Adam Haritan from Learn Your Land

<v Speaker 1>There we go. All right, Welcome to the crime Pace
<v Speaker 1>A bond he doesn't podcast. I'm stoked for today's guest.
<v Speaker 1>It's Adam Hareton, who does the Learn your Land YouTube channel,
<v Speaker 1>which is a much better quality production than me and
<v Speaker 1>than crime Pace and also covers areas that crime Pace
<v Speaker 1>doesn't normally go, which is eastern North America. All all
<v Speaker 1>facets of ecology are covered in these videos. Stuff about
<v Speaker 1>American chestnuts, how fire suppression causes, you know, explosions, and
<v Speaker 1>tick populations, Morrell mushrooms. It's it's really yeah. I mean
<v Speaker 1>you got a lot of good stuff here.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>I've been watching your channel for a while, so Adam Hereton,
<v Speaker 1>welcome to the podcast.
<v Speaker 2>Thanks great to be here. Finally, I mean I've been
<v Speaker 2>following your stuff for a long time, and I would
<v Speaker 2>say that probably the most recurring comment I get on
<v Speaker 2>my videos is you have to do something with Joey.
<v Speaker 2>You got to do something with crime pas. So finally
<v Speaker 2>we're here. I appreciate it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, totally, man. Yeah, I mean I learned so much
<v Speaker 1>watching your videos because, like I said, I mean I
<v Speaker 1>spent I was spending time on the East coast, you know, Pennsylvania,
<v Speaker 1>New York, et cetera. But long before I was in
<v Speaker 1>the plants, like a decade before I got into any
<v Speaker 1>of this stuff, and I was mostly just going through cities,
<v Speaker 1>and this is kind of an area. I always get
<v Speaker 1>people saying, Oh, you should come out east, and I'm like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I'll make it there at some point, but I haven't really.
<v Speaker 1>I dipped into Pittsburgh for a little bit last year.
<v Speaker 1>But but yeah, anyway, the the these videos are put
<v Speaker 1>together fucking great. I mean, like you could tell you
<v Speaker 1>spend a lot of time editing and putting them, you know,
<v Speaker 1>organizing them. They're fucking yeah. I love them. I was
<v Speaker 1>watching a bunch yesterday too. The one that really got
<v Speaker 1>me excited was the tick video, and I guess we'll
<v Speaker 1>just talk about that first. We'll just jump right into it.
<v Speaker 1>Explain to everybody, because this what was It was like
<v Speaker 1>a thirty minute video on basically how uh you know
<v Speaker 1>all the facett to the ecosystem, earthworms, fire, you know, predators,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera, have influenced this explosion in ticks, which is
<v Speaker 1>when I think of the East coast, that's fucking terrifying
<v Speaker 1>to me, Like that's what scares me the most. Is
<v Speaker 1>that there's just ticks everywhere. And it's like this in
<v Speaker 1>Chicago too, because the deer population is so big. So
<v Speaker 1>explain to everybody. I guess how how this all started?
<v Speaker 1>Like what is this? What's going on with the tech
<v Speaker 1>population in eastern North America.
<v Speaker 2>So there's a lot going on with the tech population
<v Speaker 2>in eastern North America. And I can't speak on behalf
<v Speaker 2>of all of eastern North America because although a lot
<v Speaker 2>of my videos are filmed here, it's mostly in the
<v Speaker 2>mid Atlantic northeastern portion of the United States. So I
<v Speaker 2>live in western Pennsylvania, a bit north of Pittsburgh, so
<v Speaker 2>most of my videos are filmed here. But I have
<v Speaker 2>traveled a bit around the East Coast. And when you
<v Speaker 2>talk to people who have been around a bit and
<v Speaker 2>you learn about their back ground or their childhood and
<v Speaker 2>maybe them hunting in the woods or fishing or foraging,
<v Speaker 2>you learn that they didn't really experience the tick abundance
<v Speaker 2>that we're experiencing right now. A lot of people say
<v Speaker 2>that when they were growing up, they didn't see a
<v Speaker 2>single tick, They never got bitten by a tick, they
<v Speaker 2>never heard of lyme disease, they didn't know anybody getting
<v Speaker 2>sick from it, and then all of the sudden, it
<v Speaker 2>seems like people as they got older started hearing more
<v Speaker 2>about ticks and seeing more ticks and pulling ticks off
<v Speaker 2>of them and knowing friends or family members who came
<v Speaker 2>down with the tick born illness, or even they perhaps
<v Speaker 2>came down with the tick born illness. So it seems
<v Speaker 2>like there was something that happened in the past couple
<v Speaker 2>of decades, and nobody is quite sure exactly what happens
<v Speaker 2>or what happened over the past couple of decades to
<v Speaker 2>lead to this explosion. But if you look back at
<v Speaker 2>the history of land use changes in the United States
<v Speaker 2>and how people have treated forests and have treated farms
<v Speaker 2>and have left farms and abandon them and let forest grow,
<v Speaker 2>and then you see what's happening with development and explosion
<v Speaker 2>and all these housing developments near cities away from cities
<v Speaker 2>in a rural areas, and you start putting things together,
<v Speaker 2>and then you start studying a little bit about ecology,
<v Speaker 2>you start to make sense of perhaps what might be
<v Speaker 2>going on, and it seems like fire suppression could be
<v Speaker 2>one of those factors that's driving the explosion in ticks,
<v Speaker 2>and it's not probably the only thing that's going on.
<v Speaker 2>But a lot of people are saying, especially acologists, they're
<v Speaker 2>saying that this is a big factor that's often overlooked,
<v Speaker 2>and a lot of people aren't really talking about it
<v Speaker 2>because they're not quite sure to what extent this is
<v Speaker 2>the factor that's causing it. But if we go back,
<v Speaker 2>perhaps let's say, six hundred to seven hundred years, in
<v Speaker 2>the Eastern United States, I don't think a lot of
<v Speaker 2>people realize, and I didn't for a long time, and
<v Speaker 2>it still kind of boggles my mind to learn that
<v Speaker 2>a lot of eastern North America was burned, and it
<v Speaker 2>was burned pretty frequently. And maybe that surprises a lot
<v Speaker 2>of us because we think of maybe fires occurring in
<v Speaker 2>the West Coast or the Pacific Northwest, but surely not
<v Speaker 2>here in eastern North America because things just seem too
<v Speaker 2>moist or too wet, and we don't have a lot
<v Speaker 2>of fires wildfires here, at least in the Eastern United
<v Speaker 2>States because of something called fire suppression, which was a
<v Speaker 2>big cultural and political and social movement pretty much starting
<v Speaker 2>in the early nineteen hundreds. But before all this, a
<v Speaker 2>lot of fires did occur in the Eastern United States,
<v Speaker 2>and throughout eastern North America, and they weren't just caused
<v Speaker 2>by lightning. And a lot of people think, well, if
<v Speaker 2>there's going to be a fire, it's going to be
<v Speaker 2>caused by lightning. But it seems that a lot of
<v Speaker 2>people were burning forests as well all over eastern North America,
<v Speaker 2>even in some areas that maybe people wouldn't expect, For example,
<v Speaker 2>the Great Smoky Mountains. I don't know if you've ever
<v Speaker 2>been there, but it's a pretty rich music area with
<v Speaker 2>a lot of big trees. There's some old growth left
<v Speaker 2>in there, and it seems like fires might not have
<v Speaker 2>been common there, But if you look at the historical
<v Speaker 2>record around there, there were clear you know, when settlers
<v Speaker 2>came here, they saw big grassy areas, they saw maize fields,
<v Speaker 2>and the reason that these areas were so open was
<v Speaker 2>because of fire set by indigenous human beings. And so
<v Speaker 2>this was a common practice to open up the land
<v Speaker 2>to travel much more easily, to hunt more easily, to
<v Speaker 2>foster the growth of certain berry producing plants, to clear
<v Speaker 2>the land, just to open it up for a lot
<v Speaker 2>of utilitarian purposes. And so this was a common practice.
<v Speaker 2>And then whenever indigenous people started getting pushed more westward,
<v Speaker 2>or being put on reservations, or just being decimated by
<v Speaker 2>European diseases. Interestingly, throughout the seventeen hundreds eighteen hundreds, fires
<v Speaker 2>were actually still common, so it was a common practice
<v Speaker 2>for early European settlers to set fire to the landscape
<v Speaker 2>for pretty much the same reasons, but interestingly, a lot
<v Speaker 2>of these fires were actually more severe. So when we're
<v Speaker 2>talking about indigenous burning practices, in a lot of cases
<v Speaker 2>in eastern North America, these were low to moderate intensity fires.
<v Speaker 2>There were surface fires, they weren't necessarily catastrophic fires, and
<v Speaker 2>they really couldn't be in many cases because if you
<v Speaker 2>set low to modern periodic fires routinely, then you kind
<v Speaker 2>of reduce the fuel load and you don't have a
<v Speaker 2>lot of fuel to climb up into these canopies and
<v Speaker 2>cause these catastrophic fires. And then when Europeans came here,
<v Speaker 2>they kind of started setting fires as well and burning
<v Speaker 2>the landscape. But then something started shifting around the mid
<v Speaker 2>eighteen hundreds into the early nineteen hundreds with new technology,
<v Speaker 2>with the railroads, with the logging crews and the logging
<v Speaker 2>industry that came through, and just massive clearcuts occurring throughout
<v Speaker 2>eastern North America. You had force that were essentially decimated,
<v Speaker 2>but you had a lot of slash as well. You
<v Speaker 2>had a lot of branches, you had a lot of
<v Speaker 2>trunks down, you had a lot of stumps, and these
<v Speaker 2>either caught fire intentionally or unintentionally through sparks for locomotives
<v Speaker 2>going by from the railroad industry, and so you had
<v Speaker 2>these catastrophic fires. Interestingly, this actually favored the reduction of
<v Speaker 2>ticks all these fires, because when you have fires, of course,
<v Speaker 2>it can burn up ticks, but that's not necessarily the
<v Speaker 2>major reason that ticks can see a reduction in populations
<v Speaker 2>if there's fires. But you have open landscapes and ticks
<v Speaker 2>at least in eastern North American, specifically the black leg
<v Speaker 2>at tick, which is probably the most common one here
<v Speaker 2>in the northeast. These ticks don't really like open environments
<v Speaker 2>because if you know anything about ticks, ticks really like moist, humid,
<v Speaker 2>kind of wet conditions. They thrive in these conditions, and
<v Speaker 2>that's why you see a lot of ticks in the spring.
<v Speaker 2>You see them in the fall as well, and sometimes
<v Speaker 2>when it's very very dry and very very sunny and
<v Speaker 2>just very hot, you don't see a lot of ticks
<v Speaker 2>because desiccation is one of the causes, one of the
<v Speaker 2>major causes of their mortality. And so when you have fire,
<v Speaker 2>even low to modern intensity fires, you open up the woodlands.
<v Speaker 2>And even if you have savannahs or open oak woodlands
<v Speaker 2>or savannahs, you still have trees, of course, but you
<v Speaker 2>don't have a lot of leaf litter for ticks to
<v Speaker 2>hide under. You have more wind coming through, you have
<v Speaker 2>more solar intensity coming through, and these all reduced tick populations,
<v Speaker 2>and so this was kind of kept in check until
<v Speaker 2>about the early nineteen hundreds. And then interestingly, even with
<v Speaker 2>the reduction in chestnut trees American chestnut when chestnut blake
<v Speaker 2>came through, that favored the reduction of ticks as well,
<v Speaker 2>because whitefooted mice were reduced, or Eastern chipmunks were reduced
<v Speaker 2>through the decimation of the American chestnut and Eastern chipmunk
<v Speaker 2>and whitefooted mice, these are reservoirs for lime disease, and
<v Speaker 2>ficks really liked these animals. But then things started changing
<v Speaker 2>with fire suppressions. So fire suppression came around early nineteen hundred,
<v Speaker 2>specifically in the nineteen thirties, and then because of this,
<v Speaker 2>people stopped fires. And interestingly, it wasn't necessarily because people
<v Speaker 2>recognized how infrastructure could be damaged, or is maybe it's
<v Speaker 2>not too aesthetically pleasing to see fires burning in the woods.
<v Speaker 2>It was mostly the timber industry. They were worried about
<v Speaker 2>their products. They didn't want their trees being decimated because
<v Speaker 2>they were valuable, and so fire suppression would allow these
<v Speaker 2>trees to grow. So the timber industry was behind a
<v Speaker 2>lot of this, and it stuck, and it sticks even
<v Speaker 2>till this day. Because a lot of people, not necessarily
<v Speaker 2>colleges or foragers, but people who don't necessarily spend a
<v Speaker 2>lot of time in the woods, they'll think that fires
<v Speaker 2>are always a bad thing, and it's not true at all.
<v Speaker 2>But because of fire suppression, a lot of our forests
<v Speaker 2>are regrowing right now, which is a good thing in
<v Speaker 2>many instances. But they're different because there's a process called
<v Speaker 2>mesofication which is taking place, which is the conversion of
<v Speaker 2>these formerly dry, open zero ecosystems with a lot of
<v Speaker 2>oaks and pines into closed canopyed moist, humid maple tulip tree,
<v Speaker 2>black dumb American beech woods, which ticks love because they're moist.
<v Speaker 2>The humid there's a lot of moist leaf litter. It
<v Speaker 2>takes are just thriving right now in these kinds of conditions.
<v Speaker 2>So that's a brief history of all the things that
<v Speaker 2>I kind of talked about in that video. That was
<v Speaker 2>fucking t aout it.
<v Speaker 1>But that was pretty much. That was so articulate. Seriously, man,
<v Speaker 1>thank you. That was like a I don't know, did
<v Speaker 1>you didn't? You should put a book together at some
<v Speaker 1>point if you haven't already. I didn't check if you have.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, I'm sorry, I'll get off your jock. But
<v Speaker 1>the fucking diversity is I'm looking through the website right now,
<v Speaker 1>learn your land dot com, which is this is very
<v Speaker 1>nice for interviewing you too, because it's got all the
<v Speaker 1>topics you've done, all the videos. But but yeah, that
<v Speaker 1>was fucking do a book. It do a book sometime, please.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, but uh, I'll think about it.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, Yeah, the thing that when I saw that
<v Speaker 1>video with I think the thing that really I always
<v Speaker 1>connected like burning and texts because you know, out West,
<v Speaker 1>I've spent twenty years living in California, I've still got
<v Speaker 1>some PTSD from certain parts of it. But now I'm
<v Speaker 1>getting PTSD from Texas where I live now. I had
<v Speaker 1>to move here for family. But when I was in California,
<v Speaker 1>you know, burn. It's a Mediterranean climate. In northern California.
<v Speaker 1>Burning is talked about all the time there among the colleges.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, we need to burn all the plants are
<v Speaker 1>so many of the plants are adapted to burning. There
<v Speaker 1>are arctostapflos, the manzanitas, won't they a lot of them
<v Speaker 1>won't germinate without smoke treatment, like you literally to germinate
<v Speaker 1>the seeds. People at the Native Plant Garden were literally
<v Speaker 1>using stubs liquid smoke in a you know, warming it
<v Speaker 1>up with water in a concentration and soaking the seeds
<v Speaker 1>in it for a day or two. So you know
<v Speaker 1>it's and there's cypresses hypericiprus that the cones don't open
<v Speaker 1>unless they get a low burning fire and it melts
<v Speaker 1>the resin between the scales like you know, pint. Some
<v Speaker 1>lot of pine species out there like that too. So
<v Speaker 1>I knew that fire could have a beneficial, you know,
<v Speaker 1>effect on plant life. And it's especially out west if
<v Speaker 1>you don't get those low burning fires you know, ever
<v Speaker 1>so frequently. Then that's when you get those maps of
<v Speaker 1>infernos that turn the sky red for five days, which
<v Speaker 1>is terrifying anyway. But coming out east, I mean, you know,
<v Speaker 1>seeing I was the friend in Alabama a few months
<v Speaker 1>ago and seeing, God, damn, I mean, you've got so
<v Speaker 1>much rain there compared to when you move west that
<v Speaker 1>you just get this explosion of growth every year, even
<v Speaker 1>though the winters can get really cold, and with all
<v Speaker 1>that growth, it's all that biomass. You got to get
<v Speaker 1>rid of it somehow or else you're just gonna have
<v Speaker 1>these forests that are just thickets, especially with invasive species,
<v Speaker 1>like that's what all the forest reserves in Chicago looked
<v Speaker 1>like when I was a little boy growing up. It
<v Speaker 1>was just European buckthorn everywhere. It was fucking horrible. And
<v Speaker 1>they're finally starting to masticate. They haven't burned in some
<v Speaker 1>of the forest preserves because I think some of the
<v Speaker 1>suburbanites are still a little too freaked out by it.
<v Speaker 1>But they'll go masticate, which is better than nothing, But
<v Speaker 1>that doesn't deal with the ticks. But when I watched
<v Speaker 1>that video that you did, and you talk about the
<v Speaker 1>layer of hummus humus I guess right, not the fucking
<v Speaker 1>peda ingredient, but hummus on the ground. It got me thinking,
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, oh, yeah, this whole like micro climate of
<v Speaker 1>humidity that's kept intact by all this duff that's not burning.
<v Speaker 1>That's got to be paradise for the nymphs, for tick nimps.
<v Speaker 1>And so it really got me thinking like, oh, there's
<v Speaker 1>this whole other element that I thought of that I
<v Speaker 1>didn't really think about with that microclimate of humidity that's
<v Speaker 1>removed when you burn, you know. And then also, you know,
<v Speaker 1>for indigenous burning practices, you think, if you don't have
<v Speaker 1>widespread metallurgy, what's the you know, but you need to
<v Speaker 1>prune force so that you can walk through them. What's
<v Speaker 1>the easiest way to do that? Just burn it right
<v Speaker 1>time of year, you know, when it's not going to
<v Speaker 1>blow up, but it's still you're able to get it going.
