Birdsong Landscapes

<v Speaker 1>Yeah. So with the with the ecotype thing, you're not
<v Speaker 1>you're like a pretty Are you pretty strict? You tend
<v Speaker 1>to be pretty strict on ecotypes or what do you
<v Speaker 1>How do you feel about those?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? I do. I try to collect whatever I can locally,
<v Speaker 2>as far as ecotype within fifty or one hundred miles
<v Speaker 2>at the most. Sometimes you can't always do that, especially
<v Speaker 2>with large prairie seedings. There's just not enough out there
<v Speaker 2>to get so I do use, you know, non local
<v Speaker 2>ecotype in that case. If you can get it as
<v Speaker 2>close as you can, that's that's essential. I will say
<v Speaker 2>when it comes to scenes though, getting into the kind of.
<v Speaker 3>I think it's okay to use.
<v Speaker 2>I personally use non native to my state annuals I'm
<v Speaker 2>talking about like planes. Choreopsis is one that I really love.
<v Speaker 2>It only is native to Indiana, but it's an annual.
<v Speaker 2>It disappears after a few years and you put it
<v Speaker 2>in the seed mix and it comes up immediately and
<v Speaker 2>good color. That that makes sense to me, and then
<v Speaker 2>they kind of fade away.
<v Speaker 3>I wouldn't do.
<v Speaker 2>That in a natural area of restoration or if you're
<v Speaker 2>dealing with a remnant, of course, but in it if
<v Speaker 2>you're hurting from a lawn to a prairie. You can
<v Speaker 2>use some of these annuals. Yeah, I mean, I feel
<v Speaker 2>like that's pretty.
<v Speaker 1>I feel like in a yard, anything, anything is better
<v Speaker 1>than the lawn.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know that's the other thing.
<v Speaker 2>Having done this a few years, the first year, somebody
<v Speaker 2>once said a first year prairie is something that only
<v Speaker 2>a mother could love. And it's like, that's it's really tough.
<v Speaker 2>The first year. It looks like hell most of the time.
<v Speaker 2>So if you can get some early color with those annuals,
<v Speaker 2>just you know, I think it's worth doing. Planes choreosis
<v Speaker 2>and lemon mint is another one.
<v Speaker 3>Menarda sin c That's yeah, it's a really good one.
<v Speaker 1>When I put when I put it, because this is
<v Speaker 1>something that I'm fighting with all the time. Is this
<v Speaker 1>it's and it really is. It's these fucking archaic ideas
<v Speaker 1>about landscaping, which really come from Europe. I feel like,
<v Speaker 1>from like not modern you're from like nineteenth century Europe.
<v Speaker 1>You know, the fucking English garden. Everything's got to be
<v Speaker 1>in a line, it's got to look tidy. When people
<v Speaker 1>call nature messy, I'm like, I mean, and there can
<v Speaker 1>be messy nature, like if something hasn't burned in a while.
<v Speaker 1>I've seen some fucking messy forests in northern California that
<v Speaker 1>have not been burned in a while, and the reason
<v Speaker 1>they look messy is because of the fire suppression. But
<v Speaker 1>when like a homeowner or in no offense to them,
<v Speaker 1>get I give everybody compassion, you know, but it fucking
<v Speaker 1>grates me. It's like it's like nails on a chopper
<v Speaker 1>when they call nature messy or they it's messy, you know.
<v Speaker 1>It makes me think of that Trump quote about like
<v Speaker 1>raking and cleaning the forest, just like, oh my god, Like,
<v Speaker 1>where do you start, buddy? Your opinion here is no offense.
<v Speaker 1>Your opinions obsolete because I can tell you don't spend
<v Speaker 1>time in natural settings, Like I don't even like the
<v Speaker 1>word natural. You don't spend the time in like the
<v Speaker 1>living world. Go out, start fucking around in there, Get
<v Speaker 1>a couple of ticks, uh, you know, get some poison ivy,
<v Speaker 1>get some scars to show it, and then come back
<v Speaker 1>and tell me what your opinion is and how how
<v Speaker 1>a landscape looks messy. But I catch myself dealing with
<v Speaker 1>that all the time. It's like it's got to look
<v Speaker 1>like a it's gonna look like, tell them it's gonna
<v Speaker 1>look like a war zone for six months because plants
<v Speaker 1>need time to grow. Who knew, you know, Like.
<v Speaker 2>They exactly yeah, And like like other people I've heard
<v Speaker 2>this as well, people don't really like plants. They like mulch.
<v Speaker 2>They like a lot of mulch, all lined, you know,
<v Speaker 2>just freshly laid and you know, the few plants here
<v Speaker 2>and there. But mostly people like the look that's the
<v Speaker 2>traditional like.
<v Speaker 3>Right, look, you know.
<v Speaker 2>So it's just like, yeah, it's it's infurior.
<v Speaker 1>What do you think about it?
<v Speaker 2>That?
<v Speaker 1>So that like the status quo you're saying. So the
<v Speaker 1>people like, like, what do you mean? They like the
<v Speaker 1>way the mulch looks like it's it comes if you.
<v Speaker 2>Just take an average Yeah, like, if you just take
<v Speaker 2>an average person, you say, look at this landscape. If
<v Speaker 2>it's filled, they think it looks nasty or overgrown or whatever.
<v Speaker 2>But if it's three shrubs along a thirty foot you
<v Speaker 2>know section, and it's nicely maulch, it's like, oh, that's
<v Speaker 2>a nice look. And that's just obviously what we need
<v Speaker 2>to get away from.
<v Speaker 3>Hate. I hate mault shit, I don't use it, don't.
<v Speaker 2>I don't only use it unless you've got the first
<v Speaker 2>year situation and you got to suppress weeds and stuff.
<v Speaker 1>Well, yeah, you don't need it where you are. It's
<v Speaker 1>like where I am, it's so fucking hot, and our
<v Speaker 1>soil type is like the silty clay and it just
<v Speaker 1>fucking bakes, like it literally just fucking bakes if the
<v Speaker 1>sun hits it. So I need to use a lot
<v Speaker 1>of mults and it'll keep weeds down and prevent you've
<v Speaker 1>moving the water all the time.
<v Speaker 2>But I'm just playing in densely enough to where eventually
<v Speaker 2>you're not having a malt. It's not a long term maintenance, right,
<v Speaker 2>or do you have to keep malt?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, No, you don't have to keep malting. And that's
<v Speaker 1>the thing too, is the density. Like I like to
<v Speaker 1>go dense if you can, especially where you are too
<v Speaker 1>with prairie. I mean you're in what southern central I know,
<v Speaker 1>Like you've got to go thick with I mean, if
<v Speaker 1>you're trying to mimic the real world, which is what
<v Speaker 1>I try to do, I try to mimic quote nature,
<v Speaker 1>I don't even like again, I don't like that word
<v Speaker 1>nature because it others it. You know, it's like it's
<v Speaker 1>it's the nature that we've got our world, which is
<v Speaker 1>the real world, the dead nature. Now our world is bullshit.
<v Speaker 1>We made it up. It didn't exist five hundred years ago.
<v Speaker 1>Fucking the quickie lube and the come and go and
<v Speaker 1>the fucking ross dress. But uh, but you know, you
<v Speaker 1>plant dense, and that's what a prairie looks like, and
<v Speaker 1>like the same thing where I am when the thorn scrub.
<v Speaker 1>You plant the dense. You keep the sun off the ground.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's all pragmatism. It's not just trying to
<v Speaker 1>do it for looks. It's pragmatism. You're keeping the sun
<v Speaker 1>off the ground. You're creating a little microclimate of humidity.
<v Speaker 1>Plants our nature, swamp coolers, all that of apple, transporational
<v Speaker 1>water coming out of the leaves that cools the landscape.
<v Speaker 1>You want to plant it dense, But you look at
<v Speaker 1>these fucking oh my god, I just I need to
<v Speaker 1>get away from this because I could feel the PTSD
<v Speaker 1>coming out when I talk about it, like the fucking
<v Speaker 1>reservoir of rage. But these landscapes where everything's in a
<v Speaker 1>line and neatly spaced, then you know, I see this
<v Speaker 1>in the Midwest a lot too. Like when we were
<v Speaker 1>doing kill your lawn, this one landscaper showed up and
<v Speaker 1>was planting everything like he wasn't mixing species. He's like, well,
<v Speaker 1>this patch is going to be all you know, uh,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know why I'm talking about my white lady voice.
<v Speaker 1>This patch is going to be all this thing. And
<v Speaker 1>then this pass is going to be this species and
<v Speaker 1>no mixing, you know, can't have any mixing. And it
<v Speaker 1>was just I was like, this is this looks like
<v Speaker 1>it was designed by a fucking you know, obsessive compulsive,
<v Speaker 1>Like why did you do this?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>And you've got to you've got to consider that these
<v Speaker 2>plants aren't some of them going to stay in the
<v Speaker 2>same spot. You've got to create a community that can
<v Speaker 2>grow and live together. You can't just put plants and
<v Speaker 2>keep them. That's going to be a lot of work
<v Speaker 2>is a garden, if you want a pollinator garden. If
<v Speaker 2>you have different batches of everything and you're trying to
<v Speaker 2>keep everything, you know, in its own spot, that's going
<v Speaker 2>to be a nightmare, especially when you get into the
<v Speaker 2>the things that have running rooms, boots or because I
<v Speaker 2>was going to say that. You know, planning densely, like
<v Speaker 2>maybe twelve to sixteen inches is definitely a good thing.
<v Speaker 2>Using a great thing is using green mulch. They call it,
<v Speaker 2>like using sedges planted like a matrix of sedges or
<v Speaker 2>maybe a matrix of little blue stem or cidots gramma
<v Speaker 2>or something like that.
<v Speaker 3>That's a really good way to fill.
<v Speaker 2>All that and not have to use as much mulch.
<v Speaker 2>Here we we have to. One of the benefits is
<v Speaker 2>you're pressing weeds. It maybe it's probably different out west,
<v Speaker 2>but like here, it's constant weeds growing all season. There's
<v Speaker 2>a lot of rain, there's a lot of like opportunity
<v Speaker 2>for and not just bad weeds, but like horse weed
<v Speaker 2>and some of the native stuff that just.
<v Speaker 1>Goes wild Canadensis, right, that's a name.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Yeah, that's that's one of the most vigorous you know,
<v Speaker 2>so called weeds and are disturbed environment. It just comes
<v Speaker 2>up everywhere. So trying to suppress those things by planting
<v Speaker 2>densely is good. And then I also sometimes I'll plant
<v Speaker 2>the plant the larger plugs of the flowers whatever they
<v Speaker 2>may be, and then instead of doing a matrix of
<v Speaker 2>sedges or grass, I'll seed in sedges or grasses or
<v Speaker 2>the annuals like the planes choreopsis. You can see that
<v Speaker 2>in maybe some shorter lived things like the lance lead choreopsis.
<v Speaker 2>That's Choreopsis lance lance a latta. I believe.
<v Speaker 1>Do you get tripped rists out there? What's that? What's
<v Speaker 1>the prairie coreopsis? The tall one? I love that one.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know. There is a prayer?
<v Speaker 3>Is it palmata?
<v Speaker 2>No?
<v Speaker 1>It begins with a tea.
<v Speaker 2>It's a oh yeah, tri triopsis. Yeah, yeah, would you
<v Speaker 2>have that? That's yeah, that's a good one. We've got this, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that's that's an interesting one. We've got a lot of
<v Speaker 2>wet We've got a lot of and wetlands and like
<v Speaker 2>wet prairies around here, and that can grow all the
<v Speaker 2>way from the dryer prairies into the wet prairies. So
<v Speaker 2>that's a really good one as well. You know, it
<v Speaker 2>gets big. I mean it's a big you know. That's
<v Speaker 2>one thing I've I've had to try to learn to
<v Speaker 2>deal with is the the heights of these plants and
<v Speaker 2>then they start to flop over. Sometimes you do have
<v Speaker 2>to be mindful of that. Like for example, I did
<v Speaker 2>a little hell strip between the sidewalk and the road
<v Speaker 2>in this neighborhood, and you couldn't have something like that,
<v Speaker 2>or let's say like New England aster, because it's going
<v Speaker 2>to flop over, you know, so you could.
<v Speaker 1>Can you just camatic after? Because I got to use
<v Speaker 1>hedge trimmers on everything. I mean, that's kind of like
<v Speaker 1>you when you the hedge trimmers are the best thing
<v Speaker 1>you can do without, you know, to mimic fire without
<v Speaker 1>bringing in fire. Just go in there. It's the disturbance,
<v Speaker 1>you know, go in there and clip them and then
<v Speaker 1>they just resprout.
<v Speaker 3>That's true. You can definitely.
<v Speaker 2>I guess what I'm trying to do, and at least
<v Speaker 2>what I'm telling as well is that this is kind
<v Speaker 2>of like a low maintenance I'm trying to make a
<v Speaker 2>low maintenance situation. Some people are willing to do that,
<v Speaker 2>especially if they're really more hardcore, and I do that
<v Speaker 2>a lot, like in my yard and stuff. But a
<v Speaker 2>lot of people aren't really looking to have to do
<v Speaker 2>maintenance like that. So sometimes making that's another point that
<v Speaker 2>I'll bring up. I will make exceptions for plants not
<v Speaker 2>native to Ohio for situations like that, like the hell strip.
<v Speaker 2>So for example, I used pale purple cone flower that's
<v Speaker 2>technically not native to Ohio Palada, but you know, Ecinasia
<v Speaker 2>proporia is native to Ohio Pallada. Is almost it's a
<v Speaker 2>very close cousin. The bees and the butterflies know what
<v Speaker 2>to do with it. The birds know how to eat
<v Speaker 2>the seeds. It's not some foreign you know. I think
<v Speaker 2>it's within the realm. So in some situations I'll use that.
<v Speaker 3>I've started to use.
<v Speaker 2>Menada Brad Barryana Bratberry's be balm. That's a really handy
<v Speaker 2>I mean compared to wildbergmont that gets five six foot tall.
<v Speaker 2>Sometimes this thing gets maybe knee high and has very
<v Speaker 2>similar blooms, but it's just a little more tame and
<v Speaker 2>usable in a high visibility space. But Yeah, on the
<v Speaker 2>other hand, I love doing the prairies where you can
<v Speaker 2>just let stuff go, you know that, and don't have
<v Speaker 2>to be trying to fit into some traditional look.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's done with nat That's what I do with
<v Speaker 1>the hedge clippers. Man. Seriously, when I discovered those, they
<v Speaker 1>changed my life because I'm like, you could just go
<v Speaker 1>in there, I can plant whatever the fuck I want
<v Speaker 1>and just go in there and cut it clip it
<v Speaker 1>to the ground. Whatever it gets too big, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it looks like an alligator gar It's like this three
<v Speaker 1>inch three foot blade with those zigzag teeth that go
<v Speaker 1>back and forth. It's just like giving the yard a
<v Speaker 1>hair gets fucking great. I got like a skill. Skill
<v Speaker 1>is a brand I use just because I ended up
<v Speaker 1>with it. Whatever this battery, you know, it's battery operator
<v Speaker 1>just going there and it takes me like twenty seconds.
<v Speaker 1>Then I just sweep the shit up at the you know,
<v Speaker 1>or throw it somewhere to compost. But that changed my
<v Speaker 1>life because I was like, man, you can plant anything
<v Speaker 1>and just literally just hedge the sides. You can walk
<v Speaker 1>through it. It's not obstructing anything. I mean, I know
<v Speaker 1>you're saying a lot of people don't want to do that.
<v Speaker 1>I'm just talking about for myself or for yards that
<v Speaker 1>I maintain, like i'll, you know, i'll my thing. I
<v Speaker 1>don't have a landscaping company. People will throw me cash
<v Speaker 1>sometimes to plant the native garden, but for me, it's
<v Speaker 1>the aim is really just planting more plants, Like that's
<v Speaker 1>all I want to do. And if it happens to
<v Speaker 1>be someone's yard, then I'm gonna do it. And they're
<v Speaker 1>gonna let me, you know, like I I will plant
<v Speaker 1>things in places that I know they won't get ripped out.
<v Speaker 1>That's all I'm trying to do, Like I'm you know.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, but what I was gonna say with the
<v Speaker 1>ecotype thing, like, I don't some people are really strict ecotype. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>And I get that, but but I think my take
<v Speaker 1>on it, and I wouldn't. I'm talking about just yards.
<v Speaker 1>I'm not talking about like restoration sides. I think restorations
<v Speaker 1>I should always use local egotype. But if a lineage
<v Speaker 1>has been on a continent and in the region, it's
<v Speaker 1>probably already been there. You know. It's the distribution shift
<v Speaker 1>over time. Like if you could view like spatially like
<v Speaker 1>a map, like a map of the United States, and watch,
<v Speaker 1>you know, a time lapse map, how the distribution. You know,
<v Speaker 1>there's like a little bubble that shows the distribution of
<v Speaker 1>where a plant grows. You'd see that over one hundred
<v Speaker 1>and fifty five hundred thousand years, it shifts like it
<v Speaker 1>goes up, it goes down. It's so, and if the
<v Speaker 1>lineage is there, then all the animals and insects whatever
<v Speaker 1>that associate with that plant are probably already adapted to
<v Speaker 1>that lineage, to the phytochemistry in that lineage, to the
<v Speaker 1>pollen that that or whatever the you know, some oil
<v Speaker 1>collecting bees, So the ecology is already intact. It may
<v Speaker 1>not be the same species, but it's the same lineage,
<v Speaker 1>and it's they're closely enough related. That's my take on it.
<v Speaker 1>So when I'm doing yards, like I live in the
<v Speaker 1>borderlands in South Texas, up plant stuff from Mexico all
<v Speaker 1>the time, you know, and then let natural selection work
<v Speaker 1>it out. Like if we get a harsh freeze and
<v Speaker 1>it kills it, so be it, you know. But but
<v Speaker 1>I think I don't know. I guess I just I've
<v Speaker 1>started to just view more like continents in regions as
<v Speaker 1>I have such a zoomed out perspective, like the continent
<v Speaker 1>as an ecosystem, the continent as a bank that harbors
<v Speaker 1>all these lineages, you know, and that have been restricted
<v Speaker 1>to that continent by the ocean. And conversely, that's why
<v Speaker 1>things like chestnut blight are so bad. When you know,
<v Speaker 1>when you mix parts of these ecosystems that have been
<v Speaker 1>separated for fifty million years, that's when you run into trouble.
<v Speaker 1>That's why nine percent of invasives are from other continents
<v Speaker 1>because they've been separated so long. But you know, I
<v Speaker 1>guess uh't.
<v Speaker 2>That's the real. That's the real. That's the nightmare is
<v Speaker 2>having the speed up timescale that we've created by this
<v Speaker 2>like industrialized society especially and bringing in different bugs and diseases.
<v Speaker 1>Mixing, yeah, mixing parts, mixing parts from one ecosystem to
<v Speaker 1>another that never would have been there otherwise, do you
<v Speaker 1>do you for brad you guys get Bradford pair out there?
<v Speaker 1>Is it invasive?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? Yeah, it's terrible. What is the worst.
<v Speaker 1>It's like it's a clone that was grafted. They're all grafted,
<v Speaker 1>but then the the stock plant got like cut loose,
<v Speaker 1>like the scion was. Do you know the full story
<v Speaker 1>without the scion was.
<v Speaker 2>But the understanding is that there was there was multiple
<v Speaker 2>varieties created. The varieties amongst themselves were sterile, so like
<v Speaker 2>I think Cleveland Select was one of them, and I
<v Speaker 2>think maybe even Bradford Pear was another variety of the
<v Speaker 2>Calorie pair. So these different varieties amongst themselves were not
<v Speaker 2>able to reproduce. But once you mix Cleveland Select with
<v Speaker 2>the Bradford pair with the white ever, it starts producing
<v Speaker 2>seed and then they go feral and they and they
<v Speaker 2>start reverting back. They get more, they get more thorns,
<v Speaker 2>they seem to become adapted.
<v Speaker 3>And one thing that one thing that I always tell.
<v Speaker 2>People is that like most of these invasive species, when
<v Speaker 2>it gets to late fall here in the east, everything
<v Speaker 2>drops its leaves. That's adapted to our region. The invasive
<v Speaker 2>species don't generally drop their leaves, and the frost messes
<v Speaker 2>them up and they fall off eventually. But you can
<v Speaker 2>tell where the invasives are because they're not going to
<v Speaker 2>drop their leaves in a natural way. Kind of concerning though,
<v Speaker 2>these Bradford pairs I see along the highway, they're starting
<v Speaker 2>to adapt to like drop their leaves at the right time.
<v Speaker 2>And yeah, of course do all these things. It's just
<v Speaker 2>a nightmare. So yeah, I mean it's a great and
<v Speaker 2>I'll say this, it's a great time of year. Right now.
<v Speaker 2>Get out your chainsaw or your knife, and even if
<v Speaker 2>it's a place that you is on your front yard
<v Speaker 2>or something, you can just girdle that thing right around
<v Speaker 2>the base of the tree, right next to the soil,
<v Speaker 2>just cut all the way around it. Cut that into
<v Speaker 2>that cambium and the leaves are off it right now,
<v Speaker 2>so no one is going to notice that something has
<v Speaker 2>been done. Spring's going to roll around and the tree
<v Speaker 2>is going to appear to head.
<v Speaker 3>They're going to go ahead and remove it.
<v Speaker 2>Like let's say it's at a let's just say a hypothetical,
<v Speaker 2>it's at a Walmart parking lot. If you if you
<v Speaker 2>girdled that tree the next year, that this next spring
<v Speaker 2>they would see, oh it's dead. We're going to have
<v Speaker 2>to remove it. Thank god, they finally banned calorie pair
<v Speaker 2>in Ohio, so they're going to replace it with something
<v Speaker 2>that's not calorie pair.
<v Speaker 1>So there's still plants, right, they're not planting.
<v Speaker 2>They got burning bush still legal year they've got It's unreal.
<v Speaker 1>Why you can't there's no herbicide you can use in winter?
<v Speaker 1>Is there? Could you? Because that's the best thing. Girdle it.
<v Speaker 2>No you can, Yeah, you can, for sure. Using herbicide
<v Speaker 2>is the best thing. Like trickle appier is a very
<v Speaker 2>commonly used one. Even Glypha state can be used in
<v Speaker 2>the winter, just the full full concentration normally and you
<v Speaker 2>hack and squirt they call it, where you just cut
<v Speaker 2>in a little bit and then fill up that you.
<v Speaker 1>Could even fill up one of those bingo pens, one
<v Speaker 1>of those little dabber dabber bingo pins with with glypha state.
<v Speaker 1>Just you know, wear gloves and uh that would be
<v Speaker 1>that'd be really nice. Just start slaughtering bread. They get
<v Speaker 1>those little hand chain saws too. Skill makes those little
<v Speaker 1>hand chain saws which are like they look like a
<v Speaker 1>power tool, you know, or take a saws all just
<v Speaker 1>girdle of shit and inject some check some herbicide into
<v Speaker 1>all that exactly.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I think it's a great time to do it.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, do it now. The vegetate, I mean all
<v Speaker 2>the leaves gone, so no one's gonna notice anything. If
<v Speaker 2>you do it somewhere, they're just gonna, you know, wake
<v Speaker 2>up some day in April and be like, oh that
<v Speaker 2>tree's dead, call somebody to remove it.
<v Speaker 1>So I get triggered by seeing that that tree, like
<v Speaker 1>it reminds me of some of the ugliest landscapes. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I got it, say man, I know, I know it's
<v Speaker 1>not your fault, you just live there. But Ohio, what's
<v Speaker 1>been done to that state. It's one of the ugliest
<v Speaker 1>states I've driven through. I think in terms of it's
<v Speaker 1>just lawn and plastic signs. They you know, it's like
<v Speaker 1>the median strips of the fucking freeway and and everything.
<v Speaker 1>It's like just the and they've got enough rain there
<v Speaker 1>where that's lawn and sustainable of course too, not sustainable,
<v Speaker 1>but it can sustain itself. You can't really do long
<v Speaker 1>where I am. It just gets too hot. I mean
<v Speaker 1>people still try, and they put in expensive irrigation systems.
<v Speaker 1>But but Jesus Christ, you.
<v Speaker 2>Know, it's a corn. It's a corn and soybean subsidized. Hell,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, that's what they've done.
<v Speaker 1>The human the human landscapes just hideous too.
<v Speaker 3>I mean it's and here's what's fucked up. This is
<v Speaker 3>the most of some.
