ground-

Dan Gluesenkamp 9:00

They're one of the most beautiful plants that you can have. They have these beautiful stems with bare smooth red bark-

Michael Chassé 9:06

Generally small, simple leaves with these bell shaped flowers kind of white or pinkish flowers-

Dan Gluesenkamp 9:13

Beautiful little pendant flowers that the pollinators love-

Michael Chassé 9:15

When those flowers are pollinated they produce these berries that look like little apples, hence the name 'Manzanita'.

Dan Gluesenkamp 9:21

Adam Huggins 9:33

They're actually over 100 officially recognized taxa, which means species, essentially, or subspecies of Manzanita in California, right now.

Mendel Skulski 9:42

Woah!

Adam Huggins 9:43

And to put that in perspective, here in BC, we have just two - which is to say nothing bad about them. They're great! I love them both dearly and would never pick favorites.

Mendel Skulski 9:52

[Laughing] Sounds like they're your kids.

Adam Huggins 9:55

Well, now that you mention it, I do consider myself the happy father of several Manzanitas in my garden.

[Laughing] ...Do we know why there are so many more manzanitas in California?

Glad you asked.

There are one of many plant taxa, many different kinds of plants, that found themselves in California during a time of global change. Across North America, across California - you name it - as climate got drier and warmer, as tectonic plates shifted and pushed up mountain ranges, and exposed new soil types and created new north-facing hills or south-facing mountains or whatever it might be. And created new rain shadows pushing up a mountain that blocks that coastal rain and creates a dry zone. We saw an emergence of all kinds of different kinds of places in California. And those plants that were already here, said, 'Awesome! Let's diversify.' Well, that's not really the way it works.

Manzanitas have gone through this rapid period of evolution in the last, say, one, one-and-a-half million years, and that seems like a long period of time, but that's a short amount of time. And so microclimates play a big factor, different geologic substrates in areas play a factor-

Basically, a plant that will find itself isolated from-from its brethren and sistren, on a unique soil type, may find it hard to survive. And, you know, if you have a population of Manzanitas on one side and the hill gets pushed up, almost all of those Manzanita's might die as the conditions change. Everyone will die - except for those that don't, and those that don't have the genes that allow them to persist there. And this is kind of the raw material for evolution. And over time, we've seen a diversification of Manzanitas.

-and Manzanitas can easily hybridize. So, two different Manzanitas can cross pollinate, create a hybrid, some of those hybrids may not survive, but if others have adaptive strategies to new changing conditions, they may become another Manzanita. So repeat this over and over three times - you have the climate getting warmer, then maybe getting cooler-

-as climate gets warmer plants, move north from the south. As climate gets colder, plants move south from the north, and you get these waves moving back and forth as you heat up and cool down and heat up and cool down. And each time a wave passes over and then retreats, it leaves some of its flora behind. And so we've had this pumping action that has pumped up the size of our flora.

And so you get all of these rapid changes - rapid in-in geologic time. And you have manzanitas that are hybridizing. And... so, here in San Francisco, we have a rock type called serpentinite. It's our state rock, actually, for California. And the soil derived from serpentinite is typically really harsh to plants - it's really high in heavy metals. Um... The-the-the calcium magnesium ratio is sort of inverted for what you would want say in a garden, right? It's not good for plants, usually. But plants have adapted to these very harsh soils and have become new species - they've speciated from a parent species that couldn't adapt to serpentine. And so we have... that is one of the reasons we have these-these unique manzanitas here is they evolved on these essentially serpentine islands.

Every part of California has a different Manzanita. You have the Vine Hill Manzanita. Well, Konocti has the Konocti Manzanita, and San Francisco has, well, they have the Franciscan Manzanita and the Ravens Manzanita and a couple that probably went extinct.

And these two Manzanitas, in the Presidio of San Francisco, they're serpentinite specialists. Say that five times fast. If you've ever been to San Francisco, you know that it's located on a thin, foggy peninsula that juts out towards the ocean.

The city is only seven miles by seven miles - 49 square miles. Before the city was built, most of this was actually coastal dunes with the occasional rocky outcrop, and these outcrops were serpentinite and you can still find them in the city. It seems like these two Manzanitas only ever really occurred on these serpentinite outcrops above the shifting sand dunes.