<v Speaker 1>That's like the most practical easiest way to do that
<v Speaker 1>to clear out the understory. So it's good for hunting
<v Speaker 1>and walking through, et cetera. What about because the video
<v Speaker 1>is about earthworms though, what effect have tell me that angle?
<v Speaker 1>I guess what's the angle of the earthworms for affecting
<v Speaker 1>tape populations.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so earthworms, I mean they're interesting because here where
<v Speaker 2>I live in Pennsylvania, supposedly there are no native earthworms
<v Speaker 2>to the state of Pennsylvania currently, although I think some
<v Speaker 2>researchers just saying, yeah, there's actually a couple, but they're
<v Speaker 2>not that common. But by far, the most common earthworms
<v Speaker 2>that you're going to see are non native earthworms. And
<v Speaker 2>pretty much all the native earthworms in this area were
<v Speaker 2>wiped out by the most recent ice age with the
<v Speaker 2>glaciers coming down. And I mean a lot of people
<v Speaker 2>have good things to say about earthworms, and I'm not
<v Speaker 2>here to say that there's nothing good about earthworms around here,
<v Speaker 2>because a lot of gardeners like them, a lot of
<v Speaker 2>composters really like earthworms, and I'm sure they're doing some
<v Speaker 2>okay things in certain conditions, but for native forest health
<v Speaker 2>in Pennsylvania in the Northeast, in these formerly glaciated areas,
<v Speaker 2>earthworms actually cause significant changes to forest ecology because they
<v Speaker 2>consume the duff layer, they consume that humanus layer, they
<v Speaker 2>consume all that organic material, which is why composters, people
<v Speaker 2>who like the compost food and work on that kind
<v Speaker 2>of stuff. They really like earthworms because of that activity,
<v Speaker 2>but unfortunately that kind of destroys a lot of native
<v Speaker 2>plant populations because a lot of that duff layer, that
<v Speaker 2>like spongy layer. I don't know if you've ever walked
<v Speaker 2>through like a really intact of course you have for
<v Speaker 2>people listening, if you've never walked through a real spongy forest,
<v Speaker 2>maybe an older growth forest, but there's just like so
<v Speaker 2>much not necessarily plant growth, although that can be the case,
<v Speaker 2>but just a lot of leaf litter, a lot of debris,
<v Speaker 2>and you kind of feel like you're just like walking
<v Speaker 2>on a springy material. It's very different than walking in
<v Speaker 2>a very degraded forest that was recently cleared for agriculture
<v Speaker 2>and then left to grow up again into a forest
<v Speaker 2>that's very dense and very hard and very compacted. But
<v Speaker 2>the earthworms consume that leaf layer. And the angle that
<v Speaker 2>I was presenting in the video is, well, isn't that
<v Speaker 2>good then for tick reduction? Because if ticks hang out
<v Speaker 2>in that leaf litter, which they do because remember ticks
<v Speaker 2>don't like to be desiccated, that's probably the number one
<v Speaker 2>cause immortality. And so if they hide in that leaf
<v Speaker 2>litter even in the winter months, they'll stay alive even
<v Speaker 2>with several inches of snow on the ground six inches
<v Speaker 2>twelve inches of snow on the ground. As long as
<v Speaker 2>they're in that leaf layer, it's warmer in there and
<v Speaker 2>they'll survive. And so with earthworms coming in, and they
<v Speaker 2>came in many many centuries ago, well in the areas
<v Speaker 2>that are heavily infested with these earthworms, wouldn't that be
<v Speaker 2>better for tick reduction? And could that be a strategy, meaning,
<v Speaker 2>if there's a force that has just so many ticks,
<v Speaker 2>should we bring earthworms in and let them go and
<v Speaker 2>just let them consume that leaf litter. And I guess
<v Speaker 2>some researchers are looking at this, but I don't think
<v Speaker 2>any ecologist is seriously considering releasing more earthworms into intact
<v Speaker 2>ecosystems as a tick production strategy. There has been research
<v Speaker 2>on it, and it seems like it can work, but
<v Speaker 2>to me, it doesn't seem convincing enough, and I don't
<v Speaker 2>think many people are advocating strictly for the release of earthworms.
<v Speaker 2>There's a populations. Yeah, so that's where I thought, well,
<v Speaker 2>maybe fire, how about fire? Because what else reduces leaf litter?
<v Speaker 2>We're not going to rake the woods. We're not going
<v Speaker 2>out there with our rakes or leaf flowers. That's not
<v Speaker 2>gonna work. Yeah, And so I thought, honestly, I wasn't
<v Speaker 2>seeing this in the research with the earthworms. People would
<v Speaker 2>just talk about earthworms and the research, and I thought, well,
<v Speaker 2>what else reduces leaffltter? Oh? How about fire? So I
<v Speaker 2>was like, well, let's see what fire does. And sure enough,
<v Speaker 2>fire seems to be a much more viable strategy, and
<v Speaker 2>it's got so many other benefits as well, because it'll
<v Speaker 2>help halt this nissification process, which a lot of ecologists
<v Speaker 2>say is not necessarily a good thing, because it seems
<v Speaker 2>like oaks and hickories and chestnuts and pines might be
<v Speaker 2>more valuable and that's a subjective term, but according to ecologist,
<v Speaker 2>might be more valuable to wildlife populations and to humans
<v Speaker 2>as well, compared to red maple and tulip tree and
<v Speaker 2>black gum and all these other miso. Yeah, vibess.
<v Speaker 1>Pittsburgh gets forty inches of rain a year, man, that's
<v Speaker 1>fucking crazy. And then you go to like, you know, Maryland,
<v Speaker 1>and they get like fifty inches of rain. That's so
<v Speaker 1>much water. That's I mean Chicago, I think is like
<v Speaker 1>at thirty where I live now in the Payote Gardens
<v Speaker 1>of South Texas, we get like twenty two inches of
<v Speaker 1>rain a year, maybe twenty five I don't know. But
<v Speaker 1>it's humid as balls down here. But you know that's
<v Speaker 1>so with that much rainfall, you're going to get so
<v Speaker 1>much biomass. Like so it's great for the plants obviously,
<v Speaker 1>but then after a few years it stops being so great,
<v Speaker 1>and that's when you get those you know, just overcrowded
<v Speaker 1>forests that need to be burned. I mean, that's what
<v Speaker 1>if you had, like I'm not sure you know, if
<v Speaker 1>you what you're living setups like, but if you had
<v Speaker 1>a patch of land with forests, then I mean, would
<v Speaker 1>you you would be what would you do to limit ticks? Obviously,
<v Speaker 1>try to keep deer out to some extent or at
<v Speaker 1>least maybe call them if they get If there's too many,
<v Speaker 1>you could take like little cotton balls with the permethron treatment,
<v Speaker 1>give them to the field mice. Right there, wasn't that
<v Speaker 1>something they were doing for a while. They bring them
<v Speaker 1>to the nest and then it kills any you know,
<v Speaker 1>I'm not sure, how do you how do you dose
<v Speaker 1>a mouth mouse with permethron without killing it? You know,
<v Speaker 1>so it's not toxic for the mouse. I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, and then burning, Like what what can people do?
<v Speaker 1>I guess too, because that's something I get, you know,
<v Speaker 1>because I'm with the killer lawn stuff. I'm always promoting.
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, I just plant the native plant card and
<v Speaker 1>people are always like, oh, taxs, ticks. I get ticks
<v Speaker 1>and just keep the deer out. And you got to burn,
<v Speaker 1>you know. Jerry Wilhelm, the author of Flora of the
<v Speaker 1>Chicago Region, who lives in fucking suburban Chicago, sets fire
<v Speaker 1>to his yard every years. It's fucking hilarious. He's like this,
<v Speaker 1>He's this badass, like seventy five year old man. You know,
<v Speaker 1>there's maybe seventy I don't know, no offense, Jerry, but
<v Speaker 1>he's out there like burning. He's got like suburban neighbors.
<v Speaker 1>He lives in a cul de sac and you know,
<v Speaker 1>his house at first looks abandoned because it's all these
<v Speaker 1>beautiful prairie plants, but he burns it every year. And anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I'm rambling, but what would what would you recommend for
<v Speaker 1>people to limit ticks if they live in the Music East.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's funny because a lot of times when I
<v Speaker 2>post something about ticks and what to do in forests,
<v Speaker 2>like large scale solutions, a lot of people say, oh,
<v Speaker 2>just get chickens or guinea fowl. It's like, okay, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that'll work in your backyard. But I don't think it's
<v Speaker 2>going to work in like the Alleghany National Force.
<v Speaker 1>What do they do to eat?
<v Speaker 2>Now? How people are going to release solve it with that?
<v Speaker 1>The chickens are going to eat all the tip really, like,
<v Speaker 1>how do they get some possible they're gonna miss?
<v Speaker 2>It's actually yeah, to eat all of them for sure.
<v Speaker 2>I mean going back to the benefits of fire, I
<v Speaker 2>think I mentioned in that video that one of the
<v Speaker 2>benefits of restoring fire is that you support certain predators
<v Speaker 2>of ticks like bob boy quail, which drive in fire
<v Speaker 2>dependent ecosystems. So I mean that's the thing where people
<v Speaker 2>get the chickens in the guinea fowl, and I bet
<v Speaker 2>it work. I can't say it doesn't work because a
<v Speaker 2>lot of people say it does work in their backyards.
<v Speaker 2>I just don't think as a large scale solution it
<v Speaker 2>would work. But if I mean, I don't own property.
<v Speaker 2>So I've never done this before. But when I see
<v Speaker 2>woodlots or I explore people's properties and they're asking me, like,
<v Speaker 2>what would you do to this landscape? First I tell
<v Speaker 2>them that this isn't going to be a solution that's
<v Speaker 2>gonna occur in your lifetime. It might take multiple generations
<v Speaker 2>in order for something significant to occur, because you have
<v Speaker 2>to remember, it took a long time for this to happen.
<v Speaker 2>It's not like it just happened in one year. It
<v Speaker 2>would just happened in ten years. There's so many things
<v Speaker 2>that took place in order for the forest to start
<v Speaker 2>looking like this in the east, and so it's something
<v Speaker 2>that's like it might take multiple generations in order for
<v Speaker 2>the biggest benefits to a crew. But I would open
<v Speaker 2>up the woods as much as possible because opening up
<v Speaker 2>increases dryness, it increases solar radiation, and it prevents a
<v Speaker 2>lot of those questing environments for the ticks. And questing
<v Speaker 2>just means whenever the ticks climb up grasses or Japanese
<v Speaker 2>barberry and they're trying to sense for any kind of
<v Speaker 2>animal walking by. But yeah, yeah, I mean you could
<v Speaker 2>see them. Sometimes A lot of people think you can't
<v Speaker 2>see them, but if you look closely enough, you'll see them.
<v Speaker 2>But I would select for more fire dependent or zero
<v Speaker 2>species on a landscape, meaning oaks and hickorys and chestnuts
<v Speaker 2>and pines over maples and tulip trees and beaches and
<v Speaker 2>black gums and other trees like that, because those lead
<v Speaker 2>to a pretty quick closed canopy forest. It leads to
<v Speaker 2>more moist conditions in the forest floor. Those leaves stay
<v Speaker 2>wetter longer, and it's a positive feedback loop where the
<v Speaker 2>longer you let that go, the harder it is to
<v Speaker 2>reverse that. So the sooner you could start I mean
<v Speaker 2>replacing those trees or getting rid of them, or if
<v Speaker 2>you have oaks in your woods and you have maples
<v Speaker 2>as well, I mean, I know a lot of people
<v Speaker 2>don't like to cut trees down because they think every
<v Speaker 2>single tree is valuable, and I get that, But if
<v Speaker 2>you're looking to reduce take populations in your woods, maybe
<v Speaker 2>start cutting down some of those maples and giving those
<v Speaker 2>oaks a chance to live. Because oaks require certain All
<v Speaker 2>species do, but oaks in particular, they're pretty finicky to
<v Speaker 2>get them to grow because they need a lot of light,
<v Speaker 2>not a lot of oaks are super state tolerant. They
<v Speaker 2>need a lot of light, which is why they like fire,
<v Speaker 2>because it reduces competition and it keeps them away and
<v Speaker 2>it opens up the canopy. But sometimes it's not enough,
<v Speaker 2>and you need to get mechanical treatment in there, like
<v Speaker 2>cutting down some species in order to let the oaks thrive.
<v Speaker 2>But once you have oaks and hickory's in there, if
<v Speaker 2>you've ever been in an oak savannah or even an
<v Speaker 2>oak forest dominated by these species, you know that the
<v Speaker 2>canopy is much more open compared to a beach forest
<v Speaker 2>or hemlock forest, or a red maple forest or tulip tree,
<v Speaker 2>because those canopies are so much denser and they just
<v Speaker 2>create those cooler moisture conditions for ticks. But even if
<v Speaker 2>you have a lot of oaks in an area, the
<v Speaker 2>canopy just isn't as dense, and so it dries out
<v Speaker 2>the undergrowth so much more quickly. But I would just
<v Speaker 2>keep in mind that it might not happen in your lifetime,
<v Speaker 2>but you could take the steps and set this process
<v Speaker 2>in motion so that hopefully the next generation will care
<v Speaker 2>enough to keep it going.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and burn if you can, I would say, definitely
<v Speaker 1>burn you guys, don't really you're in you're near Pittsburgh, right,
<v Speaker 1>there's not many. There's a couple prairies there, but as
<v Speaker 1>you go further east, you don't. Prairies aren't really a
<v Speaker 1>thing too much. Prairies and savannahs or what it's mostly
<v Speaker 1>woodlands or what is it?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean there's debate whether that tallgrass prairie peninsula
<v Speaker 2>ever came into Pennsylvania. I think the latest Reacher research
<v Speaker 2>said it didn't. But we do have I think you've been.
<v Speaker 2>There's the Jennings Prairie. Yeah, in western Pennsylvania, which is yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's a prairie remnant, but it's not really dominated by grasses.
<v Speaker 2>It's dominated by forbes, which is why some people say
<v Speaker 2>that it's not a true prairie. But regardless, we do
<v Speaker 2>have some open habitats. I mean, we have barrens in Pennsylvania.
<v Speaker 2>We have serpentine barrens, we have shale barrens. So we
<v Speaker 2>do have open dry fire somewhat taller an ecosystem. So
<v Speaker 2>it's not unheard of to have these kinds of habitats
<v Speaker 2>in Pennsylvania.
<v Speaker 1>Did you did you? You guys? There's there's timber rattlers
<v Speaker 1>out there, right? Is that Crotalus horridus? What is the
<v Speaker 1>timber rattlesnake? Do you get? Do you get? There's rattlesnakes
<v Speaker 1>are endangered in Pennsylvania, aren't they? They're they're not very common.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know if they're officially listed as endangered, but
<v Speaker 2>they're definitely not as common as they used to be.
<v Speaker 2>But I mean you could still. I believe I should
<v Speaker 2>check this out. But people still go out and trap rattlesnakes,
<v Speaker 2>like with your I think you're well, you're hunting. I
<v Speaker 2>don't know if it's your hunting license or your fish license.
<v Speaker 2>Meaning I don't think they're so endanger that you can't
<v Speaker 2>go out and trap them.
<v Speaker 1>Uh yeah, yeah, but I would.
<v Speaker 2>Definitely fact check that before something goes out and does that.
<v Speaker 2>Having said that, there are rattlesnakes around here, I've seen
<v Speaker 2>them certainly not as common as they used to be
<v Speaker 2>because of people. There's just too many people and they
<v Speaker 2>like to hide. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Oh you get massive sagas out there too, right.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, including in the Jennings Prairie.
<v Speaker 1>Oh it was so cute. I love those things. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it with the snake hate again. You know, I've been
<v Speaker 1>to Australia, where the snakes aren't nice enough to warn
<v Speaker 1>you when you're close, and they're a lot more aggressive,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the the lapids, the cobra relatives. And I'm
<v Speaker 1>just like, fuck, man, we've got it. We're so spoiled
<v Speaker 1>in North America with these these generally kind and courteous
<v Speaker 1>pit vipers that let us know when we're too close.
<v Speaker 1>I was with my daughter the other day and we
<v Speaker 1>were at this little coastal area near U near Brownsville,
<v Speaker 1>and this thing just rattled at us. I didn't even
<v Speaker 1>see it. It was like six feet away, and I was like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>thank you, thanks for the heads up. We'll just you know,
<v Speaker 1>go around. But uh, yeah, I don't know. I just
<v Speaker 1>I remember seeing something about how there the populations are
<v Speaker 1>declining out there and timber rattles next. I guess they
<v Speaker 1>do blend in very well. They can. If they don't rattle,
<v Speaker 1>you're kind of fucked. But uh, you know, it's all
<v Speaker 1>the more reason not to kill them. And the ones
<v Speaker 1>that rattle let them live. They what do they mostly
<v Speaker 1>do They trap them and just move them, or they
<v Speaker 1>trap them and kill them and use them for the
<v Speaker 1>skin or what?
<v Speaker 2>No, I think I mean, you should fact check this
<v Speaker 2>because I'm not entirely sure and I'm not going to
<v Speaker 2>look it up while I'm on this call. But I
<v Speaker 2>know people that go out and trap them during there's
<v Speaker 2>a season for them. Like, you can go out and
<v Speaker 2>I think you can keep one, meaning I think you
<v Speaker 2>can kill it. But I would definitely google that or
<v Speaker 2>look online first before anybody goes out and does that.