<v Speaker 2>Of the Ohio River Valley in north and Ohio to
<v Speaker 2>and all through the Midwest. This is some of the
<v Speaker 2>most fertile land in the world. Like the largest trees
<v Speaker 2>in the East would have grown here. In fact, when
<v Speaker 2>when Washington was fucking around and like the seventeen sixties
<v Speaker 2>or something, he came down the Ohio River, he was
<v Speaker 2>recording sycamores that had forty seven foot circumferences. And you know,
<v Speaker 2>there's multiple accounts of these sycamores. There's one account of
<v Speaker 2>a sycamore being large enough to hold thirteen men on horseback,
<v Speaker 2>a hollow sycamore being able to hold thirteen men on horseback.
<v Speaker 2>It's just these giant trees. Now, where would they have
<v Speaker 2>put the agriculture when they came in sort of clearing
<v Speaker 2>stuff where the richest soil and the biggest trees are.
<v Speaker 2>So all of the old growth we've got left in
<v Speaker 2>the East is just in the most infertile, inaccessible, difficult
<v Speaker 2>soils that they didn't want to mess with. And that's
<v Speaker 2>that's a real tragedy. I mean, we would have had
<v Speaker 2>the biggest trees of you know, the entire east.
<v Speaker 1>Well, they would put it on the prairie too, because
<v Speaker 1>the prairie soil is going to be the richest. That's
<v Speaker 1>where you've had a year after year after year of
<v Speaker 1>decomposing plant exactly from herbacious perennials. And so that would be.
<v Speaker 2>There at least until at least until they started doing
<v Speaker 2>that when what's his John Deere came up with his
<v Speaker 2>his plow, you know, his iron plow or whatever it
<v Speaker 2>was that was able to cut through the prairie sod.
<v Speaker 2>Before that, it was inaccessible and they couldn't couldn't really
<v Speaker 2>use it. That's why they called them barons. They literally
<v Speaker 2>thought they were infertile, nasty places.
<v Speaker 3>Maybe you could run cows.
<v Speaker 1>Or something because of all the roots. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
<v Speaker 2>You couldn't break through the roots with it. I guess
<v Speaker 2>an old school plow the traditional plow. So thanks to
<v Speaker 2>John Deere.
<v Speaker 1>I got PTSD from Ohio me and L scorch where
<v Speaker 1>anytime I've driven through Ohio, I mean, parts of Cleveland
<v Speaker 1>look cool, like the old industrial shit I love, like
<v Speaker 1>old rust belts. But going through we went through Central Ohio,
<v Speaker 1>like past Columbus and ship it was just oh my god, man,
<v Speaker 1>I just yeah.
<v Speaker 2>They've got it up. Columbus is really growing now.
<v Speaker 1>I mean I just the fucking mowing and the plastic
<v Speaker 1>commercial signs in the parking lots. And it's a very
<v Speaker 1>conservative state in parts too that we went through Central.
<v Speaker 1>I always like refreshing to see like a black working
<v Speaker 1>class in parts of the state, because I always thought
<v Speaker 1>it was like the Land of me and Honkeys. But
<v Speaker 1>uh but fuck man, Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>There's a lot of sam and Dayton and Cincinnati. I
<v Speaker 2>mean there's a lot of uh yeah, yeah, it's it's
<v Speaker 2>it's been fucked though, that's for sure.
<v Speaker 3>I got off situation.
<v Speaker 1>I got off a freight train in a little town
<v Speaker 1>I think it was Deshler once because I was going
<v Speaker 1>I caught it. I caught it in New York. I
<v Speaker 1>was headed west and then it uh trying to get
<v Speaker 1>to Chicago, and it it it stopped in Deshler. It
<v Speaker 1>didn't stop. It took a turn in Deshler. There's a
<v Speaker 1>diamond there. And I got off and was talking with
<v Speaker 1>these old these old bastards, these old uh you know,
<v Speaker 1>they were nice guys. They were probably extremely right leaning,
<v Speaker 1>but probably had some weird ideas, but they were nice guys.
<v Speaker 1>We shot the ship and hung out front. I didn't
<v Speaker 1>tell him I was riding trains. I had my bike
<v Speaker 1>with me, so I made them. I let him think
<v Speaker 1>that I was just biking through. And and then one
<v Speaker 1>of them actually was like, well, you know, if you're
<v Speaker 1>trying to get out here, because I knew no one
<v Speaker 1>was gonna pick me up. It's fucking northern Ohio. It's
<v Speaker 1>a small town in northern Ohio. Like that's that's like
<v Speaker 1>for like anyone trying to hitch Like that's like the
<v Speaker 1>worst you could think of, like a place where you're
<v Speaker 1>not gonna get picked. No one cool is going to
<v Speaker 1>be going through there, because it's normally going to be
<v Speaker 1>working class people to pick you up, or like some
<v Speaker 1>crazy rich if they're gonna be well, either going to
<v Speaker 1>be like alcoholic or on, you know whatever, which is
<v Speaker 1>always a fun ride, you know, exciting, gripping. But anyway, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I saw it, but I got off and I was
<v Speaker 1>hanging out with them. They had this little rail fan park.
<v Speaker 1>It was like a little foamer park and they were
<v Speaker 1>watching they'd sit there and launch airs and watch trains
<v Speaker 1>and get hammer and this one dude was sleeping in
<v Speaker 1>his van with his dog, and he was like, man, honestly,
<v Speaker 1>you could probably just there's a train coming up tomorrow
<v Speaker 1>morning at five am that goes to Chicago, and it's
<v Speaker 1>going to take this ten mile pwork curb. You could
<v Speaker 1>probably just get on that. And I was like, okay, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I'll do that. I don't even think I told him.
<v Speaker 1>I was like, oh, really okay. And then it came
<v Speaker 1>through really foggy morning and I got on that and
<v Speaker 1>h and rode that.
<v Speaker 2>Thank god, because by ten miles an hour you can
<v Speaker 2>just hop on and hop off.
<v Speaker 1>Huh, it's fucking dangerous. Yeah, I mean I was like
<v Speaker 1>twenty four, twenty two. I think it was twenty two,
<v Speaker 1>but it maybe it was going a little slower. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's the speed limit on those those tight curves is
<v Speaker 1>ten miles per hour. So like if you go to
<v Speaker 1>a diamond, which is like a rail junction, it's for
<v Speaker 1>those curves, it's usually ten miles per hour, unless it's
<v Speaker 1>a really broad one. And then they've got you know,
<v Speaker 1>these things called movable point frogs, which are a type
<v Speaker 1>of crossover switch that can allow for higher turnout speeds.
<v Speaker 1>But but yeah, it was I caught that. I just
<v Speaker 1>I was so desperate to get out of Ohio. Like
<v Speaker 1>Ohio has always been terrifying to me in a way.
<v Speaker 1>Like I say that jokingly, like it's you know, I'm
<v Speaker 1>not really in my parents, but just like, oh my god,
<v Speaker 1>I'll get fucking stuck here and then the cops, the
<v Speaker 1>cops are probably stricking.
<v Speaker 2>I've driven out, yeah, you know, going out west stuff,
<v Speaker 2>and sometimes you get out there in like the middle
<v Speaker 2>of Wherever, Illinois or Nebraska, and you just think, like,
<v Speaker 2>holy shit, man, there's probably like like a handful of
<v Speaker 2>people around me, and like a twenty mile radius, And
<v Speaker 2>what the hell would I do if you know, you're
<v Speaker 2>just so out of sorts in a place that's not
<v Speaker 2>very Uh, I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I think what scares me, What scares me most about
<v Speaker 1>those places is that, I mean, I've traveled a whole lot,
<v Speaker 1>and I've met all kinds of different people, and I
<v Speaker 1>don't have like I get judgments about people when I
<v Speaker 1>first meet them, but of course I hold on to
<v Speaker 1>them and then give them a chance and whatever, because
<v Speaker 1>I realize people a fucking surprised me all the time.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, I know that I feel like a lot
<v Speaker 1>of people in small towns like that don't have a
<v Speaker 1>lot of fucking world experience. They haven't been they don't
<v Speaker 1>have like a they don't have this repository of different
<v Speaker 1>people and personalities they've met. And I feel like they
<v Speaker 1>would see someone like me and they can There's the
<v Speaker 1>only thing they can think is that I'm like a
<v Speaker 1>fucking gang member or a drug de or some sort of
<v Speaker 1>sketchy criminal cartel.
<v Speaker 3>Definitely cartel.
<v Speaker 1>They can't. There's no yeah, man, there's no they don't.
<v Speaker 1>There's nothing else they could or maybe a veteran maybe
<v Speaker 1>they would think I'm like a veteran cent but their
<v Speaker 1>breadth of experience is so low that you're like, and
<v Speaker 1>that's what scares me. Like, I don't mean to be mean,
<v Speaker 1>but when like when someone's dumb like that or they
<v Speaker 1>don't have a lot of experience to draw on, and
<v Speaker 1>you know that's what they're going to be operating on
<v Speaker 1>those assumptions. You're like, oh fuck, I've got to really
<v Speaker 1>like break this whatever stereotype they think they have and
<v Speaker 1>just you know, and be and be jolly or fucking
<v Speaker 1>joke around or show them that like I'm not some
<v Speaker 1>like half brained.
<v Speaker 2>Fucking Who was the guy you were just talking with
<v Speaker 2>that you guys were talking about messing around on land
<v Speaker 2>that's not yours down there in Texas and trying to
<v Speaker 2>deal with these landowners and get them to calm down.
<v Speaker 3>That was that was funny.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah that was Yeah it was Kyle. Yeah, he's
<v Speaker 1>a herper. Yeah, it's like that. It's like I feel
<v Speaker 1>like every time i'm you meet one of these land owners,
<v Speaker 1>and it's like, especially if it's like an old Anglo dude,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and those cultural stereotypes are real. It's if
<v Speaker 1>there's gonna be someone freaking out and shitting a brick.
<v Speaker 1>You're about to go have an aneurysm. It's going to
<v Speaker 1>be like an old white guy, and you got to
<v Speaker 1>just talk them down and like not, you gotta just
<v Speaker 1>it's like talking down your crazy drunk uncle or well,
<v Speaker 1>I don't have crazy drunk uncles like that, but somebody
<v Speaker 1>else is crazy drunk uncle. And just being like all right,
<v Speaker 1>come on, you know, really nice, yes, sir about and
<v Speaker 1>let them feel like they're in control. That's really important
<v Speaker 1>to them, and apologize and even sometimes it doesn't work,
<v Speaker 1>and I always be like, look, man, I'll show you
<v Speaker 1>my idea, Like I don't have anything to hide, like
<v Speaker 1>we're just doing this. I'm really really sorry. I really
<v Speaker 1>didn't mean to you know. It's like shit, I would
<v Speaker 1>never say if it was just like on the street,
<v Speaker 1>I'd be like, oh, fuck yourself, ma, fuck you, you know.
<v Speaker 1>But but yeah, it's crazy because it's such a it's
<v Speaker 1>such a religion here. It's so nuts. It's and like
<v Speaker 1>no one can imagine that you would be doing something harmless.
<v Speaker 1>That's oh, that's guys just looking for snakes, are looking
<v Speaker 1>at plants. It's always like, ah, you're part of the
<v Speaker 1>migrant trainer. Oh, you're trying to steal my stuff or
<v Speaker 1>you're poaching or you know, And I get that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I couldn't imagine down there. It's got enough here,
<v Speaker 2>but I couldn't imagine.
<v Speaker 1>I get the paranoia a little bit. But like it's
<v Speaker 1>when I've been, for instance, when I've been in Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>it just tends up. You end up talking to the
<v Speaker 1>guy and you're like, you end up hanging out for
<v Speaker 1>two hours of Like they're into the same stuff too,
<v Speaker 1>generally because they live out there. They're like, oh, I
<v Speaker 1>can tell you where some fossils are or whatever, but
<v Speaker 1>yeah it's wild man. So but Ohio, so that was
<v Speaker 1>all like where you are, it was it was like
<v Speaker 1>intermittent wetlands and then tall grass prairie and oaks savannah
<v Speaker 1>or what was it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it was that's that's oak savannah as well as
<v Speaker 2>there was some more forested beach maple woods were One
<v Speaker 2>of the one of my mentors is named Dave Nolan.
<v Speaker 2>He's doing a he's doing a study of all the
<v Speaker 2>survey records and putting together what it would have looked
<v Speaker 2>like in like eighteen hundred, and what's being discovered is
<v Speaker 2>that a lot of the prairie areas are actually along
<v Speaker 2>the rivers. For example here near Dayton, the Little Miami,
<v Speaker 2>the mad River in the Great Miami, they have these
<v Speaker 2>kind of strips of mesic prairie along them. And you
<v Speaker 2>know what it's showing is that apparently those areas were
<v Speaker 2>being burnt pretty regularly, because otherwise it does become dense
<v Speaker 2>forest around here. If you're not doing anything, it's just
<v Speaker 2>going to become dense woods. So it's kind of interesting
<v Speaker 2>to see going back to eighteen hundred and.
<v Speaker 3>Honestly, I.
<v Speaker 2>Create prairies, you know, for a living and stuff, and
<v Speaker 2>I love the remnants around here.
<v Speaker 3>There's a few of them, There's.
<v Speaker 2>Not a lot. But what's amazing to me though, is
<v Speaker 2>there was a lot of prairie. There was a lot
<v Speaker 2>of savannah in Ohio. I mean, much more than I
<v Speaker 2>kind of would have just guessed, even being an advocate
<v Speaker 2>for it. It was surprising to find this out. So
<v Speaker 2>it's really exciting. The river I live near the Little
<v Speaker 2>Miami River across the river for me, was a huge
<v Speaker 2>area of prairie that and now it's prairie again. So
<v Speaker 2>it's just kind of cool to bring these places back
<v Speaker 2>and well they's see how it was?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, I mean you bring the life back. That's
<v Speaker 1>are there more people? I want to talk about burning too,
<v Speaker 1>because that's some really important shit that I think a
<v Speaker 1>lot of people in the Northeast in the Midwest don't
<v Speaker 1>realize was so important, you know, And that's I think
<v Speaker 1>the lack of burning is why the part is actually
<v Speaker 1>a large part of the reason why the tick population
<v Speaker 1>is so bad now. That and removing predators. But do
<v Speaker 1>you see a lot of people, I mean, how, how
<v Speaker 1>where's the native plant movement coming from? There?
<v Speaker 2>Like?
<v Speaker 1>How are people getting into this stuff and breaking with
<v Speaker 1>what they've been indoctrinated to believe the land around them
<v Speaker 1>should look like, you know, the CVS pharmacy landscaping or
<v Speaker 1>the fucking bank where everything's planted in a line and
<v Speaker 1>there's these horrible plants that are just so corny and
<v Speaker 1>puke worthy. Maybe maybe they're cool six thousand miles away
<v Speaker 1>where they're native and those egoisms would hear they're just
<v Speaker 1>horticultural garbage. Like when when did this change start to
<v Speaker 1>happen and what is driving it?
<v Speaker 2>I believe that a large part of it started in
<v Speaker 2>the early two thousands just from the work of Doug Tallamy.
<v Speaker 2>You know, he's a pretty well known native plan advocate
<v Speaker 2>that entomologists who started advocating realized there's not there's less bugs,
<v Speaker 2>and that's because there's less native plants for them to
<v Speaker 2>feed on since they or host on mostly host on,
<v Speaker 2>I guess. But but yeah, so.
<v Speaker 3>So I guess that's part of it.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of it is coming from you know, there's
<v Speaker 2>kind of the standard I guess the standard people, older
<v Speaker 2>people that are kind of just getting more interested in
<v Speaker 2>the world around them and stuff is one part of it.
<v Speaker 3>But I've also noticed there's a large.
<v Speaker 2>Amount of younger people getting interested in it for various reasons.
<v Speaker 2>And sometimes they come at it from you know, the
<v Speaker 2>forager angle.
<v Speaker 3>And and I.
<v Speaker 2>Know you you've talked to and I love this about you, Joey,
<v Speaker 2>that you know, eating a plant is like the least
<v Speaker 2>interesting thing about it.
<v Speaker 3>It's what I think, you know, So that's it.
<v Speaker 1>I try to be a lot softer on the foragers
<v Speaker 1>these days because I think it's.
<v Speaker 3>Great cool to get into it with that.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, how it gets people in that's you know, yeah.
<v Speaker 3>That's yeah, that's exactly it. Like people are really.
<v Speaker 2>You know, you get interested in food and different flavors,
<v Speaker 2>especially kids and stuff. So it's a good path. But
<v Speaker 2>that's one way that people are coming at it. Other
<v Speaker 2>people are kind of coming at it just from from
<v Speaker 2>trying to help certain creatures like monarchs or.
<v Speaker 3>Something like that. So yeah, that's a good way.
<v Speaker 2>But it's growing every year and people are really getting
<v Speaker 2>behind this stuff. Telling me created the Homegrown National Park Organization,
<v Speaker 2>so everyone's kind of you can go online and you
<v Speaker 2>can list your uh, you know, if you have a
<v Speaker 2>yard that has pollinator plants, you can list that on
<v Speaker 2>there and and try and to kind of build the
<v Speaker 2>momentum for all this.
<v Speaker 1>So did you listen to that episode I did with him?
<v Speaker 1>I could tell he you know, I am not his
<v Speaker 1>usual tell. He was hesitant. He was hesitant to come on.
<v Speaker 1>He's a softer, gentler understand different demographic. But he came on,
<v Speaker 1>which was cool, Like I give him much respect for that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, for being willing to break with what his
<v Speaker 1>heart was telling him not to do. And uh, and
<v Speaker 1>but he came on and you know, talk for like
<v Speaker 1>an hour and I would just ask some questions and
<v Speaker 1>it was really interesting. But I think he's been great
<v Speaker 1>to reach out to. Definitely a certain demographic, like a
<v Speaker 1>demographic I'm not going to reach you know, like I'm.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And he does a great job of kind of
<v Speaker 2>making it just readable and interesting, like and that's that's important.
<v Speaker 2>Thing that I like about your approach is that you're
<v Speaker 2>always asking what pollinates this, you know, because that's the
<v Speaker 2>important because everything's connected. Yeah, every that's the that's the
<v Speaker 2>interesting part. Like I have trouble getting interested in the
<v Speaker 2>minutia of a plant, but when you start talking about
<v Speaker 2>the ways that it's being interacted with, that's really what's
<v Speaker 2>interesting to me. That's kind of what got me started.
<v Speaker 2>I saw a wild columbine out in the Columbia River
<v Speaker 2>Gorge when I was living out in Oregon, and and then.
<v Speaker 3>I heard that hummingbird.
<v Speaker 2>First of all, I thought somebody planted it because it
<v Speaker 2>was so beautiful, and I thought, this is so nice.
<v Speaker 2>There's no way this is just wild.
<v Speaker 1>Out here.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, exactly.
<v Speaker 2>And then I found out the hummingbird approaches it from
<v Speaker 2>the bottom and pollinates it is its like soul pollinator,
<v Speaker 2>and it's just like that really got me interested in
<v Speaker 2>this because the interaction between the plants and the animals
<v Speaker 2>is like just amazing.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, that's the context I want people to start
<v Speaker 1>focusing on more because I think again, part of being
<v Speaker 1>indoctrinated in a civilization, it's got its roots and you
<v Speaker 1>know in Europe, in this death cult that is that
<v Speaker 1>holds human is the highest form of life and separate
<v Speaker 1>from all the rest of nature. Being indoctrinated in a
<v Speaker 1>culture like that, then I'm not saying that with any
<v Speaker 1>hate for anybody. That's just that we're all products of
<v Speaker 1>what we come from, you know, until you break with it,
<v Speaker 1>Like we're humans are inherently conformist. We're inherently wanting validation
<v Speaker 1>from our social group. And so culture, if you're raised
<v Speaker 1>in this culture, you're gonna suck those ideas up like
<v Speaker 1>a sponge and it's hard to break with them later.
<v Speaker 1>And so we're all taught that, you know, plants are
<v Speaker 1>supposed to be pretty and they're supposed to flower all
<v Speaker 1>the time, and so many people don't even realize that
<v Speaker 1>every plant, unless it's a kind offer, a fern, a
<v Speaker 1>moss or a spike moss, produces a flower, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and that if it flowers and it gets pounded and
<v Speaker 1>then that produces a fruit like basic life histories and
<v Speaker 1>life cycles of plant life. We're not that should be
<v Speaker 1>elementary to us, that were elementary to humans. You know,
<v Speaker 1>up until quite recently, people don't even know and that
<v Speaker 1>the only focus of a plant is to either be
<v Speaker 1>medicinal or edible or uh or pretty, and that's it.
<v Speaker 1>And it's there's which is so shit for brain. That's
<v Speaker 1>like bottom of.
<v Speaker 2>The brain that even that is disconnected. I was just
<v Speaker 2>in to my wife Natasha the other day, like it's
<v Speaker 2>amazing how this cinnamon is tree bark, Like you almost forget,
<v Speaker 2>like it's just a bark of a tree. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>like you don't, I don't know, you get so disconnected
<v Speaker 2>from it and see it as something else and it's
<v Speaker 2>not some sort of artificial thing.
<v Speaker 3>It's just literally tree bark.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. A lot of those, A lot of those basil
<v Speaker 1>angiosperms have that. Sasafras too have that that really pungent volatiles.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of the especially a lot of the trees
<v Speaker 1>that are around. But there's a there's a tree I
<v Speaker 1>think is it was it Athrosperma arthrosperma in Tasmania that's
<v Speaker 1>in that family in low Racia, the avocado family that's
<v Speaker 1>got really punda called southern Santa prass, got really pungent
<v Speaker 1>volatile compounds in the leaves. But but anyway, not to
<v Speaker 1>get to distracted, but I think that's what I've been
<v Speaker 1>fighting about or fighting against lately, you know, strategically and eloquently,
<v Speaker 1>but just trying to get away from this these corny
<v Speaker 1>as ideas, because these ideas about what a you know,
<v Speaker 1>everything needs to be planted in a line, everything's got
<v Speaker 1>to look pretty. Nature is messy. That's the same mentality
<v Speaker 1>that brought us the lawn. It's disconnected, it's fucking it's
<v Speaker 1>part of the death cult without knowing it. And so
<v Speaker 1>that's why I look at the whole picture. I'm like,
<v Speaker 1>everything is this living skin. You've got this living skin,
<v Speaker 1>this living fabric, or even a living machine. Some people
<v Speaker 1>might not like that analogy. I think it's fucking great.
<v Speaker 1>It's a living machine. It's performing a purpose that benefits
<v Speaker 1>us and all of life just by existing. It's like
<v Speaker 1>a living green skin, a living machine. And you start
<v Speaker 1>fucking around and removing pieces out of it because you
<v Speaker 1>think you don't need them, you cause the whole thing
<v Speaker 1>to break down and collapse, and you decrease the quality
<v Speaker 1>of life for us and everything else in the biosphere.
<v Speaker 1>And that, you know, that kind of shit is what
<v Speaker 1>I wish people would talk about, because you get all
<v Speaker 1>this stuff among like the self flagellating white progressive about
<v Speaker 1>indigenous this and Indigenous that, and then okay, that's great,
<v Speaker 1>but like, let's not turn this into like identitarian fetishizing
<v Speaker 1>that in itself is kind of inherently racist. Let's talk
<v Speaker 1>about the ideas like what can we as a society,
<v Speaker 1>what can those cultures teach us, you know, about how
<v Speaker 1>we cannot fuck up the place where we live and
<v Speaker 1>destroy ourselves while we move forward as a civilization. So
<v Speaker 1>that's why I'm always That's why I'm always talking about that.
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, all right, come on, let's let's get away
<v Speaker 1>from the ship to put in your profile bio and
<v Speaker 1>the performance, you know, and let's talk about the fucking
<v Speaker 1>meat here. What is what is the ideas like bringing
<v Speaker 1>back burning a more holistic approach. I don't even like
<v Speaker 1>that word holistic, but you know what I mean, a
<v Speaker 1>more like zoomed out approach to how we fit in
<v Speaker 1>the biosphere. We're part of this living skin. We're not
<v Speaker 1>here to fucking conquer it. You know, it's the earth
<v Speaker 1>is not just the temporary stepping stone to heaven, no
<v Speaker 1>matter what your religion is, it's it's it is heaven,
<v Speaker 1>like it can be heaven if we treat it right,
<v Speaker 1>you know.
<v Speaker 3>No, I agree, definitely.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Burning is an interesting thing, especially here in Ohio.
