As Hurricanes Bear Down and Get Stronger, Can a $34 Billion Plan Save Texas?

After Hurricane Ike destroyed thousands of homes and inflicted an estimated $30 billion in damages in 2008, engineers hatched an ambitious plan to protect southeast Texas and its coastal refineries and shipping routes from violent storms. The $34 billion collaboration spearheaded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is a harbinger of the type of massive public works projects that could be required to protect coastal cities like New York and Miami as sea levels rise and hurricanes become less predictable and more severe due to climate change.

In this episode of “There’s More to That,” Smithsonian magazine contributor and Texas native Xander Peters reflects on his experiences growing up in a hurricane corridor and tells us how the wildly ambitious effort came together. Then, Eric Sanderson, an ecological historian, tells us how the project could be applied to other low-lying coastal cities.

A transcript is below. To subscribe to “There’s More to That,” and to listen to past episodes on how a new generation of high-end West African restaurants is revealing the roots of “Southern” cuisine, why Colombian conservationists are now trying to sterilize the hippos descended from drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s personal menagerie, what humans’ great acumen for sweating has contributed to our evolution and more, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Chris Klimek: What part of Texas are you from?

Xander Peters: I’m over here in East Texas. We’re about 30 miles from the Louisiana border.

Klimek: Xander Peters is a contributor to Smithsonian magazine.

Peters: It’s a real small town, about 2,000 people.

Klimek: What’s life like there?

Peters: As a 33-year-old single guy? Kind of boring at times, but it’s home, you know. Not a lot of people move here, but not a lot of people leave, either. So maybe that speaks for itself.

Klimek: What’s the geography like?

Peters: It’s marshy. It’s wet. We’re kind of the last stretch of the Louisiana swamp, as we all know it. So it’s a wet, humid, difficult place at times.

Klimek: One of the constants in Xander’s life growing up in East Texas was hurricanes.

Peters: The most memorable was in 2005. Hurricane Rita pretty much was a direct impact to the region. I think it was my freshman year of high school. The power was out for three or four weeks. Society literally shut down. It was hard to get gas. You couldn’t really get groceries. Of course, there was Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and the list goes on. But it’s a fact of life here.

Klimek: This area has already been impacted by hurricanes this summer, and there may be more to come. In July, Hurricane Beryl left millions without power in the dangerously high heat, leading to more than 20 deaths. Local officials can’t prevent these big storms, but they can try to prevent the damage, which is why one of the most ambitious and expensive infrastructure projects in the country is in progress, right there along the Galveston coast. But will it be enough to prevent loss of property and life? Or do we need an entirely different way of thinking?

From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is “There’s More to That,” the show that’s glad to be your nerdy listening alternative to the song of the summer. In this episode, we learn about the so-called Ike Dike going up in East Texas, as well as alternative flood prevention efforts that rely on nature itself. I’m Chris Klimek.

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Klimek: In the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine, Xander Peters wrote about a place just a short drive from his hometown: the Bolivar Peninsula.

Peters: It’s hard to imagine a more vulnerable geographic location than Bolivar Peninsula. It’s almost totally surrounded by water, so when a storm surge comes, it comes in nearly every direction.

Klimek: What’s this region’s history with big storms?

Peters: It’s hard to talk about southeast Texas without talking about its storms. It’s defined not just every generation, but every decade. Going back to the Galveston Storm of 1900, which claimed the most fatalities of any American natural disaster. We had Harvey in 2017, which was catastrophic flooding. The list goes on. At this point, I have mixed up the more recent names. I feel like, you know, your grandmother kind of does a roll call of all the children in the family. That’s how I feel about hurricanes now.

Klimek: The biggest storm in Xander’s recent memory was 2008’s Hurricane Ike.

Peters: We’d never seen the kind of storm surge result from a hurricane as we saw from Ike. And after that storm, it actually changed the way the National Hurricane Center conducts analysis and gives insight ahead of event into a storm surge. And, really, our broader understanding of what creates the disaster aspect of this kind of natural disaster.

