00:00:00.79] (MUSIC) -How many times have you wondered, does my one life make a difference in the world?
[00:00:09.50] Do I have the potential to accomplish great things?
[00:00:14.30] Come with us on this journey, exploring interconnections through science and across cultures and time, noticing how your life impacts people, places and events around the world, whether or not you're there to see the results.
[00:00:33.34] Nothing exists in isolation.
[00:00:37.57] Your smallest act can have a ripple effect far beyond which you can imagine.
[00:00:44.71] We are a part of something much greater than ourselves.
[00:00:50.71] Welcome to the Connectivity Project.
[00:00:53.00] (MUSIC) -They're supposed to be right next to the fence, right?
[00:00:58.54] -Then they don't get mowed.
[00:01:00.36] -There you go, butterflies.
[00:01:01.50] Live.
[00:01:02.00] (MUSIC) -When I moved to Iowa, I sort of discovered the prairie.
[00:01:18.07] I was asking myself, what do people do in Iowa?
[00:01:20.91] I wanted to see that landscape that I found so intriguing and enter RAGBRAI, which is a bike ride across the entire state.
[00:01:33.97] 20,000 people from all over the world, descend on Iowa and ride their bike in this mass migration across the state.
[00:01:41.77] So I signed up.
[00:01:44.59] My roommate and best friend, we were riding together and just were brainstorming, what can we do while we're riding?
[00:01:52.03] Nature matters to us, this landscape matters to us.
[00:01:56.04] I've sort of always been into Monarch butterflies.
[00:01:59.17] Maybe we can plant things for the monarchs as we ride.
[00:02:03.72] -Pollination is a dance between the plant and animal kingdoms and provides a view into the world of interconnectivity.
[00:02:11.10] There's this relationship that we have with bees where they don't really know us.
[00:02:16.94] Outside of honeybees, we don't really know them, but yet we benefit from each other.
[00:02:22.50] - I mean, fundamentally, pollination is plant sex.
[00:02:25.93] It's the way that a plant reproduces.
[00:02:29.18] -Because plants can't move, some need help from butterflies, bees, birds, and other creatures to help them reproduce.
[00:02:38.12] As these pollinators search for food, they unwittingly help in the reproductive process by carrying pollen from flower to flower.
[00:02:46.45] -More than 85% of plant species need an animal pollinator, usually an insect, in order to move pollen around in order to successfully reproduce.
[00:02:57.04] -The systems view of life involves many key concepts, and one of them is interconnectedness.
[00:03:04.38] No individual organism can be sustainable.
[00:03:08.28] No individual organism actually can be alive because we all need this whole network of relationships with other organisms to stay alive.
[00:03:19.00] (AIRPLANE ENGINE WHIRRING) -Heyah! Heyah! Come on, come on!
[00:03:26.87] I'm just a small farmer.
[00:03:28.96] We grow food, we grow most of what we eat.
[00:03:36.41] -Oh my gosh, they looks brilliant.
[00:03:38.63] -It's great!
[00:03:41.20] What a surprise. (LAUGHING) People don't realize how critically important the bees are.
[00:03:52.08] Eveytime you go to the store and you're buying fruits and vegetables, there's a pretty good chance that a bee had something to do with that.
[00:04:00.92] If I want a tomato, I have to have bees.
[00:04:04.55] If we didn't have a sliced tomato on your sandwich, that's one thing, but what about no pizza?
[00:04:09.80] If you didn't have apples then apple juice is gone, and apple juice is a sweetener in a lot of things, too.
[00:04:17.45] No more apple pie.
[00:04:19.98] Even though you don't think of bees and beef or chicken, the feeds that we give our animals are actually pollinated by bees.
[00:04:28.13] -One out of three bites that you take required a pollinator.
[00:04:34.31] -If we didn't have the bees, you wouldn't have that food anymore.
[00:04:38.00] (MUSIC) -Unless you're looking, you won't see it.
[00:04:45.00] Unless you understand the story, you won't appreciate it.
[00:04:48.96] The different shapes, sizes, colors of flowers, not to mention their different fragrances, all play a role in attracting different pollinators.
[00:05:01.29] -One of the main strategies a flower uses to attract the desired pollinator is color.
[00:05:08.18] This is why we find such a wide assortment of hues in the plant world.