<v Speaker 2>But you definitely there's regulations for it. You can't just
<v Speaker 2>do it any time of the year.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I've never done it. I have no interest in
<v Speaker 2>doing it at all. I just know there's people that
<v Speaker 2>go out and do it in Pennsylvania.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So moving on to there was you recently did
<v Speaker 1>another video too about Parkinson's and golf courses, and I
<v Speaker 1>remember seeing that that coming up in the news, Parkinson's
<v Speaker 1>disease being linked to I presume just all the shit
<v Speaker 1>they spray on golf courses. What's going on here?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean there could be a lot going on there.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, there could be a lot of variables. There
<v Speaker 2>was a study that came out earlier this year showing
<v Speaker 2>a link between living within a few miles of a
<v Speaker 2>golf golf course and the risk of developing Parkinson's disease,
<v Speaker 2>and it seems like what the mechanism is is not
<v Speaker 2>necessarily brief in the toxic chemicals, like if you live
<v Speaker 2>nearby and they spray the golf course with all these
<v Speaker 2>chemicals and you're breathing it in, although that could be
<v Speaker 2>the case, but it's infiltrating into the water supply. And
<v Speaker 2>so if you're in an area where you get your
<v Speaker 2>water from a water supply company, whether it's an aquifer,
<v Speaker 2>whether it's a well, whether it's from the river, but
<v Speaker 2>there's also a golf course in the area as well,
<v Speaker 2>the risk seems to be greater for developing Parkinson's disease
<v Speaker 2>compared to if you don't share water supply source with
<v Speaker 2>that golf course. And the risk is even greater if
<v Speaker 2>you live in what's called a vulnerable ground water region,
<v Speaker 2>where the land might be even more porous, meaning there's
<v Speaker 2>probably limestone in the area or kars geology, so that
<v Speaker 2>these chemicals can infiltrate much more quickly into the water
<v Speaker 2>supply or even more mineral based soils as well. But
<v Speaker 2>if you live in an area with maybe a lot
<v Speaker 2>of sandstone or maybe a lot of shale, maybe not
<v Speaker 2>so much. There's definitely no cause that's linked in this study.
<v Speaker 2>It's all causation and association. But I mean to me,
<v Speaker 2>it kind of makes sense. It doesn't seem too alarming.
<v Speaker 2>I think golf courses have been linked or at least
<v Speaker 2>pasticize I should say pasticides have been linked to nerrod
<v Speaker 2>degenerative diseases for many years. And so this is just
<v Speaker 2>like another study that maybe makes a stronger link to
<v Speaker 2>that connection.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and you think, how you think how absurd it
<v Speaker 1>is to maintain this closely mode turf that you know,
<v Speaker 1>it wouldn't occur anywhere in nature. I guess some you know,
<v Speaker 1>in alpine areas, some sedges and cushion plants can kind
<v Speaker 1>of take that form, but like, no, no grass species
<v Speaker 1>grows to a height of half an inch or an
<v Speaker 1>inch and then stops growing with you know, and doesn't flower.
<v Speaker 1>Grass species all flower of course, So because it's such
<v Speaker 1>an anomaly in nature, it's it's and also because you're
<v Speaker 1>keeping it so closely prune, it's like in a perpetually
<v Speaker 1>stressed state, it's going to take a lot of fluffing
<v Speaker 1>and extra babying and nurturing normally in the form of
<v Speaker 1>chemicals and fertilizers and pesticides to keep this thing alive.
<v Speaker 1>So it makes sense that, you know, as fuck man,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's I see him trying to do golf courses
<v Speaker 1>here in South Texas. It's like in a it's nice.
<v Speaker 1>They all look you know, they look dead even with
<v Speaker 1>all the irrigation because it's one hundred and five degrees
<v Speaker 1>for six months. It's kind of insanity. But but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>I thought that was an interesting link when I saw
<v Speaker 1>that story come up in the news a few months ago.
<v Speaker 2>So anyway, yeah, I mean it seems like I guess
<v Speaker 2>some people might think, oh, what does it have to
<v Speaker 2>do with nature or ecology, But it's like if you
<v Speaker 2>do study groundwater and geology and you learn how water
<v Speaker 2>flows through the earth before it gets to you, you
<v Speaker 2>could see kind of where the areas are that might
<v Speaker 2>be more vulnerable because if you have a lot of soil,
<v Speaker 2>you have a lot of porous material that kind of
<v Speaker 2>filters out some of the toxins, like I said, sandstone,
<v Speaker 2>maybe then you might not be as high of a
<v Speaker 2>risk as somebody who lives in an area with the
<v Speaker 2>water just rapidly gets into the aquafa super quickly without
<v Speaker 2>going through a stage of being filtered over time.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I think that's.
<v Speaker 2>Where like the limestone and the cars comes in.
<v Speaker 1>It's got everything to do with with with ecology, and
<v Speaker 1>I think it's I don't know, man, it's definitely. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's in the ecosystem. It's affecting the larger living machine.
<v Speaker 1>You guys don't get. You guys don't get much. I
<v Speaker 1>guess you get some granite out there, you don't get
<v Speaker 1>many many igneous rocks, like whether volcanic or intrusive stuff.
<v Speaker 1>Do you in the Pennsylvania In Pennsylvania, yes, but not
<v Speaker 1>in western Pennsylvania.
<v Speaker 2>So I mean a lot of geologists make the joke
<v Speaker 2>that it's just sandstone shale coal in western Pennsylvania. But
<v Speaker 2>once you get into like the Ridge and Valley Province
<v Speaker 2>out east, where we've got a lot of metamorphic rock,
<v Speaker 2>then you start getting into some interesting things. You've got
<v Speaker 2>diabase in your Gettysburg as well, which is really interesting
<v Speaker 2>because if you study Gettysburg in the Civil War, it's
<v Speaker 2>intimately linked the geology and a lot of people might
<v Speaker 2>not make that connection, but it really is so we
<v Speaker 2>have all kinds of rock in pensylvand western Pennsylvania, mostly sedimentar.
<v Speaker 1>You can't say that and just move on. Let's get
<v Speaker 1>into that a little bit. Get Okay, what's the.
<v Speaker 2>I'm not an expert on it. That's why I moved
<v Speaker 2>on through.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, all right, Okay, I'll let it go. Sorry, but man,
<v Speaker 1>you're just okay.
<v Speaker 2>So some of the soldiers would hide behind diabase, like
<v Speaker 2>if you think of Devil's I don't know if you
<v Speaker 2>know anything about Gettysburg, but Gettysburg is basically just massive
<v Speaker 2>farmland and it's open, but there's these massive boulders scattered around.
<v Speaker 2>And these boulders are diabase, which is idaneous rock. And
<v Speaker 2>what's interesting is that, you know, sometimes in warfare, you
<v Speaker 2>would dig down into the earth to find or to
<v Speaker 2>make trenches for yourself to hide from enemies. Well you
<v Speaker 2>couldn't do that in Gettysburg because diabase was right underneath
<v Speaker 2>the soil, like a small layer soil. There's not much
<v Speaker 2>soil there because diabase was so close. Oh, so they
<v Speaker 2>had a hide behind boulders. That was basically it. It's
<v Speaker 2>like the only place you could really hide or in
<v Speaker 2>road cuts created by the railroad that was going through.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's fucking fascinating.
<v Speaker 2>So a lot of the soldiers just hid behind diabase.
<v Speaker 2>If you search Gettysburg on the internet and you look
<v Speaker 2>at those photos and you see these massive boulders, it's
<v Speaker 2>all just igneous rock diabase.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, which is it's it's like a yeah, it's like
<v Speaker 1>the equivalent of the salt, but you normally get diabased
<v Speaker 1>and like dykes, like intrusions and stuff. They call it
<v Speaker 1>something different in South Africa. What is it called? They
<v Speaker 1>call it? Oh god, I was down there. They were
<v Speaker 1>calling it the dolrite. Yeah, they were like, oh, there's dolaright. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>I can't do the South African accent, but it's it's
<v Speaker 1>super common out there. But yeah, that's wild. Man. The Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>when me and Al came out the Pittsburgh we were
<v Speaker 1>doing shows there last year, there were so many fucking
<v Speaker 1>road cuts I wanted to stop at.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>When we got the Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a fucking great city. Man.
<v Speaker 1>We had an it's really cool. It's old. It's like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, bike friendly, pedestrian friendly in certain parts, which
<v Speaker 1>I like. And then thee Carnegie Museum was fucking dope too.
<v Speaker 1>That's like the geology stuff they have there. The geology
<v Speaker 1>exhibits are amazing.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And I mean we've got so many road cuts
<v Speaker 2>because they're kind of necessary because there's so many hills
<v Speaker 2>and valleys, and not necessarily because it's mountainous here. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>if you look at the road cuts, everything is pretty
<v Speaker 2>much horizontal throughout western Pennsylvania. But there's just been so
<v Speaker 2>much erosion from the rivers and the streams and the
<v Speaker 2>creeks that over time it kind of looks mountainous in
<v Speaker 2>western Pennsylvania. It's interesting because a lot of people who
<v Speaker 2>hunt will say, oh, I'm going up into the mountains,
<v Speaker 2>and it's like, no, you're not. You're just going up
<v Speaker 2>in the northwestern Pennsylvania. It's actually a plateau geologically speaking,
<v Speaker 2>but it's just been so dissected that it kind of
<v Speaker 2>looks mountainous. But unlike mountains, all the peaks are the
<v Speaker 2>same level. Like if you look if you stand on
<v Speaker 2>top of one ridge in Pennsylvania, just look out across.
<v Speaker 2>It's not like you see all these peaks of different heights.
<v Speaker 2>They're all the same because it was all raised together
<v Speaker 2>and then it was cut by.
<v Speaker 1>S so it's like Colorado Plateau action, Like the uplift
<v Speaker 1>created this basically big ass mesa that was then relieved
<v Speaker 1>worked on by water. And there were glaciers there too,
<v Speaker 1>weren't there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, northwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern Pennsylvania. The cutoff was north
<v Speaker 2>of Pittsburgh. They never made their way down here to Pittsburgh,
<v Speaker 2>but of course it was heavily influenced by glacial activity
<v Speaker 2>in Pittsburgh. Like our rivers used to flow north to
<v Speaker 2>the Erie Basin and after the ancestral Saint Lawrence seaway
<v Speaker 2>and now they all go down to the Gulf of
<v Speaker 2>Mexico pretty.
<v Speaker 1>Much, which is a result of just massive glacial melt
<v Speaker 1>I assume.
<v Speaker 2>Huh, yeah, just massive glaciers coming down, blocking the north
<v Speaker 2>flowing rivers and then creating these massive glacial lakes that
<v Speaker 2>had nowhere else to go but south. They just kind
<v Speaker 2>of reversed their course.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, okay, So next moving on, next topic, I want
<v Speaker 1>to talk to you about two. I saw that I
<v Speaker 1>watched the Passenger pigeon video last night, which is, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's hard to it's hard to not almost shed a
<v Speaker 1>tear every time you you know, read about this or
<v Speaker 1>think about it. I mean, such a widespread and beautiful
<v Speaker 1>bird species being wiped out, which the last one died
<v Speaker 1>with like nineteen fourteen in a zoo in Ohio or something.
<v Speaker 1>But how did they affect the ecology? I mean these
<v Speaker 1>obviously had a massive effect on the ecology. There was
<v Speaker 1>a huge population. It's kind of unthinkable that humans could,
<v Speaker 1>you know, wipe out a species that was this this abundant.
<v Speaker 1>But what was their effect on the ecology and how
<v Speaker 1>did it change when they were gone?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so passenger pigeons, I mean that's an interesting topic
<v Speaker 2>and a lot of people don't get into the ecology
<v Speaker 2>of them, but it is really really fascinating because when
<v Speaker 2>we study you know, forest change and why forests look
<v Speaker 2>the way they do today and what they might have
<v Speaker 2>looked like. When we think of big forces that have
<v Speaker 2>shaped the landscape, of course we think of you know,
<v Speaker 2>modern human activity like logging and clearing the land for agriculture, burning.
<v Speaker 2>Of course, we think of flooding, we think of wind storms,
<v Speaker 2>we think of ice storms, but we usually don't think
<v Speaker 2>of birds, especially pigeons. So it's like, well, how could
<v Speaker 2>pigeons influence the landscape? Well, when there are literally billions
<v Speaker 2>of them, they really can. And so when passenger pigeons
<v Speaker 2>would get together and roost or migrate, they migrate that far.
<v Speaker 2>But when they did, they would roost sometimes in the
<v Speaker 2>millions or hundreds of millions, and travel together. And of
<v Speaker 2>course we've probably all heard these stories of them darkening
<v Speaker 2>the skies and for days, you know, just looking up
<v Speaker 2>and just seeing these massive flocks of birds traveling. So
<v Speaker 2>of course, when you think about that, and then you
<v Speaker 2>think of what effect they might have in the landscape,
<v Speaker 2>you think, well, maybe they did have a significant effect.
<v Speaker 2>And one of the most significant effects was just breaking
<v Speaker 2>things and destroying what was there in the forest goes
<v Speaker 2>through mechanical action, literally just roosting on these branches and
<v Speaker 2>literally just breaking them, just knocking them off. And also
<v Speaker 2>they're done just covering the ground and killing everything underneath.
<v Speaker 2>And if you walk around some of the woods today
<v Speaker 2>in the northeast, wherever the lantern flies are, you could
<v Speaker 2>see this exitate that they excrete, and it's all black underneath,
<v Speaker 2>and it kills a lot of the vegetation underneath. And
<v Speaker 2>it's not on a big scale whenever you see this stuff,
<v Speaker 2>because it's not like you walk through the woods now
<v Speaker 2>and see, oh my gosh, everything's destroyed because of the
<v Speaker 2>lantern flies. Despite what a lot of the media says,
<v Speaker 2>you just see a lot of black, gooey stuff underneath them.
<v Speaker 2>But I imagine that almost times a million when I think
<v Speaker 2>of passenger pigeons just excreting all this done and literally
<v Speaker 2>the understory, but also breaking things and opening up the canopy.
<v Speaker 2>So this is almost similar. In early accounts would describe
<v Speaker 2>this almost like a tornado coming through that kind of
<v Speaker 2>power and just clearing essentially these areas and opening them up.
<v Speaker 2>And of course a lot of people didn't like that
<v Speaker 2>because they wanted the trees to grow, they wanted to
<v Speaker 2>make money on them. They didn't like all this black
<v Speaker 2>stuff underneath on the ground or this rotting material. But
<v Speaker 2>that's one of the effects that the passenger pigeons would
<v Speaker 2>have to open up the forest. But there's other smaller effects,
<v Speaker 2>maybe not necessarily smaller, but maybe not as easy to prove.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of the collegists say that one reason that
<v Speaker 2>red oak became more dominant in the early nineteen hundreds
<v Speaker 2>and white oak decreased was because passenger pigeons became extinct
<v Speaker 2>and they used to feed on red oak acorns, and
<v Speaker 2>then once the passenger pigeons would when extinct, all these
<v Speaker 2>red oak acorns could grow and grow up in the
<v Speaker 2>bigger trees, and they kind of outcompeted the white oaks
<v Speaker 2>because they grow much more quickly than white oaks. But
<v Speaker 2>fire probably also has something to do with it as well,
<v Speaker 2>But the effects just don't stop at destruction of forests.
<v Speaker 2>It also relates to what tree species might be present today.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's it's so like a frequent and reliable disturbance event.
<v Speaker 1>And would these would they did they migrate? Did passenger
<v Speaker 1>pigeons migrate or they were they year round or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they did, but I don't think it was like
<v Speaker 2>from South America all the way after the United States.
<v Speaker 2>It might have been almost from like one broad city
<v Speaker 2>area to another broad city area, although they weren't like
<v Speaker 2>major cities. Just that's kind of where they would migrate too. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>not necessarily across large swaths of the continent. Although interestingly,
<v Speaker 2>whenever they want extinct, a lot of people thought they
<v Speaker 2>just went somewhere else. They just all went to a
<v Speaker 2>different continent because they didn't see them anymore and they
<v Speaker 2>didn't fat them that we actually killed them all.
<v Speaker 1>God, that's crazy.
<v Speaker 2>They just traveled. They're over in Europe right now, are
<v Speaker 2>they migrated all?
<v Speaker 1>And it was just hunting. I mean, it was primarily
<v Speaker 1>just over hunting.
<v Speaker 2>Why it was hunting, it was land use changes, but
<v Speaker 2>it was a lot It was very much tied into
<v Speaker 2>the technology of the time to get food to markets.
<v Speaker 2>So the railroad industry had a lot to do with
<v Speaker 2>it because before the railroad industry, basically what you hunted
<v Speaker 2>how to be sold pretty relatively close to where you were,
<v Speaker 2>and without any way to store like dead carcasses somewhat
<v Speaker 2>long term, you had to sell it pretty quickly. But
<v Speaker 2>with the new technology of refrigeration, refrigerated railroad cars and
<v Speaker 2>the railroads, you could get these pigeons into different markets,
<v Speaker 2>and so people just hunted them to oblivion and ship
<v Speaker 2>them all across the United States. But not all these
<v Speaker 2>birds were actually sold. A lot of them did just
<v Speaker 2>rot because they weren't sold. And it wasn't just hunting
<v Speaker 2>with guns. A lot of it with clubs. A lot
<v Speaker 2>of it was nets as well, just trapping them with nets.
<v Speaker 1>So it's like it's market hunting. Basically, it's taken more
<v Speaker 1>than you can actually eat so you can sell it.
