send a man into orbit. she was asked to compute by hand the same guber said data of the computer with a simulation to which the war with the could compute the berbers, dash numbers. did and if those two different sets of numbers would show the actual word common than astra not john glad that is get the girl to duet. basically. [laughter] [applause] . .

a the anecdote is an amazing story. as a young person fascinated by the book i would like to know your message to others fascinated the buck. >> there's so many things. i think one of the things i said earlier, this idea curiosity and imagination is a really important lesson i learned from the book. another one, and this is something if you ask catherine johnson and speak to her and say

how is it possible for you in the south in the work a work ent that still have segregated bathrooms and cafeterias and all these things were still happening when a woman may not have even been able to get a credit card in her own name how are you able to do this work and tell them this would bring them home safely that sounds like a lot to ask and goes back to what my father said to me. you are no better than anyone else and no one is better than you are. [applause] i've probably spent more time thinking about that than any other things because one of these things that seems very

simple to both the part about no one is better than you which gives the confidence to walk into a situation with people who may be different than we are and feel confident that we can hold our heads high but the part you are no better than anyone else i think that is the power. so catherine felt it was her prerogative in the segregated south to extend herself to all the people she worked with. she had such a sense of humanity and true e. quality meeting people regardless of who they were and i think there's so many times when i'm in a situation and i think what would catherine

johnson say about that, how do i employ this you are better thann no one knows and no one is better than you? it seems very simple and is one of the keys to her tremendous success and that's another one of the things i feel like i learned a lot from doing this research. >> one more question yes. >> [inaudible] >> and i know you're not going to be able to sign all these books, so well you have another time to sign books? >> i'm going to be back on the 30th of september at marvel state university.

[applause] so that might be another opportunity. i will talk with the museum and work out the logistics of so that we can get as many books signed as possible. [applause]

good evening ladies and gentlemen. i've been here for it is my pleasure to have the author of two previous books including "the new york times" best sell seller. a she previously worked for the service and spent 15 years writing numerous articles including "the new york times," u.s. news, world report, smithsonian. tonight we are celebrating that the most recent book of conservation heroes for defying almost every stereotype. during the conversation with one of the best-selling author but

first to tell a little about her book -- [applause] thank you for welcoming us to this incredible room for a vital part of our lives. thank you for joining me here. it's one of my most beloved books ever and if you haven't read it you should pick it up on your way out. i wanted to do a couple things before we start the conversation. one is just too explain a little bit about why i chose the geography i chose for the buck and the other is to do a little reading. let me start with the geography. the book unfolds with each with bound mississippi river and we

who live in flyover country i think overlook its significance at the center of the american story in almost every imaginable way. if kerry is a million times every day but it builds the american continent and all the land from missouri down to louisiana and about the heartland of soil into the delta and the wetlands that are just about half of the marshland in the united states and the credible ecosystem. it's been critical to american history got the geography of the

watershed matches perfectly with the louisiana purchase a. mark twain called the body of the nation. and fraser said in the buck to mississippi is us and vice versa. it's where lewis and clark took their famous journey and where many of the significant battles were fought and lost and where most of the natural wealth still resides in the mountains and the oil supplies and copper and other minerals supplies from the great plains and from the estuaries into the gulf of

mexico so it remains to the food supply in the last it's critical to the politics of and maps perfectly so figuring out who we are as a country have intimate territory. on the population is essay isn't high yearly. i have had two of them in my third chapter and they are either try a more succeeding. there are five long chapter is basically that i began with the furthest northernmost reach of the mississippi.

he's the rodeo champion that has been instrumental in serving hundreds of thousands of acres of private ranches and public wildlands. i then write about a large-scale farmer from kansas and i go to the company that navigates the waterways that provide this tremendous connectivity in the continent and the rest of the world. i go to the wetlands with the vietnamese refugee and then wear the red snapper fish have been instrumental in reforming the management to bring back the snapper population that is virtually wiped out to bring back this environment. so, the chapter a couple reasons

i want to do that is because the campus is actually here. from the very first visit to be here for this event, justin was my most challenging subject. he was a very reluctant starlet who said no to me three or four times before he finally said yes. he then opened up his life and world to me. so almost 5,000 acres they were swedish emigrants right after the civil war and for generations, they found a way for 10,000 years they went out and turned the swale over and

created those incredibly beautiful fragrant throws that we all associate with the heartland. i went back and was struck at how she sees in the early fun as indicative of the soul that is the families in her novel the forms are also dissolute. everything is ragged and the families that are upright and sound and they have a beautiful geometry like a modern art. so that's how they farmed for generations and the pioneers that is about a swedish family very much like justin she talked