Klimek: Was it forecasted to be as catastrophic as it was?

Peters: We knew it was going to be bad. It was a mandatory evacuation for, I think, even up to my region in East Texas, about 100 miles north of the coast. So we knew it was going to be bad. We at first thought it was going to be a direct hit to the Houston shipping channel, which is all kinds of bad news. We’re looking at $900 billion of goods that go up and down, much of which is oil and gas related, up and down the Houston shipping channel every year. We have the world’s largest petrochemical corridor. And if it’s a fuel, if it’s a gas, it’s being refined there. It’s being made there somehow. And then it’s going to faraway places like Europe.

But we got lucky. It missed the shipping channel by about two miles, and it hit around Galveston and Bolivar instead. So Bolivar was not so lucky. But in terms of the larger human toll, very lucky. Because if a storm surge hits the Houston shipping channel directly, we could be looking at a Chernobyl-like event, just given some of the refining capacity across the region.

Klimek: What did it look like there on the peninsula after Ike?

Peters: There was nothing left. Sixty to 80 percent of the structures were gone. You look at Highway 87, which stretches down pretty much the entire span of the peninsula, and [it was covered in] one or two feet of sediment and mud. There were cattle carcasses, alligator carcasses. There were snakes and rats running wild, confused. There were laundry machines scattered everywhere. There was twisted metal, broken telephone poles, everything in a million huge piles.

Klimek: In your story, you mentioned a smell that was very particular.

Peters: Yeah. Death lingered for months. I mentioned the cattle carcasses, and there are human carcasses in some places. And all the grasses and the stuff in people’s houses was molding and rotting, and there’s just every foul smell you can imagine. I’m not a military veteran. I’ve never fought in a war. But I can imagine that’s what a battlefield would smell like, you know?

Klimek: For more than 100 years, people in the area have been trying to prevent storm surges like this one.

Peters: After the Galveston Storm in 1900, they built a kind of state-of-the-art seawall, which has been raised a couple times, if I’m not mistaken, over the last century or so. It was commissioned only a few years after the storm. Meanwhile, you look at Bolivar Peninsula, it has none of those same infrastructure protections.

Klimek: So how did the idea of the Ike Dike come together?

Peters: A lot of arguing.

Klimek: The Ike Dike is the informal name for the massive infrastructure project that officials are betting the future of the Bolivar Peninsula on. Officially called the coastal Texas project, it involves three dozen sea gates leading up to the Houston shipping channel, and large concrete floodwalls to reinforce the city of Galveston. With a $34 billion price tag, it’s being overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers, but it was first envisioned by a local researcher.

Peters: Dr. William Merrell. He’s a professor at Texas A&M Galveston, and he’s a marine scientist. He and his wife are also investors in some of the antique architecture across Galveston. As Ike blew in, he came up with a concept that was a barrier system around Galveston that would open and close ahead of events such as Ike. He sat down that evening, as the lights remained out, and started sketching out some of the first designs of what the federal government will break ground on in the coming months—after some 16 years.

Klimek: Part of the delay came from the controversial nature of the project. Critics argued the Ike Dike would do irreparable damage to the environment, that it was too complex to work and that it was too expensive. Several different groups submitted their own plans. But after local officials asked Congress to step in, the Army Corps of Engineers was put in charge. Federal help comes with federal money.

Klimek (to Peters): Who’s funding this, and what kind of money are we talking about?

Peters: Sixty-five percent is coming from the federal government. Texas will pick up the remaining 35 percent. Only about $500,000 of that’s been allocated so far. But the Army Corps says accounting for inflation and everything else that threw it off the end of the project, we’re probably looking at something close to $55 billion. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s higher than that.

Klimek: All right. So, assuming all this investment buys what we hope it does, how is the dike intended to protect Galveston from storm surges? How will it work?

