December 13, 2002
By Thom Fowler
Phoebe Wray Protects The Small Living Things In A Big, Complicated World.
What do Shakespeare, Broadway and treefrogs have in common?
Answer: Phoebe Wray.
Phoebe Wray is a professor at the Boston Conservatory where she teaches graduate seminars in cultural history and the history of theatre. She left the stage in 1972 to begin producing a multi-media show called FLUKES THE WHALE SHOW that she toured through elementary schools to teach kids about conservation.
In 1973, she started a non-profit group called ENDANGERED SPECIES PRODUCTIONS, that created and performed similar teaching shows and wrote public education curriculum about endangered species for children. Eventually, ENDANGERED SPECIES PRODUCTIONS became a nationally accredited grass-roots environmental lobbying organization whose motto was Share the Planet.
These days, she divides her time between preparing young talent for Broadway, film and television and working aggressively on endangered species issues and is largely responsible for saving two endangered species,. We talked at length about our current environmental crisis, the key issues facing us, what lobbyists like her are doing, the simple things a Joe Schmo like me can do to save the human species and then she told me some surprising things about potato chips.
At 67 years old, Phoebe Wray is still stirring the pot and her sticking her nose into other people’s business to protect the earth and pave the way (pun intended) for a future of clean air, clean water and a healthy environment for not only those of us who are here on Earth now, but those who have yet to come for many generations into the future.
Thom: You teach pop-culture studies, what is that exactly?
Phoebe: I teach a cultural history seminar in the grad school and I teach history of the theatre. There’s a lot of pop-culture involved in theatre, especially contemporary theatre. Theatre has always been the popular culture. It was, at least, until the Twentieth Century when film came in and then television. Up to that time, theatre was the dominant cultural form.
Thom: Does film and television count as theatre?
Phoebe: They do in a larger view than I teach it.
Thom: What kind of students attend the Conservatory and what do they, ideally, go on to do?
Phoebe: Very talented ones. Ideally, they go on to Broadway. We have about 15 students at the moment who are on Broadway. We’re a small school. The graduating class in the theatre division is going to be 32 people. Every one of those was a star in their high school and came to us as a freshman as the star and they suddenly realized that everyone around them had been the star as well. So it’s a highly competitive school and we’re very proud of the kids who really are very very talented. They do well. They go off to theatre in New York, some of them go on to television. We’re mostly geared towards the legitimate stage - Broadway and theatre, other than film or television.
Thom: Are your environmental concerns part of your curriculum?
Phoebe: I do a seminar on the environment.
Thom: Should ecology be part of a public school education?
Phoebe: Yes. You ought to know where you live and what’s going on. Children should know that. And it is often taught. Especially in grammar school, kids learn about different animals and they learn about conservation. They learn some ecology.
Thom: You were personally responsible for saving two endangered species, what were they and how did that come about?
Phoebe: I did a lot of the major work on it. I was the executive director of an environmental non-governmental organization called The Center for Action on Endangered Species. We lobbied the federal government to loosen up some money to study various species. One of them was this really nifty animal called Pine Barrens Treefrog. It is found in New Jersey, and it’s found in the Florida panhandle and in one part of South Carolina. If it went extinct the world wouldn’t end but it’s a splendid little teeny-tiny frog. It has a huge voice that goes WONKA WONKA WONKA. It looks like a state trooper. It has a purple stripe and a white stripe down its side. The campaign was just intense letter writing, phone calls and getting other people interested in protecting the frog’s habitat.
The other animal I lobbied for was called the three-spined unarmored stickleback. It’s a little teeny-tiny fish that lives in California in the Soledad Canyon. That’s the only place in the world that its found. Now, there’s a park there where, if you are lucky, you can see the creature. It’s only about two inches long.
I worked a lot on the whales but then I got very interested in these remarkable, different, exotic little animals that were just disappearing because nobody was paying attention to them. My friends used to kid me and say I worked on the uglies. I did a lot of work on bats and manatees, also.
I just kept the pressure on, refused to go away and continued to say , “We’ve got to do something about this species.”
Thom: How do you go about “saving” an animal. What methods do you use and what kind of work is involved.
Phoebe: A friend of mine a long time said we’re not saving anything, we are divvying up what’s left and I think that is probably true.
There are federal laws still in existence that have been around since 1963 - the Endangered Species Act which mandates that if you can prove a species is endangered, the species will go on the list and then laws will go into effect to safeguard the destruction of its habitat or taking the species. Endangered species get a little attention by way of biologists studying it to see what it needs and there’s public education about the critter. So all of those things go toward trying to maintain an endangered species where it lives. Most of the problems are habitat ones.