<v Speaker 1>And it's fucking crazy. I mean, it's such a yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>it's wild to think about. But the other thing that is,
<v Speaker 1>I mean that that's so cool to think about. And
<v Speaker 1>that's one thing I love about the videos you do
<v Speaker 1>is it's just looking at just ecology as a whole,
<v Speaker 1>just looking at the whole ecosystem as a whole, as
<v Speaker 1>this this kind of living, breathing organism or machine. I
<v Speaker 1>always say machines. Some people don't like it, but it's
<v Speaker 1>your body's a machine, whatever you gets. Just it's just
<v Speaker 1>the terminology some people don't like. But this looking at
<v Speaker 1>this living machine where each species is a different moving
<v Speaker 1>part and seeing how they all are tied together, and
<v Speaker 1>you take one of these moving parts out and the
<v Speaker 1>machine might still function, but you're gonna it's gonna it's
<v Speaker 1>not gonna function as if efficiently, and it kind of
<v Speaker 1>breaks down a little bit. And I mean, obviously seeing
<v Speaker 1>what we've done in the last you know, a couple
<v Speaker 1>of centuries, especially with this anthra percentric landscape, this anthrapericentric, ungrateful,
<v Speaker 1>somewhat entitled ideology that our civilization tends to espouse sometimes
<v Speaker 1>to make an understatement. You see what we've done, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, like I was telling you before we started recording.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, a fucking guy I know in Vermont was
<v Speaker 1>telling me we used to not get ticks up here,
<v Speaker 1>and now we do. It's it's wild and seeing how
<v Speaker 1>just how everything is so connected. I mean, I know
<v Speaker 1>it's such a cliche to say, but everything's so connected,
<v Speaker 1>and you start tinkering with one thing and it has
<v Speaker 1>ripple effects that affect ten other things, some of which
<v Speaker 1>might directly and immediately affect us. You know. The thing
<v Speaker 1>I wanted to talk to talk about before too, was
<v Speaker 1>when we were on a subject to Parkinson's There was
<v Speaker 1>another video you did about every about which and this
<v Speaker 1>is this was tragic because I fucking love papas, but
<v Speaker 1>how papause might be linked to certain neurow degenerative disorders
<v Speaker 1>too because of chemicals in the whole family and a nacy.
<v Speaker 1>And there was another thing I remember reading about a
<v Speaker 1>few months ago. But uh, and my friend Damon Tyer
<v Speaker 1>is always mentioning that too. He's like, yeah, be careful,
<v Speaker 1>just you know, eat it and moderation. What what's going
<v Speaker 1>on there? I mean, research kind of pointed to it,
<v Speaker 1>but again, nothing's a definite or what.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. So, I mean I did a video I think
<v Speaker 2>it's called Our Our Popause Neurotoxic, and I did it
<v Speaker 2>because I just wanted to look into the question very objectively.
<v Speaker 2>And I like popase. I mean, I live in an
<v Speaker 2>area where papas grow. I like forging pa pause. I
<v Speaker 2>eat pop pause pretty much every year if I do
<v Speaker 2>find them, and it's been a good crop. And I
<v Speaker 2>think somebody came up to me a couple of years
<v Speaker 2>ago at an event and they asked me, what you know,
<v Speaker 2>what are my top like three wild foods, and I
<v Speaker 2>think number one, I think I said popa And she's like, really,
<v Speaker 2>have you heard about you know, their neurotoxicity and like
<v Speaker 2>you still feel comfortable eating them? And I said, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I mean I've heard that, but I didn't think it
<v Speaker 2>was actually like a.
<v Speaker 1>Real thing happy to buzz kill you. She's like, hey,
<v Speaker 1>did you hear it isle for you?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? Well, I mean you hear things like sasafras you
<v Speaker 2>really want to drink sasafras tea, don't you know it
<v Speaker 2>has that carcinogen in it? And I just thought of
<v Speaker 2>it as something like that and I'm just thinking, well,
<v Speaker 2>I know that papas have been eating for a really
<v Speaker 2>long time in North America, like a really long time,
<v Speaker 2>And I thought, well, how could it be bad for
<v Speaker 2>you then if it's been eating for a long time.
<v Speaker 2>And so I just looked more into it, and then
<v Speaker 2>I started seeing videos put up by people that say, like,
<v Speaker 2>don't eat popas. Here's why, like never eat another papa again.
<v Speaker 2>I thought, Okay, it seems like an extreme take. I
<v Speaker 2>don't think that's necessarily true, but I'll look into it.
<v Speaker 2>And I mean, it seems like the answer to this
<v Speaker 2>is it depends are they neurotoxic? Well, it depends how
<v Speaker 2>many are you eating? Are you eating a lot? Is
<v Speaker 2>this like the main food you're eating all year round?
<v Speaker 2>Are you putting it into every single food that you eat?
<v Speaker 2>Are you preserving it? Are you baking it? Are you
<v Speaker 2>cooking it? Like? How are you treating pop? Pause? Because
<v Speaker 2>it seems like members of that family, So pop pop
<v Speaker 2>belongs to a family called an an Ace, which is
<v Speaker 2>mostly a tropical family, and it seems like there's some
<v Speaker 2>epidemiological research linking in an ac consumption to neurodegenerative diseases,
<v Speaker 2>not specifically or necessarily Parkinson's disease. They call it atypical parkinsonism,
<v Speaker 2>and Parkinson's disease is a kind of parkinson ism, but
<v Speaker 2>their neurodegenerative diseases. And what it seems to be the
<v Speaker 2>case is that there are certain groups of people that
<v Speaker 2>eat a lot of this stuff, not necessarily popause, but
<v Speaker 2>soursop and cherimoia and custard apple. These are all members
<v Speaker 2>of the Papa family, which is Annace, and there's an
<v Speaker 2>elevated risk or incidence of atypical parkinsonism. And this was
<v Speaker 2>discovered I think in the late nineties, and then researchers
<v Speaker 2>started wondering, well, what could the mechanism be here, and
<v Speaker 2>then they isolated a compound known as an nacine, named
<v Speaker 2>after the family Annace, and they found that, oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it is neurotoxic in laboratory studies. So if we have
<v Speaker 2>rats and we give them purified annacine, it shows neurotoxicity.
<v Speaker 2>Even if we have human cultured cells and we doast
<v Speaker 2>these cells with annacine, yeah, there's some neurotoxic effects there.
<v Speaker 2>But it wasn't known whether or not Papa even had
<v Speaker 2>this compound, or whether or not it was in any
<v Speaker 2>kind of like physiologically relevant concentration. But then in the
<v Speaker 2>early twenty tens, yeah, it was found that papa does
<v Speaker 2>contain anna scene and some research even showed that the
<v Speaker 2>levels in popa are so much higher than the levels
<v Speaker 2>found in soursop and these other tropical fruits associated with
<v Speaker 2>these degenerative conditions in certain groups of people. And so
<v Speaker 2>people are worried about this, and they're wondering, well, is
<v Speaker 2>this causing any kind of issues in me if I'm
<v Speaker 2>eating it? And then a case study was published in
<v Speaker 2>twenty twenty showing that a man who ate popas I
<v Speaker 2>think for ten years and eventually died from a neurodegenerative
<v Speaker 2>disease I think they called it super nuclear palsy. And
<v Speaker 2>he didn't know why he was getting sick. His wife
<v Speaker 2>didn't know, but the wife told the doctor, well, he's
<v Speaker 2>been eating poppas for five years, and he continued eating
<v Speaker 2>them for five more years until his death. And so
<v Speaker 2>the paper is titled like super nuclear palsy and pop
<v Speaker 2>pok consumption. So right there they're making the link and saying, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it might be this, but it might be something else.
<v Speaker 2>In all these studies, I mean, if you look at
<v Speaker 2>all these studies, though they're also saying genetics player role,
<v Speaker 2>that's the side exposure could play. These fruits are heavily
<v Speaker 2>sprayed with pesticides, especially in some of these areas where
<v Speaker 2>these fruits grow, like in the French West Indies, and
<v Speaker 2>there hasn't been any study looking at pop pak consumption
<v Speaker 2>and human beings and making any kind of link to
<v Speaker 2>neurodegenital diseases, so that doesn't exist at all. The thing
<v Speaker 2>about poppas compared to these tropical fruits found elsewhere is
<v Speaker 2>that poppas usually aren't available year round. And I say
<v Speaker 2>usually because I mean if you're going to forge plopause,
<v Speaker 2>you only have about a month to do it. Really,
<v Speaker 2>they don't store well, they don't ship well, they don't
<v Speaker 2>commercialize well. Soursop is available year round in some countries.
<v Speaker 2>Charamoia is as well. In these areas where you're seeing
<v Speaker 2>a lot of neurodegeneration within certain groups of people, people
<v Speaker 2>are consuming herbal teas made of these products as well.
<v Speaker 2>They're not just eating the fruits, and sometimes they're doing
<v Speaker 2>it on a daily basis. I don't know many people
<v Speaker 2>that are consuming pop on a daily basis. I don't
<v Speaker 2>know anybody drinking keys made out of pop pause. But
<v Speaker 2>because papas are becoming more popular, people are trying to
<v Speaker 2>commercialize them more. They're trying to fit them into the
<v Speaker 2>market today through all these value added products. They're trying
<v Speaker 2>to figure out ways how can we extend the shelf life.
<v Speaker 2>And I'm not convinced that's a really good idea. I'm
<v Speaker 2>wondering if this is a fruit that just needs to
<v Speaker 2>be respected, created as digital food when it's fresh season,
<v Speaker 2>and maybe that will resolve any kind of issue associated
<v Speaker 2>with NeuroD the generation. But I don't know because I've
<v Speaker 2>never done research on this myself. I haven't talked to
<v Speaker 2>these researchers. But there is a long history of consumption
<v Speaker 2>of papa in the United States. I don't think too
<v Speaker 2>many people can argue with that. We don't see in
<v Speaker 2>cultures in North America that consume papas any strong link
<v Speaker 2>to nerve the generative, to nerve degenerative diseases. So personally,
<v Speaker 2>I think I ended the video by saying I'm gonna
<v Speaker 2>still eat them. I just.
<v Speaker 1>Moderation. Yeah, yeah, said what a buzzkill though, damn still
<v Speaker 1>you know, but a lot of those it's a it's
<v Speaker 1>you know, those basil angiosperm families. They got some weird
<v Speaker 1>phyto chemicals in them.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>It's one of the magnoliads. It's a order Magnolia alies
<v Speaker 1>and an ac and uh you know, yeah, there's I
<v Speaker 1>guess it's not surprising because there there is some weird
<v Speaker 1>there's some weird chemistry in that hole in all those
<v Speaker 1>four orders Cannialales, pipeer Ales, magnolia Alies, and lore Alies,
<v Speaker 1>the Bay Baytree order. But uh yeah, still what a
<v Speaker 1>drag though, man, I think as long as yeah, don't
<v Speaker 1>drink tea out of it, don't boof it, just once
<v Speaker 1>in a while, eat it when it's you know, when
<v Speaker 1>it's in season. Yeah, that was surprising to me though,
<v Speaker 1>Uh to to learn about that anyway, Yeah, that was
<v Speaker 1>That was a fucking great another great video I saw
<v Speaker 1>of yours. I guess, I mean, I love talking about
<v Speaker 1>all this stuff, but I'm curious too, just about your
<v Speaker 1>personal story. How did you get into all this? How
<v Speaker 1>do you start making videos? What's your background?
<v Speaker 2>Like? What?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I don't know, I guess did you just learn
<v Speaker 1>for the video stuff you just learn as you go
<v Speaker 1>or what were you, I guess, Yeah, just tell me
<v Speaker 1>how you got into into making this and how learned
<v Speaker 1>your land came to be.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean that's a good question. Sometimes I don't
<v Speaker 2>even know, because sometimes I wonder, you know, how much
<v Speaker 2>influence did I have on this or how much am
<v Speaker 2>I just being influenced, because sometimes I don't know how
<v Speaker 2>much of control I have over my life. But that's
<v Speaker 2>like an existential, existential thing I'm working through for growing up.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I wasn't raised like a wild chot or anything.
<v Speaker 2>It's not like I forged a lot or I hunted
<v Speaker 2>or fish or anything. I mean, the more that I
<v Speaker 2>speak to people who know things about nature today, not
<v Speaker 2>like I like to divide people into group, but you
<v Speaker 2>have groups of people that were raised this way, like
<v Speaker 2>their family. They were hunters, they were fishers, they spent
<v Speaker 2>time in the woods, they flipped stones in the creeks,
<v Speaker 2>and they look for salamanders that kind of thing. And
<v Speaker 2>then there are people that just got into this as
<v Speaker 2>an adult. And I'm definitely the latter. I was into sports,
<v Speaker 2>I was into music, I was into playing in bands, academics,
<v Speaker 2>all that stuff growing up. But I think in my
<v Speaker 2>late teens early twenties. I got into nature because I
<v Speaker 2>got into health and nutrition. I didn't feel very good
<v Speaker 2>at the time, and I thought, rather than going to
<v Speaker 2>the doctor, I'm going to try to figure it out
<v Speaker 2>to the best of my ability. And fortunately I started
<v Speaker 2>hanging out with people who knew a thing or two
<v Speaker 2>about health, but they are also interested in forging. So
<v Speaker 2>it's kind of foraging that got me into it, and
<v Speaker 2>I was pretty much just interested in forging for the
<v Speaker 2>health benefits of it. I was looking for medicinal plants
<v Speaker 2>and mushrooms. But soon, you know, I hit that point
<v Speaker 2>where I thought, well, I want to know everything, Like,
<v Speaker 2>I don't care if it's that war medicinal, I just
<v Speaker 2>want to know what it is. And it just became
<v Speaker 2>so it became so fascinating to me, and over time
<v Speaker 2>I realized that there was a limit to just identifying
<v Speaker 2>certain organisms. And you know, I belonged to a lot
<v Speaker 2>of nature clubs and there's a lot of fantastic nature
<v Speaker 2>organizations out there. But two things I think that kind
<v Speaker 2>of limited my education at the time was that a
<v Speaker 2>lot of these organizations just focused on one group of organisms,
<v Speaker 2>whether it's plants, birds, mushrooms, lichens, and that's all they
<v Speaker 2>would talk about. And they just talked about the identification
<v Speaker 2>of it. Maybe they said one or two things about
<v Speaker 2>the ecology, but that was about it. And I thought, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>but I want to know how all these things have connected.
<v Speaker 2>And I don't just want to know about birds. I
<v Speaker 2>don't just want to know about plants. I want to
<v Speaker 2>know why is this plant growing here? And why is
<v Speaker 2>it not growing over there? And does it have anything
<v Speaker 2>to do with geology at all? Or the rocks or
<v Speaker 2>why why are the mountains over in eastern Pennsylvania and
<v Speaker 2>not in western Pennsylvania. Does that have anything to do
<v Speaker 2>with ecology? And I soon realized that I needed to
<v Speaker 2>learn ecology and I needed to learn geology as well,
<v Speaker 2>and that's kind of where I am right now, studying
<v Speaker 2>those things. But yeah, because I love.
<v Speaker 1>Just curiosity, man, Just fucking curiosity.
<v Speaker 2>That's so important. Yeah. I mean, it's it's asking questions
<v Speaker 2>and it's being very curious. And I just feel blessed
<v Speaker 2>that I'm curious about this in life, Like I'm not
<v Speaker 2>that curious about cars or airplanes or like the economy.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, those things are fine, and people are into them.
<v Speaker 2>I think it's fantastic but for me, like what really
<v Speaker 2>lights me up is like knowing why the rivers in
<v Speaker 2>Pennsylvania changed course, or what's the fourth River all about
<v Speaker 2>in Pittsburgh, Because in Pittsburgh there's this myth of the
<v Speaker 2>fourth river even though we supposedly only have three around
<v Speaker 2>the point, It's like, well, what's the fourth river and
<v Speaker 2>what does that mean? Like why is that even an issue?
<v Speaker 2>And a lot of it has to do with geology,
<v Speaker 2>and that's why I just had to keep going deeper
<v Speaker 2>and deeper and deeper. But the interesting thing is, you know,
<v Speaker 2>I hang out with geologists and I go to some
<v Speaker 2>geology conferences and they're just into geology. A lot of
<v Speaker 2>them are like everyone, and it's like they don't talk
<v Speaker 2>about ecology. They they just talk about geology and they
<v Speaker 2>love it. And I really appreciate them for that to
<v Speaker 2>them a little bit bounce back and forth between worlds
<v Speaker 2>in order to try to piece it all together, because
<v Speaker 2>that's what I'm interested in seeing, like the whole, not
<v Speaker 2>the individual components. Like I want to see the whole.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah, you like connecting as well. Yeah, man, you
<v Speaker 1>like connecting the dots and you like you like look,
<v Speaker 1>you like zooming out I always mention that zooming out,
<v Speaker 1>like literally, just if you're looking at like a satellite
<v Speaker 1>image of your backyard and you keep hitting the minus
<v Speaker 1>button and you zoom, zoom zoom, you get further and
<v Speaker 1>further out, and you can suddenly see the whole picture
<v Speaker 1>and start connecting the dots and seeing how everything is connected,
<v Speaker 1>how everything works. I wish more people did that, because
<v Speaker 1>shaking out of that myopia, whether it's just you know,
<v Speaker 1>looking at the human world or whether it's just looking
<v Speaker 1>at this one thing, is so so critical and people
<v Speaker 1>will people will write me and they'll be like, what
<v Speaker 1>book should I get? What book? And I'll say this, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>there's books out there. But really the most important thing
<v Speaker 1>is going into with the right mindset and wondering why
<v Speaker 1>does this do this? Why does like being able to
<v Speaker 1>ask those questions and being curious, like having that hunger
<v Speaker 1>for answers and for information, and being able to think
<v Speaker 1>it's it's the way you think it's not. You don't
<v Speaker 1>just pick up a book and oh, I'm going to
<v Speaker 1>just absorb this by osmosis and and just just memorize it.
<v Speaker 1>That's what American schooling teaches us to do. It's no
<v Speaker 1>it's thinking like why does this do this? And what
<v Speaker 1>effect would this have on this? And what's the cause
<v Speaker 1>that this reason does this? And you know whatever it is.
