Ryan McManamay

Transcript

DEREK SMITH:

Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in depth with Baylor leaders, professors, and more discussing important topics in higher education, research and student life. I'm Derek Smith, and today we are talking natural resources, infrastructure and more with Dr. Ryan McManamay. Dr. McManamay is an assistant professor of environmental science at Baylor. He's a spatial ecologist whose research focuses on the relationship between humans and environmental systems with a particular interest in infrastructure. Last year, a family vacation to Yellowstone National Park turned into a research opportunity when flooding destroyed roads within the park, cutting off communities surrounded from the park, and cutting them off from vital resources and tourism. With the help of an NSF Rapid grant, McManamay took a team to interview business owners and residents around the park to better understand community dependence on natural resources, and to start a conversation about natural resources and national parks as well, like Yellowstone as critical infrastructure. It's been quite a journey in the last year, and I'm glad to have you with us on the program today. Ryan McManamay, thanks so much for joining us.

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

Thank you, Derek. It's really great to be here and thanks for the invitation.

DEREK SMITH:

Well, it's good to visit with you on this and we've enjoyed hearing your story and it's really quite a story out of the blue in some ways, but I want to go way back before we ask you about it. Yellowstone National Park, what did that and/or other national parks mean to you and your family really throughout your life?

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

Great question. The national parks have been really important to my family, Yellowstone in particular. It's interesting, I didn't get to go until I was a teenager, but my dad had gone as a kid about the same age. And when I went the first time and his family took a road trip across the western US in the early sixties and he saw Yellowstone for the first time and fell in love with it. And since then there was always stories about Yellowstone. And so we went back later, several times. I worked out there after college for a summer right outside the park. And so the region has always been really important to us. And then my parents had always, well really, dad had a real desire to work in the park and so for two seasons they worked for [inaudible], the major contractor and worked in the general store and the service station to be able to spend time in the park. So it's always been a big importance to our family and place to go back to over time.

DEREK SMITH:

Did that love of Yellowstone and the outdoors, how much did that shape your career path?

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

It certainly did. So we were always outdoors doing stuff, hiking, camping. We grew up hunting and fishing. So being outdoors was a big component of my life. And I mentioned to you earlier, we always have gardened and enjoyed just natural resources and are appreciative of those and have a practical appreciation of the land and the land ethic. That just being outdoors, spending time in nature was a big component and understanding that, valuing that, having a ethic about that and the importance of managing the land as well.

DEREK SMITH:

Visiting with Ryan McManamay. And Ryan, I gave a brief description of your research focus at the top of the show. How would you describe that? If you were talking to someone while you were waiting in line at the DMV and they ask you, how would you describe what you do?

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

The science elevator pitch changes depending on the audience, right? Many places I try to tell them about the work in infrastructure that we do and how we're trying to ensure a sustainable future. We need infrastructures, we need roads, we need buildings to live in. We need a way to grow food. At the same time, we can balance that. We can find ways to preserve the natural function of ecosystems because we really depend on those, the services that we derive from those. What I talk about is balances, how you can meet the needs of society as well as enhancing if not preserving ecosystems.

DEREK SMITH:

We're going to talk about infrastructure on the program, and I think you kind of just did, but I want to ask you specifically when you talk about natural resources as infrastructure, what does that mean to you?

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

So this kind of started with this idea of critical infrastructures and if you look at what the government considers critical to the functioning of humanity, there's things that we would agree with, right? Electricity, water infrastructure, dams to store water. If we have a failure, we lose water. If we have a failure in electricity, we lose electricity. We need these things to function. We need hospitals, our buildings, in a winter storm, we need to have electricity to stay warm. The chemical industry is in a critical infrastructure. Agriculture are critical. So you look at these sectors of the government where it's considered critical to functions. And so we know that natural systems don't operate on these timelines. If we cut down a tree or we end up developing an agricultural plot of land to put in a new [inaudible] that this isn't creating an immediate concern. However, the Yellowstone story is really interesting because here we have a national park and we have a flood, and typically floods are disastrous. They can knock out critical infrastructure such as roads, and they did that within the park. But this park is serving as a critical means of economic support for these gateway communities. And so the closure of the park from a natural disaster, a very naturalized area is creating significant economic impact. And many of those communities, which I hope we'll talk about more, completely lost their livelihoods during the summer, at least if they're not completely lost, their livelihoods, they've had a major setback. And so it really poses this question of natural areas support critical infrastructures. For instance, water, there's a number of small creeks and rivers on lands across Texas. A rancher may say, "Well, this is a small creek, why does it matter?" Well, it feeds public supply water reservoirs, it feeds cooling supplies for thermoelectric power plants. So I think it's rethinking what these things do and reshaping how we develop, how consume, so it's broader than just national parks. I think federally owned lands, state owned land, government owned lands open to the public are really important for aesthetic reasons. But it's broader than that. It's how we manage private lands as well and how we convert those into the future. If you're talking about putting up new shopping malls, putting in new grocery stores, et cetera, we have to think about these areas before we do. And Texas is a land rich state, but the land is also finite.