So... there probably were never that many to begin with.

Probably. It's hard to say though.

You know, the Presidio was settled, you know, as a, as a fort, as a military base back in the 1770s. And of course, land use change dramatically after that point. There aren't very detailed records of what grew here in 1776. That came a little later. But what we're finding out - both through discovering these Manzanitas emerging from seed bank, and also the genetic analysis of these plants - is that there-there was likely much more here than we, we know. And so Manzanita populations may have been pretty common at the time of Spanish arrival. But through land use changes may have been lost pretty quickly through the, the need for fuel. It's documented that in San Francisco, even shrubs were gathered for firewood, because it's not a natural... It's not a natural tree landscape. There aren't many tall trees in San Francisco, naturally.

So it's possible that there were a lot more But by the turn of the century, there were only an isolated view. And these attracted the attention of some of California's legendary botanists, who we'll hear about - after the break.

Okay, so the Franciscan Manzanita story is inextricably intertwined with the stories of some of California's greatest botanists.

This Manzanita seems to be at the nexus of all these important historic California plant conservation stories. It was a rare plant.

For thousands of years. It occurred in just a few spots on planet Earth, all of them in San Francisco. botanists knew it and loved it. In a typical California fashion. We have a great history of women botanists, being botanists at a time when they were not even allowed to be! Lester Rowntree, who, um, succeeded as a botanist for many years because, ah, most of the male botanist never met her. Jepson, the, you know, one of the legendary California botanists was-was, ah, completely overwhelmed when he met Lester in person, found that she was a woman, and-and just sputtered that he thought she was a man, and-and kind of presumably therefore had let her 'get away' with botany for all those years. So she was very active in this plant - she actually, Lester Rowntree actually, in one of her books, describes how she went to save a Franciscan Manzanita from one of these cemeteries before it got bulldozed. She crept up in the dead of night in her Packard, backed it up to the gate of the cemetery, snuck in with a shovel and a gunny sack and dragged it out and loaded it in her trunk - like a grave robber. She said. 'I garnered it ghoulishly in a gunnysack.'

Alice Eastwood was another fantastic botanist in California who happened to be a woman at a time when botanists were not allowed to be women. Um... She apparently had every stagecoach schedule in California memorized, in her, in her work to get out into the hills and dales and collect plants. She was a great botanist, described many species, worked at the California Academy of Sciences. When the, when the great earthquake of 1906 hit and shook her out of bed in her North Beach apartment, she ran all the way to the California Academy of Sciences, ran upstairs into the burning building and opened up the cabinets - not of her collections but of the type specimens, and started lowering 'em down on bedsheets out of the windows of this burning building. And so we still have those.

Ah... and so Alice Eastwood looked at the Manzanitas here in San Francisco - ah... they were surviving in the tops of the tallest hills, in any cemeteries that weren't developed - and determined that they were, in fact, unique. They were different than other manzanitas. And so... she wrote this up in a scientific paper, and it was peer reviewed and accepted. And her determination has existed to today. That, um, the-the-the Franciscan Manzanita, which grew in Laurel Hill Cemetery, is a unique manzanita and different from the ones that it was lumped in with previously. Now what Alice Eastwood didn't know was that there-there was a second manzanita in these locations that looked a lot like the Franciscan Manzanita. It really wasn't until the 60s, when genetic analysis became part of plant taxonomy, that it was determined that the, that the other manzanita, that the other form of-of the Franciscan Manzanita was actually a unique species. It was different - which we now know as the Ravens Manzanita. So we now know there are two unique manzanitas that only grew here in San Francisco and nowhere else - they've never been described from anywhere else. All the collections that were done in California - the only place that the Franciscan Manzanita and the Ravens Manzanita were found were here in San Francisco. In, like, five location.

The last of the 1849er cemeteries - these beautiful, wild old cemeteries, with the tombstones from those first Europeans to lay siege to California-

-Over the course of the 1930s and 40s, all of these cemeteries were removed, one by one, until only the Laurel Hill Cemetery was left, which really alarmed our merry band of botanists.

-and so they were terribly upset when they learned that the last of these cemeteries was going to get bulldozed to make room for housing, and that the Franciscan Manzanita and some other rare plants were going to be lost.