[00:05:13.08] These shapes have co-evolved with the pollinators, playing an important role in the communication between these species.
[00:05:21.12] The umbrella shape flower offers a landing pad for a bee to rest and feed efficiently.
[00:05:27.18] Wide open flowers like this poppy invite easy access for a quick visit.
[00:05:32.58] -Some of the big complex flowers, like on a lupin with it's keel and its banner, and it's really sort of big flower, and it takes, like, a strong bee to get in there.
[00:05:43.62] If you think about different flowers that are a little bit deeper, you've got to work harder to get in there.
[00:05:48.27] So you typically need bees or butterflies that have longer tongues.
[00:05:52.12] So you've got a whole different suite of pollinators and insects that might visit them.
[00:05:58.22] -In some cases, flowers have markings that can act like an airplane runway.
[00:06:04.07] Best of all, some pollinators see ultraviolet colors, guiding the bee to exactly where the flower desires.
[00:06:13.91] There's a whole array of things we can learn about the fascinating ways plants communicate to the animal world.
[00:06:23.41] -The bees are like the wings of the plants that enables each plant to communicate to the next plant.
[00:06:30.26] You can take this whole field of sunflowers and all of a sudden the plants can talk to each other by virtue of the bees visiting and doing their pollination.
[00:06:38.51] I love that.
[00:06:42.28] -Monarchs represent to me this inter-generational connection.
[00:06:47.67] The reason for that is the monarch migration.
[00:06:51.11] They overwinter in Mexico, something triggers them, so four or five generations of monarchs make the journey north all the way to Toronto, Canada.
[00:07:01.93] -On their journey north, they will stop along the way to lay eggs on milkweed plants, which will eventually become caterpillars and then turn into butterflies.
[00:07:12.28] This will happen four to five times until they reach their destination.
[00:07:16.63] On their way south, however, one generation will make the same 2000 mile journey.
[00:07:23.58] -And they end up in that same spot that their great, great, great, great grandparents were the previous winter.
[00:07:30.86] The Midwest is really central to their migration.
[00:07:33.94] -Milkweed is actually the only food source for something like the monarch butterfly.
[00:07:38.35] -Milkweed used to be widespread in the landscape and isn't anymore.
[00:07:44.57] -In the past two decades, monarch butterfly populations have declined by almost 80%.
[00:07:50.23] -If monarchs continue to decline, that means that many other pollinators are also suffering.
[00:07:55.51] Many other species of pollinators are even more endangered than monarchs.
[00:08:00.97] -You've probably heard a lot about colony collapse disorder.
[00:08:03.92] That is a decline in the honeybee populations.
[00:08:07.59] -In the last two decades, hundreds of millions of honeybees have been lost to colony collapse disorder.
[00:08:14.75] -When looking at pollinator plants in general, the same issues apply in terms of the different drivers, whether that's habitat loss, exposure to pesticides, mostly insecticides, diseases brought into that population, or even climate change and the effects of more severe, more frequent droughts.
[00:08:35.55] -The pervasive use of neonicotinoid chemicals in both large scale agriculture as well as home use is linked to pollination decline.
[00:08:44.67] There's a dangerous ripple effect to these practices.
[00:08:48.73] -When you go out and you put products on your lawn to make it more lush, the bees bring that stuff home.
[00:08:55.13] It stays in the wax long after the lifetime of those first few generations of bees, those chemicals are still in there.
[00:09:01.79] It's like having bedsheets treated with toxic chemicals and you sleep in them every single night.
[00:09:09.99] -80% of Iowa was covered in tall grass prairie when European settlers arrived.
[00:09:14.88] Now it's less than one tenth of 1% of the state.
[00:09:19.31] -Today it's really about, how do we create this habitat that's out there?
[00:09:23.15] How do we protect that habitat, and how do we help turn around the declines that we're seeing in pollinators across the country?
[00:09:30.44] (MUSIC) -Part of the reason I got the farm was to take a certain portion of the farm back to nature.
[00:09:42.78] -Pollinators thrive on diversity.
[00:09:45.57] There are many different kinds of pollinators, and they need different types of plants to thrive.
[00:09:50.88] Too often in large scale agriculture, a monoculture is created with acres and acres of just one type of plant, basically creating a food desert.