<v Speaker 2>We've got some of the most unfortunately, some of the
<v Speaker 2>most backwards burning laws. And uh I see these guys
<v Speaker 2>like like online that are burning down south and they're
<v Speaker 2>just lighting it up. There are a right to burn states,
<v Speaker 2>you know, like Florida is a right to burn state
<v Speaker 2>where you can pretty much do it.
<v Speaker 3>You have a right to it.
<v Speaker 2>But here it's like you've got to become a burn
<v Speaker 2>there's all kinds of certifications and.
<v Speaker 3>Wow, I actually can't.
<v Speaker 2>I can't do it professionally because it's going to take
<v Speaker 2>don't be able to do it yet.
<v Speaker 1>Would you could you get arrested or fined or what?
<v Speaker 3>Uh?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, I mean I could get find The fire
<v Speaker 2>department normally gets called out whenever there's smoke, so the
<v Speaker 2>fire department comes, they could file a report.
<v Speaker 3>There's like insurance liabilities and.
<v Speaker 2>Stuff like that.
<v Speaker 3>It's just like a mess of red tape and that. Now.
<v Speaker 2>On the other hand, though, I go out to one
<v Speaker 2>of the most rural areas in Ohio is down south
<v Speaker 2>right called Adams County and very rugged. It's actually more
<v Speaker 2>it's part of the outer Bluegrass. It's it's more related
<v Speaker 2>to Kentucky and some of the more southern It's very dry,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of prairies there. He Braun did a lot
<v Speaker 2>of work there that's really interesting. But I went down
<v Speaker 2>there last last spring to help this guy burn and
<v Speaker 2>he had an old extension agent.
<v Speaker 3>Helping him do it.
<v Speaker 2>In this extension agent, he what I kind of asked him, like,
<v Speaker 2>are you certified as a He didn't have any you know,
<v Speaker 2>he was he'd worked within the agricultural sector for a
<v Speaker 2>long time. But there it was like a tradition of burning.
<v Speaker 2>You just did it and you called the fire department
<v Speaker 2>and let him know. And so I was kind of
<v Speaker 2>expecting it to be this you've seen when they do
<v Speaker 2>the burns and they've got the big fire trucks out
<v Speaker 2>and the suits and stuff. I was kind of expecting
<v Speaker 2>something like that or I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>So was he doing out was he unauthorized or what?
<v Speaker 2>No, he was doing an author right. It was for
<v Speaker 2>a land that lives in Cincinnati but just has land
<v Speaker 2>out there, and he was burning the prairie for him.
<v Speaker 2>It's a really beautiful, high quality prairie. But he had
<v Speaker 2>me included. He had four guys hands, each of us
<v Speaker 2>a shovel and each of us a lighter and just
<v Speaker 2>go out and start burning and if it starts burning
<v Speaker 2>out of control, pad it down with the shovel and
<v Speaker 2>everything was fine.
<v Speaker 3>It worked out.
<v Speaker 2>I mean that complicated was the lesson from that that
<v Speaker 2>I learned, Like, you don't have to There is a
<v Speaker 2>tradition of this and it can be done safely. You
<v Speaker 2>just have to have your fire lines and well everything.
<v Speaker 1>The reason it's not safe is because it's been suppressed
<v Speaker 1>for so long and then the fuel builds up. If
<v Speaker 1>you do low burning. If it's if you have a
<v Speaker 1>high fuel load, you go in, you reduce some of it,
<v Speaker 1>you put it in piles, and then if it's it's
<v Speaker 1>you know, you don't need to do that if it's low,
<v Speaker 1>if it's a low burning, if there's not a high
<v Speaker 1>fuel load. But there was. I did another episode with
<v Speaker 1>this guy, Jerry Wilhelm. He's a Euroo floor of the
<v Speaker 1>Chicago region and he lives in the suburb. And I
<v Speaker 1>remember we were going going out to talk to him
<v Speaker 1>for kill your lawn and I was like, oh God,
<v Speaker 1>like I knew that what suburb it was. And I
<v Speaker 1>was like, oh, fuck, man, this is a rough place,
<v Speaker 1>like at least for people like me, you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>like for ship I'm into. I'm like, this is pure
<v Speaker 1>death cult out here, man, what this is gonna be rough?
<v Speaker 1>You know, lawns and fucking no sidewalks and shopping plazas
<v Speaker 1>and uh. And we get through his house and it
<v Speaker 1>looks like it's abandoned. Compared to all the other houses,
<v Speaker 1>it was awesome. I mean the house was well kept,
<v Speaker 1>but the yard was just it was tall grass prairie.
<v Speaker 1>He had tall grass prairie. And then you get up
<v Speaker 1>close You're like, oh wow, these this is all these
<v Speaker 1>these are all these great species, these native species. And
<v Speaker 1>he doesn't know it. He just burns it every year.
<v Speaker 3>And he's away with me.
<v Speaker 2>He just said he burn it every He just said nope,
<v Speaker 2>didn't didn't spray the grass or anything, just started burning.
<v Speaker 2>And hear it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, to anybody out west, where you've anybody like in California,
<v Speaker 1>where you've got aridity and high high winds, especially the
<v Speaker 1>Santa Anas in the fall, you can't do that, obviously,
<v Speaker 1>but in a in a in a Midwest or East
<v Speaker 1>coast setting where you've got these you know, cold, dreary
<v Speaker 1>days where it's wet or maybe it's it's there's still
<v Speaker 1>you know, humidity and the doff, but the stuff up
<v Speaker 1>top is dry. You know, it's a great time to burn,
<v Speaker 1>and you could do it and it's not super windy.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, that's the best thing that there. Did you
<v Speaker 1>see that There was a I don't know if you've
<v Speaker 1>heard of that YouTube channel, Learn Your Land, but oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>he just did an episode on tics and how fire.
<v Speaker 1>And I've been saying this for years, how fire could
<v Speaker 1>you know, probably get rid of a lot of the tick.
<v Speaker 1>It's want It burns the ticks, It incinerates the ticks
<v Speaker 1>if they're questing, if they're hanging out on any of
<v Speaker 1>the plants. But also it burns the duff and that
<v Speaker 1>humidity that they need to stay alive, like drives out
<v Speaker 1>the landscape. It's I'm sure that's probably you know why.
<v Speaker 1>That's one of the main reasons a lot of indigenous
<v Speaker 1>cultures were we're burning back in the day was for
<v Speaker 1>you know, chiggers and ticks and insects. I mean from
<v Speaker 1>just yeah, that makes sense though, creating a more open
<v Speaker 1>creating a more open landscape.
<v Speaker 2>But and I also, you know, this is my speculation,
<v Speaker 2>but I kind of as far as I understand it,
<v Speaker 2>they begin on mice and voles and stuff, and we
<v Speaker 2>don't have the predators to keep the mice population down.
<v Speaker 2>Like there's mice everywhere, at least around here, Like there's
<v Speaker 2>field mice all over, and there's deer all over, so
<v Speaker 2>there's like multiple hosts that they can move up before
<v Speaker 2>they get to the human.
<v Speaker 1>Eating any of those. And people shoot coyotes. People shoot
<v Speaker 1>coyotes or.
<v Speaker 2>Hate coyotes, They hate raccoons, they hate you know, it's
<v Speaker 2>it's it's very I get.
<v Speaker 1>So excited when when I hear coyotes, Like they're great.
<v Speaker 1>They keep the feral cap population down. I wish they'd
<v Speaker 1>get some of the ones near my house. Uh, they
<v Speaker 1>keep you know, rodent populations down. They're fucking hilarious. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I've never had any bad experiences with them. I never have.
<v Speaker 2>Have you heard that when they moved because they were
<v Speaker 2>out west they moved to the east after the extirpation
<v Speaker 2>of the wolves right now the eighteen late eighteen hundreds.
<v Speaker 2>But I guess that they mixed with at least here
<v Speaker 2>in Ohio and in the Northern States up here, they
<v Speaker 2>mixed with the remaining wolves. So they're like bigger out here.
<v Speaker 2>They're like a hybrid between a wolf than a coyote.
<v Speaker 2>They've got a thicker coat, they're a little bigger, and
<v Speaker 2>I guess they're a little more pack like potentially.
<v Speaker 1>Did they confirm that genetically, you know, because I.
<v Speaker 3>Think, yeah, I think so.
<v Speaker 1>I feel like I feel like natural selection in deserts
<v Speaker 1>would I mean, natural selection in deserts and arid climates
<v Speaker 1>just naturally selects for smaller animals because it's way easier
<v Speaker 1>for them to get by since there's not as much
<v Speaker 1>right food. But you know, whereas if you if you're
<v Speaker 1>in a more music environment that's more lush, there's going
<v Speaker 1>to be more food sources, it's going to be easier
<v Speaker 1>to to So maybe, I mean, I would think maybe
<v Speaker 1>a natural selection would partially be responsible for that too,
<v Speaker 1>just that they're going to get they live in an
<v Speaker 1>easier climate, they're going to get a little a little bigger.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, in furrier, but I guess I as far
<v Speaker 2>as I understand, they have genetically tested some of them
<v Speaker 2>and their their hybrid hybrid species, which is pretty cool.
<v Speaker 2>I mean it, I mean it's not it is what
<v Speaker 2>it is. It's in a destroyed landscape. It's something we
<v Speaker 2>can take a little bit of open and they can
<v Speaker 2>kill some real cats or some whatever.
<v Speaker 1>Mind feral cat thing is the feral cat things. Really
<v Speaker 1>it could be really bad, man. I mean, they can
<v Speaker 1>easily clean an area out. They can they can cause
<v Speaker 1>the local ext they can cause the extirpation, the regional
<v Speaker 1>extirpation of a lot of cool small reptiles, from snakes
<v Speaker 1>to lizards to you know, important rodents whatever. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>they do so much damage. I mean I've I've never
<v Speaker 1>owned cats because I'm allergic, but I mean I've had
<v Speaker 1>so many friends who were like, yeah, we used to.
<v Speaker 1>We had a family cat we slet out when it
<v Speaker 1>was when it was young and or when I was young,
<v Speaker 1>and it would come back every day it was killing something.
<v Speaker 1>It'd bring back a mangled thing, leave it on the
<v Speaker 1>sidewalk in front of the house, and you know, you imagine,
<v Speaker 1>and that's one cat killing how many what forty or
<v Speaker 1>fifty small animals a year? And then every house has
<v Speaker 1>a cat, or every other house has a cat. You
<v Speaker 1>could see how stuff just starts to disappear. Then you've
<v Speaker 1>got the shifting baselines thing all over again, and suddenly
<v Speaker 1>nobody knows what's been lost.
<v Speaker 2>You just they're not around it now exactly. That's the
<v Speaker 2>scariest thing, the shifting baseline. The more I learn about
<v Speaker 2>the history of Ohio and stuff, it's just well, like
<v Speaker 2>you were saying, now, it's just a terrible landscape filled
<v Speaker 2>with corn and it's just totally it start reading back
<v Speaker 2>and it's like holy shit. Like, for example, there's a
<v Speaker 2>one of the most famous oaks in Ohio is called
<v Speaker 2>the Logan Oak in Logan, Ohio. It's this giant, supposedly
<v Speaker 2>six hundred year old white oak. Its canopy reaches down
<v Speaker 2>to the you know, stretches out and comes down to
<v Speaker 2>the ground. It's just beautiful.
<v Speaker 3>It almost looks like a live oak a little bit.
<v Speaker 3>It's so old.
<v Speaker 2>But you know this, this wouldn't have been uncommon, like
<v Speaker 2>there would have been tons of these all through Ohio.
<v Speaker 2>And and that's another sign of the management that happened,
<v Speaker 2>which is the burning. You know, you can't have open
<v Speaker 2>grown trees unless you're in a savannah environment or a
<v Speaker 2>prairie environment. You're not going to have them in a
<v Speaker 2>forest because forest is going to encourage the forest grown
<v Speaker 2>straight up, you know. And so these ancient trees that
<v Speaker 2>are open grown are direct evidence that this area was open.
<v Speaker 1>What does open grow mean?
<v Speaker 2>Like spreading exactly, just like a spreading more lollipop. Whereas
<v Speaker 2>a forest grown, even a wide oak and a forest
<v Speaker 2>it's going to grow straight up sixty foot and then
<v Speaker 2>start branching out. An open grown is going to be
<v Speaker 2>in a field where it's stretching out in all directions.
<v Speaker 2>And then sometimes you get one where if an oak's
<v Speaker 2>been on the property line or i mean the fence
<v Speaker 2>line for a long time, it's got all its branches
<v Speaker 2>out on one side, you know. And that's another sign
<v Speaker 2>of what how the land would have looked back in
<v Speaker 2>the day. But I love reading the lands gates and
<v Speaker 2>trying to piece together how it would have looked and
<v Speaker 2>all this stuff, and there's a lot to it, and
<v Speaker 2>it's definitely changed a whole lot. I mean, one of
<v Speaker 2>the big things that I think about is the fucking
<v Speaker 2>passenger pigeons. Man Like, they would have literated entire parts
<v Speaker 2>of forests and restarted the process and created so much succession,
<v Speaker 2>and it would have been unreal. I mean, and they
<v Speaker 2>were migratory, but they weren't north south migratory on it.
<v Speaker 2>They were just going everywhere. They just picked random spots
<v Speaker 2>and would go around the landscape, randomly filling it with dung,
<v Speaker 2>destroying all the understory, killing all the trees, and then
<v Speaker 2>moving on and taking a new spot. And it just
<v Speaker 2>would have been a mosaic of landscapes.
<v Speaker 1>I just see when I think about what's been lost.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, and I live in a place that's ecological
<v Speaker 1>wreckage and it's still happening. I just, I just I
<v Speaker 1>can never believe why. I can never understand why the
<v Speaker 1>cultures that do that is don't leave sections of it,
<v Speaker 1>like don't realize the importance of like, well, we're gonna
<v Speaker 1>leave and I'm not talking about little crumbs. I'm talking
<v Speaker 1>about like a big we're gonna section this off, and
<v Speaker 1>this is gonna be you know, this fucking five hundred
<v Speaker 1>acre area every few miles, and this is gonna be
<v Speaker 1>you know, a remnant of what was here so future
<v Speaker 1>generations can see it and so maybe there's like a
<v Speaker 1>seed bank to restore at one point, but they take
<v Speaker 1>everything and that's what they do in in Texas, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and it's it drives me nuts, man, It's how do
<v Speaker 1>you how do you? How do you get to that mindset?
<v Speaker 1>It's just it's so every bit so isolating, like you're
<v Speaker 1>so isolated from the life around you. You have no
<v Speaker 1>clue what's going on. You have no clue.
<v Speaker 2>And I think the general consensus back in the day
<v Speaker 2>was there's no way. I mean, could you imagine the
<v Speaker 2>skies being blackened for three days from passenger pigeons, Like,
<v Speaker 2>there's no way you're going to kill all the passenger pigeons.
<v Speaker 2>There's just no possibility you could cut all of the
<v Speaker 2>eastern forest old growth, Like there's no way that you
<v Speaker 2>get But they did, and and you know, I've seen
<v Speaker 2>accounts of the some of the pioneers. They would cut
<v Speaker 2>the forests here.
<v Speaker 3>In Ohio and Indiana and they would just pile.
<v Speaker 2>Up the wood and burn it just because it was best.
<v Speaker 2>Would they didn't even any.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, they're still doing that in Amazon, they still
<v Speaker 1>do that in that you.
<v Speaker 2>Know, what what happened in the Amazon is what happened
<v Speaker 2>here two hundred, one hundred and fifty years ago. It's
<v Speaker 2>just kind of moving forward, but it really is exactly
<v Speaker 2>what happened, destruction of of of the forests.
<v Speaker 1>And it's anthropostcentrism. It's an anthropocentric, disconnected mindset that shouldn't exist.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's it's deranged, it's perverse.
<v Speaker 3>Yep.
<v Speaker 1>And I'm not demonizing peoples. I'm not demonizing anybody. I'm
<v Speaker 1>just saying it's I'm saying it in the hopes that
<v Speaker 1>that culture, people that are in that culture will realize
<v Speaker 1>it and want to get away from it. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I think a lot of people that are you know
<v Speaker 1>that don't any anybody who would have an issue with
<v Speaker 1>what I'm saying who's like in that culture in that
<v Speaker 1>I mean, we're all in the culture, we're all part
<v Speaker 1>of the society. But I think anybody would have a
<v Speaker 1>problem with it if they really looked inside they realized
<v Speaker 1>like they don't like it either, like this is not
<v Speaker 1>you know, they just don't know, and they don't go
<v Speaker 1>to compare it with they don't they don't know.
<v Speaker 3>It's true. Yeah, yeah, and then all this all this.
<v Speaker 2>You know, the commodification of everything. I really have to
<v Speaker 2>sattle it on, like modern capitalism being this force that
<v Speaker 2>is able to basically make a commodity if a thing
<v Speaker 2>can be sold and you make more. It just once
<v Speaker 2>you start getting into commodities and selling and all this
<v Speaker 2>ship making the land into a commodity, you're lost, no turning,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, and then people have to do this ship
<v Speaker 2>to survive. People are putting the tough spot a destroying
<v Speaker 2>the land that they've they've been on forever or starvy,
<v Speaker 2>you know what I mean.
<v Speaker 3>It's like, I mean, I.
<v Speaker 1>Think it comes I think it comes from all this
<v Speaker 1>stuff is within us as prime Like every every single
<v Speaker 1>person has these has this potential like this is a
<v Speaker 1>this is a human hoarding. These are obsolete, evolutionarily obsolete
<v Speaker 1>hoarding impulses that we get as human primates. And unfortunately,
<v Speaker 1>this system that's been created plays into them, and and
<v Speaker 1>uh you know, emphasizes these above other uh perhaps more
<v Speaker 1>beneficial and more adaptive qualities that would serve us better
<v Speaker 1>in the long run, you know. And so we've especially
<v Speaker 1>I think a lot in this country, Like it's this
<v Speaker 1>ship's always been there but especially with like stuff that
<v Speaker 1>Reagan did in the eighties, Like, you know, business is
<v Speaker 1>the best thing you can do. Business as a religion. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>science is only good if it benefits business. Business men
<v Speaker 1>and entrepreneurs are you know, the the highest form of
<v Speaker 1>life in the United States. And privatize everything and government thing,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's the whole thing that was such a ruse.
<v Speaker 1>It was such an obvious fucking ploy to get people
<v Speaker 1>to believe that, you know, the government can't do anything,
<v Speaker 1>but the private corporations are going to do a much
<v Speaker 1>better job. And it's not because they're my cronies and
<v Speaker 1>friends and I want them to be able to make
<v Speaker 1>money off this because I have these this these you know,
<v Speaker 1>evolutionarily obsolete hoarding impulses towards greed. It's it's because the
<v Speaker 1>government just can't do it. It's like, well, yeah, any
<v Speaker 1>any government will have bureaucracy and problems, but any corporation,
<v Speaker 1>their main their main aim is the profit, you know,
<v Speaker 1>beyond providing the service or the necessity that they're supposed
<v Speaker 1>to do. So now like everything everything they said was
<v Speaker 1>gonna happen under communism and and I will give it
<v Speaker 1>to them. It's Okay, that does we did it? Did
<v Speaker 1>happen in communists, you know, breadlines and fucking you know,
<v Speaker 1>just a breakdown of uh, the machine of society. And
<v Speaker 1>it's happening under this capitalism on steroids we've got now.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, look at this, like there's everything's inefficient, grossly inefficient,
<v Speaker 1>grossly expensive, takes forever, nothing gets done, shit falls apart.
<v Speaker 1>You you spend a lot of money for shit that breaks.
<v Speaker 3>It's like, fuck me, I can't.
<v Speaker 2>I can't get over how you can't hardly buy anything
<v Speaker 2>that's decent anymore. I mean even the simplest little things.
<v Speaker 2>It's like, I'll pay two dollars if it I just
<v Speaker 2>need a decent quality product, like all of these things
<v Speaker 2>that I'm trying to think of an example, but it's
<v Speaker 2>just any little like any you ever need any of
<v Speaker 2>this shit. It's just every single quarter it gets you know, stripped,
<v Speaker 2>a little bit more, a little less quality, a little tighter,
<v Speaker 2>a little bit you know, higher profits every quarter is
<v Speaker 2>the goal. And and you know what sucks is that,
<v Speaker 2>like it doesn't matter if you're a good person in
<v Speaker 2>charge of that company. If you don't do it, they
<v Speaker 2>have to find someone that's going to do it because
<v Speaker 2>the whole motive is to create profit every quarter. So
<v Speaker 2>like it's not about being good or bad, it's about
<v Speaker 2>like creating profit under the system.
<v Speaker 3>That's the only thing.
<v Speaker 1>That also when us you know, when you when money,
<v Speaker 1>like it's people need money to be comfortable. You want
<v Speaker 1>money obviously to a certain extent. But I think beyond
<v Speaker 1>a certain level of comfort, it becomes an illness. It's
<v Speaker 1>a mental illness. And that if you're spending all this money,
<v Speaker 1>if you're spending all this time on this focusing on
<v Speaker 1>this one subject, well what about the things like the
<v Speaker 1>other the things that drive me, yeah, are art, science,
<v Speaker 1>you know, laughing my ass off with friends, being you know,
<v Speaker 1>mental exercise, reading, learning, having conversations that make me think,
<v Speaker 1>you know that might be uncomfortable, but make me think
<v Speaker 1>might be horrible sometimes, but still makes me think that
<v Speaker 1>like things, that's what feels good. Like, that's what's going
<v Speaker 1>to feel good when I'm about the croak and I'm like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I got like every last bed of Like I used
<v Speaker 1>everything that makes me human as much as I could,
<v Speaker 1>and I got a ton of cool experiences and I
<v Speaker 1>thought a lot, and I made some cool art and
<v Speaker 1>came a better person versus at the end of the day,
<v Speaker 1>Like if at the end of your life you're like, well,
<v Speaker 1>I got all this stuff, and I got this big
<v Speaker 1>shiny truck, and you know, and I got a lot
<v Speaker 1>of money and papilled all who I am and that
<v Speaker 1>what does that do for? I got a swimming pole
<v Speaker 1>with a D and I just it just seems so
<v Speaker 1>fucking boring to me. It seems really boring. It's it's
<v Speaker 1>an empty it's an empty existence.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, now it really is.
<v Speaker 4>It's it's But anyway, back to Ohio, so so because
<v Speaker 4>I wanted to there's a couple of things I want
<v Speaker 4>to talk to you about, like on on your Instagram page, uh,
<v Speaker 4>bird song, landscapes. You've got a bunch of cool stuff
<v Speaker 4>on there about muscles, about the chestnuts, lots of cool
<v Speaker 4>natural history stuff, the rest belt Botany.
<v Speaker 1>I liked a lot, especially what Mad.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I was definitely inspired by you, of course, and
<v Speaker 2>old walking along the Chicago railroad tracks. That was great.
<v Speaker 1>But where was that? Like, what was that was just
<v Speaker 1>an abandoned parking line you're looking at the stuff that's
<v Speaker 1>popping up in the seams or whereas.
<v Speaker 2>I think it was an old I think it was
<v Speaker 2>an old Meyer that they tore down probably fifteen twenty
<v Speaker 2>years ago. A meyer was ittore Oh oh yeah, oh
<v Speaker 2>Kroger or something right now. But yeah, they just tore
<v Speaker 2>it down and then and then it started popping up
<v Speaker 2>with stuff and it was just kind of interesting. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>invasives and native but it's kind of interesting to see
<v Speaker 2>how it all plays out when you've just got absolute obliterated,
<v Speaker 2>you know site.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, it's interesting. I'm writing a book about that
<v Speaker 1>kind of shit right now. It's really interesting. It's cool
<v Speaker 1>to see. That's weird ecology that forms. But I saw
<v Speaker 1>that same kind of thing happening at Floyd Bennett Field
<v Speaker 1>in Brooklyn, where it's a mixture of natives and invasives,
<v Speaker 1>and you can kind of hold your nose for the invasives.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you're like, okay, this is just a session.
<v Speaker 1>Most of these plants, whether they're native or invasive, they're
<v Speaker 1>they're pioneer species. They're ruturals, so that's how they kind
<v Speaker 1>of come back and are able to do this. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, the they're the first step in ecological secession,
<v Speaker 1>and of course the end goal you're just hoping that
<v Speaker 1>the invasives eventually get out competed by the natives, you know,
<v Speaker 1>but obviously if it was like a proper ass restorations
<v Speaker 1>that you go in and remove the invasives. But it's
<v Speaker 1>always interesting to see what natives pop up and in
<v Speaker 1>sights like that because they are the ones that end
<v Speaker 1>up normally being invasive overseas, you know, and they may's true.