Peters: The whole idea is to stop the water at the sea, not let the water get into the Houston Ship Channel, which causes flooding all the way across it. So essentially, it’s a big gate that, in theory, will stop this huge wall of water as it surges toward the coast ahead of hurricane events like Ike and other ones. It draws on a Dutch flood theory, and the Dutch have some of the earliest forms of flood mitigation systems. Nothing like this has ever been even attempted in the U.S. Not at this scale, not with these high of stakes. It’s a new defining of how not just the federal government, but state governments as well, are going to approach building our way out of the climate crisis.

Klimek: How will the gate-and-ring system work?

Peters: Twenty-four to 48 hours ahead of a storm surge event, the alerts start going out, and they start moving some of the first ships out of the Houston Ship Channel. And, essentially, they have to hit that button to close the two main gates at the right time so that not too much water gets past it as the storm surge begins coming in in the 12 or 18 hours ahead of a hurricane. When I think of the Ike Dike gates closing, I think of, like, Indiana Jones when the stone rolls out of the cave after him, in terms of what these massive walls will look like moving toward each other.

Klimek: How will the Ike Dike incorporate natural storm barriers like sand dunes?

Peters: There along Bolivar Peninsula, we’re going to see a massive dune system. I think it was 12- to 14-foot dunes with a swale between them. That is going to line the stretch between Highway 87 and the beachfront. And that’s just piling sediment and sand on top of each other to create a wall. That’s nothing different than what the tides have done themselves, except to a much, much, much larger degree. And then in other places, we’re going to see wetlands restoration, which helps buffer storm surge from the coast. I think it was 6,600 acres of wetlands restoration or remediation for similar marshlands. So it’s equally significant—the natural restoration process—as much as the engineering phase of the project.

Klimek: What kind of concerns have environmentalists raised about the coastal Texas project?

Peters: Rightful ones, actually. It’s to be expected when you essentially inject these enormous concrete structures into ecosystems. Over the last 50 years in the Netherlands, environmental researchers have noticed changes to ecosystems, sediment patterns being shifted around. And that’s the same concern that we’re seeing on the Texas coast. These are unprecedented actions. A lot of this project is operating on hypothesis and theory. We probably can expect to see some ecological changes along the Texas coast as a result of it long term.

Klimek: So how does what they’re trying to do in Galveston reflect how we’re responding nationally to increasingly severe storms and floods?

Peters: I guess we’re paying attention now. It took a long time to get to this point. We’re approaching the 16-year anniversary of Ike, and you look at the Houston Ship Channel. You look at Bolivar and the months after Ike. It’s a pretty convincing argument. And over the years, we’ve seen the same argument made over and over. It’s very slow-moving, and I feel it’s very difficult to respond to a fast-moving crisis with a slow-moving solution, but it seems to be the best we have.

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Klimek: For more context on floods and their potential solutions, we reached out to an expert.

Eric Sanderson: Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Eric Sanderson. I’m the vice president for urban conservation at the New York Botanical Garden. I live and work in New York City, and I’ve studied the historical ecology of New York for many years.

Klimek: Eric recently spoke about flooding on New York Botanical Garden’s new podcast, “Plant People.” And while New York City may be far from Houston, it faces many of the same challenges.

Sanderson: I was here during Hurricane Sandy, and I was here during Hurricane Ida. And after Sandy, I made this map that showed that the areas that flooded during Sandy were more or less where the tidal marshes were around the city. And I showed that around. And at the time, a lot of people are like, oh, well, that’s kind of interesting. But I guess that makes sense. Those would be the lowest places, right? But then Hurricane Ida happened in 2021, and Hurricane Ida was not a coastal storm, but an intense rainstorm. And what re-emerged were the upland streams and wetlands and ponds and places that people weren’t expecting. I made a map there, kind of compared that, and I started talking about it, and I wrote a little thing that was in the New York Times that just made the case that the water is going to go where the water is going to go, and that’s going to be downhill, and that’s going to be where the old streams were.

