Atlas Nativa de Chile - Miquel Moya

<v Speaker 1>Okay, there we go. Now we're recording kid Feel the Flame.
<v Speaker 1>It's a nice opening line. It's a nice opening line
<v Speaker 1>for them listeners. Okay, Jesus, all right, well I'm second
<v Speaker 1>again from my four year old. Welcome to the Crime
<v Speaker 1>Pace podcast. And today we have Michael Moya, who runs
<v Speaker 1>atlass Nativa, which is a you like that fucking gringo accent,
<v Speaker 1>Atlas Nativa, which is, uh, we tell everybody, what is
<v Speaker 1>that lest nativa? What is it? Exactly?
<v Speaker 2>At first I did it in twenty eighteen eighteen, it
<v Speaker 2>was like an artist residency program when we did like
<v Speaker 2>an exchange. I did like guides through the forest and
<v Speaker 2>they did artwork. But nowadays I'm doing nature guides, Like
<v Speaker 2>I'm digitalizing all the leaves, all the woody plants, and
<v Speaker 2>I'm doing like cool guides with this thing.
<v Speaker 1>So you're making we're making like Gia de campos for
<v Speaker 1>all the yeah, for all the Chilean plants. And what
<v Speaker 1>the region you're in too, is you're south of Santiago
<v Speaker 1>by how how how far south? There was it like
<v Speaker 1>three or four hours?
<v Speaker 2>Yes? Like five hours down going down there more or less?
<v Speaker 1>So and explain what the biome is because it's it's
<v Speaker 1>very steep, but it's forested. It's not like northern Chile,
<v Speaker 1>which is very dry. You've got the other Kama lots
<v Speaker 1>of barren volcano, I.
<v Speaker 2>Mean one of the leasts. I mean, it's it's it's
<v Speaker 2>weird because if one of is one of it's one
<v Speaker 2>of the most biodiverse biomes Intila, because it's like the
<v Speaker 2>mix between the Mediterranean and the temperate rainy forests. So
<v Speaker 2>you have the biggest tree diversity. It's still Mediterranean climate,
<v Speaker 2>but you have you have a lot of the southern plants.
<v Speaker 2>So it's for that reason is kind of confusing. You know,
<v Speaker 2>you have the sclerophild forest, but you also have the
<v Speaker 2>kind of forest you have the most biodiversity in north
<v Speaker 2>of Fagus. So that's one of the reasons why I
<v Speaker 2>went to live there, you know, because it's a like
<v Speaker 2>a not very studied area and it's like it has
<v Speaker 2>a lot of different landscapes.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's it feels like for me, it felt like
<v Speaker 1>like Plumus County, California, maybe like northern Sierra Nevada foothills.
<v Speaker 1>And also it's so tell first telebody with the boss
<v Speaker 1>Que Sclerophilo is that I pronounce that right, is the.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's like the typic forests of the Mediterranean region
<v Speaker 2>here in Chile, and I think they call it like
<v Speaker 2>that also in Europe, like in Spain. Yeah, because they
<v Speaker 2>have the same climate. So it's a type of forest
<v Speaker 2>that have trees that are accustomed to have very little
<v Speaker 2>water in the summer, actually no water in the summer, like.
<v Speaker 3>A long stummer. So the leaves are like tough.
<v Speaker 2>You know, they have like some I don't know how
<v Speaker 2>to go into English, but it's like a Scotch tape
<v Speaker 2>and it.
<v Speaker 1>Feels like plastic. Yeah, it's like, yeah, hard evergreen, feels
<v Speaker 1>like plastic, maybe a little pliable, maybe some velvet, maybe
<v Speaker 1>some little hairs on them.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So they don't lose the leaves. They are evergreen,
<v Speaker 2>they don't grow so tall, and they are they are
<v Speaker 2>like very tough trees. They can manage these like no
<v Speaker 2>water where they most need them. So that's like the
<v Speaker 2>basic sclorophyll. I'm actually in Greek it means like tough leaves.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. What are some of the species you got? Gwena,
<v Speaker 1>which is proty ac. It's in the Macadamia tribe.
<v Speaker 2>Lots and not of Giena give weena.
<v Speaker 3>It's like it's in the south.
<v Speaker 2>It's it's not like proper sclerophild you know that, like
<v Speaker 2>like the the iconic because you have it, you don't
<v Speaker 2>have it in Santiago. Like in Santiago you have like
<v Speaker 2>the most standard scleral fild forest and the species like
<v Speaker 2>the typical ones are kiahaaria that you love, that.
<v Speaker 1>Permus balder pumus boulders. Yeah, yeah, I just ordered some
<v Speaker 1>bold of tea. Yeah, the tea is right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that is I mean people take it not because
<v Speaker 2>it's good flavor, because it's just so good for your tommy,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, Monemi is the family I think, right, Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Actually, the Kiakaaria is also very high in Saponins,
<v Speaker 2>especially the bark. So in the in the old days,
<v Speaker 2>they they took the bark of a lot of these trees,
<v Speaker 2>but they're still.
<v Speaker 3>Harvesting a lot of yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Branches. They have like a big plant in the Maulay
<v Speaker 2>region and they exported it's like I don't know, like
<v Speaker 2>bubblely you know, so they used it in soda and
<v Speaker 2>a lot of stuff like that. But the Pelmus baldos
<v Speaker 2>is used in like all of Latin America for the
<v Speaker 2>tomb is good for the Tommy yeah, you know, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>so delicious.
<v Speaker 1>And that's the one that's got scabbard leaves, right, just
<v Speaker 1>like ex toxicon. Yeah yeah. It feels like sandpaper.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah yeah, exactly like sandpaper.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Okay, that's one of the And it's very if
<v Speaker 2>you bend it, it cracks, you know, it's.
<v Speaker 1>Very hif Yeah, yeah, it's you know. What was weird
<v Speaker 1>was we were we were in Santiago on the last day,
<v Speaker 1>and uh, Matt, I just wanted to go to the
<v Speaker 1>fucking airport because it's it's like, you know, it's just
<v Speaker 1>cars and people and fucking shitty driving, and it's much
<v Speaker 1>more tolerable than any American city. But uh, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>and the lack of billboards was amazing. I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>still can't believe I went two weeks without the subliminal, subconscious,
<v Speaker 1>horrible messaging of billboards, like it just for my soul.
<v Speaker 1>It made me so much less hateful than not have
<v Speaker 1>to see a shy. You know.
<v Speaker 2>That's funny because I think maybe over there you have
<v Speaker 2>so many billbirds that you didn't sell the billboards that
<v Speaker 2>have here, because we do have bilbirds.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it may be horrific. It's every fucking two hundred
<v Speaker 1>feet and like along a highway and there'll be some
<v Speaker 1>plastic botox injected face with a shit eating grin trying
<v Speaker 1>to sell you something you don't want. Like just these
<v Speaker 1>fucking people that look like maggots, these horrible, horrible money
<v Speaker 1>worshiping thieves, these fucking sleep Oh. It fills me with hate.
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, God, I just I fucking don't want to
<v Speaker 1>even know that you exist. You're like, you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>like I go down to hate wormhole. But but we
<v Speaker 1>went out of we went east that of Santiago into
<v Speaker 1>the hills, and I was like, man, this isn't I
<v Speaker 1>thought this was like Mediterranean climate, man, but this is
<v Speaker 1>more of like desert. Santiago is more like it feels
<v Speaker 1>like la like the climate and maybe even more so
<v Speaker 1>like it's you know, there's there's it's desert plants. It
<v Speaker 1>feels more like Mediterranean style desert. It's the parallels between
<v Speaker 1>southern California or even like the Tijuana area are crazy.
<v Speaker 2>It's cool, like there's a lot of I think you
<v Speaker 2>saw that there's a huge difference between the part the
<v Speaker 2>slope of the mountains that face to the sun. There
<v Speaker 2>you have like more serophitic plants. But the slopes the
<v Speaker 2>face to the south, they are very different, you know.
<v Speaker 2>But also in Santiago the forest is very depleted. You know,
<v Speaker 2>it's like centuries of the forestation these I guess you
<v Speaker 2>the same in California, Like this ecosystem takes like centuries
<v Speaker 2>to rebuild again.
<v Speaker 1>Like the Yeah, there's nothing.
<v Speaker 3>Like they're ancient glory, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, you have to go outside of the you have
<v Speaker 1>to go to like where the rich people live in
<v Speaker 1>the hills to get any taste of like what might
<v Speaker 1>be native to like see a native plant. I guess
<v Speaker 1>Jubeya chileansis was really common in Santiago when it got settled,
<v Speaker 1>you know.
<v Speaker 2>They actually they actually they naturalist think it only grew
<v Speaker 2>like on the coastal range.
<v Speaker 3>But there is.
<v Speaker 2>There is an ancient map of Santiago where they show
<v Speaker 2>like palm trees, so.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there's probably.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, because also they used it for making like.
<v Speaker 3>Like the sap.
<v Speaker 2>They boiled it down and make like a syrup. So
<v Speaker 2>they cutted it down. They say nowadays there's only two
<v Speaker 2>percent left of the of of the.
<v Speaker 3>Past distribution of the Hubaya.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's a tree that if I live down there,
<v Speaker 1>I'd be just growing the ship out of it. Natural
<v Speaker 1>brought my friend, Natural brought over some seeds. They're like
<v Speaker 1>for fruits, like the little golf all sized fruits. They
<v Speaker 1>smell amazing, like you can't really eat the the music
<v Speaker 1>car but the seed inside I guess is at a bowl.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, it's like it's it's actually a coconut.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, it's just but it's a beautiful tree.
<v Speaker 3>Man.
<v Speaker 1>They're like these big stout palm trees.
<v Speaker 3>And it's and and the bark is.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know if you saw the bark of Hubai
<v Speaker 2>lenses is soft.
<v Speaker 3>You know, it's very different from other palm trees.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, it.
<v Speaker 2>Looks and it's and it's very thick. It looks like
<v Speaker 2>the like the feet of an elephant. It's so beautiful.
<v Speaker 1>I want I wanted to ask you about the Mapocha
<v Speaker 1>River because when I first saw it, I was like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I saw the water and I was like, man,
<v Speaker 1>and that's not like ship water. That's like that looks
<v Speaker 1>like just volcanic sediment. It had that pink color to it.
<v Speaker 1>And then I remember you would message me, and you
<v Speaker 1>were like, God, it's actually a clean river. It's been
<v Speaker 1>clean for like a decade. What happened with it?