<v Speaker 3>That's true too.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. The Canada golden rod and stuff kind.
<v Speaker 3>Of makes me laugh.
<v Speaker 2>All the ship we've had to deal with from the
<v Speaker 2>Eurasian species or whatever, and then hearing about blue gills
<v Speaker 2>and golden rod being a nightmare over there, It's like, wow.
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy blue blue gill fish.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I guess so blue gills and bass are really
<v Speaker 2>bad over there. Bass is a really bad one, the
<v Speaker 2>largemouth bass.
<v Speaker 1>Oh they just eat everything.
<v Speaker 2>Huh yeah, non native eat just yeah, hoover it all up.
<v Speaker 1>So do you know Yeah, I had asked you about
<v Speaker 1>this for but do you know anything about the early
<v Speaker 1>cultures that had built mounds in what was it southern Ohio,
<v Speaker 1>like long before the Death cult arrived.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Yeah, that's a really interesting part of Ohio history
<v Speaker 2>is like from probably I think maybe five hundred BC.
<v Speaker 2>All the way to about fifteen hundred AD, there was
<v Speaker 2>mound building cultures that were building mounds as well as
<v Speaker 2>like hill forts and these large kind of enclosures they're
<v Speaker 2>called it the mostly along rivers and things like that.
<v Speaker 2>There were actually over ten thousand of them recorded in
<v Speaker 2>Ohio before most of them have been plowed out of existence.
<v Speaker 2>I always say that if this was a if this
<v Speaker 2>was like the in Egypt and was like you know,
<v Speaker 2>the Pyramids or something, this would be like a World
<v Speaker 2>Heritage Site, there'd be tourists.
<v Speaker 3>But it's Ohio.
<v Speaker 2>So they just like plowed over all these and that
<v Speaker 2>includes the mounds. I mean, there were seven giant mounds
<v Speaker 2>on the in the land of downtown Cincinnati that they
<v Speaker 2>destroyed to create the city. Same thing with Columbus. They
<v Speaker 2>leveled mounds and actually use some of the rocks around
<v Speaker 2>the mounds to create the Columbus Courthouse, in a further
<v Speaker 2>disgrace of the our state's history, you know. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>it's like, oh my god, you can't even make this
<v Speaker 2>evil shit up. So but yeah, it's really interesting, and
<v Speaker 2>there's still quite I mean, there's still quite a lot left.
<v Speaker 2>They're still actually with this light oar stuff. You know,
<v Speaker 2>where they go over and they have the the scan
<v Speaker 2>of the earth. They've been able to find ancient mounds
<v Speaker 2>that are imperceivable on the you know, if you're standing there,
<v Speaker 2>you can't really see it, but you can see it
<v Speaker 2>on the light are for some reason because of the
<v Speaker 2>different material they used in the mounds to create.
<v Speaker 1>Them, so different there. Do you know how old?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah?
<v Speaker 3>How old are the mounds?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>The I think the oldest about about five hundred years
<v Speaker 2>old around here. I think the oldest in America is
<v Speaker 2>Poverty Point down in Louisiana, and I think that gets
<v Speaker 2>back to like two thousand years EC. Maybe I'd be
<v Speaker 2>mixing that up.
<v Speaker 1>But they, I mean, these were basically kind of cities.
<v Speaker 1>These were like large, probably large populations.
<v Speaker 2>Exactly same thing with Gohokia over in Illinois and Missouri.
<v Speaker 2>I mean that's been wild, huge And you know what's
<v Speaker 2>interesting too. Prior to I think it was about eleven
<v Speaker 2>hundred or twelve hundred, there was no corn around here
<v Speaker 2>like north It was all a southern thing. So they
<v Speaker 2>had their own species and there was actually five species
<v Speaker 2>that are seven species that they got to the point
<v Speaker 2>of being considered cultivated by modern science considers these cultivated crops.
<v Speaker 2>So it was like annual sunflower, some weed, may grass.
<v Speaker 1>What is something we do?
<v Speaker 2>I don't, I can't. I've actually not seen many. A
<v Speaker 2>lot of them are annuals. So they're just they're kind
<v Speaker 2>of like random. You just don't see a lot of
<v Speaker 2>may grass or something.
<v Speaker 1>Is it that? Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>Is it?
<v Speaker 3>I think it's I think so that could make Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>It's relative that produces the seeds.
<v Speaker 3>So the seeds.
<v Speaker 2>So they actually got the seeds like five or ten
<v Speaker 2>times the size of the natural size of the seed,
<v Speaker 2>and they were able to you know, whether that was
<v Speaker 2>so intentional or not, it's unclear. Maybe they were just
<v Speaker 2>throwing those nearby the village sites and they eventually I'm
<v Speaker 2>sure the larger ones.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, any any human population is select is going to
<v Speaker 1>be a selective force, whether it's intentional or unintentional, on
<v Speaker 1>the plants around them. But I think for crops, they're
<v Speaker 1>probably going to be like, you know, people just pick
<v Speaker 1>what's what's going to be bigger and produce more food
<v Speaker 1>and grow those and don't grow the little ones.
<v Speaker 2>Probably, so yeah, exactly, and a quick turnaround the annual species,
<v Speaker 2>so that means they were able to potentially get them
<v Speaker 2>under cultivation and get the size increased relatively quickly. They
<v Speaker 2>call it the Eastern Agricultural Complex, and it's the only
<v Speaker 2>place in Kentucky in Ohio around the Ohio Valley. It's
<v Speaker 2>it's like one of the five places in the world
<v Speaker 2>that agriculture was invented, you know, I mean people actually
<v Speaker 2>cultivated wild crops into something different, the other ones being
<v Speaker 2>you know, South America and Central America and in this valley.
<v Speaker 1>Do you do you know what happened to the cultures there,
<v Speaker 1>if it collapsed or just disintegrated then into like nomadic
<v Speaker 1>tribes again or I'm really interested that The first time
<v Speaker 1>I learned, I mean, I knew about the mounds in
<v Speaker 1>southern Illinois, but I was in the Field Museum and
<v Speaker 1>they've got some really cool displays, and I was I
<v Speaker 1>just sat there looking at these displays of these artifacts
<v Speaker 1>just you know, blown away like there was you know,
<v Speaker 1>looked like there was metallurgy and these were pretty advanced,
<v Speaker 1>uh City states. It seemed like, you know, I don't
<v Speaker 1>know much Aboutely.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's it's I'd love to see that collection. The
<v Speaker 2>Field Museum is supposed to have.
<v Speaker 3>It's such a huge amount.
<v Speaker 1>It's such a great They've got a fucking well Witchy
<v Speaker 1>had diorama in there. You know, well, Witchi the weird
<v Speaker 1>plant from the maybe yeah, Jurassic or a Triassic of
<v Speaker 1>it's still one species extent, but used to be a
<v Speaker 1>lot more about it. But they've got they've got a
<v Speaker 1>Witchy had diorama in there. It's like where I want
<v Speaker 1>my ashes spread. It's such a I just remember going
<v Speaker 1>there as a kid and just running wild and being
<v Speaker 1>it's such a cool building too.
<v Speaker 3>But that's awesome.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but yeah, they've got they've actually got a huge
<v Speaker 2>amount of the contents of the nouns from mostly southern Ohio.
<v Speaker 2>Archaeology was pretty much developed in the Ohio River Valley
<v Speaker 2>by by investigating these sounds in the late eighteen hundreds,
<v Speaker 2>and they took out, you know, the contents, and they
<v Speaker 2>sent them to the Chicago World's Fair, I think it
<v Speaker 2>was eighteen ninety three or whatever, and then they eventually
<v Speaker 2>got to the Field Museum, so and then some of
<v Speaker 2>them get sent to fucking the British Museum. Of course,
<v Speaker 2>there's tons of hope Well and a Dina artifacts in
<v Speaker 2>the British Museum, which is just ridiculous.
<v Speaker 1>But hopefully Yeah, that's really hope.
<v Speaker 2>Really interesting stuff. They were doing opper pieces. They were
<v Speaker 2>creating things out of mica that like kind of quortsy
<v Speaker 2>looking rack they I think I've seen like a skull
<v Speaker 2>made out of mica that the and they also had
<v Speaker 2>a really advanced like level of stone napping and creating
<v Speaker 2>different types of h you know, points and arrowheads and things.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>When I when, I yeah, really interesting.
<v Speaker 1>When I type in why did the Hope Well culture disappear,
<v Speaker 1>this is what AI says. It says the exact reason
<v Speaker 1>for the disappearance that a Hope Well culture remains unknown,
<v Speaker 1>but theories include climate chair change, warfare with other tribes,
<v Speaker 1>over hunting due to the introduction of the bow and arrow.
<v Speaker 1>These all just sound like standard human you know, this
<v Speaker 1>is what happens when human human societies burned themselves, a
<v Speaker 1>breakdown in their complex trade network, and even a potential
<v Speaker 1>cosmic event. And I don't know about that.
<v Speaker 2>No, that's that was a famous paper a few years ago,
<v Speaker 2>but that kind of got debunked. They said that a
<v Speaker 2>meteor came through and halls that climate change a band and.
<v Speaker 1>That's Joe Rogan's going to happen on his podcast.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah right, No, he loved that. That's some what's that
<v Speaker 2>one now doing all that Graham hit Hancock or something,
<v Speaker 2>I forget his name.
<v Speaker 1>Anyway, Yeah, I saw part of that Netflix thing and
<v Speaker 1>I was like, man, this is so fucking hilarious. It's
<v Speaker 1>like Discovery Discovery Channel Circle nineteen ninety six, you know what,
<v Speaker 1>like the just what it is like they put in
<v Speaker 1>the music. They put in the music so you know
<v Speaker 1>when to feel you know, uh mystified.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's crazy though. So these trade networks of the
<v Speaker 2>Hopewell people in particular, they were they stretched all the
<v Speaker 2>way from Yellowstone because they've found certain points that were
<v Speaker 2>made out of.
<v Speaker 3>I'm blanket on the black what's that black rock?
<v Speaker 2>That's like yeah, obsidian, So they've got obsidian blades from there,
<v Speaker 2>so it's from this particular hillside that they've traced it to.
<v Speaker 3>They've also got shells.
<v Speaker 1>Wait, Citi was traced from where Mexico or what.
<v Speaker 2>No, from the Yellowstone actually from from this particular hillside
<v Speaker 2>and Yellowstone National Park.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Man, there's no obsidy in anywhere around Ohio. That's
<v Speaker 1>crazy to fea exactly.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so that's a weird so all the way from
<v Speaker 2>there and then all the way up from Florida the
<v Speaker 2>East coast as well, So these trade networks were massive,
<v Speaker 2>and they were yeah, really advanced, interesting culture and and
<v Speaker 2>you know, I don't know. I mean, that's one of
<v Speaker 2>the things that I've slowly kind of learned. I'm not
<v Speaker 2>formally educated in any of this, but the Hopewell culture
<v Speaker 2>is not a tribe or necessarily a group of people
<v Speaker 2>at all.
<v Speaker 3>It's a culture of.
<v Speaker 2>Mostly earth and wear and points creating points in a
<v Speaker 2>certain way. It's a type of art style that we
<v Speaker 2>call a culture. So we don't really know much about
<v Speaker 2>the tribes themselves and all that stuff, like it really
<v Speaker 2>is just this kind of and then when you get
<v Speaker 2>to about fifteen hundred, the last one was the Ford
<v Speaker 2>Ancient culture. At that point, you know, history comes in,
<v Speaker 2>the European perspective comes in, and there is tribes that
<v Speaker 2>you can name. So that's when the culture stuff stops
<v Speaker 2>and it starts becoming tribes. But ultimately they're the same
<v Speaker 2>people that we're here. You know, there's movements happening all
<v Speaker 2>the time.
<v Speaker 1>Right, it's the same human lineage, but the societies and
<v Speaker 1>the culture has change. It's so it's so interesting to me.
<v Speaker 1>Like I always wonder about the h I was talking
<v Speaker 1>to this guy, Keeper Trout, and he kind of put
<v Speaker 1>this in my head. He was like, you know, before
<v Speaker 1>he was basically I forget what words he used, but
<v Speaker 1>he's like, you know, before the Death Cult crossed the
<v Speaker 1>ocean and moved to North America, they exterminated all the
<v Speaker 1>people that were, you know, had a relationship with the
<v Speaker 1>living world in Europe first, And who were those people?
<v Speaker 1>And I think about that, and I'm like, man, that's
<v Speaker 1>the who were those people?
<v Speaker 2>That? What was interesting too? Yeah, I mean you read that.
<v Speaker 2>I've read some of the even like Julius Caesar going
<v Speaker 2>into Britain and finding these picks people and stuff, and
<v Speaker 2>these Gaelic people that were or the Celtic people that
<v Speaker 2>were like basically worshiping oak trees and stuff.
<v Speaker 3>And yeah, really interesting though. But yeah, that got wiped out,
<v Speaker 3>no doubt.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, yeah, that's where the shit started. You know,
<v Speaker 1>this this separate, this this civilization that thinks it's better
<v Speaker 1>than than than quote unquote nature. And I think there's
<v Speaker 1>because I think about all the time. I think it's
<v Speaker 1>you know it's the partially the mono theism. I think
<v Speaker 1>it's so funny because I mean, you look at like
<v Speaker 1>Jesus and it was like this guy was a fucking
<v Speaker 1>socialist man. This guy was like a fucking took the side,
<v Speaker 1>a little guy, fight for the poor like he was about.
<v Speaker 1>You can't really argue about a lot of the shit
<v Speaker 1>that he was preaching. But then you talk, you'd like,
<v Speaker 1>meet Christians and they're they never talk about that. They're
<v Speaker 1>never about that. You know, they're they're like, they're never
<v Speaker 1>about those things. They're always about.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, or if they are, they're not talking about you know.
<v Speaker 2>The people who are so loud aren't all about that. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>theist I mean.
<v Speaker 1>There are some, there're some cool of course, there's cool
<v Speaker 1>people in everything religion. I'm not I'm not saying that
<v Speaker 1>everyone who's religious is not whatever. You know, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>you cut me some sleck if you're listening. But I'm
<v Speaker 1>just saying when you look at the words that a guy,
<v Speaker 1>you know, a son of Gad, and then you compare
<v Speaker 1>that with how a lot of modern day Christians, especially
<v Speaker 1>in this country, actor you're like, man, what the fuck
<v Speaker 1>got lost in translation? Like that? Whole part about about,
<v Speaker 1>you know, standing with the poor and helping people and
<v Speaker 1>bringing people up. Like you guys don't listen to that,
<v Speaker 1>do you? You focused on all this other shit and
<v Speaker 1>how much is that fucking shiny watch in that car
<v Speaker 1>that you're driving. You know, it's like you're a fucking
<v Speaker 1>victim of the human ape complex, just like everyone can
<v Speaker 1>be if you don't keep on top of your shit.
<v Speaker 1>So it's wild, exactly. I went on fund at Tangent.
<v Speaker 1>I'm sorry, let's talk about muscles. I could talk about
<v Speaker 1>the Hopewell culture for forever and any.
<v Speaker 2>Love that stuff. I mean, that's really interesting.
<v Speaker 1>I just want to understand.
<v Speaker 2>You just got we just got the UNESCO World Heritage
<v Speaker 2>for some of the sites that was like I think
<v Speaker 2>it was last year or the year prior twenty twenty two,
<v Speaker 2>so they are officially UNESCO World Heritage Sites, some of
<v Speaker 2>them are. And I definitely encourage if anyone's out here
<v Speaker 2>in Ohio or even anywhere in the Midwest, like seek
<v Speaker 2>these sites out. There's a bunch up in wiscons that
<v Speaker 2>are really unique because they're they're more animal characters like
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, like deer and bad. I think there's
<v Speaker 2>an awesome one.
<v Speaker 3>Really cool stuff, and it's it's here.
<v Speaker 2>It's just kind of overlooked and I wouldn't hard to see,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, hard to appreciate sometimes, but once you start
<v Speaker 2>learning about it, it's really exciting.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder why that shit just got plowed. I think
<v Speaker 1>because it was like at that time, it was like
<v Speaker 1>the frontier and nobody was really watching it, at least
<v Speaker 1>no one that was associated with any kind of like
<v Speaker 1>fucking maybe university or something who'd be like, wait, maybe
<v Speaker 1>we want to study these and it was you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's all like frontiers people and pioneers and they're just
<v Speaker 1>they don't fucking.
<v Speaker 3>Know, they're you know, yeah, exactly, poor.
<v Speaker 1>Uneducated, like get rid of this, it's in the way,
<v Speaker 1>fuck it, you know. Or if it was like nefarious,
<v Speaker 1>like what the Spanish did with with the Aztec, you
<v Speaker 1>know in Mexico City, where they're like, well, we're going
<v Speaker 1>to build a fucking you know church on top of
<v Speaker 1>this beautiful temple.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and a lot of them, the existing ones often
<v Speaker 2>exist because they put a cemetery on top of the
<v Speaker 2>biggest mound in town, and then they would put you know,
<v Speaker 2>graves on the mound as well. But they were a
<v Speaker 2>lot of them are preserved because they were in a miterary.
<v Speaker 2>So but yeah, at that time, I don't think anyone
<v Speaker 2>was given a crap about anything. Like I say, I
<v Speaker 2>think it was I'm looking up here Ephraim Squire and
<v Speaker 2>Edwin Hamilton Davis. So Squire and Davis put out their
<v Speaker 2>Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi in eighteen forty eight, and
<v Speaker 2>that was been by the Smithsonian. That was the first
<v Speaker 2>text of basically of like archaeology, Like nobody was really
<v Speaker 2>doing much, you know, nobody was doing much of this
<v Speaker 2>stuff until this, and that was the And to this
<v Speaker 2>day the Peabodies were highly involved in funding all this
<v Speaker 2>and some of the rich people out east. To this day,
<v Speaker 2>Serpent Nouns in Ohio is still owned by Harvard University,
<v Speaker 2>although it's administered by the Ohio History Connection. You know,
<v Speaker 2>it's it's owned by the university. So the peabodies bought it.
<v Speaker 1>I think, like so much of America, you think about
<v Speaker 1>what's there today, there's like a come and go on
<v Speaker 1>top of where there was a fucking mountain. You guys
<v Speaker 1>have come and go out there, right? What is what
<v Speaker 1>are like some of the the horrible franchise businesses.
<v Speaker 2>That is a big one.
<v Speaker 1>The mental pollution, like the ship, if I could get
<v Speaker 1>it out of my mind as a cat, I've got
<v Speaker 1>memories of these fucking corporate logos and signs, just you know,
<v Speaker 1>I've got the taint. What what is that that?
<v Speaker 2>You know?
<v Speaker 1>What are some of the what are some of the
<v Speaker 1>horrible corporate that these you guys get out there?
<v Speaker 3>Oh god, let's see. Speedway is a big one for me.
<v Speaker 2>There's always speed ways around at least where I'm at,
<v Speaker 2>just track.
<v Speaker 3>I mean, Walmart takes over every small.
<v Speaker 2>Town or mid sized town, and you know it gets
<v Speaker 2>their Walmart's so fucked man. They always get ten year
<v Speaker 2>tax exemption status and then after ten years they're fucking
<v Speaker 2>moving and they're out of that tower, or they're putting
<v Speaker 2>pressure on them to give them another extension, or they're
<v Speaker 2>gonna move. And just crap, like my mind, the empty
<v Speaker 2>Kroger's and Walmart.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, garbage, just fucking effluent. You know, America had
<v Speaker 1>too much land. I mean, you can't do this shit.
<v Speaker 1>If you don't have a lot of land, you can't
<v Speaker 1>build as much stupid shit like this. You got to
<v Speaker 1>get a little bit darker. Yeah, but my mom this
<v Speaker 1>is a funny story. It's kind of a we're all
<v Speaker 1>over the place here today. It's fine. My mom used
<v Speaker 1>to she'd go to Walmart. I was in the graffiti
<v Speaker 1>as a kid. She'd go to Walmart and I would
<v Speaker 1>be like, oh, let me come, because I'd go there
<v Speaker 1>and I would fucking rack like fifteen Kansas spray paint.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I had this coat where I could stuff
<v Speaker 1>them in, and she would she never knew. Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>she never knew. She's I told her later on, She's like,
<v Speaker 1>I knew you were doing that. I was like, the
<v Speaker 1>fuck you. You didn't know I was doing that. You
<v Speaker 1>hated all that shit. I would go in there and
<v Speaker 1>the whole time hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. I
<v Speaker 1>shouldn't be saying this on a podcast. This is twenty
<v Speaker 1>years ago. Man, it's almost thirty years ago. There's a
<v Speaker 1>fucking statute of limitations. I fucking robb I fucking robbed them.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I would get and then you could fly
<v Speaker 1>with paintback then too, So I'd like send a duffel
<v Speaker 1>bag with eighty Kansas spray paint in it to San
<v Speaker 1>Francisco in the bottom of a plane. You know, I
<v Speaker 1>would just check it and carry on. I never got
<v Speaker 1>I don't know how, because it seems like should be
<v Speaker 1>a log inst I think that is illegal. They tell
<v Speaker 1>you can't take aerosols in your your checked ball.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah yeah, but I never had an issue now.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, okay, moving on. Sorry, what are we talking about?
<v Speaker 2>Well, you mentioned muscles man, that's one of my favorite
<v Speaker 2>I made that video because I really and that's another thing.
<v Speaker 2>The reason I love this creature the freshwater muzzles. So
<v Speaker 2>they're they're basically a clam that lived in the streams
<v Speaker 2>and rivers of the east in Ohio. There's a lot
<v Speaker 2>that I like about them. But this is the center
<v Speaker 2>of diversity for that for that type of creatures, for
<v Speaker 2>that family.
<v Speaker 1>There were there were like many species, right, like I
<v Speaker 1>think my friend Roger Pete was telling me about this
<v Speaker 1>one like there were because he was work he was
<v Speaker 1>doing Endangered spear, Endangered and Extinct species murals with Center
<v Speaker 1>for Biological Diversity. He was telling me the muscle diversity
<v Speaker 1>out east was fucking nuts because the rivers were so extensive.
<v Speaker 3>It's crazy.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly, because you have the wet rivers you've got
<v Speaker 2>a lot of streams.
<v Speaker 3>You got you know where I'm at. It starts getting to.
<v Speaker 2>The glaciated topography, kind of some rolling and a lot
<v Speaker 2>of flat areas, but then further south you've got the
<v Speaker 2>more steep hillsides and the streams coming down. So there
<v Speaker 2>was a huge variety and like dozens, probably hundreds of
<v Speaker 2>different species. And they're still kind of discovering species of
<v Speaker 2>darters and species of which is a little brightly colored fish,
<v Speaker 2>and species of muscles to this day. But what's really
<v Speaker 2>screwed and part of the reason I was going to
<v Speaker 2>say that I love them their interaction with the fish.
<v Speaker 2>So just like flowers and certain species of plants, they
<v Speaker 2>have very unique relationships with the fish because they inject
<v Speaker 2>their eggs into the fish's gills to live kind of
<v Speaker 2>like a symbiotic relationship where these little mini muscles are
<v Speaker 2>living on the fishkills and then eventually they drop down
<v Speaker 2>and start getting bigger and you know, get to.
<v Speaker 1>The bottom of it, and the muscles like they have
<v Speaker 1>to get them all the.
<v Speaker 2>Muscles exactly, They got to find a way to get
<v Speaker 2>them in. So you lure the fish in either by
<v Speaker 2>chemical means or some of them even have little appendages
<v Speaker 2>that look like a minnow or look like a lure,
<v Speaker 2>and they wave that in the water the fish gets
<v Speaker 2>close enough, and then they clamp down on the fish's like,
<v Speaker 2>you know, mouth, and inject those eggs into their I'm
<v Speaker 2>not sure if they're eggs. I think they're actually tiny
<v Speaker 2>little muzzles, but they inject them onto the fish's gills
<v Speaker 2>and then, like I'm saying, so, some muzzles only use
<v Speaker 2>one species of fish to host on, like maybe they'll
<v Speaker 2>only use a certain darter or.
<v Speaker 1>They have they have specifist relationships.
<v Speaker 2>Exactly with these little minofish that are I grew up fishing,
<v Speaker 2>but these mino fit. Nobody cares about all these different
<v Speaker 2>hundreds of different fish that they aren't game species. They're
<v Speaker 2>just little minnows. Some of them are beautiful.