Klimek: Eric does a lot of work with historic maps. He overlays the original topography of a place with the city we know now to reveal where the rivers, lakes, streams and marshes used to be. Often these are the very same places that flood during storms.

Sanderson: We call those areas “blue zones,” and they cover some 20 percent of New York City. Places where about a million people live.

Klimek: So you’re saying that some of the flooding resulting from Hurricane Ida happened in surprising places, places that were not predicted to flood?

Sanderson: Yes. Basements were flooded. And it turns out that a lot of those places were former wetlands or ponds or streams. Because when we build, the city will fill in the wetland. But it’s actually hard to raise the topography high enough that you divert the direction of the water. The water goes where the water has always gone.

Klimek: Eric says some of the best examples can be found in our nation’s airports.

Sanderson: Think about where JFK Airport is, or LaGuardia Airport, in New York. JFK Airport is built on a big salt marsh. The Great Haystack, as it was called. LaGuardia is actually built in Bowery Bay. It was built in a bay! They filled in the bay, and they built the airport. And why is that? Why did they do that? It’s because by the time we decided we wanted commercial aviation in the late ’20s and 1930s, most of the upland had been built on, right?

And so, you know, you weren’t going to, like, clear Flatbush in order to build an airport. What the city did is they took whatever they had, which was the near-coastal zone, and they filled it in. That’s what LaGuardia [is]. And that’s what we did for JFK, and that’s Newark Airport. But that’s also, you know, Reagan Airport in D.C., and that’s also SFO in San Francisco and the Oakland Airport and practically every airport in a coastal city. And it’s because of the relationship of when that technological economic activity developed in the historical projection of the city. It’s fascinating.

Klimek: Are there specific human populations most likely to be affected by floods?

Sanderson: Yeah. Well, everybody who’s in a low spot. It turns out, of course, that those places have been wet for a long time. Many of them were less desirable. And there’s two consequences of that: One is that they’re disproportionately in public hands, still. So there are places where schools are, where public housing is, where parks are. Because those places were less desirable for private development in the past. And so they tended to stay in the public sphere. The other sort of important factor is poor people. You know, people with less power and less financial capacity tend to go to the places that are more affordable and in some sense have been, you know, shunted by the various systematic mechanisms. You know, redlining and these sorts of things tend to push people into certain precincts of the city. It just turns out that some of those precincts of the city were formerly wetlands, and then those former wetlands are starting to flood again. We did an analysis of our blue zones against environmental justice areas of the city. And about a third of the blue zones overlap with areas that are identified as environmental justice communities.

Klimek: Our magazine story about flooding is largely set in Houston, which, you know, in recent days as we’re speaking has been hit by Hurricane Beryl-related flooding. But this obviously has been a problem there for decades, considering that Houston, too, was built on a swamp. Why are so many of our major U.S. cities built on floodplains?

Sanderson: They weren’t built to destroy swamps, per se. It’s more, if you think about where it’s a good place to put a city, there’s sort of four factors. One is that there is food. So you have to have agricultural land nearby, and you need water. You need fresh water, right? You also want to be on a trade route. So that means cities like to be on the coast, or on major rivers, or some way of moving stuff around. And the fourth one is defense. A lot of cities were founded at a time where, you know, you had to worry about other people. So they’re often in defensive places. It’s maybe worth saying, Chris, that once a city is established, the next best place to put a city is right beside the city you already have. Once you have that core, then they tend to grow out sort of radially from them.

Klimek: So in Houston, the so-called Ike Dike, this massive infrastructure project—I want to ask how you feel about these kinds of large-scale solutions. Is there a limit to what can be achieved with these kinds of massive infrastructure projects?

Sanderson: I can’t speak specifically to the details of Houston, but there’s similar sorts of things proposed here in New York. And what I would just say is, I don’t think you can solve the problem with the same kind of thinking that created it in the first place.