<v Speaker 2>They I mean, they just stopped throwing the ship on
<v Speaker 2>it many years ago. Actually, there's a lot of people
<v Speaker 2>that go and but but people have the the memories
<v Speaker 2>from from the past, so a lot of people still
<v Speaker 2>think it's dirty, you know. And yeah, because in Chile
<v Speaker 2>we have a lot of like clean water rivers. That's
<v Speaker 2>also another reason why people think it's still dirty, you know.
<v Speaker 2>But yes, that's like the natural sediment because it's so
<v Speaker 2>steep that the path that this river takes, the path
<v Speaker 2>that this river takes is very steep, so there's a
<v Speaker 2>lot of sediment.
<v Speaker 1>The andes are fucking incredibly steep, man. But yeah, it's
<v Speaker 1>a it's wild what can happen when you stop throwing
<v Speaker 1>garbage and talks waste and human shit into an urban river.
<v Speaker 1>The life comes back. We had a similar thing in
<v Speaker 1>Chicago where there's fucking beavers. Someone saw a river otter
<v Speaker 1>in the Chicago River, like you know, Chicago, Illinois, Like
<v Speaker 1>it's a big shitty city. I'd say that with love. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>but that river is fucking filthy. I almost fell in
<v Speaker 1>it once when I was running away from these crackheads
<v Speaker 1>and uh, I've been painting graffiti in these crackheads where
<v Speaker 1>they were like, yeah, it us twenty bucks, we're calling
<v Speaker 1>the cops. I was like, fuck you man, I don't
<v Speaker 1>have a shit on me. And I had to like
<v Speaker 1>scale horizontally on this chain link fence with no ground
<v Speaker 1>beneath it, just ten you know, it was a ten
<v Speaker 1>foot drop into the river and I was like, oh fuck,
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to fall in. I'm gonna get tennis
<v Speaker 1>it by falling. And uh, but it was it was
<v Speaker 1>like a filthy river. And now it's like there's fucking
<v Speaker 1>beavers and otters in it. That's insane. It's it's really clean,
<v Speaker 1>the silt at the bottom.
<v Speaker 2>You know that we have we have beavers here in
<v Speaker 2>Chili also Native yes, no, no, some Argentinians to get too.
<v Speaker 2>It's like a big island that is just when the
<v Speaker 2>continent ends and they put the beavers on a lagoon.
<v Speaker 2>But the beavers swam through the ocean and now they're
<v Speaker 2>like each year they're going up and they're going up
<v Speaker 2>and they're sucking the consistent because here the trees are
<v Speaker 2>not accustomed, you know, to be so wet.
<v Speaker 3>You know, so they're killing a lot of our forests.
<v Speaker 1>So beavers are invasive down there.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, very invasive.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and there I tell you, each year they're going
<v Speaker 2>more north. You know, they're colonizing new grounds, and it's
<v Speaker 2>like a really huge problem for the future because now
<v Speaker 2>they're very far they will Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's the thing is, you know, that's why I
<v Speaker 1>could never get the people that deny invasive species. They're like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, they they're like, well, those happened before. Well, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's occasionally every few million years you would get in
<v Speaker 1>like a species crossing a continental boundary or some other
<v Speaker 1>vicariates barrier and getting established. But it's having happening. It's
<v Speaker 1>such a fast rate now that it's and who knows
<v Speaker 1>what it did, you know, who knows what consequences happened
<v Speaker 1>millions of years ago whenever a plant or animal or
<v Speaker 1>fungus would cross the vikry its barrier and get to
<v Speaker 1>a new continent or on the other side of the equator, whatever.
<v Speaker 1>But but now it's happening. It's such a rate that
<v Speaker 1>it's overwhelming the system. And so you know, like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>trees that aren't adapted. Yeah, man, trees are trees that
<v Speaker 1>aren't adapted to something like beavers or fucking I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's it happens so quickly. They just while they're getting
<v Speaker 1>shipped on by people, and there's habitat loss and climate
<v Speaker 1>change and that's gnarly. I didn't know beavers, I mean
<v Speaker 1>that makes sense though. Yeah, they would. I could say
<v Speaker 1>they would fucking ecosystem up if they were just suddenly
<v Speaker 1>thrown into a you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, because they actually they drown the trees, you know,
<v Speaker 2>in the diet that they're not like they don't have
<v Speaker 2>accustomed to so wet and in those type of systems.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and the trees that that in North America that
<v Speaker 1>are adapted to them can sprout from the base and
<v Speaker 1>not all trees can do that, and and certainly not
<v Speaker 1>as you know, as as readily as some of the
<v Speaker 1>North American ones can it that evolve with beavers, but
<v Speaker 1>as fucked man. But anyway, okay, so, but Mapocho River
<v Speaker 1>is clean now, and the and these mountains, I mean
<v Speaker 1>they're really fucking steep. This is a relatively new mountain range.
<v Speaker 1>So like I remember when we were we were hanging
<v Speaker 1>out with you we saw these massive landslides. That's a
<v Speaker 1>common thing. Huh.
<v Speaker 2>They're in in San Fay and Lego. They're happening right
<v Speaker 2>now because of the climate change, you know. I mean
<v Speaker 2>they're normal, but once every one hundred years, once every
<v Speaker 2>one hundred and fifty years.
<v Speaker 3>But right now they're happening like, you know, a.
<v Speaker 2>Quicker pace because two years ago we had rains like man,
<v Speaker 2>it was like it was crazy. It rained so much
<v Speaker 2>in very few days that the land was collapsed with water.
<v Speaker 2>You know, where you have the granite then it's when
<v Speaker 2>it gets like soaked with water. And yeah, it's not
<v Speaker 2>normal at the space, you know, because well I didn't
<v Speaker 2>took you to the places that are worse. But in
<v Speaker 2>the ravine that is close to my house, we counted
<v Speaker 2>like ten of this how do you call it the.
<v Speaker 1>Fall landslides, the room based landslides?
<v Speaker 2>Ten ten different landslides in in one ravine, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and one of the landslides is like kilometers long. You know,
<v Speaker 2>it's crazy.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, And so what happened, I mean, what like that
<v Speaker 1>one that we the one that we saw in it
<v Speaker 1>that eucrypia, that glutenosa, that that rare Eucreyffia when we
<v Speaker 1>like that one was nuts. I mean that was basically
<v Speaker 1>like half the fucking hillside just suddenly collapses and all
<v Speaker 1>the plants are gone, and they just and it's like
<v Speaker 1>someone pulling a tablecloth off from a fucking you know,
<v Speaker 1>table with a bunch of dish wearing China and ship. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And that was a small one, you know, because in
<v Speaker 2>my place, there were in ravines where there was full
<v Speaker 2>of very big not a fouls onbeggy. So it's full
<v Speaker 2>of like very thick destroyed like cut in half trees.
<v Speaker 3>It's like it's crazy to see.
<v Speaker 2>You know. Yeah, and the river full of stones. I
<v Speaker 2>mean it's kind of depressing, you know, to see these changes.
<v Speaker 2>I lived in Chiloe. I lived in the island of Chiloe,
<v Speaker 2>and I also saw a lot of like landscape change
<v Speaker 2>the human made. Like you you went to a really
<v Speaker 2>nice forest and next week you went there it was
<v Speaker 2>all piles of wood, you know. Yeah, So I think
<v Speaker 2>I think that's one of the most depressing things to see,
<v Speaker 2>like the quick face in which nature is being destroyed, you.
<v Speaker 1>Know, it's assaulted, just like straight assaulted. You know. What
<v Speaker 1>drives me nuts that I was like when you meet people
<v Speaker 1>who are like, nah, there's no way nature will recover.
<v Speaker 1>There's no way that we're gonna I mean, humans can't.
<v Speaker 1>We think we can do so much more than we can.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, motherfucker, there's eight billion of us. Do you
<v Speaker 1>know how fucking large of a number that is eight
<v Speaker 1>billion fucking turds like eight billion you know, eating mouths,
<v Speaker 1>shitting asses, people that need resources, you know what, you
<v Speaker 1>know what I mean, it's it's just like are you
<v Speaker 1>fucking in phais? Are you? Are you a child? Like
<v Speaker 1>do you have any have you stopped and thought about this?
<v Speaker 1>Like the scale at which you know it's all, especially
<v Speaker 1>when there's no regard among like ninety percent of us,
<v Speaker 1>there's no regard for the living system. It's just, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>especially with religion. The two dominant world religions think that
<v Speaker 1>everything was put here for them, So why not fucking
<v Speaker 1>into a comma and take everything?
<v Speaker 2>You know, No, in Chile is like a low density country,
<v Speaker 2>a population country, so I imagine like in China and like
<v Speaker 2>these intruction must be like crazy, like.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, or the US the US is now in
<v Speaker 1>the US, the US, I mean the US. Just the
<v Speaker 1>mindset is just like cash in the chips, just fucking
<v Speaker 1>you know, burn it out, you know, fuck all the
<v Speaker 1>holes take everything? Why not? You know, it's just it's
<v Speaker 1>it's it's such a like exploitative, single serving, single use
<v Speaker 1>mindset here. But I'm telling you, man, she like, what's
<v Speaker 1>the population. It's like fifteen millions. Like that's a that's million.
<v Speaker 1>And when I'm a refugee, that's my spot I might
<v Speaker 1>go to, you know when it gets so nauseating here.
<v Speaker 2>It's a million. But but you have to think that
<v Speaker 2>one third of that population is in Santiago, more than
<v Speaker 2>one third, and also the north and the Patagonia. If
<v Speaker 2>you look at the numbers, it there's almost no people there,
<v Speaker 2>you know. Yeah, it's all centered in the central region
<v Speaker 2>and a little bit more in the south. But the
<v Speaker 2>rest of the country huge land.
<v Speaker 1>You know.
<v Speaker 2>Also, I was telling you about there's plans on paranoia,
<v Speaker 2>plans that maybe the Israelites want to come here and
<v Speaker 2>take our land because there's a lot of water. You know. Shit,
<v Speaker 2>we're scared of the we're scared of the feudure. Anytime
<v Speaker 2>Trump will say, okay, we need chili, also.
<v Speaker 1>Need I mean, I think I think Trump was sent
<v Speaker 1>by a joking God to ruin the US and cause
<v Speaker 1>the downfall of the United States. I think he'll do
<v Speaker 1>a good job too. I think he'll ruin everything. I think, uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, he'll just he's gonna be like Reagan two
<v Speaker 1>point zero. He's going to further eradicate the middle class,
<v Speaker 1>make the populace dumber. And then you know, by the
<v Speaker 1>time he croaks whenever that is, the motherfucker probably be
<v Speaker 1>like one hundred and ten. By the time he croaks,
<v Speaker 1>you know, they'll just be like a smoldering wreck, and
<v Speaker 1>the job will be done. And and you know, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what maybe China will take. I have no clue.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, but certainly who am I to say?
