I created this thread so we don’t go off-topic in the other thread.
To debrief from the talk, here are some things that @loarie said that resonated with me:
Birds:
At 8:58 “Birders are so insane!”
At 9:11 “Birds are 0.5% of the tree of life, but 80% of what we know about the natural world . . . are birds!”
It reminded me of a post that Diana made: 10 minutes to Research Grade!
CNC:
At 27:02 “In 2025 . . . almost a thousand cities [participated in the CNC]. Just these thousand . . . cities . . . were able to . . . census 1 in 20 of all species on the planet. Which is crazy to think about!”
Alison @kestrel and Robbie @yayemaster, I don’t remember if that was mentioned in the CNC training materials, but it is impressive!
A message of hope:
At 29:01, Scott said, “I grew up on a river in Northern California . . . that was what got me interested in nature . . . that river was really beat down . . . When I was in college . . . bald eagles came back . . . steelhead came back . . . the foothill yellow-legged frog came back . . . That was just . . . people stopping doing the horrible things that were happening in the 1970s . . . Let’s not throw all our pesticides into this river. Let’s not put dams up right when the steelhead [spawn]. It made me realize . . . there are little things we can do, to act, and these ecosystems will respond to it!”
Scott has told this story of river recovery before, and I love it! Stories of hope and inspiration are important, because there is a lot of doom and gloom in the environmental movement, but in order to motivate people, they need to feel like they can make a difference! They need a future that they can look forward to!
Both are true… But hey, I’m probably pretty insane for going out on wet, cold days, lugging around some camera gear, a plastic lid, and a bag of vials. All for the sake of springtails, which whenever people ask what I’m doing, I have to waste their time explaining what they even are, since I refuse to use the term “bug.”
This is really good, for at least two reasons. One, it’s good to see Loarie doing what a nonprofit ED should do, which is communicate the vision for the nonprofit.
Two, this is perhaps the best summary I’ve yet seen of what iNat is about. I’m already thinking about how to use this as an iNat Ambassador. It’s too long, but there are excerpts that could be super useful. When he talks about using iNat for land protection – that’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve been trying to communicate to local land stewards in my area, to convince them that mobilizing people to use iNat could be an excellent tool for engaging citizens in their land stewardship efforts. (For this purpose, it’s much better than Loarie’s TEDx talk.) @kestrel I don’t want to second-guess what you’re doing with the Ambassador program, but this might be worth thinking about – as an iNat Ambassador, I’m not only reaching out to potential new users, I’m also reaching out to local conservation organizations to get them to sponsor presentations.
Thanks for posting this @AdamWargon, my personal favorite part so far was his description @ 20:04 of trying to re-catalyze an environmental movement from the bottom up, rather than top-down since people often see “the environment” as a government problem that’s not being solved; as opposed to something we can and should all be involved with participating in, whether that’s by making or identifying observations here, or going out and removing invasive species, or restoring native plants to degraded habitats.
I try to do everything I can in my area, but if we could get just a small amount of people more engaged doing the same where they are, it’d make a huge difference to ecosystem integrity and native species health.
I completely agree, everyone can start somewhere with conservation, even if the steps are small. Those small changes can add up. One example I often think about is mowing: mowing every week significantly reduces arthropod abundance, limits flowering, and even decreases bird foraging. But when you extend the interval to every two weeks or longer, you see a noticeable rebound across all of those groups. I can’t recall the study’s name offhand, but the difference was surprisingly substantial for such a simple change.
A challenge, of course, is navigating the rules people have to work within. Many cities are finally beginning to allow more naturalized yards, which is a great shift. But then you run into HOAs—they can override city policies unless state law supersedes them. So even if your city encourages these practices, an HOA can still prohibit them if they decide the yard looks “unkept.”
It’s frustrating, especially for people who genuinely want to support ecosystems but are constrained by outdated aesthetic standards. Still, the more individuals advocate for these changes and normalize this kind of work, the harder it becomes for these rules to persist.