Studying Grand Canyon with Dr Larry Stevens

Behind the Scenery

Dr. Larry Stevens has spent over fifty years as a boatman and researcher trying to understand water and life in the Grand Canyon. In this time, he has explored much of the change in important river and spring ecosystems within the desert. On this episode of Behind the Scenery listen as Larry shares observations on insect life, healthy seeps and springs, and the role hope plays in science.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Larry: If we we're to start a first Church of the Earth, Grand Canyon would be the temple. And the story that Grand Canyon reveals about the tremendous expanse of time, life's role and change through that, through that process is the material reality that we have here and to drift off into other belief systems just takes us away from appreciation of this incredible green planet that we live on.

Behind the Scenery Introduction (multiple voices): Grand Canyon; Where hidden forces shape our ideas, beliefs, and experiences. Join us as we uncover the stories between the canyon’s colorful walls. Probe the depths and add your voice for what happens next at Grand Canyon. Hello and Welcome!... This is Behind the Scenery Luke: Hey Ya’ll, I’m Luke and Interpretive Ranger here on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. For this episode of Behind the Scenery I got the chance to sit down with Larry Stevens whose life and career has been heavily intertwined with the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. I was curious to hear Larry’s perspective on the changes and development of the river and its ecosystems and where he sees us headed in the years ahead. Larry would you be willing to introduce yourself, please? Larry: Sure. My name's Larry Stevens. I'm the director of the Spring Stewardship Institute. Senior scientist for the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council. And I've got a Ph.D. in zoology from Northern Arizona University. I've been working in Grand Canyon since 1974. But in the landscape since 1970. Luke: Would you be willing to expand off of that and describe maybe what you're currently interacting with the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon with and maybe your past interactions as well? Just a brief discussion of your career. Larry: Okay. So in 1974, I became a biotech here at grand National Park, working on all manner of fire issues and insect life and bird life. Yeah, here at the park, back in those days, it was a pretty deep focus on natural history. And so as a biotech, I guess pretty much free roam of the collections and wandering around the park looking at the various organisms, did that for a year, went off back to my family farm in northern New Hampshire, uh, for a while and got a call from the Museum of Northern Arizona from Steve Carruthers, and he was looking for somebody to do an insect inventory of the Colorado River corridor. Knowing that I had that interest, he called me in and I said, Well, yes, I'm interested. And, uh, pursued the interview with him in which he asked, Do you want to do science or do you want to eat? And I said, Science, of course. I'm a scientist. So I spent two and a half years collecting, analyzing the insect fauna of the river corridor, and in that time period, learned just a huge amount, including how to row on the river and did that job as he has, he promised, I had $4.10 to my name, so I walked around Flagstaff to try to find somebody who would be willing to hire a kind of a mendicant boatman and stumbled into a company that was willing to hire me. And it launched my commercial river running career. I've done more than 400 trips on the Colorado River, commercially guiding, doing research, taking thousands of people down, many scientists, who really opened my eyes to all of dimensionality of the place over the last 50 years. And, uh, went on to get my master's and Ph.D. funding myself by doing commercial River guiding, uh, during the summer months, worked on issues related to Glen Canyon Dam. So how Glen Canyon Dam has affected the Colorado River Corridor has been a real focus of that research. Um, became the ecologist for Grand Canyon National Park in 1989, worked there for five or six years in that position, then moved on to work for the Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Interior, etc. and primarily working on dam management issues. Co-initiated the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council with Kim Crumble and Kelly Burke in 1998. Maybe so 25 years ago an effort to preserve the natural ecosystems and native species of the landscape. And that work has culminated just in the last, this last month with, uh, with completion of protected land surrounding Grand Canyon National Park. Work isn't completely done because kaibab national forest is not... the Teddy Roosevelt's authorization of that as a game preserve has not been reauthorized and that this is the last piece of the puzzle of trying to protect the area around Grand Canyon. Anyway. So it's been a 25 year effort to get that protection done. My typos show up in the enabling legislation for these national monuments, which is kind of strange, but good. And that's one of my one of the achievements in my life that I'm most proud of. Um, pursued many, many different topics, continuing the, you know, the biggest source of macro biodiversity of Grand Canyon is insect life. And my, my goal is to actually get a compendium of the insect life of Grand Canyon done, want to try to make as much headway as I can while I'm on the planet with that. With that effort, um, I started the Spring Stewardship Institute in part because of my interest in managing the Colorado River and all the different stakeholders that deal with it. And I serve as an environmental advisor to the Secretary of the Interior on management of Glen Canyon Dam through the Adaptive Management program. It takes decades to