So, bulldozers essentially take out the last of these plants, except for these two individuals, one of each species: the loneliest plants.

Yeah, and ironically, it might have actually been bulldozers that were responsible for even the existence of this last Franciscan Manzanita. The seeds of most manzanitas have this tough outer coating, and they won't germinate at all unless they undergo a process called scarification.

What's called scarification. The seeds - where, if you, if the seeds are scratched in some way to allow for moisture to then... cause the seeds to germinate.

Historically, this would mean either being triggered by the heat or smoke or fire or passing through the guts of a bird.

There have been manzanita seed bank emergence observed along road cuts. So the thought is that, you know, you have heavy machinery come and scrape a roadside for a highway that may in the process also scarify these seeds, and-and-and cause them to germinate.

Wait, how old is this plant?

We don't really know!

Possibly 70, 80-year-old plant - we're not sure but that was the-the-the, that was the guess by-by the experts. And so that 70-year estimate corresponds with the construction of the highway - the original highway approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. And so, the best guess among the experts is that... that Franciscan Manzanita found along the highway may have germinated from the construction of the highway, um, from seed that was in the seed bank for who knows how long.

Isn't that cool? This plant might be the actual, like, sister of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Oh, man. So this last Manzanita is hidden by the highway for decades until Dan spots it during construction?

Yeah.

So what do they do with the plant?

Well, this is where things get pretty weird.

Why? What happened?

Ahh... Fox News happened [laughing].

Oh...

[Fox News anchor] Right, so would you spend $175,000 to move a bush? Now, San Francisco recently did and Steven Crowder went to the city by the Bay to find out why. Steven.

[Steven Crowder, with upbeat music in the background] This is Doyle Drive - a billion dollar freeway reconstruction project in San Francisco. Now nobody has a problem with the rebuilding of this place. But what people might have a problem with, however it is 175,000 taxpayer dollars used to move a bush!

[Unspecified interviewee] -that was smack dab in the middle of it.

Enter the Franciscan Manzanita, otherwise known as - [slamming sound effect, computer typing] - this word here that I can't pronounce.

[Laughing] Awesome.... Oh my God.

Okay. The Latin, or scientific name of this species is Arctostaphylos franciscana.

That's not so bad.

And I am a fierce proponent of Latin binomials as species names - they're actually really helpful and descriptive, because they not only contain clues about what the species is like and what its history is, but also how it's related to other similar species. And it doesn't matter how you pronounce them, because Latin is a dead language.

You know, if someone tries to insist they have the right pronunciation for a scientific name, just give them a knowing smile and nod and... [laughing]

And I'll give you one example of why this is so cool. So there's this other manzanita that has tons of common names. Some people call it 'bearberry', some call it 'kinnikinnick'.

I love kinnikinnick.

Me too. And its Latin name is arctostaphylos uva-ursi. The first part is actually Greek. 'Arctos', meaning 'bear'.

And 'staphylos', meaning 'grapes', essentially.

And the second part is Latin. 'Uva' meaning 'grape'.

And 'ursi', meaning 'bear'.

So... its Latin name means 'bear grapes, grapes bear'?

I like to think of it as 'bear grapes, bear grapes', but yeah.

'Bear grapes, bear grapes', it is.

Okay, that's hilarious. But... are we done now? Can we move on?

Yeah, okay, we're good.

So they spent some money to do what?

Well, just like botanical superheroes. They swooped in to save the plant.

The highway construction plans were to clear that whole area and have that become part of the roadway. So it was right in harm's way in terms of the design of the highway. And so a special process was created to build essentially a raft to lift the plant out of the ground to a new location, which was chosen by, um, by the manzanita experts at San Francisco State. Again, it's in a location that we don't reveal to the public. It was lifted out with a crane and placed on a flatbed. The attempt was to remove as much of the plant as possible. And so the plant, the soil, the rocks in the soil, weighed about... I think it was about 20,000 pounds? And the risk paid off! That original plant - which the staff here in the Presidio have nicknamed 'Francie' - has survived. And it's still in its location and producing flowers and thriving to this day.

So this was a different era. This, this was in the wake of the Great Recession. Obama's stimulus program was in effect.