<v Speaker 1>Or it's like why does nitrogeny enzymes need a low
<v Speaker 1>oxygen environment? What is you know, why is atmospheric nitrogen
<v Speaker 1>inaccessible to plants? You know that kind of thing. Like
<v Speaker 1>that's what I think is really remarkable. And that's what
<v Speaker 1>I love about the videos you do too. They're fucking
<v Speaker 1>all over the place. Man, they're so broad. It's like
<v Speaker 1>such a but it's all shit, that's interesting, and it
<v Speaker 1>all it's all related, you know, as hopes. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it is. No, man, it's fucking great. You have a
<v Speaker 1>fucking great thing going. It's but it's it's those asking questions,
<v Speaker 1>that's what's so, that's what's so important. So that's that's
<v Speaker 1>cause you've been trying to get into more geology or
<v Speaker 1>you're in a great spot for it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean I remember back in maybe twenty fifteen
<v Speaker 2>to sixteen picking up a few geology books from the library,
<v Speaker 2>like real old books, real old geology books. Even before
<v Speaker 2>like the theory of play tectonics was like wisely accept it,
<v Speaker 2>like we're all geology books, but about like Pittsburgh, and
<v Speaker 2>I remember opening it up and not really understanding most
<v Speaker 2>of it, like seeing all these huge words and concepts,
<v Speaker 2>but seeing a couple pictures and like arrows pointing, and
<v Speaker 2>realizing that I just opened something that is going to
<v Speaker 2>have such a profound effect on I'm what I know
<v Speaker 2>about the land or will help me learn something that
<v Speaker 2>nothing else can help me learn. It was almost like
<v Speaker 2>opening up sacred text that you're not allowed to read,
<v Speaker 2>but like you get access to it. And I know
<v Speaker 2>it sound so weird to say it, but it just
<v Speaker 2>felt like I was holding something that could tell me
<v Speaker 2>so much in piece all these things together, but it
<v Speaker 2>would take me many, many years to kind of do
<v Speaker 2>all that. And that's what geology books feel like to me.
<v Speaker 2>It feels like if I have a geology book, even
<v Speaker 2>if it's like so over my head because I didn't
<v Speaker 2>attend like a geology program in school, it just feels like,
<v Speaker 2>if I can eventually understand this, it's going to make
<v Speaker 2>me feel so much better about what I know about
<v Speaker 2>the land and ecology and everything else. It just feels
<v Speaker 2>so important and it's I don't think it's a surprise
<v Speaker 2>that we call rock like bedrock. You know, I really
<v Speaker 2>think it's the bedrock of nature education to understand geology.
<v Speaker 1>Oh it is one hundred percent man, it's it's the
<v Speaker 1>substrate that all of life, that all terrestrial life depends on.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, and you know marine life as well, from
<v Speaker 1>all the dissolved, weathered bits of rock that end up
<v Speaker 1>in ocean waters. But that, you know, that's what That's
<v Speaker 1>what the geologic timescale and and understanding of taxonomy, like
<v Speaker 1>just the phylogenetic tree of life did for me. It
<v Speaker 1>was like, this is the fucking roadmap to everything. This
<v Speaker 1>explains everything. This is amazing. You know, we can prove
<v Speaker 1>it with radiometric dating and DNA bar coding. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's that's fascinating stuff.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>When you get into Appalachia, like east of where you are,
<v Speaker 1>it's just a fucking paradise for geology. But it's also
<v Speaker 1>like a giant Rubik's cube, which is huge puzzle on
<v Speaker 1>it is it's I wish I knew.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, a lot of geologists say like, oh, you got
<v Speaker 2>to go west to learn geology because like that's all
<v Speaker 2>the exposures are, and they joke that we have geology here.
<v Speaker 2>But it's buried by ten feet of biology. But to me,
<v Speaker 2>that's amazing to have both, to have so much of
<v Speaker 2>both as well. So I don't feel like I need
<v Speaker 2>to go out west to just learn geology, like I
<v Speaker 2>think you can do it anywhere. And honestly, that's that's
<v Speaker 2>why I named the thing that I do learn your Land,
<v Speaker 2>because it's about learning where you are, like your backyard,
<v Speaker 2>your city, your town, your region. I love traveling as well,
<v Speaker 2>and I love learning about those areas when I'm there
<v Speaker 2>and before I get there, and a little after as well.
<v Speaker 2>But wherever I am, I want to learn that. Wherever
<v Speaker 2>I am, wherever, it's so important.
<v Speaker 1>It's so important. I mean you think about the number
<v Speaker 1>of people that that's what bombs me out is and
<v Speaker 1>people just take things for granted. And and I don't
<v Speaker 1>mean like entitled to take them for granted. I mean
<v Speaker 1>like they just it's just it is what it is.
<v Speaker 1>It's and that's all I don't need. There's no reason
<v Speaker 1>to think any deeper about the ground beneath my feet,
<v Speaker 1>or the plants growing on the side of the road,
<v Speaker 1>you know, next to the chain liing fence, or any
<v Speaker 1>of that. There's no need it's just it is what
<v Speaker 1>it is. It's just there. But when you start, i mean,
<v Speaker 1>when you start looking closer, you realize there's a whole
<v Speaker 1>fucking world. There's a whole universe right there underneath your nose.
<v Speaker 1>And again, everything's connected. It all, everything's interacting. And so
<v Speaker 1>it's you know, the plants. The plants are affected by
<v Speaker 1>the geology, and then the pollinators and whether it's vertebrates
<v Speaker 1>or insects are affected by the plants, and then you've
<v Speaker 1>got the atmosphere. Everything's interacting. It's all tied together. There's
<v Speaker 1>so much there. I mean, people always say, oh, it's
<v Speaker 1>you know, I remember growing up, especially too in Chicago.
<v Speaker 1>People are always like, oh, yeah, you know, it's the
<v Speaker 1>nature's boring here. We've you know, it's it's you got
<v Speaker 1>to go to like Central America or the tropics for
<v Speaker 1>it to get interesting. I'm like, fuck, no, it's not.
<v Speaker 1>It's amazing here. It's just where it's still intact, where
<v Speaker 1>it hasn't been cleared, you know, the tall grass prairies,
<v Speaker 1>the Devonian limestone all that. It's Chicago area that has
<v Speaker 1>amazing ship right there. You know, it's it's just learning
<v Speaker 1>about it being able to access it. That's why what
<v Speaker 1>you do is so important. So yeah, man, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>fucking great. Do you use that? Uh you use that
<v Speaker 1>rock step at all? R O C K D.
<v Speaker 2>I only started a couple months ago actually, but I
<v Speaker 2>don't use it that much. Do you use it?
<v Speaker 1>I use it all the time. It's amazing. It's because
<v Speaker 1>it's just like a geologic map. It's essentially a geologic
<v Speaker 1>map for everything. Like I found. I was in New
<v Speaker 1>Mexico and I found these coal deposits like nothing, you know,
<v Speaker 1>nothing uh that high quality coal for human burning, but
<v Speaker 1>it was you know, still lithified uh carbon. It was
<v Speaker 1>with trace fossils in it and little you know, bits
<v Speaker 1>of fossils he couldn't really decipher, and it was, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was amazing stuff. And I looked it up and
<v Speaker 1>I found the age and some papers on it, like
<v Speaker 1>it's got links to like papers written on that exposure.
<v Speaker 1>It's yeah, it's it's fucking it's a really helpful app
<v Speaker 1>at least if you want to learn learn about things.
<v Speaker 1>It'll get into like what the lithology is, you know,
<v Speaker 1>coal with some shale and then you know the age
<v Speaker 1>is always really cool too. It's like, oh, this is
<v Speaker 1>you know, early early to mid Cretaceous. Well, and then
<v Speaker 1>you can think about, well, what the fuck was going on?
<v Speaker 1>Then you know it's lots of conifer diversity, dinosaurs were
<v Speaker 1>still around. It's yeah, it's it's cool. It's cool stuff.
<v Speaker 1>I like it. But I think with you know that
<v Speaker 1>geology being buried beneath ten feet of biology, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you just got to go to the road cuts, and
<v Speaker 1>there's a lot of road cuts between between where you
<v Speaker 1>are and like, say New Jersey. I mean John McPhee
<v Speaker 1>wrote that fucking book, one of the Open Afrigat which
<v Speaker 1>one it was. I know it's an analyst in the
<v Speaker 1>former world, but you know he's like it's him standing
<v Speaker 1>at a road cut in New Jersey looking at like
<v Speaker 1>four hundred million year old rock. It's fucking out. You've
<v Speaker 1>read John McPhee.
<v Speaker 2>Huh, Yeah, I have. I have read all the books
<v Speaker 2>in that series, and interestingly, my brother just gave me
<v Speaker 2>one of them the other day. I read. I read
<v Speaker 2>that one, the New Jersey one in New York. I
<v Speaker 2>think I forget the title that one as well.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I haven't. I've read bits and pieces. I can't
<v Speaker 1>sit through the whole thing. I just my my fucking
<v Speaker 1>eighty ds too too bad. But but yeah, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>man that dude has written some very inspiring, wonderful bits
<v Speaker 1>about geology. You did one in California and then Basin
<v Speaker 1>and range. But but anyway, you got time still and
<v Speaker 1>we got what's your time on me here? When you
<v Speaker 1>got to dip out?
<v Speaker 2>No, I got time?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, cool? All right?
<v Speaker 2>Cool? I mean the interesting thing about geology also, it's,
<v Speaker 2>even though it can be very difficult to learn because
<v Speaker 2>of all the like terminology used, it's so accessible because
<v Speaker 2>it's still like something you can do with your life
<v Speaker 2>as a major in school and as a career that
<v Speaker 2>the culture actually supports this time, meaning it's very difficult
<v Speaker 2>to getting to botany. It's difficult to be like am
<v Speaker 2>I cologists and make a lot of money doing it,
<v Speaker 2>but as a geologist, it's like there's actually money in it.
<v Speaker 2>So there's actually a lot of resources available, like a
<v Speaker 2>lot of free PDFs online. There's a lot of books written,
<v Speaker 2>much more than there are books written on plants and
<v Speaker 2>especially mushrooms today. And it's because I think of just
<v Speaker 2>all the money tied up in geology with coal, with oil,
<v Speaker 2>with natural gas. I mean, nowadays, it's like not many
<v Speaker 2>people are making a lot of money on plants. They're
<v Speaker 2>certainly not making too much money on mushrooms unless you're
<v Speaker 2>getting into psychedelics. But with geology, it's like it's still
<v Speaker 2>a career path. And because of that, there's so many
<v Speaker 2>materials out there that are easily accessible and free. Like
<v Speaker 2>if you just want to learn the geology of your area,
<v Speaker 2>do you just type in your city or your region
<v Speaker 2>like PDF in a in a search bar, you'll come
<v Speaker 2>across all this information and all these maps and detailed information.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's true, that's totally true.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>People ask me, like, what's the good book for geology.
<v Speaker 1>I'm always like, uh, John McFee. And then you know,
<v Speaker 1>if you can get into it and then just get
<v Speaker 1>a fucking geology textbook and don't read it start to finish,
<v Speaker 1>just pick it up wherever and start looking at stuff.
<v Speaker 1>And but again you got to ask questions. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you got to be like looking at the text, you
<v Speaker 1>don't just take it for its word that it's basalt.
<v Speaker 1>Go to the internet and look up like pictures of basalt,
<v Speaker 1>how does it form? Whatever? But you know, learning the
<v Speaker 1>three major rock types and then you know the two
<v Speaker 1>two sub designations of igneous rock and all that ship
<v Speaker 1>is just you know, like basic play techtonic, subduction zones,
<v Speaker 1>all that ship it's it's you know, That's That's where
<v Speaker 1>I always tell people to to start. What did you
<v Speaker 1>What did you major in in school? What was your
<v Speaker 1>main focus?
<v Speaker 2>Well, I started out as a music major, classical piano,
<v Speaker 2>uh jad, guitar, piano. Yeah, well I'm used to a lot.
<v Speaker 2>I don't. I haven't played in many years.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but that ship doesn't. That ship doesn't leave you.
<v Speaker 1>Fuck that. I would love to. I would love to
<v Speaker 1>fucking be able to play a piano.
<v Speaker 2>I'm just so piano. Piano is awesome and there's death
<v Speaker 2>only a connection between piano and nature. And I only
<v Speaker 2>made this connection a couple of years ago. But I
<v Speaker 2>encourage people to pick up an instrument and study music.
<v Speaker 2>It's fantastic. And I'm so glad that my dad basically
<v Speaker 2>made all of his sons, including me, study music and
<v Speaker 2>push us into the musical field, like to the point
<v Speaker 2>where we went to college for music and you know,
<v Speaker 2>try to make a career out of it. I stopped
<v Speaker 2>that and then I went back to school for Nutrition
<v Speaker 2>at the University of Pittsburgh. And that benefited me because
<v Speaker 2>it allowed me to have access to all these research papers,
<v Speaker 2>and it taught me how to read research objectively as
<v Speaker 2>well and actually get through all the different parts of
<v Speaker 2>it and not just read like the headline or the conclusion.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what what do you mean by sanna read research?
<v Speaker 1>Hold that thought really quick? I want to ask to
<v Speaker 1>read research because I think that's important for people to hear.
<v Speaker 1>What do you mean, like to sort through stuff and
<v Speaker 1>not just take it, well, this is the results and
<v Speaker 1>this is the way it is, but actually think about
<v Speaker 1>it and kind of quantify for yourself what's true. What
<v Speaker 1>might be bullshit, not bullshit, but maybe not the best
<v Speaker 1>conclusion to arrive at. Is that what you're talking about?
<v Speaker 1>Or what do you mean?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? Exactly, just that I mean knowing what you're getting into.
<v Speaker 2>Because when you read like a well published scientific article,
<v Speaker 2>it doesn't read like a book, it doesn't read like
<v Speaker 2>an article in a magazine. I mean, there's a strict
<v Speaker 2>formula from how people write papers, right, and sometimes people
<v Speaker 2>just skip over a lot of it. They'll read the
<v Speaker 2>abstract or they'll read the conclusion, and I can't say
<v Speaker 2>I've never done such a thing because sometimes in the middle,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's very dry or very detailed and abstract
<v Speaker 2>for me to understand. But like when you want to
<v Speaker 2>present something like popause are neurotoxic because certain cultures around
<v Speaker 2>the world have neudegenitive diseases. But if you just read
<v Speaker 2>the abstract or conclusion, you'll miss what they say there's
<v Speaker 2>probably a genetic component. Yeah, you'll miss where it says, well,
<v Speaker 2>they spray a lot of pesticides on these fruits in
<v Speaker 2>those areas. You might miss that while these people are
<v Speaker 2>drinking lots of teas from these products as well, and
<v Speaker 2>those might be left out of the two book and
<v Speaker 2>parts of the article. So just being familiar with the
<v Speaker 2>layout of an article and how to read it in
<v Speaker 2>a search for them as well. Yeah, just critical kind
<v Speaker 2>of what like college toppy.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, man, that's I think. I started reading papers. I
<v Speaker 1>was working for the railroad and I just couldn't find
<v Speaker 1>enough information on the plants I was interested in, and
<v Speaker 1>it would be like bullshit websites or you know, Wikipedia
<v Speaker 1>would only go so far. And so then I started,
<v Speaker 1>you know, coming across scientific papers, and then then I
<v Speaker 1>learned about sy Hub and that changed everything. It was
<v Speaker 1>like now you could just download them for free. And
<v Speaker 1>then I got to the point where like that was
<v Speaker 1>primarily what I was reading was you know, research papers.
<v Speaker 1>So anybody that's my hope, is it like for especially
<v Speaker 1>like people that are into what I do or whatever,
<v Speaker 1>just you know, have no connection to academia, aren't interested
<v Speaker 1>in it, maybe didn't even go to college, just start,
<v Speaker 1>but they're interested in plants and ecology. They start you know,
<v Speaker 1>stealing papers on SI hub and reading research papers and whatever.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's really it's really fucking, you know, helpful
<v Speaker 1>in the end. That's just getting into science. And I
<v Speaker 1>think especially the more that our society defunds science, the
<v Speaker 1>more important it is for just lay people to start
<v Speaker 1>getting more into it and learning how to do it
<v Speaker 1>and taking the information. You know. Yeah, absolutely sorry, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>if you can remember your thought that you were making
<v Speaker 1>the connection to piano, go back to that. If not,
<v Speaker 1>I apologize.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. So when I was growing up, I played piano
<v Speaker 2>a lot, and I didn't like it, but I played it.
<v Speaker 2>And I also played other instruments like trumpet and uphonium
<v Speaker 2>and guitar and bass guitar and drums and I could
<v Speaker 2>kind of pick up his instruments pretty quickly, and I
<v Speaker 2>didn't know why, but I just could. And when I
<v Speaker 2>got older, I remember older people than me, like professional musicians, saying,
<v Speaker 2>you know what, the hardest instrument to learn is piano.
<v Speaker 2>Really but that makes me feel good because I mean,
<v Speaker 2>I wasn't the best at piano, but I wasn't bad either,
<v Speaker 2>and I guess I was pretty proficient at it. But
<v Speaker 2>what I realized was that it helped me learn all
<v Speaker 2>those other instruments pretty quickly. And you can't really say
<v Speaker 2>the same thing all the time for everybody. For something
<v Speaker 2>like the flute, Like if you pick up the flute
<v Speaker 2>and you start on flute, will every other instrument comes
<v Speaker 2>easy to you? Maybe, but probably not as quickly as
<v Speaker 2>if you would had started on piano. There's just something
<v Speaker 2>about piano. It's reading two lines of music at the
<v Speaker 2>same time, using both of your hands, using your feet.