<v Speaker 1>Though I don't. I try not to think about politics
<v Speaker 1>more than I need to and focus on the plants.
<v Speaker 1>But okay, so you lived in that, You lived in
<v Speaker 1>Santiago for a while, and then you lived in chilo A,
<v Speaker 1>which is an island the way down there by what
<v Speaker 1>is that forty four degrees latitude south and the fitz
<v Speaker 1>Royal Forests southwest of Puerto mont which is a lovely thing.
<v Speaker 1>I love Oh you like yeah, I like it. I
<v Speaker 1>was we went to Porto Varus, which is nice. Porto
<v Speaker 1>Varus is nice, like you go there for a day,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and then but it's very like it's kind
<v Speaker 1>of wealthy. It's like very uppy. And then Puerto Mont
<v Speaker 1>is yeah, and Puerto Mont is kind of grimy. It's
<v Speaker 1>like a fishing town. It's got more of like a Tacoma,
<v Speaker 1>Washington vibe.
<v Speaker 2>It's like it's like the normal people where normal people live,
<v Speaker 2>you know, yeah, like for rich people exactly.
<v Speaker 1>I like port a month and I've known of portumonth
<v Speaker 1>for like a decade and a half. It's because I
<v Speaker 1>was obsessed with alers trees back in the day, you know,
<v Speaker 1>when I first got into all this ship and so
<v Speaker 1>but anyway, so you lived in what was living in chileaway, like.
<v Speaker 3>Oh it was it was very.
<v Speaker 2>How can I say, like some really cool things and
<v Speaker 2>also bad things. You know. The cool things were that
<v Speaker 2>over there the land, it's like the public property is
<v Speaker 2>not like so you can enter anywhere you know and
<v Speaker 2>walk and you're free to roam anywhere you want. So
<v Speaker 2>that thing, I think it's awesome, you know, like you
<v Speaker 2>have to have the liberty to stop your car and
<v Speaker 2>because over there they have only forests and fields for
<v Speaker 2>the cows and the sheep, you know, so for the
<v Speaker 2>for them, the forest is like almost useless land, you know.
<v Speaker 2>So in that regard, it was really nice, you know,
<v Speaker 2>to see the I mean, to be able to roam
<v Speaker 2>freely and feel free.
<v Speaker 1>You know. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>But for me, the obscure part was this climate that
<v Speaker 2>is so different to Santiago. It rains like almost all year,
<v Speaker 2>there's very little sunlight, so and people is like kind
<v Speaker 2>of green and chiloe. There's like a tradition of witchcraft
<v Speaker 2>and like obscure, like.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, I see what you're doing. Do they have heroin
<v Speaker 1>down there?
<v Speaker 2>No?
<v Speaker 3>No, no, just crack you know.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, okay. So it's yeah, because.
<v Speaker 2>Alcohol, alcohol is the is the thing that goes you know,
<v Speaker 2>you go is very depressing.
<v Speaker 1>Alcohols. Yeah, alcohol is pretty terrible, I think. I think, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's definitely for numbing yourself and not dealing with things
<v Speaker 1>you need to deal with and ruining them and taking
<v Speaker 1>years off you. But it's because it so so basically
<v Speaker 1>it was like it was like a gath vibe. It
<v Speaker 1>was like a seasonal effective disorder. Gray Pacific in the
<v Speaker 1>Pacific Northwest here in the United States. It's it's like
<v Speaker 1>a similar thing, but there's heroin up there, so a
<v Speaker 1>lot of people around heroin all the time, which now
<v Speaker 1>is mostly fennol, so like half of them are dying,
<v Speaker 1>you know, all the time. So lots of overdose deaths,
<v Speaker 1>grim rain. So that's nice that it's not as bad,
<v Speaker 1>you know, there's the lack of heroin Chilaway. It must
<v Speaker 1>be nice. But I definitely feel you want the seasonal
<v Speaker 1>effective disorder vibe, you know what I.
<v Speaker 2>Mean, also has a nice thing. And I think that
<v Speaker 2>the culture there is like more that there was a
<v Speaker 2>little bit more Pacific exchange between indigenous people and Spaniards,
<v Speaker 2>so the culture is a little more cool, you know,
<v Speaker 2>like they have a lot of traditions, like very old traditions.
<v Speaker 2>And also you can learn a lot of no botanical
<v Speaker 2>things about the plants and different ways to use plants,
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, and different names. It's like a country
<v Speaker 2>in itself, you know.
<v Speaker 1>So there's more. There's more. There's more indigenous culture. That's
<v Speaker 1>like evident.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, the how can I say that the mix
<v Speaker 2>was like healthier, you know, and and the and the
<v Speaker 2>east mix is not like you go and you see
<v Speaker 2>indigenous people, but normal Chilottes have like traditions that have
<v Speaker 2>more indigenous parts in it, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah that's cool. Yeah, not as not as stiff
<v Speaker 1>and enrigid, and perhaps not as money obsessed as you
<v Speaker 1>might get an urban center like Santiago.
<v Speaker 3>And also as a as a person from Santiago.
<v Speaker 2>Like everywhere you go in Chile they look you like,
<v Speaker 2>oh this is they kind of hate us, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and in Chilo it's worse. Like in Chiloe they hate
<v Speaker 2>everyone from outside Tilo. But if you're from Santiago, like
<v Speaker 2>you're like the worst ship. When I went to live there, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of people ask me when you come here,
<v Speaker 2>like where is your reason? Like they're very like skeptical,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>So it's regional beef. They've got like regional beef. They
<v Speaker 1>don't like the Northerners, No.
<v Speaker 3>They only like and they have like a culture is
<v Speaker 3>very close.
<v Speaker 2>You know. It's very hard. And my dream was like
<v Speaker 2>to have actually a lot of friends, but I I
<v Speaker 2>didn't accomplish it.
<v Speaker 1>They're fucking yeah, okay, so they're like, yeah, I.
<v Speaker 2>Was hanging with a lot of people from some THIAGONI
<v Speaker 2>what do you.
<v Speaker 1>Mean, like the witchcraft they got like like the like
<v Speaker 1>the gothing are they doing? What do you mean witchcraft?
<v Speaker 1>They're like etsy witches? What do you mean?
<v Speaker 2>They had? Like actually this is documented. At some point
<v Speaker 2>they acknowledged that witches and I don't know how to
<v Speaker 2>say male witch like a wizard wizard and witches where
<v Speaker 2>secretly like dominating the island and they had they have
<v Speaker 2>like a parallel government. So the central government Santiago went
<v Speaker 2>and killed them all and they have like a big fight.
<v Speaker 1>Wait is this real?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, it's documented. When I can, I don't, I don't.
<v Speaker 2>I think it was in eighteen something I can send you,
<v Speaker 2>like the there's books and yeah. So it's like known
<v Speaker 2>for for their wizards and which and till this day
<v Speaker 2>people always talk about strange stories over there, like and
<v Speaker 2>people believe and these wizards. And also when I lived there,
<v Speaker 2>I also felt strange things. You know, it's I think
<v Speaker 2>it's real.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so this isn't just you're not talking about just
<v Speaker 1>like a cat, like a fifty year old cat lady
<v Speaker 1>wearing a momo and a witch's hat and going to
<v Speaker 1>a renaissance fair. You're talking about like actually.
<v Speaker 3>Like old school, old school.
<v Speaker 1>But but but which culture based out of like northern Europe,
<v Speaker 1>like Europeans.
<v Speaker 2>It was again it was a really cool mixture between
<v Speaker 2>the Northern European Oh no, no, I mean mostly Spaniards
<v Speaker 2>and other countries of Europe.
<v Speaker 3>And then we eat people that is like the Mapucha.
<v Speaker 2>People, but from they're a little bit more southern and have.
<v Speaker 3>More different traditions, you know.
<v Speaker 1>So there was but there was a witch culture where
<v Speaker 1>like the government was worried that these were anti Christian
<v Speaker 1>like evil, dangerous, like similar to what we had with
<v Speaker 1>like the Salem witch trials in North America.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, that's weird, crazy like that.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, that's that we eat a culture. And there
<v Speaker 2>also the Channel culture. There was a really cool culture
<v Speaker 2>that only lived on canoes and they live by the sea,
<v Speaker 2>you know. So Theta culture is very like close to
<v Speaker 2>the sea to the boat.
<v Speaker 1>That cool.
<v Speaker 3>And they also have the Alersa they over there.
<v Speaker 2>They they almost made it disappear like you can only
<v Speaker 2>see on the highest slopes of the coastal cordeera.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I was about.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And they have like a really cool architectural school
<v Speaker 2>of wood without nails.
<v Speaker 3>The only like the wood joints.
<v Speaker 1>You know, or like the Japanese.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it's so culture.
<v Speaker 2>That's why we're telling you, like maybe botanically, that's not
<v Speaker 2>because the island was separated like not so long ago.
<v Speaker 2>There's not like the cool endemics to the island. But
<v Speaker 2>culturally it's really interesting, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I'm seeing the indigenous people of Chilawe Island, Chile
<v Speaker 1>include the Chanos, Huiliches h u i l l I
<v Speaker 1>c h e s if anyone does, someone's looking at
<v Speaker 1>and Councos. The Chilaway people are Chilotes are a mix
<v Speaker 1>of indigenous and European.
<v Speaker 2>Oh.
<v Speaker 1>So this is like that's like what Mexico is basically
<v Speaker 1>where Mexico.
<v Speaker 3>Most similar thing.
<v Speaker 2>We have two Mexico, but in the southern region because
<v Speaker 2>in the north of Chile you also have that kind
<v Speaker 2>of thing, you.
<v Speaker 1>Know, oh like the indigenous in the Spanish mixt.
<v Speaker 2>Uh always. But no, but I think I'm just telling
<v Speaker 2>that in the central regions, the indigenous component it was
<v Speaker 2>like almost cleared out, you know. Yeah, more in the
<v Speaker 2>south and more in the north. You can see more
<v Speaker 2>more of this component.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, the Santiagouary I just felt like Spain. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it felt like just just Spaniards, you know, just European.
<v Speaker 2>I mean there's still like some indigenous left, but they're
<v Speaker 2>very assimilated, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah. The you know, what was the cool time
<v Speaker 1>we went to was Melepuco. How do you stay that
<v Speaker 1>Malapuco outside of Congo?
<v Speaker 3>Melipelko?
