Setting Fire to Suburbia w/ Gerould Wilhelm

Okay, welcome to the crime pace of Botany doesn't podcast on hearing the backyard
of Jerry Wilhelm, who wrote Flora of the Chicago Region along with Laura Richa.
How do you Rica, Rica? I think I sucked that up last
time too, So anyway, so anyway, thank you for being down to
do this. We we recorded a segment for Kill Your Lawn, the TV
show a few days ago, and then I was so, I was so
impressed with your yard and everything you said. And I mean, I gotta
be honest, and I were in Glenn Ellen. I thought this was gonna
be a little more stiff, you know, a little more rigid. You
really got into the weeds there with some I mean you said some wonderful shit.
I was really into it. So and not just good science, but
but good ethos And that was what really impressed me. That's what I I
was like, God, damn, I gotta come back so here I am,
well hit what hit your heart? I mean well, I mean being
in your yard, I could see your some one that spends time in nature.
We were just doing a I don't know how to describe Killer along.
What does a landscaping show for slobs? It's like a little bit more professional
than crime pays, which is what I do. Criased body doesn't. But
it's you know, we were spending time working with landscapers, and I don't
trust most landscapers, nothing against them, but they're forced to supply with the
market demands. And in the Midwest, what the market demands is still a
fundamental disconnection from nature and this cookie cutter shit. You know, plants lined
up, even if you're using native plants, they're still lined up like products
on a shelf at a department store. And the groupings of color, and
I mean, it looks like the people who design these landscapes never spent time
in a prairie or a savannah. No offense to them, but that's and
that's just because what you know, I think what Midwest landscaping wants is that,
you know, nineteenth century European model of gardening. You know, that's
what people know all they know here. You could get born, you could
be born in Chicago, live in Chicago, and die in Chicago and never
see a prairie. That's what happened to me. You could exactly. I
mean, I didn't die yet, but you know what I mean I thirty
five until I knew what silphium, terrabinth and asium was or what you know.
I knew what a prairie was, but I didn't know there were you
know, liliums, native lilies, and I had no idea, man it
was. And then I was like, this is fucking offensive to me.
I was deprived of this growing up because everything's been murked. You know,
ever heard of doctor Robert F. Betts, who played a lot of prairies
in Illinois back in the seventies and sixties. Well, he was a Bridgeport
guy. He lived right there, you know, in Bridgeport, where the
dailies are and all that. And he grew up in Chicago. He was
he'd been in the army World War Two. He was a he had a
PhD. Organic chemistry taught at or bio chemistry taught at Northeastern. And he
and then between some of the houses there they had these vacant places grew up
in. They called him prairies because in the in the old days, they
were prairies between the lots and whatnot. So they just kept calling on prairies.
Well, he saw this milkweed there and it was kind of strange looking
things. We took this more breedhom he showed Foyd's week. He said,
what's this? What's this? Uh, what's this there? And he's one
of our milkweeds. He says, uh, that's a common milkweed. And
he said, what do you mean there's more than one kind of milkweed?
And for oh yeah, we got you know, up a dozen milkweeds.
It stunned him. He shocked him. He spent the rest of his life
trying to save prairies and find prairies and milkweeds. And he devoted himself.
It was epifinous to him. When was this. This is probably in the
in the in the middle sixties. Yeah, and he and he saved so
many prairies in Illinois. He saved he found and discovered, uh, the
Gaysburg Markhing Prairie down there off of one hundred and fifty ninth in the Tollway.
Yeah, he saved Goose Lake Prairie. He saved the Vermont Cemetery Prairie
down here in Plainfield. He saved so many of the prairies. He was
the one that really made it start getting interest in the public eye of Illinoisans.
People didn't know. Yeah, and even and he was the first one.
He in Schulenburg where among the first who even thought you should burn a
prairie. All of the geniuses in the state at the time, from the
natural history survey, all the academics and the universities. Oh, no,
we should have worn a prairie because we'll getting away of the climax, you
see. And so the climax was this thing set up by this theory developed
coming initially out of the University of Chicago a nineteen hundred, where they had
this thing that well, if you wait, if you step back long enough,
everything will kind of grow back to something so that nature can grow itself.
Yeah, this is this kind of John Muir just stepped back in.
John Muller was the wilderness guy, right, Pete, He didn't think you
should even step in it. Right. It's this mentality that humans are are
indeed apart from nature. They're not part of it, They're separate from it,
which is kind of what got us here in the first place, exactly.
And that and that was what people were thinking at the time, that
all this stuff in nature would occur without us. And they even they didn't
they didn't take into account that, for example, around here or even where
coals developed in nineteen hundred, his theories of succession and whatnot. At the
Indian of dunes, Indians didn't count as people. And so the fact that
they were lived in landscapes and at the Indians were burning them all the time
and living in them and harvesting trees and harvesting plants and things, and that
the whole system around here co evolved with human culture, it didn't count.
And so this is confused ecologists because when they began to understand, because he
used to think that nature had to occur without without us. Yeah, but
then when they started recognizing the Indians were, you know what kind of people
too, and they started to get in the way of their theory. And
it's still a bit of a problem, in a conundrum because scientists liked to
prove everything with repeatable experiments with statistics, asotistics can't be motivated by human choice.
Yes, it wasn't flexible enough, It wasn't mentally flexible enough. It
was so it's so weird. So I hear about like the study of geology
having these everything's got to be this way, you know, these principles late
nineteenth century geology. So like, who the fuck says they have to be
that way? Why can't there be sudden catastrophes that reshape things. I mean,
it's well, it's a legacy of the Enlightenment. Yeah, and so
the Enlightenment paradoxically brought us toward understanding of things in a deeper way. It
also took us away from understandings in a deeper gave us more rigidity. Here,
we can't tump the lives of mind. Yeah. Well you said one
thing that really hit me here, And this is when I was like,
this guy, is this guy's more than just a scientist that wrote a book.
You know. This is you said something if you live and we were
over there, I said, if you live in a landscape of sterility and
ugliness, you're going to exude sterility and ugliness. And you basically summed up
because I grew up out in the suburbs. I mean where I grew up.
The suburb wasn't too bad. It was an older one. We could
walk around the you know, the head sidewalks. You didn't there were no
cul de sacs, but it was still you know, I would end up
going to visit friends and other suburbs that were newer, that had the cul
de sac, all the huge roads and the mini mall parking lots, and
it always fell bad to be there. And I mean, you basically summed
up why I knew this. I knew this landscape that we've built wasn't right
from a very early age, and you basically summed up why it's sterile and
it's ugly. And when you contrast that with the beautiful, intricate chaos of
a prairie, which is one of my favorite landscapes in the world, probably
right up there with Brazilian Sahato and fog deserts of Namibia, et cetera,
you know, then you understand, oh, yeah, this is what this
is, what's real. You know, this ship we're making out here,
these you know, perfect landscaping beds that are all curved lines and edging and
lawn and uniformity is not natural. And it is in spite of the fact
that it looks organized, it's just really chaotic. What my co author Laura
Rica has discovered with the bees from Jump as she's studying the bees is when
you go into a real prairie and when it's burning on an annual basis.
There's no of the five hundred and thirty bees we have, she's found almost
never no more than forty outside of remnant. They're almost all confined a remnants
because in these remnants, while you are burning every year, for example,
there are several cohorts of blooming and all these populations of flowers, and so
these bees, they don't waste any energy. They know right way to go,
the flowers, the male and the female part phases present themselves just at
the right time. It's like this amazing symphony, untilly choreographed, and there's
no energy way to these bees that are that are conservative to these aboriginal systems
are conservative to that high complexity like a it's like to simplify it, it's
like a highly tuned race car engine. He need a little thing goes out
of place. It's subtle a little bit, Yeah, it's going to come
apart. It's it's incredibly intricated. Yeah, it looks I mean I say
chaotic, but it's not really. There's like an amazing amount of it looks
it's chaotic in this yard because this yard is not put together that way.
This yard has some of the plants your yard. It's the coolest. But
your yard is the coolest yard we I've seen in all of the Tristate area,
probably because it looks it's like a nature preserve. And you burn it
too. I want to talk about that later. You actually burn here in
the submers it's fucking hilarious and awesome. Yeah, you know, I mean,
well, by by chaotic, I mean it isn't. It doesn't have
the diversity, It doesn't have the organized the organized structure is certle like you
have. Like I had a little landrover, had a four banger engine in
it, and it could run a very low compression. All of SuDS and
other stuff could be wrong, but it just you could never get it to
really run right because it wasn't. He just wasn't. It wasn't in tune
even is it, even when you try to get it wasn't engineered that way.
And all things made by man rushed and crumble and can't make new things.
Nature is organized, or all of the bits in it have a whole
life within which they can meet each other, have children, you know,
food, have food you'll eat and reproduce, dye and all that whole.
It's all working together almost like h in a healthy uh, in a healthy
gut, you got the proper bacteria, you get the proper this, You've
got a good mitochondria going on in your cells. It's all working like a
like a fine tune thing. And a restoration or a place like this is
attractive. It's better than you know, Kentucky bluegrass with the boxwood and uh
and you know a red lava rock underneath for sure, and it holds the
rain water. It does some things. But what I would ever, what
I always incaution people is that by planting native plants in your yard and by
making a restoration or whatever, that's not going to replace a remnant. No,
once they're gone. If they're gone, they don't come back. They
don't grow back, right, And so that was why I just everything within
me wants to help people say, yeah, plant everything you want in your
yard, make it as diverse as you can, make it as beautiful as
she'd be beautiful. But uh, don't don't ever suggest to yourself they can
replace a remnant. Once they're gone, they're gone. And Illinois, we
have less than one half of one percent of the land in the state is
even close to remember, so how do we get here, Like, how
did we I just can't imagine the mentality of the people that were doing this
one hundred and years ago, hundred fifty years ago, I was speaking everything.
I don't know. The definition for civilization was tilling the land. That's
why the native people weren't considered civilized, because they thought and they gathered.
They tilled a little bit, but they didn't really till. Tilling the land.
Agriculture is the definition of civilization. So when when they started to civilize
the Northwest Territory out in and the old Northwest Territory, you know, each
of the Mississippi north of the Ohio, the first thing you started doing was
tilling the land. And of course the prairies was so wet it was hard
to till it, and he couldn't even if you did, then it would
be too wet to grow corn and bean. So they started ditching it.
They had a ditch to drain it. And then I can tell you that
that had serious and profound impact on the climate and the culture at the time,
because we were take We went from a land that Amos Sawyer published a
paper in eighteen seventy four in tital the reasons for climate change in Illinois.
And he was born he was just a little boy, probably in nineteen eighteen
when the state became a state down south if here. And he noticed that
every afternoon, just like when I was a kid in Florida, there would
be an afternoon rain shower coming around two thirty three o'clock. He almost set
o'clock by it. And he said, the fraries were so wet. There
was always this water to go up, being sucked up by roots for inspired
out a leaf. Stillmata get to the cool air and come back down.
And then he said, with all the ditching that went on, because he
said that well after the War of eighteen twelve, veterans were getting patents of
eighty acres, usually eighty acres in Illinois. So he was born in eighteen
nineteen. Oh, No, he was probably a little boy in eighteen nineteen,
eighteen eighteen. Yeah. He published this in nineteen seventy four. All
right, okay, so and he was old man. Yeah, But he
said that the the climate had changed. That was the title of his paper.
How why had the climate changed? And he thought it had to do
with the d watering of the prairie. And he said that the rain now
no longer came every afternoon, but only occasionally, and there are much more
violent storms than was than was common when he was because the because all those
plants ack like a paper towel, sucking water up through capillary action and then
a vappo transparring into the air, and then it rises hits the cold there
and you take that paper towel away, you don't have it coming back down
anymore. You don't have it being put back into the atmosphere. I can
tell you that if you think of the earth, so the the soil in
which the prairies embedded, the forest fro embedded, is that sweet happy interface
between Heaven and Earth where life is. That's how the earth film I regulates
is because the and why climate couldn't change too much, too fast over a
course of a couple of seasons, because the soil could never get too hot
or too cold, because there was a connection, a moist water connection.
It's like a heat heat pump works. There was a connection between the thermal
mass twenty five centimeters down and the surface. So just the way if you
put a pot of water on the stove and you try to heat that up,
it takes forever, particularly if you're hungry, right, But if you
put the pot on there without any water in, it gets hot in a
hurry. And so this is the way it used to be. And all
of the plants are ectothermic. The bees, the larvae, the insects,
all those are ectotherms. They depend upon the environment around them as there are.
Their enzyme systems work at the temperature within which they find themselves, and
so they can adjust different temperature changes slowly over the season, but not quickly.
And so this water in the in the soil, this moisture on the
Earth's surface where life was, was a mediating effect. And so when you
when you tell it, and you and you start to do water that upper
surface, and you do water it to the point where your moisture levels drop
to the such that there's no longer an aqueous collection connection to the earth below.
Now that surface material becomes subjective to wrap more rapid temperature changes, you
see what I mean, And so you can get your soil too hot over
the course of the growing season. Lauren, I have mentioned the measured soils.
It highs one hundred twelve degrees fahrenheit on a September day at the surface,
whereas in a sward of a little blue stem grass right nearby, in
an undisturbed portion, the temper is eighty five degrees fairy and it got up
and that's where all the ants were, all the cool all the cool ants
were in this stable soil temperature. The only one ant we found out in
the hundred twelve that was Prelius pruinosis. It's the fastest little anti little scene
like ev a feeno gash is a slow kind of lumbering across the ant that
would never you'd never find that out there. But Prelius just speeds across there
to the next place where it wants to go or whatever. The how are
they But a friend of mine, Kyle, Kyle Librarier, he's got the
Native Habitat Project is he got like a social media page. He's in Alabama.
But he did a little video where he took a you know, a
thermometer that reads temperature on it, pointed it at lawn and it was like
one hundred and thirty degrees. He pointed at at tall grass prairie and the
soil and there it was like yeah eighty basically ambient. Yeah yeah, yeah,
I mean it's it's just the difference is vast. So what are you
gonna do to keep a lawn at all growing and dying? You gotta water
it m and so when you water, like around here, the water we
get let's say thirty seven inches of rain. If that's what you get,
let's get a little bit more, a little bit less sometime some years.
But the we live in what they what trans so called the prairie peninsula,
the tall us Pray Peninsula, where the evaporation rate pretty much equal the precipitation
rate. So the when you are evaporating that much water off a lawn or
running it away, because because the lawn can't hold the rain water, you
have to water them. You have to water it. So you have to
mean you have to mine water from somewhere else in order to keep that lawn
wet. Right, So in my yard here I have charge of or I
would I guess I would say, since it's a third acre, little cut
in the end of the could detect here, that's about three hundred and thirty
gallons of three hundred and thirty thousand gallons of water a year, over which
I have a responsibility not to send in new Orleans dirty. Yeah, let's
so let's talk about this. So what is this what's the situation with water
in Illinois? Because when you've all this lawn all especially all the parking lots
and concrete, that's a thirty seven inches of rain, it's quite a bit,
especially compared the water, it's a million gallons breaker. Right, So
where does all that water end up going? And especially with lawns, I
mean a lot of these are what's the predominant lawn species here, Kentucky blue
grass and where is that? That's not even native? It's not a Kentucky
Eurasians, right, it's Eurasian. It's just got that stupid name. So
it doesn't really do well growing here. And it's especially doesn't do well.
I mean, grasses don't want to continuously be mode. It's like you're neutering
the grass before it gets a chance to reproduce. You know, it's existing
in this state where it's just continuously mowed down. And so that of course
would probably require a lot of chemicals as well, right, I mean you
see a lot of a lot of energy being put into lawn care. Okay,
the reason Okay, so it's always whenever there's a circle. It's always
hard to know where to cook into it, right. But the so take
the way photosynthesis works is, let's say you've got a leaf blade. I
love the grass leaf blade. Think of that as a solar panel, right.