DEREK SMITH:

As we talk about the national parks, those are easy for people to grasp, but it really just trickles on down from [inaudible].

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

It does, it extends. So if we think of trees as infrastructures that are important to sustain our livelihoods, that's changes the conversation somewhat.

DEREK SMITH:

Visiting with Ryan McManamay from Baylor Environmental Science, and you mentioned the communities. As we talk about Yellowstone, what we're really going to be talking about here are the communities impacted by Yellowstone. But let me ask you about really the genesis of what it is that we're talking about now. Take us back to last summer around this time or a little past this time when you were out to visit Yellowstone with your family.

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

Certainly. So my family and I, my wife and our two kids, we were going to be meeting my parents outside of Yellowstone in Island Park. And on the way in, on the highways, we saw these signs that were saying, "All entrances to Yellowstone closed." And we didn't know what that was about. So we contacted my folks. They were also coming in to West Yellowstone, and they said it was chaos. Everybody was out of the park and they were trying to find where visitors could go. And so they were trying to get information themselves, but they found out while there that it was flooding. And they said it appears that the park's been closed from flooding. And so that was June 13th, that was the day the park closed is the day we're coming in to have a two-week vacation in the gateway areas going in and out of the park. And we were really closed off from it. So at that point, we had a real big derailment of a family vacation, which happened to be my parents' 50th. So we were there to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. And so we had a big change of plans, but I was like, "Well, this is a big event. This is causing a lot of issues. And here we are." I want to start documenting that and start documenting that in conventional but non-conventional ways to understand who all has been affected, the nature of recovery, the timelines of recovery, so that we could compare how the park recovers relative to how critical infrastructures outside the park are recovered.

DEREK SMITH:

What was the damage inside? We're going to zoom outside the park just a second, but what were the damages inside the park?

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

The significant amounts of damage were in the northern portion of the park along the Gardiner River valley, along the Lamar River valleys. These rivers, the Gardiner and Lamar overtopped their banks, and in some areas they're floodplains. However, the roads that parallel these valleys were really close to the rivers and as to provide people the scenic quality, but also these are the old wagon trails that traverse these areas. And the road corridors, over a century, have stayed largely the same. And so these rivers carved the toe of the bank creating collapse. These are landslide risk areas anyway, the soils, the hillsides are pretty unstable. And so complete sections of roads were wiped out, infrastructure to carry water or wastes, for instance, from Mammoth to Gardiner, where the wastewater facility was, those wastewater lines were completely severed. It really kind of looks apocalyptic when you look at the pictures of the areas, a hundred yards of road was just washed away. And so this was severe impacts to the corridors, critical corridors within the park. There was other damages to other areas, buildings were kind of damaged, trails were damaged. But those two areas, those roadways were the most significant.

DEREK SMITH:

Visiting with Ryan McManamay. And so Ryan, the roads are washed out. For you and your family and many others out there, it's a disappointing sidetrack on a vacation. But you mentioned Gardiner, Gardiner, Montana, these gateway cities, there's a huge impact. What are the gateway cities that most people could probably recognize?

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

Definitely. So Yellowstone National Park has five entrances, the north, northeast, west, east and south. Along each of these entrances, there's communities that have developed and grown as the popularity of the park has grown to have economies based on those. So on the west side, West Yellowstone, Montana, and that is the west entrance. You go to the north, you have Gardiner right outside, both of those are in... That's Gardiner, Montana and also Cooke City is the northeast. Cooke City and Silver Gate. Those are all in Montana. Southwest Montana was probably the most significantly hit by the flooding and especially Gardiner and Cooke City, they were completely cut off from the park. And so I'll go back to Cooke City here in a second. But on the east side, you go out the east entrance and you travel ways to Cody, Wyoming. And out of the south entrance you go through Teton National Park, and below that is Jackson Hole. Those were the communities that we really focused on, evaluating impacts in.

DEREK SMITH:

Most of their income from the year is reliant on those months when people are traveling there.