<v Speaker 1>Melee, Yes, fucking butchered Melepeuco. How do you pronounce that?
<v Speaker 1>Say it again, Melipelko? Yeah, I'm not I'm fucked. I'm fucked.
<v Speaker 1>Never mind, Okay, Well, either way, it was a cool
<v Speaker 1>town and there was you know, they had LARTs of
<v Speaker 1>era Carria stuff in the little shops and like a
<v Speaker 1>little statue they had made of I mean, you could
<v Speaker 1>tell there was a reverence for that tree, which I
<v Speaker 1>was happy to see. But those those fucking trees, man,
<v Speaker 1>that was one of my That was one of my favorite,
<v Speaker 1>one of my favorite places that we had went to
<v Speaker 1>Congio and now a Buddha, now a Buddha, I think, yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Oh, I think you like the you like it better
<v Speaker 3>than Buddha, right, And no.
<v Speaker 1>I think I like Nawa Buddha better because the the
<v Speaker 1>lichen and the coastal I mean, the trees were just
<v Speaker 1>more insane looking in the in Nawa Buddha. Maybe the
<v Speaker 1>forest that's where the really really I mean there's massive
<v Speaker 1>trees everywhere. But but now Wabuda is not that big.
<v Speaker 1>I mean it's it's surrounded by pine hill right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean actually Nawa Buddha's in the latitude with
<v Speaker 2>most biodiversity, like for I mean vascular plants. Yeah, I've
<v Speaker 2>never been in Nawa Buddha. It's uh sad for me
<v Speaker 2>I have to go. But yeah, it's I mean all
<v Speaker 2>the actually now with Buddhas save that the heights saved
<v Speaker 2>some of the vegetation because in other regions in the
<v Speaker 2>coastal forest or the coastal range, man, it's like three
<v Speaker 2>percent native forest left.
<v Speaker 3>It's depressing.
<v Speaker 2>The first time I took the first time I went
<v Speaker 2>by car in this infinite plantation forest, man, I felt
<v Speaker 2>like shed Like you you stop the car, you see
<v Speaker 2>these plantations and there's not beards singing.
<v Speaker 4>There's no lfe. You know, it's like a it's like
<v Speaker 4>a green desert. Yeah, that's horrible. Yeah, that's what I mean.
<v Speaker 4>It really does feel bad. It feels like a bad trip.
<v Speaker 4>We stopped at some of these pine plantations. I felt
<v Speaker 4>like a little ten minute video, which is basically just
<v Speaker 4>me ranting and looking at pine hell and.
<v Speaker 2>Man, it's hell, got it really is.
<v Speaker 1>It's fucking miserable. And that's the thing is it's funny
<v Speaker 1>too because Pinus radiata occupies like a very small area
<v Speaker 1>in northern California. It's an endangered tree in the wild,
<v Speaker 1>but it's probably the most it's the most abundant tree
<v Speaker 1>on planet Earth right now.
<v Speaker 2>Probably because these companies will will say they're doing XC
<v Speaker 2>to conservation now.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, or they're doing they're doing carbon sick wist. This
<v Speaker 1>is the thing. That's why you have to be wary
<v Speaker 1>of this bullshit that gets put out there where they're like, oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>we're planting trees. You know, we might be a United Airlines,
<v Speaker 1>we might be you know, uh, profiting off of massive
<v Speaker 1>flights whatever and people gotta fly. I fucking get it.
<v Speaker 1>But but but you know they're like, well, we're doing offsets,
<v Speaker 1>we're doing carbon offsets. Well, you're not restoring forest jackets,
<v Speaker 1>you're just planting. You're just planting farms. It's like cows
<v Speaker 1>are not wildlife either, Like, yeah, you're murking habitat and
<v Speaker 1>killing a bunch of wildlife. And then it's like sitting.
<v Speaker 1>It's like doing that and then saying like, well, but
<v Speaker 1>we're breeding cows, so it's it's okay, we're offsetting. Yeah right,
<v Speaker 1>it's just anything will do right, like it's it's so.
<v Speaker 1>But the fucking pines were everywhere. God, I couldn't believe it.
<v Speaker 1>And they're fucking everywhere, doug fur up in the fucking mountains.
<v Speaker 1>You think you're you think you've escaped them, you're in
<v Speaker 1>like a somewhat native area, and then you look and
<v Speaker 1>there's a fucking doug fur or a pine or a
<v Speaker 1>eucalyptus orally Jesus man.
<v Speaker 2>When I see a pine, like any like species of pine,
<v Speaker 2>I feel something bad, you know. So I'm trying to
<v Speaker 2>resettle my brain to not hate every pine I see.
<v Speaker 2>But for me, like this kind of landscape, it means
<v Speaker 2>like death, you know it does. It's example, when I
<v Speaker 2>went to the Mexico to the Sierra to see like
<v Speaker 2>native pines and all, it's like a mind fuck for
<v Speaker 2>my brain, you know, like I still cannot understand.
<v Speaker 1>Well for me, you know, because for me, it's like
<v Speaker 1>eucalyptus are like that in California, they're just the desert
<v Speaker 1>and it's garbage. And I guess they're still yahoos that
<v Speaker 1>you know, don't want them cut down. But but then
<v Speaker 1>you know, and I hated them, but then when I
<v Speaker 1>saw them in Australia, I was like, man, these are
<v Speaker 1>fucking dope. This is such a cool genus. They're so
<v Speaker 1>unique and and they're in they're and they're an important
<v Speaker 1>part of this living machine. But you know, over here,
<v Speaker 1>not ten thousand miles away, And so I had more
<v Speaker 1>found beautiful. Yeah, and I've seen I've seen Eucalyptus globulus
<v Speaker 1>in Tasmania where there are these fucking beasts. They're so
<v Speaker 1>beautiful and they they're in these beautiful forests that sound amazing.
<v Speaker 1>And and then when you see them in planted in
<v Speaker 1>you know, in California, you're like, god, this is hell.
<v Speaker 1>And it was the same thing with the redwoods. I saw,
<v Speaker 1>you know, coast redwood forests are amazing. But then I
<v Speaker 1>saw a redwood plantation in New Zealand and it was
<v Speaker 1>fucking horrible. There was nothing growing in the understory, like nothing.
<v Speaker 2>It was just when you went to when you went
<v Speaker 2>to Australia, and it must be very really difficult to
<v Speaker 2>tell apart the different, like they almost all looked the same.
<v Speaker 1>No, man, no, there's no, there's there's fucking in the
<v Speaker 1>Sterling Range there's ones that aren't only like three or
<v Speaker 1>four meters tall with these crazy leaves, and then in
<v Speaker 1>Tasmania there's one that only gets two meters or excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>half a meter tall, not even it's it's like and
<v Speaker 1>it needs fire. Yeah, it forms these massive ligno tubers
<v Speaker 1>underground and it needs fire to burn, and it grows
<v Speaker 1>in like alpine Tasmania like it's it's so you'd never
<v Speaker 1>guess it was a eucalyptus. It looks like a Arctostaphalos
<v Speaker 1>or something really cool. I mean, there's so much diversity.
<v Speaker 1>And then then you've got those rainbow eucalyptus with the
<v Speaker 1>cool bark, and Eucalyptus regnans that gets really big and
<v Speaker 1>it's basically a tempered rainforest tree. I mean, it's a
<v Speaker 1>really cool lineage. There used to be Eucalyptus in South America,
<v Speaker 1>I guess forty million years ago, but they wont extinct
<v Speaker 1>there for whatever reason.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. The other day I heard that it seems like
<v Speaker 2>they developed here in South America and then they left us.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, yeah, because you guys have a lot of
<v Speaker 1>Mrtesi down there too. I mean that's a huge.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, a lot of Yeah, we have a lot of that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, a lot of.
<v Speaker 1>So what with the pines? What's up with when that
<v Speaker 1>all started in the seventies, right, that was like Pinochet mostly,
<v Speaker 1>that was that Forest Law.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I think that.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know the year as well, but I think
<v Speaker 2>it was in the twentieth century that different scientists started
<v Speaker 2>to look at different trees that behaved well, because I
<v Speaker 2>mean beforehand, I mean, they did a lot of deforestation
<v Speaker 2>of native forests, you know, but this coastal range was
<v Speaker 2>really I kind of sucked up before Pinochet came and
<v Speaker 2>they started to plant the pines, you know, because they
<v Speaker 2>used this for planting wheat.
<v Speaker 3>So they cleared the forest.
<v Speaker 2>They planted wheat, and after some years the soil was useless,
<v Speaker 2>you know. So if you see pictures, ancient pictures of
<v Speaker 2>these places, it was like a desert in some areas,
<v Speaker 2>you know. So then in the seventies came Pinochet with
<v Speaker 2>the Special Law and they subsidized the plantation of trees.
<v Speaker 2>So a lot of people like the little remains of
<v Speaker 2>native forest. They started cutting down also to plant finds.
<v Speaker 2>You know, r man, it's it's it's it's crazy like.
<v Speaker 2>And also they don't it's like it's a shitty wood,
<v Speaker 2>you know, like, yeah, they should at least some good wood.
<v Speaker 2>You know that this wood sucks.
<v Speaker 1>Now, pine sucks. It's the ship. We make fun of
<v Speaker 1>it here in the US. I mean, you'll find some
<v Speaker 1>clowns sometimes that like defend it. They're like, no, it's
<v Speaker 1>it's gary. You can't build gout houses. You build houses
<v Speaker 1>at last thirty or forty years. And the ship grows
<v Speaker 1>so fast and it needs to be. If it's got
<v Speaker 1>any contact at all with moisture, it starts rotting. It's
<v Speaker 1>not good wood. It's not it's you know, it's there's
<v Speaker 1>no rod resistance. It's like the home you know what
<v Speaker 1>home Depot is. I hope not, but if you do.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, we here we have like Easy or come Center.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, these like brandnames. God, if I could just if
<v Speaker 1>I could purge it, if I could purge all the
<v Speaker 1>corporate logos from my head and just never think of
<v Speaker 1>them again, I would. But like, you go to home
<v Speaker 1>Depot and you buy a shitty two by four, and
<v Speaker 1>that's it's like rady out of pine. It probably comes
<v Speaker 1>from Chile or New Zealand or somewhere else. I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I saw this ship in Brazil too,
<v Speaker 1>but it's it requires massive amounts of land that destroys
<v Speaker 1>the soil too. I mean it destroys all the microbial
<v Speaker 1>richness in the soil, and so all you get are
<v Speaker 1>the ectomycro rise that associate with the pine roots. And
<v Speaker 1>it's a fucking tinder box too. Like we went, we
<v Speaker 1>went by somebody's forests that not forest pine plantations where
<v Speaker 1>it's like that is a fucking tinder box waiting to
<v Speaker 1>go up like that.