That's that's taking sunlight energy, converting it into box of list ra aldehyde
becomes part of the food of the what what everybody wants to eat, including
the planet itself, and then that also builds routeness root system. So in
a cool season grass like Kentucky bluegrass, it evolved in a place where it
would grow up and the farmers wouldn't overgraze it, so it just about the
time and then it would be it would get to be almost the not quite
star starting to go dormant because it's a cool season. They would they would
graze it and then they'll let it grow back whatever it so, because it's
not going to photosynthesize much after it's gone dormant, so they would graze it
from time to time. That's how it evolved a little bit of grazy.
It starts to go down, they graze it up, and they were grazing
it every week, and they weren't an inch and a half tall because that
would that would award in the place out And so what we do we take.
We get in this neighborhood. The people who pay for it get about
twenty six mollings a year every mowing. Jesus. It's like removing solar panels.
And so that's removing the ability for that grass, that Kentucky blue grass,
to build root system. So you're keeping not only that, but you're
keeping this this organism and a perpetually stressed state, professionally stress state, which
requires then since it can't and those little roots, since they're always cut back
and cut back, cut back, they can't generate get very deep to get
to the water, can't generate more room, they can't generate realmoots. So
you need to water it well. So when you water it, the problem
is it then it keeps growing. And one of it seems to me,
one of the esthetics that nobody in the modern suburb today can stand is grass.
It looks like it's grown. So then they mow it. And when
you mow it, you keep it. You have to keep watering it,
and it keeps looking it's like it's growing. But as that rain comes down
because there's no root system and it's setting off over a clay. Most of
that rain water after the first eighth or sixteenth when it starts washing, washing
away, particularly there's any slope. When water moves on the surface of the
ground, and it moves with any kind of ball all oor energy, it
takes big pieces with it, including nutrients and other stuff. And so you're
eventually leaching away or washing away whatever nutrients you dot and you're washing away water.
So you've got it exactly what happens. And tropical rainforest too. After
they caught him and confirm the agricultures. Every anytime you unstabilize the system,
it's the downside is it's unstable, and so then you have to you have
to keep mowing it. It has to keep fertilizing it. And that fertilizer
gets doesn't little right, and then it washes away yea, And so it's
a it's a vicious circle. And plus all that rainwater that you wish you
had three thirty thousand gallons winds up in New Orleans hot and dirty, as
opposed to being held in the telling the system and nurturing life. Jesus Christ,
and think about this, So you got like I look at look at
your Google map and look at all the land and agricultural and corporate scale tillage,
all those squares on a sway involving the corporate scale tagetillage where they can't
put organic matter back in at the scale that human beings can do it,
and there's not enough organic matter they do it. So what happens is they
have to put drugs into that corn field or bean field to keep it,
to keep it growing, and they have to irrigate it in many cases.
And so but that's but now with ninety day corn ninety day bean over different
phases of the seas, so they get to the elevator at different times and
whatever that land, it doesn't have corn of beans in. It just sits
there and cooks. There's no organic matter and it's been tilled out. They
used to be six seven eight percent organic matter in our perious Well we're down
under two. This seems insane. I mean, how how much longer can
this go on? They can't, it can't already running down. And so
the only the only I actually wrote about this, there's an essay and then
some of the problems in the solutions on the Conservation Research Institute pages Conservation Research
Institute website, and it's called food production issues, and it goes into all
of this. Uh, the way the soil has been abused and our agricultural
approaches to gathering food at at the corporate scale has has changed things and in
some potential solutions. But what you know it comes down to in the end
is local farms done at a scale which of a human being at organic matter
back in every year and replenished that which was lost until its oxidation. And
this is what it's what you call a real farm. The Italian Centurion farm
has been going on, many of those for thousands of years, the same
farm producing food for the little village. What is that? Where is that?
There's all in Italy. They think like southern Italy is the model Italy
what you call a lot of places in Europe. Italian Centurion firm, the
Centurion farm is what I heard. But they've been going back because Alfa,
it was centurions, you know who owned these who had these farms, because
they were kind of big shots, you know, yeah, yeah, and
so they were that's what they did, you know, they were when they
weren't off, you know, killing huns and stuff. You know they were
fine, run to manage the their their thing, you know. So I
don't know why actually why I got the call cent Churien Farm, but whatever,
And they're probably called other things in Italy, right right, But the
point is human scale, human scale instead of these huge monocles. Well,
you know, it's weird. It's like when I went out to Pizzow the
other day. You're driving through oceans of this corn. I remember being a
kid and just thinking, who the fuck is eating all this corn? Whereas
I don't. I eat corn a couple of times a year in the summer.
And then I realized, oh, it's going to pigs. It's going
to pigs. Pigs. You could drive Rockport to Cairo and seek sweetcorn.
God, that's goss and it's terrible for him too. It's not what they
evolved from. It's it's just madness. It's just and this is what we've
gotten rid of, this rich biological system for it to build this trash and
the subs. And then they they they they eat corn for what seven or
eight nine months, I don't know what it is. Then they then we
eat that, you know. Then it says, I mean I love meat,
you know, when I was a kid and we lived in Amarillo,
sant Angelo and San Antonio, Texas for a while, and even yead,
I just love a good Uh, but this isn't healthy, me said in
a longhorns mistake. You know that was real meat, but corn fed stock.
Heard meat doesn't seem like good meat. It doesn't. It's it's they
look at the cost, you know, the the overall cost. Like I
said, the downside of a buns of steable behaviors. You can't you can't
continue it. That was there's there's there are these realities in nature, and
I'm one of the life. Father was a pilot heat and pilots, just
like sea captains, have to understand their medium, understanding their craft. Understand
the realities is merciless. It doesn't make you a bad person. He told
me. I came in one late late one night, he was living in
Florida, and and I was, you know, I'd probably been a little
bit, you know, doing things that shouldn't been doing or whatever. And
he he looked at me, he said, son, He said, uh,
you're running out of altitude, airspeed and experience that will lead to one
of grace will landing it doesn't mean it doesn't. You may have meant well,
you've tried hard, sed your prayers, told your modem please and thank
you, fed the dog without being told, did your math homework. You
still die, not because you're a bad person, because you broke a real
law. You didn't maintain the configuration of your aircraft. And that's what we're
doing. And it doesn't matter what our intentions are. It doesn't matter what
the geniuses with PhDs say, It doesn't matter what the government officials with all
of the high priced suits say. The nature is still going to come back
and bite us in the ass if we if we if we mess with it.
So we have to be attentive to the realities if we're going to sustain
a real relationship. So this means we have to figure out And what I've
learned is that it isn't people with me. I've learned a lot from smart
people. But people are just ignorant as hell. They'll infinitely ignorant, they'll
always be ignorant. But the plants and animals, they they don't lie,
they don't cheat, they don't tenure tract, they're not an ego dribbon.
They don't try to be at you. They just they just what you can
see is if they're languishing, you need to adjust your behavior with them,
you need to adjust your relationship. If they're flourishing, you must be done
doing something right. And so the plants will tell you only truth. It's
pain. Yeah, there was something else you who had said you had said,
And it's kind of struck me too, because this is something I've arrived
at and I guess to some it may sound a little woo woo, but
you know, I'm pretty fucking far from woo woo. But but you had
said something whereas if you read the landscape, if you know how to read
the landscape, the plants will tell you, you know, and it's and
that's true. They do. I mean, if plants will you'll be able
to tell whether they're thriving, what's what's causing them to go, you know,
to decline. And on a grander scale, you can read the landscape
and see that same thing, you know. I mean, there's a I
think there's there's And that's not just about horticulture. It's not just the keeping.
It's not just about land management. That being a good steward of whatever,
you know, ecosystem you're in. It's it's on a larger scale.
It's kind of an ethos, like a civilizational ethos that we could benefit from.
And you know, you kept bringing up you know, native people here,
and I think, you know, they get romanticized a lot, they
get fetishized a lot by different sides. All that bullshit aside. It's all
silly pop culture shit. It's got you know, but all that aside,
I think there was a real ethos we could stand to learn from them.
And I think more importantly too, that they they got that as a result
of of of having failed before. I think there were crashes they had they
learned that. You know that that learning was the result of numerous mistakes.
And we're gonna walk, yeah, and we're just ignoring all that shit,
and we're going to repeat those same fucking mistakes, but on an exponentially larger
scale. And then I wonder, is there any coming back for that from
that for us? You know, well, I would say this that the
reason they sustained that throughout the Holocene was because they had to have all resources
within walking distance. They couldn't screw up, not too often, not too
long. They would die with all those that lived that were here when we
got here, had figured it out all a long time ago. We can
defer accountability, but bringing our resources from distant lands grown and soils about which
we could care less and about and populations and cultures of which we couldn't have
no interest in in understanding. We just want what it is they got and
we truck it. Or training technologies allowed us to fuck around and fuck off
and who cares and be reckless. But I think but eventually we will be
accountable exactly. And that's not just that's not some warnings, that's just just
the way it is. Those are the laws, sure, just like the
laws of gravity. I mean, if they're undeniable. And I think too
about you know, the people who have learned anywhere, whether it's you know,
the fucking Pagans in northern Europe who got slaughtered by the Romans, or
whether it's the you know, the Potawatami they used to live here, or
the fucking Aborigines in Australia. I think people people learn these lessons on how
to live on land responsibly. They had to do it by default because they
couldn't escape. They didn't have technological escape. But they also eventually those lessons
were so strong that they became a part of their cultural ethos. You know,
we need to we need to do. Our ethos is different, our
our landscape aesthetic is different. And so that's part of the problem. People
where we're sitting right now, you're like, you know, you're an average
person would think, good god, you know what's he twice? What's the
instance? Are lazy? Yeah? I was here. I was like,
this is the coolest fucking yard I've been in. And what would any of
the people I grew up with, like friends, like my friends dad's you
know, growing up, what would they think? This guy? What's he
doing? He didn't cut his law, he can't cut his law. What
is he doing? This looks it's all filthy, dirty and weedy. Just
I was just imagining the ignorant shit they would say. And I was like,
I just want to give this dude is full of psychedelics and put them
in the prairie or not. You don't need those, you know what I
mean? I mean, I just I want people to spend time in nature
and see these connections, because you start to notice them the more the closer
you look, the more you crouch down. The more time you spend in
these places, the more you start to notice. And and that's what I'm
saying. There's a lesson to be learned in those places, and you become
then your your athos responds to that. But if you don't do that,
if you're born and you live and you die in a place where all made
by man, then you come to think of that all around you must be
made or control by man to be right, That's just the way it is.
And so it's hard to break out of that. The average person who
does I mean in ninety nine percent of Illinois and the people in his neighborhood,
that's what they do. But they don't know anything else. They just
don't know. Yeah, you know, I remember reading in a Canoe with
Frank belro Is, one of the he was one of one of the great
wildlife biologists in the state of Illinois with the history and he he told me
when he was younger, he did some research and he he he these ducks,
I think there were ducks, and he and they made of course,
they had eggs in their little nest. And he said, if you put
uh, like, let's say, I don't know what the number was let's
say seventy one or a half hours or whatever after they were after they were
hatched. If they couldn't see the sky that evening, that night or that
day, whatever that time was, they would never be able to migrate.
There wasn't an imprinting phase. It happened, and it wasn't because you could
it could be a cloudy sky. He didn't understand it. But if but
there was a imprinting as as that child is developing, there there's imprints happening
all the time that once that imprint is in there, you can't get it
out. It's very hard about some sort of the fiffiness thing going on in
human beings. And so once you've passed that, often it's like third grade.
Wherever you are, a third grade, it's really hard after third grade
to start changing things. Yeah, and it because your your body, your
mind, your everything has has has gathered this in within your culture and you
can't help it. You know what I am hopeful about though, and I
see this, you know, I know I know that. You know,
once the prairie remnants are gone, there's no you can't restore those. They
take thousands of years, if not more, but definitely if I think for
for planting native habitat in your yard. I've seen a lot of people doing
that in Chicago and it's fucking great and you see people getting excited about it
too. You know, you get to see twenty years ago. I mean
I walk by these parkways right between sidewalk and street, just the normal Chicago
neighborhoods, beautiful Chicago neighborhoods, beautiful bungalows, beautiful silver maples, and a
lot of honey locusts too, And uh, twenty years ago, you would
never see what I see now. I see fucking parkways that are spilling with
golden rod and synthio trichum and fucking sylfium's in Chicago City. I never I
grew up. I didn't see my first sylfium til I was fucking thirty five.
I didn't see a single Yeah, yeah, no, because I would
remember, like I'm prairie doctor, fucking leaves can be three foot long,
you know, I saw it in thirty five, and now you can see
them in the city. I mean, there's kids that can get exposed these
things. There's people being aware of what the prairie is. There's people younger
people that want to bring it back. I went around last night the four
different houses, you know, from South Loop to up in Niles, just
planting. I had all this leftover plants from Pizzo. I was just sticking
plugs in the ground. Can't keep mallow, silphium, big blue stem.
You know, if people were just stamped on it. And a couple people
I met already had prairie gardens, they were stoked on it. I mean,
I do see. And that's what's gonna slowly bring bring it back into
people's lives, and maybe maybe before I mean I don't know if it'll happen
before we hit the edge of the cliff, but you know, bring bring
us to like a more irrational ethos, inject more of this stuff into the
culture, you know. I mean, I still I am a catastrophist.
I think, no, no drunk quits drinking on its own without hitting rock
bottom. And that's where we're as a society. You know, Yeah,
you're not gonna start going to a meetings until you actually fuck up your life.
And I like learning the but and we hopefully will do that before we
go extinct. But it's nice to see these little glimmers, you know of
just even just to see these prairie plants in eighteen thirty two, before we
had the steel plow, the prairiers was still too wet to plow even if
we had one. Practically, can you imagine the farmer standing at Fort Dearborn
looking west and try to imagine that tills and farm from here to Denver in
his lifetime? How could you have imagined that there was no technology, there
was no economy that was supported. Yeah, but if you can imagine that
same idea, we can. We see it here today. It's hard to
imagine a healing process actually happening. But as long as we save the germ
material, the remnants, yeah, then by degrees that this. But but
that was done anyteen thirty two by one farmer and one farmer, and on
one another farmer and another farmer and another farmer as the technology and the economy
and the estics and the essets and the ethnics or ethos began to govern that,
and that was all done by one person at a time. Same way
it can happen again if you save the remnants, If they saved the remnants,
there you go. It's spreads It's like a positive contagion. Baby come
starts with an egg and a sperm, and then two three, four suddenly
you have billions and you have a baby. It all happen the nature.
When nature works is that's the where it works, not in big bangs,
not in in uh uh. You know, genius is running things. Well,
Jerry, it sounds like it sounds like you're you're exuding a hopeful note
for this colossal fuck up we've committed as a civilization. Maybe there's a if
we save the remnants, If we save the remnants exactly, so let's talk.
So let's talk about some of the science of the prairie, right because
we had talked about I guess where to start. I mean, I had
asked you when we were doing the Killer Long thing with if you could go
back to a specific time period in Chicago, what would it be, you
know? And I was thinking, oh, maybe I I'd be cool to
see the glaciers I'm standing on a mile and a half fucking eyes, you
know, or maybe even farther back, like you know, and the Mia
scene or something. But you said, what did you say? You said
a couple hundred years ago, right right before here's the reason, because my
whole if you want to call it a career, well you you as you
said two hundred years ago, right that, I'll tell you why. Yeah,
it's because in order to do what we're talking about, you have to
understand there. You have to first understand that this whole system co evolved with
human culture. So therefore, the human culture, the way those people chose
to relate to the land, that particular relationship that had been successful up until
we ran them out. If we're trying to resurrect a cultural relationship with the
land that is salubrious to the species that are native here, then we have
to try to read, recover the best we can and that relationship and try
to try to patch that being back into our own culture by degrees the only
way to do that. And so so I've that's how I why I've looked
into Indian languages. Who I've looked into it, read everything I can read
about native people and how they how they lived in the land. Because because
that place where we sort of stepped off the path and got going the wrong
direction is where we need to sort of learn how to come back to the
rails. How do we get back on the rails exactly. And that's and
so that's the time period that we most informative because of the what's it was
eighteen hundred native species in or here or whatever it is. Uh, those
are the plants that we're dealing with, and it's their relationships and their complexity,
their internal structure, the way they work together with all the insects.