[President Barack Obama] The most sweeping economic recovery package in our history.

Nancy Pelosi was under attack from the Tea Party conservatives.

[Unspecified news reporter] The Tea Party is... [fade out]

$1.1 billion Golden Gate Bridge project, funded by Obama's stimulus program, and in Nancy Pelosi's district was a great target for those Tea Party conservatives, to say 'It's a shrub! I can buy a shrub at the nursery for $6. Why are we spending money on that?' Fortunately, Caltrans is used to stuff - they had budgeted $750,000 for this. And so, putting a very small portion of that into saving the plant - they were, they were thankful for the chance. They got to de-extinct a species. They were quite happy about it. The money was there for it. It costs about a cup of coffee for every person in San Francisco for one day - relatively cheap. San Franciscans were generally very much behind it. It wound up on the cover of the voter pamphlet for that year, which was very interesting, given the kind of political attacks on it.

So when the dust clears, the Franciscan Manzanita was successfully secreted away to an undisclosed location, which makes it a lot like its relative, the Ravens Manzanita, not far away.

Hmm. I can see why Fox would have latched on to this, though. It's like, we spent all this money to protect these manzanitas, but, we don't tell anyone where they are?

Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate. But the danger of damage is just too great if they were public. And besides, it gives those of us who are really committed a really exciting treasure hunt.

[Laughing] Don't tell me you know where they are.

Well... I did grow up with Pokemon, you know?

[Laughing] Like, you gotta catch them all?

Yeah, exactly. And let's just say I fared a little bit better than Fox News did.

[Detective theme music, Fox news reporter] Excuse me, have you seen this bush?

[Member of the public] No.

No? Have you seen this bush? Have either of you seen this bush?

There's still this question that's bugging me. Like, how do you go from just one remaining plant individual? Aren't they basically just extinct at that point without a mating pair?

Well, yeah. That's, that's actually where the two manzanitas differ. Before all the Franciscan Manzanitas were destroyed, some really committed botanists collected some and started growing them out.

There were collectors - horticulturalists that were kind of pioneers in native plant horticulture back in the 30s, who knew that these rare manzanitas in San Francisco were going to be lost to development and so they went in before the bulldozers came through, dug the plants out, brought them to Botanic Gardens.

James Roof, the director of the Tilden Botanic Garden - by all accounts a curmudgeon - grew up in the dunes of San Francisco. And, and one of the great things that he saved in his garden was a Franciscan Manzanita that had been collected from the wild.

So Michael and his team - they got to work.

Bringing in those plants that were collected from the wild locations to San Francisco back in the 1930s, preserved in Botanic Gardens... So, these are different genetic individuals than the one found here in the Presidio. And so that provides the potential for cross pollination for viable seed production. So we feel we have three different genetic individuals, in addition to the one here in the Presidio, which makes four. Still a very small population, but better than one, right? And so this provides potential for future populations of manzanitas that are genetically different.

So because of this combination of the discovery of the last remaining wild individual, and propagation of plants at Botanical Gardens, there's actually a future for this plant.

Wait, wait, wait. Hold up. There were other individuals of this Franciscan Manzanita all along, just living in Botanical Gardens?

Yeah! You can actually buy them when the gardens have plant sales.

[Fox News reporter] Okay, so there it is.

[Botanic Gardens representative] These were taken November 9th from the original plant.

[Fox News] Could I hold the actual, ah...

[Botanic Gardens] Mm-hmm.

[Fox News] Holding piece of magic.

[Laughing] Conservation can be... pretty strange.

Yeah, but you have to admit that there's something important about the fact that there was still an individual living out there in the wild. It tells us that these Botanical Garden collections are still viable out there too. And they can help create the next generation where there wouldn't have been one otherwise. Plus, it's a much better outcome than what's happening with the Ravens Manzanita.