There was this idea that developed during the Enlightenment, and was expressed through the Industrial Age and into the 20th century, that we could basically control nature. That we were smarter and more powerful than nature is. And the consequences of that are that we have radically changed the atmospheric composition of the Earth in such a way that it’s holding in more energy and creating these storms. So there’s that. And then, you know, we thought, “We can build on a beach, we can build on a wetland. We’ll just fill it in; it’ll be fine.” But we didn’t anticipate sea-level rise and climate change and more severe storms. And so I really think this is a moment where we need a different way of thinking and another kind of wisdom.

Klimek: What would a more comprehensive long-term solution for a coastal city, whether it’s Houston or New York, what would that look like if we had some way to address all of this pre-existing construction, and the fact that we’re having to interpolate centuries of prior development? If we could somehow put that aside and just think about the future, what would you do?

Sanderson: So I would take the historical lesson, which is that we’ve overbuilt in some places, we built in places that we shouldn’t have. And so, what should we do? I think there are some places where we need to invest in nature instead of more infrastructure. I think it’s actually the reverse thing. Don’t build a giant wall; build a giant park. Don’t build a new storm drain; build a stream. Don’t build another massive retention pond that you don’t know how big to make it; build a wetland that knows how to adapt to changing conditions.

And that’s hard, because it means that it just isn’t a problem of the neighborhoods that are flooding. It’s also a problem of the upland areas that aren’t flooding. If a million people need to move, and we need to build another million housing units in safer places—and probably more to help with the housing affordability and other things, right? This is what I mean. It challenges us at many levels. It challenges us in terms of the wisdom to know what to do as an individual person or individual family, but it also challenges our social structures. We need to have a mechanism to try and work that out, and then we need to restore the nature that we destroyed, and that will save us.

Klimek: Do plants have a role to play in addressing some of the problems we’re having with flooding?

Sanderson: Planting really is the key here. And that’s what I mean by restoring nature from a water perspective. When you see a tree, you should think of a straw. You have this organism that has these roots that are going down into the ground, and they’re pulling the water out and they’re putting it back in the atmosphere. The traditional way of managing water in the city is to build pipes and infrastructures that replace the streams, right? And then take it to the water treatment plants. That’s sort of this one way of managing water. And the goal is to get rid of it as fast as possible. Nature’s way is: There’s many routes that water can take. Water can run down a stream, but it can also percolate into the ground and into the aquifer. Or it can evaporate or evapotranspiration through trees and up into the atmosphere, right? It has multiple pathways to go.

So these are all sorts of lessons out of ecology that we can apply with plants to make flooding better. More trees is going to help with interception. It’s going to help with groundwater flows, and it’s going to help with evapotranspiration. More wetland plants is going to help with slowing the water, holding the water and providing habitat for other organisms that use that water. Nature’s been at this for a long time. Like, it really has a lot of great tricks that we can lean into in a way that can make our lives better, too.

Klimek: Eric spoke about another innovative solution called “stream daylighting.” Most of the small streams that used to exist in the landscape have been forced underground, rerouted into pipes or otherwise covered by our urban infrastructure. Daylighting restores the streams, bringing them back up to the surface.

Sanderson: Here in New York City, there’s this fascinating story on Staten Island that when Staten Island was developing, there was this moment where they were about to spend a lot of money on their sewage infrastructure. And then someone said, well, why don’t we put some of that money into just restoring the streams? And then the streams can help with the stormwater. We can do some adaptations. We can build some ponds and things to help hold a little bit more water in the system. And then the sewage system can just deal with the sewage and not have to deal with the stormwater.

But then there’s other things that are being invented, like a green roof. You know, a green roof actually slows the water down. And it used to be that our green roofs, you know, were pretty shallow. But there’s been a lot of experimentation. I was slightly involved with a project that Google built in New York, where they took an old industrial building that was strong enough that they used to drive trains into this building, like locomotives, at the end of the High Line. It’s now an office building, and they popped up the middle of it to create the office structures, and then they put green roofs on them, and those green roofs could hold enough weight that they can have trees on them. Trees and shrubs and plants. And then they planted them with 95 percent native plants. So they’re doing the water thing and they’re doing the biodiversity thing at the same time. It’s a really beautiful project, and an acre and a half of habitat on the West Side of Manhattan. Incredible.