make headway in that program because there's so many voices and so much controversy about about the Colorado River. And in part in response to that, I began thinking more about springs, which are little points in the landscape that are incredibly influential biodiversity wise and have been widely ignored as conservation targets and so trying to bring attention to springs and better management of springs around the world. I work with about 100 different collaborators around the world who are studying the ecosystem ecology of springs, and I'll be headed to Italy in November, December to pursue a global think tank on Springs ecosystem ecology. And where we're going to go with that science. Luke: you mentioned several times now that, you know, either a focus or an interest in the insects of the environment. Is this just out of curiosity and just a passion of yours, or do insects play an important and vital role in understanding, you know, the Grand Canyon and the health of the ecosystem. Larry: Not just insects, but invertebrates in general. Remembering that the karstic terrain here is largely composed of decomposed invertebrate life. So our life has influenced Grand Canyon, you know, in ways that we scarcely think about. but the trillions and trillions of invertebrates that compose the kaibab limestone, the redwall limestone, and provide the concrete for things like the of the Coconino Sandstone And the amount of life that's gone into shaping this landscape is just incredible, very poorly known modern insect life. We don't we don't have more than one. Well, there are maybe half a dozen places on Earth where we actually understand insect biodiversity in detail. Great Smokies is one place where there's been pretty good headway made on that. But so I'm trying to bring that science up to snuff for Grand Canyon because it's such a tremendous landscape for biodiversity. We have so many poorly known species that are distributed in funny places, you know, three dozen species that are endemic to caves, for example, in Grand Canyon that we know of, not that we've explored more than a few of the thousand caves that we have in the park in terms of invertebrate life. But, uh, and then the meadows up on the north rim here support unique tiger beetles and just the list goes on and on and on. And so bringing attention to that level of biodiversity I think is important because these are pretty charismatic and sometimes just incredibly gorgeous creatures to understand. It is a passion, but it's also the role that insects play in our world is much underappreciated. Luke: I feel like I've heard a lot of times when it comes to insect understanding and knowledge, just, you know, a data deficient species is pretty frequent. Larry: Yeah, we're at, you know less than five. We know probably less than 5% of what we need to know about the insect world, for example. Some whole families of snails and, and mites and other critters, we might only know 5% of the species. Luke: Have you, have you found your research, your research into, you know, the insect invertebrate life around here, aiding you in other elements as well, like, you know, in your protection of springs or in, the ecology based around the Glen Canyon and its effect on the water. Does this, does this new amount of data that you are collecting go into furthering any other research or. Larry: Sure. Two examples of that. One is I discovered a previously unrecognized species of spring snail on the Hualapai reservation, went to the tribal council to make sure it was okay with them that I, that I named the species. The logic there is that this is an aquatic snail living at one spring in their landscape, but as a species that they can appreciate, especially because I named it after the tribe Pyrgulopsis hualapaiensis with several colleagues. Uh, that species can help protect not only that spring, but the water resource for the whole tribe. And so, uh, the tribal council agreed with that, and we went ahead and went ahead and named the species. And, um, that's one example of how a species can help protect water resources. It's been a huge controversy about insects in the Colorado River, in the post dam Colorado River, and why we don't have all these great critters like stone flies and Mayflies and caddisfly living in the Colorado River in post dam time, lots of them, lots of kind of murky uncertainty because we didn't do any surveys of the river before the dam. I didn't arrive in the scene until the seventies, which is, you know, ten years after the dam had been created. So by studying insect life upstream in, uh, in Cataract Canyon and, and Desolation Canyon and looking at the tributaries in Grand Canyon, we get a sense of what's not in the in the Colorado River. And these, these key groups of mayflies stone flies and caddisflies which are dominant in some of our cold water tributaries like Tapeats Creek. They don't actually occur in any kind of functional number in the in the Colorado River. caddisflies are kind of increasing in the lower most canyon. But that's a kind of an anomalous story there. So that kind of level of interest has sparked millions and millions of dollars of research on the part of the USGS to try to try to understand how to increase insect life in a river for fish as fish food base. The water that comes out of Glen Canyon Dam is cold, clear, fairly quite constant, you know, relative to the pre dam past. Luke: No. Yeah. Not what it would have been before. Yeah. Before dam construction. correct Larry: So now Glen Canyon Dam is acting as a spring in a way. The nearest natural analog to what's coming out of Glen Canyon Dam is Tapeats Creek. Water temperature is the same as what comes out of the dam in most years with enough water in the reservoir clear water, relatively little, relatively low flow fluctuations, order of magnitude, maybe about the same as the dam. And so I went into Tapeats Creek to understand why it's so richly