The collectors focused on the type form of the Franciscan Manzanita, the one that Alice Eastwood would collected and brought to the California Academy of Sciences. What they fail to collect was the Ravens Manzanita. And so we just have the one genetic individual and all we can do right now is clone that to preserve the one plant, to spread the risk. And so we have been collecting branch cuttings which you can then... You dip it in a rooting hormone, you can grow another plant - you can clone it. So we're doing that, planting that, planting those in new locations to spread the risk out, in case something would happen to the, the original location. With the hope in the future, with advances in plant propagation, um, there may be ways to actually produce new genetic individuals of the Ravens Manzanita. The recovery plan for the Ravens Manzanita calls for potentially cross pollinating with its closest manzanita relative and then selecting the offspring that most closely match the Ravens parent.

Mmm. Yeah, that's a bummer. Honestly, it sounds like a lot of work to keep these two species going. And even if they're still here, do they really have any impact on the local ecosystem anymore?

I- Yeah, I think what you're referring to would be something called 'functional extinction', which basically just means that, even if there are a few individuals surviving, a species that has been been reduced to such a low population no longer plays the ecological roles that it used to.

Hmm, yeah. Like, uh, like if a person who's an important community member - they get sick, they're not dead, but they can't really be a part of the community the same way they were before. So... so it feels like a loss.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you're right, they, they don't perform the same role they used to. They actually have an entirely new role to play. They've catalyzed the restoration of the entire coastal scrub community. More on that after the break.

We don't value these things simply because they have ecological function at this moment in time. So there are plants where, you know, when you get down to one individual... We talk about it being, you know, people say things like it's eco, ecologically dead, but we're not valuing them because of their great ecological benefit. To some degree, the more rare they are, the more special they are to us, which is... Which is not what you would expect if it were just a simple amount of impact they have on the world. There's an emotional side to that, that, again, is the result of evolution. There's selective reasons for it. And then there's also a strategic side to it.

We've been talking a lot about these two very rare manzanitas. But, on a larger level, we're restoring habitat. We're planting not only manzanitas but plants that are associated with these manzanitas. So we've gone through the botanical records from all the historic locations and we've, we've seen patterns and plants that are growing with these manzanitas... Our nursery's also growing those, and so we plant out not only Franciscan and Ravens Manzanitas but we plant out, you kn ow, eriogonum, we plant out ceanothus, we plant out all the other plants that grow in that community. So we're really restoring a community with the kind of keystone species being these two rare manzanitas.

So what do you think?

That's definitely cool. But I'm still hung up on what I said before. It seems like a lot of work to keep these species alive. It sounds like they're just gonna be wholly dependent on us to survive. Even in the long term. I kind of have mixed feelings about that.

I... kind of have mixed feelings about that, too. You're definitely not alone in that respect. It's actually part of a larger shift that's happening in scientists' thinking around these kinds of issues - and conservation and ecological restoration - about so-called 'conservation-dependent species'. Sometimes I feel pretty pessimistic about what's going to happen to these rare species, especially when we can hardly even protect large animals like rhinos.

Talk about another case of lonely endangered species without mates.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fortunately, that's not at all how Dan feels about this.