<v Speaker 1>Anthric sit right there is like no one cares. Why not?
<v Speaker 1>This is a beautiful machine. This is it's been gifted
<v Speaker 1>to us by you know, those that came before. Why
<v Speaker 1>the fuck would do you?
<v Speaker 2>And they're beautiful, man, they rival anything from the tropics
<v Speaker 2>in my opinion. I mean, they're like orange and green
<v Speaker 2>and just the most beautiful candy darters or one that
<v Speaker 2>Johnny darters are really beautiful. One. There's a lot of
<v Speaker 2>different species, but yeah, they so these these muzzles have
<v Speaker 2>different relationships. Some of them are generalists and can use
<v Speaker 2>different species of fish, but some of them only use
<v Speaker 2>a particular species of fish. So they're kind of like
<v Speaker 2>And then they filter the water and they keep it clean,
<v Speaker 2>and they keep the algae looms down, and they keep
<v Speaker 2>the sedimentation down. Machine that they kept the waters really clean.
<v Speaker 2>And now they's you know, we got a lot of
<v Speaker 2>clear creeks and stuff like that around here. Every water
<v Speaker 2>body of water is muddy like almost all of the year,
<v Speaker 2>you know, because we've destroyed the forests. All of this
<v Speaker 2>water is running off the corn fields and the soybean
<v Speaker 2>fields into the creeks. Back in the day, the early
<v Speaker 2>explorers said that they could see ten foot down to
<v Speaker 2>the bottom of these rivers and creeks.
<v Speaker 1>Filtering it through. Man, that's great, I mean, in the forest,
<v Speaker 1>perfect example living living machine. Like why should I care
<v Speaker 1>about this tiny fish if it's too small to eat, Well,
<v Speaker 1>it's a small it's a small cog in this much
<v Speaker 1>larger living machine. That the fish is tied because of
<v Speaker 1>its relationship with this muscle. It's tied to clear water.
<v Speaker 1>You know, do you want exact shitty dirty water that
<v Speaker 1>you can't mean? This is this It's all connected, man.
<v Speaker 2>And then it really I mean, even if you have
<v Speaker 2>no appreciation for all of that and the beauty of
<v Speaker 2>all of that, Like the algae blooms are going to
<v Speaker 2>kill your dog, you know, or kill your or kill
<v Speaker 2>you know. They're real serious now. So this stuff is
<v Speaker 2>having a serious impact. The algae blooms in Lake Erie
<v Speaker 2>and the the you know, I think the Gulf of
<v Speaker 2>Mexico too, are really bad.
<v Speaker 3>So is there hope for that?
<v Speaker 1>Is there hope for you know? I mean that would
<v Speaker 1>be a thing like we're storing part of this living machine,
<v Speaker 1>is getting those muscles back to the populations they were
<v Speaker 1>at stink clean the water. Is anybody trying to do that?
<v Speaker 1>Are there? Is there government money going towards that?
<v Speaker 3>They are a little bit.
<v Speaker 2>It's disappointing all of the money generally. And this is
<v Speaker 2>a huge critique I have of of wildlife management whatever
<v Speaker 2>you call it natural resources. It all goes species, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and then a little tiny portion is going to go
<v Speaker 2>to the songbirds and the muzzles and the fish and
<v Speaker 2>the you know, the non game fish and the all
<v Speaker 2>of the other things, the minx and the fishures or
<v Speaker 2>whatever else they're trying to help out with. But they
<v Speaker 2>are doing a little bit, especially down in Kentucky. There's
<v Speaker 2>a few nonprofits. Conservation Fisheries is a really good nonprofit
<v Speaker 2>out of Tennessee. I believe they've got a TikTok and
<v Speaker 2>an so they're they're cool to follow, and they're they're
<v Speaker 2>also helping with the hell Benders, that giant new looking thing.
<v Speaker 1>What's it cool?
<v Speaker 3>What's the hell Bender?
<v Speaker 2>No?
<v Speaker 1>No, No, The organization Conservation.
<v Speaker 2>Fisheries I believe it's called and I know they're on Instagram,
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, they're a really good organization. That's that they've
<v Speaker 2>got to They breed these species out and then reintroduce
<v Speaker 2>them and stuff.
<v Speaker 1>I'd imagine a lot of the I'd imagine a lot
<v Speaker 1>of the muscle species are just extinct now too. And
<v Speaker 1>they're specifist, you know if you when you've got specifist
<v Speaker 1>relationships in an ecosystem. First off, it's a thing. It's
<v Speaker 1>totally fascinating, like how does this evolve? How many steps
<v Speaker 1>did this take? What? How to how to get there.
<v Speaker 1>It's so cool, but also it makes it really sensitive. Obviously,
<v Speaker 1>it's this thing that needs to be protected because if
<v Speaker 1>one gets all you have to do is to get
<v Speaker 1>the extinction of one is get the you know, take
<v Speaker 1>out the other. And it's it's like it's literally like
<v Speaker 1>a Jenga tower. You take the whole thing apart just
<v Speaker 1>by removing one small piece.
<v Speaker 2>But I think that, yeah, and that's what that's what
<v Speaker 2>we had to you know, Ohio. One of the things
<v Speaker 2>I am sometimes I'm was jealous of watching your stuff
<v Speaker 2>is you have so many endemic species in California and
<v Speaker 2>in Texas because you have these difficult environments, these microclid
<v Speaker 2>or whatever they are, the the serpentine soils come up
<v Speaker 2>or whatever it is that make it very difficult.
<v Speaker 3>To live in.
<v Speaker 2>In Ohio, all of that's been kind of flattened in
<v Speaker 2>a race, like all of the complexity of the streams.
<v Speaker 2>We've got dams all up and down the Ohio River.
<v Speaker 2>It's basically a series of reservoirs that allows for barge traffic.
<v Speaker 2>Back in the day, the Ohio River would have went
<v Speaker 2>down to like I have just made a video about
<v Speaker 2>this too. There's pictures of the Ohio River being like
<v Speaker 2>five inches deep or like two inches deep. You could
<v Speaker 2>have they drove cars across it and it would have varied.
<v Speaker 2>In the spring, it would have been flooded, and then
<v Speaker 2>it would have came down in the fall. All of these,
<v Speaker 2>all of these hydrological changes, from the dams, to.
<v Speaker 3>The to the ditches.
<v Speaker 2>To the freaking tiles in the fields they put i
<v Speaker 2>under all the fields that are wet to drain them
<v Speaker 2>to the ditches and get them drained. All of this
<v Speaker 2>stuff is extremely altered at least Ohio in the east.
<v Speaker 2>And it's it's fucked I mean, and and things like muscles.
<v Speaker 2>You can't you have to have the habitat. You can't
<v Speaker 2>just throw them wherever.
<v Speaker 3>I mean.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, it's it's really messed up. I mean, that's
<v Speaker 2>one of the biggest things. I saw your post about
<v Speaker 2>the ditch the other day, and like restoring ditches that
<v Speaker 2>is so important, Like people do not understand.
<v Speaker 3>Especially here, they don't get it.
<v Speaker 1>So mass again, it's just that's the fucking living machine.
<v Speaker 1>It's the the plant life. They scraped the ditches for anybody, listen,
<v Speaker 1>to scrape the sides of these ditches every six months
<v Speaker 1>of all the plant life. And then of course, because
<v Speaker 1>there's nothing holding the sides of the slope together, the
<v Speaker 1>fucking ground, the crouch just collapses. And so uh, you
<v Speaker 1>know it was I was just like, wh you plant cypresses?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, someone else made the point. Plant you know,
<v Speaker 1>some grass species, some native grasses. I don't think we unfortunately,
<v Speaker 1>I don't think we have, not that I'm familiar with
<v Speaker 1>a lot of large growing grass species like you would
<v Speaker 1>get in the prairie. Because grasses, of course, have the
<v Speaker 1>fibrous roots. They're monocots, whereas you know the die coots,
<v Speaker 1>unicots and conifers would have a big tap root generally,
<v Speaker 1>well maybe not conifers so much, but and so that
<v Speaker 1>fibrous network is going to act like the netting the
<v Speaker 1>whole those slopes together. I don't know down here if
<v Speaker 1>I mean, we've got a lot of invasive grasses, and
<v Speaker 1>I think of the native grasses, I'm not too familiar
<v Speaker 1>with the native grasses here, but we don't have anything
<v Speaker 1>like big blue stem you know that's kind of sent
<v Speaker 1>down rooms like twenty foot deep. But either way, man,
<v Speaker 1>it's sund.
<v Speaker 2>That needs to be done though. I mean, these these ditches,
<v Speaker 2>they do the same thing here. They scrape them. They
<v Speaker 2>still all the It's funny they kill all the wild
<v Speaker 2>there's wild rye, normally there's cut leaf cone flour. There's
<v Speaker 2>all kinds of different species that are going to grow
<v Speaker 2>in the ditches and the wet ditches, and they just
<v Speaker 2>destroy it.
<v Speaker 1>But that mentality that you're gonna come you know, you
<v Speaker 1>come into the Ohio River Valley and you don't adapt
<v Speaker 1>to the way things are, you make it adapt to you.
<v Speaker 1>It's that's the fucked mentality. You're like, war gonna deil
<v Speaker 1>those because wait at batter and you don't. You're you're
<v Speaker 1>not working with all the fucking tools upstairs. Like obviously
<v Speaker 1>this stuff is here for a reason. It's been here
<v Speaker 1>for a long time. Maybe you should keep it around
<v Speaker 1>before you start throwing shit out of the you know,
<v Speaker 1>out from under the hood. Yeah, exactly.
<v Speaker 2>It's like rolling op It's.
<v Speaker 1>Like rolling up to a fucking car, like I don't
<v Speaker 1>anyth about cars. Just be like, well, I probably don't
<v Speaker 1>know it this time, and I'll just start throwing shit out.
<v Speaker 2>Eh.
<v Speaker 1>If it doesn't look like I don't know, I can't
<v Speaker 1>understand why you can't understand it. If you can't understand it,
<v Speaker 1>then don't fuck with it. Maybe try to understand it
<v Speaker 1>before you get rid of it. What is it doing?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, we got no idea. Man, we still don't even
<v Speaker 2>have any I mean, we are just scratching the surface
<v Speaker 2>of this of these connections. Like I'm always the fucking
<v Speaker 2>arrogance covered. I read a paper from twenty seventeen. They
<v Speaker 2>discovered like five species of weevil on uh uh, I'm
<v Speaker 2>blanking on the scientific name.
<v Speaker 3>What's prairie doc and H.
<v Speaker 2>Sylphia, all the others rosenweed, Sylpium, So I think they're
<v Speaker 2>like Sylphium specialist.
<v Speaker 3>Beetles. We just discovered these.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, there's so many things they are discovering that
<v Speaker 2>the the pollen and the nectar from native flowers have
<v Speaker 2>certain like medical benefits for bees, for like bumblebees and
<v Speaker 2>in summer high.
<v Speaker 1>Why should you care about a beetle? Why watch a
<v Speaker 1>beetle gonna do well? The beetle might be the thing
<v Speaker 1>that keeps that plant in check because they co evolved together,
<v Speaker 1>you fucking knit with Of course, I wouldn't say this
<v Speaker 1>like this to them, but that's why I want to
<v Speaker 1>shake them. And I just think of like the fucking
<v Speaker 1>Republican senator that why are studying quail Why are studying
<v Speaker 1>how Quayle have sex? Because it's part of the fucking
<v Speaker 1>living machine that you don't understand yet because you've been
<v Speaker 1>indoctrinated in this fucking death cult. That's why, that's why
<v Speaker 1>we're studying it, because we absolutely like, are you really
<v Speaker 1>questioning God? There's a fucking Reagan quote. I always bring
<v Speaker 1>it back, always bring it back the Reagan. I mean, granted,
<v Speaker 1>Gregan was just the puppet. He was a trojan horse
<v Speaker 1>for this whole fucked up economic and Randy and economic
<v Speaker 1>ideology we're living in it. But there's a Reagan quote
<v Speaker 1>and Carl Sagan put it in his book The Demon
<v Speaker 1>Haunted World, that's like, uh, we're not here to subsidize curiosity.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, well, that's why you're gonna it was something
<v Speaker 1>like that. It's like, well, that's why you're gonna end
<v Speaker 1>up with society for a fucking nit which like we
<v Speaker 1>have now. You know, like that's good in the short term.
<v Speaker 2>You can advertize, yeah.
<v Speaker 1>That's good. In the short term. You can sell people
<v Speaker 1>stupid shit that they don't really need it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>eighteen percent interest but in long term, if you want
<v Speaker 1>a sustainable a society that is self sustaining and is
<v Speaker 1>going to be around for a while, that might not
<v Speaker 1>be the best attitude to take. Maybe you want to
<v Speaker 1>fund well curiosity.
<v Speaker 2>And it wasn't too long ago, remember when people would
<v Speaker 2>hate on China and say, China's not gonna mess with
<v Speaker 2>us because they can't invent anything. They've got to do
<v Speaker 2>is produce what we give them in our plans and
<v Speaker 2>our blueprint. And now it's like no, because they've invested
<v Speaker 2>in certain things education, curiosity, the fund, it's a big deal.
<v Speaker 1>Y friend Peter Art studies orchids, he's he knows. He
<v Speaker 1>tells me all about like the botanists, and he knows
<v Speaker 1>a lot of botanists and couldn't bring and he's like, oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>they don't have much. They don't have nearly as much
<v Speaker 1>trouble getting funding as American scientists.
<v Speaker 2>And sense we've got we've got whole arbariums closing down,
<v Speaker 2>like huge depositories of knowledge just closing down, like a
<v Speaker 2>library of Alexandria or something. It's ridiculous, Like yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's very.
<v Speaker 1>We're not going to be I don't think this country's
<v Speaker 1>gonna be around in a century. Maybe. I think it's
<v Speaker 1>probably what's going to happen is it's gonna just I mean,
<v Speaker 1>Trump's gonna be like Reagan two point zero and it's
<v Speaker 1>just going to get further deregulated. People are gonna get dumber,
<v Speaker 1>the middle class is going to further a road, and
<v Speaker 1>then people are going to be scratching or you know,
<v Speaker 1>like I thought he was going to lower grocery prices.
<v Speaker 1>What happened, Well, you know, nope, yeah, I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, at the same time, the left fucking
<v Speaker 1>dropped the ball. They don't have any answer. They abandoned
<v Speaker 1>the working class and they're all about all the identitarian
<v Speaker 1>shit and you know, performing on online and sh it's
<v Speaker 1>and attacking each other.
<v Speaker 2>We are their corporate democrats, and they don't you know,
<v Speaker 2>aren't going to do anything for anybody. They just give
<v Speaker 2>the the you know, lip service.
<v Speaker 1>I think what what drives me next? When you look
<v Speaker 1>at like the sixties, and granted it was drug addult
<v Speaker 1>and there's a lot of dumb shit there too, you know,
<v Speaker 1>but when you look at the sixties and why it
<v Speaker 1>was successful at what it did, it wasn't a culture
<v Speaker 1>of like attacking each other and constantly putting shit through
<v Speaker 1>this filter and shaming each other, and we need, you know,
<v Speaker 1>everyone's going to toe the line, or we're or we're
<v Speaker 1>gonna we're going to counsel you, or say you're a
<v Speaker 1>fucking Republican or what you know. And it was about
<v Speaker 1>it was seemingly for I wouldn't live through it. I was,
<v Speaker 1>but what I can tell it was just a lot
<v Speaker 1>more warm. It was a lot more friendly, and it
<v Speaker 1>was fun. Maybe the culture was. And now it's like
<v Speaker 1>I feel like the American left has just not all
<v Speaker 1>of it, of course, but it's gotten away from the
<v Speaker 1>working class, been taken over by bourgeois college kids with
<v Speaker 1>rich parents. This is these are broad generalizations. Of course,
<v Speaker 1>there's exceptions to everything. And it's become this culture of
<v Speaker 1>like mean girls, you know, not literally it can be
<v Speaker 1>the movie the movie Mean Girls. They're like mean just
<v Speaker 1>then they're not happy, like you. Look, I look at
<v Speaker 1>the people who do this, who talk shit online and
<v Speaker 1>are just constant assholes, and I'm like, man, these people,
<v Speaker 1>like this is not how a happy person act acts.
<v Speaker 2>Like No, they're right, that's the main thing. That's what
<v Speaker 2>I've discovered too, is they're they're just they're struggling in
<v Speaker 2>their own way, even if what they say is just ridiculous,
<v Speaker 2>Like they're not in a good spot. That's why they're
<v Speaker 2>posting so much online. That's why they're just like blabbing
<v Speaker 2>about like they're That's what I've found time and time again.
<v Speaker 2>And it's like and it almost seems like the worst,
<v Speaker 2>more desperate spot you get into, the more you post
<v Speaker 2>online you get.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, and it's a bad thing.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, And you know what I was gonna say too, though,
<v Speaker 2>I've seen this crap and even native plan you know,
<v Speaker 2>even like Facebook groups about native plants and stuff, people
<v Speaker 2>get so shamey and so trying to guilt people into
<v Speaker 2>doing this, are trying to strong arm them in this
<v Speaker 2>like very you know, untactful way, and it's just it's
<v Speaker 2>really irritating.
<v Speaker 3>And I'll say, this is.
<v Speaker 2>One thing that I like to let people know. Everyone.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of times in those groups, people say, I've
<v Speaker 2>got a neighbor with a calorie tear and I don't
<v Speaker 2>know what to do. I've talked to them, they won't
<v Speaker 2>cut it down. You guys need to quit with this shit,
<v Speaker 2>like stop going to people and trying to force these
<v Speaker 2>ideas you should plant something new. That's not that's and
<v Speaker 2>it's fine, that's a good thing if they're your friend
<v Speaker 2>and you want to help them. But you don't go
<v Speaker 2>approach people that way. If you want to do something positive,
<v Speaker 2>talk to a kid about native plants, because I've never
<v Speaker 2>met a kid that's not interested in the bugs and
<v Speaker 2>in the whatever it is. They're interested and they will
<v Speaker 2>listen to you, and you will make an impact on them,
<v Speaker 2>and that's the future. Don't worry about your old fucking
<v Speaker 2>neighbor that has a there's no hope for them, like
<v Speaker 2>you've got to give them.
<v Speaker 1>Also, yeah, you got to meet people where they're at too.
<v Speaker 1>It's that trying to sit that's true. That's what religious
<v Speaker 1>people do. That like the street corner preachers do. Nobody
<v Speaker 1>likes it, even if you're right, like it's not you know,
<v Speaker 1>you got to learn life skills at some point, buddy.
<v Speaker 1>But again, you pick that shit up from actually existing
<v Speaker 1>in the real world. And a lot of the people
<v Speaker 1>that act like this don't exist in the real world.
<v Speaker 1>They're online all the time, and I have sympathy for
<v Speaker 1>them to a certain degree, you know, I mean I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure I was like that in my fucking mid twenties
<v Speaker 1>early whenever, you know. But at the same time, they're
<v Speaker 1>like they're assholes. They're like acting like dicks and causing
<v Speaker 1>shit for other people, and it's, oh god, I just
<v Speaker 1>want to shake them, just dose them or something like,
<v Speaker 1>come on, man, it's not bad that you don't need
<v Speaker 1>to act like that. Like think about this. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you don't need to feel bad. I don't want you
<v Speaker 1>to feel bad, but just don't act like that. You
<v Speaker 1>don't need to do that. That's not hell, that's not
<v Speaker 1>gonna it's not good for anybody. And this doesn't work.
<v Speaker 1>You don't change people by shitting on them and shaming
<v Speaker 1>them or by acting like a Karen and you know,
<v Speaker 1>policing everything and just you know, yeah, be kind. It's
<v Speaker 1>it's it does so much more, really, does you know?
<v Speaker 1>You can still joke around and be a cynic or whatever,
<v Speaker 1>but like, just you don't want to make people feel
<v Speaker 1>attacked and ship on and put on the spot.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I agree, absolutely.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. But the native plant thing is now you see
<v Speaker 1>a lot of infighting and like native plant groups or.
<v Speaker 2>What, well, just this kind of like purity kind of
<v Speaker 2>like shaming if somebody it's a dumb question or not
<v Speaker 2>a dumb question, but has a novice question like oh,
<v Speaker 2>I I don't know if I should plant this or this,
<v Speaker 2>or maybe I'm going to plant this cultivar of eucanasia.
<v Speaker 3>And people are like, you can't plant cultivars.
<v Speaker 2>Cultivars aren't And it's like, just chill out on them,
<v Speaker 2>like they're just there. This is their first post every.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they're not planting it in your yard.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, Like people get so.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, it's just like you say, the kindness is
<v Speaker 2>not there. It's just this like quick to jump on
<v Speaker 2>people and quick to it's it's a bad environment. And
<v Speaker 2>I guess that's probably. I guess it's just kind of
<v Speaker 2>throughout society. It's a lot of that. Yes, it seems
<v Speaker 2>to be a lot of places.
<v Speaker 1>I'm a line too.
<v Speaker 3>I think it's I think it's exactly.
<v Speaker 1>It's really easy to do it when you're not face
<v Speaker 1>to face with someone, you can't see their humanity in
<v Speaker 1>front of you, And maybe you had a bad day
<v Speaker 1>and you're you're angry about something else, just in a
<v Speaker 1>bad mood, and you're like, oh, this makes me so mad,
<v Speaker 1>I'm just gonna send this on.
<v Speaker 2>That's when I make That's when I make bad comments,
<v Speaker 2>is when I'm in a pissed off mood and i
<v Speaker 2>just lose myself and I say something stupid.
<v Speaker 3>I've done that definitely a lot.
<v Speaker 2>Every every time I look at it, it's like I
<v Speaker 2>shouldn't have done you know, I should just and I've
<v Speaker 2>finally learned, like, don't, don't do that, just don't even
<v Speaker 2>it's not worth getting involved in.
<v Speaker 1>So well, also, do you do you want to, like,
<v Speaker 1>do you want to actually make someone think about something?
<v Speaker 1>Or do you want to shit on them? And that's
<v Speaker 1>why when I thought about it like that. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's been a while. I mean I still slip up sometimes,
<v Speaker 1>but when I thought about it like that, I was like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>this is like what am I doing. I'm not like
<v Speaker 1>trying to like defend the fucking my ego or something.
<v Speaker 1>I don't need to do that, you know, like that,
<v Speaker 1>I'm want someone to like think about their behavior. That's
<v Speaker 1>the way you actually change a culture. But you know, again,
<v Speaker 1>you compare like today today's like a modern American online
<v Speaker 1>leftism with like that of the the late sixties, nineteen sixties.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, man, those are like apples and oranges, like
<v Speaker 1>completely different approaches, almost polar opposites. But the yeah that
<v Speaker 1>I had a guy get mad at me for I
<v Speaker 1>was talking about the pig damage the Thorn Scrubs Sanctuary.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, yeah, and he got mad and I tried
<v Speaker 1>not to lay into him too much. I was like
<v Speaker 1>kind of irritated first. But he was a some vegan
<v Speaker 1>guy in Michigan, you know, and I was like, he's like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>why do you you talk about them? I'm like, they're
<v Speaker 1>the problem. Get off your fucking high horse. Like he
<v Speaker 1>was a dick about it, and I was like, man,
<v Speaker 1>I'm not, like I'm not in a high horse, Like
<v Speaker 1>this is an invasive species that you know, Like, how
<v Speaker 1>can you be mad at some for want to remove
<v Speaker 1>an invasive species? If believe me, if I could like
<v Speaker 1>go ask the pigs to go elsewhere and not destroys, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>like I would. I would do that. But then unfortunately
<v Speaker 1>I don't speak English, so we've got to trap him
<v Speaker 1>and shoot him. And yeah, I told a friend about
<v Speaker 1>that and he's.
<v Speaker 3>Like, you guys can start doing that too.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, oh, yeah, we're gonna We're trying to get
<v Speaker 1>this pig brig trap it's like a corral. They can
<v Speaker 1>go in so they can stack them, but they can't
<v Speaker 1>get out, and uh and then you just go in
<v Speaker 1>and just smoke them all.
<v Speaker 2>But but hey, I'll tell you what, man, can I
<v Speaker 2>can I run to the restroom real quick?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, do it, do it. We'll take a break. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>here we go. Okay, there we go. Yeah. See, we
<v Speaker 1>get crime pays. We want everybody to have good you know,
<v Speaker 1>be good to their kidneys. You gotta get a you
<v Speaker 1>gotta get a pitch jug next time. That's what I do.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I'm not hiding anything. I got a pitch
<v Speaker 1>jug under the d I.