<v Speaker 2>Every three or four years or left. We have like
<v Speaker 2>huge forest fires, and they're especially in the in the
<v Speaker 2>pine plantations.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, because the old limbs die and then then you've
<v Speaker 1>just got this dead dry wood during a long dry
<v Speaker 1>summer season, just sitting there and it's just a ladder fire.
<v Speaker 1>And I saw one area where they limb them up
<v Speaker 1>when the trees are closest to the road. But then
<v Speaker 1>you go into the pine plantation and it's thick, and
<v Speaker 1>you know, I had a friend in northern California who
<v Speaker 1>had some land and it was he basically bought land
<v Speaker 1>that was a garbage dump and a pine plantation, but
<v Speaker 1>the pines are native there. It was Pinus ponderosa. And
<v Speaker 1>so the first five years he owned that spot, you know,
<v Speaker 1>we ended up restoring it. We planted a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>native California cypresses is in Sisku County, California, and the
<v Speaker 1>first five years we would have to go up and
<v Speaker 1>limb the pines up to like fifteen feet what is
<v Speaker 1>that five meters and then do burn piles in the
<v Speaker 1>winter to get rid of this fuel. Because I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you saw this. You'd see these forests and you're like,
<v Speaker 1>that is a fucking bomb. That's literally a bomb that's
<v Speaker 1>gonna go off. You're gonna get a windy day. Some
<v Speaker 1>jackass throws a spark, you know, whatever lights a cigarette
<v Speaker 1>forgets to put it out. There's a fire they have,
<v Speaker 1>it doesn't and you get these winds that are so
<v Speaker 1>strong that it's basically blowing. Laterally, it's like turns the
<v Speaker 1>fire into a blowtorch and everything goes up. And so
<v Speaker 1>we did that and we limbed the because once the pine,
<v Speaker 1>once you get the branches up to twenty feet, the
<v Speaker 1>pines are pretty fire resistant if it's a low burning fire.
<v Speaker 1>But below that, man, they just it just is a bomb.
<v Speaker 1>They just ladder fire, you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean, as I was telling you the worst
<v Speaker 2>fires that we had lately, it's only in the pine plantations.
<v Speaker 2>And also it's very sketchy because the like there's two
<v Speaker 2>or three companies that own most of these land with
<v Speaker 2>the pines, you know, and also Pinochette like gave these
<v Speaker 2>to Israelatives, you know, people that is really close to
<v Speaker 2>that redeem No classic and yeah, sitting from this. And
<v Speaker 2>also a lot of times people also here like fires
<v Speaker 2>that are not normal, like in California, you know, so
<v Speaker 2>ninety point ninety nine point nine of the times is
<v Speaker 2>the same company is putting fire to the plantations to
<v Speaker 2>to collect insurance and stuff like that. You know, it's
<v Speaker 2>really dark.
<v Speaker 1>Are they national? Are they foreign companies or Chilean companies.
<v Speaker 2>Or Chilean company.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's like local people ruining the landscape and not foreigners.
<v Speaker 3>But it's local, local rich people.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure they have fun at the ski resorts.
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure they love some of those, you know, luxury
<v Speaker 1>resorts in the winter, of course, but but yeah, so
<v Speaker 1>so the the pines were So that was episode. It
<v Speaker 1>started off basically planting over degraded wheat fields, but then
<v Speaker 1>it was so I mean, there was such a huge
<v Speaker 1>subsidy for planting pines that eventually they were just like funk,
<v Speaker 1>we just start taking the native forest. It's there's no
<v Speaker 1>use for it anyway. And so that's what they do.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and some of the for example, the part that
<v Speaker 2>you went to Besit in sang this forest is kind
<v Speaker 2>of protected. You know, you cannot like go and cut
<v Speaker 2>of the trees. You need special permission, you cannot cut everything,
<v Speaker 2>you know. But in other parts of Chile. But par example,
<v Speaker 2>in Chilo, man they're taking everything apart because they they
<v Speaker 2>love these luma.
<v Speaker 1>Luma.
<v Speaker 2>No no, it has another I forgot, the the amo
<v Speaker 2>miltus luma and this is a very strong wood. And
<v Speaker 2>also the poliast pipularist over there. The polist tipularist is
<v Speaker 2>a really cool forest that looks like from an enchanted
<v Speaker 2>forest because the trees don't grow like straight. They grow
<v Speaker 2>in forty five degrees, you know, like it's really cool
<v Speaker 2>on the inside, it's like a net of wood, you know.
<v Speaker 2>Then the roots come to the outside and they do
<v Speaker 2>cool curves and all that kind of forest.
<v Speaker 3>They don't cut with the chain, so they go like
<v Speaker 3>with a like a.
<v Speaker 2>Heavy machinery to take it, like all the soils, you know,
<v Speaker 2>everything like the roots, the tree. So in the south
<v Speaker 2>they're they're repeating the same thing that happened in the
<v Speaker 2>central region in Chile, you know.
<v Speaker 1>And it's not protected. I mean, is there is There
<v Speaker 1>are there pieces of it that are protected.
<v Speaker 2>I mean they're huge pieces that are protected like far
<v Speaker 2>away from where the people live, you know, but where
<v Speaker 2>there is population people, especially like in Chile or in
<v Speaker 2>near Portomont, they're still taking a part of this forest,
<v Speaker 2>you know, Jesus. Yeah, But Chilo also has men. We
<v Speaker 2>have a lot of hectars, protected hectars in the south
<v Speaker 2>of Chile in the Patagonia. But it's like a scam,
<v Speaker 2>you know, because we have huge parks that most of
<v Speaker 2>them don't have people like taking care of them. And
<v Speaker 2>the place where we most need the parks in the
<v Speaker 2>central region, where we have more endangered species or where
<v Speaker 2>they are carriers, are you know, the the there's not
<v Speaker 2>so many protected areas, you know. So Chile is doing
<v Speaker 2>like this camp of doing this the huge national park
<v Speaker 2>that is the same if they are a national park,
<v Speaker 2>of they are not like there's no one living there,
<v Speaker 2>you know. So and actually these parks are full of
<v Speaker 2>salmon farms, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, the salmon farm. That's right. You guys have
<v Speaker 1>salmon farms down. Salmon are not native to Chile.
<v Speaker 2>No, they're not native, and especially Patagonia. I mean it's
<v Speaker 2>full of them, especially and also in the in these
<v Speaker 2>national parks, you know.
<v Speaker 3>So it's it's crazy. It's not the actual protection.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, Amma murders luma that yeah, we saw that.
<v Speaker 1>Where I see that? Where the fuck did I see that?
<v Speaker 1>I forget it was, Oh that was in alert se Costero. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>mertesi there's so much more most man lamb luma. But
<v Speaker 1>Luma peculata, not to change the subject, but Luma peculata
<v Speaker 1>that's around you too. That's the one that looks it's
<v Speaker 1>got bark like a madrone, which is a member of
<v Speaker 1>the blueberry family that we have up here. But it's
<v Speaker 1>got that smooth bark and makes a really delicious fruit
<v Speaker 1>that's mertasty as well. That that is, I mean, that's
<v Speaker 1>a really common tree. Where does that Where does that start?
<v Speaker 1>What's the range of that.
<v Speaker 2>It's common and it's very it grows on it very
<v Speaker 2>like it starts on Cokimbo or Valparaiso, I don't remember.
<v Speaker 2>But in the central region you can see it more
<v Speaker 2>like a shrub, you know. But in the south, in
<v Speaker 2>like especially in Chiloe and in Islamocha, you have like
<v Speaker 2>pure luma picolata forests. They're huge, and it's amazing. They're huge,
<v Speaker 2>they're beautiful. It's it's crazy, like it's so different from
<v Speaker 2>other forests that we have here because normally they don't
<v Speaker 2>tend to do pure forest, you know, they do one
<v Speaker 2>one over here, one over there. But I don't know why.
<v Speaker 2>You know, they have a lot of like pure you know.
<v Speaker 1>It was going back to what you were saying about
<v Speaker 1>about you know, where the word protected land is needed.
<v Speaker 1>I think I mean Central Chile. Yeah, because there's more biodiversity,
<v Speaker 1>it's more endangered, it's more directly there's more of a
<v Speaker 1>direct threat to it from development because that's where the
<v Speaker 1>population is. But also I think just that's where the
<v Speaker 1>population center is, that's where people have more of a
<v Speaker 1>need to be exposed to what the land looked like.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's it's so crazy. It's so crazy to me.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you can spend your entire life in a
<v Speaker 1>place and have no idea what it looked like one
<v Speaker 1>hundred bucking years before, and you the only plants you
<v Speaker 1>see are the invasive garbage that's brought in, that escaped
<v Speaker 1>out of horticulture, that's got no ecological context, that doesn't
<v Speaker 1>have any of the relationships with the insects and animals.
<v Speaker 2>And it's crazy. There's people that will never know how
<v Speaker 2>the like the nature ecosystem and natural ecosystem is over there. Actually,
<v Speaker 2>I started like my not Alison thing when I because
<v Speaker 2>when I live in Santiago. When I was a kid,
<v Speaker 2>I saw only like the Vattelia cavin you know, like littriacostia,
<v Speaker 2>very open forests.
<v Speaker 3>So when I was like twenty something, I went.
<v Speaker 2>To the coastal forest near Santiago, where you have not
<v Speaker 2>a fagus, you have Gunera victoria, you have magayanica, you
<v Speaker 2>have stuff that for me was Southern stuff, you know.
<v Speaker 2>So my brain just exploded and then I understood, but
<v Speaker 2>was for me it was such a like impactful thing
<v Speaker 2>to see, like man, like these places had like really
<v Speaker 2>cool ecosystems before the destruction, you know.
<v Speaker 1>And where was this?
<v Speaker 2>In? Alto? The Chicama is the coastal range that you
<v Speaker 2>have to the west of Santiago, you know, I don't
<v Speaker 2>know if if you crossed from Santiago to Valparaiso, you
<v Speaker 2>have to pass some tunnels. You know, there's like a
<v Speaker 2>arrange that has like two thousand meters in height, so
<v Speaker 2>over there you have like the most cool forests near Santiago,
<v Speaker 2>you know, or the most bio diverse.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, I was going to ask you, how did
<v Speaker 1>you because your background wasn't in Banni, you didn't go
<v Speaker 1>to school for any of this, how did you how
<v Speaker 1>did you get started paying attention to it and developing
<v Speaker 1>a love for it? Fuck?