endowed with aquatic insects in comparison with the main stream. And we did a flow fluctuation simulations to see if fluctuating flows were what were keeping insects out of the out of the picture in the mainstream, and also lots and lots of analyses of the sediment structure and whatnot. The story is actually quite simple in that the mainstream is managed for sand, for recreational beaches, for shoreline habitats, for for things like birds and whatnot. Whereas Tapeats Creek is a gravel based system, lots of interstitial space. And so that interstitial spaces is essential for aquatic insects and is not available in the mainstream. And it never has been simply because, you know, over geologic time has built a sand transporting river. So the answer is pretty simple. You can't have you can't manage for both fine sediments, sandbars and aquatic, you know, aquatic insects that are attractive to fish and useful for fish food. Luke: So the aquatic insects benefit from having more space between the gravel, which creating the space, but they. Larry: They need that under many of them are kind of full of negatively phototrophic they, they avoid sunlight, come out at night and so they hide under the in the interstitial surfaces. They can also answer some really just wonderful questions there. They can actually detect flashfloods coming in and sink down into the gravels. That story is only known for a couple species, but quite intriguing. Luke: So the original Colorado River ecosystem, would it have been more of a gravel structure because all of that sediment would have been moving downstream that's now collected behind the dam or? Larry: So that the dam did three things to the Colorado River, Glen Canyon dam did three things for the Colorado River. It pretty much stopped sediment transport. Sediment transport that was on average about 60 million tons per year. That's equivalent of a of a five ton dump truck going by every two and a half seconds. That much sand moving through the system, not a gravel based system, the biggest floods could certainly move rocks and cobbles, but the flecks of fine sediment coming through was just tremendous. There's always been sand moving through cobble, kind of a river system. Luke: So at this point in time, with the data you have, do you not believe the early Grand Canyon in the Colorado River to be a heavy insect life that would always have been based more around those creeks and streams that were, were tributaries of the river itself. Larry: Yeah. So the pre dam river was sediment laden. No sunlight reached the floor of the river and the level of the river fluctuated. The stage of the river fluctuated really wildly orders of magnitude, of course, over the course of a year. So therefore, literally no opportunity for plant life to develop on which the invertebrates feed and then the support fish. In July every year at Lees ferry the river water temperature reached 89 degrees Fahrenheit every year. That means on a low flow of summer year, the water going through Grand Canyon, by the time it reached the end of Grand Canyon, it might have been 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Really, really harsh. Luke: Extremely warm water. Yeah. Having been on the river recently. Larry: Yes. It is not that temperature now. Larry: And so the turbidity and water temperature were both, you know, affected by a Grand Canyon that we have more or less constant water temperature increasing now because of drought and the climate change a little bit. But nothing like the pre dam past conditions that would pretty much prevent anything insect life from living in the river, the fish in the river are all opportunistic feeders, and most of them spawn in the tributaries. But we have records of Colorado Pike Minnow running all the way up to Grand Falls, for example, in the little Colorado River and for humpback chub breeding quite successfully. And the other suckers are as well speckled dace all through the system, but spawning in the tributaries and returning to the main stream during the winter. Luke: So the constant source of insect life is more important to those introduced or invasive species that we have added to the river. Larry: Yeah, we’ve certainly changed the whole structure of the ecosystem, the river, the aquatic ecosystem really dramatically by introducing 20 non-native fish species turning the river into a clear water constant environment. That's what humans do is we turn our ecosystems into simple, simple systems. And so clear water, sunlight reaches the floor of the river, a whole raft of aquatic species, aquatic macrophites now live on the floor of the river that support some insect life. Midges mostly, but the sand moving through just prevents these more important aquatic invertebrates from being able to propagate in the river. Luke: Going back to something you had mentioned previously, you mentioned, you know, working with water resources and this the snail I believe you mentioned in your interactions with the Colorado River and seeps and springs how have the indigenous cultures that are associated with the Grand Canyon, have they been a support system for you? Have you had a lot of interactions with them? Can you go in a little bit of detail about that? Larry: Sure. Yeah. Pretty much every culture on earth except our own regard springs as sacred spots. Even Western Europe springs are places where miracles happened. There are places with revered historical significance, the socioeconomic value of them for subsistence existence of really farming, ranches, whatnot, are all very much reliant on springs water all throughout the world, all throughout the world. We just finished a paper on a conservation assessment of the springs of the world, and it's the same story everywhere that these are really important features of the landscape that have been pretty broadly overlooked by Western cultures, but are totally revered, revered by the by indigenous