<v Speaker 2>Remember those from my truck or grandpa he for the
<v Speaker 2>truck man. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Then when you're done, you mix it with a little
<v Speaker 1>bit of water, like seven parts water one part, but
<v Speaker 1>you go dump it on a plane. So I say,
<v Speaker 1>you're getting nitrogen out there.
<v Speaker 2>So uh yeah, but anyway, yeah, yeah, these pigs are
<v Speaker 2>a nightmare. Man. I'm I'm we don't have them too
<v Speaker 2>bad up here, but I'm I hope you guys can
<v Speaker 2>try to do something about them.
<v Speaker 3>That's just that's one of the worst invasive species. They're impact.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, yeah, they just it's the worst thing, especially
<v Speaker 2>I'm sure for the desert.
<v Speaker 1>Pigs, pigs, feral cats, pigs, feral cats, and rats.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah it's yeah, rats too, Yeah it's.
<v Speaker 1>But I didn't I didn't think it was going to
<v Speaker 1>be that's bad, man, I was. I was really surprised
<v Speaker 1>because we hadn't been there, We hadn't been there in
<v Speaker 1>a few months because it was it's so fucking hot,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, we didn't have a road uh cleared yet,
<v Speaker 1>like the road was all overgrown, and man, they just went,
<v Speaker 1>they just went to town. They just destroyed so much,
<v Speaker 1>I mean literally reducing diversity. And again it's one of
<v Speaker 1>those cases where you could see, you know, shifting baselines.
<v Speaker 1>If they did this in six months, imagine what they
<v Speaker 1>could do in a few years with nobody paying attention
<v Speaker 1>to it. Like if our neighbors, like no one cares
<v Speaker 1>around us about any of these plants. I mean they
<v Speaker 1>they care when it's in there in front of their
<v Speaker 1>house or on their farm, but they don't care about
<v Speaker 1>like wild habitat. The pigs are stry wild habitat, so
<v Speaker 1>it's just a free for all and just if they're
<v Speaker 1>out there long enough and there's nothing to eat them,
<v Speaker 1>they're or no disease to take them down. They can
<v Speaker 1>really cause massive local extinctions of a lot of these
<v Speaker 1>cool native cacti, and not just payotes but all I mean,
<v Speaker 1>there's a huge there's like a nineteen species long list
<v Speaker 1>of cacti that only grow in the Rio Grande Valley
<v Speaker 1>of South Texas, and they just wipe them out. It's
<v Speaker 1>really sad, man.
<v Speaker 2>And they can eat peyoti and just be I mean,
<v Speaker 2>they're pretty similar to us, but.
<v Speaker 1>They I mean, I don't know, man, I've never seen
<v Speaker 1>a human eat buckets of slop, you know, without getting sick,
<v Speaker 1>So I think they've got I don't know. I'm not
<v Speaker 1>a vet obviously, but I don't know what their stomach
<v Speaker 1>flora is like or what their metabolis.
<v Speaker 2>Surprises me though, I mean, what a that's a really
<v Speaker 2>powerful plant though. I mean in terms of the chemicals
<v Speaker 2>right as well.
<v Speaker 1>You take a couple of bites out of it. If
<v Speaker 1>you take a couple of bites out of it, it's
<v Speaker 1>it might be bitter, but it's got water in it.
<v Speaker 1>And you know, if the bitter, you can get past
<v Speaker 1>the bitterness, if the drought's bad enough, and then you know,
<v Speaker 1>and then for the other cacti that had spines, they'll
<v Speaker 1>just like some of the mammalarias and stuff, they'll just
<v Speaker 1>uproot them and then eat the roots and take big
<v Speaker 1>chunks out of them and leave the needles intact. I
<v Speaker 1>saw them wipe out a whole like thirty foot by
<v Speaker 1>thirty foot population of a matto cactus that is Spinus,
<v Speaker 1>which is this really cool native cactus. And it grew.
<v Speaker 1>It was growing under the canopy of this light canopy
<v Speaker 1>of miskait second growth miskit at this little hiking like
<v Speaker 1>hiking biking trail near the town I live in, and
<v Speaker 1>within six months it was completely gone. You know, they
<v Speaker 1>would go in, they'd uproot them and then eat the
<v Speaker 1>roots and then leave the cactus to die. And it's
<v Speaker 1>you know, the cactus is to ticking clock. It's only
<v Speaker 1>got so much juice stored up in it. And so
<v Speaker 1>we actually we went in and removed the rest that
<v Speaker 1>were all because I mean I have photos from even
<v Speaker 1>like three or four years ago, and there was a
<v Speaker 1>huge population. There were hundreds of stems of this cactus
<v Speaker 1>about you know, diameter of a baseball and then somewhere
<v Speaker 1>as tall as like you know, twelve inches, and I
<v Speaker 1>talked to the city about it. I was like, the
<v Speaker 1>spot's getting mrked. This could be a really cool conservation
<v Speaker 1>privacy and give a fuck. They don't care. They're all
<v Speaker 1>there are concerns. None of them care about conservation. The
<v Speaker 1>dominant culture here doesn't care about conservation at all at all,
<v Speaker 1>Like they don't. These plants are just scrub they're brush,
<v Speaker 1>they're in the way, they're spiny, they're not nice, and
<v Speaker 1>so they didn't do anything. And then finally just went
<v Speaker 1>in there with a couple kids from the university and
<v Speaker 1>other conservationists, and I was like, well, all we can
<v Speaker 1>do now was like, let's just take the rest and
<v Speaker 1>put them somewhere and try to get seed off of them,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, make a record of this and then
<v Speaker 1>reach out. There's like a something that's kind of akin
<v Speaker 1>to a botanic garden down here, and bring them there
<v Speaker 1>and maybe they can set up because it needs to
<v Speaker 1>be set up somewhere where it's protected from pigs and
<v Speaker 1>people can monitor it. And it was happening. The pigs
<v Speaker 1>go in there at night and just destroy everything. But
<v Speaker 1>it was really sad because it was such a cool
<v Speaker 1>spot and I loved visiting it. And I was there
<v Speaker 1>a week ago and everything's gone, everything like there's nothing left.
<v Speaker 2>Due And just so you didn't you weren't able to
<v Speaker 2>obtain official permission. You just had to do it yourself.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I mean, well it wasn't protected anyway, Like this
<v Speaker 1>is all. It was all second growth misky. The cactus
<v Speaker 1>seed is spread by birds. The fruits are bright red.
<v Speaker 1>The birds eat the fruits, you know, they eat the
<v Speaker 1>pair of carp up in the canopies of the trees
<v Speaker 1>and then scatter seeds everywhere. And so you know, in
<v Speaker 1>a few decades this population had formed and it was
<v Speaker 1>really thick. And I've seen other populations of other cacti
<v Speaker 1>like this, and here in South Texas, I saw one
<v Speaker 1>at this spot called Chihuahua Woods that was epic. It
<v Speaker 1>was huge clumps. I had like three feet wide of
<v Speaker 1>Mammalaria hyder rye and a kind of serious any of
<v Speaker 1>Canthus and a kind of serious penthealofus. It looks like this,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it looks like ropey medusa hair that forms
<v Speaker 1>like a you know, four or foot wide matt of
<v Speaker 1>these just trailing trailing cactus stems. And I and I
<v Speaker 1>went to that. I was here in twenty fourteen and
<v Speaker 1>saw that, and it blew my mind. There was no
<v Speaker 1>invasive grass. And I came back the whole area was
<v Speaker 1>infested with invasive grasses and all the cacti were gone
<v Speaker 1>by pigs presumably they dig them up, they eat the roots,
<v Speaker 1>and nobody was monitoring. It was a Nature Conservancy property,
<v Speaker 1>and nature Conservancy they don't know it anymore. They got
<v Speaker 1>rid of it, and they totally I mean you could
<v Speaker 1>tell why they didn't give a fuck. They had nobody
<v Speaker 1>down here who was paying attention to it. So like that,
<v Speaker 1>you just slowly watch the life from your area get extirpated,
<v Speaker 1>and then you're just left with invasive grasses and whatever
<v Speaker 1>native ruteral species like huisach and misky can can you know,
<v Speaker 1>still get an edge in ecologically and find a place
<v Speaker 1>to grow. And then then it's all just personal injury
<v Speaker 1>attorney billboards and car dealerships and there you go. Yeah, right,
<v Speaker 1>and then now you want to.
<v Speaker 3>That's my experience too.
<v Speaker 2>I cannot get permission for anything, and I've just come
<v Speaker 2>to the conclusion. You've just like, and I give that
<v Speaker 2>advice to anyone, like, do not listen to any worry
<v Speaker 2>about property rights, don't worry about I mean, be reasonable
<v Speaker 2>and don't get yourself into trouble for no reason. But
<v Speaker 2>when it comes to saving something, go save itself.
<v Speaker 1>If you can get away with you gone. Yeah, if
<v Speaker 1>you can get away.
<v Speaker 2>With it, if you can get away with it and
<v Speaker 2>do something with it, please go save it, because in
<v Speaker 2>five ten years it's going to be gone.
<v Speaker 1>But I ask for permits if I know I'm going
<v Speaker 1>to get if they're going to give it to me
<v Speaker 1>and it's not going to be an involved process, I
<v Speaker 1>just don't. I don't bother whether we really get a permit. Well,
<v Speaker 1>I'm not associated with any institution. I don't have a
<v Speaker 1>reputation I have to worry about losing. If there's not
<v Speaker 1>a good reason for that permit, then you know, and
<v Speaker 1>I'm obviously I'm not going to collect seed if the
<v Speaker 1>population is not robust and doing well. And anytime I
<v Speaker 1>collect seed, it I scatter some two in places where.
<v Speaker 3>I think it will absolutely it's protected.
<v Speaker 1>But a lot of stuff here, I mean, the unfortunate
<v Speaker 1>reality in Texas is that it's I haven't seen it
<v Speaker 1>like this in any other place that I've lived. Is
<v Speaker 1>that nothing's really protect if it's not on a state
<v Speaker 1>park or something. Nothing's protected. Private property owners don't protect shit.
<v Speaker 1>They might, but their kids probably won't. I mean there's
<v Speaker 1>no guarantee. So yeah, yeah, I mean for me now,
<v Speaker 1>it's like I'm getting this. A lot of this stuff
<v Speaker 1>in cultivation is the best you could do. That's why.
<v Speaker 1>Like I work with nurseries here, friends that have nurseries,
<v Speaker 1>and I I'm always collecting seed and just sending it
<v Speaker 1>to them for free. In most cases, I'm just pay
<v Speaker 1>me for shipping whatever, and I just want you to
<v Speaker 1>grow this, save me a couple whatever. But I want
<v Speaker 1>to get this into cultivation because Texas doesn't respect any
<v Speaker 1>of its you know, native plants do the.
<v Speaker 2>Same thing I'm always always trying to get. And my
<v Speaker 2>kind of big thing around here is I love the
<v Speaker 2>thickest species man. Like we've got a sweet crab apple,
<v Speaker 2>a native grab apple that's really really cool, Malice Coronada.
<v Speaker 2>I think it's called cornaya something like that. I didn't
<v Speaker 2>know we had native apples to America, but we do.
<v Speaker 1>Malice probably in a genus Mallage.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, well it's malice coronett. It's called the sweet crab
<v Speaker 2>apple and then there's also one out closer to Illinois,
<v Speaker 2>the prairie crab apple malice io insists or something like that.
<v Speaker 3>There's like four of them.
<v Speaker 2>I think there's a specific crab apple too, but anyway,
<v Speaker 2>there's not very many.
<v Speaker 3>But the thicket speci.
<v Speaker 2>I like all these thicket species, but the one that
<v Speaker 2>I really love is the wild plums.
<v Speaker 3>They are so cool.
<v Speaker 2>Man. And I saw you were getting some seed or
<v Speaker 2>something of the Texas plum.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, that that's awesome.
<v Speaker 2>I mean that talk about we were talking earlier about
<v Speaker 2>ecotypes and ranges and stuff. If you look at the
<v Speaker 2>BNAP for for Brunus Americana, it's it's unreal. It's in
<v Speaker 2>almost every state, It's in almost every single area in
<v Speaker 2>the whole US.
<v Speaker 3>It's it's really cool. Yeah, And so then you.
<v Speaker 2>Start looking for sure.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, if it's right, you've got.
<v Speaker 2>And then you've got the You've got the klamate plum
<v Speaker 2>out in Oregon, northern California. You've got the Texas plumb
<v Speaker 2>down there, You've got we've got Hortland's plum and the
<v Speaker 2>wild goose plum. These stupid names, but Prudis munciana and
<v Speaker 2>Pruna's Hortelana are two of the ones from the Midwest.
<v Speaker 2>There's a huge variety and really cool, really cool species.
<v Speaker 2>These thicket species often get overlooked. I feel like, what
<v Speaker 2>is the thicket. I by thicket, I mean something that
<v Speaker 2>doesn't get as big of a tree as a tree,
<v Speaker 2>so probably twenty five thirty foot tall at the most
<v Speaker 2>and generally suckers at the base. It creates like a
<v Speaker 2>thicket of suckering stems that is going to create a
<v Speaker 2>a distinct like micro climate and habitat like.
<v Speaker 1>A dense shrub layer of and re sprouting is the
<v Speaker 1>probably resprouting is an adaptation of fire.
<v Speaker 2>Well fire and the big you know, the ice age megafauna,
<v Speaker 2>the NaSTA dons, the bison, they were tearing shit up,
<v Speaker 2>just like I've seen some of these videos of today.
<v Speaker 2>Elephants in Africa will just over top of an entire
<v Speaker 2>tree just for kind of like fun. I don't know
<v Speaker 2>why they did it, they just like pushed the thing down.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, that's that's what these that's what these mastodons
<v Speaker 2>and mammoths would have been doing. But you know, Sumac
<v Speaker 2>is a really good example. If you see a sumac
<v Speaker 2>thicket where it's just like the middle is kind of
<v Speaker 2>the highest point and then it kind of slowly goes
<v Speaker 2>down in size. Is the suckers are younger and younger
<v Speaker 2>as they get to the outside of the circle. But
<v Speaker 2>these thickets are really a unique place, and I think
<v Speaker 2>also they get in the context of US prairie people.
<v Speaker 2>In prairie enthusiasts, thickets are kind of like hated, you know,
<v Speaker 2>they don't really like the dogwoods or the plums and
<v Speaker 2>in the prairies. But really they're they're a part of it.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, they were always a part of it, and
<v Speaker 2>they just easy to overlook. Wild plum and the American
<v Speaker 2>hazel nut is another huge one. Those were the two
<v Speaker 2>dominant ones at least in Ohio and what they called
<v Speaker 2>the brush lands.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and they really they just evolved with disturbance and
<v Speaker 1>they need that disturbance. Though, whether it's fire or the
<v Speaker 1>hedge clipper or whatever. The fire thing is really I
<v Speaker 1>wish that was I wish fire was still a tool,
<v Speaker 1>because it's something our species has been using all over
<v Speaker 1>the globe for so long, and it's so it's so important.
<v Speaker 1>It works so well. Obviously you don't want to burn
<v Speaker 1>down buildings, but you know again, you don't have to
<v Speaker 1>worry about burning down buildings if you're doing it consistently enough,
<v Speaker 1>and there's not you're not building up the fuel load.
<v Speaker 1>But God, get rid of the fucking ticks, you know,
<v Speaker 1>get rid of those ticks? What is them?
<v Speaker 3>Absolutely with your.
<v Speaker 1>Work with getting like when you're like landscaping for clients
<v Speaker 1>or whatever, like how do you get people interested in this?
<v Speaker 1>How do you kind of plant the seed in their
<v Speaker 1>head to get rid of the lawn? And where do
<v Speaker 1>you see, like where are they coming from when they
<v Speaker 1>first reach out to you, Like is it like they're like, well,
<v Speaker 1>we we ear this is a good thing to do.
<v Speaker 1>We don't know much about it. Can you help us
<v Speaker 1>and then they hire you and let you go wild?
<v Speaker 1>Or are there people who already know what they want?
<v Speaker 1>Or I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's kind of both, kind of a mix of
<v Speaker 2>both people that are kind of shallowly interested and then
<v Speaker 2>some people that are more intensely interested.
<v Speaker 3>Kind of both ways.
<v Speaker 2>And I guess I don't really even understand it that much.
<v Speaker 2>I don't understand how I can. I guess what I'm
<v Speaker 2>saying is I don't do any advertising. I'm not a
<v Speaker 2>very business minded person. But I'm able to run my
<v Speaker 2>small business successfully because people just keep coming and I
<v Speaker 2>don't know what is I mean, I know what's fueling it.
<v Speaker 2>Like we talked about tallom and the kind of movement
<v Speaker 2>for native plants, but it's just incredible to me that
<v Speaker 2>it just people keep hitting me up and interested in
<v Speaker 2>this stuff and want to want to do good. And
<v Speaker 2>it's a wide variety of people. And you know, a
<v Speaker 2>lot of the bigger prairies are people who have a
<v Speaker 2>lot of lawn that they don't want to take care
<v Speaker 2>of anymore, or mow every few weeks anymore every week,
<v Speaker 2>or it's somebody who let's say they and sometimes it
<v Speaker 2>is you know, this is one thing that I found.
<v Speaker 2>Sometimes it is like people who have a little bit
<v Speaker 2>of the extra income. Maybe they've bought five acres of
<v Speaker 2>farmland and they're building a house, and they think, well,
<v Speaker 2>we could make all this sod or whatever and pay
<v Speaker 2>outrageous amount, or we could bring in some prairies. So
<v Speaker 2>I've definitely had some situations like that. But yeah, it's
<v Speaker 2>it's just a wide variety of people kind of kind
<v Speaker 2>of interested in this stuff. And I guess the way
<v Speaker 2>that the way I do it though. I was just
<v Speaker 2>going to say that just for people who are interested
<v Speaker 2>in this or trying to carve out a space, because
<v Speaker 2>it really is a new thing and it's possible to do.
<v Speaker 2>I try to do a lot of talks with the
<v Speaker 2>wild ones, with local native plant organizations, with nonprofits in
<v Speaker 2>my area. I tried to do walks, like through the
<v Speaker 2>wetlands or through places where I can give a little
<v Speaker 2>walk of ten, fifteen, twenty people. I just try to
<v Speaker 2>speak to people about it and get involved in different stuff,
<v Speaker 2>and that has led to success for me. Like I say,
<v Speaker 2>I never advertise. I don't even talk on social media
<v Speaker 2>about this stuff. I don't advertise in like oh I
<v Speaker 2>could give you a pollinaer gardener, I could kill your lawn.
<v Speaker 2>I just like talk about doing it and somehow I'm
<v Speaker 2>able to hang in there.
<v Speaker 1>So spread it by example. Yeah, just by demonstrating. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that s it's cool. It's like you see somebody doing something.
<v Speaker 1>We've fucking skateboarding, Like some kid sees someone skateboarding. Guy,
<v Speaker 1>I want to do that too. I wonder what that's
<v Speaker 1>like my thing exactly? I want people, I want like
<v Speaker 1>just random because this has been something this field has
<v Speaker 1>been such a a stiff in Vanilla historically and very soft.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it applies to a certain demographic basically, And
<v Speaker 1>I want I want like the fucking guy that works
<v Speaker 1>at the gas station and to be like, I'm gonna
<v Speaker 1>do that. That's kind of cool. Or like the guy
<v Speaker 1>some dude that works in a shoe store, or some
<v Speaker 1>fucking lady that works in a nail salon or as
<v Speaker 1>a fucking nurse or something to be like, oh, this
<v Speaker 1>is uh, this is kind of cool. Like I want
<v Speaker 1>them to know a few of the native plants around them,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and like be interested in it. Like that's
<v Speaker 1>how you kind of create a culture around it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>Like there's cultures where you go to, Like you know,
<v Speaker 1>everybody knows the redwoods. If you live in California, you
<v Speaker 1>know what a fucking redwood tree is. You know, if
<v Speaker 1>you live in New Zealand, they've got their own caste
<v Speaker 1>of cool birds and that are you know that people know.
<v Speaker 1>I want it. We need more of those I want
<v Speaker 1>more of those species that people actually know. Like God,
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to know what Chick fil a is.
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to know what a burger is or
<v Speaker 1>russ dress for less. I want to know, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I want people to know what the plants are like.
<v Speaker 1>They can name it, maybe not Latin name, but at
<v Speaker 1>least know the genus or know the common name. Know
<v Speaker 1>that this is like an iconic piece of the living
<v Speaker 1>fabric around you. But anyway, moving out, what's.
<v Speaker 2>Plant blindness is real? So it's something to overcome. Sure,
<v Speaker 2>all this plant blindness?
<v Speaker 1>What is what's the good? How do you kill the
<v Speaker 1>lawns after you get called into do one?
<v Speaker 4>Uh?
<v Speaker 2>Generally I'm using herbicide because it's larger areas.
<v Speaker 3>So I was using glycasate just to kill.
<v Speaker 2>It's a broad spectrum, as you know, it's a broad
<v Speaker 2>spectrum overside that kills everything. Recently I've switched to using
<v Speaker 2>clethodim or clethodemee. I don't know.
<v Speaker 3>It's you know, these made up works.
<v Speaker 1>We got some people listening clutching their pearls right now here, say,
<v Speaker 1>I know.
<v Speaker 2>Dude, it's been such a controversial. I hate the thing.
<v Speaker 2>I hate industrial agriculture. I am disgusted that they are
<v Speaker 2>sprain shipped from airplanes all over the Midwest, all over
<v Speaker 2>the state, near schools, near houses, everywhere, on these huge
<v Speaker 2>booms it's crazy. It's absolutely madness. But that is separate
<v Speaker 2>from the use of herbicide. Is a restoration tool, is
<v Speaker 2>a tool to be able to make things better. Like
<v Speaker 2>just like I try to come up with an analogy,
<v Speaker 2>but just like a chainsaw, you could have the Texas
<v Speaker 2>chainsaw massacre, or you could have a chainsaw that helps
<v Speaker 2>you cut down a tree to make a dog.
<v Speaker 3>House or something.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, Like there's different ways you can use
<v Speaker 2>these tools.
<v Speaker 3>It's just a tool.
<v Speaker 2>And what's really evil is round up ready crops and
<v Speaker 2>these crops that have been developed to the stand herbicide.
<v Speaker 3>That's that's the problem.
<v Speaker 2>And we get into this with the we get into
<v Speaker 2>this with the GMOs, with the chestnuts too.
<v Speaker 3>The hippie groups are kind of like, we don't want
<v Speaker 3>to do the GMO.
<v Speaker 2>It's not like that. It's not like GMO round up
<v Speaker 2>ready crops. They're just trying to insert is you had
<v Speaker 2>on your great interview with Eric. They're trying to insert
<v Speaker 2>a team from Wheat that can deal with this, exhaust
<v Speaker 2>the the damn thing that the blight is creating, the
<v Speaker 2>act AD.
<v Speaker 1>I did a talk yesterday that's it'll be the next
<v Speaker 1>podcast that comes out with this Jared Westbrook from American
<v Speaker 1>Chestnut Foundation, and it was it was kind of like
<v Speaker 1>the other side to that story, you know, and it
<v Speaker 1>sounds I mean, yeah, man, it was really good to
<v Speaker 1>talk to him. He's a geneticist. And you know, when
<v Speaker 1>I was talking to Eric too, that's one thing he said,
<v Speaker 1>It's like, it's not it's not just this one site
<v Speaker 1>that gave Chinese chestnuts resistance. There's like thousands of genes
<v Speaker 1>involved in resistance to the blight. So I mean, obviously
<v Speaker 1>it's a lot more complicated than that. But I guess
<v Speaker 1>there were some real issues with that that gene, the oxogene,
<v Speaker 1>being inserted, and that it just wasn't as haritable as
<v Speaker 1>they thought. And so and it makes sense because it's
<v Speaker 1>like that and that oxogene is inserted into a lot
<v Speaker 1>of crops. It's well known. They use it for other
<v Speaker 1>fungi that attack you know, crop plants. So it's a
<v Speaker 1>good My opinion on it's kind of changed. It's a
<v Speaker 1>good first effort and it's great, but it's I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if it's long lasting, like if the heritability is
<v Speaker 1>long lasting. I mean, and that's one thing Eric was
<v Speaker 1>saying too. He's like, we got to do more work,
<v Speaker 1>We got to find different spots to put it, insert
<v Speaker 1>it into the genome. You know, obviously as the technology improves,
<v Speaker 1>we have more control over where it goes instead of
<v Speaker 1>just like using agrobacterium to throw it into the genome
<v Speaker 1>and hoping that it lands in a good spot.
