Appa perches on Maya's shoulder. / 📸 Shua Buhangin
Epilogue.
The Austin sun is setting soon,and the one-hundred degree heat is starting to break.
As we pack up our car, several of the Alveus staff members are returning to the sanctuary. Most days, feeding begins in the mornings—as early as six-thirty—and finishes up later in the evenings.

We say our goodbyes and drive away. Forty-eight hours later, I’ll be back at the studio, on my computer, catching up on emails and tackling the stressors of day-to-day life.

In the following days, I reflected on what I’d learned about Maya, the Streamer and Maya, the Conservationist. The obvious takeaway is that the grand ambitions of the latter are made possible by the work of the former.

At Alveus, I asked Maya why she left Wine About It—the lifestyle podcast she started with her friend, QTCinderella, in 2022—earlier this year. “Were you worried about not being taken seriously by the more traditional scientific world?” I posed.

Short answer: No. She just got busy. But even without a wine-sipping podcast to her name, Maya’s communication style hasn’t skipped a beat. “I think it’s really important that people see me as a person more than, like, a formal wildlife presenter,” Maya said. “[It’s the] difference between reading something in a textbook versus sitting on a couch, listening to your friend talk about something that they care about.

“One is much more anecdotal and trustworthy—something that you can get invested in. And one is very traditional, and more just learning. And so I obviously subscribed to the second model.”

I thought about this upon reading several obituaries for Dr. Jane Goodall. Coincidentally, the woman whom Maya has looked up to for a majority of her life—the legendary figure whom she is now sometimes compared to—passed away in October, at the age of ninety-one.

Most people accept that Dr. Goodall was a clear-cut expert in her field, venturing past her groundbreaking research on East African chimpanzees to also leave a legacy of conservationist advocacy and environmental activism. In her twenties, Dr. Goodall inspired an entirely new style for the science of animal observation; her deeply-researched and vivid storytelling led to many National Geographic articles based on her work, as well as her most famous book, In the Shadow of Man.

Curiously enough, however, critics emerged, questioning her scientific integrity simply based on how popular her writing had become. “Wasn’t good science supposed to be boring?” read one obituary this month, poking fun at Dr. Goodall’s detractors.

Still, Goodall emerged in a vastly different period of science communication. So I asked several experts and researchers I spoke with for this piece: As social media eats the word, what’s gained and lost in their line of work? 

Hank Green, who’s launched several careers off of YouTube stardom, has mixed feelings. “There’s a lot of people who are communicating about science or the state of the human body or the universe or whatever,” he tells me. “They can just sort of say the most interesting, possible thing, because they have no need to be connected to the truth.”

“Because of the way that the Internet is structured, that stuff is getting a lot of attention,” Hank follows up. “And I really don’t know how to interface with that, except to just keep doing my part of the job.”

But he does point out that there’s no longer “one guy,” a la past educators like Bill Nye or Carl Sagan. “Up and down the scale, from TikTok creators to magazine writers to authors, there’s a lot more of it,” he says. “And it’s very good, and I’m glad for it.”

Shel Winkley is one of those communicators. A veteran meteorologist based in College Station, Texas, Shel realized early on that translating his local weather reports to online spaces like Twitter threads and TikTok videos could help his community—a community with viewpoints across the political spectrum—better comprehend the effects of climate change. 

“In Texas, we love our bluebonnets—it’s the state flower,” he tells me over a video call. He mentions that the flower patches have become a popular Instagram attraction for parents and their kids. But over the years, as springtime started creeping earlier and earlier on the calendar, locals couldn’t understand why the bonnets would pop up in February—then disappear due to freezes.

“That was my first chance to really tie something that everybody loves and everybody associates with to the impacts of climate change, right?” Shel says. “And so I used that moment to really localize climate change. You can talk about polar bears all you want, but what does it matter to Mom as she walks out the door, and is trying to get her kids to soccer practice?”

In other words, She is hiding the broccoli.

Maya believes that there will always be some experts who—out of sheer ignorance, intentional or otherwise—don’t understand her brand of science communication. Yet there are plenty of others who recognize its potential, to bridge information gaps across generations.

“We need people to be able to adapt quickly,” Dr. Solomon David, the gar researcher, tells me. “And I recognize the irony as somebody who studies very slowly evolving fish.”

For Joe Siegrist, Alveus board member and Purple Martin Conservation Association director, his work relies on educating younger audiences—else the birds he’s spent years of his life researching will cease to exist. “Purple martins need humans to provide birdhouses for them, or else they can’t reproduce,” Joe says. “They don’t nest at all in the wild anymore due to habitat loss. So we need to have people interested from generation to generation, because the genie isn’t going back in the bottle.”

At the beginning of this piece, I wondered aloud if Maya, the Streamer and Maya, the Conservationist were poised to meet the current moment. Truth is, I wasn’t expecting to discover a factual answer. Saving the world is a lot of pressure to put on one person’s shoulders. There are too many stakeholders at play: partisan politicians; oil and gas companies stuck in the twentieth century; universities seeing their federal funding slashed; tech companies bolstering AI training models and energy-sucking data centers; and us, as consumers.

But what’s clear is that Maya Higa continues to blaze her own trail, and set a vision worth following. She’s straddling two lines—one foot in the conservation world, the other in the creator world. Many of Alveus’ hires come from traditional zoo backgrounds; at the same time, a pair of OnlyFans creators helped fund the wolf dog enclosure by selling photos online. “We’re not a traditional nonprofit in a lot of ways,” Maya jokes.

Her Twitch peers have taken note, and their descent on Alveus following the floods was a physical manifestation of all the goodwill Maya has gained in the streamer community. In two days, their combined audiences raised over one hundred eighty thousand dollars. Alveus was able to rebuild its entrance road within a week.

That sense of connection, that ability to click a button and broadcast a message to the world…none of it would be possible without the Internet. Maya, the Streamer isn’t ignorant of that. She constantly expresses her gratitude for the millions of people who tune in every day.

But for Maya, the Conservationist—the same woman who grew up leading 4-H meetings, and once drove her horse three hours south to college—the life she’s carved out for herself revolves around a burning desire to protect the things she cares most about. 

“With content creation, it's really easy to get sucked into the numbers and the game of it all,” Maya tells me. “This team here, at the sanctuary, is very grounding. Animals in themselves are so grounding.”

“That's one of the reasons that I love them so much,” she continues. “When you show up and you walk into an animal's enclosure, they have no concept or care for your size as a creator online, right? Or the mistakes that you made three years ago, or a year ago, or yesterday.”

“The only thing that they care about is how you show up that day,” Maya concludes. “They help keep you really present, which is the most important thing I think I've learned as a creator. To find ways, all the time, in between the pockets—of the views, and the numbers, and the posting and everything. 

“To just keep feeling human.”

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