Klimek: The solutions to flooding as a result of coastal surges—are those different from rainfall-induced flooding, or do we address them in the same way?

Sanderson: We have to address them in different kinds of ways, because the coastal storm surge, that’s the sea level. And then the waves that are being driven by a storm. And so that’s really about, in my view, dunes and beaches and maybe oyster reefs to help break that energy of the storm water and then salt marshes to help absorb it.

If it’s an intense rainfall, I think that’s about streams and wetlands and interior modifications giving the water someplace to go. The problem is that you could try and solve one and mess up the other. I think this is why the engineers are so interested in this problem, and they can design something if you tell them what to design for. It’s easy to do the design, but then to miss the specification by a little bit.

Remember during Hurricane Sandy when there was that famous photograph of Lower Manhattan being all dark? That’s because the flood took out a power plant that was on the East Side of Manhattan. There was on a little hill beside an old salt marsh. It was designed to be 12 feet above the tide, and that storm surge was 14 feet. So it was just two feet over. You know, like, if they designed it at 14 or 16 feet or would have been OK. When they built that thing, nobody knew exactly what it was. You’re taking a guess. You’re sort of rolling the dice. Natural systems are adaptive on their own.

So it’s not like there’s a design blueprint for nature that says, this is exactly what it’ll do. Nature’s a little bit more adaptable, and it can do kind of different sorts of things. And I think that’s a strength in the long run. But it makes people uncertain in the short run.

Klimek: Are there any other solutions we haven’t gotten to yet, either in New York City or other cities, approaches to addressing flooding that you find worthy of exploration?

Sanderson: We didn’t mention specifically things like bioswales, which are sort of like a small little version of a forest or a little wetland on the side of a street. There’s this idea of permeable pavers, you know, allowing water to get to the ground. Essentially, we’ve covered our cities in stone because we don’t like mud. Essentially, we’ve paved over the city, and our buildings are built in these hard materials, which are like stone and glass and so forth. And so that’s why the water sheets off of it.

And, you know, anybody can do this experiment. You just take a bucket of water and go outside and pour it on a rock and watch how fast the water comes off. And then you pour it on the adjacent soil and you’ll see how fast it infiltrates to the ground and doesn’t run off. And so we’ve hardened the city. Anything we can do to soften the city that way, to expose the soil, it’s going to help us with water. I think the only thing to say about that, of course, is that, you know, in the historical conditions, when it was a forest, the water that was in the ground would either eventually emerge in a spring and a stream or go down into the aquifer and then out into the ocean.

Now we have other stuff that’s also on the ground, like the subway system and like all the electrical wires, and all the plumbing. So it’s a little bit more complicated. There’s a lot of work in cities to put water in the ground, and I totally understand why. But if you’re ever in New York City on a rainy day, it’s raining above the ground and it’s raining below the ground, in the subway system. Water is single-minded like this. It just wants to go downhill.

Klimek: It sounds like we really need to think about more than just rerouting water to solve some of these problems that coastal cities are experiencing. What are the opportunities that we could open up by thinking about more than just moving excess water from one place to another place?

Sanderson: Well, I think we need to think about the mitigation side. Of course, everything we’ve talked about adapting to flooding doesn’t mean we don’t have to do something about trying to decrease the amount of carbon that’s in the atmosphere. Floods are a big problem in cities, both because of the way we’ve made our cities and because of the way cities have changed the atmosphere. I mean, there’s the basic climate change fact that the atmosphere has a lot more carbon dioxide in it and other greenhouse gases than it did before. Those holding the heat, the warmer air holds more water and has more energy. And so that creates larger storms. So there’s that.