That's that's. Uh, that's the condition. That's the that we want to
try to through with our choices. The choices that we make are relationship to
re establish a more congenial relationship with all of the things around us that are
alive, not just ourselves. And so we've become very so focused. And
this is what happens when everything is made by man. Then we think that
everything that gets broken can be fixed by many through some operation, some craft
or something. But it's this, but a relationship with the earth is beyond
craft. It's it's like you said earlier, it's there's an ethos, there's
a and and also an aesthetic. What do you what do you find attractive?
You know? I mean I personally find diversity of flowers in each season
and seeing healthy plants, I just see that as beautiful. I just do.
It's incredible. I just need nothing can rival. I mean, you
can't see the ground in a prairie. I can't see the ground in your
yard. Man. I you've got how many different species you have here?
Fifty probably one hundred and fifty. I mean, it's it's you could tell
this is the yard as someone that's trying to recreate what they love. What
they love is nature. I could tell you're someone who spends time in nature.
But let's get back to that ethos. So how do you how do
we get back What was that ethos that the native people who lived there exuded,
and what were some of the focal points of it. They they listened
to their elders, and the elders had listened to their elders, and they
knew what to do, and so there was kind of a humility in it.
It sounds like absolutely humility. Actually there's a story. What part of
what gets us into trouble? We went back to the Enlightenment. Remember I've
mentioned that that's sort of how we started getting off the rails a little bit.
Started the STACUMSI the great Shawnee leader uh who was in lived born in
the Philcott the Ohio area whatnot. I don't know if you know about Jacumcy.
Yeah, but uh he had older brother Chiknica and uh they were in
the kiss Pacota sept of the Shawnee. They were one of seven steps.
But anyway, he they were getting these books on the flat boats coming down
the Ohio and he had too. One of these books was older brother cheek
Dica. He said, look, cheek Deka, what the white men can
do? He can add the next white man you can help hear what the
next white man said, even though the lips don't move, doesn't even have
to be there. They were books. Books. He talked about books.
Yeh, look what wait what what what white their man can do? He
can make the other white man hear him without the lips moving, doesn't even
have to be there. And particularly because said the company, this is why
the white man so confused, is because he traps the words from out of
the air, and he puts edges on him that you can't see like he
does the land, but you can't you can't cross it. And this makes
it hard for the elder to explain things to people who have different levels of
thinking and whatnot. Though the words are trapped. And now you can't look
into the eyes of the man who wrote those words to see if he's been
listening to bad birds. Not only it sounded like the compsul was foreseeing the
older brother of bullshit and social media. No, this is his older brother.
And he said, not only that the company, anyone can read those
words, even when the older loods are not ready. Yeah, this is
why the white man so confused. So the humility comes in for us and
understanding that a written word such as we all right and try to communicate.
It's just our own particular thing that we're doing. And we could be wrong.
We could beat this, We could beat that. We don't know the
level of understanding of the reader. We just write, but we think that
because it's written out of publishing. Got three referee papers. You got a
paper, We've got three reviewers. Review your referee paper and publishing and learn
a journal and that's not God spoke. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Well now
and now it's I mean social media through a wrench and all of that too.
I remember when it's just the Internet coming out. I was I was
stoked because I was like, wow, I can get access to all this
information, but now with comments sections and social media, and you don't know
if someone's putting this up because they actually believe it, or if they're just
posing and trying to paint the nice picture of themselves or what there's just and
not to mention all the misinformation that comes out politically and trying to I mean,
just turn up the thermometer in the room, you know, and get
two sides against each other, divisive bullshit. You know, you've got grandpa's
being radicalized, you got like young kids being radicalized about goofy bullshit. It's
I thought of everything's out of phase. But getting back to this and what
you've got like in your yard seems like I mean, just getting back to
for I hate almost hate the word nature, right, I almost hate it
because what is nature? Nature is real, what we make is not real.
Nature is just the real world. But getting back to that seems like
that might be a way to suck people out of this void of nonsense and
get them back to what really matters. I don't know, Well, there's
a serenity here when when we moved in and it was all one. We
can see the neighbors, this everybody but if they're there, their wind breaks
in it. You can't see him through breaks whatever. But I mean it
was all so we were embedded in this. To me, it looked like
a drug dependent rug. You had said that before, that's a great fucking
just a drug dependent rug. And about that, it's drug dependent rug,
heavily medicated. It's like going down to the Laura Whacker or whatever in a
bad night, you know it just it does make you feel good. Yeah,
And so in my own particular way, I thought, well, you
know, do something about it. And so initially and that was there have
been a pool out there something pool. People before us had had a pool
out there and said they're going to compacted that soil forever to get anything to
grow in it. How did you fill it in? Or was it above
ground pool? What was it above ground pool? Okay, yeah, yeah,
my grandma had one of those long park Yeah, but you know,
how do people everyway's got them, you know. But but it made a
big flat compact this spot there, and so it took forever done. So
it was still a problem. I can show you where it was. You
can tell because the plants are a little depressed and a little this a little
bit. It's got a lot better, whereas prairie soil is. I don't
want to interrupt you, but yeah, we got to talk about prairie soil
after this because it's so fucking rich. And that's something people noticed in my
videos. They're like, God, that soil is incredibly black, and I'm
like, that's organic, thousands of years of plants growing and dying. Anyway,
So talking talking about your yards, So how did you how did you
come to create what? You started? Burning? Scattering seed and burning,
burning, burning, so you burn. I mean I should mention that anybody
listening, we are. We're in the suburbs. I mean, this is
fucking Glenn Ellen. You live in a rolled up I told you. When
I rolled up, I was like, oh fucky, this is not what
I expected. But then I you know, because the suburbs zuda vibe,
right, you know, it's just boom boom boom everything. And then I
roll up to your yard and I'm like this, Okay, I get it
now, I get what he's doing. So into yeah, exactly, Well,
well, you know I because I mean, I deal with a lot
of people in academia, and I'm friends with a lot of them. A
lot of them are really wonderful people. It's actually the younger crowds that I
tend to have problems with. They tend to be surprisingly the more stiff.
But but uh, I guess, you know, I just I didn't Yeah,
I thought you were going to be a scientist and not. I didn't
know that you were gonna be I mean, there's good stuff everywhere, but
I just didn't know like we were gonna end up having a conversation about how
our civilizational ethos needs to change, you know. I mean, I I
don't know. It's it's yeah, it's really cool. I'm pretty excited about.
But anyway, so Glenn Ellen, yeah, I rolled up. And
then I mean, your yard stands out. How did you get, oh
your neighbors to be cool with this? How did you get you said that
the fire department came the first time you started burned or the cops. Yeah,
and uh, you know, I think the first couple of years,
I actually got a burn permit from us from Illinois EPA, and you know,
burned it with a permit. But then I get the paperwork is overwhelming.
Every year you have to do it again. I would imagine the burn
permits were primarily for farmers, right burning or they were actually people mostly in
this area to doing restorations. Oh wow, like uh yeah really and so
this is what what years is it? Mid eighties? This is probably would
have been eighty five, eighty five, yeah, eighty six, something like
that. And uh but after a while, you know, the neighbors kind
of got cool with it, you know, they just they can see that
only what I was doing and the fire will go out world I wanted to
do. So you would start and of course this is what when would you
burn in November? October later? Usually I sometimes have to burn in the
spring. Yeah, but in a prairie, you want to burn it in
October. So that's so when you started doing this, you would just go
out there. Were you using an accelerat at all or were you just matches?
Just matches and you just the vedge would be that dry, Well,
it wouldn't burn if it wouldn't go right, So you wasn't ready yet.
You had to wait on next year. So yeah, and once you start
getting the fire going, didn't other things start starts to boof up? Yeah,
then you can then you can carry the fire better and it wouldn't.
It wouldn't. You weren't worried about burning the porch or seed or sighting it.
It wouldn't. And you had you had a hose on hand, I'd
had a hose or a brake and or or like a snow shovel, because
a snow shovel, well, what you do is if your fire is going
where you don't want it to go, you just put the snow shovel down
on it and let it keep the oxygen away and it puts out the fire.
Yeah, or whatever, I mean, just what things you'd learn how
to do right just by thinking about them and doing it. You're doing it.
And then I'd had experience burning, you know in du Pays County Force
Preserve with Wayne lamp that we would burn before it was a formal thing.
You know, we'd watt and burn Force Preserves. We'd we'd use railroad flares,
you know, you'd take off the thing and makes a flare for thirty
minutes. Oh yeah, I were for the railroad for fifteen years. Well,
familiar with the floor. I may have stolen a couple for my own
personal enjoyment. You know. Wait, that's what we would use. Those
are great. Yeah, and uh, I don't even do they still make
them? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, they got him in the front
of all the locomotives. Yeah, they don't make torpedoes anymore. You know
those things you would put on the tracks and then it'd be a signal,
you know, the conductor have to walk a mile down or get shoved a
mile down, put them on the track and then pull up and that'd be
a signal to a train. Boom boom. You hear it when you roll
over it that you know, you got to stop your train. So yeah,
but but so, oh oh the thing fell off on one. Okay,
here we go. Yeah, it's the Yeah, it sounds great.
So it is the green praymantis, the native one, and then there because
I don't I'm not enough of anatomology. I know which one. There's that
big one that's that's not you know, that big brown one or whatever.
Yeah, this was the green. I've seen the brown on at wolf Row
and that's the Chinese one, I think, But I don't know. She's
she's the one who knows everything. But anyway, so, okay, so
we're torching the suburbs. Let's get back to it. How did you do
how so do you just and you were doing this in the eighties, man,
Yeah, so this is and I mean, I just I'm just so
blown away. I think it's so fucking cool, you know. I mean,
my mom still lives in Lagrange. I would love to convince her to
do it. She probably wouldn't. It was the prairie garden. I got
her to plant the prairie garden. That took a while, but now it's
it's rolling. It's great. People are afraid of fire. Yeah, this
has come. This is this is a linguistic thing. Remember what the coomps
he was saying his older brother. But also fire comes from the We get
the word fire dust from the German dust fire, right, that's it,
that's our word. Now the native people's who spoke, well, I've studied
so the Potawatomy and the Jibwey and the dog was speaking very similar language.
Those were those were the native tribes here. The Potawatomies came here after the
Potiac War after seventeen sixty nine, after the Miamis were had to move.
They were made to go moved east. So this was a big war that
started. Not to get distracted by Pontiac warps, right right, this was
a big This is a big Indian war. That was another one of the
Indian wars. Yeah, and how do we know about it? This from
French fur traders writing it down or how I know that's that's that's that's history.
Seventy sixty nine is well into the history. There were already European we
know the history recording stuff, and so let's people were voted about it.
I mean, it's history. Yeah. So anyway I was with her.
I'll tell you a whole story. You got a minute. But so the
thing is we in the eighties, actually it was about the eighties, maybe
it might have been early nineties, and we had a what they call a
savannah conference down in uh Bloomington, Illinois. Everybody trying to figure out what
a savannah was. They figured out they didn't want to call it forest because
back east, the forest or something else, and these things out here were
a little bit different. They didn't want to call it. In English,
we had the word forest, forests are done, savannahs are more. Who
know. But the fact that everybody was still struggled to find a word that
would describe even more open timbers that weren't like those eastern forests, you know.
Yeah, And so they came up with the words savannah. And then
they started arguing what a savannah was. And so they some people would say,
well, you know, savannah, I have fourteen referee papers. They
say, savannah, it's fifty percent canopy cover. And another guy says,
ah, that fifteen referee papers. They say it's seventy five percent. You
have a curtis in a vegetation Wisconsin said it was this and that or whatever.
Everybody's arguing over how what the tree density is in a savannah? And
so it's just just one word, right, It's just a word. Yeah.
And so but if they time makes science out of it, if it's
the one thing, you'll say, hey, Joli day, it was really
it's really cool savannah. You don't say, well, what was the canopy
cover? Right? I just sort of know where it was. I just
know it's gonna generally look like this. It might look a little different.
It is not going to be a dense woodland quickly. So you got an
idea. It's a colloquial word, but we turned it into into science.
Yeah, and argue over it. It's a weird relaxed. It's just for
chill, yeah, and so so. And then I went to the Walpaul
Island over and let's Saint Clair River where it comes down in splits of on
the north of Detroit. And uh, there's an Indian reservation there, the
Noialpol Island they call the they call that Pacasianong, the place where the waters
divide. See. And so I was there talking to Rita's and they burned
that island every year. They've been burning it from time beyond mine. It's
like walking into Eden. Man, it's unbelievable. Anyway, So I was
talking without in the prairie with Areta Sands, who's a spoke through a Jibwe,
and I said, and I just was talking to about our plants and
things, you know, because I'm about this and have an interest in stuff
like that, and so what they would do with them, and so so
I actually I said, we're a reta, what you know. And the
prairie was so beautiful. I said, what do you call the prairie?
You know what, what's your word for the prairie And she said, well,
we call that skoda And she makes the labials come the l the lips
moved the lips come together. M Skoda said, a very all gunkin south
and uh and she said, we called it means the burned over bear Land
and she did her hand like that. I said, wow, you know.
But anyway, back at that conference, to go back, one of
the people in that congress in that after the scientists got through, tell it
all or haven't many referee papers they had asked Steve Packard, who got up,
who was sort of more and more of a local, uh, sort
of community organizer with the ecology and things. And uh, it said Steve,
what is the savannah tree? And Steve said, a savannah tree is
a tree with big nuts. Well that got a hell of a laugh,
you know, partly from the crowd, right, And so then I was
thinking, so then Rita said so then I So she said that the burndle
of bare Land, okay. And then I and I looked over on the
where they had the trees, and there was everything from closed canopy to a
open, completely open grown burr oak. Every can be closer you could ever
come up with, but it was all beautiful, gorgeous underneath because they burned
it every year. And uh, and so I said, and I thought,
well, here's a woman who might know what to call that, not
in German but in you know, Jibway, because I lived here for ten
thousand years, right, yeah, yeah, so so maybe she'd she might
have a clue. Yeah. And so I said, Arita, what do
you call that? I kind of pointed it ambiguously to all those trees were
she said, we called that from ti Quake. I oh, ti qua
keik. Wouldn't that be cool? You know, I wouldn't have that means
the burndle or bare land, but trees with big nuts. And so I
didn't think any more about it. But I later I checked in Roses Dictionary
at nineteen eighty five, I think it was nineteen eighty six of the Ajibwe
language, and I looked up from ti Quake and it said forest. Because
he was a linguist, he was just he was thinking, Okay, that's
that's the word for fourth. You thought that was a forest because at trees?
Yeah, And so then I think, but then we went to this
little visitor center thing, the cinder block visitor center with a little lawn out
front. We sat there and had a little picnic or whatever, a little
eight or lunch I tried to explain to her that there was Kentucky bluegrass and
dandelion, these weren't native here or whatever. She didn't really have a have
a thought about that. She didn't really, I don't think it was too
interesting to her. But anyway, behind the thing was a woods that looked
like a typical forest preserve, hadn't been burning, very dark yeah, and
looked so different. And I thought, I thought, oh my gosh,
one, what she calls that? And then I thought, oh, well,
she'd reproach me and say, Jerry, I told you already that was
from Tiquaki. But then I had a dog in Alaska. We called him
Kobuk, Kinnick, cobuck kakc required two names, and kinnick meant polar bear,
are two big he's out of the water onto the ice, and kobuck
meant big river at a little river. Yeah, And so I thought,
hmm, so maybe she maybe she called it something else, But that's why
I risked it. I risked it, and I said, read it.
What do you call that? She said, oh, Jerry, and she
shivered involuntarily. She said, that's one of the most terrifying words in our
language. We call that the guta quok. The g's a guta quok doesn't
even sound particularly all gonkin, that's don't move. That sounded more here cooian
right, a good talk quok. And so, oh my god, you
know, I looked that up and and Rhodes didn't have it. He thought
they had already done the forest word. Yeah you see. And so then
but I did find a good and then a qua meant well anyway. So
then I asked her, she says, I said, well, what's the
most dangerous word in your scary word in your life? She says, the
ac quack. She says, that's the edge of the guta quack. Because
if you're a little jibwey girl and you're living your whole life with tiny little
pupils, that great depth of field, and you approached someplace that dark,
it could be enemy in there, There could be who knows what's in there.
