It’s a weird time to be an environmental scientist. The proposed cuts to federal science funding in the United States are profound, and if they come to pass, it’s not clear what American science will look like on the other side. But for many researchers, science is much more than a career: it’s a community, lifestyle, and sometimes even a family business.

Outside/In producer Justine Paradis tagged along with researchers in the field to learn what it’s like to be a scientist right now. We visit one of the oldest atmospheric monitoring stations in the country, and venture onto the Finger Lakes with an ad-hoc group of researchers struggling to understand an emerging threat to water quality: harmful algal blooms.

This is a glimpse of the people behind the headlines, navigating questions both personal and professional, and trying to find ways to continue their work, even as much of their funding is simultaneously collapsing around them.

Featuring Bob Howarth, Joshua Thienpont, Irena Creed, Nico Trick, Anita Dedić, and Tom Butler, with appearances from Roxanne Marino, Renee Santoro, and Garreth Smith.

Click photos to enlarge and for captions.

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

NY67, one of the oldest atmospheric monitoring stations in the U.S., was established by Gene Likens, who helped discover acid rain in the 1960s (The Guardian).

More on the cuts to the National Science Foundation from The Guardian, which references this Federal Reserve Bank analysis, finding that for every dollar spent on R&D by the major federal science funding agencies, there’s been a return to U.S. taxpayers of $1.50-$3.00—in other words, 150-300%.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been tracking the federal science budget for decades, and publishes an ongoing analysis breaking down the proposed cuts as they change.

A map tracking harmful algal blooms, past and present, in New York State.

In the early 2000s, some wondered if seeding the ocean with iron could be a climate solution. They hoped that the iron would trigger the growth of marine phytoplankton, which would sequester carbon in the ocean. But when Charlie Trick and his colleagues studied it, they learned it had unintended consequences: it triggered the growth of highly toxic algal blooms.

A paper on the rise of ammonia, using data from the National Atmospheric Deposition Program and co-authored by Tom Butler.

A letter condemning the proposed cuts to science in FY26, signed by more than 1200 members of the National Academy of Sciences.

SUPPORT

To share your questions and feedback with Outside/In, call the show’s hotline and leave us a voicemail. The number is 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.

Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In.

Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook.

CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported, produced, and mixed by Justine Paradis

Edited by Taylor Quimby

Our staff includes Felix Poon, Marina Henke, and Jessica Hunt.

Special thanks to Gene Likens, Charlie Trick, Doug Young, Sudip Parikh, and Alessandra Zimmerman.

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio

Music by Lofive, Silver Maple, and Blue Dot Sessions.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio

Download a transcript

Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi.

[bbq ambi rise]

Nate Hegyi: Our story starts at a barbecue, at a park just outside of Ithaca, New York. It’s a warm day in late spring. There’s a waterfall nearby. Swallows are nesting in the rafters. And almost every person here is a scientist. They’re grilling, catching up… and making so many PhD jokes.

Roxanne Marino: We're having a good laugh about too many PhDs cooking the barbecue.

Garreth Smith: ‘How many does it take’ kind of thing? That's funny.

Joshua Thienpont: All of them.

Roxanne Marino: All of them, of course, because they all have an opinion…

Nate Hegyi: This group has spent the past few days together, collecting samples on the lakes in the area. They’re studying a growing environmental problem: toxic algae blooms. But one thing that struck our producer Justine Paradis, who was there, was that pretty much everyone appeared to be in a great mood.

Justine Paradis: You know, part of what I'm curious about coming here is understanding just the general mood of, of scientists right now. And everyone seems so happy [laughter] at least at this table.

Renee Santoro: We've got some wine.

Bob Howarth: Yeah.

[general merriment]

Renee Santoro: What's the alternative? Just roll over and be like, okay, the world's gonna, you know, just end up like a Star Wars scene. Like, I mean, come on. No one expects us to do that. It will all work out. Don't know how, but it will.