<v Speaker 2>It was a very slow process because right now I'm
<v Speaker 2>thirty nine years old, and through my twenties I didn't know.
<v Speaker 3>Much about nature. I loved the thing.
<v Speaker 2>I love to go to to national parks for some reason,
<v Speaker 2>and like in two thousand and sixteen, more or less,
<v Speaker 2>I came across these birds bird Chilean birds guide. So
<v Speaker 2>when I saw that, my head, my head exploded, you know,
<v Speaker 2>like I was like a fuck, there is like guides
<v Speaker 2>for Chilean things. And then I mean, it was two
<v Speaker 2>things to see this guide and to look at this
<v Speaker 2>forest that I was telling you about, the Chica forest.
<v Speaker 2>And then my head exploded and I started taking courses
<v Speaker 2>of wild edible plants.
<v Speaker 3>And I was telling you before.
<v Speaker 2>I started with that, you know, I started like learning
<v Speaker 2>a lot about wild edible plants foraging, and I started
<v Speaker 2>making courses, you know, like teaching people about this. Yeah. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>but it was I don't know. That project is almost
<v Speaker 2>dead right now because for so many reasons. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>the coolest edible plants here are endangered. You know, like
<v Speaker 2>for example, got that fruit is edible. It's awesome. Like
<v Speaker 2>the pujas also are edible, but are very endangered. The
<v Speaker 2>Jubai culensis you can need the like the thing that
<v Speaker 2>is inside how did you call the heart.
<v Speaker 1>The seed or inside the state the heart? Yeah, the
<v Speaker 1>embryo inside the leaves. Oh okay, yeah yeah, yeah, okay,
<v Speaker 1>so the heart of the pond, like the inside that
<v Speaker 1>where the new leaves are like that, you're basically eating
<v Speaker 1>the appicle maristime. You can eat that from jubea, but
<v Speaker 1>it kills the plant, right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, So there was so much cool stuff that
<v Speaker 2>you cannot do that I was like tiny hands. And
<v Speaker 2>also the the cooks and the chefs, like they don't
<v Speaker 2>care about the ecosystem or to know about the story
<v Speaker 2>of the planet. They just see an ingredient and they
<v Speaker 2>tell you, Okay, I want tenklos of this. So it's
<v Speaker 2>so very not sustainable that I was like, I don't know,
<v Speaker 2>it was like mind bending or mind sucking and how
<v Speaker 2>to say it. So I just left that, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and I and I think, like, what can I do
<v Speaker 2>to preserve nature, you know, not to use it? And
<v Speaker 2>so that's why I started doing this guy and like
<v Speaker 2>more teaching about the native flora than their uses, you know.
<v Speaker 1>So you went, you went from like an anthropocentric view,
<v Speaker 1>which is I think how a lot of people get
<v Speaker 1>into it. Like for me, my anthropocentric view was I
<v Speaker 1>just want to plant trees that will destroy, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the uh. I want to plant these large trees and
<v Speaker 1>cities that will destroy, that will vandalize these you know
<v Speaker 1>places basically like fuck up the sidewalk or whatever you know,
<v Speaker 1>that will get big and uh cool. And I think
<v Speaker 1>it was like a relation. Maybe it was a relationship
<v Speaker 1>to graffiti when I was younger. So I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I just wanted to and that's why you.
<v Speaker 2>I wanted to ask you, like, why did you get
<v Speaker 2>obsessed with the Fitzroya.
<v Speaker 1>Well, because they were related to redwoods. Somebody told me
<v Speaker 1>about Fitzroya. And you know, there's these trees that grow
<v Speaker 1>in South America that are really old and evolved in
<v Speaker 1>the Jurassic and there's fossils of them, you know, from
<v Speaker 1>the other side of the world, from Tasmania. There's a
<v Speaker 1>you know, there's a Fitzroya from Tasmania that's you know,
<v Speaker 1>the cones. That's like clearly, it's clearly related to allersays.
<v Speaker 1>And I was, you know, and I would think about
<v Speaker 1>these distant places in these forests, and it always felt
<v Speaker 1>good to be in those places, you know, versus being
<v Speaker 1>in like a shopping mall. There's like a very for me.
<v Speaker 1>There's a connection between the things I hate and using
<v Speaker 1>the things I love as an antidote to them, because
<v Speaker 1>I grew up really angry and hating a lot of
<v Speaker 1>what I saw around me, which I think is good.
<v Speaker 1>I think if you don't have I think if you
<v Speaker 1>don't have that, you're not awake yet, You're not fucking
<v Speaker 1>paying attention, you know, because the world that humans have created,
<v Speaker 1>especially in this century, this consumer world. And again that's
<v Speaker 1>why the billboards are like so jarring to me. It's
<v Speaker 1>like it's so disgusting. There's so much more there than
<v Speaker 1>just this you know, piece of metal and board that's
<v Speaker 1>got an image on it, Like there's it says so
<v Speaker 1>much more to me. It's like it's so much more
<v Speaker 1>fucking repugnant and disgusting to me. And so but anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I got into I got into redwoods when someone told
<v Speaker 1>me what they were. I'd been around them for five years.
<v Speaker 1>I just wasn't paying attention. And then and then it
<v Speaker 1>was the same thing. I started to just pay attention
<v Speaker 1>to more stuff and read about more stuff, and then
<v Speaker 1>learning about taxonomy and this is related to this, And
<v Speaker 1>slowly I started zooming out more and looking at other
<v Speaker 1>plant groups and it was really fascinating. I just you know,
<v Speaker 1>the more you learn, the more you're like, holy shit,
<v Speaker 1>there's some really fascinating stuff here. And so that's what
<v Speaker 1>I did, and that's how I ended up kind of
<v Speaker 1>getting going down this wormhole that I'm like now perpetually
<v Speaker 1>stuck in. And I think it's you know, for edible plants.
<v Speaker 1>It's the same for a lot of people too. They're like,
<v Speaker 1>I'm really into like foraging, going out there, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I'm going out there starting off with this like just
<v Speaker 1>the primal urge to eat something, to put some shit
<v Speaker 1>in my mouth, see what I could eat whatever, And
<v Speaker 1>then it kind of branches off into this other stuff
<v Speaker 1>or herbalism, medicinal people get into like medicinal plants, what
<v Speaker 1>can I use to make a potion? Whatever? And I'm
<v Speaker 1>not knocking it, but but you know, and then they
<v Speaker 1>kind of zoom out and they're like, wow, there's a
<v Speaker 1>lot more here than I thought. This is pretty cool,
<v Speaker 1>you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's just one element of the whole picture. And yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I mean when I started, I also like for me,
<v Speaker 2>I even if I didn't get it at first, for me,
<v Speaker 2>going to the forest is like a huge medicine, you know,
<v Speaker 2>Like I was because when I live in Santiago, like
<v Speaker 2>this life was so stressful that just going to the
<v Speaker 2>forest was like a like clear your mind and you
<v Speaker 2>feel so much better, like being alone, like listening to
<v Speaker 2>the birds to always discovers some new thing, you know,
<v Speaker 2>or the climate every day is different. So man, I
<v Speaker 2>think it's such a great medicine, even if you don't know,
<v Speaker 2>like which plants are you seeing or whatever, like, man,
<v Speaker 2>just go to the to the end. Luckily in Santiago
<v Speaker 2>we have the hills, you know, and you can just
<v Speaker 2>go up a hill and you will get away from
<v Speaker 2>it all and you can see it from far, like
<v Speaker 2>two different, completely different worlds.
<v Speaker 3>I think it's crazy.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And and I feel bad for flat places, like
<v Speaker 2>you were telling me, like you know how you o,
<v Speaker 2>because I think if Tila was flat, we wouldn't have
<v Speaker 2>any nature whatsoever, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the terrain protects everything. The terrain protects anything otherwise,
<v Speaker 1>the ecosystem. Otherwise the death cult would have taken everything,
<v Speaker 1>because it's it does behave like a tumor. It takes everything.
<v Speaker 1>It's it just keeps growing.
<v Speaker 2>So it's a sanctuary for plants and for people or
<v Speaker 2>so like you can go there and feel amazing, like
<v Speaker 2>for free.
<v Speaker 1>But the more people you have that are turned out
<v Speaker 1>of this shit, the more protection it affords it, because
<v Speaker 1>then people start valuing it and there's an inherent value
<v Speaker 1>for it, and they decide they don't want to let
<v Speaker 1>the developers and the you know, the greedy companies and
<v Speaker 1>all these people that have no clue what they're missing,
<v Speaker 1>that are so thoroughly disconnected that you know, the people
<v Speaker 1>that value this stuff are then you know, don't want
<v Speaker 1>to let them take everything. But if you're in a
<v Speaker 1>place where you have no idea what's out there, you
<v Speaker 1>see a lot being developed or sign go up, you know,
<v Speaker 1>telling you that, oh there's going to be you know,
<v Speaker 1>five hundred town homes here or a shopping center, and
<v Speaker 1>you're like, well, I don't care whatever, it doesn't affect me.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I got video games and a job that
<v Speaker 1>I have to go to and uh, you know, I
<v Speaker 1>come home and watch Netflix and disconnect and what do
<v Speaker 1>I care? Like that's my world, has nothing to do
<v Speaker 1>with that. But when you value it, it's like that's
<v Speaker 1>my ship. Man, what are you doing. You're taking you're
<v Speaker 1>robbing me to put up like this garbage that is hideous,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and that is just going to make you.
<v Speaker 2>Here in Tilla now, one of the biggest problems we
<v Speaker 2>have is like they're selling a lot of natural landscapes
<v Speaker 2>two people as something ecological, you know, say go and
<v Speaker 2>live here in the forest, like, but they're like disgregating
<v Speaker 2>so much land. Actually a lot of the boat.
<v Speaker 3>And East and specialists. This is like the most.
<v Speaker 2>I mean the the the actual worst danger that we
<v Speaker 2>have in nature that there's so much of it is
<v Speaker 2>being like turned into like developing but masquerade as ecological thing.
<v Speaker 2>You know. I don't know if you have that over
<v Speaker 2>there also.
<v Speaker 1>Where it's like, you know, come live in your dream
<v Speaker 1>home in the in the forest or something like that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Yeah, and they sell it like we're protecting this,
<v Speaker 2>but actually they're they're the strain it. And they also
<v Speaker 2>starting use to use the mountains, like the very high
<v Speaker 2>high mountains that we saw in San Fabiano. They're being
<v Speaker 2>sold to people, you know, like even though it's very
<v Speaker 2>steep and all. They will do a road, you know,
<v Speaker 2>they will do some houses. But these people are selling
<v Speaker 2>it as as preservation, you know. And this is a
<v Speaker 2>big year it's happening.