Thom: Where in the animal’s life do you intervene in order to save it from extinction?
Phoebe: Any place you can. Mostly protecting habitat. The law requires that studies be done. If anyone is going to go into the habitat of an endangered species, they have to look at it and make sure that whatever they do is not going to totally wipe it out.
Thom: So what kinds of things impinge on the habitat of wild creatures?
Phoebe: Well, you know, urban sprawl [laugh]. Any number of things. Where we put our nuclear waste dumps. Where roads are built. Any human activity that goes through and changes a place on the planet could negatively impact an endangered species. That’s not always true though.
That little Pine Barrens Treefrog that I worked on. It lived in what are called Pine barrens. They are like peat bogs . The soil is very thick and peaty and boggy and acidic and that habitat is only found around a stand of particular kinds of Pine trees. In the Florida panhandle there was logging going on near the place where there was a colony of Pine Barrens Treefrogs. The logging trucks were leaving these huge tire tracks that were maybe 2 or 3 inches deep. And the frogs started to breed in them. So, in a sense, they were helping. Those big logging trucks were providing an additional breeding place for the Pine Barrens Treefrog and we were all joking saying, “Does that mean you have to drive trucks through the Pine Barren Treefrog’s habitat in order to help it?
There’s no easy answer to any of these questions. There are a great many millions of people on the planet who really do feel that we have touched nature much to heavily and if we help something like an endangered species or if we help bring back the fisheries, that it is a good thing to do.
Thom: Why is it important to save endangered species from extinction, after all, the Dinosaurs became extinct and life on planet Earth still continued.
Phoebe: That’s a good question. “Why should we save endangered species” is because the trend of nature is towards diversity. And a diverse planet with all kinds of different critters and plants and kinds of waters and kinds of mountains is a healthier planet for us as well as everything else.
One person answered that question once by saying, “Would we need any more Beethoven symphonies. Why do we have symphonies?” Wouldn’t the world go on fine without it? And that’s true. There’s a certain beauty in the diversity of species that humans appreciate. Most humans, if they think about it, they like nature. So why should we save them? It really does make the planet healthier. Diversity of species makes the planet healthier.
Thom: Why is habitat protection such a politically loaded proposition?
Phoebe: Because there is much money to be made in utilizing natural resources. Logging and mineral extractions, building tract houses. There’s just money there.
Thom: What are the current ecological challenges facing us as a population and why should we care?
Phoebe: You mean globally? Many people would say the major environmental problem is actually sociological – its overpopulation. We are so many people on this planet, its not going to be able to sustain, and in fact, isn’t sustaining, the size of the human population.
This is the first time in the history of the planet that one species has dominated. The dinosaurs were many different species. Their demise was probably caused by the meteorite. That’s the theory. It wasn’t a natural occurrence. That’s not what’s happening now on the planet. We humans are literally eating up the earth up. And part of that is a neo-Cartesian idea that the planet is a shopping mall for people and that will not hold. The planet is not a shopping mall for people.
Thom: Do ecological issues transcend national politics? Should we be only concerned about our own interior?
Phoebe: We can do more about our own interior than we can globabally but the natural world does not have boundaries. Most environmental problems are transnational. It’s all a web. There is that wonderful image of the whole of life as a web. And you break a strand at your peril because it resonates through everything else. It will eventually resonate.
Thom: Are there international groups that work on these issues together?
Phoebe: Sure. Hundreds if not thousands of national groups and many of them are famous and a lot of them are not so famous. Plus many little tiny grass-roots regional groups. One time there was a little group in Kentucky that got together. They were just a bunch of farmers and they got together and started something called “Save The Pipe Stem” which was a little river and they were quite effective locally. So, yeah, there are many many groups. And they do tend to coalesce, share resources and present a united front on the larger global issues like saving the rainforest or saving the whales or getting nuclear weapons out of Antarctica.
Thom: How is the US Government responding to endangered wildlife?
Phoebe: We did fine for a little while. This administration [The Bush Administration] doesn’t give a damn about the environment, it’s quite clear. Who knows what they are going to do about endangered species. There are dedicated federal biologists that are working all over the country who do care about them and do good work. At a policy level Bush is certainly not interested in the environment. He hasn’t shown any evidence of that at all.
Thom: What kinds of things has he done to show his lack of concern?
Phoebe: He appoints people who don’t like environment. He puts his cronies in and he’s ready to make money out of everything. Like, “Let’s drill for oil in the Arctic national wildlife refuge,” which is a pristine area, one of the few left and there is no technology that will not leave a footprint there if we went in and drilled. We don’t know how to take the oil out without leaving a footprint even though they say, “Oh we can.” It’s nonsense anyway. Even if they drilled up there its not going to help our current energy crunch. They wouldn’t be getting any oil out of there for a decade if they started tomorrow.