Nate Hegyi: That’s Renee, a researcher at Cornell. She motions at her colleague across the table – Bob Howarth, a biogeochemist.

Renee: Santoro: He says I'm an optimist. Well.

Bob Howarth: I don't know that I am. I mean, the world's got a lot of problems, but. But I'm tremendously excited about being in this group of people… I mean, the average day, what we're doing is tedious as hell, quite frankly. And yet, it's still really fun.

MUSIC: Capocollo Theme, Blue Dot Sessions

Nate Hegyi: This is a weird time to be an environmental scientist. That guy, Bob Howarth? He’s one of the most widely cited scientists in his field. A “legend,” one of the others said. And the questions they’re working on have global implications.

But there’s also a feeling of unease in the air. Because funding for this type of research is changing dramatically.

Bob Howarth: It’s going to be very very difficult. And for our graduate students, extremely, extremely difficult… I, I'm okay. I'm a, I'm an old guy. I'm retiring and I've got friends and we're doing exciting things. But the future scares me.

MUSIC SWELL

Nate Hegyi: You’ve probably heard about all the cuts being made to research programs and federal grants. These changes are so widespread, and happening so fast, it can feel dizzying just to keep track of it all.

So, today on Outside/In, producer Justine Paradis is focusing on one group of scientists. Researchers from three different countries, and seven universities, who are trying to continue their work at a time of huge transition and uncertainty.

We’ll meet some of the people behind the headlines, find out how cuts are impacting their science, and why they’re willing to put themselves on the line to keep doing it.

Stay tuned.

MUSIC FADE

///

Justine Paradis: This is Outside/In. I’m Justine Paradis. The morning after the barbecue, I headed out bright and early to meet the research team at a boat launch at Owasco Lake.

Josh Thienpont: We can do four transects.

Irena Creed: Let’s do four and then come back.

Josh Thienpont: Come back, cut ‘em…

Irena Creed: And then do the next four.

Bob Howarth: So we’re doing the work on shore. Which is easier, right?

Justine Paradis: This is their last day collecting samples, and they were getting organized.

Bob Howarth: We're compromising.

Justine Paradis: Owasco Lake is one of upstate New York’s Finger Lakes: a cluster of long and narrow troughs, carved by retreating glaciers beginning millions of years ago.

Historically, they are deep and beautiful, and clean. But the team here is trying to understand something new happening on these lakes. Harmful algal blooms.

MUSIC: Thin Man, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: Generally speaking, harmful algal blooms, or HABS, for short, are not uncommon in the summer. But globally, they’re on the rise. Factors like heat and agricultural run-off can feed pre-existing microbes until their populations suddenly explode.

The ones that these scientists are most interested in are actually caused by cyanobacteria, which is technically not actually an algae, but anyway. These blooms can look weird. Foamy or scummy, turning the water as green and thick as pea soup. They can also smell weird. Like sulfur or rotten eggs.

But the scary part is less immediately perceptible. The blooms produce toxins - harmful to your nervous system and to your liver – which make the water undrinkable… and dangerous. Here’s Bob Howarth.

Bob Howarth: Yeah, exactly. They'll stick to a dog, and the dog goes home and licks them, and it'll kill them.

Justine Paradis: Oh, yikes.

Bob Howarth: Yeah. Some of the toxins are also volatile, so it'll be released to the air. And even kayaking through the bloom can be hazardous.

Justine Paradis: No way. Wow.

Justine Paradis: Until 2015, no one had ever documented a HAB in all but one of the Finger Lakes. That’s because, typically, harmful algal blooms occur in muckier water, places that are high in phosphorus. According to scientists, these blooms should not be happening in the Finger Lakes. But they are. And they’re starting to appear in other places where they shouldn’t: in Lake Superior, Quebec, lakes further north in the Canadian Shield. So, the scientists here are calling them unconventional harmful algal blooms.