One thing I think a lot about is we tend to forget that we make a lot of choices about how we live in the city. So there’s a sort of lifestyle aspect to this, as well as a sort of urban planning aspect to it, if you like. And I think we could do a lot more on the lifestyle side. Some of that is just coming to this expectation that, yes, there’s going to be flooding in our cities and another ecosystems, right? These things are not going away anytime soon. So we just need to, like, reset, maybe, our expectation that we can build pipes large enough to handle all the water and that, you know, despite whatever the conditions are, if it’s pouring rain, maybe you can’t go outside, or maybe you can’t do something that you were able to do before. So that’s one thing.

A second one is to sort of think about those sort of lifestyle choices in terms of all the things you need to do about them. Flooding, about where the water goes, that’s in conversation with where the cars go and where people go. So the transportation networks. There’s some clever ideas there. If you look at the New York City streets now, they’re designed with this bend, so they’re higher in the middle so that the water sheets off toward the gutters on the side. But there’s been some experiments in cities around the world to build them the other way, lower in the middle, and the water comes in. And so basically when there’s a flood, you close the road. And for the short period of time, that road is a stream. Not traffic. It’s a stream. And it turns out that some of our roads are on old streams. And so that kind of solution could work. So these are quite clever things that you can do.

Klimek: How would it benefit people to take that into account, to start to think more ecologically and adjust our expectations? How would we ultimately benefit from this?

Sanderson: Well, in the near term, we won’t die, right? Like we won’t drown, and we won’t lose our stuff, and we won’t have the social unrest that arises from those bad things. But to sort of turn around in a positive mode at some level, I think this is what life is for, right? Knowing how to live here on Earth with the nature that we have. It’s that kind of deep-seated understanding and desire to be the best person I can be in this amazing, amazing planet that we have that has led my whole career in conservation.

Klimek: Eric Sanderson is the vice president of urban conservation for the New York Botanical Garden. He is also the author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, which is an ecological history of Manhattan Island. Thank you, Dr. Sanderson, for talking with us.

Sanderson: Terrific. Thank you so much, Chris.

Klimek: To hear more from Eric Sanderson, subscribe to NYBG’s brand new podcast, which is called “Plant People.” We’ll put a link in our show notes along with links to more resources, including Xander Peters’ Smithsonian article about the Ike Dike.

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Klimek: Before we let you go, let’s give you one last dinner party fact to tide you over as we wrap up our season.

Ted Scheinman: I’m Ted Scheinman. I’m a senior editor here at Smithsonian magazine, and I recently edited a great piece by our frequent contributor Richard Grant about Akito Kawahara, who is a butterfly scientist at the University of Florida. And Kawahara’s recent research has changed our understanding of butterflies in major ways. He has traced the evolution of butterflies directly from moths. Butterflies became butterflies when they became day-flying, essentially. But a really curious and, to me, sort of funny wrinkle here is that some of those butterflies who escaped the night and became day-flying, then evolved back into being night fliers and into essentially being moths again, which I can’t help but consider a sort of step backward, like moving back in with your parents or something. But it goes to show you that, you know, evolution is not, you know, directional. And it always brings up some crazy stuff.

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Klimek: I hope you liked this season of “There’s More of That.” We did something new for us, and we hope that our episodes gave you a sense of what the world of Smithsonian magazine is all about. We’d love to hear from you about how the season was and, more importantly, what you want to hear more of. We’re taking time between seasons to make the show even better. Having your help is key. So if you have the time to help us design our future episodes, please take this survey. You can find it at SmithsonianMag.com/podcastsurvey. It should take about five minutes.

“There’s More to That” is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine. Our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Genevieve Sponsler, Adriana Rozas Rivera, Ry Dorsey and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Our music is from APM Music.

I’m Chris Klimek. Thank you for listening.

Chris Klimek | READ MORE

Chris Klimek is a writer and podcast host for Smithsonian.