cultures. I have worked with the Havasupai, the Hualapai, with the spring snail story, the Zuni, Hopi, Apache, and Yavapai tribes on springs. Significance of water, especially in these arid landscapes, is just off the charts important to their to their cultures. Been a real pleasure to be able to work with the tribes on some of their spring related issues and doing restoration on quite a few of them. Luke: the Colorado River more so maybe than ever before is part of the zeitgeist these days, right? it's drying up. If you went on Google News and you typed in Colorado River pretty much every day, you're going to see brand new headlines popping up with more information and new media presence. Has this had an impact on your efforts, whether that's you know, you've been you've gotten more funding, less funding, anything. Has this had a significant impact with its new presence in the media recently? Larry: okay there's two sides to this sword. One is that we have shifted our national attention to the environment, to climate change, and rightly so. It's terribly important issues, vexingly complex, difficult to manage and, you know, really kind of conflict laden. But what we've lost is paying attention to the details. The spring's conservation work is an effort to bring attention to small points in the landscape that are incredibly influential regionally. We regard springs as keystone ecosystems, little patches of ecologically, highly interactive patches of the landscape that, uh, that influence the entire surrounding area. Here you go to Cliff Spring, for example, on Cape Royal there. It's a very, very isolated spring. Every bird in the landscape comes in there to water, many of them every day. I was there once we saw 35 species of birds come in for water in less than an hour. And so these little points in the landscape are playing a role not only internally within as it's kind of these small ecosystems, but also in terms of the overall landscape. And simply if that water wasn't there, the birds would not be there, literally couldn't be there. So all kinds of challenges with understanding the role of these little points in the landscape, but the way that the focus of national focus on climate change has shifted our attention away from the need to manage it and manage the pieces, as Aldo Leopold said, and not lose these pieces of the landscape while we're, you know, running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to worry about climate change that we really functionally can't do anything about, springs are manageable. We can understand what's going on there, understand how to protect those aquifers. And there, you know, many, many tens of thousands of aquifers that are that are feeding and feeding these millions of springs around the earth. Pay attention to that at that scale, as well as well as the global scale. It's also much easier to manage springs than it is global climate, of course, uh, much less controversial because everybody wants their springs to be functional for the future. What's good for springs is good for all things we say. So there's that kind of side of the story of the sort of how focus on climate change has influenced our work as it shifted attention away from, from the real, you know, kind of on the ground detail that people can actually appreciating and accomplish things out. The other side of it is, yes, organizations like U.S. Forest Service is now taking up a national interest in Springs. We've given them, we stimulated some of that by providing them with trainings about springs and through Springs Stewardship Institute, provide them with tools, and we manage all the data on springs from the National Forest Service on a national basis. So we're trying to encourage other agencies to take up that, take up that task as well. Park Service is a very divided organization, so individual parks one by one have come to us and we've interacted with them. But as a as an agency, Park Service has a Springs program nationally, but it's not very well integrated. What we're trying to offer is an integrated way of looking at springs. So you do understand that wet meadows are springs and that, you know, gushets pouring out of the cliff walls like Thunder River are springs that there are many different types of springs and it's expression of groundwater that is the key feature of these ecosystems that integrates the below ground of the underworld really with the above. Above ground. Yeah. Uh, part of the landscape is that linkage is, critical to the springs function. Luke: Is your spring stewardship program largely designed to help educate and bring knowledge about springs or are you also playing a data collection role with that, that particular organization? Larry: So, uh, the mission of the Springs Stewardship Institute is to improve understanding of springs as ecosystems and to help people manage them better and to do with the management part of it. We've developed a free, online secure and incredibly user friendly database for springs information as being the programs being used by more than 1500 users, agencies, counties, tribes, researchers, NGOs, etc. And the database contains information on more than 160,000 springs in West, mostly in Western U.S. But we're bringing in all the springs data for the for the U.S. into that system. You might think that because springs are often mapped on USGS topo maps that we actually know where they are. That's not true. And many, many springs are not mapped. Many springs that have been mapped are either dry or headed or were so mismapped that we can't even, you know, can't even figure out what they were talking about. And so bringing that kind of more accurate information together and this springs online database springsdata.org is a relational database as we're compiling information that we can't even ask., we don't even know which questions to ask about yet. For example, in many landscapes we've worked in, if