Bob Howarth: I thought I understood lakes, I thought I understood cyanobacteria blooms, and I don't. What am I missing?

Justine Paradis: This week’s sampling will be, they hope, a start of an answer.

MUSIC OUT

[boat ambi]

Bob Howarth: Doug says we're on station.

Josh Thienpont: Roger, Roger.

Justine Paradis: Today, they’re sampling a shallower area, but all week, the team has been pulling cores of mud, in very deep parts of the lake. Layers of sediment that will let them look back at conditions for the past couple centuries.

Josh Thienpont: The front side of the boat is just the muddy part.

Justine Paradis: I’m in the mud zone.

Josh Thienpont: You’re in the mud zone.

Justine Paradis: That’s Joshua Thienpont, a Canadian paleolimnologist. He studies ancient lakes.

Josh Thienpont: There’s like these hands here. It looks like some swamp monster has come out of the bottom of the lake and was clinging to the front door. When in reality it’s just me.

Justine Paradis: You're the swamp monster.

Josh Thienpont: I’m the mud monster.

Justine Paradis: Josh is a flurry of activity: tossing the unwieldy corer into the water, then lying down flat on the deck, leaning over the side. Then up again, hauling ropes like he’s pulling up an anchor.

Josh Thienpont: Comin’ up!

Justine Paradis: It is really physical work. And it’s going okay…

Josh Thienpont: Sorry. Oh, jeez. F**k! Sorry.

Justine Paradis: Josh loses one coring tube. Then, a few minutes later…

Josh Thienpont: Another tube. God damn it!

Justine Paradis: …he loses another.

Justine Paradis: Sorry. I'm here to capture the the hard day. And not the –

Josh Thienpont: That's okay. I don't want it all looking like sunshine and rainbows… there are some sediments that just give up their secrets a little bit less easily, so. [laughs]

MUSIC: Order of Entrance, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: From the outside, science might feel faraway from everyday realities. Maybe a sterile or even elite life of papers, journals, labwork. But today, Josh is literally getting his hands dirty. He’s got mud splattered everywhere: on his clothes, on his face, even in his mouth.

Irena Creed: You’ve got it in your teeth.

Josh Thienpont: Yeah, I can taste it.

Irena Creed: It looks clay-ey.

Josh Thienpont: 40% sand.

Justine Paradis: And the stakes of this work are very real. It’s hard and expensive to remove the toxins caused by harmful algal blooms. Boiling the water doesn’t help – it actually makes it worse. And the Finger Lakes alone are the water supply for more thanover a million people.

And that’s one reason why, for many of these folks, science is more than a career. It’s a community. A lifestyle. And, sometimes, even a family business.

Josh, for instance, has a 6-year old. When he gets back to Toronto, his wife – who’s also a paleolimnologist – will take off to do her own fieldwork. Irena Creed, one of the leads this week, is a hydrologist at the University of Toronto. And she’s here with her 20-something year old daughter Nico Trick.

Nico Trick: I've tagged along all my life, actually, yeah! Since I was, like, ten. Um, I've done coring in, particularly since I was about ten.

Justine Paradis: Nico’s dad, Charlie Trick – he also studies harmful algal blooms, but on the ocean. About twenty years ago, after returning from an 18-day ocean cruise, sampling a particularly big harmful algal bloom off the coast of Vancouver, Charlie got sick. Here’s Irena.

Irena Creed: He was giving a lecture at Western University in Canada… it was the time of chalk and blackboard. And he's writing there. And … by the end of the lecture, he had dropped the line that he was writing, and it just fell right down to the bottom, and he had no strength whatsoever left…

Justine Paradis: It was neurological damage in his shoulder. Charlie couldn’t lift his 9-month-old baby. And he says the doctors said it was one-in-a-million neurological damage, caused by a poison. And their family thinks the timing was such that it was caused by the algae.