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

Significant income. So we conducted surveys of the communities, Gardiner and Cooke City especially, 50% was the minimum loss. We're talking about many folks that have lost 80%, 90% of their income. Many that were like, "I've lost everything." A hundred percent losses. They're not getting any income this past summer or the summer of 2022 from the flooding. Cooke City was very critical because at the time the flood hit, you really have only a couple of entrances to this village. You enter through the park, through the northeast entrance into the Lamar Valley, and then people that needed supplies, food would have to go through the park out through the north entrance into Gardiner so they could travel to Livingston to go get groceries. The road is severed and the northeast entrance is severed. The Beartooth was closed for its own damages. The Beartooth is a path, goes over really high altitude mountains. It's actually the longest contiguous road in Alpine Tundra area in the lower 48. So it's a really beautiful road, but as you can imagine, in cooler months, it's going to be closed. So it was closed. So you really only have one exit route going over through really windy mountain road to Cody. And so it's a critical path. This community was completely closed off and economically suffered as a result.

DEREK SMITH:

And I've not been there, but when we're talking about Gardiner, Cooke City, we're not talking about big box stores and recognizable signs towering over the highway. We're talking about a lot of mom and pop diners, gas stations.

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

That's right. These are non-incorporated areas. The fear in many of the people that we talked to was that they have purposely remained non-incorporated because of the small stores, the small town feel, the locally owned and operated recreation ecotourism community. And the fear there is that after losing out, you may have more corporatized ownership come in and present opportunities for folks to sell out because of the economic impacts that they've incurred. And so that's a real risk in this community, and it may change these communities for the long haul.

DEREK SMITH:

Visiting with Ryan McManamay here on Baylor Connections. So Ryan, you're there, the vacations' derailed, the idea for what you just described starts forming. Take us through the months after the trip when you started looking at ways to gather data on this and tell us what it meant then from there to work with people in these communities.

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

Certainly, you wanted to help in some way, and there's only so much that you can do. And so the biggest thing was, well, I'll say at that time and the people will tell you themselves, the media didn't help a lot in this situation because there was the repeated visuals of the one house in Gardiner floating down the Yellowstone River. Well, that was a very small section of Gardiner. That was one house, that was the only really big piece of infrastructure that was lost. And so the town was really untouched, largely aside from the closure of the park. So the thing that the people wanted the general public to know is, "Hey, we're open for business. We have a lot to offer. You may not be able to get into Yellowstone, but actually you can walk in through this section, but you can visit the national forests around the communities, et cetera." So the way to help was getting the story out is, "Hey, these places are open, they've been really heavily impacted. Is there things we can do?" So part of it was understanding the economic impact. And so we devised a survey to be able to document this. That's the first thing that you need. In a standardized fashion, a scientific fashion, let's get some numbers about how these businesses have been impacted. And we found out it was pretty severe. But before we devised that survey, we were like, "Well, we need money to basically get research support to go back out to Yellowstone to be able to do some of the research that we want to do, document the infrastructure." So we applied for NSF Rapid, National Science Foundation Rapid grant. And these grants are aimed at capturing ephemeral data before it's lost. They're exactly suited. They're designed for researchers to use them to get after data and patterns that are going to be lost if you don't collect them immediately. And so we applied for that. We sent a proposal and that was funded and that allowed us to go back to Yellowstone that same season in September to do these surveys to conduct photo documentation mapping of infrastructures that were lost to understand the extent of the problem.

DEREK SMITH:

Who all participated with you on this?

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

So it was a fun group. So in the Rapid, we have a collaborator at Montana State University, Dr. Jean Dixon, and she specializes in landslide risks. So she had been studying these road corridors and been telling the park it's just a matter of time before these roads succumb to a natural disaster. Ben Ryan, who is an associate clinical professor at Baylor, was with us. And Ben specializes in disaster risk as well as communicable diseases. He was very important to Baylor, helping the COVID task force.

DEREK SMITH:

We had him on this program.

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

That's great. So Ben, he's my next door office mate on the hall. And then we had two of my graduate students, Jillian Sturtevant and Jordan Jatko, who came out to help with the surveys and also an undergraduate, Josh Beard, in film and media, because at that time we were wanting to collect information for the eventual development of a documentary.

DEREK SMITH:

So you got a good crew going out there. And you're gathering data, and obviously you said that the impacts were severe, but take us inside. What was it like working with the people there? What stood out to you and your team as you just spent time in their world?