[00:10:00.38] These are often treated with pesticides to make up for their lack of diversity.
[00:10:05.87] But some farmers are looking to better models to support a healthy ecosystem.
[00:10:10.88] -As part of any cropping operation you want to protect the soil quality, and buffers around crop fields are part of that process.
[00:10:18.82] Traditionally those buffers have just been brome grass, and they did a fine job on soil quality, but it didn't provide native habitat.
[00:10:26.34] -Removing small amounts of the farmland from production and putting in tall grass prairie becomes a model for large scale agriculture.
[00:10:36.38] -We're literally right here next to the edge of the soybean field.
[00:10:39.49] Right here we have milkweed coming in, we've got some coneflower back here.
[00:10:43.73] Other native flowers, some goldenrod.
[00:10:46.88] -The biggest audience for this are other farmers.
[00:10:48.83] They don't want to kill bees.
[00:10:50.36] They see themselves as stewards of the land.
[00:10:55.03] -When riders first come up to the RAGBRAI race they say, "What's this?" "What are you doing?" "What are you giving out?" "Are you selling something?" "Is this a truffle?
[00:11:04.91] "Can I eat it?" They're all these questions, and we simply tell them what we're doing.
[00:11:11.46] So using seed balls, just as you ride, lob it from your bike, and the following spring it'll germinate.
[00:11:18.46] We've got all this loss of habitat because of agricultural practices.
[00:11:23.75] So the question then is, where else can this plant exist?
[00:11:28.67] What are the other available spaces?
[00:11:31.44] In Iowa, for example, there are 115,000 miles of roadside.
[00:11:36.38] That's so much potential habitat.
[00:11:39.14] We see many of those riders come back the next day and they are full of stories, maybe full of frustration because they couldn't find a roadside that wasn't sprayed or mowed.
[00:11:54.83] There was no place that they could throw their seed ball.
[00:11:58.87] We start to think, huh, "Well, why can't I find a good spot for this seed ball?" And so that's a great teachable moment.
[00:12:14.12] -I spend a lot of time thinking about the interrelationships of all the things on this farm.
[00:12:21.63] I ask myself all the time, this decision that I make, this small act that I do, how does that impact nature?
[00:12:28.76] -It's very easy to go to the grocery store and pick up any meal and never even think about the farmer who planted the plant, which brought the pollinator.
[00:12:38.70] -The magic of pollination has been a crucial part of the web of life on our planet for millions of years.
[00:12:45.48] Now, more than ever before, we are an integral part of the pollination process.
[00:12:51.87] This has not always been true.
[00:12:54.33] Our daily choices have a significant role in the future success or or decline of this essential, precious, and delicate process of life.
[00:13:06.84] -The systems view of life is a change from seeing the world as a machine to seeing it as a living network.
[00:13:14.74] We have realized that the material world is a pattern of interdependent relationships.
[00:13:26.53] -We as a people, and as an Earth, need all of these parts.
[00:13:32.64] Every little piece of the Earth needs to be there for it to exist.
[00:13:38.19] And so my role in that system is to not do harm.
[00:13:44.19] What are my little day-to-day decisions that are going to help that?
[00:13:48.50] -Plant native wildflowers or native shrubs and trees that can be beneficial to pollinators.
[00:13:55.13] -Plant flowers around that bees like to visit, especially flowering herbs.
[00:13:59.55] -Really question your insecticide use around your house.
[00:14:02.90] -Buy organic, because it takes the chemicals out of the system.
[00:14:06.80] -Vote with your dollars, supporting efforts banning the use of those neonicotinoids.
[00:14:13.88] I feel like I could come up with an example from almost every state in the country of something that somebody is doing at a significant scale for pollinators.
[00:14:24.11] For me, that's incredibly exciting.
[00:14:27.28] -The other whole area of impact is with the people-- rolling seed balls at these events, whether they're riding their bikes and tossing it into the roadsides, the wife of the farmer, it's her job to mow and now she's thinking twice about that little strip along the road.
[00:14:44.31] -These are all things that anybody can do and you can pick which one you want to engage in.
[00:14:49.80] -We have to make decisions that really make a difference so that everything we do allows nature to thrive and grow, and then we will too.
[00:14:58.91] (MUSIC) (MUSIC)