Irena Creed: It makes it very personal. I've seen firsthand the harm that these toxin-producing algae can create… And so… it makes me feel even more wanting to solve the problem… not only for my husband. I can't solve what happened to him. But maybe we can avoid it happening to others, or at least understand it better so that others can benefit.

Justine Paradis: Is he still living with that?

Irena Creed: Yes… since that time, which would have been 22 years ago… the recovery has not been complete.

MUSIC SWELL AND OUT

Justine Paradis: You might think that all of this personal sacrifice and the proximity to climate change and pollution and the problems of the world — might be a good reason for scientists to feel depressed. But, at least here, that doesn’t appear to be so. Back at the barbecue, I overheard Irena reflecting on the week.

Irena Creed: Do you ever just feel lucky? This whole week has been luck. Everything working out.

Garreth Smith: It certainly has been.

Irena Creed: … Good weather. Come here with a good heart... everything works out.

MUSIC: Particle Emission, Silver Maple

Justine Paradis: I heard this kind of thing repeatedly. Expressions of positivity, gratitude, and curiosity. But the truth is, there is also a whole other set of feelings running in the background. Fear, anxiety, and shock.

Irena Creed: I work with U.S. EPA, USGS, U.S. Forest Service, and and it's almost like we're morning on the call for the first 20 minutes about what the loss is. And it's very heavy. It's very heavy.

Justine Paradis: Here’s Bob Howarth.

Bob Howarth: At Cornell, I'm on the faculty at Cornell University, I lost $1.2 million worth of funding over the last month or so. We had a grant from the USDA to measure methane from dairy farm operations… That funding’s been pulled. It’s gone.

Justine Paradis: The Trump administration is making major cuts to science funding. Shuttering the entire scientific research arm of the EPA. Pausing federal grants to universities. So, there’s hiring freezes all over the place. And fewer opportunities for students.

Bob Howarth: Our graduate students are scared. They're wondering whether there'll be jobs available for them when they get out. Our undergraduates… if they're majoring in environmental science. Some of them are doing it just because they are so in love with the field and so dedicated. But those who have a practical bent to going:.. Look, we're giving up on environmental protection. Research stuff is going away. Will there be jobs? You know, I get asked that on an almost daily basis when I'm at work advising students… There isn't a good answer. I. You know, you can't be reassuring. I don't, I don't think. We're not being reassuring.

Irena Creed: We're not safe. If I gave that impression, we're not. I have colleagues in Canada who receive funding from the United States…who have expended funds on doing research for American organizations, and that funding has just been cut off. And there are debts that are associated with that, that Canadian universities have to reconcile and address. We're not talking about tens, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Justine Paradis: Another member of this international group is Fulbright scholar Anita Dedić, a Bosnian scientist with a special focus on algae. This is a huge career moment for her, years in the making.

Anita Dedić: And for me, this was confirmation that I was on the great way.

Justine Paradis: You almost couldn't come, right?

Anita Dedić: Yeah. Mhm.

Bob Howarth: So she's worked for years to apply to get here. Right? It's a very very competitive process to be a Fulbright scholar… Anita, you started applying three years ago, working on it?

Anita Dedić: Four!

Bob Howarth: Yeah. Right.

Anita Dedić: Four. Yes. Yes.

Justine Paradis: Earlier this spring, just as Anita was set to get her visa, the entire Fulbright program was frozen at the State Department. Bob had to personally intervene to get her here.

Bob Howarth: You know, it just adds chaos and stress to, and that's that's true of virtually everything we're doing now.

MUSIC SWELL AND OUT

Justine Paradis: And that’s just the money. Travel to the United States wasn’t a simple choice for everyone.

Justine Paradis: So, for the Canadians in the room… crossing the border, uh, how was, how was that feeling these days?

Irena Creed: Uncomfortable.

Justine Paradis: Because of nerves? Or tell me more?