<v Speaker 2>You're using a lot of parts of your body, including
<v Speaker 2>your brain when you're playing the piano. So what does
<v Speaker 2>it have to do with nature? Well, when I started
<v Speaker 2>learning plants and mushrooms and learning ecology, and this is
<v Speaker 2>before I actually really appreciated geology, I didn't realize how
<v Speaker 2>important tree identification actually was and learning all the things
<v Speaker 2>I can learn about trees, and I realizes that trees
<v Speaker 2>actually made me a better ecologist. It made me a
<v Speaker 2>better plant hunter, it made me a better mushroom hunter,
<v Speaker 2>and it made me see so much about the lay
<v Speaker 2>of the land in ecology, more so than if I
<v Speaker 2>would just head learned insects or just head learned ferns,
<v Speaker 2>or just had learned grasses. I mean, these are all
<v Speaker 2>important things, for sure, and I think it's very important
<v Speaker 2>for people to get into the all different components of
<v Speaker 2>nature and see how they're related. But when I started
<v Speaker 2>really paying attention to trees, especially where I live, because
<v Speaker 2>it's a very treed landscape. I mean, if you're living
<v Speaker 2>in an area it was not a lot of trees,
<v Speaker 2>maybe the analogy doesn't apply. But being able to see, Okay,
<v Speaker 2>there's a lot of basswood here, and there's hackberry as well. Well,
<v Speaker 2>I'll bet there's limestone in the soil. And because there's
<v Speaker 2>limestone in the soil, I'm probably going to see some
<v Speaker 2>golden seal. I might see some Virginia penny wart, I
<v Speaker 2>might see a lot of calcareous species. I might see
<v Speaker 2>walking fern and so the fertility actually might be higher
<v Speaker 2>in this air. And just knowing that thing, Oh, because
<v Speaker 2>of that, I might find moral mushrooms here because morel
<v Speaker 2>mushrooms tend to like lime in your area. Damn Compared
<v Speaker 2>to if I would just learn how to identify moral
<v Speaker 2>mushrooms and just focus on moral mushrooms and just look
<v Speaker 2>for moral mushrooms without ever asking the question why are
<v Speaker 2>they even growing here? And whenever you hunt mushrooms, a
<v Speaker 2>lot of people will say yeah, but then you learn
<v Speaker 2>tree identification, and that's true. But I wouldn't just stop
<v Speaker 2>at those two connections, because just learning the trees as well,
<v Speaker 2>and learning a bit about them their ecology, and then
<v Speaker 2>learning how that's tied to geology, it really just opens
<v Speaker 2>up your whole world. It just makes you better naturalist.
<v Speaker 2>And the thing about trees is that they're there all
<v Speaker 2>year round, unlike a mushroom, unlike an in rebaceous plant,
<v Speaker 2>and they're big, they're tall in many cases, so you
<v Speaker 2>could just see them all year round. I mean, you
<v Speaker 2>could be driving on the highway, and especially if you
<v Speaker 2>pay attention to phenology, like when things change or when
<v Speaker 2>things appear like the timing of things. And you see
<v Speaker 2>like a hillside turning red be in October, and you
<v Speaker 2>know it's maybe a ridge and you might say, oh,
<v Speaker 2>that's all scarlet oak over there, and then what does
<v Speaker 2>that tell you? Well, maybe it's a dryer area. Maybe
<v Speaker 2>there's probably black oak in there as well. Maybe I'll
<v Speaker 2>find an American chest and that I'm not sure. But
<v Speaker 2>you start to make all these connections because you know
<v Speaker 2>how to identify trees, and you paid attention a little
<v Speaker 2>bit to ecology as well, So how piano kind of
<v Speaker 2>makes you a better musician overall. And it's kind of
<v Speaker 2>like that one thing that if you if you learn,
<v Speaker 2>it'll really help you and everything else. I think trees
<v Speaker 2>are that way as well, if you live in an
<v Speaker 2>area where forests occur.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, it's the mental exercise to play an instrument,
<v Speaker 1>especially piano. Like the sheet music thing. I used to
<v Speaker 1>know how to read it twenty fucking years ago, it's
<v Speaker 1>I don't anymore. I've I started playing drums and that
<v Speaker 1>was like my that was easy, just bang on shit
<v Speaker 1>and you know, keep it in time. But but the
<v Speaker 1>piano thing is, I mean, it's it's great fucking mental
<v Speaker 1>exercise it's it sounds really nice, it's very pleasant, it's calm.
<v Speaker 1>Other people will enjoy it if they can hear it. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I want it. I definitely would love to get back
<v Speaker 1>into that. But that's a really cool take on it.
<v Speaker 1>On its connection again, it's just having a it's being versatile,
<v Speaker 1>and it's having knowing, knowing many topics, many aspects of
<v Speaker 1>the subject matter to look at, and taking a broader,
<v Speaker 1>zoomed out perspective, so that I mean, you're basically you know,
<v Speaker 1>you're basically a great ecologist. How did you get into
<v Speaker 1>ecology from from foraging? From getting from just initially going
<v Speaker 1>out there and foraging was never something I was really into.
<v Speaker 1>I mean I was into it a little bit at first,
<v Speaker 1>and the mushrooms and stuff, but but I guess for me,
<v Speaker 1>it was just being able to, you know, get seeds,
<v Speaker 1>study something, gets seeds, and then grow the shit out
<v Speaker 1>of that and make more of it, plant it around whatever.
<v Speaker 1>But you know a lot of my friends have my
<v Speaker 1>friend Josh and Alabama and other people I follow are into, uh,
<v Speaker 1>really into foraging. That was like their gay way to everything.
<v Speaker 1>It gets a lot of people into this stuff, which
<v Speaker 1>I think it's great for how did that lead you
<v Speaker 1>to ecology?
<v Speaker 2>I think it's because I just wanted to know why.
<v Speaker 2>Like the question was always why, not necessarily what, but why.
<v Speaker 2>I mean with identification, it's a lot of what what
<v Speaker 2>is this? Or how? Like how do I process this?
<v Speaker 2>And I don't honestly, I don't even know why. So
<v Speaker 2>like my question in life right now is well, why
<v Speaker 2>am I even into this at all? But what I realized,
<v Speaker 2>you know I do. I do ecology outings now, So
<v Speaker 2>I take people out and we spend maybe five or
<v Speaker 2>six hours together as a group, and we talk about
<v Speaker 2>these things. We go around, we learn about connections, we
<v Speaker 2>point things out, we study geology. But I think and
<v Speaker 2>I only started doing these again this year after taking
<v Speaker 2>a couple of years off. But when I started planning
<v Speaker 2>for these, I started asking myself, well, what's the point
<v Speaker 2>of this, Like why am I even doing this? What
<v Speaker 2>do I want people to actually learn? Because myself included
<v Speaker 2>like facts don't always stick, like dates of things or
<v Speaker 2>exact numbers or even sometimes the taxonomy of things, like
<v Speaker 2>sometimes I need to refresh my memory.
<v Speaker 1>I do it all the time.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, it makes me feel good, But I think
<v Speaker 2>that I always say you know, a successful day for
<v Speaker 2>me would be whenever I lead these events is if
<v Speaker 2>all the participants come away feeling like they actually know
<v Speaker 2>the place better than they knew before coming there, even
<v Speaker 2>if they had been there a hundred times before, and
<v Speaker 2>that they feel more connected to it. And I know
<v Speaker 2>it sounds like kind of woo woof.
<v Speaker 1>That's the connection. That's what fills the fucking void in
<v Speaker 1>the soul.
<v Speaker 2>That is. And you know what, we so many naturalists,
<v Speaker 2>including myself, it's like we're so good at categorizing things
<v Speaker 2>and saying this belongs to this genus or this belongs
<v Speaker 2>to this family or this subfamily, and that's what this
<v Speaker 2>thing does. This is its niche. But it's like, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>but what about you as a human, Like where do
<v Speaker 2>you belong? Like do you belong as well to nature?
<v Speaker 2>Are you nature? Do you belong to a place or
<v Speaker 2>is everything else outside of you and separate and you're
<v Speaker 2>just the observer, paying attention and learning all of it.
<v Speaker 2>And so when I say connect to a place, I
<v Speaker 2>actually mean, yeah, you are connected to this place as well,
<v Speaker 2>this forest when you're here, Yeah, because you're here physically,
<v Speaker 2>you're paying attention to it, you're touching things. You're smelling things,
<v Speaker 2>you're breathing things, you're tasting things, and because you're here,
<v Speaker 2>you are connected as well. And I honestly think one
<v Speaker 2>of the most severe existential crises of our time that's
<v Speaker 2>not often talked about, is that humans don't feel like
<v Speaker 2>they actually belong to a place at the name of
<v Speaker 2>a city or like an alma mater. Absolutely, like I've
<v Speaker 2>belonged a college brand. It's like they belong to land.
<v Speaker 1>They belong to a brand or a sports team. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>I like to go to Chick fil A. That's my restaurant.
<v Speaker 1>You know what, I don't even fuck know anything about sports,
<v Speaker 1>but I you know, I'm a fan of this team.
<v Speaker 1>Blah blah blah. We're gonna kick your kick, you know.
<v Speaker 1>But the fucking and that works. That gives people a
<v Speaker 1>little bit of sense of existential fulfillment. But I think
<v Speaker 1>I've watched this happen in so many people too. Is
<v Speaker 1>when they when they you know, if they're just they
<v Speaker 1>planted a native plant garden, killed their law and they
<v Speaker 1>got the chance to see a new cool bird come by,
<v Speaker 1>or if they're going out, they went on a hike
<v Speaker 1>and they learned a little bit and it actually stuck
<v Speaker 1>like they got it. You could tell they got a
<v Speaker 1>dopamine release when they learned it. You can see the
<v Speaker 1>excitement in their eyes that that shit affects people. That
<v Speaker 1>really changes people, because it does. It's we fucking evolved
<v Speaker 1>on on on earth. We evolved on land. We evolved
<v Speaker 1>having these connections to plants and mushrooms and other living things.
<v Speaker 1>And that's kind of one of the great crimes of
<v Speaker 1>modern civilization. It doesn't need to be like this, but
<v Speaker 1>this is the way it's turned out, is that people
<v Speaker 1>have been disconnected from that. They've lost that, and you
<v Speaker 1>can clearly see it and the biological and ecological collapse
<v Speaker 1>that's happening around us. It's people stopped caringly and they
<v Speaker 1>got this disconnected from the land. And so it's that's
<v Speaker 1>why it's so imperative to bring people back to it.
<v Speaker 1>And that's what I think it does for people. It's
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's yeah, what's the point of it is
<v Speaker 1>that it fills the void and the soul, and it
<v Speaker 1>really does, and it gives people a sense of belonging
<v Speaker 1>and like, holy shit, a timeline to place themselves on
<v Speaker 1>geologic timescale, how to think, you know, just knowing recent events.
<v Speaker 1>By recent, I mean the last few million years, and
<v Speaker 1>just spatially too, like, oh, this is the landscape I
<v Speaker 1>live on, This is the climate that goes with the landscape,
<v Speaker 1>This is the geology that goes with the landscape. These
<v Speaker 1>are the pollinators that go with the landscape, and the
<v Speaker 1>plants that go with the landscape, and et cetera. Man,
<v Speaker 1>it's really it's really good stuff. It's it's so fucking important.
<v Speaker 1>That's cool. You've been doing those so you're like leading forays.
<v Speaker 1>Can people learn about that on the website or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they're posted on the website learnoland dot com. I
<v Speaker 2>do a couple of year, or at least I started
<v Speaker 2>doing it a couple of year again, But yeah, I
<v Speaker 2>mean that's the point of it. I mean, I do
<v Speaker 2>advertise we're going to learn tree identification, mushroom identification, plant identification.
<v Speaker 2>But there's also ecology, there's also geology. And honestly, it
<v Speaker 2>is my way of helping people connect to a particular place.
<v Speaker 2>And I like using that wordplace because honestly, I think
<v Speaker 2>I think the word nature doesn't mean a lot when
<v Speaker 2>you really think about it to people, because it's too big,
<v Speaker 2>it's too broad, too abstract. I I mean I use
<v Speaker 2>the term all the time. I do because a lot
<v Speaker 2>of people kind of understand what when you say nature,
<v Speaker 2>people picture in their minds, Okay, that's what nature is. Interestingly,
<v Speaker 2>it's always outside of people. It's never them, which goes
<v Speaker 2>to show that people actually don't feel like they belong
<v Speaker 2>to nature, because if you did, you wouldn't use phrases
<v Speaker 2>like I want to go into nature. I like to
<v Speaker 2>study nature. It's like, well, then study yourself, right, because
<v Speaker 2>aren't you nature? Orways say things like things humans do
<v Speaker 2>aren't natural, It's like, yeah, but were they ever natural?
<v Speaker 2>I mean, when let's say the charoite set fire to
<v Speaker 2>the southeastern forest, is that natural or was that not natural?
<v Speaker 2>And if humans do it today, is that natural? Or
<v Speaker 2>is that not natural? And I don't have a good
<v Speaker 2>answer for it. I don't know anybody who really does.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, it just depends on your worldview and what
<v Speaker 2>you believe in what you know. But whenever we say place,
<v Speaker 2>it's much more tangible. There's limits around it, and I
<v Speaker 2>think humans thrive with limits. And it sounds so contrary
<v Speaker 2>to what we're told today to be unlimited and be
<v Speaker 2>global and worldly and like think far and wide and
<v Speaker 2>all this stuff. It's like yeah, but for a long time,
<v Speaker 2>it's like we lived in smaller groups. We had kind
<v Speaker 2>of boundaries. I know we were nomadic. I know we
<v Speaker 2>migrated as well, but it was much smaller, much more intact.
<v Speaker 2>And I think when you want somebody to connect to nature,
<v Speaker 2>a good place to start is just pick a place
<v Speaker 2>and help them learn that place and connect to that
<v Speaker 2>particular place, because I think humans are place based creatures.
<v Speaker 2>I think we thrive when we feel like we belong
<v Speaker 2>to a place. It's much easier to take care of
<v Speaker 2>a place than to take care of nature.
<v Speaker 1>That word natural drives me fucking nutsy. It doesn't mean anything.
<v Speaker 1>I mean they put it on like you know that
<v Speaker 1>we're seeing natural skippy peanut butter, natural scent, you know,
<v Speaker 1>natural scent, and it's like filled with chemicals you know,
<v Speaker 1>produced in a lab. Yeah, it doesn't, you know, it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't it's natural. What what people with this is natural
<v Speaker 1>for this to have. It doesn't mean anything, you know,
<v Speaker 1>whereas if you use the word yeah the living world
<v Speaker 1>or involved in this place, or or you know that
<v Speaker 1>there's actually a connection there, it's more it's articulate. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>but I think that's what Yeah, that's what I try
<v Speaker 1>to do with the killer lawn stuff is because I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I fucking always hated lawns. But you know, once I
<v Speaker 1>got into botany and learning native plants, that's when I
<v Speaker 1>really was like, holy shit, this is amazing. Like I've
<v Speaker 1>observed so many different life forms in my front yard
<v Speaker 1>because I planted all the native plants that evolved here
<v Speaker 1>in that those life forms evolved with. And I'm learning
<v Speaker 1>so much just by encountering it because it's all coming
<v Speaker 1>to my yard, because my yard's an oasis and a
<v Speaker 1>sea of shitty turf grass and pavement. Yeah. Man, it's
<v Speaker 1>it's fucking great. I can't believe we didn't talk about
<v Speaker 1>American chestnuts yet, Like they were mentioned a little bit,
<v Speaker 1>but this you've done a lot of videos on American chestnuts,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, they were one of the I think
<v Speaker 1>what it was, one out of every four trees it's
<v Speaker 1>commonly said, was an American chestnut out east, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>they were fucking everywhere and you could still see stump
<v Speaker 1>sprouts everywhere. I just saw some in Northwest Georgia in April.
<v Speaker 1>Remember seeing them in Pennsylvania, just passing through driving to
<v Speaker 1>New York. Once I got off the interstate to piss
<v Speaker 1>and there was like a little chestnuts sprout. You know,
<v Speaker 1>as everyone knows, they were lost or became functionally extinct
<v Speaker 1>because of the introduced blight that had evolved with their
<v Speaker 1>close relative, the Chinese chests.
<v Speaker 2>No.
<v Speaker 1>Two species are estimated to have diverged like nine to
<v Speaker 1>twelve million years ago, and Chinese chestnuts resistant to the blight,
<v Speaker 1>Americans not. But with this, I mean, you did a
<v Speaker 1>video on you know, the how the size was over exaggerated,
<v Speaker 1>which I pretty much wholly agree with. Hold on one second, okay, anyway, sorry,
<v Speaker 1>but that dogs were barking at the mailman. So anyway, okay,
<v Speaker 1>so back to but you know you've done quite a
<v Speaker 1>few videos on American chestnuts. What's the status with American
<v Speaker 1>chestnuts where you are right now? I mean, I guess
<v Speaker 1>it's the same and much of the range you just
<v Speaker 1>see stump sprouts. Are there any large ones that you encounter?
<v Speaker 1>And yeah, what do you have to say about that?
<v Speaker 1>You know, the current status of the species out there
<v Speaker 1>and whether you're hoping or what you think of possibilities
<v Speaker 1>for reintroduction.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so American chestnut. I really like finding the tree,
<v Speaker 2>and I think it probably comes from the fact that,
<v Speaker 2>you know, I started forging mushrooms, like getting into nature
<v Speaker 2>and like finding things that might not be there. And
<v Speaker 2>with trees, it's like, well, trees are usually always there,
<v Speaker 2>you kind of know where they are. But finding an
<v Speaker 2>American chestnut is almost like finding a morele mushroom for me,
<v Speaker 2>because when I explore new areas, I'm not quite sure
<v Speaker 2>if I ever see it. Sometimes I'm not looking for it,
<v Speaker 2>but then it appears, and you know, sometimes you find
<v Speaker 2>a decent sized one, and I say decent. It's all
<v Speaker 2>relatively speaking, because I don't think in eastern North America
<v Speaker 2>you'll ever find a mature one today. But I think
<v Speaker 2>elsewhere where it's been planted where the blight isn't found,
<v Speaker 2>then you can find some bigger American chestnuts. It's certainly
<v Speaker 2>not incredibly common where I live in western Pennsylvania to
<v Speaker 2>other species, but I know many spots where I can
<v Speaker 2>reliably find them. They're always on the smaller side. Although
<v Speaker 2>up in northwestern Pennsylvania there's an area where there's just
<v Speaker 2>hundreds of living American chestnuts, and I didn't measure. The
<v Speaker 2>biggest one I found, but it's not a small tree.
<v Speaker 2>It was of living ones. Yeah, and some of them
<v Speaker 2>are producing fruits. And I don't think too many people
<v Speaker 2>are aware that they're up there, other than foresters and
<v Speaker 2>people who manage this area, because there's a campground around
<v Speaker 2>there as well, and I don't think people understand that
<v Speaker 2>when they're camping they're literally under living American chestnut trees.