There was a recent law that Mr. Bush that was touting about cutting out some of the undergrowth in the Western forests that was so badly hit by fire this year. But that isn’t what the law says. The law actually just opened the gate for more logging in the forests. It wasn’t about clearing out undergrowth so that fires would not be as bad as they were this year. That was just a farce. All it did was give the logging companies more places to cut trees.
Thom: How does that compare to other countries?
Phoebe: In some ways we are better than a whole lot of other countries, partly because of laws that are on the books from the Seventies and the Eighties. Policy-wise, we have not had a good reputation internationally under Bush’s administration. He didn’t even show up to the last world summit on the environment. He had promised us that when he was running for president that he was going to sign the Kyoto Accords that would reduce greenhouse gasses and he immediately backed away from that. I would say that his reputation elsewhere in the world is that he speaks out of both sides of his mouth and that he isn’t interested in cleaner air and cleaner water.
Thom: Why do you think he pulled out of the Kyoto Accord?
Phoebe: Because its going to be costly to the car manufacturers to further reduce emissions on their cars. That’s just crazy. We need a cleaner environment. We need cleaner air. And we need to stop the warming of the atmosphere. But the car manufacturers are still not supplying the proper technology and building it into the car. Instead they are building SUV’s that are just gobbling up more and more gas.
Thom: What creates greenhouse gasses?
Phoebe: It’s mostly automobiles.
Thom: Is there an intentional use of disinformation about the environment to mislead the American public?
Phoebe: That one is hard to prove. There is something that just happened a couple of days ago. It was in a publication called BAYAREA.COM. It’s part of the San Jose Mercury News group of papers in California. It was an article that claimed that 46% of the world is still wilderness. And that sounds like “Wow! We’re not doing so bad.” But if you look at the map that accompanied the article, that’s counting the Arctic, and the Antarctic and the Saharan desert and all the deserts and the tundra areas. That is very misleading to say 46% is still wilderness. Its ammunition for people who want to eat the world up. Their 46% is not hospitable to people. It is not something that could be or should be developed to stick more people in it. We can’t live everywhere. We can live almost everywhere but not really everywhere.
Thom: Is the impression they are trying to give that since 46% of the wilderness remains, its okay if I spread my suburban subdivision out another mile?
Phoebe: That’s right.
Thom: Where can you get reliable information?
Phoebe: It has to come from two places. One, the scientific community and through publications like WILD EARTH and through the environmental groups who are sometimes guilty of exaggeration but in general they get their facts right. Greenpeace gets their facts right, Environmental Defense Fund has a really good journal that is very soundly based. The Humane Society of The United States, they don’t just work on dogs and cats, they have a big wildlife area. And the magazine ECOLOGY which is a little bit more scientifically bent but the information that is there is accurate. And its in the newspapers if you read between the lines. You just have to consider the sources.
Thom: What would make a source suspect? Is there a learning curve before you get to the point where you can read between the lines very well?
Phoebe: There is. I wouldn’t know quite how to answer that. I have seen excellent pamphlets that have been put out by Exxon that are really very sound and balanced and very good. So just because its Exxon doesn’t mean that they are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. All of the multi-nationals have scientists that they use as part of their effort to keep people informed about what they do about the environment. Sometimes they are as guilty of exaggeration and selective memory as environmental groups are often accused of.
Thom: What’s at stake in the struggle to save endangered species for those who want to use land any way they see fit and people like yourself? What do both sides have to either gain or lose?
Phoebe: There’s a moral imperative in there. You make up your mind. One has to personally make up his or her mind as to whether they have a personal responsibility towards the Earth. I personally do. And then how you use the Earth or don’t use the Earth has to come out of that moral imperative. It has to be a personal choice.
There are larger political issues where you have opposing groups. We have a problem in my little town in Massachusetts. The aquifer for our town is about to be asphalted over to provide a storage area for the shipment of cars. That is going to be very hard on our town water supply because the rain won’t soak into the ground and into the aquifer and there is no law that prevents that from happening. The people who want to pave it, own the land. But the aquifer is underneath it. They don’t own the water. That’s part of our groundwater here. And the run-off is going to be significant and it’s going to be a very knotty problem.
So here you have essentially a question of what is best for the largest number of people. The people of the town say it is our best interest to have clean water. The guy who owns the land says, “I own the land. It is my personal property and this is my business. I ship automobiles. If I don’t have a place to put the cars, I put a lot of people out of work then I don’t make any money.” Those kinds of local dilemmas probably happen 500 times a day over the world where someone has to make that decision and someone wins and someone else loses.