Plus it's so shady. All the women's plants are gone, all the
dyed plants of food plants and spirit plants of this, and then all the
kind of plants that that the grandmother's us were shaded away as scary place,
right, And so there's these dark mismanaged, unburned. For if they didn't
burn it because it was right and near where the white people come. Yeah,
and they didn't already the people when Sarni on the Canadian side got pissed
off when they burnt because the smoke of got over the Stake Cloud River and
high over their town. But the white people didn't like the smoke going over
their town once a year. We're just weird. But anyway, but the
point is the the I looked up Atlanta later then and and well, what
mantique Wauki really means isn't forest? She said, it means the place where
there is wood. And they and they had they harvested wood. They'll they
didn't just burn. They harvested wood enough. How you can imagine how many
bat use it took to keep a good algonkin village alive. And he did
during the winter, a long Interario or Michigan winter. Oh god, so
they were they harvested. I can tell you more stories about that too.
I'm so curious how they did that. Yeah, that's almost like another that's
it's part of the relationship thing. And I I could go on forever about
that, But I mean, the point is the word savannah. Then see
that the problem is when when when when people of our kinds, like botanists
and ecologists, they come up with things like prairie in our language in Illinois,
say this prairie, wet prairie, music, prairie, wet music,
prairie. It's like a genus, a species of a riven prairie, so
withan prairie. So we're thinking these are like a like taxonomy, right,
And we think because it matches up with taxonomy, that there's a kind of
analog there. And so if you take all the peramutation of for us prairie,
savannah, wet music and dry bog and fans and things, you get
ninety nine words ninety nine point communities for Illinois. And so the presumption is
that there's a typical one and and degraded ones, as if the word then
becomes the impromator of the thought process rather than the way around. And so
the but the mistake, the sort of philosophical mistake. I hope we're not
getting to be deep into the weeds. But the thing is is that they
a landscape such in my yard here there is no DNA that governs its existence,
that that there's no part of that that a recombination of jeans as a
as a nucleated DNA can form itself again. Yeah, so there's no analog
to like wet mesic prairie. There is no one. There's just things that
we call that because we don't know what else to call them. But when
we start to make it science and say, oh, there is such a
thing, then now that's how we dropped the ball. I remember working with
a guy with a tnc. He was working in Michigan and he did heavy
transsex and lake plane prairies over near Wayne County Airport in uh de Froit,
and he had all this hard data saying what, like I said, wet
mesic a lake plane prairie was Okay. Then he came over to the Indiana
Dunes to tell everybody what what what mesic late plane prairie was and what you
had to look for, and here's the hard science to call it a wet
mesic la playing prairie. And heck, a third of the species that grew
over in Wayne County we don't even have it Indiana, Jesus, And so
are things that we call wet mesical lake plain prairie the same as their rigid
thinking. It's like it's like species concepts, you gotta be loose with it.
Well, species concepts at least they're species, right right, but yeah,
right, then you have to be going to eagle types and you go,
you gotta understand. I mean that's like elementary when you're learning the species
concepts, like what is it? There's there's three or four different definitions,
right, there's variation. It all comes down to DNA, you know,
phenotypes, ego types, et cetera. So it's just that their rigidity of
thinking seems so particularly with play communities, because the play community is governed by
l language, not by not by wills, not by science. And they
and so if you were to actually take a quarter meter quadrap which is about
half a meter on the side right, and place it down in that yard,
as depauful as that is, it's not like a remnant, but even
even a yard like that, and you took the inventory of every species in
that quarter meter quadrate, every five or three paces apart your core fish,
a similarity would be rarely more than point seven. Yeah, there's not a
square quarter meter out there there's identical to another, even though it kind of
looks all the same. Every square meter of earth in a healthy system is
unique to all other square meters. I've done this over and over again,
right, Species, richness, diversity, it's all overlaid over land use,
soil, position, exposure or unable. There's so many things to go into
it, we can't even begin to imagine. But they're all different. Man,
Well wait, but I want to bring it back to this so when
you started, I mean, just back to the burning thing, because I
think it's so unique and I think it's something that could really inspire other people
too. Hopefully no one out there burns are garaged now, but you've got
to crack a couple of eggs to make an omelet, if so. So.
But I would love to see more people burning in the suburbs and doing
what you're doing. I mean the look first of let's talk why is burning
and boring in the prairie? Like why? Because you all the plants in
the prairie are generally our baseous perennials, right, so the roots they alive,
the tops die. Every year. You've got this massive explosion of growth
starting around May, and it just explodes. I mean, some of these
plants get twelve feet tall and even taller in a season. So this massive
just eruption of biomass in a very short time span from May and then it
kind of finishes up starting now in September late September. Why is burning important,
Well, there's a lot of reasons, but as far as the aesthetics
goes, when you don't burn, your flower production next year is very low,
which means your insect population is gonna be very low. They haven't got
much to eat. That takes sack lunch in some of those places to find
something to heat. So the burning on a very simple level just keeps the
diversity, the flowering diversity. And also, like I mentioned earlier, the
amount of flowering per stem or per plant is much longer period in the year
the drist burned then when it doesn't burn. Also, when you burn,
the fire is scudding across the surface of the ground and the only fuel it
can burn is from the standing up fuel of the season. It's above the
ground. Get on your tummy and look at a prairie that's burned the year
before and look where the fuel is. It's not down on the ground,
it's it's up off the ground and so when the fire goes, it kind
of scuds through there and it's a little patchy here there, and it leaves
the ground more or less brown, it leaves other other little things going on
in there. It's a much more healthy burn for all sorts of things going
on. Also. The uh then when the when in spring the leaves come
shooting up earlier in spring because it's burned. You get the sunlight hitting that
black, black or brown earth sooner that it actually, if you burn in
October or November, there's what they call the Indian summer, can come back
and you can get a little bit of green already coming back in the window
already starts popping them back. It can come back and and uh but theh
but anyway, so then when that green leaves come up like this, you
know, pointing into the air as they come up above the ground standing up
the night moisture. Have you ever walked in a prairie on a July day
and you get wet to the thighs. Yeah, that's that's moisture that comes
down at the night. All that fog comes down that worked this way down,
uh, in a burn system, all the way to the ground.
It starts nurturing with more water. And so in fact, I read a
paper and the fifties some guy had a crop in Mississippi and he put a
he put a tarp over over his crop to keep the night air office to
find out how important it was. This production dropped. Yeah, so water,
night water is very important when you don't burn or when the snow pack
set that stuffed down the grass is lying all over each other, back and
forth in here, and that the night moisture comes down, sits on it,
and then and then evaporate. It's off in the day. Yeah,
it doesn't go down to the ground. Right, So that's a source of
water you've already forsaken. You're blocking, you're blocking the connection between the atmosphere
and the soil. And again this goes back into that kind of paper towel
effect and that capillary action effect, the moisture. It's all one thing,
yeah, right, the connection of moisture between atmosphere, plants, soil,
just like the connection of moisture and CEO two in your lungs or whatever.
It's all one thing. But we think of it as bits and parts,
and so we don't phases emotionally or whatever when we see a prairie and not
burned because we're not realizing way you have now disconnected that night air from the
ground. The moisture thing, to me is especially striking because I lived in
California for twenty years and right now on California it's dries the bone. You've
got Mediterranean climate summer, dry winter. Well, I lived in the Bay
Area in Oakland, but I was all over the state. I mean up
to like Modak County, learned a lot of body in Mojave Desert. But
but I always remember, you know, flying in the Chicago I'd come to
visit my son, visit my mom, whatever, how fucking green it was
like in August. It was striking and you could smell it. You could
smell all those turpenes and volatiles leaking out of the leaves. I mean,
the area has a smell to it. It's it's sensory overload. That's what
a prairie is at dusk to me, on like a September night. But
but you know, I think a lot of people in Chicago don't realize like
east of the hundredth meridian, I mean you could see it on the satellite
map of the common and everything's green. West everything's dry, yeah, you
know, And and they went Originally that hundredth meridian was the point in America
where it was believed you did not need to irrigate east to the hundreth Bridian
initially. And by the way, in the Bay Area, that area around
Sacramento and the old forts there and whatnot, that was all tall grass prairie
at one time. Oh and rich delta and really burdened and green. It
was. It was not what we see today with a bunch of Eurasian uh
uh, you know, oat grasses and stuff going all over the damn places,
you know, I mean, California is and so bumm. So I
would have loved to see the Delta two, even to see when you get
into a real, real remnant in California. It's like there aren't many,
yeah, but when you get into one, it's really expressive. But you
don't you don't. I don't know of any prairie left California. Maybe there
is one somewhere, but they're all gone now, yeah, there's well.
But anyway, so with your burning here, I mean you you started doing
it in the eighties and you just started saying I imagine just immediate results.
I mean, well, go slow, it goes slow, but at least
you know, you can see it everything a little more, a little bit.
How'd you get rid of the lawn? Get out competed it? Oh
you didn't even have to like dig it up or anything. Oh wow.
You put your prairie in and the perenials will eventually overwhelm it. You can
hell, you can see a little Kentucky blue graphs still in there. But
it, you know, the fire, these native perennials with fire will begin
to just run it out. God, I bet it's for ticks and sugars
and stuff too. It's gotta be just tick here. Well this is this
is not a prairie. But you still burn the burning. But don't we
burn in the dormant season? Yeah? When when when they're already crawling into
the ground or what? I know, why we burn it when we're not
killing things? What all we're doing. All we're doing is burning the fixed
carment of the season. You're ruining the stream for me, I'd like to
think of burning ticks, you know, I'm sure it's got to happen,
right, So this is a problem. We tend to think of fire as
a tool that we can use to kill things we don't like. That's why
you're getting it into You'll see some of this uh plaver about burning in the
growing season and yeah, burning in odd seasons to get diversity and all this
bullshit. Well that's this garbage. Yeah, you burn it. You what
you're burning in the growing season, you're burning into life itself. Yeah.
If you don't like ticks, be more attentive to when you take your clothes
off, you think you can find them, right, right, right,
I mean that's what I do. I've been in But also there's I see
more ticks in woodlands than and burned. It can fall on you. Yeah,
but I don't see I don't see them many ticks in places that burn.
I just don't. That's prairie a lot of that's that's just I don't.
I haven't done a demography on ticks and with what you're talking about,
so I can't talk to me about it. I just don't know. Yeah,
but I don't. I don't. Maybe it's just me because of a
botanist and I've been botanizing for fifty years out in the wild in Florida,
And you did it all over California, and I don't I've never been bothered
by anything. Yeah, right, I know, but everyone hates ticks,
but I just figured me personally, I just I always I think they get
I think they get toasted. On a good burns side, they might,
yeah, I don't know, but what they were, you know, they
got to be up and out, yeah, I mean the right, they
gotta be lurking to be got to be looking around, and so they're generally
not looking around. And then there's there's some animals looking around. So I
don't know about ticks. I can't tell you why. Yeah. Yeah,
where you got mice and deer, you're gonna have ticks? Yeah yeah.
But all right, Well, I want to talk about because this essay you
wrote in the back of Laura of Chicago, which I got right here,
is you know, I love it. Yeah, I love it. I
want to talk about this one quo you have. It's it's what we were
kind of talking about before. It's one could drive randomly all day long within
the Chicago region today and not pass a single aboriginal remnant, not witness a
single recognizable tract of natural plant community. Most remnants are so tiny as to
be nearly unresolvable on a Google map. Aside from the sterile developments of subdivisions,
malls, industrial scale fields of corn and soybean manufactories, golf courses,
vast tracts of lawn, and master works of landscape architecture and architecture replete with
their drug dependent rugs, lollipop trees and poodle shrubs, nearly all the interstitial
landscapes today represent neglect and abandonment, the covenant of creation forsaken. That really,
that really sums it up. That really sums up the Midwest predicament.
There's nothing left, our disaffection from eating. Yeah, it really is what
it is. I mean, that's that is what it is. It's this
neglecting disregard for these incredible intricate systems. Still part of that. John Murrer,
uh, if you see, he was seeing massive coalsale destruction, and
so all he could think of was our relationship with the land is crazy.
Let's stop it, let's get out of here, let's keep preserve these willderness.
I can understand that, and I can see how we evolved into that.
But he was wrong. Well, he was trying to because redevelop his
sensitivity to things. And then Rachel Carson came along, and well, you
know, there's a whole evolution of thinking about this, right, But it's
been a drive on the part of Western civilization to try to rediscover our relationship
with nature. But this has been as you punt out earlier nature you've looked
at there's a book called Before the Wilderness about the California Indians by Planchard and
Black I mean Kat Anderson and Black Blackbirds. Yeah, and uh she they
had no word in their language, so she was in this one like the
Pomo endings the Blake County for example. Yeah, there's no word for nature.
It was just the world. It was like home, right, There
was no there was no thing out there that was nature. There was no
word for wilderness. It just wasn't part of the language. The language.
And this is this is so our basic language of English in this land is
divisive by its nature, right, by the very impressions it puts on our
head, as if nature is still something we need to take care of.
R exactly, That's what That's what I was saying before. I don't even
like that word nature. It implies an inherent separation and we have to use
it, but but we should use it with humility and understand the limits of
our words. I understand that our language is simply a language. It isn't
just because we're uttering a particular language doesn't mean God speaking. It just means
we're speaking English. How we ever, we've learned it, right. The
language betrays the idea, the idea. Yeah, I want to talk to
you about you mentioned this when you were you were working for what was it?
Aren't you? Weren't you in the army? You're working was You're working
for Army Corps of Engineers and the Lamont Prairie, which of course is of
Lockport Prairie, Lockport Prairie, right right, Lamont, Like I always cone
the same done in that area, right, Yeah? So this is this
is like southwest of Chicago along the canal. You were working with Ray Schulenberg,
who started that epic prairie at Morton Arboretum, who seemed to really get
it. That guy got it, He did get it. And then you
were working with who is it Roy Fink or someone Floyd's Swink. Yeah I
fucked that name up anyway. But but you, uh, you talk about
going to these places and and who was it? Someone was saying. Uh.
Ray was saying that these you know, these these you could these,
they'll come back. You could spoil this side, it'll come back. Stuff
will regrow. And then when they got to the Lockport Prairie, he said,
you can't, you can't spoil this. This is America. Yeah,
tell me about that. What was that whole interaction? I mean, what
did you so? I was just a kid, Yeah, I was just
in the rby. I didn't I had a course in bought me at Florida
State. Uh, but I didn't. Also, I went out the first
day with well, so there was no Lockport Prairie then and when it was
there, but nobody called it that. This is before there was all the
savings show was just an undeveloped, undeveloped piece of track. And this is
sixties seventies. This was in seventy two. Yeah, seventy two, right
after the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Environmental Policy Act of nineteen sixty
nine signed in the law January first, nineteen seventy was a result. I
think of Rachel Carson's book published in nineteen sety two, Silent Spring, which
caused our generation the sixteen generation to stand back and say, whoa, whoa,
Wait a minute, we gotta take a look at this ships and that's
going on. We don't we're doing things we shouldn't be doing. We don't
even know what it is. Yeah, so we kind of drew back,
all right, let nature take his course out of the way. That was
part of that thing. And so so this is sort of where we were.
And so I I was we were working on an environmental impact statement,
one of the first ever done because it was right there at that time.
And they wanted to put some locks in, some duplant locks and as well
put channel at Lockport and Brendan Road and Joliet, and we were wares barges
increase the number, the large, the size and the number of barges going
up the channel. So we're doing an environmental impact statement, which is a
new thing. It's all environmental impact statement thing that was just required by the
the new NIPA. And so this is one of the first ones. And
so I was told to make a long story a little bit shorter, to
go up there and characterize the vegetation. Okay, So I did that.