Irena Creed: It's a complex situation. I think some of my colleagues have been, um, afraid to cross the border. Especially ones that are visible minorities. We've had national academic organizations giving advisories for us not to come to the United States, especially if you're socially active on media… and custom officers can stop and check your social media. And there have been reports of computers being taken and academics being detained…

Justine Paradis: These experiences aren’t the norm, but Irena says it only takes a couple stories to make everyone scared. So, they did take precautions. Like, instead of the Canadians driving their equipment across the border, Bob (an American) drove up and brought it back himself. Just in case.

Irena Creed: These tense times, you just don't know. Things are not normal. And so you kind of feel a blessing when it works and pray for the best.

MUSIC IN: Li Fonte, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: Pray for the best. This project involves acts of faith. That they’ll find a boat capable of doing this kind of sampling – in this case, lent and driven by a local dairy farmer, who even paid for the gas out of his own pocket – and faith that the delicate work of deep water coring will go well.

And – faith they’ll find the money to even pay for it. They don’t actually have any dedicated funding for this project.

Some are earning their regular salary this week. Others aren’t getting paid at all. But their time is just one part of it. There’s also the cost of analysis. Six lakes, 120 samples each… each costing $1000 to process. So, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Irena Creed: Frankly, I'll be completely honest with you, I don't know where I'm going to get some of the funding… maybe we've been at this long enough that we believe that it will come and we'll figure it out. But that's where we're, that's the situation we're in.

Bob (off mic): You hope, right?

Irena Creed: You hope!

Justine Paradis: Outside/In will be back after a break.

MUSIC SWELL AND FADE

BREAK

Justine Paradis: This is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Justine Paradis. We spent the first half of the show on and around upstate New York’s Finger Lakes. Now, I want to take you to another place – not far from there, to a hill just south of Ithaca, New York.

Tom Butler: So, there's our precipitation collector, and up there is where we're collecting air quality samples.

Justine Paradis: This is Tom Butler. Today, sporting a Cornell Ornithology baseball cap, and a tee shirt depicting the state fossil of New York. He manages this site in the woods outside of Ithaca, one of the longest running atmospheric monitoring stations in the country. It’s modest. At the top of the hill, there’s a little hut with a small tower, and down the hill, in the meadow –

Justine Paradis: Basically it's like a wooden platform with a couple buckets. That's what it looks like from here.

Tom Butler: Yeah. Bucket science.

MUSIC: Kirkus, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: Bucket science. Tom tells me this method was originally designed to measure nuclear fall-out in the mid-20th century. But here, they’re using it to measure rainfall chemistry – notably, acid rain. Up the hill, he’s measuring atmospheric gases like ozone.

Tom Butler: So there's, there's – the ozone is 32 parts per billion, 33 parts per billion, which is pretty good. You want to keep it under, under 70.

Justine Paradis: This site is one of hundreds across the country which, together, offer a window into the atmosphere. The data is available for free for anyone to use – and has been critical for designing policy that tackles things like acid rain.

Every week, Tom visits the site to collect the samples and mail them off to a central lab in Wisconsin for processing.

Tom Butler: Okay. And then, you know, they ask about, uh, sensor heater and motor box operated properly? Yes. Spring gauge operated properly? Yes. [fade]

Justine Paradis: It’s quiet. Routine. Even kind of boring. The only drama today was the question of if a bird had pooped in his samples –

Tom Butler: [fade up] Bird droppings, no.

Justine Paradis: It hadn’t. Or if the hornets were still nesting on one of the platforms – they weren’t.

MUSIC FADE

Tom Butler: Okay how long have I been doing this? … We found this location in 1976…

Justine Paradis: So, you've basically been coming here at least once a week for 50 years.

Tom Butler: Yeah. Yeah. Stuck in a rut. [laughs]

Justine Paradis: You think? [laughs]

Tom Butler: No, I think it's worthwhile. It's a real worthwhile – you know, long term monitoring is not sexy. Lots of times people don't want to fund it, but it's very, very valuable stuff.

Justine Paradis: Why?