about then with a blissful sigh. i am paraphrasing a little bit. we all know what happened in the 30s when we had prolonged droughts some steady wind started blowing and 10 million acres picked up and blew away a. a. there's 10,000 feet high and ten wide so it is a renewable resource and it's taken millions of years to build because as it turns out when you turn them over, they become highly vulnerable to the wind erosion and water erosion. they collapse all the beautiful

space and collapse until it can take water anymore and then it becomes an increasingly critical problem. then to the damage of the lights and decide what is the most diverse ecosystem that's got more biodiversity than a topical rainforest and it's all microbes. they are undoubtedly thousands bb tens of thousands, trillions of organisms and they are the foundation of life on earth from which all of our food and air comes from. they are critical to every plant grown. so come justin has totally revised the way his family farms along with many like him they

have retired. he's introduced enormous increase diversity into his thousands of acres s that he kes adding new locations. he is the first for this thing for organic local farmer but they are rebounding in a remarkable way. it is an important achievement given how critical it is for all of our future. i want to read it just a little bit. i spent many hours with him and

when you walk on this beautiful map from the previous crops and listening to justin talk about why he farms the way he forms we want to read just a little bit. he now looks nothing like his grandfather's tidy for roads, so they are still marked off like the checkerboard light and dark, dark and light. it's a thick tangled mass following the ground. when they set out to clear away he starts to emulate the native prairie. with heavy rainfall we get hot

and windy and cold with blizzard. it can weather all of that and its resilience across the farms on the prairie have to learn to do the same to be resilient to these dramatic forces. learning how to come alongside abouthat of biology to partner h it it also requires resisting the temptation to think we can't control it. a living system is complex, always changing and adapting. science and technology as part of it but humility is part of it as well. farming in concert with the prairie requires constant close attention.

justin knows the land intimately through the data analysis and even in his own sentences in the issue for the online writing class describes watching him studying seeing things i can't see, turning it over examining every square inch with the eye of the scientist and the touch of a father he scrapes away at something his nose almost touching. he is often studied across the field as he is cocooned across the chapter to bite into one of the tiny yellow seeds to see if it is ready for harvest with a small shovel he carries everywhere or crouching to the fragrant soil joined by garrett kennedy fresh out of college.

they barely notice him when he jumps on. sometimes their son comes along diligently digging alongside. it would be hard to say who was more excited in the excavations to inspire the thrill as on, call. this is wonderful for shiny material very rich for plans there's five or more filling their bellies with nutrients that they carry so deep and into carrying other things that come. they tie themselves in a knot and go dormant. we can't see the bacteria so the activity is the best measure of the biological activity.

so, thank you for sharing your life with me. [applause] one of my friends has a photo [inaudible] [inaudible] that is a great chapter and so inspiring to read about having read a lot about the dust storms of the 30s and seeing the

pictures it's amazing to think that is something you could actually do something about. as i read the book, what impressed me is the square-foot in terms of geography. it's the places where the people were into it sort of reminded e that here when my book about the great plains came out, i had people say to me i liked your book about iowa. i am from ohio and the standard of thing they say is yes, here we call that iowa.

[laughter] it's made me think that they may not be good at geography in general and republicans are better. it's just an instinct i have because i feel like these are red states and yet everybody seems to have this incredible knowledge where they are. did you start with a pleasing to look for people or did you start with the people and become interested in the place where the people were? how did you get together with justin and -- >> i started with the people. i spent a lot of my own childhood on a farm in california with some farmers that were extraordinary stewards and took a long view of the

land. then in both cases i had gotten exposed to how deeply people live and work on the land. the fund is unusual seeking out the partners and working with industrial scale the farmers and commercial fishermen and corporate ceos to move these to make change. i had been hearing stories for years about people giving this tremendous work that was going overlooked by most of us in the

environmental community. so i started canvassing everyone i knew for the good subjects and slowly began to converge on this narrative in the book and when i realized it was the louisiana purchase at geography really began to speak to me so it's kind of fell into place. montana i had to look extra hard because the first cowboy i found was on the wrong side of the continental divide. the cowbo cowboy i write about t

of this huge partnership that spans the divide but other than that, but geography fell nicely into place. then you have the marriage enterprise. part of the operation is all the way in illinois to chicago. chicago. then they go of the tennessee river and the cumberland river they go all the way up. and the tributaries it does look like this enormous you can actually start here and go through the great lakes and come down the mississippi that there is a connected waterway all the way there so you look at those tributaries and they go all the

way up and carry coal and oil and gas and red flag cargoes with eight men pushing for football fields up the river and it is mind blowing it is bumper to bumper traffic and everything you can imagine you see that there is an industrial heart that is enormously important. there were dozens of other stories i could have pulled that would have been as good so then i have the latitude to find a nice journey.