I was sent up there. Major RINGI sent me up there and I met
this. Uh. I was supposed to WoT the first day with Floyd Swink,
and I did. From the Morton, I breedom and Floyd we went
through these where there were fifty sites we were supposed to look at. They
were gonna put spoil on, you know, from the river, from just
from the stuff for the dredging. And so the first one we went into,
and Floyd he he, he said, okay, it's popular, still
toyed. He's asked if I lows his past neck, said, type of
poor potensis. I was writing it down. I'd had Latin all through college,
but I didn't so I wouldn't bother with the Latin. But I didn't
know what the hell these things were. It was just weeds and sticks and
stuff. What did I know? You know, I'd write it down,
but at the indep site, i'd have this list of plants. Oh,
so what was gonna what was gonna do? What? I think? What
could I do with it? What did it mean? He didn't say.
He just went to the next one. Oh, there's populus still toyed,
is poor pretensis past neck, etcetera eta. So he's dictating you just writing.
I think I was writing it down doing the vegetation thing. Yeah,
you know, because I was commanded to by my my my, my major.
And so then we went through about a third of these sites with Floyd
and I had you know what, you know, fifteen sixteen sheets of paper
with Latin names on it. Boy, what I'm gonna do with that?
Right? And so then I went out with Ray Schulenberg the next day.
Floyd couldn't make it, and Ray did the same thing. He knew all
the weeds and sticks in October. I couldn't believe it, you know,
he'd picked up a stick and say this is something you know? Yeah,
I didn't know what the hell you know? And so uh, I was
mostly interested in fishes you see earlier. Yeah, and so so then,
but he would do one thing at the end of each site. He would
say, Jerry, you can spoil it here. You can't hurt it.
It could grow back. Now, whoa, here we have a mega eco
freak from the Martin Uberretum telling a factor from the core of engineers that we
can dump all this dirt and crapping corruption on his on his weeds and sticks.
Yeah, didn't that, you know, didn't that something wrong with that,
you know, kind of threw you off. Me off, I said,
well, because I didn't know what he college he was. I didn't
know anything. You know, nobody did. I called what I when I
was told to do this, I called every ecologist in the country on my
fts line. Try to figure out how you'd discover whether something would grow back
or not, or whether whether it was irreplaceable or not. Because at that
time, everybody thought that if you stood back long enough, it all become
a climax forest. You didn't have to worry about it. And so everybody
thought everything could grow back. So they thought forest was like the idea,
that was the ideal, that was the climax or whatever, and then that
was the thing. And so but Ray would say, don't worry, Jerry,
you could spoil here. You can't hurt it. It could grow back.
Now though, all now there's a weird thought. Yeah, that that
made no sense in nineteen seventy two, in a world where the climax was
such all you have to get out of the way and let the trees grow,
let the beach forest grow back in time through succession. Yeah, But
then we got to this area in near Lockport to south the division streets.
This is a spoil side up two spoils side l two yeah, and he
he suddenly we we came over this brassica nigra. This is a black mustard
burn area where burn would black mustard on it. And we walked into this
place and suddenly Ray just put his hand up and cost me. I said.
He said, oh, Jerry, He said, look there's aaron area
patchula boodleoo a kurt a pendula scrudal area, part of the bridal enterdy polygala
Santego. I hadn't words. I hadn't heard. He just stradling off all
these rare plays, all these things. I didn't there were rare names.
I never heard him. He was saying with a fair amount of reverence.
And he and he said, and I hadn't heard these names. He said,
Jerry, don't spoil here, for this is America and it will not
grow back. Oh my god. And I got weak in the knees.
I got. I just got literally weak in the knees. I almost fell
over with America. And I looked at a little little America there. I
won't grow back, I thought to myself, Because this is someone who knows
his ship, he knows. And he you could see he was in awe
of this. Oh, he was in total awe. Yeah. And uh,
in fact, that day that picture there, he took a picture.
I took a picture of him with that uh meal and burge of cush ponato
which he hadn't seen, hadn't been seen since the turn of the century.
He was thrilled out of his mind to see that there. And uh,
this is where lake was, lakeside, Daisy there still it kind of be
in. It wasn't there there, and it had been put in since then.
Yeah, yeah, and so I could tell that story sometime too.
But anyway, so then I went back to Warren Katty, Mississippi, and
I started learning plants, and I the first plant I picked up was hand
bit lemmi and plexically outside my dooryard in Mississippi, and I keyed it out
in the Redford Allan Bells, Redford Alas in Bells, Florth, Carolina.
And it he don't want to say when I find a guy that took me
half a morning to get there because I hadn't look up. Maybe we word
in the index in the bossary, you know, first used with the key
exactly. And so then I and I said, and then it got and
I said, leman and plexically hand bit roads, fields, roads and waste
places or something like that. And I thought, well, does it native
or whatever? You know, it's part of America. I tried to figure
it out. Yeah, and so but then I went to Major EMI when
I got back, and I said, uh, and I had all the
fifty sites with all these all these lists of plants on it. And he
said, all right, well Helm and you will you will categorize or order
order all of those fifty small sites from from the least important to the best
important, and uh and have it on my desk in three weeks or whatever,
you know. And so I said, well, sir, there's only
one. There's just this U L two and that's a So you imagine a
private talking to a you know, this square jawed major there. You know,
well, sir, that said, the thing is, that's America there,
you can't you know, you know that that's America. When he looked
at me like a some sort of like flake, right, he didn't get
it. He didn't get it at all. He said, well, I
told you to organize one to fifty. That's it. That's it couldn't he
couldn't get it. That's why I later invented that first to quality assessment system
so that people who were outside the discipline could understand that there were big numbers
and small number of places that it mattered. There was there's something you that
actually want to measure it. So this so this, this uh Lockport Prairie.
I mean this because I've been there and it's it's incredible. It's I
mean, I saw plants that I've never seen anywhere else in Chicago land.
Was that after a burn or was it I don't know when day last burned.
I went out there with Mark clues and I forget who else I was
with it. Either way, I was blown away and beautiful. Why did
I not know about this spot? But so, so, how did you
guys go about getting that place protected? Because that's such a rich sight.
I mean, what happened after Ray found it? Well, because nobody was
interested in those things. Really, there was a net praiory inventory that happened
in the middle seventies, but there was an endangered species program that included the
leafy prairie clover for Illinois. Yeah, that daily is there, right,
yeah, and so Ray. The first three years I worked with Ray.
When I got out of the Army, I went to work with Ray.
Right, I'm just looking that up really quick, but I'm listening. Yeah,
and so I wasn't supposed to walk in a prairie. I wasn't a
step in one. The first three years I spent with Ray, we walked
only along railroads and rights away and thinks he would never let me step in
a prairie. I hadn't earned stripes I had in order to write to step
up the prairie. I'm serious. And so so I'll go out on the
weekends. And I knew doctor Betts, Bob Betts, whom I referred to
earlier, wanted to find the leafy prairie clover. He wanted to find this
sandecy, milk betch and meads milk weed. Those are the three plants he
really wanted to find. And this dalli, this Dalia foliosa, this leafy
pray cover hadn't been seen since the turn of the century. Right J.
Hill discovered it. There's only one of the population of the world, and
that's not in near Nashville, in a glade. And so, yeah,
that's the one that Kyle Leibarger that I had mentioned before is working on leafy
prairie clover, and he's down in alabamaic northern Alabamas, and so anyway,
so anyway, I but I would what happened on a weekend, I would
being somewhat naughty by nature. I would go to these prairies where I wasn't
supposed to go, and I would step in him and I kind of look
around. And so I stepped in and I stepped in there off a division
street at headed south looking for this something it's wanted to be there. It
just grew so beautiful and it was so ray had That's why I learned that
was such a thing as in America as America, Right. So I just
wandered around and then I suddenly saw it leafy pray clover. Oh my god,
that's prey clover. I didn't know what. I've never seen it.
Had he hadn't seen it before? No, he nobody's seen it. Wow,
nobody's seen it. So you just went there just to go seventy four
So you just went to Lockport, PRAI just to go to the site.
El tude to just go just kind of time enjoy it, and you rediscovered
a plant that hadn't been seen all the time. I saw it. And
then I thought, oh my god, what am I gonna do. I'm
gonna have to tell Ray I stepped in this prairie to see this, and
I thought he could get me in trouble, you know. And so then
I called doctor Betts. And I called doctor Betts. I said, doctor
Bets, I found uh leafy pray clover. And we went there. We
looked at it. We both stood there and looked at it, you know,
a lot as you know, I mean, who's seen this plant?
Right that? No one, no one alive had ever seen it. Yeah,
And so then we went and told Ray and he was very good about
it. He knew I was, you know, he didn't he knew I
probably by then, i'd you know, I knew enough respect not to go
tromping through a prairie, you know. Yeah. So but he was nice.
It was a nice man, very nice, very nice. But uh
that was That was that story of Blackport Prairie. And then but that I
didn't I didn't want to live another but I knew that that day in October
seventy two, that the only way to discover whether or not as in America.
What's it all the plants? Yeah, So my interest in taxonomy isn't
a kind of uh sort of inborn interest in taxonomy. It's taxonomy is the
tool I used to figure out whether or not I'm in America, or how
well or wherever I am. What's the condition of the America I'm in?
Yeah? Right, what's the species composition, what's the what's it telling me?
Then when I actually get into a place like a real America, that
whole thing comes back. I think, there's there, it is, there's
America. There's this, there's this. This is the stuff that won't grow
back. It's this stuff, it won't grow back. It's all. It's
that simple, boy, that's simple. It was very almost a childish thing.
He told me, don't spoil here. And after after I my nose
had been rubbed, it all the crap, you know, for three days,
then the suddenly have him say, oh, Jerry, don't spoil here.
Well, this is America. It had to have struck you because I
mean, you're with someone who's, yeah, who understands this these plants and
obviously loves them. But it's still his job is to see what can take
a beating and come back from it. You know, where's the army You're
going to dump this these canal tailings, et cetera. You know, and
he knows it sucks, but he's still got to do it. And then
he hits this one spot. He's like, you can't, don't, don't,
don't, don't fuck this up. I've seen I've seen sights like that
before. I've seen actually a lot of them, and there was one down
in South Texas where I live that unfortunately they did get rid of. I
mean, it was it was. It was like the old growth redwood forest
of the time of leap and thorn scrub, you know, I mean just
just incredible. You know, it's much different plant community from here. It's
you know, the blackbrush acacias the dominant that kind of holds it together.
I mean, you had peyote that was down there, massive peyote plants,
all kinds of cool cacti and cistro cactus that forms a little potatoes in the
ground because it's such an extreme environment. Then it was it was. I
mean, I just feel privileged to have experienced it. And then they,
you know, the state built that border wall through it. The destroyed like
a two hundred foot wide swath. I mean there's still there's still remnants of
it around, but I mean you cut a line right through it, it's
you know, and you cut a line right through it, it's you bring
in invasive grasses. It's just yeah, it's it's done. I mean,
I'm a friend of mine who it won't come back, right, A friend
of mine who wrote deep Plants of South There Plants of Deep South Texas,
Ken King, he won't. He's like, I don't even want to go
there anymore. It was a site that all these naturals used to go through
borders. And because he's like, it would just hurt too much to see
it, you know. And I just wonder, why, you know,
why are we still doing this? Is a civilizing We just destroyed Bellbow Prairie?
Yeah, yeah, right, Illinois. You know, Pritzker, the
what's their name, Duckworth, all these senators and people could have could have
stopped that twenty twenty three. Why are we I don't don't make any sense.
Unbelievable to me, That's what I'm like. It's going to take a
catastrophe to stop us on this unbelievable to me. Unbelievable to me that these
people must be completely soulless, because I know that every and every person who
understands went to these people with the most deep knowledge and heartfelt understanding of how
they could even avoid it and do what they wanted to do, and they
wouldn't listen. It's amazing just because of the money involved. I don't know
is the corruption is so deep in our politics said, it's almost unfathomable.
An honest mind can't can't grasp it. Most of us are reasonable thinkers.
We'd like to say, well, you must have some sort of what's your
reason or what is your what is uh, what's the other point of view
that makes this make sense? But there is none. Yeah, and then
most people are reasonable. They just want to be reasonable. And it's so
hard to just believe that it all comes down to money, because that's to
value money more than any of these things. You have to have a nine
year old's brain, like you have to have such an undeveloped I think,
just undeveloped, didn't you know, never really left your little bubble, never
never thought it to prolifically, never really expand it on I just I don't
get it, Like you just have to be kind of a moron. I
guess I think I mean not to sound arrogant, but that's what it is.
You just got to be kind of dumb. I don't get it.
I mean I don't get it either. I've lived for seventy five years and
I can't fathom not not a lot of substance upstairs, not a lot of
depth. I don't know. How do you if you have for a fucking
airport, like an airport to like to it's for Amazon, right, like
to for stupid shit that people buy on Amazon, half of which goes into
the garbage yet too later, yeah said here did they gone tomorrow enterprise that
they were replacing it? It'd be replaceable. And I don't know, but
see that's happened in twenty twenty three, after after fifty plus years of knowing
better. Yeah, so I think there's there's also if there isn't just intelligent,
there's a soul problem going on here, there's something that gets into the
human being that is. I was Steinbeck, you know, talked about this
in east of Eden, that there were people born amongst us who aren't really
human. They they did you read East of Beeden? That that thing?
I've read a lot of Steinbeck. I can't remember when if I did,
it was sixteen years ago. But anyway, he he believed that the way
he defined a human. And I I was kind of struck by this because
I remember I was reading East to Beedan. It was in nineteen eighty four.
I was lying in bed and I had just got to the end of
book one. Now though, oh my god, I could have lived my
whole life through and I thought these thoughts. It was freaking me out,
you know, I thought, what if I hadn't read this, you know,
and then and then I thought, we think of all the books that
have been written down by human beings that I haven't read. Oh my god,
that's terrifying. Well what did he say? Oh he said, uh,
he said, uh, there were people born the'em So he believed that
that, you see, as a biologist, I I thought the high whole
idea of Adam and Eve was silly, right, because but I also wondering,
well, how do you get to be a man versus an animal?
Where did that happen? And so Steinbeck didn't think of it as something a
mammal or human was something you key out and the peters feel a gode to
mammals. In Steinbeck's mind, it was what what Adam and Eve represented was
this this this this development of the capacity to choose and to feel good about
what you do or bad about it. So for the so that uh uh,
that this gives the human being this ability they could they do bad things,
they could do it they and then but they feel bad about it.
Yeah, like they also feel good about doing good things. Yeah, but
he said there were people born amongst us who don't feel bad or good about
doing anything. They just do. They're not human, they don't have that
human genes. It's just programming. They're just program that like animalistics. It's
just I wouldn't want to accuse an animal being like that, but just what
I'm just trying to imagine how the neurology works, because I know you're talking
about I see that, you know, I see that in things. I
see that. I mean, that's how we get here, you know,
that's how we get her as a civilization. That's why I think something happens.
I'm not sure exactly if that's completely analoged what a human is but I
think I've seen that the way our educational system works. Third grade is a
place where, yeah, you I sometimes looking a little a toddler, a
little kid, you know, you know, four or five, six years
old when I look a little kid, and I think, you know,
I want a cute little kid, you know, and it's just a lovely
little kid. And I think, I hate to say, I think,
what are you gonna be? Quit? You know? What are you going
to grow up to be a dickhead? You know? You know what happened?
And I thought it was a missing thrill, But it's true, and
and it it's somewhere, happens around in the third grade, I think.
And what's what does it in take? I don't know. It's just a
way. It's just remember talk about the imprint earlier. Yeah, there's a
there's a developmental thing that's going on. If you haven't, if you haven't,
it made me if some kids are born that way, I don't know,
I don't know, I don't understand it. Yeah, but there's something
they said in these Often our politicians seem to be like that. They seem
to be all sorts of full of you know, bs and happy talk and
slap you on the back and I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna support you
whatever your thing. But I work at we get a compromise politicians and businessmen
and attracts that. Yeah, they just I don't know how you get to
be that way. I couldn't be a politician that had to do stuff that
was evil, that that was soulless. Well, just too. I mean
whenever you whenever you know, in your deathbed and you're looking back, I
mean, don't you want to look back on your life and be like,
then, I had a lot of good laughs, and I saw a lot
of beautiful things that created beautiful things. I fostered great relationships. I inspired
people. And then what do these people look back on They're like, well,
I was the reason an airport got built, and I I I you
know, I was in the newspapers a lot, and I own I own
a large house, and I uh yeah, I had I spent out three
kids and they all went to great colleges. And you know, I mean,
what is that? Yeah, I don't know what doesn't I don't know
what goes on in the mind. If it's got to feel kind of empty,
I mean, it would to me at least, I would think I
don't understand it. I honestly don't understand it. I can't. That's I
can't. I can't. I can't understand it. So Bell Bull was a
prairie remnant too. We should tell you absolutely, anyone listening who's not in
Illinois, what was Bell Bull? Explain it to people who are left.