Tom Butler: Because you can see what’s happening over the long term. And what direction things are going. And you only get that with longterm data. And it takes a while to consider something longterm.

Justine Paradis: Yeah.

MUSIC: Germanius, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: In recent years, these monitoring stations have started to pick up something new. Not just here at this site in upstate New York, but in a lot of places across the country: a rise in ammonia.

Ammonia is a form of nitrogen gas. It’s not regulated as a pollutant, but plenty of people consider it to be one. And one reason why this matters –

Tom Butler: Around here, everybody's concerned about, um, these harmful algae blooms…

Justine Paradis: – is that it COULD be connected to these new, unconventional harmful algal blooms.

MUSIC OUT

Justine Paradis: That ammonia hypothesis – it’s Bob’s. Bob Howarth, earth systems scientist and Cornell professor.

Bob Howarth: My hypothesis is that it’s nitrogen… I think it's safe to say that no one can claim with certainty and understand what's going on.

Justine Paradis: Bob’s getting ready to retire next year. And he’s been around the block. Again, Bob is one of the most widely cited environmental scientists in the world, and he’s worked under a lot of different political winds. He’s even served on the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee under multiple presidents.

Bob Howarth: When Mr. Biden became president, he fired everyone on that panel, including me, in order to just have a clean slate. And then they reappointed me. And as far as I know, as of today, I have not yet been fired again.

Justine Paradis: Through it all, he’s found a way to get a lot of different work funded. But this moment is different. And one way to understand why scientists are so concerned is by understanding the distinction between basic science and applied science.

MUSIC: Offset Edge, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: Applied science is a targeted way of looking at an issue – pursuing ways to make batteries more efficient to support renewable energy, or trials of new treatments to fight cancer.

Basic science is much more… well, basic. It’s the pursuit of understanding, almost for the sake of it. Things like: how do black holes work? Or spike proteins on viruses?

Bob Howarth: You know, in order to do strong science long term, you can't only do applied science. You really need to encourage people to do basic science, follow their curiosity, follow their creativity. And that's how totally new discoveries are made.

Justine Paradis: This spring, on top of the cancelled grants, the Trump administration proposed about 15 billion of dollars worth of cuts to basic science. That’s a third of the nationwide budget for this work.

This is, of course, all in flux, and that number may change. But if big cuts come to pass, a lot of scientists think it would be a huge mistake.

There are proposed cuts to applied science too, but the folks I talked to are specifically alarmed about the cuts to basic research.

And that’s because basic science is specifically long-term in nature, an investment in the future. They say with this level of cut – we don’t know what we won’t know in the future.

MUSIC OUT

Justine Paradis: Plus, applied science – the more targeted kind – tends be built on basic science. Take the research into the harmful algal blooms. It doesn’t fall easily into one category. It’s both.

Bob Howarth: If we're going to manage it, we need to understand it… you can't manage what you don't understand. So that's a real applied issue. My interest in it, you know, I'm interested in that management aspect. But, you know, I'm driven equally by just raw curiosity. I thought I understood lakes, I thought I understood cyanobacteria blooms, and I don't.

Justine Paradis: To do applied science to manage harmful algal blooms, we’re gonna need information from cool international teams doing deep-water coring out on the Finger Lakes, from unsexy stuff like long term monitoring, and who knows where else.

Bob Howarth: As a basic scientist, you never tell what will matter and what won't. Right? You just you can't tell.

Justine Paradis: I did, by the way, reach out to the National Science Foundation for this story, to ask about what’s getting cut, and why. They declined to comment.

MUSIC: Rapids, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: For Bob and the scientists sampling in the Finger Lakes this week, this project has involved acts of faith. A gamble that things will work out. But that’s not just true for the scientists. Investing taxpayer money into scientific institutions and research grants — that’s kind of an act of faith too. A gamble that the scientific process is a pretty decent way of stress-testing new information and ideas. That supporting scientists to follow their curiosity ultimately benefits society, or at least, the country.