I don't think we talked about 'conservation-dependent antiquities' in great works of art. We accept that those marvelous paintings that we get to look at in art museums, that, that teach us about what people were like hundreds of years ago - they are conservation dependent. If we don't take care of them, we'll lose them. And in the same way, yes, we do have some species that that are conservation dependent. But that doesn't diminish their value. We get something out of taking care of things. It is fundamental to our nature to need to take care of other humans - of other species, of systems, of things, of beliefs. It's - it sustains us. To a certain degree, some of the problems that we have in this world is that people who need to take care of, people who need to be working on making things better, don't have that opportunity. And I think that... far from conservation-dependent species being a burden, they're a blessing. There's something that we need. It's an opportunity to involve everybody in something that obviously makes the world better but also helps us individually live in this crazy world. And find - find our own personal meaning. You know, in - in some, in these fields, people get points for coming up with fancy phrases that are easy to be repeated and 'conservation-dependent species' is the current phrase of the day. That, a few people are getting a little bit of media attention by talking about the question of whether we need to take care of conservation-dependent species. I absolutely reject anyone who's saying that we need to give up on trying to save species. Anyone who says that we need to give up on trying to save species because it's been a failure just doesn't know the facts - the data are clear that we've been incredibly successful, even though we haven't invested in it. Those folks who are really working in it, they may bemoan how expensive it is, they may bemoan that there isn't enough money allocated to save this bird or that plant. But none of them are saying that we shouldn't try. First we have to try before we give up. I think that with a small investment, an investment that really yields all kinds of special dividends, we can save everything. And we can actually have a period here, not of great extinction, but of reduced extinction - that we can actually lower the extinction rate beyond the natural background rate. And that creatures looking at the geologic record a million years from now, can look at that level, they can look at the plastic layer in the Earth's geologic history and say, 'Wow, something really weird happened there. Extinction kind of went on pause, someone must have been there emitting plastic and saving species, so that when they were done, the earth was more diverse. All those species that they inherited, most of them are still there, and new species emerged. There's the South Central clarkia. There's all these species that emerge due to diversification of things that we are planting and spreading around. Over geologic time they will be become part of their natural communities, they will diversify, they will pick up predators and pathogens and herbivores, and they will become part of international communities and climate will change and there will be different selective pressures, and these different populations will diverge. And the fancy word for that is evolution. And there's a, a near certainty that if we don't Venus the place if Earth is left living when we're done, that our legacy will be one of diversification. That having moved these things around the planet, even though they cause a lot of trouble, and even though... even though biological invasions do reduce diversity locally, on the geologic timescale, it'll actually be a net plus. Our job is to make sure that it's a big plus. That we, that we move new flowers into our garden and we don't lose the old ones that we save those special things from the past so that they get to persist alongside the new things, and that we, that we expand the... we expand the diversity of planet Earth, and we absolutely can.

Don't worry, we haven't Venus'd the place that was the sound of my mind exploding.

[Laughing] Yeah, it's... It's so beautiful to me to imagine that, given that we're perpetuating what many scientists are calling the sixth great mass extinction, just to imagine that if we chose to we could actually save species from extinction that otherwise would have gone extinct. Like, like we could-

Lower the background rate of extinction in certain places?

Yeah. Yeah, that we could all come out of this with more diversity than, than when we went into it.

Ah, Dan is, Dan is taking the long view on this one.

And so I, I think that if we, again, this is an 'if' - if we get through this crazy bottleneck of, you know, the juvenile years of, of godlike human power, if we get through the next few decades, in the next century, we'll be able to do what we want and much of what we want will be to make our garden more beautiful and more wild.

Hmm. It's interesting he mentions the word 'garden' in there. It's kind of hard to articulate but he's essentially saying that it's fine that these manzanitas might not be able to persist on their own in the wild, at least right now. Like, we're transitioning from being conservationists to being gardeners.

Yeah. Yeah, I kind of... [laughing]. I started as a gardener. So I've been going the other way. But now I'm kind of going back. It's a kind of back and forth. I love gardening. Lots of people love gardening. In this way, the Presidio of San Francisco is kind of like a microcosm of what we're doing to the planet in general. And so the management reflects that.

Well, the Presidio is definitely a mosaic of different land types, and, and the land use history is different throughout the park. And that's what we have, and we're preserving what we have, restoring what we can. And by restoration, you know, we're not trying to restore back to a certain period in time, certainly we're using the past to inform our efforts. We look at what's lost. We try to bring those plants back, knowing full well that conditions have changed, knowing that it's going to go on a trajectory that's appropriate for right now and for where we're going in the future. So, especially with climate change being a big consideration, you know that the guidance that's really given by climate change experts is build resiliency into these ecosystems as much as you can, so that they have the ability to adapt over time to rapid climate change.

For as long as we're on this rock, the genes in these plants, the genes in these animals, are going to be the raw material, the engineering foodstock we need to survive on planet Earth. Each of these organisms is the latest story in living on planet Earth. During each generation, they go through these bottlenecks: one year is a wet year and everyone drowns except for those that can survive that wet here. Then next is a dry year and everything dies except for those that have the genes to survive a dry year. The next year is a fungus outbreak and everything dies except for those that have the genes to survived a fungus outbreak. You do that for a few billion generations, and you wind up with organisms that are a library of secrets to surviving on planet Earth. This, these organisms are books that we are just learning how to read, we're only just deciphering the alphabet. We're going to be on this planet for as long as there are humans, we're not going to colonize other stars. This is what we got. And we owe it to our descendants, to save those books intact, to not lose them, to not scramble the pages, to keep those, those, those valuable things intact so that as they learn to read 'em, and they learn to write their own books, they'll have that raw material.