It was a remnant prairie. There was nothing else like it on earth.
If you were if you took the list of plants that grew up Bell Bull
Prairie and took any other kind of prairie of its kind, what we would
call its name, it would be like no other. They had a completely
unique assemblage of species, probably no more than seventy no more than sixty perce
similar to any other thing. And how how big was it? And how
did be big? I don't remember how exactly big it was, maybe just
a few acres. How did it get left? You know, well,
there's probably probably sort of the way west Chester Prairie got left. It's probably
somewhere along the land there was a legal dispute or land dispute, or nobody
we could figure out how to mess it up. It was. It fell
through the cracks. You might say, yeah, and so, yeah,
we wouldn't have Wolf Rolle Prairie if we didn't have the depression. Yeah,
that's a terrible thought. I can't imagine not having That's Everyone asked me where
to go in Chicago if they're getting in a native plants, I always say
Wolf Roe Prairie, wolf Rolle Prairie, Ginsburg, Markham Prairie, Uh,
Lockport Prairie. Uh, there's a lot of there's not a little little fragment.
Stone is good, but ted stone is deserved. The stone restoration,
they've been doing a lot of planting in there. It's hard to see what
was real and what isn't. Yeah, I mean there's some remnant stuff in
there, but I mean I'm not being critical of it. But yeah,
you know, but it is a restoration. Well there's the was remnant there
too, but it's a lot of us restoration. Yeah. But uh,
but you know they're they're doing the Cook County Forest Preserve is doing a lot
of burning. They've been there are some places they've been burning now for over
twenty years. There's like few factory Roll Prairie. You're stepping into Eden on
Earth, right, there. You know where's that? It's just a few
one hundred yards west of fifty nine off a shoe factory road. Saw the
shoe factory road at the Poplar Creek Preserve. What what town is that I'm
looking at? Probably, uh, that's probably it might be. Yeah,
Shoe Factory Road, Prairie Nature Preserve. That shit, I've never been there
before. It's gorgeous. What was there was a let's I want to talk
about a sleepiest media. I just to change the subject really quick because I
don't want to forget this one. That's a really rare milkweed. It used
to be? Was it ever abundant? Here? Was it common? What
is the because there's still remnants of it in Missouri and Nebraska? Yeah?
Well yeah, Why why did that decline so much here? Why did it
not thrive? Is it? Is there something about it that? Well?
It wasn't It wasn't common to begin with. Yeah. Now you now take
your take, your take your painting, your beautiful painting. Let's say you
take the mortal least, say you take the last Supper. Okay, you
know there's every nobody in that Last Supper is over everywhere, right, And
so you got you got the disciples, you got Jesus, you got a
bunch of other stuff hanging up. So you you take, and you and
you you mess up. Ninety nine point nine percent of it. All you
have left is Saint Peter's nose. That's all we have left, right,
one of the chances it's ninety nine point six percent of the prairie that's gone.
Yeah, right, do you know I mean with that, with that
species especially, I mean that seems like something that people should be at least
cultivating, right, like there should be some people are, but the nursery
just growing ship tons of it and trying to where it's healthiest. Is uh
in western Missouri, West central Missouri and in Nebraska. There's a couple of
populations in Nebraska. I don't think there's a living population alone. Best.
One of the ones that Bob Best really wanted to find. Supposedly there was
a palatine at one point. Yeah, there was. There are old specimens
Jesus, yeah, but palotine prairie. There's a palatine prairie remnant, but
they don't burn it enough. There's their barium sheets from yeah around Chicano.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's wild man that's at the Field Museum.
I think, yeah, yeah, but uh no, no, that's a
that's just one. Are the many rare plants? What are some of the
other rare plants in Chicago? They that people should be growing. It should
be growing any of them. They should be saving where they grow, saving
where they grow. But but I'm an advocate. I really love people seeing
people grow these in their yards. I mean, if if there was someone
here he was like, I want to just have all the all the all
the super rare stuff using as stock plants get set out there. What are
some species that really need you know, ext the dou conservation, which again
is an idea. We want to conserve the remnants, right, but what
are some great species? I mean, just I don't think that way.
Yeah, I'm thinking about here, I get to I'm thinking about what you
could put in your yard. Grasses that learn to hold the water. And
once you started restoring the soil, if we've saved the remnants, then we
can begin to bring some of these things back to have a chance. But
if you're a plant meets milk weed in my yard is even though it's had
fifty years of yeah, I don't think it growed there very long. It
soils wrong, right right, It's just it's you can respect that. Yeah,
you don't think that. I totally get there. I mean, what
are what are some more of the rare plants around Chicago though? I mean,
well, I would say Lakeside Daisy. Let's talk about that. Wait,
now that's been resurrected at Lockport. Yeah, that's uh, Lakeside Daisy
was very rare. In fact that it's the last known location was because I
recall one plant at Rockdale, which is downstream from Lockport Prairie, and it
was a big slag pile up just north of it, and then the slag
pile was getting closer and closer every year to Lakeside Daisy. And so this
this is tetra Nurse, or basically it's tetra nurse the whole genus. Diner
likes it growing further west in drier areas. So it was it needed these
things that we get so much rainier and need these thin soils, these rocky
It was over a limestone pavement in the cracks, and then it was getting
extra water from the Henry formation, which is a standing revel shoulder of the
disciplines river and the rainwater would go in and go into the shoulder, and
it would seep out and would even kind of bubble up a little bit under
the under the limestone. And so that was because you had that that Henry
formation geological shoulder, it had more water than just rainwater or condensation. It
actually had some water coming from the hinterland up underneath, and so it stayed
wet and cold. So, uh, that's a whole other stut discussion.
And even there's a problem at Lockport because of what they built a big golf
course up on the bluff, but they've been mining water out like I'm getting
away from this ship man. No, And we measured, we measured a
change in the in the quality just five years after they built that golf course
to Lockport, a fucking golf course from It's obscene. It's like it's just
it's like a Simpson episode. So anyway, there was a lake side Daisy.
There was one thing in the Marcy Tomorrow who got who wanted to work
on a MATCHSS degree. She wanted to try to resurrect it. So she
she picked up the lake side Daisy from Rockdale. She got some I mean,
she's got some flowers of it, you know, And then she pollinated
them with some pollen from lakeside daisy growing out an elvar in northern Ohio.
And she grew with them in the greenhouse at Universe at what they called University
of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus back in the day. Yeah, And so then
she had all these little she got all sorts of a little because the thing
I couldn't self itself, you know, And so they had to get some
pollen from elsewhere, from a totally different, totally totally different plant from another
place. And so she grew and she had all these little plants in the
greenhouse, and then she wanted to put some out back in the in our
natural in a natural habitat. So she thought, who'll do it at Lockport
Prairie. There's some there's some disturbed limestone outcrops. She put it on,
or she wanted to put it on. So she went, but she had
to get permission from the bureaucrats that were in the Nature Preserves Commission. And
so they said, all and all, we can't be planting that there because
you know why, that's got Ohio jeans in it. You'll pollute the gene
pool, I'm thinking, she was thinking, what he had no gene pool,
it was dye, it was dead. There was one plant left,
and so and so she she basically did tell her to go of themselves,
and she did it anyway. She went and planted out there. She was
she was a late amazing lady, and she did this, and she she
planted a chief ships stuck them out in there, and they'd been spreading,
and so what it was. But she could see that there was subtle differences
in the Ohio in the pubescence and the leaf shape of the Ohio plants versus
the Illinois plant yea. And so she's course, so she could see that.
She said, she thinks herself, what sort of the mother on the
lakeside, Daisy? She said, I can tell my babies, and so
she so she was looking at the plants they put out, and initially they
looked at sort of like the hybrid, like they were sort of half Ohio
and I and I. And she said, you know, well, heck,
at that time, Ohio and the Illinois Republican states, why would you
worry about, you know, taking Ohio genes pointing it in Illinois lakesite Daisy
anyways crazy, you know, thinking about it's just it's just crazy. There's
all this esoteric about gene pollution or something, you know, that's just would
rather kill the whole plant rather than anyway. So yeah, right, and
so she put them back in, and then after a number of years they
began to spread, and she said, those that started spreading had that Illinois
form that Illinois The environment's naturally going to select for what in that case,
Yeah, it did. In that case, she saved the species. And
I agree with it. You know, if you're planting stuff, you want
to plant local ecotype. But you know, if it's that versus not having
it at all due to extinction, it gives a fuck. No, I
mean, it's it's who are we to say? I mean, you know,
but at Lockport Prairie, I don't. I don't believe in planting in
remnants. But she planted it at Lockport Prairie in an area it really wasn't
remnant. It was just these exposures where it would grow and it would decide
itself whether the prairie would sort of let it in and let it out.
And it has moved a little bit out into the prairie. But not very
far, but who knows what'll happen over time. But the point is there
was an example where somebody planted some a rare plant and they had a rationale
for it, and it it makes sense and if you put it in a
place that she thought they had a reasonable chance to grow. But most of
our soils we do restorations on, and our lawns I don't have don't have
a little soil. They just they're just basically they are basically a turf graphs
rug over hard clay. Yeah, and so why would you inflict out on
a night on a rare plant. That's weird too, because when you go
to there's sites where that redtail is it a redtail would be that's all most
we see that in the harriers. Yeah, it's nice. It's a nice
background anyway. Yeah, you know when the thing that struck me too about
the soil. You know, when you go to that good prairie soil,
it's rich and black and just so you can't versus then there's other areas I
would see, you know, and some of the suburbs we were digging in
because we did four we planted four yards to kill your lawn and you dig
down and it's just thick clay. I mean it's like it's been almost compacted
or in or something. I don't know, it's been almost thing compacted.
Because what they do, what they do the way they build a subdivision today
is they they they they they shovel off or they scrape off the they put
it off to the side what composts basically, and then when they get done
with the subject and they put it in the utilities, yeah, because it's
because it's it's not necessarily been cheaper, but it's easier. Yeah, And
so they do that and then they then they take a little bit of push
left of the compost and they put it back over the clay that they've compacted
during the construction. Everything it's just down to clay. And the one thing
that water cannot do it abhors a boundary. And so when you put that
soil back in over clay, it can't get into the clay. Even if
the clay was loose, I couldn't even get into the sand if it was
sandy, because water kit has a hard time crossing boundaries. If you were
going to put it back over sand, what you'd have to put that back
in. What you'd have to do is go in there and stir it up,
kind of chill it up, put in a small layer of soil again
to work that in. Put another layer work it in. So it's not
such a harsh contrast. No borders. Water does not like a border,
right, And so that's what I mean. So let's talk about how the
prairie soil got so rich. I mean, it's basically just composting, right.
It's these those generations of plants growing and dying and decomposing. And it's
because the prairie grasses in this area produce more root system every year than decomposed.
Its accumulated. And the soils are so wet because these glacial soils,
largely, they were so wet that the oxidation rate was so low that whenever
they produced, their root system was dying. It was just constantly accumulating,
and constantly they would more accumulate every year than oxidized by those same grasses.
They were building soil. They're building soil the same grasses out in western Nebraska.
We are building soil too, but they build because it's better, much
better drain, and the evaporation rates so high, the oxidation rates higher,
and so they build They take the same root system, build the same amount
of soil, but about as much oxidized as every year as is made.
So you don't get the big, deep black soil accumulation that you get these
out of the Meridia because they don't have as much rain. They don't have
and they have a higher evaporation rate. And so there, So if you
lightly graze or don't burn a prairie out there the same grasses for a period
of time, your soil'll start to oxidize down and it'll it'll start to net
loss. In Illinois, so burning will prevent that, well, it was
maintaining that he'll be maintaining the grasses out there will prevent it from net loss.
And so. But in the Illinois country and much of that area east
of the Missus Missouri and is such that it's the evaporation rate low enough and
the rainfall is high enough, and the humidity is high enough to where you
you actually can grow more roots system every year than be composers. Wow.
So that rich black soil is mostly coming from the roof's tall roots, not
just the vege up top top burns off right, it would burn off every
year. Yeah, and so that that that extra CO two wound up is
fixed carbon below the ground, basically the soil. That's soil. That's soil.
That's what is so grasslands. It sounds like our massive carbon sinks.
It's carbon sink. The way to scrub carbon out of the air is exactly
grow tall grass. If we don't yeah, tall grass, not fucking lawns,
as long as we don't scrape it all off. So that's a long
term solution too. Some people say, well, how would you restore this
way? What would you do? What flow would you what you put your
mix in? Nobody wants to do what I want to do, but I
would bus is what I would do. In a lot of cases. I
would where you have a plow pan from the previous agriculture, or where you
have a compacted soil, I would put the the prairie grasses, the tall
grasses around here at a rate of about ten pounds per acre, believe it
or not, and just where to grow. Maybe you put some flowers in
if you want to make nothing expensive and just burn it for a hundred years
if you store that. So what species of grass would you use? Big
blue stem many grass, switch grass from tans in the co's the switch what's
switch grass was kind of congregatum pendulum, the side oats grandma, And uh,
that's all I think i've right off the top of my head. Those
are the main A little blue stem excuse, So those are the main grasses.
Depending on where you wouldn't what in a or the pideoats in a in
a very heavy soil. But uh, but those four main grasses, Uh,
depends on where. But that, but you're getting grass, getting warm
seasoned grasses in m and that because because what you're really trying to do,
I think in the long run is resurrect the connection between the heaven and the
earth, which you can't do unless there's soil to talk about. Because a
lot of people won't understand this, the difference between cool season and warm season
grasses. The cool season grasses are those that are are pretty much done flowering
on their own about in June or even July. And the warm season grasses
have plenty of green stuff going on, but they don't bolt until September,
you know, late August September, And so those are the warm season grasses.
Right. It's actually why some people who graze like to have some of
the warm season grasses in there because the cool season grasses in the cool season
pasture, they'll they'll get dormant. Even if you properly raise it will tend
to get dormant in the middle of the season. They call it the summer
slump, and until then they can get green again later in the season.
But the warm season grasses, if they're in there, they can give you.
They can give you forage during the summer slump till the warm season grass
are basically fall bloomers like a lot of the composite, but they grow all
either they start growing immediately. They grow immediately, but that's when they produce.
That that's when they produce. They call them a warm season Yeah,
but uh but that's what they're. Bison and the elk, they those are
what they ate. Why are why did cattle men bring in eur Asia?
I don't get that, Like, we've got so many wonderful grasses in North
America. Why do you get cattle? You know, people, this is
part of this is the land grant universities, and they started recommending things like
bescue. So there's no real reason to it. I mean, there's no
good reason to it. Well, there's all there's referee papers say there's good
reasons. Yeah, but there's no You know what we are so so eft
up in our heads, in our science and our things that we think at
any given point in time. Yeah, it's amazing we even I don't,
I don't, I don't know. You know West Jackson, I don't if
you ever heard of West Jackson. But he he gave a talk at a
prairie conference and Quago back in the seventies already, and everybody was there.
We loved west Jackson because he was looking for now. He worked out in
the Selena's, Kansas. I think you know prairie there cons over that area.
Yeah, And he said, you know the problem with scientist, He
says that the scientist, uh, we'll find fault with papers written fifty years
ago. Oh, and they're happy to talk about it and point out the
problems with their colleagues at this and criticize these papers. They'll even criticize some
of their own. Joel criticized papers written twenty years ago. And they don't
want their students reading anything more than more than ten years old. But the
said is never quite grasped, is that there's infinitely ignorant now as they ever
have been. We keep acting like we sad me know it all right.