you go to 50 or 100 springs, you detect more than a quarter of the flora in those settings in the province of Alberta. And for example, we went to 56 Springs and came up with a list of one quarter of the flora of Alberta of the province of Alberta. Total area we looked at was only about ten acres of habitat, but we came up with a quarter of the flora for the entire province. So we developed this relationship between the geographic data and all these species of invertebrates and fish and vertebrates and all kinds of things living at springs, snails, whatnot. And we can begin to put together stories of and relationships between things like slope aspect and elevation for literally thousands of species of plants. So in terms of understanding climate change, every species of plant has a relationship between elevation and aspect of ponderosa pine, for example, dominant plant here on the Grand Canyon. It occurs on south facing slopes at the highest elevations north facing slopes at lowest elevations, just kind of funny leech shaped spiral range as it wraps around from north facing to south, facing slopes across elevation. Every plant has its own relationship to that story and as climate change happens that shape of that relationship will change to a very funny geometry to try to put together to model. But it gives us a way to understand because elevation is such a key driver of climate, that we understand that if you want to understand what climate change is going to do, warming climate, just go down slope a thousand feet. Right? And so this is one example of a question that we are just were beginning to explore here. But we can begin to understand what climate change will have effect on, on pretty much all the species in the landscape, all the plant species or just a great many of them. Trees, shrubs follow this pattern very clearly. Wetland, vegetation, some of the species like helleborine orchids they have cutoff points. Strange cut off points, 6000 feet or so for helleborine and orchids, which are found only at Springs here in Arizona and in the southwest. So why is that happening? So those are questions to be to be answered. Is it a pollinator issue? Is it you know, what happened? Can you take a helleborine orchid and grow it at 8000 feet? We don't know. But some of our rare plants are, you know, very constrained elevationally. Many many questions like that within this relational database we haven't even begun to explore water quality relationships to plant diversity, for example, or to invertebrate diversity, trying to characterize the habitats of spring snails or fish based on water quality collected across, you know, many, many different springs all put into this relational database. We're getting there. And these are these are really exciting questions scientifically to be able to pursue. Luke: You mentioned, the ability to kind of at least get a rough understanding of what might happen as climate change continues to progress. And, you know, you go down downslope to kind of discover what will happen upslope as things warm and dry out. Has there been any other interesting or unexpected discoveries that you have had along this path, and along this changing data collection you've had that you know, we know climate change is a negative. It has a lot of negative impacts. Is there something else that came up that was unexpected? Larry: Yeah. There's a lot we don't know about climate change. And at these high elevations, the growing season has been quite short for you know under natural conditions as the growing season extends its duration. That's a, it's a big question. Um, another really big question is how to predict climate change impacts on, on discharge, groundwater discharge. Um, with climate change reducing the amount of snowpack, increasing sublimation, which is the transition of ice crystals straight to water vapor without going through the liquid. Hydrologically is this transition from ice out of water vapor without melting and a very common phenomenon in our snowpacks here we lose snow through that process. And therefore, not only is climate change kind of reducing snowpack overall, but it's increasing the loss of that snow through sublimation. So that will have an effect on surface flow. Uh, springs are contributing, you know, uh, many, many river systems are fed, base flow fed by springs, any river. For example, Colorado, 53% of the Colorado River is groundwater coming out of springs, not the base flow of the Colorado River. Yes, snowpack and rain contribute to it, but the base flow is 53% Groundwater at least. So it's climate change influences on discharge of springs is something that is statistically quite complicated. Hydrologists have traditionally wanted, you know, 30, 50, 100 years of data to be able to predict what's going to happen with groundwater withdrawal and an effect on streamflow. That's not the right approach we're beyond the envelope of understanding normalcy in climate and therefore smaller timeframes that are more reflective of current conditions are probably a better way to go and it's been a little bit of a little bit of statistical research in this, but, you know, intervals of 20 years might be more accurate for actually predicting what's going to happen in the future. There are big adventures to be had with understanding how to approach the study of climate change. Um, and some of, some of these are very basic questions that we have to, you know, devote more attention to. Having monitoring data on springs is essential for that simply because, we have to understand these statistical patterns over time and we don't have very much monitoring data on springs. Very, very few springs are monitored. You know, uh, Vasey’s Paradise [spring], for example, in Grand Canyon has gone dry during these dry years. This year it's really gushing really splendidly. Um, but the only way we're getting flow data there is occasionally passing by and evaluating