<v Speaker 1>So it's so twisted, it's so cynical. Man.
<v Speaker 2>Well, actually in San Fayandco, we we have an on
<v Speaker 2>g and we met up with the corporate bustards man
<v Speaker 2>and then they they didn't know nothing about the place,
<v Speaker 2>you know, like and and their web page they're putting
<v Speaker 2>pictures of the species that grow in North America birds
<v Speaker 2>that are from Africa.
<v Speaker 1>Man, it's crazy, classy, classy, fucking fuck.
<v Speaker 2>They just see that that's a business for them. It's
<v Speaker 2>just a business opportunity, but they sell it us something.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they're tainted. They're tainted with the Yeah that's that's
<v Speaker 1>so gross. Oh cup living your your dream forest and
<v Speaker 1>we don't know anything about it. Yeah, it's just that,
<v Speaker 1>it's that mentality, it's the disconnected. They need to be
<v Speaker 1>dosed either with with LSD or with like having to
<v Speaker 1>go live in these places and learn the plants.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>That's what I would do if I had like a
<v Speaker 1>boot camp, I could force people to go take some
<v Speaker 1>of these fucking business assholes on a school bus and
<v Speaker 1>and make them go to a camp where it's like,
<v Speaker 1>you're forced to fucking learn the plants. I'm gonna drag
<v Speaker 1>your ass up these hills. You know, we'll go on
<v Speaker 1>how you're gonna learn all shit, You're gonna whatever. And
<v Speaker 1>if you don't, you get bat you get beaten. You
<v Speaker 1>just you know, you get lashes, like a forced bootcap
<v Speaker 1>punishment a prison camp where you're forced to learn botany
<v Speaker 1>and hike. And it's only it's reserved specifically for businessmen.
<v Speaker 2>That's a really great idea, that's.
<v Speaker 1>What you need. Yeah, okay, well let's talk about plans.
<v Speaker 1>So well, well, actually, first off, I want to get
<v Speaker 1>to the when you left Santiago and then we'll talk
<v Speaker 1>about plans. So you were living in Santiago and it
<v Speaker 1>just felt like hell, and then you kind of already
<v Speaker 1>were turned onto this and then that's when you.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, santiagois it's not such a word city, but
<v Speaker 2>it depends a lot, like where you live and where
<v Speaker 2>you work, you know, because people live in like cool
<v Speaker 2>places and they go to buy through work and they
<v Speaker 2>go to the coffee shop, and I think that life
<v Speaker 2>is kind of cool, you know. But there's also people
<v Speaker 2>that live like two hours away from their work, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and that's when life turns hell. And that life for
<v Speaker 2>me was kind of like that, you know. So after
<v Speaker 2>first my job as a designer was it was killing
<v Speaker 2>me on the inside.
<v Speaker 3>I was working for big companies, you know, doing.
<v Speaker 2>Work for corporate assholes that treated us like shit, you know,
<v Speaker 2>so slowly I was thinking like, how can I leave
<v Speaker 2>this work and work in the forest, you know, like
<v Speaker 2>work in a natural environment. So that's why I started
<v Speaker 2>learning about these edible plants to to make a living
<v Speaker 2>out of it, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think Santiago is actually by American
<v Speaker 1>city standards, like we can Americans do cities worst in Santiago.
<v Speaker 1>Santiago wasn't that bad a lack of billboards alone. But
<v Speaker 1>what did drive me nuts there was the car dependency.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, it's so fucking polluted. Man, in Mexico City
<v Speaker 1>is like that too. It's like so polluted, and everybody's
<v Speaker 1>trying to drive and it's like, man, you live in
<v Speaker 1>a fucking dope city. Like you can walk. You evolved
<v Speaker 1>to walk, you got two legs, Like there's no reason
<v Speaker 1>you need to drive everywhere. It's inane, Like you can walk. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you know, Like that's that's the one of the best
<v Speaker 1>things about cities like that that are older is that
<v Speaker 1>you can walk around and and see things and it's
<v Speaker 1>nice and you get exercise and to get to like actually,
<v Speaker 1>you know, burn calories or get you know, spend energy.
<v Speaker 1>You don't need to go to a gym and breathe
<v Speaker 1>a off gassing plastic can listen to shitty techno and
<v Speaker 1>hear the grunts of some meathead dropping it. You know,
<v Speaker 1>weights every fucking you know, thirty seconds. You ever been
<v Speaker 1>to a gym, So I try to avoid them now,
<v Speaker 1>but I usually, oh god, it's so depressed.
<v Speaker 2>And exercise in the in the hill. Yeah. I think
<v Speaker 2>Santiago is that you have a mix, you know, like
<v Speaker 2>like little spots where it's cool, but most of this,
<v Speaker 2>most of it, I think it's hell because we're getting
<v Speaker 2>I mean we're American. I think you know, we're having
<v Speaker 2>each time more cars, each time, more highways.
<v Speaker 3>And the thing that you said about pollution, it's big.
<v Speaker 2>You know, in Chile we have like most of the
<v Speaker 2>most polluted cities in America because they're we're in a hole,
<v Speaker 2>you know, like there's nowhere for.
<v Speaker 1>The Yeah, it's like the mountains are like a wall.
<v Speaker 1>You're just it's like you're just poisoning yourself.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know if you saw it, but when you
<v Speaker 2>you reach Santiago in by car from far you can
<v Speaker 2>see like the mushroom clouds of smug you know.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, yeah, it's Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>That was also a big reason for me to live
<v Speaker 2>because I have like some respiratory issues, so that that
<v Speaker 2>thing was killing me.
<v Speaker 1>Basically, Yeah, you're just smelling car you're just smelling like
<v Speaker 1>exhaust the whole time. It's like sitting in a It's
<v Speaker 1>like sitting in a garage and just running the car.
<v Speaker 1>You know. It's like, which is how people kill themselves
<v Speaker 1>sometimes too here. You know, I don't know if when
<v Speaker 1>the last time I heard someone in the US commit
<v Speaker 1>suicide with the old hose in the exhaust pipe. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, it's been a while, but that used to
<v Speaker 1>be a popular way to check out, you know, in
<v Speaker 1>the eighties and nineties, and it worked. It worked. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that's that parking smell. But anyway, so you go ahead.
<v Speaker 2>I think the crazy thing is that you get used
<v Speaker 2>to it. Like right now I'm in my Alcore, like
<v Speaker 2>where my girlfriend lives. That it's near Santiago. So yesterday
<v Speaker 2>I was in the bus station. There was like fifty
<v Speaker 2>buses with the engines on. And now that I'm used
<v Speaker 2>to live in the forest, man, my brain was like melting,
<v Speaker 2>you know. And I saw people around and they make
<v Speaker 2>their lives like they think that it's normal. But you
<v Speaker 2>can see their eye twitching. You know, it's not good.
<v Speaker 1>It's really it's really bad. I mean that ship is
<v Speaker 1>really that's poison. You're breathing in poison air.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and the stressed.
<v Speaker 1>So tell me, but now you live in a really
<v Speaker 1>nice area, and so let's talk about some of the plants.
<v Speaker 1>They're like, you know, it's cool to see I really
<v Speaker 1>wanted to see what it was underwhelming when I saw
<v Speaker 1>it was Bokila trifolia, of the plant that's gotten so much,
<v Speaker 1>so much press for being able to mimic other plants,
<v Speaker 1>but we did not see that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. I actually I'm in my project of digitalizing leads.
<v Speaker 2>I'm also every bokilla that I see growing on a
<v Speaker 2>specific tree, I'm digitalizing it so I can so maybe
<v Speaker 2>I can see a pattern. But like you, every time
<v Speaker 2>I see a I don't see it. Like especially like
<v Speaker 2>mimicking the plant where it's growing on the leaves are
<v Speaker 2>some like it changes a lot from plant to plants,
<v Speaker 2>but for me, it's not evident that the plant does this.
<v Speaker 1>You know, large dieselbilasi order with an alas yeah, and
<v Speaker 1>large lard lard disabella. Yeah. What was any other genus
<v Speaker 1>was lard disabella in there? Right? Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that one didn't copy the other plants.
<v Speaker 1>And they just got these tiny you know, like almost
<v Speaker 1>as flowers, small flowers but uh, but it was still
<v Speaker 1>cool to see. It was like, okay, well this is it.
<v Speaker 1>And also nah, you know, but you know, not to
<v Speaker 1>be not to be you know, not to be rude
<v Speaker 1>to the plant or anything. I still appreciate it as
<v Speaker 1>part of a living system. But but drymus winter I
<v Speaker 1>you guys, there's all these Magnolias. You guys got all
<v Speaker 1>these magnoliads down there, the four Magnoliad orders Canalalies, pipe Ales,
<v Speaker 1>magnolia alis, and Loreles. Although like more basil angiosperms, and
<v Speaker 1>it was cool to see. I mean these weird family
<v Speaker 1>like monimiac I don't really I don't you know what
<v Speaker 1>that's a that's a family we don't get that much
<v Speaker 1>in North America. Athosperma tacy which I think was at
<v Speaker 1>Loureliopsis or Lourelia I forget which one. But that's a
<v Speaker 1>family that I saw in Tasmania. I mean all these
<v Speaker 1>Southern hemisphere Magnoliad lineages, which also have members on the
<v Speaker 1>other side of the globe in New Zealand or Tasmania.
<v Speaker 1>Was really cool to see all those.
<v Speaker 2>I think it's for for us to see other people
<v Speaker 2>like getting a kick out of our forest. It's I
<v Speaker 2>mean for us that's the normal thing, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yea.
<v Speaker 3>So it's very cool to see.
<v Speaker 2>You and Matt and when Nolan and Mia came that
<v Speaker 2>you have like you have like a more world flora view,
<v Speaker 2>you know. So I also wanted to ask you, like,
<v Speaker 2>what do you think is so special about the Chilian flora, like,
<v Speaker 2>because I know you guys like.
<v Speaker 3>The conifferst because here are.
<v Speaker 2>Like rare, you know, over there they're like the norm,
<v Speaker 2>but here all the conifers are like kind of rare.
<v Speaker 2>And also the violas Nolan was also crazy about, I
<v Speaker 2>mean something about viola's the form that you like or.
<v Speaker 1>Well it's well with the alpine stuff. It's not just
<v Speaker 1>the violas that do that rosolate rosette form. It's so much.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, there's so many different families. You know, it's
<v Speaker 1>a convergent trait. It's a convergent evolution among high alpine environments.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you're staying out of the wind, You're staying
<v Speaker 1>closer to the ground where it's warm where because it
<v Speaker 1>gets chilly up there obviously, and you're also conserving moisture.