You heard of things like oh well we have smart growth, there are smart
cities, we have smart this, smart that. Like suddenly we somebody in
better what smart? It was? All right, like this is the best
we do. Well, listen, now we hit it now, we got
it right, just like the doctors thought, oh we got the thing on
contagion. It's all that humid craft rising up out of the wetlands in the
Morlands causing the disease. Let's get some reaches. Oh god. But they
always think they know what they're doing. They always think they so science.
The biggest problem with the since the Enlightenment in particular, is a lack of
humility. Lack of humility, which is which should be constantly should your humility
It should grow the older you get, right, the more the more you
realize you don't know ship, the more you realize the more you've seen the
doctrines change in your lifetime. Yeah, then you ought to start saying,
well, okay, I think I know what I know. Now. It
kind of gets rid of that rigidity of thought. It stubbornness. You know,
I remember Lioness and Lucy. There were a Penis cartoon with Charles Schultz
back in the day, and I remember Linus and Lucy. You don't know,
you don't I'm talking about that anyway. So they were sitting on the
steps. Well, you know how Lucy was a patant, you know,
she was always telling everybody what what what the thing was. So she was
sitting there with Linus and she said, you know, Linus, they used
to think the world was flat. And line assists there for the middle frame,
it's kind of the third frame. He says, well, what do
we think now? Right? Right? We don't know. I mean,
we'll always changing what we think we know, right, and so which it's
supposed to be the beauty, that's the beauty of it. But the but
the fallacy comes when you suddenly think you finally got it right. Yeah,
it's it's it's uh. But the plants don't don't have that problem trying to
draw boxes around things, trying to you know, make sure things fit into
specific definitions, and forgetting that there is forgetting that flexibility. Because I said,
the white man is always putting his things in boxes with edges on him
that you can't see but you can't cross, but he does the land right.
This is a problem. Yeah, And I hope we I hope we
figure it out at some point. I want to. You've got a cup,
You got some time left? Yeah, go ahead, because I want
to want to. I just want to keep I mean, I could talk
to another fucking hour, but I won't. I won't burden you with that,
I guess uh talk. Going back to the soil, if we could
do a cross section of like a good healthy prairie sort of the bedrock would
be what like twenty thirty down than that even lower than that, depends on
where you are, and then you'd have would you generally have the clay and
you've got soil up top or it all mixes together to where you are.
If you're along a river, what you have is you have like the desk
plains, for example, there's a shoulder. So when the when the glaciers
emptied out and came through the uh you know they're at uh at the in
county what do you call it? The where the where the where the blowouts
were? They're coming through the moraine. Yeah, and any would who when
the lake levels were going down, they would fall out and sometimes it go
back up or whatever. But anyway, they would flow through there like a
mad torrent, right, and they would bring in sand and gravel. All
those glaciers they had empty out, and they all that and just they leaves
as those waters slowed, as the lake came down, then leave a shoulder
of sand and gravel along the edge because it used to be flowing in the
water, but when that water slowed down, they sort of settling out along
the edge. You talking about glaciers melting when the glacier's milk held up by
these moraine dams. You know, just like if you bulldozs see exactly and
you get that where the bulldozs are stops, that's or the snow shovel stops.
That's where that big pile up is snow is Go to Illinois. You
ever been to Peoria, somewhere along the Illinois River. You go to somewhere
you stand on the bluff and look all the way across Illinois to the other
side of the bluff. You want to why the hell was this big trench
running down to the state of Illinois. There was tiny ice stream in the
middle of it. There was once a huge massive glacial outwash glint. Yeah,
and that left those shoulders there. Later and behind those shoulders was moraine.
It hadn't gotten plowed through right and washed through and so behind there.
So it depends on what your bedrock it's like in this plains. The bedrock
I mean in Lockport Lamote, the bed rocks right there, those lock Port,
those lock those limestone, the dolomite puriries are right right at the surface,
right soil, because they're washed all washed out. In some cases that
the dolomite is pretty deep down. But either whatever it is. Sometimes it's
over lake plain, sometimes it's sandy. There was a big lake there that
had silk and sand. It was settling down. And this limestone is all
really old. It's like four hundred million years. It's not our. A
lot of our limestone and our dolomite here is the same dolomite, the same
limestone over which the nagrover flows at Buffalo, that nagrant dolomite. Oh wow,
Yeah, if you go this is old stuff though, I mean,
this is it's old. Yeah. Silurian the von exactly, and so Silurian.
A lot of ours is silurian. And uh but that that whole Nagrane
Escarpment is under Lake Eerie, you know, and Lake Michigan. It's all
under there, and and then it's just been exposed in some cases. So
every place is different. You going on I geology map in front of their
now see the front of this book is amazing. You guys did such a
good job with that geology map. It's h It's just everywhere is different ecosystem
types, geology, you know, geology maps. Uh, it just it
just shows you, right photos every place is unique. Yeah it was so.
But but prairie plants have such a reputation for having those deep roots,
you know, I mean like the big blues them. How deep can the
roots get a big as far as its oxygen and water? Twenty feet forty
feet soils in the Lower Illino River valley at forty feet prairie dock? How
how deep does some of the root can go as slow as it's oxygen and
water. What a root need, root tip needs is oxygen and water.
What's what's the what's the largest prairie dock you've seen? I mean because someone
can live really long, right, I mean, what what is have you
ever seen like a you know, maybe there was a construction project or something
that cut away some soil. You saw this massive roots like the I suppose
those have been there a long time. I don't know how old have you
seen? Have you what's the biggest one you've seen? Like basketball sized?
Oh? The leaves, the root, the root, it's like the cat
x. I don't know, it's it's it's it's they they may split.
I don't know they it's who knows. But uh, there's probably as old
as Bristol colmb pines some of them, I would think that, or not
not four thousand years old? Yeah? They were they they they've been.
They've probably been there since the hipsothermal five six thousand years ago. A prairie
docks some of them like an individual plant. Can they farts? That population
in there? Yeah? Who knows? What? The crowd how you how
would you measure it? They're not witty, right, so you know they
keep rebuilding and doing what they do. But the prairie was old. Yeah,
old, you're dealing with the glaciers were treated what fifteen nineteen thousand years
ago? The last one left finally I think about twelve thousand years ago.
And uh, depending on where you are. If you're over in Boone County,
it's probably been thirty forty thousand years ago. Yeah, over and you
know like Western Velvet Are Yeah, that area Rockford. But the Illinois Beach
State Park is only eighteen hundred years old. Oh wow. That that that
didn't happen until Lake Algoma went down about three thousand years ago, and then
the sand coming out of the Root river up and racine worked its way down
the Wisconsin Illinois coast and created the Illinoie Beach State Park years ago. Jesus
that that beautiful park with all of that beautiful the first wasn't in America.
Yeah, that's crazy, man. Yeah, I'm used to that out west
a little bit on some of these lava flows, you know. Yeah,
pretty recent. But but talking about the flora that you guys wrote, I
want to mention. I mean, I thought it was pretty cool how you
guys arranged it. Everything's alphabetical, genus, family, it's all. It
makes it really easy to find, you know, whereas opposed if it's organized
by family, and then you've got to go, Okay, it's this plant,
I've got to go to this uderstood that when he when he worked on
his first Flora, well, he would he would see Flora's and he would
notice that they're all arranged philogenetically quote unquote, yeah, and he would notice
that the back of the book where the index was the thumb worn, the
pages were coming apart. And that's what he said, he said, he
said, nobody can't remember where you put the only ace versus the own a
Gracie versus the h Henro kalidas. They are who knows where they are in
the books? So they get the index, he said, But the one
thing everybody knows is the alphabet. They if they want to, they go
straight to the alphabet and figure it out. And so even if you know
that was great too, because if you know some of these genera have been
putting different families, there's but they're still going to be in the same spot
in the book alphabet gift, they're the same genus down and we have moved
rounds around a little bit. But there's an index to that in the back.
But the but like you say, some people already know the genus or
the family anyway, and they go to the family and they get try to
get there. A lot faster. It's such a great way to organize.
I wish all Floras were done like this. You know, it's well before
he was criticized by the scribes and fair she's a boxing at the time because
it didn't it wasn't the way that I was always done right. They had
this pretension of Darwinian evolution, that's the way the plant families evolved linearly,
as if there was such a thing could happen, and so there was a
Every genius had a different idea every twenty years as to how that went right,
and so everybody had a different thought as to how. And so Floyd's
thought, well, you know, how do I know in nineteen sixty seven
or whatever, sixty nine what they're thinking, what they're gonna be thinking of
an eighty nine. I'll just make it alphabetical. Yeah, I mean,
it works fucking great. Yeah, what what is the what's the insect that's
been in the background, Not the cicadas, but that like gentle you know,
Laura wouldn't know. Laura would know. Oh yeah, where she based
out of? Is she deserve? Yeah? Okay, I got this Singing
Insects of the Chicago Region by Carl Strang. You know Carl Strang. Yeah,
you used to work with your page County Force bisers. Really. Yeah,
someone told me they're like, you gotta get this PDF, but you
gotta email this dude and they'll send it to you. And sure enough I
did it. Like there, like old school, like underground, you know
something, this one hundred and thirty eight page pdf of Yeah, it's it's
cool, man, there's you know shit, I would love to know what
that sound was in the background because it's one of the best things about you
know, having yard a yard like this. Yeah, it's just it's it
takes in all the senses, you know it does. But but anyway,
okay, so and as long as you're taking in those senses getting back what
we're talking about earlier, Yeah, you're not taking in other senses. You're
a dumb bullshit. That's something you're not freeway. You're taking in beauty.
Yeah, and whatever your body does when it's receiving beauty versus ugginess, there's
there's something transformative about that. Yeah, it's something much healthier. I think
it's I don't know how it works, but there's a physiological thing that happens.
Yeah, you would you had said that too. I mean, when
you would you would largely say as probably I would like. The surrounding world
we've created is not very pretty. We've we've created by man. We've created
a lot of sterility and ugliness. Everything made by man rusts and crumbles.
Men kit make it single thing that lives. All we can all we can
do is nurture that which God gig I'd created. We can't make a single
thing that lives. So all life is made by somebody who isn't us.
Yeah, and and and and all we can do is either damage it or
or nurture it. And those are choices we make as humans. Yea to
nourish or to or to or to be oblivious with whatever. You can be
oblivious. But still it's it can it can be deadlterious. Yeah, So
it's all come back to what is a human? What is it? What's
our you? Like you were saying earlier, when you when you're when you're
in your your your death battle and starting to rattle and stuff, what are
you thinking? What are you looking back on? What are you looking back?
Are you looking back on the billboards On two ninety four for personal injury
attorneys and car insurance. Are you thinking about this? You know, beautiful,
diverse landscape you've created, it's full of life in your back yard,
or healthy grandchildren or and yeah, and relationships you've foster relationship people you've helped
and inspired whatever you know. So so, so go to a morphakness in
there? Yeah, okay, So going back to the floor because another thing
I love about this too is in the descriptions. You guys wrote good descriptions.
It's not dry. You wrote where it occurs, other you know,
as the botanical notes about it, I mean personal experiences were you know,
sheemology in there. Let's see, wait, where is the I don't even
know what every plant tell us that came from? Yeah that yeah that too.
A lot of flora's don't even do that. But I just people can
see those aren't just mystery names. You know. I got distracted by the
Arista Loki section anyway. Okay, so we're going to a morpha. The
diagrams or the floral diagrams are at two these drawings. Did you get the
beautiful job lord? Did those? That was the leady in the back?
Okay? Yeah? Mary margat Loather, shit excellent. We're all pen and
ink drawing. She had almost two thousand of them. Excellent Jesus Christ.
Two thousand. Man. Yeah, I drove her crazy. That's a man.
Must have been some carpal tunnel. But it was worth it. It
looks well a lot of crying. I mean, she she sent me a
thing, you know what, the picture of it. How she what she
had done? Maybe pel had how a little tiny little dot or line they
shouldn't have been there, but it was on the picture or whatever. And
then yeah, and there was another thing that should have been there there wasn't
because she didn't see it. And I tell her, oh shit, to
do it all. Okay, well, yeah, here we go a morpha,
Morpha condescence. Oh wow, this is holy shit. Look at all
the insects to grow with it. Oh my god, Yeah, I forgot
that. You list you list all the ecological relationships too, so so yeah.
The genus are Morpha, two species in Illinois. And we have how
many pages like three of this giant coffee table book, four pages on devoted
to three pages devoted to this. I mean, it's it's so in depth.
Look at all. So if you people think that if they plant that
plant in their garden. They're gonna get those insects. Look at all,
look at them all there? Where did the insects treatment start? The following
beatles consist, so it goes all the way down. Yeah, okay,
So people think they're gonna you plant that in your garden. If it lives
for five years, you still won't get any hardly maybe six of those insects
will show up because they're all gone, because the remnants are gone. They
don't go, they don't leave the remnants. Yeah. Yeah, how did
you guys get all this data? I mean, Laura just uh the other
of it. She's amazing. Yeah, it's incredible. I mean it's just
so in depth, you know, and those are all a boucher to specimens
of insectarium. Wow, that's incredible, man. I know if she's an
unusual character. In fact, when Floyd died, I thought I was done
doing Flora's and because you know, the last one I did it was nineteen
ninety four with Floyd to answer the Chicago region. Okay, and then I
met this young lady Laura at a meeting in Coconty Forest Preserve, and I
thought, oh my god, this is the first person i've talked to this
since I was in college, who who really seemed to understand biology? And
so I I said, the world's got to hear what she has to say
and how she thinks it. And so we started this more. I took
it a seventeen years, but I wanted I wanted to work. So I
started the whole thing again with with with Laura and her husband is a is
a Cook County Force Reserve wildlife biologist. Because the finest wildlife biologist in the
nation. You can't believe it. Who took these photos? Different people?
Yeah, it says on the bottom. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
mean it's yeah, It's fucking incredible. Man, this is great. So
when did this? When did you guys finally publish this? I'm looking for
the day twenty seventeen, seventeen, Yeah, and it took you seventeen years.
You started in two thousand roughly, so roughly, yeah, And so
what was there before this then? Places as Chicago Region you know that book
which is the one now, which is what you did that with Floyd?
Yeah? Yeah, and before that? What was there was there? That
was our nineteen seventy nine editions the Chicago Regions, Okay, and then before
that was his nineteen seventy four. I have a I have the I have
the ninety four and the ninety and the seventy nine and the other road.
We're going to bring it out, but I mean they're just there are early
iterations of this. We had a lot of plant of sociates in it,
so we knew early on that there was no such thing really as a plant
community per se. So every one of those socialists are unique to those species
pretty much. And so the and then what Lauren I did finally for this
particular book, we made those associate was very fine drained, not just a
sort of abroad associate from around the region, but various soils and various districts.
So that's why those those descriptions, because yeah, because this isn't just
the flora. This is like an ecological synthesis anyways. I mean, you're
basically compiling the ecology noting the relationships that exist we've observed. Yeah, right,
the ones, the ones that have been observed it that we've observed.
That's so incredible, it's nuts. Man. So I guess you know,
because I try to get you know, not a lot of people who are
getting into plants end up reading floors within the first year of their introduction into
this, so I think, but I mean, it's really one of the
best ways to learn. You just start, like you said, you start
learning the key stuff out. You have questions, I don't understand this.
You try to answer those questions. You know, use the glossary when you
see words you don't understand. But we have an illustrated glossy we've published as
instant for this book. Have you seen that? No, would you guys?