<v Speaker 2>And they're not saplings either, but they're not massive trees.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I'm not trying to tell you that these
<v Speaker 2>are like full grown American chestnuts or even considered mature,
<v Speaker 2>but for decent sizes, and I've shown some of them
<v Speaker 2>in some of the videos that I've done, so I
<v Speaker 2>am hopeful that given enough time, American chestnut will be okay.
<v Speaker 2>And it's kind of like the thing that I said
<v Speaker 2>with the ticks and fire and well, what can we
<v Speaker 2>do today for a landscape? And there's a lot that
<v Speaker 2>we can do, but I don't think I would be
<v Speaker 2>under the impression that I can do everything today and
<v Speaker 2>see the results next year or even in my lifetime.
<v Speaker 2>It's gonna be something that I think over generations, you'll
<v Speaker 2>eventually see the results. Same thing with American chestnut. I'm
<v Speaker 2>not even sure. There's a lot of things that we
<v Speaker 2>can do other than just protect areas where American chestnut
<v Speaker 2>might be growing. Don't log these areas, and then over time,
<v Speaker 2>maybe resistance will be a thing with some of the
<v Speaker 2>younger trees because some resistance mature trees are there, they're available.
<v Speaker 1>There is some resistance. Yeah, I'm looking at this video
<v Speaker 1>now finding dozens of American chestnut trees and yeah, that's
<v Speaker 1>a fucking I mean that thing is that's a foot
<v Speaker 1>diameter of breast height. Probably that's a large tree. And
<v Speaker 1>I didn't see this one. You gotta watch this video now,
<v Speaker 1>not now, but you know, when we're when we're through
<v Speaker 1>with the podcast, maybe later today with my kid. That's
<v Speaker 1>the nice thing about your videos too, is I can
<v Speaker 1>watch them with my kid. Like my videos. People always
<v Speaker 1>write me like, I love your videos, but I kid
<v Speaker 1>watch them because you curse too much, And I was like,
<v Speaker 1>you know what they're not. They're not insults. Well sometimes
<v Speaker 1>they are, but anyway, you know, I need, I need.
<v Speaker 1>I've thought about maybe doing a kid friendly channel at
<v Speaker 1>some point, which sounds hilarious for me, but and not
<v Speaker 1>even bleeping words out, just not using them. You know,
<v Speaker 1>I've I've learned since I retired from the railroad to
<v Speaker 1>not curse anyway. But this is I mean, this is
<v Speaker 1>fucking wild. What's what is going on? Why do they
<v Speaker 1>not have the blight like these these? And I haven't
<v Speaker 1>watched the video yet, but feel free to spoil it
<v Speaker 1>for me. Why do they not have the blight? You
<v Speaker 1>any idea, any guesses what's going on here?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I'm not sure. It's a remote it's a rather
<v Speaker 2>remote area, meaning it's not a lot of developments that area,
<v Speaker 2>not a lot of infrastructure. The area was logged for sure.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I'm not filming in an old growth area.
<v Speaker 2>I'm not entirely sure. I mean, it's kind of at
<v Speaker 2>a limit of its range. It's not the extreme limit
<v Speaker 2>of the range, and usually you see differences at extremes
<v Speaker 2>of ranges, and so maybe this is just an example
<v Speaker 2>of that where you still find some available but the
<v Speaker 2>blight is there. I mean, I said I found dozens
<v Speaker 2>of American chestnuts, and I did, and there's also dozens
<v Speaker 2>that have the blight in that particular forest as well.
<v Speaker 2>So maybe it's only a matter of time before some
<v Speaker 2>of the bigger ones to come to it. I wouldn't
<v Speaker 2>be surprised if that happens, But just the fact that
<v Speaker 2>it's still holding on after a century of decimation, I
<v Speaker 2>think that's good news. I mean, it's certainly not as
<v Speaker 2>common as it used to be, and it's not reaching
<v Speaker 2>the sizes that it did. But I don't know if
<v Speaker 2>you're familiar with what happened to eastern hemlock thousands of
<v Speaker 2>years ago. I mean, it seems like eastern hemlock populations
<v Speaker 2>almost collapsed completely. When ecologists study the pollen record, they
<v Speaker 2>see that eastern hemlock and they make the deduction that
<v Speaker 2>eastern hemlock was nearly wiped off the entire North American continent,
<v Speaker 2>just an extreme drop in the pallen record of eastern hemlock.
<v Speaker 2>And this lasted for over two thousand years. Two thousand
<v Speaker 2>years that eastern hemlock was nearly wiped out of the
<v Speaker 2>North American continent, and then it rebounded, it came back.
<v Speaker 2>And so if something could happen like that in the
<v Speaker 2>past that we know of at least once, imagine how
<v Speaker 2>many times that must have happened. And Eastern hemlock came
<v Speaker 2>back as a really dominant significant tree. Now today it
<v Speaker 2>has its threats of course, with hemlock wully indelged and
<v Speaker 2>the logging industry in eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds. But
<v Speaker 2>that's just one example of a tree that was almost
<v Speaker 2>wiped out completely for nearly two thousand years it still came.
<v Speaker 1>Back and not know why.
<v Speaker 2>I don't imagine if that might happen with the chestment,
<v Speaker 2>what was it?
<v Speaker 1>Were there any hypotheses why it took it?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah?
<v Speaker 1>Beating back then?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you have to watch the video now, I'm just kidding.
<v Speaker 1>I'll tell you, Okay.
<v Speaker 2>So I mean, of course it's not proven, because I
<v Speaker 2>don't it's very difficult to prove things that happened that
<v Speaker 2>long ago. But they think it was drought, an extensive
<v Speaker 2>period of drought. They looked at insect insect damage. That
<v Speaker 2>was a plausible hypothesis, but they landed on drought a
<v Speaker 2>significant warming drying period, and eastern hemlock doesn't really like that.
<v Speaker 2>Eastern hemlock likes cooler moisture conditions. So the significant warming
<v Speaker 2>drying period, which favored oak trees, which favored hickories, which
<v Speaker 2>favored chestnuts, wasn't very good for eastern hemlock. But it's
<v Speaker 2>not to say that this also didn't stress the trees
<v Speaker 2>and lead to an insect outbreak. So maybe because it
<v Speaker 2>was drought stressed, it was also prone to fungal infestation,
<v Speaker 2>which is very difficult to prove today because fungi don't
<v Speaker 2>preserve well.
<v Speaker 1>In the fossil record.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but yeah, they think it was drought as opposed
<v Speaker 2>to some kind of pathog and outbreak.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but it could have been tied to it invasive.
<v Speaker 2>All is to say I'm hopeful about American justice.
<v Speaker 1>I always point out to people too, like on the
<v Speaker 1>topic of invasion biology, and I don't know where you
<v Speaker 1>stand on this, but you know, for me, invasion biology,
<v Speaker 1>I see it. It's very real. It's all over the place,
<v Speaker 1>and it's just a simple concept of you know, the
<v Speaker 1>oceans having kept you know, not just plant species, but
<v Speaker 1>entire ecosystems and continents isolated from each other, and so
<v Speaker 1>you know, they you take one piece from one ecosystem
<v Speaker 1>and continent and move it to another one because the
<v Speaker 1>worst invasives always tend to be from other continents. It
<v Speaker 1>makes sense, you know, and they're often very important species
<v Speaker 1>where they're native, but they you know, run rampant when
<v Speaker 1>they don't have any ecological checks and balances. But I
<v Speaker 1>always point out to people, you know, almost every major
<v Speaker 1>pathogen or insect past of North American trees, it's causing
<v Speaker 1>massive declines right now in North American forests is from
<v Speaker 1>another continent, you know, and recently arrived from human transport.
<v Speaker 1>And that's that's like the chestnut is like the classic
<v Speaker 1>case of that happening. But what's interesting is you can
<v Speaker 1>see it seems like they're a lot more resilient out west,
<v Speaker 1>or they're because you get into more arid places with
<v Speaker 1>arid summers, which to you know, wester North America has,
<v Speaker 1>they can grow, they can grow relatively blight free because
<v Speaker 1>the blight just can't get established there and it needs
<v Speaker 1>those you know, humid, humid, humid, warm temperatures. So and
<v Speaker 1>I've seen some really large ones out west at least
<v Speaker 1>that's what that's what I assume, because they seem to
<v Speaker 1>just really take off out west. But then of course
<v Speaker 1>you're limited by having to irrigate them because a lot
<v Speaker 1>of places in West just don't get enough summer range,
<v Speaker 1>so they've either got to be riparian or I remember
<v Speaker 1>seeing like a giant one on the Klamath River in
<v Speaker 1>northern California that was planted by some gold miner from
<v Speaker 1>Virginia in like the eighteen fifties. Was fucking huge, very stout,
<v Speaker 1>not that tall, but massive trunk. So I wish someone
<v Speaker 1>would set up like an ex sit to, you know,
<v Speaker 1>grove of them out west so they just to keep
<v Speaker 1>producing seeds. But do you know for that one in
<v Speaker 1>the grove that the video is on and again it's
<v Speaker 1>called finding dozens of American chestnut trees on the Learn
<v Speaker 1>Your Land YouTube? Does ACF know about that? Does American
<v Speaker 1>Chestnut Federation? I assume they probably do?
<v Speaker 2>I think I think so. Yeah. I mean it's if
<v Speaker 2>you look online that area. I mean, I think I
<v Speaker 2>can give it. I won't give it away specifically, but
<v Speaker 2>I think one of the ridges around is called Chestnut Ridge.
<v Speaker 2>But there are a couple chestnut ridges in Pennsylvania. But anyway,
<v Speaker 2>it is kind of public knowledge that that area exists
<v Speaker 2>because some people lead walks to see the American chestnuts there.
<v Speaker 2>So I think the American Chestnut Foundation doesn't know about it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I wonder if that'd be good to test for
<v Speaker 1>blight resistance genes. You know, it's it's wild. I did
<v Speaker 1>two podcasts on that, one with someone from Sunni State,
<v Speaker 1>University of New York who helped develop that blight resistant,
<v Speaker 1>you know, genetically modified one where they took the gene
<v Speaker 1>from wheat that produces an enzyme that breaks down oxalic acid.
<v Speaker 1>And then I did another interview with someone from ACF
<v Speaker 1>that said, oh, there were problems with that, you know,
<v Speaker 1>they were that, you know, problems with what they were
<v Speaker 1>doing and it's not as simple as just this one gene.
<v Speaker 1>But it was really interesting. It really shed light on
<v Speaker 1>the whole subject. It's fucking so tragic what happened out there,
<v Speaker 1>because you know, it was just such a keystone species.
<v Speaker 1>And yeah, the fucking fruits are delicious, the seeds are delicious.
<v Speaker 1>Does just you get European and Chinese chestnuts like planted
<v Speaker 1>in agriculture you're out there or like at homesteads in
<v Speaker 1>your area.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. And what's funny is that anytime I post something
<v Speaker 2>about American chestnut, and usually I'm standing next to not
<v Speaker 2>a massive tree, and I still call them decent sized
<v Speaker 2>trees because for an American chestnut today, they are in
<v Speaker 2>decent size. But I'll always I always, always, always get
<v Speaker 2>emails or comments saying that was a bigger one in
<v Speaker 2>my yard. We've got a massive one in my yard,
<v Speaker 2>and I like, okay, let me see it. And it's
<v Speaker 2>always a Chinese chestnut or European chestnut or another chestnut.
<v Speaker 2>It's never the American chestnut. But yeah, we do have
<v Speaker 2>them around here. I have seen them in woods like
<v Speaker 2>wooded ecosystems, but for the most part, they're just planeted
<v Speaker 2>in people's yards. They might be in cemeteries, they might
<v Speaker 2>be in planet orchards. If they're in woods, it's because
<v Speaker 2>somebody tried to establish them and then died or abandoned
<v Speaker 2>the land, and then the forest grew up around it.
<v Speaker 2>So you still see them, and they kind of take
<v Speaker 2>on more of the tall, trunk straight look that an
<v Speaker 2>American chestnut would. But one way to tell the difference
<v Speaker 2>is that usually those non native chestnuts have more of
<v Speaker 2>what's called an orchard look to them, where they kind
<v Speaker 2>of grow more short and stout like an apple tree
<v Speaker 2>mite compared to just super tall and straight like an
<v Speaker 2>oak miight. But of course if it's growing out in
<v Speaker 2>the open, that changes for American chestnut.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what about just leaf texture is there. The American
<v Speaker 1>chestnuts are like a little bit more scabbard, like sandpapery
<v Speaker 1>or what.
<v Speaker 2>So. American chestnuts very smooth and it's thin, thin leaf
<v Speaker 2>and the teeth around the margins they kind of curve
<v Speaker 2>upward towards the tip the apex of the leaf, whereas
<v Speaker 2>the non native chestnuts are typically thicker, they're more leathery,
<v Speaker 2>they're shinier, and they sometimes they have like a scurfy
<v Speaker 2>feel to them as well. So that's one way, but
<v Speaker 2>usually I'm looking at the ecosystem like it's one of
<v Speaker 2>the best ways to do it. If you're seeing other
<v Speaker 2>native trees around and you're not seeing a lot of disturbance,
<v Speaker 2>and you're seeing a tree that's probably not massive and
<v Speaker 2>it's not doesn't have that orchard look to it, but
<v Speaker 2>it's probably American chestnut. It's usually when you get into
<v Speaker 2>areas where you see planted crab apples or apple trees yea,
<v Speaker 2>or non native oaks thrown in there like a saw
<v Speaker 2>tooth oak, and then you see a chestnut there, it's like,
<v Speaker 2>it's probably not American chestnut.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, hints that it was a former homestead and that
<v Speaker 1>it was probably planted and the forest just grew up.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, exactly. But they're fun to find. I mean
<v Speaker 2>I encourage people to look for them. They're not that
<v Speaker 2>hard to find either. It's as you have to know
<v Speaker 2>what you're looking for.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember, like the ones I saw
<v Speaker 1>in Georgia. They were only three feet tall and they
<v Speaker 1>probably working to get any bigger because it was they
<v Speaker 1>were in the shade. It was there just wasn't enough
<v Speaker 1>light up there. But you know, maybe some disturbance event
<v Speaker 1>or a forest fire or you know, something opens up
<v Speaker 1>the clearing bed storm I could see. You know, if
<v Speaker 1>suddenly they're able to get light, they can grow to
<v Speaker 1>whatever height they normally grow to when the blight can
<v Speaker 1>finally hit on you know, because the blight is still
<v Speaker 1>I mean it hits other trees, right, That's why it
<v Speaker 1>persists in the environment, So even without chestnuts, it still
<v Speaker 1>is there.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, what is that? That's my understanding.
<v Speaker 1>It's oaks probably or closely related trees it grows on.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean it's been a wall since I've looked
<v Speaker 2>into that, but I have heard that oaks also can
<v Speaker 2>like host that fungus. I don't think it's I could
<v Speaker 2>be wrong, but I don't think it seriously affects the oaks.
<v Speaker 2>But maybe I'm wrong in that. Yeah, but yeah, there
<v Speaker 2>are the trees that can also host the fungus.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, you got how you got some time to talk
<v Speaker 1>about the fungui really quick? Well not really quick. I
<v Speaker 1>want to do like twenty minutes, but you know what
<v Speaker 1>I mean, let me know if you got to go
<v Speaker 1>and I can, I can we cut?
<v Speaker 2>I have exactly I have exactly twenty minutes. Twenty minutes.
<v Speaker 1>Good, okay, great, perfect, all right, So let's talk about
<v Speaker 1>you know, medicinal mushrooms. That's like a great that's a
<v Speaker 1>great way to get people interested in going outside. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the foraging aspect, especially with mushrooms is fucking wonderful, especially
<v Speaker 1>because mushrooms are you know, analogous to fruits of a plant.
<v Speaker 1>They need to be picked there how they need to
<v Speaker 1>be picked. The spores need to be dispersed. That's how
<v Speaker 1>the fungus reproduces and disperses. What are some of the
<v Speaker 1>what are like the top three medicinal mushrooms in eastern
<v Speaker 1>North America and the ones that you're I guess and
<v Speaker 1>you can list more than three, but the ones that
<v Speaker 1>you're really stoked about that like you're always amped to
<v Speaker 1>find that. You know the benefits, you know, you're a
<v Speaker 1>firm believer in name like three or four.
<v Speaker 2>So my relationship with medicinal mushrooms has changed, I would say,
<v Speaker 2>a lot, over the past fifteen years or so. And
<v Speaker 2>I agree with what you said. It's a great way
<v Speaker 2>to get into four and just to spend more time
<v Speaker 2>in a wild place. And I think it's that way,
<v Speaker 2>And I mean there's such like a there's so much
<v Speaker 2>enthusiasm around mushrooms right now, and it's been that way
<v Speaker 2>maybe for the past five six seven years, much more
<v Speaker 2>so than when I got into it maybe fifteen years ago.
<v Speaker 2>And I think part of the reason is more and
<v Speaker 2>more people are understanding the benefits of spending time outside
<v Speaker 2>and connecting to wild places and nature. But with hunting animals,
<v Speaker 2>there's a lot of regulations involved, and you got to
<v Speaker 2>learn how to use weapons like firearms. With foraging mushrooms
<v Speaker 2>and plants, there's less regulations around it, and so people
<v Speaker 2>literally can just go into the woods like today and
<v Speaker 2>start looking for mushrooms and thinking that you can't do
<v Speaker 2>that with deer. You can't even do that with fish
<v Speaker 2>like you need licenses. These things are heavily regulated. Now.