>> it's also kind of a cliffhanger like you don't know are they going to be able to in the story that the cowboy, will that work with all these different people that are so that they can get all these different people to work together is amazing. they are patient and able to deal with people yelling from both sides. >> montana is a great place where people hate each other's guts. i took western montana and it's the nastiest natural resource site one of the nastiest ever. you've got the green insurer --e

ranchers and the bureaucrats but somehow they all came together. there were exceptions. there were people who never joined. >> they were going to come in and change the largest landscape in the united states that's 10 million acres so they came back from the radio and got involved in that and that's what caused the rift with his best man because they were seeing visions of this before their eyes. but they saw what they thought

were going to be fortunes to be made. and they knew that once you destroy this stuff you can't get it back. they say there's more to so they had a sense and that's been one of the things us to see there'ss places where people still can bridge these vast political divides. >> these are situations where things do get done. i found a hair-raising you've got either an enormous flood that is just fallaciously

difficult to keep control of the barge or you've got 9 feet 10 inches of water in a draft so how they managed to deal with this difficult waterway i was out there and i did a piece about this a while ago and read the infrastructure of the mississippi is just falling apart. that comes through also in your book. how do they manage to keep pushing them through when he's either got a flood or drought? >> he described life on the mississippi and what it meant to be a riverboat pilot. he spends weeks going up the

river. the guy teaching him says it is completely different going down and it will be completely different tomorrow. it is a level of alertness that they have to maintain. they've got dangerous cargo and the weather is getting more and more extreme over time so they will have one to try to release the flood and another dredging the bottom to try to deal with the drought. that is another thing they have in common with an advantage of geography they are on the front lines of the changes happening in the rains come much more intensely and concentrated and

in terms of those moving across where they didn't use to access. >> he's coming around the bend where you have to let it drift. you found an exact parallel and it was the hardest thing in the world. it was a steamboat captain that made his grand like that but he really did do some difficult things. >> he was navigating the smaller vessels. they are so huge you can't believe it. they walked to the front of the barges and it took ten minutes to walk from the house to the

front. these things are so huge and they are navigating them through witwhich the water whipping them around and it's also one of the central themes in the book. you can't control it. you have to accept that there is a lot we can't understand. there will be hundreds of thousands of years before we understand what it is doing a so there is a lot of yielding and in the mississippi river it is to those forces to navigate but it's also in the wetland to realize the way they will save the wetlands are 2,000 square miles and the only way to do it

is to use the power in th and te river to release the river and in a controlled way but to let this force that is greater than any human engine ever could be to carry that again into the wetlands so there is a kind of letting go. >> and the corps of engineers comes across like something in a cartoon or something. so then they think maybe we should have done some of these things but let it go its way. they've been there for years but of course they've had a whole generation there and every story that you tell you.

>> they give the country no choice. the tough lives those people have had. >> those must've been very amazing people. you've also describe what is a total new thing. >> my daughters tell me that i should do a presentation for the greatest meals. and i think when i'm in new orleans i am going to do that. one was to have the shrimp boats and everywhere you go, it was so

central so we fly out and they invite us to lunch and they are always in their pajamas and slippers. they go into the kitchen and they brought those that use often in hot water and they brought those the bushes diesels and mint and pork belly and we make these that i will never forget for the rest of my life and i have many fabulous meals i but i have great meals all the way along. you and the book that takes place in the gulf with the fishermen and i guess people are

aware from having watched the horrible deepwater horizon coverage but talk a little bit about what the gold looks like. i hadn't realized the industrial floor basically. >> it was completely shocking to me. it was very wild. it is rugged waters but everywhere you look there are the biggest things you've seen in your lives it's like you're in a space colony. these things are -- is this a hundred times bigger than those and they are strung with lights so you look off in the water and you don't see stars but you see these industrial constellations

as far as the eye can see and the red snapper. so we would go out and he would be looking for the fish for his nephew and invariably he would find them gathering around so we would have this pristine nature experience in the shadow. >> and you are catching hundreds of pounds of snapper. >> it looked like a christmas tree with shiny red ornaments on either side. it's an amazing landscape that i was not prepared for. >> one of the pleasures of the book is the american landscape. you go for a month an from monty

out the golf and it's something you don't see all that much anymore where someone will take an entire than to describe it. it's much more now than just the one thing. it's easier to talk about the country if you go north and south and east and west. if you go north and south it's more interesting. anyway, we want to have questions.