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

These are tough folks, and they'll tell you that too. It was really interesting talking with the people. They were pretty clear about the problem, but they were still very optimistic. They hadn't given up and they weren't casting blame elsewhere. They're clearly were like, "We need help." They were very clear this was a repeated kind of thing was that, "Hey, the media could help us out in being able to promote the fact that we are open. The whole town didn't wash away and Red Lodge." And this was something repeated across these communities. And so there was a lot of optimism and I think there was a toughness and grit to the people that was apparent and they were curious as to what we were doing. And they were supportive, and it was neat to work with the Chamber of Commerce. So before we started the surveys, we contacted the chambers, the respective chambers of commerce and each community. And wanted their buy-in to be like, "We're coming into each town, we would love to work with you to understand the community, the economic sectors here to understand the impact." And so we certainly wanted to coordinate with them that there was multiple channels of communication to these businesses to form trust. And the communities have had survey, there were weary from a number of surveys because they had had a couple more earlier. Our survey was aimed at understanding very acutely the economic impact, but also the importance of the park to their community. So we really documented that as well.

DEREK SMITH:

So you gathered this information, what do you do with it? What are some ways you can deploy this?

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

Certainly. So the first was we need to document the problem. And so if you think about how disaster relief works it's all about valuation. So insurance, flood hazards, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. It operates by valuating lost assets. And there certainly were community members that had buildings flooded, had lost buildings, but really that was cleaned up very quickly. And so there is valuation there to understand the needs for insurance payments, disbursements, et cetera. In situations where a park closes and you have economic impacts from that, so it's an indirect impact to your business. There's a lot less ways to value that loss. Documenting that is number one importance. And so there are grants that people can apply for their loans. The problem was that COVID in 2020 really had created another deficit on this economy and 2020 came and they had a lot less visitors to the park that created losses. So in that year, a lot of folks applied for loans. So 2021, they had a boon year because everyone had locked down, ready to go visit the park. 2022 came and having this flood that completely cuts off... And I think if many people were to have reserved applying for loans, they would've done so in 2022 instead of 2020. But they had already applied for loan, they're already having credit issues, et cetera. So you've now got double whammy. You've been hit multiple times and you're out of options. So the first thing was documenting this, we handed our results to the economic development agency that works with FEMA to help in these kinds of situations. It helps with economic build back looking at strategies for how you can rebuild the economic resiliency of a community. They use the results.

DEREK SMITH:

So they use the results and you can work on other papers or efforts to stand up for these people or just what you've talked about at the beginning of the show when you're talking about valuing these assets as infrastructure. So what are the next steps on this, for you and your team?

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

Well, so I've been trying to float grant opportunities to the chambers of commerce. Be like, "Please work with your relative state Department of Transportation." These are the grants that Baylor cannot lead. And I've even indicated to the folks in the chambers in the communities will be willing to help out at no cost, as a cost share just to support the activities that you want. But you guys have to apply to help reshape, how do you rebuild, how do you develop economic resilience in your own community with or without the park? There is this really neat tight relationship between these communities and the park. For instance, if there are disasters or there's need for emergency responders, folks in the town like Gardiner will come help the park service. The park service has a number of contractors, but the number of staff are actually very few. So they have to rely on each other in times of fighting fires or whatever it is to deal with an issue. So there's this interdependence. So how do you continue that? How do you develop that? We're trying to float opportunities by them. For us, we want to keep pursuing these ideas. And any grant that we write, we want to ensure that it has on the ground relevance, but also on the ground return of revenues that we're actually helping with. A big need for the area is that you have park service employees or even contractor employees. These areas and these communities are meant for tourism. So the properties are pretty expensive. So another issue that's needed is affordable housing for workers within the park to be able to live proximate to the park. And they're losing workforce because people don't have a place to live. All of these things call for a need for very integrative regional planning and consideration of what does infrastructure look like in the future.

DEREK SMITH:

So as you look ahead to the summer, you're headed back here next month.

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

That's right.

DEREK SMITH:

What's on the agenda there?

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

So one of the things when we were talking to the park service was how can we help? And we wanted to be a big help. We tried to get in the park there. Obviously the park service is very busy during the summer months. And so when we were there the first time, we were trying to get a permit to come in the park and evaluate infrastructure that had been damaged. The park actually has a great inventory and monitoring program. They were able to monitor all the assets that had been damaged, but one of the things they needed was a group to return and look at, "Okay, we haven't done a reassessment of what's been repaired and after a really long, hard winter, what's the current status of these infrastructures?" And so our team's going back in to reevaluate that and provide an update of their monitoring of the infrastructures lost in the park. So that's their primary role is mapping those. Where did those occur? What's their status?

DEREK SMITH:

Well, we'll look forward to seeing what you find there. It's really a great story, and as you continue to work on this, we'll have to stay in touch so we can share more about this work, and not just at Yellowstone, but the way we value these resources in general. So thank you very much.

RYAN MCMANAMAY:

Definitely. Thank you, Derek. I really appreciate being invited.

DEREK SMITH:

Great visit. Ryan McManamay, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, our guest today on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith. Reminder, you can hear this and other programs online, baylor.edu/connections and you can subscribe on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.