Would I have a question that would you guys? Are you guys ever
gonna do? Like a PDF version available for so we have a PDF of
the keys we're producing, Yeah, that would be, but the PDF of
that would be, uh like the a PDF of the keys, Yeah,
that'll be a that'll be available soon some like Weekly's got yeah, like and
we got we got one of those. Yeah, that'd be. It's already
done. We just need to get it. In fact, it should be
up on the website. A web guy sometimes does the pay attention to when
we send them an email. So I'll have to call it again. I
want to. I want to ask you too. There's you know, if
I was walking the train tracks to the northwest side of Chicago today and I
was noticing that there's actually like a healthy amount of natives. There's a lot
of invasive bullshit, but there's a healthy amount of native plants there. How
do those But I wonder, you know, does it not only how do
they thrive there, but comparing that plant community like the side of a railroad
embankment with historically what was there, does it paint an inaccurate picture of you
know this because just because you Petorium serodenum is dominant now and so common,
does that mean that back then it was a dominant species as well? Before
the railroads. One of the most beautiful places like a prairie. It was
one of the Monon Railroad over in Indiana in Struck County, because they would
from time to time those prairies would burn. And then they went the Monar
and started running into trouble. For some reason, they decided to invest in
heribicide and went along and tried to herbicide the pies. I don't know why,
Jesus. And so they killed a lot of the prairies off in my
lifetime along the railroads. Yeah, but there are some, but there's some
rights away that were maybe twenty feet wide, and there's some they're like fifty
feet wide or something. And so those that have that cut through the prairie
that were kind of wide like that still have some nice prairie because they coudn't
get everything. They would just spraying along them. They wouldn't spray, and
then then the hot boxes would they would they would just catch on fire and
then they would go out when they got to the farm field or whatever or
cross just going across the prairie or whatever. But simil those prairies were actually
to build the ballast were cut out of the prairie. That build a ballast
up, you know, build the build the roadway, road grade up,
yeah, raise thee raise the grade, and then there would be a little
bit of a dish, you know. They're right. Yeah, but back
in those days, in the eighteen sixties, eighteen eighties and whatnot, what
would come bad. Only what would come in was prairie. And so those
prairies, you can tell, and they tended to be to talk about how
accurate they were, Oh, they seemed to be more a little a little
strong in composites the astracy. Yeah, but by and large you know,
if they're burning, there are some of the sweetest pieces left in the state.
Yeah. God, So that's an interesting concept too. I mean,
when the rail was clearing a lot of the stuff in eighteen sixties, the
the INVA, a lot of the bad invasives hadn't showed up to Yeah.
In fact, a lot of the invasives have showed up in my lifetime.
Like buck Thorne was the buck Thorne problem is bad fifty years ago. Now
it was, it was pretty bad fifty years ago. But the a lot
of weeds have really really burgeoned in my lifetime since I worked on the ninety
four edition. For example, the plants that you see all along the interstates
today and and expressways that are admissible Garris what do you call it? Mug
wart? Yeah, that's all over now. That used to be when I
was young, that was pretty much confined to the Pullman area and the industrial
area that's outside. Yeah. And but what's happened is in the last fifty
years we have so damaged our soils, so depleted them that are even our
even our suburban soils are all as in are as industrial as they were back
in the in the Pullman and and and the plants that used to grow in
heavy soiled you know, heavy soiled weeds you know from Europe. Yeah,
you know, the butterprint, the not weeds and things like that that we're
common in my day are almost missing now. And many of the many of
the suburbs and the little h even some of the little flower garden weeds you
know, like flower of an hour and some of those that used to when
people had soil. Uh, it's uh, there were some nice little weeds.
So even even a lot of these invasive weeds can't cut it anymore with
U No, even well, they're not really invasive. They're very two invasive
weeds. I know that we're used a lot, But to me, an
invasive weed is a weed that comes in no matter what you do the fire.
It'd be less something like frag mighties, you know. Huh would you
consider buck thorne? Uh, If you're burning and you've got a healthy assistant
buck forn, it won't inter it. This doesn't invade it. It can
get you can try to get rid of it because they are already. But
if you're burning a savana or burning a timber, you don't have to worry
about buck you don't have to worry about it. But but but fragmighties if
it gets in. I've seen frag mighties put that little stolen up over railroad
tracks and keep going. I mean, it goes and you can burn it
if nothing happens you. The only way to do it is where frais species
is invasively. Where is it from Eurasia as the worldwide, but it's most
of that particular is eur Asia. But but then you've got uh the some
of those Eurasian legumes, you know, like the uh lotus, the tictra,
the yellow tick, trefoil or what do they call it, the lotus
crinculatus, And that's you can burn it, you can piss on it,
you can do it. I mean it won't get rid of it. You
have to get to herb beside it. And same way with a crown vetch
so or the little further south Cerisia. So those are the plants that I
would consider almost an alex as to cancer. You can't you've got to exercise
them. Yeah, I think a bucked one like that because what I've seen,
I mean, it just it just takes over it. It's where it's
already it's where you already have a weak system, and it's already there,
right. It thrives on the on an already weakened system, and it's and
it's also what you can get rid of it if if you got if you
and if you're burning and you've got a good system, your buck things aren't
going to come in. So it's a badass weed. It's hard to get
rid of, but I wouldn't call it if people use by using the word
invasive, it waters the word down to meaning you have to up attack every
plant as if you would say a frag might ease or a crown right now,
I know there's definitely a grading. I mean, I consider it invasive,
you know, one hundred percent. Especially you know when you're mixing.
It's really about mixing ecosystems that have been separated for millions of years, you
know, which is the case of bodies European weeds. Uh, you know,
no buck flor is a bad one, honeysuckle is a bad one.
Yeah, those are some bad weeds. I would say hard to get rid
of. Yeah, but once you got rid of them with with good fire
and good management, they won't come back in because you're gonna going away to
get rid of them as herbicide, just cutting in herbiciding. Yeah, it
really is the way if people say, if you're if you're a pure equal
freaks, say, wow, we don't want to use herbicide. Meanwhile,
the golf course is out there herbiciding every day the day, and all you
have to do it be like if you had a heart, if you had
a heart problem and you went in you had to get a valve put in.
Well, no one wants to cut your chest open, but sometimes you
got to do these things to fix things right. And so using a herbicide
a little bit in the beginning to get rid of these things, it'll cause
you. Yeah, I don't get it. It's not a it's start a
big people just don't think very far. Yeah, well, it's I think
we think in herds, you know, we think there's herd mentality. I
think this way because there's not a lot of critical thought. But we're moving
on. I guess I guess if we're wrap up soon, I guess I
just wanted to ask, you know, and you're the time you've seen I
mean being the region Chicago is so ecologically destroyed. I mean how you.
I guess, at what point you know, when you moved here, did
you realize you know what you wanted and that there was an alternative and that
the answer really laid and lays in these prairie remnants. And I mean,
what's your opinion now, like going forward into the future. Well, I
can I think with the caveats I said before that we preserved the remnants.
Yeah, that's why the Bellboll was a crushing Yeah. But when I first
started doing a floor, the first floor I did with Floyd was nineteen seventy
nine. That was Plants of the Chicago Region and it was an early iteration
of this book. But at that time we did we did all the associate
lists and all that kind of stuff, same way as here. But what
we were doing there had been almost no management, no stewardship of these systems,
and so the so our associate lists, what they were really recording was
the least accurate disposition of associates with those plants at that time. And I
didn't really, we didn't realize at the time. We thought we were being
we were just recording the data as we saw it, right. But with
beginning in the seventy beginning when that book actually came out. The the with
more burning and more thinning and more addressing these natural areas, they've there's been
a lot of improvement over a lot of the remnant lands, and the plants
are doing things that now that we never dreamed could be done in nineteen seventy
nine. They're they're they're growing in places we never thought they would. They
would hack it. I'll never forget. It was about nineteen probably seventy five.
And Ray was because he burned his prairie every year, but he wouldn't
burn the weedy areas, and he wouldn't burn the you know, he was
only burned the prairie restoration because that's what he was working on. Yeah,
and so I remember one year the the prairie fire kind of leaped out and
got started burning along the ditch they're along Lacey Creek and which had all been
just European weed, you know, brome and rescue and stuff. And you
know, it came up nine specimens in that burned area. Nine specimens of
Riddell's golden rod came up in there, and and r and I thought we
didn't think that could do that. So were the seeds just there. All
the seas had been raining in but needed the fire to express themselves. And
then there was a later So that was a revelation. We didn't even think
a native plant could do that. And so uh we we hadn't been burning
on prairies either. We hadn't been burning non, we hadn't been burning on
restorations. So then I also out there was a large field about there was
all this rescue brome Kentucky blue grass that for years and years everyone wating while
we'd see an Indian grass pop out out in there, or maybe a silpium
pop up here and there a stiff golden rod. Didn't think too much of
it. But the thing is, it stuck out into the prairie and we
had to make a firebreak all the way around it because it wasn't prairie.
And so we were thinking, well, we're burning the prairie restoration, not
the field, and so dumb, dumb, dumb. It only took a
lot three decades to figure out that why not just go ahead, burn across
the field, have a shorter firebreak, and that way we don't have to
put as much time into preparation. We'll just burn a freight across it.
Yeah, well there have been seed from the prairie raining in there for decades.
Oh yeah, okay, but so we burned through there. Within three
years, you can find a weed. The prairie completely re emerged. Amazing,
man, I can't believe it's that easy. Fire. It's just fire
well, and it had been raining in from the right, and of course
seeds arriving. But you're you're clearing the slate, you're making room for all
this stuff, and then you've got seeds just comings are much more competitive with
those particular weeds in that context, and these these non native weeds just starting
to out their habitat and then they get they get out competed. They got
that's not their habitat. Yea. Their habitat isn't an annually burned prairie.
It's a it's a nutrient rich old field. That's where they grow. You
think more suburbanies should be burning their yards and doing what you're doing. Well,
I think I think the most guards won't burn. Right, It's it's
gonna take a little bit. Like the first year, we didn't do anything,
you know it. Uh so you didn't plant any full size plants,
over here around, but my son planted a few, but it was mostly
I mean, you had you had a suburban brought in seed and you just
some plants were brought in. Yeah, he brought in some things, and
I brought in you know, some things. But uh but uh, there
were a few rescues here and there where you know, jerks would do what
jerks do, Yeah, and we'd go rescue it before they did the complete
jerk thing, you know, and then uh so, but most of it
were seated in. And then what was planted like see those uh eutropiums here,
those Joe Pye weeds. Yeah, we played three of up there up
there by the by the air. Can they they they were spreading around.
That's amazing, man, Yeah, that's that. Going back really quick to
that u Putorium serodnum, which it's all over Chicago. You see it popping
up in alleys. You see it popping up and you know, the really
ugly manicured garden beds just pops up as weed. I mean, is that
Why do you think it does so well? I mean, is that it's
it's a non conservative plant. Okay, so there were one way to think
about it, is the the the weeds that followed European man Western man to
this country were those plants that co evolved agricultural semetary people beginning with fertile pressent
m and they've adapted to hear European farms. It's yeah, farm soil forever.
So they're like an a pertinence to our culture. Yeah, okay,
so that they're they're like the camp following flora of Europe. So then they
followed us here, and then there was a camp following flora of natives here
that can followed Indians around, you know whoever. They would you know,
put a duigiwa or kitchen or something like that. They'd mess up the soil
here and they're locally and uh, the little native weeze to come in and
sort of heal that wound. And then when after they left, and it's
so so those that those conserts places. Are you talking about the do you
Petorium serato? Yeah, this sort of the can't follower Flora's sort of analogous
to and you need them because let's say you you damage your your army or
something of your skin, you cut it, what happens you don't immediately get
new skin right, you get you get uh plate let's you know, you
make cloths started to get then you get a scabbed and then you get some
scar tissue a little bit and then you and then that help your tissue.
If it's not too deep, it can grow back. And so that's what
happens. So they you think they can't follow your flora, like uh,
the pretorium serapt them as as that they was trying to stat the hiansis up
on this fucking round embankment. I couldn't believe it. I'm so they they
they're like the healing they're like the they're like the healing plants. And so
you see how these each plants in here have a have a C value from
one from zero to ten. What the natives have a zero? Yeah,
okay, what's that say? C seven? C seven? Okay? So
uh there we gave plas a rating from zero to ten depending on how conservative
they were, how confident we were. When somebody brought that planet into Reverian,
well, we knew where they were. They were in a pretty cool
praier. You're in the parking lot, right like, so zero would be
as plant. There's zero plan would be a plant like historium surround them,
right, that just pops. So that's part zero. And if you look
in there, so and this is Angelica Atropurperia, which is a seven.
Yeah, so if you get that means so that's a pretty good site.
That means you're sure it was in some sort of remnant. Fin. Yeah,
it may be a little bit degraded. It's it's not a ten,
but it's a remnant. Fine. Actually, if a five out of five
means is but you see a five, you're pretty sure that that's it could
be a redegraded site, but it could be it's it's aboriginal, probably aboriginal
soil never got tilled, never really got tailed, probably, Yeah, and
so on the low side of fives. So they'll sort of the think of
it this way. So when the Indians would leave, then they would leave
this vessed up ground. Then you get to eupraetorium serratum, upratorium, boutassium
um, you know what, they're a bianas you see, if you're tricked
and pylosan come in, then sort of heel of that stabilize at soil,
and then as that slow stabilizes, then like the railroad track program came into
the healthier tissues can come in and heel that wounds, right like just elementary
session. So just because it gets a zero rating doesn't mean it's a bad
plan, right, It just means that you when you see it, you're
not confident it came from a remnant what kind of sight it associates with?
Yeah, well you're you're sure it came from a really beat up site at
all likelihood. I'm just always impressed with these natives that can compete with the
invasive non natives, you know, which is nothing. It looks at sea
value, they're incredible. I mean, yeah, that vitorium, I love
seeing that. You know, the anathrobienist and that's etho Thera biennis is good
because it can take some compacted soil. It's got that cap root and it
can struct to break up that compaction. Yeah, you know. And so
these are all the doagos to al tessima you know it's Aissa candidensis. Yeah,
uh, they can do that. Everybody says, oh, we get
too much solid and all tissima because they don't like it or whatever it's got
a low sea value. Well you gotta be patient and you want to understand
what it's doing. They're great. Are you dealing with a sucked up side
site that you know, what do you expect? They're great? Means milk
weed to pop up out there, right, you know, so you gotta
you gotta deal with the healing process. All right. I've actually seen a
lot of milk we'd popping up, like popping up their old asphalt in Chicago.
I mean, like Shariaka. It's Saraaka. Yeah, but it's still
well, it's it's it's a nice native player, but it's one of those
can't followers New World can't follow camp followers. Yeah, well, all right,
we just hit two hours and thirty minutes, so I'll let you go.
But thanks the last man. That's too long a podcast most people,
No, that's fucking a lot of people just put this on during a drive
or whatever. Though I see, I get a lot of people actually tell
me they listen to the whole things. So okay, And I mean,
being that you wrote an entire flora, it seems like a pretty good you
know, it's gonna be a lot of good material in there. I think
it was a great conversation man, Thanks a lot, so I enjoyed it.
The moral of the story is set the suburban yards on fire. Well,
the story, I actually think the big story. I'm just kidding.
That's for me, that's but it's how we help our people change their aesthetic.
You know, what they see is beautiful. Yeah. Then once they
start changing that aesthetic, they're gonna want to do something about it. Right.
No, no, no, no, I was just saying, I'll
just bring the microlo closure. That's that's what I think. That's what you
the fundamental problem. Expose people to it and show them what's help them see
that there's another way. Yeah, and it'll take you know, but it's
you know, I'm not a proselytizer. I'm not gonna stand over here in
rick of Over in the Aghbers say you know, I'm gonna you anymore because
you because you gotta right, right. I shit on the ideology and ei
those of the suburbs, but not even the suburbs of this landscaping. But
I don't shit on people. I want to show people, you know,
but it took me a while to understand it. I love watching people.
I love watching their eyes light up when they finally connect the dots and they're
like wow, this is good. It's so funny that that sound is.
You know, we finished just in time. There's the lawnmowers startup. You
know, it's like, God, good luck, buddy. Seems very sisifician
anyway. All right, man, well thanks so much, Jerry, appreciate
it. Jerry Wilhelm and uh author along with Laura Rica of Flora of the
Chicago Region of Floristic and Ecological synthesis of those illustrations, frankly by Mary all
right with k I I know I can't forget her. Let me which let
me say her name. I just saw her picture. But yeah, there
we go. Yeah, Mary Marguerite lout their excellent illustrations. Uh she's from
Juliet. No, she's yes, she was born Juliet, beautiful Juliet.
It so all right, man, Well thanks so much. Holy shit,
that's loud. Alright, that's all. I gotta go fucking something.