<v Speaker 2>I understand that mushrooms are regulated in certain areas and
<v Speaker 2>in Pennsylvania and in many states they're regulated to a
<v Speaker 2>degree when it comes to commercial foraging. But all this
<v Speaker 2>to say, it's a very easy thing to get into
<v Speaker 2>because the bar is pretty low, like the barrier to entry,
<v Speaker 2>it's not that great, and there are clubs associated with
<v Speaker 2>these that will help you find these organisms. All is
<v Speaker 2>to say, I think this is one of the reasons
<v Speaker 2>why mushrooms are so popular today. And I got into
<v Speaker 2>the mushrooms specifically for the medicinal benefits, but over the
<v Speaker 2>years less into making the tinctures and the teas, and
<v Speaker 2>maybe I should get back into that. But I like
<v Speaker 2>eating them. I like eating mushrooms. Not every day, not
<v Speaker 2>even every month. I mean when they're available and I
<v Speaker 2>find a lot, yeah, I mean I'll forge some and
<v Speaker 2>eat them. And so the medicinal mushrooms that also are
<v Speaker 2>edible mushrooms, those are the ones that excite me the
<v Speaker 2>most because I think it's it requires less processing initially
<v Speaker 2>as well, and it doesn't take as much time. I
<v Speaker 2>mean with a tank, sure it could take many months
<v Speaker 2>in order for you to see the results of that
<v Speaker 2>so that you could take it, because you just have
<v Speaker 2>to extract it for a significant length of time in
<v Speaker 2>some cases not all of course, both eating. I mean
<v Speaker 2>you can come home and just throw that thing in
<v Speaker 2>a pan and cook it and eat it up, and
<v Speaker 2>you'll probably get some of the benefits as well. But
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I like hand of the woods at the
<v Speaker 2>my taki mushroom, yeah, which is one that grows an
<v Speaker 2>association with oak trees. Yeah, yeah, I mean it just
<v Speaker 2>it tastes good, it's needy. You get a lot out
<v Speaker 2>of it. Like if you find one of those, like,
<v Speaker 2>that's a lot of food. If you find one morale mushroom,
<v Speaker 2>that's not a lot of food. That's why I like
<v Speaker 2>finding my taki mushroom. It's a good time to be
<v Speaker 2>outside as well.
<v Speaker 1>They're huge. They're mostly in the faller. Can they be whenever?
<v Speaker 2>I would say the seasons typically, and these are the extremes,
<v Speaker 2>but mid August through about mid November, that's like the
<v Speaker 2>two ends of when I've ever found them, But usually
<v Speaker 2>it's September through October. Yeah, and usually don't see it
<v Speaker 2>any other time of the year. At least I've never
<v Speaker 2>seen it any other time of the year. But there's
<v Speaker 2>some good medicinal research on that one as well. There's
<v Speaker 2>a compound and is defraction that's in there. It's a
<v Speaker 2>polysach and it seems to have immunosupport of benefits, which
<v Speaker 2>sounds so generic to say, but with immune to support,
<v Speaker 2>you're talking about something that can regulate the immune system
<v Speaker 2>in a dual directional way, either stimulating the immune system
<v Speaker 2>or suppressing inflammation associated with an overactive immune system. Now,
<v Speaker 2>how much of that compound do you get when you
<v Speaker 2>eat it? I'm not exactly sure. If you make a
<v Speaker 2>soup out of those mushrooms, maybe you're probably getting a
<v Speaker 2>little more compared to than if you eat it. But
<v Speaker 2>at this point in my life, I've been focusing a
<v Speaker 2>lot more on just diet, not so much medicinal herbs
<v Speaker 2>and medicinal mushrooms, because I've gotten to a place where
<v Speaker 2>I feel pretty good with my lifestyle choices. Yea, and
<v Speaker 2>I don't think, at least at this point in my life,
<v Speaker 2>I really need to rely on a lot of that stuff.
<v Speaker 2>What is to say that's where I'll always be? What's
<v Speaker 2>my diet?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, like by the way, like like just you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's always good to hear like friends talk about
<v Speaker 1>what they eat. Mostly it's well, there some friends I
<v Speaker 1>don't want to know what they eat because they have
<v Speaker 1>horrible fucking diets. But but yeah, I mean it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>like like what do you try to limit? What do
<v Speaker 1>you eat a lot of et cetera.
<v Speaker 2>So at this point in my life, it's a lot
<v Speaker 2>of protein, some carbs as well, some fat. But you know,
<v Speaker 2>I did the vegan thing. I did the vegetarian thing
<v Speaker 2>for a while. I tried raw food for a while,
<v Speaker 2>and I lost a lot of weight doing that stuff.
<v Speaker 2>I probably damaged myself doing a lot of stuff as well.
<v Speaker 2>But I found that eating good quality meats that's pretty
<v Speaker 2>good for me. So I eat a lot of meat.
<v Speaker 2>I eat a lot of eggs. Yeah, I mean stuff
<v Speaker 2>like that. I do eat carbs as well. I try
<v Speaker 2>not to eat a lot of junk food. I probably
<v Speaker 2>don't eat a lot of it at all anyway. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I drink a lot of water, I drink a lot
<v Speaker 2>of tea. I have coffee every day. I move my
<v Speaker 2>body every day. I get good quality sleep. But it's
<v Speaker 2>a lot of like the most boring things that you
<v Speaker 2>hear are actually the most beneficial, which is why like
<v Speaker 2>a lot of health YouTube channels and social media, whenever
<v Speaker 2>they counts like the new latest thing, it's like, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's probably not as good as just like getting good sleep. Yeah, man,
<v Speaker 2>drinking more water. It's limiting your intake of ultra processed food.
<v Speaker 1>It's in a consumer society. It's always like some big
<v Speaker 1>new thing. You take this thing, it's going to improve everything,
<v Speaker 1>but there's never any focus on just long term like
<v Speaker 1>getting adequate exercise, not eating shit, getting good sleep, you know,
<v Speaker 1>not eating a lot of processed sugary bullshit. There's an
<v Speaker 1>Asian grocery store just to open up near my house,
<v Speaker 1>which I'm fucking oh my god. It's you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>like a I was in heaven. When I go to
<v Speaker 1>they've got my talkie like you can get you can
<v Speaker 1>get cultivated head of the woods. It's not it's nowhere
<v Speaker 1>near as big or as tasty as the ones you
<v Speaker 1>can you know when you find one. But uh, they've
<v Speaker 1>got that there. They got like buckwheat noodles, all this
<v Speaker 1>shit that I love. It's fucking great. But but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I think just like eating healthy and cooking and avoiding
<v Speaker 1>a lot of you know, bullshit that's just produced for taste,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like a lot of fast food is especially
<v Speaker 1>it's good. But anyway, okay, So going back to mushrooms though,
<v Speaker 1>what about ray sheet you get? What's the Gandoderma species
<v Speaker 1>that you get out there? And do you you make
<v Speaker 1>tea out of it? I mean, what's what's your whole
<v Speaker 1>take on on its benefits and how do you how
<v Speaker 1>do you how do you administer it?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so we have we have a couple of Ganoderma species.
<v Speaker 2>I think probably the most popular medicinal one is the
<v Speaker 2>one that grows almost exclusively with hemlocks, which is Ganoderma suge. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>this is probably the most popular one in this part
<v Speaker 2>of the world. And I used to make a lot
<v Speaker 2>of tinctures out of it, not really teas, because it's
<v Speaker 2>incredibly bitter, and some people are like, just add honey,
<v Speaker 2>it'll taste good, Like, yeah, I believe that. I'll just
<v Speaker 2>stick with the tinctures. Some people eat it when it's
<v Speaker 2>really young, like they'll just cut off the outer margins
<v Speaker 2>and eat it and cook it up. I've never done that.
<v Speaker 2>It's been actually probably a couple of years since I've
<v Speaker 2>consumed that one, surprisingly, but there were many, many years
<v Speaker 2>where I would forge it and consume it. These days,
<v Speaker 2>I'm kind of cautious about it in some areas because
<v Speaker 2>a lot of our forests are being treated for hamilag
<v Speaker 2>wooly adelged and they're injecting a lot of insecticides into
<v Speaker 2>the forest, and sometimes you don't know where they're doing it.
<v Speaker 2>Sometimes you know exactly where they're doing it. But I
<v Speaker 2>always wonder about people who forge these mushrooms and sell
<v Speaker 2>them if they're disclosing where they're getting them from, and
<v Speaker 2>if they should tell people, yeah, I got in this forest.
<v Speaker 2>It's being treated, and I'm ensuring that it's not coming
<v Speaker 2>from a tree that was treated, because not all these
<v Speaker 2>trees live even if they are treated, and that insecticide
<v Speaker 2>just doesn't get absorbed by one particular tree, even though
<v Speaker 2>it's injected at the trunk of a tree. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>it's in the soil, so it's in that immediate vicinity,
<v Speaker 2>and I don't know. I mean, if it's strong enough
<v Speaker 2>to kill awful lot of insects, it might do something
<v Speaker 2>to my body. So I'm not interested in consuming that.
<v Speaker 1>In second one, ingesting it. Yeah, it's just a stemic.
<v Speaker 1>I take it it's a systemic insecticide that they probably
<v Speaker 1>some nicotine analog or something.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I'm not exactly sure, but that sounds good. It's
<v Speaker 2>not to say that every forest is treated like that,
<v Speaker 2>and I'm sure there are many forests that are clean,
<v Speaker 2>but it's just something that I'm mindful of more today
<v Speaker 2>than I was many years ago, because more of these
<v Speaker 2>trees are being infected and more people are injecting those
<v Speaker 2>insecticides into the tree, and people are forging these mushrooms.
<v Speaker 1>Do they grow? They only grow on hemlocks out there.
<v Speaker 1>Are there any other conifer species that the Ganaderma species
<v Speaker 1>hits or what.
<v Speaker 2>I've never seen Ganaderma suga on another conifer, but I've
<v Speaker 2>seen it on America Beach, I've seen it on yellow birch,
<v Speaker 2>and I think I heard it can grow on red
<v Speaker 2>maple as well.
<v Speaker 1>Oh cool, I'm surprised there's nobody. I wonder if there
<v Speaker 1>is anybody cultivating it, like just growing in mass, like
<v Speaker 1>mushroom farm, the forest understore or something, but with natives,
<v Speaker 1>with the native North American species, not the Asian one,
<v Speaker 1>it'd probably be a good you know, they could ensure
<v Speaker 1>it was organic and everything, they'd probably be a good
<v Speaker 1>market for it. But I love I love racie, man,
<v Speaker 1>it's fucking great. I would get them from like the yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the Asian grocery store and make this fall tasting tea.
<v Speaker 1>But it's you could tell it's got a lot of
<v Speaker 1>good shit in there. I mean, the bad taste. This
<v Speaker 1>is probably all the all the beneficial compounds. Whether it's
<v Speaker 1>whether it's placebo or not. I'm fine with that. I
<v Speaker 1>like making raciy tea. When you make tinctures, how do
<v Speaker 1>you do it?
<v Speaker 2>Typically with vodka? I think it's an eighty proof that
<v Speaker 2>I typically use, and yeah, I let it steep in
<v Speaker 2>the alcohol for about minimum six weeks, sometimes longer, and
<v Speaker 2>then I would do a dual extraction, which then you
<v Speaker 2>take that material or you take fresh material. I think
<v Speaker 2>it's controversial, like if there's still any medicinal compounds left
<v Speaker 2>in that original material, but then soak that in water
<v Speaker 2>for a couple hours, so you're making the hot water
<v Speaker 2>extraction and then you combine the two and that's what
<v Speaker 2>people typically call it dual extraction.
<v Speaker 1>Oh okay, So you do a six weeks in alcohol
<v Speaker 1>and then and then how long in water?
<v Speaker 2>If you're using hot water, I don't think you need
<v Speaker 2>a lot of time. So you can do that in
<v Speaker 2>a couple hours, and you basically let that reduce in
<v Speaker 2>concentration almost to where it's almost like a syrupy mix.
<v Speaker 2>Because if you add too much water back into the
<v Speaker 2>alcohol tincture, you dilute it too much, Yeah, and you'll
<v Speaker 2>lose the preservative qualities of it. So you want to
<v Speaker 2>get it down pretty low so that you don't dilute
<v Speaker 2>your final.
<v Speaker 1>Product, and you keep it on like do you then
<v Speaker 1>put it on like a low heat so that the
<v Speaker 1>water evaporates to a certain concentration.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah exactly. Yeah, just a low simmer essentially, or
<v Speaker 2>a little below, and just let that go for a
<v Speaker 2>couple hours. But don't forget about it, because if you
<v Speaker 2>forget about it, then you lose it.
<v Speaker 1>All, yeah, and then you have to start again. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>then you've just got this crusty, burnt paste. So but
<v Speaker 1>I guess the thinking there is that the alcohol bonds
<v Speaker 1>with certain compounds and then the water other things will
<v Speaker 1>just come out in the water that may not have
<v Speaker 1>bonded that the alcohol wasn't.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, And I mean there's a lot
<v Speaker 2>of people selling the stuff today, and it's been a
<v Speaker 2>while since I've actually looked into the market on the
<v Speaker 2>stuff because people ask me, like, which products do I recommend?
<v Speaker 2>And I don't know because I don't really pay attention
<v Speaker 2>too much these days. There's so many people doing it,
<v Speaker 2>and I'm sure there's a lot of great products. It's
<v Speaker 2>just it's been a while since I've looked into it.
<v Speaker 2>But I would just make sure the product you're getting
<v Speaker 2>isn't being harvested from an area it's being treated with
<v Speaker 2>any kind of pathticide or insecticide.
<v Speaker 1>They're always so expensive too. Man, it seems pretty it
<v Speaker 1>seems pretty fun to just go down the wormhole of
<v Speaker 1>trying to learn to do it yourself. What about lions
<v Speaker 1>main do? How common is that in Pennsylvania in the
<v Speaker 1>East coast? The herasium, Yeah, lines means a good one.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, that's another one that I like because not
<v Speaker 2>only is it medicinal, but you can eat it so
<v Speaker 2>it's edible as well, and it's a beautiful mushroom. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>as far as how common it is, honestly, I don't
<v Speaker 2>see it that often at all, so I rarely see
<v Speaker 2>enough to make a tincture out of it. I think
<v Speaker 2>I did it once because I think it tastes really good,
<v Speaker 2>So in any cases, I would rather just eat it
<v Speaker 2>than preserve it in a tincture. But yeah, there's a
<v Speaker 2>lot of good research on that one, not research that
<v Speaker 2>I've looked into in a while, so I can't really
<v Speaker 2>quote too many studies on Lion's made right now, but
<v Speaker 2>I mean for mental clarity, for cognitive benefits, that's typically
<v Speaker 2>why people would look into lions made, and it does
<v Speaker 2>seem pretty promising. I mean, there are studies on human beings,
<v Speaker 2>like randomized controlled trials, so that's always something good to
<v Speaker 2>look for when you're looking at the medicinal.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there's good data on that one's pretty legit. I
<v Speaker 1>mean I taught like my friend Alan, you know Alan
<v Speaker 1>arcke Fella, he was in You did a video with him.
<v Speaker 1>He was. He's always like that, he goes back. If
<v Speaker 1>I'll ask him one time about it, he's like, oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>this is medicinal, and then like six months later I'll
<v Speaker 1>ask him the same thing and he's like he says
<v Speaker 1>something completely different. He's like it's a placebo blah blah, blah.
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, okay, we fuck whatever. It's yes, that's what
<v Speaker 1>I get for asking that my college just about you know,
<v Speaker 1>medicinal mushrooms whatever. But but I yeah, I mean, I'm
<v Speaker 1>I'm in't all that shit. I think it's pretty fucking Uh,
<v Speaker 1>it's pretty interesting and I can definitely you know, I
<v Speaker 1>had friends that had like a medicinal mushroom company. One
<v Speaker 1>of them just gave me like twenty bags of racie
<v Speaker 1>spawn and he kind of neglected and he's like, just
<v Speaker 1>take it man, whatever instead. Yeah, anyway, but well, cool man,
<v Speaker 1>I really appreciate your time. We did two We just
<v Speaker 1>did two hours. You were very patient, and uh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's he got a great fucking channel. And where can
<v Speaker 1>people learn about it? You've got to learn your land
<v Speaker 1>dot com and then of course to learn your land
<v Speaker 1>YouTube channel and uh what else.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean that's pretty much. I mean, I'm on
<v Speaker 2>Instagram and Facebook. That's about it. But learn your land
<v Speaker 2>dot com. And I have an email list if people
<v Speaker 2>want to stay in touch, and that's probably the best way.
<v Speaker 1>You got online courses email list. And then what about
<v Speaker 1>the tours that you're doing or just like Foray's like
<v Speaker 1>walks that kind of thing.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean you could find that on the website.
<v Speaker 2>I think all of them for the rest of the
<v Speaker 2>year fully booked, unless I decided to schedule another one
<v Speaker 2>in November. But at this point, I mean, you can
<v Speaker 2>get on a wait list, or you could just keep
<v Speaker 2>that in mind for next year because I'll probably leave
<v Speaker 2>more next year, or you just reach out to me
<v Speaker 2>and if you think you want to tend one of these,
<v Speaker 2>and if enough people reach out, maybe I'll just host
<v Speaker 2>more at the end of this year.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, how long has learned your land? But you've been
<v Speaker 1>around for what like five or seven years? How long? Exactly?
<v Speaker 2>This is actually the tenth year. Got wow, this is
<v Speaker 2>the tenth year anniversary. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>So extensive library. So there's an extensive library covering a
<v Speaker 1>diversity of really interesting topics. Uh, so everybody go check
<v Speaker 1>it out, please, Adam Hareton, thank you so much. And
<v Speaker 1>if I ever, when next time I come through Pittsburgh,
<v Speaker 1>I'm buying you a burrito. We're gonna go out.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, okay, just make sure make sure there's a lot
<v Speaker 2>of protein in it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I promise, brother. All right, thank you, thank you
<v Speaker 1>so much.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>I love what you're doing.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, thanks, it's great to thank you.
<v Speaker 1>Have a good one.
<v Speaker 2>Bye bye.