how much water is coming out. So not very, uh, not very precise monitoring data on that very important site. That is the second highest concentration of land snails of any point in Grand Canyon, Thunder River, having the highest concentration. Yeah, many patterns that are kind of baffling and really kind of cool. Luke: I think that that gives us an excellent place to, you know, kind of wrap up and move forward. And I think I've just got one last question for you, and that is with all this understanding, right, you're developing and you’re continuing to develop further and further understanding more data leads to more discoveries for you. And you've had quite a significant career on the canyon as well as with seeps and springs. Knowing all of that, putting all of that together, is there something or maybe multiple things that give you hope for the future, that give you hope for the continuation of healthy ecosystems and healthy river ecology and seeps and springs in this area as well as beyond? Larry: Couple of things here. I'm a scientist. I take the charge of being a scientist very, very seriously. Uh, and uh, and hope is not necessarily part of science. Our job is to provide information that can contribute to a better understanding of the physical reality of the world that we live in. I'm going to launch into a little bit of a diversion here because, um, Carl Jung talked about peeling back the layers of the unconscious to, to really reveal the depth of human experience. And, uh, David Hinton talked about the yin yang issues with the fertile void and the material world splendid book called Existence, that I totally recommend reading, as well as the work of Carl Jung. Carl Jung is kind of an unraveling the union of human consciousness is something he wrote as an introduction to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Both of those approaches fail to grasp the dimensionality from us going out into the rest of the universe and failed to take that into a serious enough context that this dimensionality that we live in, we see ourselves in the center of kind of a heliocentric or anthropocentric kind of perspective of the universe. It goes in both directions, both into our personalities and out into the universe. And by taking thousands of people through and many, many researchers who are focused on individual research topics, spiders, plant physiology, whatever this array of kind of people that have come through my life, through Grand Canyon and guiding on river trips, research river trips and, sometimes just as passengers, has just brought incredible insight into this dimensionality. As a scientist, I have to deal with the material world which both of those philosophies kind of ignore. Um, uh, the continuity of life on earth going back 4 billion years to the present that brought us here. To be able to appreciate Grand Canyon is just absolutely extraordinary. You know, we look at the canyon and the humbling effect of look of being able to see the place, understanding that our contribution to the universe is less than a grain of sand in the context of Grand Canyon is humbling. And, uh, and, and has given me a perspective that, you know, I can make my contributions in this life. They won't be very much, but I can try and that's kind of my job as a scientist keeping to the material world that I can study. Uh, is the, is the responsibility of science. A lot of people claim that science doesn't provide a moral compass for humanity. I beg to differ. Trying to stay open, open minded, and pay attention to the facts and be willing to change your mind about reality. If the data point in that direction is a tremendously important lesson for humanity. Um, if I could change anything, it would be human nature in this, in this landscape to get to take us away from a I me, mine kind of perspective towards compassion for the for the life, for the health of the earth, for the incredible insight that I'm being able to see. And appreciate each organism that we have that we come across each organism tells us so much about the world around us, uh, its own life and the path of evolution. If we we're to start a first Church of the Earth, Grand Canyon would be the temple. And the story that Grand Canyon reveals about the tremendous expanse of time, life's role and change through that, through that process is, uh, is the, you know, the material reality that we have here and to drift off into other belief systems just takes us away from appreciation of this incredible green planet that we live on. Luke: Well, I appreciate it, Larry. I think that is a wonderful way to sum this up. And I really appreciate your focus on learning to accept and appreciate change. I think sometimes we as humanity struggle to do it even though we're so very good at it ourselves. We can change on a dime. But we don't love to talk about it too frequently. Yeah. So anything else you'd like to share? Larry: Sure. Just to wrap up that question of what gives me hope. You give me hope. Luke: I appreciate that. Larry: Yeah. Luke, this has been a really great opportunity to speak about some of these things. I don't get that much chance to spout off on this, uh, this kind of philosophical, uh, perspective very much. And Uh, and the more we can teach the youth about, about this place, the better. And so this effort, I think, is really worthwhile. Luke: Well, thank you, Larry. I appreciate that. And I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us and being willing to record your thoughts on this. Larry: Totally. My pleasure. Thank you. Luke: Many thanks to Larry Stevens for sharing his stories and perspectives on the canyon. The Behind the Scenery Podcast is brought to you by the interpretation team at Grand Canyon National Park. We gratefully acknowledge the native peoples on whose ancestral homelands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant native communities who make their homes here today.