Bob Howarth: We live in the richest country in the world, richest country that's ever existed in the world. And and that's, uh, in large part because of our technological prowess. And that comes from high quality science and engineering.

Justine Paradis: Without that federal money, some research – perhaps the most obviously profitable kind – might be fine. But environmental science? Bucket science and long-term monitoring? Bob’s doubtful.

Bob Howarth: Would someone else fund it? Well, no one else has, you know. No one stepped forward for this so far. So, that's one answer. And I don't think I don't think, uh, it would happen.

MUSIC SWELL AND OUT

[fidding with scale at NY67]

Justine Paradis: Got a little scale here.

Tom Butler: Yeah… so I got a weight, and I wanna subtract the lid. I know the weight of the bucket.

Justine Paradis: Back at the hill just outside of Ithaca, Tom Butler is wrapping up his sampling for this week. Collecting information on acid rain and ozone – just one site in a couple networks of nationwide monitoring programs.

Tom Butler: You know, this data is used by people all over the country and all over the world. Just since 2007, they've estimated, um, over 3000 publications related to these networks.

Justine Paradis: Over the years, Tom’s routine has changed. Largely for a reason that you might be able to guess. Money. Tom used to come out twice a week. Now, it’s once, every Tuesday. Right now, they’re testing new, cheaper types of sample rs. They’re also planning to combine samples to save money on analysis, not to mention to save on postage.

Justine Paradis: How much does it cost to run this site?

Tom Butler: Oh, boy. That's a tricky question because there's analytical costs and, uh, you know, site operator costs… per year, I would say. If you're including everything… it's probably $25,000 a year or something like that.

Justine Paradis: So, what happened this spring?

Tom Butler: So April 30th, uh, Cary Institute got a, um, a letter from the federal government …

Justine Paradis: The Cary Institute is Tom’s employer.

MUSIC: System Shell, Blue Dot Sessions

Tom Butler: … saying, um, your contract is immediately terminated at the convenience of the government, um, as soon as you acknowledge that you received this message. And we acknowledged we received the message. So at 1:53 p.m. on April 30th, uh, our contract was terminated.

Justine Paradis: Right at a moment when the Trump administration is moving to open coal plants and loosen regulations on power plants — the federal government is pulling their funding from one of the country’s oldest atmospheric monitoring sites. The kind of place that can tell us what’s going on in the atmosphere, if acid rain is on the rise.

As for Tom, he’s been doing this fifty years. He could have retired a long time ago. But for now, funding be damned, Tom’s out here every Tuesday.

Justine Paradis: Yet you have kept coming out to take the samples.

Tom Butler: Yeah. [laughs] And I'm going to keep doing it as long as I can.

Justine Paradis: Later, after we turned off the mic and got in the car to drive down the hill, Tom added something else. It’s easy to wreck stuff, he said. It’s a lot harder to build it.

CREDITS

Nate Hegyi: Justine, you took tons of pictures of science in action during your reporting, right?

Justine Paradis: Yes! To see pictures of bucket science and lake coring in action, check out the show notes. We’ve got a link to our website and to our instagram. We’re @outsideinradio there and on BlueSky and TikTok.

Nate Hegyi: That’s it for Outside/In this week. This episode was produced, reported, and mixed by Justine Paradis.

Justine Paradis: Special thanks to all the folks who talked to me for this episode – Gene Likens, Charlie Trick, Doug Young, Roxanne Marino, Garreth Smith, and Renee Santoro. At AAAS, thanks to Sudip Parikh and Alessandra Zimmerman.

Nate Hegyi: This episode was edited by our executive producer Taylor Quimby. I’m your host, Nate Hegyi. Our team also includes Marina Henke, Jessica Hunt and Felix Poon.

Justine Paradis: Music in this episode came from Lofive, Silver Maple, and Blue Dot Sessions.

Nate Hegyi: Outside/In is a production of NHPR.