<v Speaker 3>You know, like, yeah, that's and that's exciting.
<v Speaker 2>That's exciting because there are so many exactly and there's
<v Speaker 2>so many of those genes that apparently provide the resistance.
<v Speaker 2>But like I believe you said during that interview with Eric,
<v Speaker 2>if you go the trying to breed with the Chinese
<v Speaker 2>chestnut route, it's like a monkey at a typewriter, Like
<v Speaker 2>you're literally hoping for a random chance, and that's not
<v Speaker 2>going to work. That's the part that frustrates me with it.
<v Speaker 2>And furthermore, I don't even like hybrid Like that's not
<v Speaker 2>an American chestnut anymore. Once you hybridize it, what the
<v Speaker 2>hell is that you literally you want.
<v Speaker 1>To just get those genes, like I think, and what
<v Speaker 1>they're trying to do now is and it was really
<v Speaker 1>cool talking to this guy was there. They're using genetic
<v Speaker 1>analysis and hopefully genetic modification to actually do a more
<v Speaker 1>precise like they're not just like mixing pollen blindly anymore.
<v Speaker 1>They're they're actually like trying to take apart to map
<v Speaker 1>the chestnut genome of both species, the resistant one in
<v Speaker 1>the niners is one, and see what codes for resistance,
<v Speaker 1>and then identify those genes, nail them down, isolate them,
<v Speaker 1>and then hopefully not just use one gene from wheat
<v Speaker 1>like that, because it doesn't seem like that's the It
<v Speaker 1>doesn't seem like that's a good idea honestly anymore, my
<v Speaker 1>thin But they're going to take these genes that already exist,
<v Speaker 1>that were evolved in Mellissima and use the ones that
<v Speaker 1>aren't tied to like a different you know, don't have
<v Speaker 1>like the byproduct effect of creating a shorter stature tree,
<v Speaker 1>because it's the other thing is Melissima was selected for
<v Speaker 1>over thousands of years by humans to be an orchard tree,
<v Speaker 1>not to get you know, the tall I mean, the
<v Speaker 1>tree itself doesn't get in the wild. I don't think
<v Speaker 1>it's anywhere near the Statue of Americans. But but but
<v Speaker 1>so it's a more targeted approach. It sounds cool, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that's what they really need to do is like find
<v Speaker 1>isolate if you can isolate like a dozen genes that
<v Speaker 1>code for resistance, because it's not just the exalic acid
<v Speaker 1>that's killing the tree, that the Cryphenectria parasitica, the chestnut
<v Speaker 1>blight is using. It's there's a whole bunch of shit
<v Speaker 1>going on there. I mean, these things evolve together, the
<v Speaker 1>blight and the host for millions of years. So it's
<v Speaker 1>going to be a really complicated it's going to be
<v Speaker 1>like trying to untangle it huge you know, boll of spaghetti.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, right, so yeah, so it's cool. Yeah it should.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's coming out. Put it out tomorrow or
<v Speaker 1>today or somebody. Either way. It's it was really enlightening
<v Speaker 1>to learn about. And yeah, I just hope they could
<v Speaker 1>do it, man, but it requires a lot.
<v Speaker 2>I just support I support all the you know, I
<v Speaker 2>know there was kind of the split of the you
<v Speaker 2>know New York Org or yes, yes, yeah, so then
<v Speaker 2>and the American Chestnut Foundation had their little split or whatever.
<v Speaker 2>But I just support all of them, just hoping to
<v Speaker 2>get this done in whatever way they can. And yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, I mean, it's just like it's a
<v Speaker 2>massive undertaking but yeah, that's really interesting about the genes.
<v Speaker 2>I understand that the wheat gene was somehow took extra
<v Speaker 2>resources to run.
<v Speaker 1>Well because it was on all the time. Yeah, like
<v Speaker 1>it's all the time, So it's producing this oxidase enzyme
<v Speaker 1>all the time, and the.
<v Speaker 2>Whole tree weaker though, and causing other problems that are
<v Speaker 2>that are kind of you know.
<v Speaker 1>Well, yeah you're putting Yeah, it'd be analogous to like,
<v Speaker 1>if you know, when you you get the sight of
<v Speaker 1>kind of response when you get the flu or something. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>it'd be analogous to instead of just having a fever
<v Speaker 1>and a red face and puffy eyes when you're sick,
<v Speaker 1>to being like that all the time. Like that's that
<v Speaker 1>constant inflammation is going to wear you down. And so
<v Speaker 1>that's why some of these trees that had that oxogene,
<v Speaker 1>you know, until they can figure out a way to
<v Speaker 1>have it only be turned down on the fungus and
<v Speaker 1>this is Eric mentioned this too, until they can find
<v Speaker 1>a way to have it only be turned on when
<v Speaker 1>the fungus infects the tree, it's not ideal right now,
<v Speaker 1>because it leads to it takes energy from growth, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like they're living in a perpetually inflamed and stressed state.
<v Speaker 3>So I should mention my chestnut videos.
<v Speaker 2>People just love American chestnut for some reason, and they're
<v Speaker 2>like some of the most popular videos I've made. But
<v Speaker 2>the constant refrain in question is where can I get chestnuts?
<v Speaker 2>The American chestnuts seat, So I just want to address
<v Speaker 2>that if anyone is curious or listening. American Chestnut Foundation
<v Speaker 2>has a chapter in each state that the chestnuts are
<v Speaker 2>native and something that even to a little further east,
<v Speaker 2>but anyways west rather anyways, reach out to your local
<v Speaker 2>American Chestnut Foundation chapter. All these people are really nice,
<v Speaker 2>They love American chestnut. They want to share. You don't
<v Speaker 2>have to pay anything, you don't have to become a member.
<v Speaker 2>You just have to show that you're a decent person
<v Speaker 2>that's really interested and wants to plant some of these.
<v Speaker 2>I get a lot of my chestnuts for Bill Dieter,
<v Speaker 2>who's the president of the Indiana American Chestnut Chapter. We
<v Speaker 2>are growing pure American chestnuts and they are going to
<v Speaker 2>die from the blight, but we're trying to keep the
<v Speaker 2>genetics going so that when a solution is found, we
<v Speaker 2>can breed them with the pure American chestnuts and have
<v Speaker 2>this huge bank of genetic you know, diversity.
<v Speaker 1>It's so important to yeah, and that.
<v Speaker 2>So please grow them if you can get a hold
<v Speaker 2>of the American Chestnut Foundation and get them growing.
<v Speaker 3>I mean it's it's we're happy to share.
<v Speaker 1>And so you got pure seed, you got ceilings that
<v Speaker 1>were just trees. That's cool. Yeah, because they can get
<v Speaker 1>you know, they it's it's like it's always a gamble, right,
<v Speaker 1>they can. They'll get sick eventually on the East coast,
<v Speaker 1>whereas I guess you can grow them's relatively blight free
<v Speaker 1>out west because you get arid summers. You never get
<v Speaker 1>warmth in humidity. I only get you know, humidity and
<v Speaker 1>cool temperatures for the most part out west. But but
<v Speaker 1>but anyway, so that was another cool thing I learned
<v Speaker 1>was that yeah, there's still trees out there and that
<v Speaker 1>are reproducing. You know, they'll be isolated, they'll produce seed.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe they'll do it for a couple of years and
<v Speaker 1>then get knocked back. But I think they have to
<v Speaker 1>be like six or seven until they start producing seed.
<v Speaker 1>But and also I thought I was always thought that
<v Speaker 1>no trees were resistant, but there actually are a couple
<v Speaker 1>of trees that have like thirty percent very mild resistant,
<v Speaker 1>very mildly resistant. They're like thirty percent, yeah, exactly resistant,
<v Speaker 1>which is cool to know. I didn't know that, but
<v Speaker 1>that's what that's what the American Chestnut Foundation's doing out there,
<v Speaker 1>and they're actually like working with They're using genetic analysis
<v Speaker 1>and keeping track of all this. They got a map
<v Speaker 1>of the chestnut genome. They keep the ones that are
<v Speaker 1>not resistant around so they can measure why. They can
<v Speaker 1>look at the genome of those and compare it with
<v Speaker 1>ones that are resistant. And it sounds like really cool work.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, good stuff, and I really, you know, I
<v Speaker 2>know it's not exciting to say, a play a tree
<v Speaker 2>that's going to die in fifteen or twenty years, but
<v Speaker 2>there's a very real chance I don't know what the
<v Speaker 2>percentage is, but more than probably twenty percent that it
<v Speaker 2>could grow. I mean, Bill Deeeder put some of these
<v Speaker 2>trees in in I think two thousand he started he
<v Speaker 2>started direct seeding them in woodlands and Indiana that he owns.
<v Speaker 2>He's got sixty foot tall American chestnut dropping so many
<v Speaker 2>fucking chestnuts you can believe it.
<v Speaker 3>I Mean, the.
<v Speaker 2>Videos are on Facebook and stuff, if you want to
<v Speaker 2>find Bill Dee. That's what made me really believe this
<v Speaker 2>is not only possible, this is something we should be
<v Speaker 2>doing because some are going to die, but some of
<v Speaker 2>them are going to become big trees and maybe they'll
<v Speaker 2>live forty years.
<v Speaker 1>I'm alive. Yeah, and you're a kid, and you're you're
<v Speaker 1>basically keeping a seed factory. You're keeping that diversity, right,
<v Speaker 1>and that's cool. I mean, I cut down trees all
<v Speaker 1>the time. I mean, I've got trees in my yard now.
<v Speaker 1>I know I'm na have to take out in five years.
<v Speaker 1>I don't care. It's I'm farming trees. I'll use the
<v Speaker 1>wood for some I'll use it for steaks. In the meantime,
<v Speaker 1>I go to enjoy it for now. That's another thing,
<v Speaker 1>like with the unrelated but like with planting dense, you know,
<v Speaker 1>plant it dense. I mean people, there's this thing people
<v Speaker 1>do in landscapes that they you know, in like their
<v Speaker 1>yard or whatever. In gardens, they're like, well, I'm not
<v Speaker 1>going to plant those too close together because that's a
<v Speaker 1>thirty foot tall tree. Well it's not thirty feet tall. Now,
<v Speaker 1>it's six inches planted fucking close together, knowing you'll have
<v Speaker 1>to take it out. You know, when it gets I
<v Speaker 1>manageable size, it'll take you ten minutes some afternoon, five
<v Speaker 1>years from now, and plant it now. You get to
<v Speaker 1>enjoy it. Now it's going to be producing seed and
<v Speaker 1>feeding pollinators and acting as a scaffolding for soil, fungi,
<v Speaker 1>Michael rise and other stuff. For now. It doesn't need
<v Speaker 1>to be permanent. Nothing's ever permanent. Disturbance is part of ecology.
<v Speaker 1>You can be the disturbance that enables future diversity. I've
<v Speaker 1>got stuff I play. That's why I always plant it
<v Speaker 1>super dense, knowing, Okay, I can just remove shit in
<v Speaker 1>two years if I need to. In the meantime, I
<v Speaker 1>got to enjoy the hell out of it. I'm not
<v Speaker 1>going to plant these things five feet apart. So the
<v Speaker 1>soil is getting baked and it looks you know, that
<v Speaker 1>looks weird. It's I want dent exactly, and then you're
<v Speaker 1>thinned as you go.
<v Speaker 3>So yeah, I agree, hundred percent.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the chestnut thing is cool. Man. So you've got
<v Speaker 1>how many trees do you have?
<v Speaker 2>I don't have a big I've probably got half an
<v Speaker 2>acre yard. So I just have a little maybe twenty
<v Speaker 2>by thirty sized little native nursery in my backyard that
<v Speaker 2>I've created. So I've I've only got a handful of them,
<v Speaker 2>probably like fifteen or twenty trees.
<v Speaker 1>How many in the ground.
<v Speaker 2>Oh, I've got a few plane and probably another ten
<v Speaker 2>or fifteen planet. I also was able to work with
<v Speaker 2>the Ohio Chapter of American Chestnut Foundation and supply Quail
<v Speaker 2>Ridge Specimen Trees, which is near Southwest Ohio company, as
<v Speaker 2>well as Deeply Rooted Natives, which is another native nursery
<v Speaker 2>in Southwest Ohio. So they have American chestnut, they'll probably
<v Speaker 2>have them next year two if you want to buy
<v Speaker 2>pure American chestnut. And then the other thing is the
<v Speaker 2>organization SYSTED not be more than like twenty.
<v Speaker 3>Bucks or something. So yeah, they're they're cheap trees.
<v Speaker 2>They're like three gallon trees, but they're selling them for
<v Speaker 2>like twenty bucks or maybe it's twenty five.
<v Speaker 1>But there was a there was University of Idaho Forest
<v Speaker 1>Nursery used to sell they had a lead on pure
<v Speaker 1>American sea that was planted XCITU and they like ten
<v Speaker 1>years ago they used to sell seedlings like fucking plugs
<v Speaker 1>for like four bucks, three or four bucks each, which
<v Speaker 1>is fine and The plugs were super healthy too, because
<v Speaker 1>they were all in preinocuately with Michael Rise, which I guess, great,
<v Speaker 1>I guess you know. I guess you're you're potentially introducing
<v Speaker 1>non native Michael Rising whatever.
<v Speaker 2>But the yeah, that's a mess. We don't know anything
<v Speaker 2>about that now, we don't.
<v Speaker 1>We don't.
<v Speaker 2>Sometimes I worry about just buying econ Asia from a
<v Speaker 2>different Minnesota in bringing it here.
<v Speaker 3>Am I lissening something up?
<v Speaker 2>No, it is.
<v Speaker 1>If it's not adapted there, natural solection will eventually filter
<v Speaker 1>it out. And if it is adaptit then you're kind
<v Speaker 1>of improving the gene pool. Again, the lineage is on
<v Speaker 1>the continent already. It's not like you're you know there,
<v Speaker 1>They were maybe one hundred thousand years ago, those two
<v Speaker 1>were together, whereas if you're bringing something from Europe or
<v Speaker 1>Africa or Asia, that's probably been a long like ten
<v Speaker 1>to fifty million years before since those, yeah, were growing together.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, but the American chestnuthing man, I would love
<v Speaker 1>to just get some seedlings, and because they wouldn't grow
<v Speaker 1>for me down here in South Texas, I'd plant them,
<v Speaker 1>you know, at friends' houses in Chicago or wherever. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I'm really good at finding places to plant stuff. You know.
<v Speaker 1>It's like whether it's authorized they're not, or hitting people
<v Speaker 1>up and just be like we put them. Come and
<v Speaker 1>put this in your yard. It's fine, weird do you're
<v Speaker 1>not doing anything here? I can tell you how big
<v Speaker 1>this tree is gonna get. I'll come back and you know,
<v Speaker 1>prune it through, maintenance on it if you need it,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. I just want to plant shit. It's like,
<v Speaker 1>it's like my graffiti. It's like the graffiti that I
<v Speaker 1>do now in my I want to just plant shit
<v Speaker 1>as much as possible. But that would be great to
<v Speaker 1>plant some in Chicago. They'll get the blipe or whatever,
<v Speaker 1>you know. In the meantime, hopefully you can get seed
<v Speaker 1>at some point.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, absolutely, man, I could probably send you some
<v Speaker 2>seed if you can't get any any other way.
<v Speaker 1>I would love that.
<v Speaker 2>What we found is that it grows best in southeast Ohio.
<v Speaker 2>The chestnuts, they're more natives in southeast Ohio. I'm in
<v Speaker 2>southwest Ohio, so once you get into the glaciation, it's
<v Speaker 2>not chestnuts aren't as prominent. They're more kind of a
<v Speaker 2>Appalachian species, you know, in the mountains and stuff, the
<v Speaker 2>acidic soil. So but what they found is the strip
<v Speaker 2>mine sites in Ohio. They're growing really well there in
<v Speaker 2>this like terrible rocky soil. I'm also finding they converted
<v Speaker 2>the railroads to bike paths here in where I'm at,
<v Speaker 2>and along the bike paths are the old Dallas stuff,
<v Speaker 2>the rocks and stuff. They're growing really well there as well.
<v Speaker 2>So any anywhere in the East, if you're in a
<v Speaker 2>glaciated area, if you put them in a really dry,
<v Speaker 2>rocky difficult to live in for many species situation, chestnuts
<v Speaker 2>are American chestnuts are probably going to thrive.
<v Speaker 1>So I wonder what enables recommend to tolerate that that
<v Speaker 1>stress they like. I mean, obviously the full sun's good,
<v Speaker 1>there's no competition, but I wonder what enables them to
<v Speaker 1>tolerate that stressful rocky stuff.
<v Speaker 2>If it's I don't know, uh, maybe I guess there
<v Speaker 2>the reports are that they were always on the bridge
<v Speaker 2>lines and stuff, so they're just kind of a I
<v Speaker 2>don't know, a higher they're not really a lowland species,
<v Speaker 2>I guess.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>I think really know about that.
<v Speaker 1>I think that I think these organizations that are trying
<v Speaker 1>to bring it back. I think they're going to crack
<v Speaker 1>the code eventually.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. I always say if it was if it was
<v Speaker 2>fucking Monsanto, it would have been done. So I mean
<v Speaker 2>it eventually it will get done, I think. But we're
<v Speaker 2>just it's a resources thing. Nobody's you know.
<v Speaker 1>Well also it's it's really it's really complex, man. Like
<v Speaker 1>the Again, it's ten million years that castanaa, melissma and
<v Speaker 1>Cryphenetria were evolving together. It was an evolutionary arms race.
<v Speaker 1>You know, cast the Chinese chestnut would evolve some adaptation
<v Speaker 1>and then you know, the parasite would have to evolve
<v Speaker 1>an adaptation around it, and boom boom boom, back and forth,
<v Speaker 1>just like you know, host plants and butterflies. And then
<v Speaker 1>now you've got this extremely virulent you know, ten million years.
<v Speaker 1>Then now you've got an extremely virulent fungal pathogen, an
<v Speaker 1>extremely resistant tree. And then anything that wasn't involved in
<v Speaker 1>that little back and forth is now at a loss,
<v Speaker 1>you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and a great Another great example is, you know
<v Speaker 2>when we were kids before twenty oh four, there was
<v Speaker 2>no threat to ash. They're one of the most plentiful
<v Speaker 2>species in all of the Eastern forests, like forty of
<v Speaker 2>the forest in some areas, but after two thousand and four,
<v Speaker 2>the amoral ashborg gets introduced in Detroit via wooden pallets
<v Speaker 2>from Siberia or China or whatever. Devastated to add I mean,
<v Speaker 2>they really thought ash were going to go extinct. It's
<v Speaker 2>looking a little better for them now, but they're in
<v Speaker 2>a bad spot and we've lost almost all the big
<v Speaker 2>ash and it's devastating. But again, I do encourage people,
<v Speaker 2>just for some practical advice. If you've got young ash
<v Speaker 2>on your land or something or land that you're managing,
<v Speaker 2>encourage them and let them grow. I mean, we don't
<v Speaker 2>know what's going you know, just let this stuff happen.
<v Speaker 2>And if it dies, it's going to die. If it's
<v Speaker 2>near a house and you got to cut it, okay,
<v Speaker 2>But if you can just let stuff go and grow,
<v Speaker 2>what I'm kind of suspecting is almost like you picture
<v Speaker 2>a fire in a prairie if you started it in
<v Speaker 2>the middle and it's burnt out to the edges. The
<v Speaker 2>m Raal ash border is now in New York and
<v Speaker 2>in Kansas, we're in the center of what was the fire.
<v Speaker 2>It's all burnt out. Now there's no food sources for them,
<v Speaker 2>so we don't have the population that we once had.
<v Speaker 1>So it's not like chestnut light where it can live
<v Speaker 1>on other things.
<v Speaker 3>No, it does need ash.
<v Speaker 2>It can host on a few other things. Fringe tree
<v Speaker 2>if you know that one is an ash relative.
<v Speaker 1>Right relatives, Yeah, members of olyac basically right.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, so but it is I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>I'm I'm hopeful that you know, not only are maybe
<v Speaker 2>some of the seedlings resistant, but I think that the
<v Speaker 2>population has come down. We're never going to have a
<v Speaker 2>population like that again because there's never going to be food.
<v Speaker 3>Like that again.
<v Speaker 2>And then on top of that, they found sixty percent
<v Speaker 2>control up in Michigan where they've released these uh parasitic
<v Speaker 2>wasps that are only parasitized the emerald ash borer.
<v Speaker 3>And I know, I know it's scary, Yeah, to bring
<v Speaker 3>in another fucking bug.
<v Speaker 1>Well, you would look, I would look and see if
<v Speaker 1>there's any native things that are closely related.
<v Speaker 2>That's what they did for like a decade. Yeah, they
<v Speaker 2>did it for like a decade. They tested it. Apparently
<v Speaker 2>it's all good, and honestly, biocontrols are I cannot see
<v Speaker 2>a future where we're not going to be where we
<v Speaker 2>can get out of this ship without bio controls, we
<v Speaker 2>need those chests.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's it depends man again. It's how you know.
<v Speaker 1>The reason biocontrols worked on things like prickly pair in
<v Speaker 1>Australia that Cacto blastis moth was because Australia had been
<v Speaker 1>isolated for so long from the rest of the world.
<v Speaker 1>There was nothing closely related to cactus that that moth
<v Speaker 1>could then switch to once the cactus, the invasive cactus
<v Speaker 1>was gone. But when it's when you're working with you know,
<v Speaker 1>Europe and North America, they've been separated for much less
<v Speaker 1>amounts of much smaller amounts of time. So it's it.
<v Speaker 3>Does get it's a good point. I mean, that's a
<v Speaker 3>good point.
<v Speaker 1>Like there's biocontrols for kudzu, but you can't bring them
<v Speaker 1>here because there's so many relatives. I mean, Kudzu's infabasi,
<v Speaker 1>it's a relatively widespread family. There's so many relatives, there's
<v Speaker 1>so many relatives that are native here that that beetle,
<v Speaker 1>the beatles that keep kudzu and check in Asia could
<v Speaker 1>then switch to. So it's I think it's got to
<v Speaker 1>be yeah, herbicide and management, but that's something I hear
<v Speaker 1>from invasive species biologists you know, who are like, to me,
<v Speaker 1>they're the equivalent of global warming deniers. It's like, man,
<v Speaker 1>you're just out of touch. But it's like you're not.
<v Speaker 1>You're never going to get all of it. Well, that's
<v Speaker 1>we're not trying to get all of it. We're trying
<v Speaker 1>to keep diversity alive in certain places. It's not about
<v Speaker 1>getting rid of all of it. Like if you had
<v Speaker 1>a fiuse this analogy. There's some cancers that are slow
<v Speaker 1>moving and you can live thirty years by just taking
<v Speaker 1>a pill every day. You're never going to get all
<v Speaker 1>of it, but you're going to keep it in check.
<v Speaker 1>That's what invasive species can be. Or would you tell
<v Speaker 1>someone that had like a slow moving leukemia or thyroid cancer, like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you're never going to get all of it, don't even
<v Speaker 1>try it, Like no, because they'd eventually fucking die. But
<v Speaker 1>if you can live to be eighty with this cancer
<v Speaker 1>by just taking this pill, you would do it. You're
<v Speaker 1>managing it, you know.
<v Speaker 2>Right, absolutely, Yeah, And that makes that makes total sense.
<v Speaker 2>And but I will say, though, I have to call
<v Speaker 2>a little bit bullshit on that idea because it's like, listen,
<v Speaker 2>We're the country that had sixty million bison roaming the planes.
<v Speaker 3>We almost brought them.
<v Speaker 2>To extinction just for fucking to put a hurting on
<v Speaker 2>the native people and just to fuck all, you.
<v Speaker 1>Know, just have fun on the market market hunting.
<v Speaker 2>In market hunting, we brought the passenger pigeon, the most
<v Speaker 2>plentiful creature that has ever existed on Earth, to extinction
<v Speaker 2>in this country.
<v Speaker 3>We can do it. We can get rid of all
<v Speaker 3>the huntings.
<v Speaker 2>We could we I'm serious, if we really put our
<v Speaker 2>minds to it, well this ship, it would not even
<v Speaker 2>be a problem. It probably wouldn't take a couple of decades.