>> maybe we will ask you that question. >> [inaudible] >> it is more complicated than that. we ended up talking about climate a lot and it's still not an easy conversation to have. if you listen to the leadership in washington, d.c. come it doesn't exist. if you follow them home to louisiana, they are totally accepting of sea level rise and they were relying on the signs to the calculating sea level rise and intensifying hurricanes

as part of the plan. so the politics gets more authentic and interesting if you leave the sort of media bubble in the political bubble in washington and i if you have the conversations closer to the ground. he took me where he went to school to meet his professors and first he showed me where they would have to toe the difference between the meet but they said that's quite far in 20 years. so when we went to talk to his professors, they all were completely clear that the climate change was happening. so they tal talked to the state

legislators about the weather and the aquifer that is being depleted and the same conversation is happening among the farmers if you look at the ad justin shared some articles from the mainstream press and have moved from the first step of extreme weather happening. the next step seems to be a trend that maybe this is happening a lot but this is the ceo of the company and i don't see any purpose of getting in a fight about what's causing it but what's the deal with the fact the climate is getting more extreme and take things together and do everything we can. then the next step is to say if

the problem is there is too much carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere i have things i can do that offers solutions to that data that can store carbon in the soil and prevents nitrogen. so there's a woman that i quote in the chapter that says if you listen to people and give them a chance to not be defensive you can get somewhere and what i loved about this book i felt like i pushed hard on him on

these insecticides people are concerned about having along with a lot of other things at there is evidence they are one of the contributors. it is the report on the particular chemical she had been using and there is a level of openness and the people i met it wasn't just that i found those in the heartland. it's the huge networks many of whom have come out of the land grant colleges and our high-tech and sophisticated in the science who are inviting other people including new york environmentalists he too took

between confidence and none of them had even met a new yorker before. so i had to pass a test at the lunch table. i'm not going to tell you what my answer was, that i passed the test. >> [inaudible]

[inaudible] >> the first answer there was a lot less time but you also have to work a lot of hours and be succession today it's much more van when i was young.

[inaudible] the lifestyle with our families and generations. that changed. the knowledge for the bill thinking and studying and challenging other peers that want to be challenged on how to improve the system. so now there are these questions we worke work as many hours as e

could because the storms that come across the plains. [inaudible] she brought her notepad and started asking questions and learning.

we tend to be introverts because the land reflects so as difficult honoring that and wanting to truly understand the decisions made and how we navigate from the start selling the time went on [inaudible]

>> i'm curious about your thoughts [inaudible] and how to bridge that divide. >> what about the activists that are not prepared to trust the

heartland and i think it is a hard question. there are people that view this as ready to partner with companies like wal-mart which is believed to partner with. there have been tensions in the community. i think that it's fair to say that there has been an evolution at least in the bigger groups you have heard of in the the convergence around a kind of pragmatism and recognition that it's now or never and if you hold out for the perfect you may not get anywhere but the idea is itself flawed. you see this in the food production that there is a sort of idea if justin were just a better guy he would get rid of every pesticide on his farm.

when you start to look at the choices that he's making come every choice you make comes with trade-offs of the honorable way is to consider what the choices are so if you forgo the pesticides you wind up losing an entire crop and therefore you've lost every natural resource you put into it and you lost all the diesel and so you constantly are having to weigh in on the balances and i think the environmental community more and more is in part because of the urgency of climate change and the challenges we are facing with all things in climate change and the wildlands and the

loss of important habitats and endangered species. there is a growing convergence never feels like compromise to me. it's not like you're giving up half of what you believe in. you were listening t to a more complete story. some of the people i met on the continental divide in montana, one woman had her tires slashed about ten times. she was doing political cartoons and it was like pictures of clear-cut and she was going after the loggers and then she started working with the walkers to find common ground and she realized both of them felt the

best they could find was in the woods and the longer this group of people who thought there was nothing in common, the longer they talked and listened, the more consensus emerged. it was realizing the a few people in more parameters, you can arrive at something that works better all the way around. >> we have time for just one more question. >> [inaudible] when you are faced with such enormous profit now you see all

these environmental effects but it just seems like at some point there is so much money to be made that you will come to the point where -- >> there are places where it gets so high that you can't actually find common ground. there will be places where there just are coalitions that are impossible to overcome. there is no place on the planet where you have more powerful interest. that's another mind blowing thing you have america's biggest fisheries, new orleans, the

complex and atmosphere, they are all sitting there together and they managed to figure out a restoration plan that they got a total consensus from exxon mobil and the legislature and again it's pushing harder to figure out if we can restore the wetlands, the republican congressman from louisiana that used to have the coastal louisiana told a story that i repeat in the book about the disappearing wetlands and most of the coast of louisiana is owned by the oil and gas companies and he said the environmentalists are like take the land away from them because it was a critical ecological critical storm protection only for the city of new orleans and

all those that most of the oil and gas hoops from those pipelines and so instead he said we could go to the oil company and say if you help us restore this wetland not only are you going to hold onto the rights but you will have shelter from the storm and we are going to get all of these nutrients coming down the mississippi river creating the algae blooms and really harming the louisiana fisheries that we planned the wet lands so the nutrients become like miracle grow and they are no longer -- it's now like a bad thing in the gulf of mexico. so it is sort of mind blowing that you can come up with the solutions that help everybody.

they protected the oil and gas interests and the navigation interests and it's remarkable where the stakes are that high that you can get that kind of unanimity. ..