Mmm. That library metaphor is actually really helpful. Like if the Great Library of Alexandria is burning, every single last book that we could save could be so valuable in the future, even if it is missing a few pages.

Especially with climate change. There are species that are rare now that might become keystone species in future ecosystems, future ecologies, as the climate ranges.

It's still hard for me to understand how Dan can be so optimistic.

Yeah, well, that's the fun thing about plants. I mean, I get to be optimistic because I'm not working on the oceans.

[Laughing]

It's so sad. [Laughing]. But in all seriousness, I'll let him... I'll let him make his pitch.

We have, in California, we have more plants than any other state. We actually have more rare plants than most other states even have plants. People come from all over the world. I mean, a chunk of our economy is supported by people coming from Germany to see Joshua trees, or people coming from China to see redwood trees. People come in to see the great wildflower displays that California has. I mean, this is... There are, there are other countries that would love to have the tourism economy that we have that's just based on a few charismatic plants. Beyond that we've got - we don't even know how many because we're in an era of incredible botanical discovery right now. We know that we have something like 7000 plant species, plant types that are native to California. The truth of the matter is that It's probably more like 12,000. Once we start looking at 'em carefully, we'll find, that's not a species, that's six different species, and they're not even related to each other. But we do know that we have an incredible wealth of species, about a third of them are rare, that doesn't mean that a third of them are endangered and gonna go extinct. It just means that they're rare. They're special. They may only occur in one or two or 10 places. And they've only ever occurred in one or two or 10. And they're still there. And so I think we've got the elements of a really great story. We've got the world's fifth largest economy, where we have done more paving and adding and parking lotting than anyone else in the world. And yet, somehow, we have managed to save essentially, all of those things, we have more to lose, and we have done more to lose 'em. And you would think that it would just be complete devastation. But the one story that people don't tell is the incredible success story of plant conservation in California. We're actually rolling back the list of extinctions in California. And we're not doing it by incredible magical technology. We're doing it by getting out there with some boots and looking for plants, or by doing the science to try and resolve these kind of taxonomic questions. Or even just by driving and looking out the window and spotting a plant in a place that a million people have driven by in the last month.

Yes, I'm feeling a little bit better, about California at least.

Oh, man, I am not that optimistic about California. Hence, me leaving. But I think that Dan's point extends well beyond California. It's like, it's a major shift in how we think about and fund and participate in conservation.

And so I believe biodiversity is at its all time low valuation right now. We don't value it - we're willing to lose something to extinction for the, for the value of a mall parking lot. It is at the lowest possible valuation that biodiversity has ever been or ever will be. And future generations will recognize that. So, our greatest enemy is giving up and it [laughing] and it really makes no sense to give up when you're succeeding. And that's kind of where we are now. So I think, at this point in time, we could be in a completely different world 10 years from now, through some small thing that we just don't see now. And it could be something like we start talking about our successes and realizing that we have them. And we start feeling like we do have power. And that spreads. And the whole paradigm changes, where we're joined by other partners, where the community buys in, where we're part of a winning team that is growing. And, and that's kind of all it would take to completely turn this around. And for us to realize that we live in a garden, that we live in a garden of Eden, where things are mostly wonderful, and, and you can go outside and see a beautiful sky and it ain't falling.

And with that, thanks for listening to our third episode of Future Ecologies. Future Ecologies is produced by myself, Adam Huggins.

And me, Mendel Skulski.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks. Please tell everybody that you know. Subscribe, rate and review the show wherever podcasts can be found. It actually takes a lot of work to put these together, and it really helps us get the word out.

In this episode you heard Dan Gluesenkamp and Michael Chassé.

This has been an independent production of Future Ecologies. Our first season is supported in part by the Vancouver Foundation. If you'd like to help us make the show, you can support us on Patreon. To say thanks, we're releasing exclusive mini episodes every other week. The first one is already out on our main feed. Check it out, it's really good! To get access to the rest, head over to patreon.com/futureecologies.

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Special thanks to Kirsty Cameron, Theo Fitanides, Jaclyn Lim and Ilana Fonariov.

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