<v Speaker 2>There's no, there's no. I mean, we got to be
<v Speaker 2>real about the influence that humans can have. Like, if
<v Speaker 2>we really put our mind to it, we could get
<v Speaker 2>rid of all the Yeah, I mean, what if we
<v Speaker 2>had a even did some some ship like the Roosevelt
<v Speaker 2>did with the CCC or something, and had young kids
<v Speaker 2>that need jobs, pay them a decent wage, have them
<v Speaker 2>go out and cut these invasives and get the economy
<v Speaker 2>going in some of these areas.
<v Speaker 3>I mean, it's just any ways to do it.
<v Speaker 1>I don't I don't give America much credit though, I
<v Speaker 1>don't think that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's a it's a pie in the sky idea.
<v Speaker 2>But I do like to say, shit, we killed all
<v Speaker 2>the passenger pigeons. We could do this, yeah you wanted to.
<v Speaker 1>You could remove invasive species if you could. If you
<v Speaker 1>told people in the eighteen fifties, like one day, these
<v Speaker 1>won't be here anymore, they'd be like, no way, they're
<v Speaker 1>everywhere whereas I think you could easily do that with
<v Speaker 1>things like Scotch broom and kud zoo.
<v Speaker 3>And if there was enough, that'd be fantastic, enough.
<v Speaker 1>Time spent at it. But but then you know you've
<v Speaker 1>got and you've got a soil seed bank. You'd have
<v Speaker 1>to keep coming back whatever. But it's it's like anything
<v Speaker 1>weeding isn't the one time thing.
<v Speaker 2>But but you you mentioned, I think the other day
<v Speaker 2>talking about these invasive berries. They're they're low quality. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>it's I think that I saw a graph recently. It
<v Speaker 2>was multi floor rows, autumn olive, bush, honeysuckle, and one
<v Speaker 2>other one and they were all like point six percent fat,
<v Speaker 2>point five percent fat or.
<v Speaker 1>Oh you mean for wild life.
<v Speaker 3>For wildlife, for the for the birds.
<v Speaker 2>So then you go to the native side and it's
<v Speaker 2>the wax myrtle or the spice bush is like fifty
<v Speaker 2>or sixty percent lipids and fats. So when you're thinking
<v Speaker 2>you've got a bird that weighs about a nickel, it's
<v Speaker 2>got to fly from Canada or Ohio all the way
<v Speaker 2>over the Gulf of Mexico down into the tropics twice
<v Speaker 2>a year, and it's trying to get back down there
<v Speaker 2>for the for the winter. It needs those high lipid
<v Speaker 2>berries to be able to get there. I mean it's
<v Speaker 2>five hundred miles over the Gulf of Mexico. It's got
<v Speaker 2>to fly NonStop, so it needs These are the connections
<v Speaker 2>that fuel life, you know, and having these invasive species,
<v Speaker 2>it's not just oh, the robin's still I see robins
<v Speaker 2>eating honeysuckle all the time.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I see. Okay, so you're saying no, you're saying this.
<v Speaker 1>You're saying this in response to those knitwigs that are like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>it provides services. It's vasives, cutted crowspier. Like that's one
<v Speaker 1>of the most shit for brain talking points. Again, it's
<v Speaker 1>you're not thinking about this, like you're not. No invasive
<v Speaker 1>species is gonna be better at the any you know,
<v Speaker 1>anything that the natives have evolved in doing that. They've
<v Speaker 1>been doing for literally millions of fucking years. Man, Like
<v Speaker 1>you can't.
<v Speaker 2>Ignore it to even fathom all the connections and all
<v Speaker 2>the different things that go into that. Like these birds
<v Speaker 2>have been doing this for for thows hundreds of thousands
<v Speaker 2>of years, so we we Yeah, I mean that that
<v Speaker 2>is a very.
<v Speaker 1>I use the analogy all the time. It's like, Okay, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>well you can, you know you can?
<v Speaker 2>I do.
<v Speaker 1>You have like a Honda and a Buick next to
<v Speaker 1>each other. You could take like maybe some pieces from
<v Speaker 1>the Honda and Jerry rigged up to make it work
<v Speaker 1>in the Buick. Most isn't gonna work, but you make
<v Speaker 1>it work in the Buick for a little while, but
<v Speaker 1>eventually it wasn't you know, it wasn't built for that car.
<v Speaker 1>It's gonna fucking You're gonna blow up the transmissioner. It's
<v Speaker 1>just going to take a ship and fall apart on you.
<v Speaker 1>You know at some point, like there's no there's just
<v Speaker 1>no rhyme or reason to it. I don't do get
<v Speaker 1>a lot of invasive species deniers still like is that
<v Speaker 1>still a thing? I very rarely see that.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, amongst the foraging community.
<v Speaker 3>Unfortunately people.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I'm sorry, I'm always sitting on permaculture, which
<v Speaker 1>I don't mean to do too much because there's there's
<v Speaker 1>cool people in permaculture, but if you're coming at things,
<v Speaker 1>it's but again, I hope that it's a stepping stone
<v Speaker 1>to more ecologically minded approach. That's just reality. That's the
<v Speaker 1>reality we live, and everything's connected. There's these living fabrics,
<v Speaker 1>there's natural selection, evolution and ecology. Need I mean, everybody
<v Speaker 1>would do themselves well to learn basic elements of that,
<v Speaker 1>basic tenets of those two fields of science. Even if
<v Speaker 1>you don't care about plants, they'll enrich your understanding of
<v Speaker 1>your own species, of how everything works. I mean, it's
<v Speaker 1>stuff that I wish they taught in grade school. It's
<v Speaker 1>so important.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and they should. But also I think with that
<v Speaker 2>is like learn about the area around you don't listen
<v Speaker 2>to I think his name is Bill Mollison, that created permaculture.
<v Speaker 2>He's from Australia, Like they have a different situation down there,
<v Speaker 2>Like you don't want to do there's all these ideas
<v Speaker 2>and permaculture like creating mounds and pits and all this
<v Speaker 2>shit about you don't need to do that in the East,
<v Speaker 2>like I'm in Ohio, Like you do not need to
<v Speaker 2>harvest rain water. That's not sensible. Like if we were
<v Speaker 2>in a desert in Australia, it totally could make sense
<v Speaker 2>to do something like that or whatever the Hugo culture
<v Speaker 2>stuff that's that's so trendy and like, there's no need
<v Speaker 2>for that here. I mean in some places it may
<v Speaker 2>be really useful and it may be part of traditional
<v Speaker 2>knowledge and you know the way they used to.
<v Speaker 3>Do it in that area.
<v Speaker 2>But it's different every it's not how it works.
<v Speaker 1>Every biome and every biome and every ecosystem is different,
<v Speaker 1>and how do you learn about your local biome and
<v Speaker 1>ecosystem through the fields of ecology and evolution. Things evolve together,
<v Speaker 1>they have relationships because they evolve together. It's not just
<v Speaker 1>an individual plant species or animal species that evolved, it's
<v Speaker 1>the relationship they may have with each other that evolves.
<v Speaker 1>And you can't when you understand the great amounts of
<v Speaker 1>time that are involved in that coevolution, you're not gonna
<v Speaker 1>you're not gonna supplant that with something that evolved six
<v Speaker 1>thousand miles away in a completely different setting. It's just
<v Speaker 1>shit rained. Yeah, and I understand it now if you don't,
<v Speaker 1>if you don't get this stuff yet, that's fine. Again,
<v Speaker 1>it's I excuse the ignorance. I don't excuse the arrogance,
<v Speaker 1>you know, if.
<v Speaker 2>You're still it's the people educating and making I see
<v Speaker 2>these Oh my god, these permaculture classes. They're two thousand
<v Speaker 2>dollars for seventy hours of instruction or something.
<v Speaker 3>It's insane.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, it's a total ripoff and a scam. They're
<v Speaker 2>not going to teach you anything about local ecology in
<v Speaker 2>most cases, at least in my experience here in the Midwest,
<v Speaker 2>and it's just like worthless. Like you you really are
<v Speaker 2>trying to apply concepts from like different parts of the
<v Speaker 2>world here, and it's the hodgepodge of you never know
<v Speaker 2>what you're going to get with with perma culture. If
<v Speaker 2>permaculture has no definition or anything like that.
<v Speaker 1>Right, the context for permaculture should be in the point
<v Speaker 1>of growing food and not you know, trying to do
<v Speaker 1>better agriculture, more ecologically minded agriculture, not monocultures, planting things
<v Speaker 1>together and not having flow, increasing soil health, things that
<v Speaker 1>are not just going to benefit people, but the whole
<v Speaker 1>living ecosystem around you. That's the point of prop culture.
<v Speaker 1>That's the point if you're looking if you're going out
<v Speaker 1>into the fucking woods or the native habitat around you
<v Speaker 1>with a permaculture mindset. I'm sorry, but you're gonna be that.
<v Speaker 1>You're gonna be twenty percent educated. You know, you're gonna
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna be looking at a small sliver of what
<v Speaker 1>you need.
<v Speaker 3>To be a pain attention to.
<v Speaker 2>Although, although, like you say, like is a stepping stone,
<v Speaker 2>you can see where if someone has no interest in
<v Speaker 2>plants and then someone says, look, I can make a
<v Speaker 2>food forest out of goji berry and autum olive and whatever,
<v Speaker 2>and it's like, oh, well that's cool. I mean that's
<v Speaker 2>better than a lawn. I get so, I can see
<v Speaker 2>how it'd be a stepping stone. But when we get
<v Speaker 2>serious about managing land and looking at the land and stuff,
<v Speaker 2>permaculture is not it. I mean, no one who says
<v Speaker 2>there a permaculture list is doing work like that.
<v Speaker 3>I used to be a serious ecologic I.
<v Speaker 1>Used to be an invasive species denihilist, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>fifteen years ago. I was only interested. I had a
<v Speaker 1>very narrow, uh breadth of topics that I looked at
<v Speaker 1>in regards to plants, I ignored everything else, and I
<v Speaker 1>would make fun of people that were, you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>not native, because I mean generally it was like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>more well to do people. I'd probably end up getting
<v Speaker 1>it out, getting it into it with anyway it is not.
<v Speaker 1>But but uh, but then I how I got into it.
<v Speaker 1>How I learned that it made sense. I was planting
<v Speaker 1>illegal gardens and I was not. I was trying to
<v Speaker 1>plant like fucking down redwoods in a place where it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't rain for six months during the summer. These are
<v Speaker 1>riparian trees that you know, they grow in floodplains. They're
<v Speaker 1>not invasive yeast, but but they're not going to work.
<v Speaker 1>And so I was like, what the fuck, This isn't
<v Speaker 1>gonna work. But oh, there's these cool native conifers, the cypresses,
<v Speaker 1>the California cypresses that evolved in this region. Maybe I
<v Speaker 1>should plant those instead, And I did. I planted them
<v Speaker 1>in the winter. They were already adapted to growing in
<v Speaker 1>shitty soil like the you know, concrete landfill that from
<v Speaker 1>the freeway that used to be where I was planting
<v Speaker 1>these things, and they were adapted to the climate because
<v Speaker 1>they evolved there over a million years, and so they'd
<v Speaker 1>make it through the summers without you know, without any rain,
<v Speaker 1>and be fine. They wouldn't grow much, but they wouldn't die,
<v Speaker 1>and then it would rain in the winter and they'd
<v Speaker 1>take off and after a year they were established. And and
<v Speaker 1>that's when I was like, huh, well this this kind
<v Speaker 1>of makes sense. And then the more I thought about it,
<v Speaker 1>I was like, well, these things did evolve here, so
<v Speaker 1>I guess it does make sense. They evolved with the pollinators,
<v Speaker 1>the herbivores, the microbivores, the insects. They evolved with this
<v Speaker 1>really weird climate we have in California, the Mediterranean summer
<v Speaker 1>where it's winter wet, summer dry. This makes sense. And
<v Speaker 1>that overnight I just I mean, I was It wasn't
<v Speaker 1>like a purity thing. It was just pragmatism. I was like,
<v Speaker 1>this is what makes sense, man, And they're not going
<v Speaker 1>to get out of control. They're not going to form monocultures.
<v Speaker 1>I rarely see monocultures in nature. You might see one
<v Speaker 1>species of plant dominating, but there'll be other shit mixed in.
<v Speaker 1>You're very rarely going to see a solid monoculture. There
<v Speaker 1>are exceptions, like kreosop bush in the southwest, or some
<v Speaker 1>of the cane you know along the corridors. What was
<v Speaker 1>that species? That native cane break?
<v Speaker 2>Oh, yeah, that's some cool stuff. The river cane. I
<v Speaker 2>can't even remember. That's one of the some of these
<v Speaker 2>Latin names. Man, they got to get a handle on
<v Speaker 2>this ship.
<v Speaker 1>This is a or something.
<v Speaker 2>No, it's just I have trouble with these, you know,
<v Speaker 2>like asters, Fine, but what's the new one for aster
<v Speaker 2>simple cia? Jesus, couldn't you have made it aster a
<v Speaker 2>or something or something easy?
<v Speaker 3>I mean, like just for us.
<v Speaker 1>Rundin area gigantea. Yeah, and is that? I think the
<v Speaker 1>it's it's a native bamboo, which means it's in the
<v Speaker 1>bamboo subfamily bamboo soidy, which is really cool. There's some
<v Speaker 1>really cool South American ones I've seen, But that that's
<v Speaker 1>a fucking ecosystem I would have loved to see I've
<v Speaker 1>I don't think I'm familiar with that species. I don't
<v Speaker 1>think i've seen it before. There's a Rondo donuts, you guys,
<v Speaker 1>get a Rondo donuts up there. That is a horrible invasive.
<v Speaker 1>It might be too cold up there for it.
<v Speaker 2>Just the bamboo. Like one of the bamboo species, it's.
<v Speaker 1>A Rondo donax. It's invasive. I think it's from uh
<v Speaker 1>northeastern Africa. I'd have to check, but it's really bad
<v Speaker 1>at lower latitude, it's like La river Rio Grande and
<v Speaker 1>it just forms these fucking impenetrable thickets. They're really bad
<v Speaker 1>invasive species.
<v Speaker 2>Oh okay, no, I don't think we actually do have
<v Speaker 2>that as much. Probably got We've got U Fragmighties, which
<v Speaker 2>looks very similar to this, and this kind of seems
<v Speaker 2>to act in the same way Pragmightes australiaalis or something
<v Speaker 2>in Australis anyway. But yeah, but the native bamboo is
<v Speaker 2>super cool. There's four species. That's the big one that
<v Speaker 2>the Gigantica is the the most wide ranging one. There's
<v Speaker 2>also an upland one and an Alabama species, and I
<v Speaker 2>think there's one other species. But these tane breaks would
<v Speaker 2>have created miles long continue with pure cane. That would
<v Speaker 2>have just been a thicket of caine, impassable for anything.
<v Speaker 2>It would have been like twenty foot tall. That bison
<v Speaker 2>and the elk were feeding on the cane. And that's
<v Speaker 2>that was the reports from like Daniel boone. In these
<v Speaker 2>early explorers, they were seeing tons of Cain's one of
<v Speaker 2>the most common plants reported in the early you know,
<v Speaker 2>explorers accounts and stuff, and it was really cool. The
<v Speaker 2>box warbler is an extinct species warbler that you only
<v Speaker 2>in the mostly in the cane uh you know, the
<v Speaker 2>cane thickets. There's a lot of different and it's a
<v Speaker 2>really weird species.
<v Speaker 3>It's one of those.
<v Speaker 2>I'm blanking on all the scientific terms. What is it
<v Speaker 2>mono when they when they die after flower.
<v Speaker 1>Like, okay, monocarp me, sorry, monocarpic, That's what it is.
<v Speaker 2>So so they flower and they all die back and
<v Speaker 2>they only do that once every like twenty or years.
<v Speaker 2>So it's a really interesting species. There's some speculation to
<v Speaker 2>passenger pigeons could have played a role in keeping the
<v Speaker 2>cane breaks the way they were. And then interestingly, in
<v Speaker 2>two thousand, I think it was two thousand and one,
<v Speaker 2>they discovered that there was a native red panda species
<v Speaker 2>living in Tennessee and it probably lived in the cane
<v Speaker 2>breaks as well. So we actually had a native North
<v Speaker 2>American red panda.
<v Speaker 1>When did it go extinct?
<v Speaker 3>You know, I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>I think they've only found one one specimen or just
<v Speaker 2>a few specimens.
<v Speaker 1>These were fossils bones, right.
<v Speaker 2>They were fossils, and they were very rare because fossils
<v Speaker 2>are rare in Appalachia because of the geology. It's just
<v Speaker 2>rare to find these were five million years old. Oh
<v Speaker 2>so they also found they found a new species of
<v Speaker 2>I think they found a new species of like the
<v Speaker 2>pig like creatures. They found a new species of camel. There,
<v Speaker 2>they found a new species of curry that had never
<v Speaker 2>been discovered before. Just really interesting stuff in Tennis. It's
<v Speaker 2>it's called the Gray Fossil Site. You should definitely check
<v Speaker 2>this out. Gray Fossil Site. That sounds pretty randomly found
<v Speaker 2>it making this highway and they immediately said, oh shit,
<v Speaker 2>this is something big. And they've created a center. They've
<v Speaker 2>created an interpretive center over it now. But super fascinating,
<v Speaker 2>and you know, it just goes to show all those
<v Speaker 2>big species. We underestimate how much disturbance would have been
<v Speaker 2>happening in North America. We had this is the origin
<v Speaker 2>of horses, this is the this is the original place
<v Speaker 2>of camels. We also had the bison and the mammoths
<v Speaker 2>and all that stuff. We had giant ground sloths that
<v Speaker 2>were trampling around twenty thirty feet tall, pulling down anything
<v Speaker 2>they wanted. Yeah, it was just a crazy world.
<v Speaker 1>Uh. You know what's really wild too is to think
<v Speaker 1>about some of I mean, there was meta sequoia here too.
<v Speaker 1>I think it only went out like two or three
<v Speaker 1>million years ago. There's relatively recent fossils, but there was
<v Speaker 1>you know, forests in places where it's completely boned dry
<v Speaker 1>no now like northwestern Nevada, southeastern Oregon. I mean I've
<v Speaker 1>seen trunks of these fossil redwoods that are fucking huge,
<v Speaker 1>like just not no interpretive center around them. I think
<v Speaker 1>we might have been trespassing with that wasn't trespassing, it
<v Speaker 1>was public land, but somebody had a claim there. You can,
<v Speaker 1>you know, put claims mining claims or fossil claims to
<v Speaker 1>public land. But there was this huge trunk of this
<v Speaker 1>redwood that was like three feet diameter just sticking out
<v Speaker 1>of this layer of tofacious sediment volcanic ash like white
<v Speaker 1>powdery shit, basically pure silica, and the layer of basalt
<v Speaker 1>above it, which was probably two feet thick, was twelve
<v Speaker 1>million years old according to the geologic map. So this
<v Speaker 1>stuff was probably assuming there were no one conformities. This
<v Speaker 1>stuff was probably thirteen, fourteen, fifteen million years old, so
<v Speaker 1>fifteen million years ago there were these dense, lush forests
<v Speaker 1>in a place where it's now very very dry and
<v Speaker 1>very cold, and there are basically no trees except for
<v Speaker 1>in the mountains, you know, I mean, Northern Basin Range
<v Speaker 1>is not You're not going to get trees anywhere there
<v Speaker 1>except for in the mountains. So that's pretty wild to
<v Speaker 1>think about. It's like, God, there's so much landscape change
<v Speaker 1>and in a short amount of time, like fifteen million years.
<v Speaker 1>And also you know, fossils of other you know, more
<v Speaker 1>leafy plant sassafrass and chestnuts and shit, and areas that
<v Speaker 1>are very dry now where those lineages are restricted to
<v Speaker 1>the east coast. Now they don't. You don't getting that
<v Speaker 1>stuff out west. It's crazy to think about, Man.
<v Speaker 2>That is crazy. That's really interesting.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but well, I guess we're we're two and a
<v Speaker 1>half hours now. I'll let you go. But that was
<v Speaker 1>that was a wonderful conversation. So thanksin absolutely, man.
<v Speaker 2>I appreciate you giving me the opportunity here. And I've
<v Speaker 2>been a long time listener. As I told you, when
<v Speaker 2>I messaged you, and I just appreciate your work. Man.
<v Speaker 2>You do great and always bringing on great voices on
<v Speaker 2>the podcast and everything.
<v Speaker 3>So I just appreciate it.
<v Speaker 1>Thanks you man, Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. So I
<v Speaker 1>just like, I just want to get more people thinking
<v Speaker 1>about the stuff and put on people's radar. It's done
<v Speaker 1>so much for me to keep me fucking you know,
<v Speaker 1>calmed down and yellow and just made my life so
<v Speaker 1>much richer than it would otherwise be paying attention, you know,
<v Speaker 1>if I weren't paying attention to this living world. So
<v Speaker 1>would you want to tell everybody where to where they
<v Speaker 1>can find you? Got bird Song Landscapes Instagram page? What
<v Speaker 1>else are you up to?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? Yeah, I'm on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok is
<v Speaker 2>bird Song Landscapes. I'm in Southwest Ohio, so you can
<v Speaker 2>find my information on there and hit me up. Did
<v Speaker 2>you ever have any questions or want some help, need
<v Speaker 2>some advice on a seed mix or something like that.
<v Speaker 3>I'm happy to help out. Yeah, And I was going
<v Speaker 3>to say as well.
<v Speaker 2>I work with Beaver Creek Wetlands Association. It's a local
<v Speaker 2>org that takes care of some really special property Wetlands
<v Speaker 2>in Dayton. We're going to be bringing in Doug Tallamy
<v Speaker 2>on February fourteenth in Dayton. So if you're in the
<v Speaker 2>Ohio region, if you're in the Cincinnati Dayton region, you
<v Speaker 2>want to come see Doug Tallamy, just kind of keep
<v Speaker 2>that in mind. It'll be the middle of February and
<v Speaker 2>he'll be given a talk. I believe in Yellow Springs.
<v Speaker 2>So anyway, and I also wanted to mention I'm really
<v Speaker 2>proud of my step son Xander Cameron. He's really into
<v Speaker 2>this stuff and he's seventeen, but you know, he's gone
<v Speaker 2>out of his way to learn learn all the scientific
<v Speaker 2>names of the trees and stuff. He's really gotten into it,
<v Speaker 2>and he's interested in this stuff, and he's looking into
<v Speaker 2>going to Hocking College.
<v Speaker 3>So I just wanted to.
<v Speaker 2>Shout him out and say I'm proud of you, man,
<v Speaker 2>because that's that's good to see the younger generations coming
<v Speaker 2>up and doing good works.
<v Speaker 1>I'm so jealous of kids that get into this when
<v Speaker 1>they're younger. I wish I hadn't, I know, but I
<v Speaker 1>think you too. I think it kind of took getting
<v Speaker 1>like a crusty, spiny exterior in a hate for what
<v Speaker 1>you know the deaf cult is doing now, you know,
<v Speaker 1>to really learn to appreciate all this other stuff, like
<v Speaker 1>the living world outside.
<v Speaker 2>Maybe man.
<v Speaker 3>That's that's how I felt.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I went out to Oregon and I couldn't
<v Speaker 2>see anything interesting about Ohio. But once I came back
<v Speaker 2>with a different perspective, it kind of allowed me to
<v Speaker 2>see I didn't have to be hit in the face
<v Speaker 2>with the Grand Canyon or the Columbia River gorge. I
<v Speaker 2>could start looking at the plants and say, this is
<v Speaker 2>this is an amazing beautiful site itself.
<v Speaker 3>You know, you saw it to be a giant mountain
<v Speaker 3>or something.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you saw what in well, I think you
<v Speaker 1>know out west, which was you know, there's still a
<v Speaker 1>lot more intact ecology out there than there isn't.
<v Speaker 3>The e exactly.
<v Speaker 1>You saw what it was, and it put it on
<v Speaker 1>your radar, and then you're like, I'm gonna come back
<v Speaker 1>home and I wonder what was here that was? I
<v Speaker 1>wonder what the native landscape was like here. That's what
<v Speaker 1>happened to me in Chicago. I was I saw where
<v Speaker 1>it was still intact, and then I put the pieces
<v Speaker 1>together and figured out what it was. And then came
<v Speaker 1>back and realized it was also at one point in
<v Speaker 1>the Chicago area and maybe little bits of it are
<v Speaker 1>still there, and sure enough they were.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Absolutely, Chicago's an interesting spot too.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. So anyway, man, well thanks a lot, Austin Miller,
<v Speaker 1>everybody Birchsung landscapes and yeah, Austin, good talking to everybody. Else.
<v Speaker 1>Have a grocery, they go fuck you. Somebody