Thom: Does anyone buy land for the sole purpose of doing nothing with it?
Phoebe: Yes. Nature Conservancy does. It’s not that you do nothing with it. It’s that you keep your eye on it. Other things can happen if a fire goes through or if there is a polluter upstream from the land that you have set aside. So its monitored. Nature Conservancy is a national group and that’s exactly what they do. They buy land and set it aside as open land.
Thom: What kind of pollution might get into the water from upstream?
Phoebe: Agricultural run-off. If there is a farm or a farming community that uses pesticides on their land or phosphates. And that rinses off and goes into the water table.
Thom: When you look into the future, What do you hope to see in terms of land-use issues, the environment and human interaction with the natural world. And how does what you hope compare with what do you actually see?
Phoebe: Its going to get worse before it gets better just because we seem to be in a frenzy of greed all over the world. Greed is taking a toll on the environment. My wish is that people would learn how to share the planet. It’s not saving it, its sharing it. If we could do that, we would have the diversity of species, we would have clean air and clean water and we would be happier with each other as well.
Thom: Do you think our attitude towards the environment is part of our attitude towards medicine. Here in the U.S. we have a crisis model of medicine where we wait to get sick before we take care of ourselves rather than a preventative model where we maintain health so we don’t get sick? Metaphorically speaking, are we waiting to get sick or see that we are sick before we go see a “doctor”?
Phoebe: I think a lot of people are trying to have that not happen. Crisis prevention was built in to the law that protects truly endangered species. There are other categories. There are Threatened Species, there are Species At Risk that could become threatened and once they are threatened they could become endangered. So there are categories that were meant to head off the crisis mentality. People in general don’t seem to get it. It’s like it happens to someone else and no amount of talking seems to get through.
Victorian London had to clean up their environment after it was so smoky in the city that people died on the street from inhaling fumes from all the factories and woodstoves. In Minamata Bay in Japan people died of mercury poisoning before the society did anything about the pollutants that were going into the bay. That seems to be … Maybe that’s a human trait. Maybe its hardwired into our brain that you don’t move until there is a crisis.
Thom: Is there a crisis now?
Phoebe: Oh yeah. The fisheries have crashed almost everywhere in the world.
Thom: Commercial fisheries or natural fisheries?
Phoebe: Commercial fisheries. We are running out of fish from over-fishing. Some of the Japanese fisherman use a net called “The Walls of Death.” They have a net that is ten miles long. It catches everything and they throw away a lot of it. It catches anything that swims into it and all of it is not viable commercially and they just get trashed.
Thom: How do you get people to see there is a crisis?
Phoebe: Keep talking about it. Keep showing it on television. Keep writing stuff. You keep trying to remind people about it saying, “Do you not miss those trees.” The pine trees between here and Boston are all suffering from acid rain. They are all dying. Does that not mean anything to you. Stamina is the name of the game. You just have to keep on truckin’. It isn’t as easy as “let’s legislate and everything will be okay.”
Thom: So what can I do? I try to follow the reduce, reuse, recycle rule but it doesn’t seem like my small efforts make a difference. How can people who live in urban and suburban environments adjust their lifestyle to minimize their impact on the environment without having to radically and fundamentally change the way they live?
Phoebe: Recycling and reusing does make a difference. If everybody did it, the cumulative impact would be incredible. You just take personal responsibility for things like saving energy. Turning off lights. That really does, over the long haul, make a difference. In your lifetime, you will have made a difference. You are reusing, you are recycling and you are supporting people who are working in the trenches where you don’t choose to work.
Thom: Can it be something as simple as buying different types of products?
Phoebe: It can be. One of the products that uses the most water in the world to make are potato chips. Now try to get people not to eat potato chips. Do you eat potato chips?
Thom: No, but because they aren’t good for you. I’m surprised about potato chips. I always thought meat production uses the most water.
Phoebe: Buying locally helps, from local farmers if that’s possible. It’s good if you try to think of yourself as a friend of the natural world. And think of it as a friend who needs some help so whatever you can do, you try do to. You turn off the water when you brush your teeth so you aren’t using all the water and watching it go down the drain.
Thom: Do have any books you want to recommend or websites?
Phoebe: There’s a good journal called WILD EARTH, it comes out quarterly, always printed on acid free recycled paper. Its published out of Brattleboro, Vermont. They do themed issues that really dig in and its extremely well done. It’s a beautiful publication. They are world class thinkers who discuss environmental topics across the board all kinds of topics.
Thom: Can you get in bookstores or online?
Phoebe: Its usually sold in good bookstores. Borders might even have it.
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