<v Speaker 1>You're preventing the wind flow from getting in between those
<v Speaker 1>leaves and the axis of the plant. You're basically like
<v Speaker 1>becoming a little helmet, you know. But what the lower
<v Speaker 1>elevation forest though, that I think is cool. You know
<v Speaker 1>when you see like Lourelia sempervenance, which is at therospermatas,
<v Speaker 1>or any of these weird magnolia lineages, or fuck the Lomosia,
<v Speaker 1>I mean that is that's proteace. That's the other Lomosia.
<v Speaker 1>The other Lomeosia grows in the other Lomesias grow in
<v Speaker 1>Tasmania and Australia. I mean, these are these are plants
<v Speaker 1>that have this innate connection to deep time and that
<v Speaker 1>we're the whole time. I'm down there, I was like, man,
<v Speaker 1>this ship was growing on Antarctica forty million years ago.
<v Speaker 1>This is what was growing, like, there was a lursa
<v Speaker 1>growing on Antarctica. Maybe the fossils haven't been found yet,
<v Speaker 1>but it was there. It's on the know, there's fossils.
<v Speaker 1>In Tasmania, there's fossils, I mean, and that's that's what
<v Speaker 1>it feels like in parts of like western Tasmania. I
<v Speaker 1>remember being on this like quartzitic white sand in Tasmania
<v Speaker 1>on this mountain, you know, it's only like a thousand,
<v Speaker 1>two thousand feet not even a thousand meters tall, and
<v Speaker 1>being like man, this feels like fucking this is some
<v Speaker 1>wild shit, like this is what and it was all
<v Speaker 1>gray and and you're like, this is what Antarctica was
<v Speaker 1>probably like during the Eocene. This is the same stuff,
<v Speaker 1>The same lineage is the same. You know, they've got
<v Speaker 1>Lagaro Struggles Franklinia over there, which is yeah, not though Vegas. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>same thing. I mean, there's like so many lineages that
<v Speaker 1>are in Tasmania, dozens dozens of lineages that are in
<v Speaker 1>Tasmania and also in South America and Chile and and
<v Speaker 1>don't grow anywhere else. And it was it's so cool.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's did you have there was a movie
<v Speaker 1>that came out where they filmed it in uh? I
<v Speaker 1>think it was in Patagonia. I forget it was Prometheus.
<v Speaker 1>It was like part of the sci fi alien movies,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like the you know that hr Giger.
<v Speaker 3>I didn't know they here. I saw it, like the Alien.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there's there's parts where I mean you could see
<v Speaker 1>Alersay trees in the fucking yeah, where was it? Where
<v Speaker 1>was you can see Alersay trees and that, and then
<v Speaker 1>you know it's all gray and it looks like a
<v Speaker 1>temperate rainforest. The yeah, it's it's wild, man.
<v Speaker 3>But forest is like a forest. That was it is
<v Speaker 3>like past in time.
<v Speaker 1>Oh you know what, I'm wrong, I'm sorry, it's it
<v Speaker 1>was filmed in Iceland, Scotland, England, Jordan, in Spain. What
<v Speaker 1>the fuck do I know? But there were I feel
<v Speaker 1>like there was a scene though where there was fucking
<v Speaker 1>huge allerses. I don't know either way, but it's got
<v Speaker 1>that I mean still high latitude. It's just the other
<v Speaker 1>side of the globe, but these high latitude environments and
<v Speaker 1>I think, you know, for me, that was the coolest
<v Speaker 1>part being at Chile was seeing these these plants that
<v Speaker 1>I know, you know, I've seen on the other side
<v Speaker 1>of the world, and that they are relictive when all
<v Speaker 1>those continents were together fifty million years ago, you know,
<v Speaker 1>because count the tectonic plates move at the rate that
<v Speaker 1>your fingernails grow. And it's like, man, this is I
<v Speaker 1>mean to think that like Antarctica had forests on it once.
<v Speaker 1>It's crazy. It's so nuts, you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I think not many people know this the specific data.
<v Speaker 2>So I also think it's very interesting and they're always
<v Speaker 2>finding like not the fact with fu yeah.
<v Speaker 1>And yeah, and the reason that it that it froze
<v Speaker 1>over was basically once the contents moved far enough away
<v Speaker 1>the ocean currents around it, you know, because oceans are
<v Speaker 1>like the heat transport mechanisms. You get a warm ocean
<v Speaker 1>current that's going to change the climate on the continent.
<v Speaker 1>Once it was cut off from those warm ocean currents,
<v Speaker 1>then then it fully froze over, and then we just
<v Speaker 1>entered the glaciation in general, global cooling in general. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, play tectonics are part of the reason why
<v Speaker 1>Antarctica froze over, and they're also the reason why there's
<v Speaker 1>these disparate you know, these disjunctions, you know, southern Chile
<v Speaker 1>and Tasmania and New Zealand and eastern southeastern Australia. So cool,
<v Speaker 1>so cool. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Actually, I've read I've read many papers on the notaphous
<v Speaker 2>and they say they enough houls developed on Antarctica and
<v Speaker 2>it started irradiating like through the centuries to Chile.
<v Speaker 3>Well, first like the Mediterranean.
<v Speaker 2>Ones were the biggest leaves were the one to come first.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And lastly, like the Dombeyi and these ones they need
<v Speaker 2>more cold or I don't know, Antarctica.
<v Speaker 1>What was that? Because you love the the not of Vegas,
<v Speaker 1>which is fucking I mean that's huge. How many species
<v Speaker 1>not of Vegas you got down there where I live? Well,
<v Speaker 1>where you living? Then further south, like what did you
<v Speaker 1>see on chilaway? What are some of the dominants?
<v Speaker 2>The Yeah, Chile, the dominant is not a fab but
<v Speaker 2>over if you go south, the biodiversity starts getting less,
<v Speaker 2>you know, like where we were in San Faandlico and
<v Speaker 2>especially the Maule region is the hot spot for biodiversities.
<v Speaker 3>In Maula they have eight species.
<v Speaker 1>What was to me so like around you because I
<v Speaker 1>remember you were you were we were walking with you, man,
<v Speaker 1>you were listening. You were like popping off not a
<v Speaker 1>Vegas species like nothing like that's not a Vegas blah
<v Speaker 1>blah blah, that's not a Vegas in this And I
<v Speaker 1>was like, holy shit, I can't keep up. And these
<v Speaker 1>these are like massively important trees. I mean they're scaffolding
<v Speaker 1>for a host of microorganisms in the soil. They associate
<v Speaker 1>with that Sitaria fungus, which is that cool edible you
<v Speaker 1>know orange fungus, which is that doesn't come out till winter, right.
<v Speaker 3>No citarias come out in spring.
<v Speaker 1>Oh shit, and they formed alls.
<v Speaker 3>I think you saw one hard one with matt in
<v Speaker 3>the ground.
<v Speaker 1>Right, yeah. Yeah, but I mean I first saw them
<v Speaker 1>in Tasmania and then in New Zealand. They're everywhere. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you can you know. They're edible. They kind of taste
<v Speaker 1>like mildly like apricots, but better than that, the kind
<v Speaker 1>of flavors.
<v Speaker 2>Not that facus is so important in Chile because they
<v Speaker 2>like dominate like fifty percent of all the forests, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and you have different they dominate, each specieses dominant, and
<v Speaker 2>some of them in Patagonia.
<v Speaker 3>Are like pure forests. So yeah, it's really important.
<v Speaker 2>And also the thing you were telling about the mushrooms,
<v Speaker 2>like some of the coolest for example, edible mushrooms are
<v Speaker 2>associated with nota fouls Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, because they're i mean, they're related to oaks or
<v Speaker 1>in the order for gaillies.
<v Speaker 2>But we saw in the Spanish the word for like
<v Speaker 2>not a fhaus obliqua it's oak, you know, like the
<v Speaker 2>Spaniards saw it and they said, oh, this is like
<v Speaker 2>the biggest and most dominant tree. It's an oak, you know.
<v Speaker 1>What is it Robla or encino or what? Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>there are We saw a dambie. I I mean, I'm
<v Speaker 1>pretty sure it was a dambia. The leaves were like
<v Speaker 1>one hundred feet above the ground, you know, thirty meters
<v Speaker 1>of the ground. But it was fucking massive in Conillo.
<v Speaker 1>And then there was Alpina and Pumilio. Pumilio is one
<v Speaker 1>of my favorites. Antarctica and nited A.
<v Speaker 2>What was that they leave?
<v Speaker 3>It's beautiful. It's like a little cloud.
<v Speaker 1>You get you get the dambie around you, right, But
<v Speaker 1>that's like the Northern Enche, northern edge of the range.
<v Speaker 3>I don't know if you remember.
<v Speaker 2>The biggest trees we saw in San Fabian are actually
<v Speaker 2>DOMBEYI is the biggest tree we have in Chile after
<v Speaker 2>the Yeah, man, it grows huge. Actually, in Congill it's
<v Speaker 2>full of like really huge dombeys.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah, we saw one. It was so it
<v Speaker 1>was so cool to see. I was like, man, how
<v Speaker 1>the fuck how old is this? How fast did they grow?
<v Speaker 1>Are they like medium? Right? Not very fast? Not very slower?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, media, Actually at first they grow relatively fast and
<v Speaker 2>they start pacing. But some of these trees are six hundred,
<v Speaker 2>seven hundred years old. So cool to see them and
<v Speaker 2>think that they have seen all the story of Chile
<v Speaker 2>and they've been saved, you know, because here there's such
<v Speaker 2>a long history of the forestation and selling.
<v Speaker 3>Wood to all the world.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, to see a big one, it's like, man, this
<v Speaker 2>God's saved.
<v Speaker 1>You know. Did you say they can live? How old?
<v Speaker 1>Fifteen hundred no?
<v Speaker 2>No? No? Seven seven zero zero? I think seven yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>a little bit less than one thousand.
<v Speaker 1>Years can reach Yeah, okay, yeah, that makes because they.
<v Speaker 2>Start they just at some point they always grow by
<v Speaker 2>the water, the die off or they fall.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know the SKA I want to. I'm trying
<v Speaker 1>to get someone about on the podcast talking about Chisca
<v Speaker 1>that that was seeing that down there as wild because
<v Speaker 1>it's so dominant the further south you go. I mean
<v Speaker 1>like in Congeo, it's like the whole understory. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if it was just keay aquila or uh cool
<v Speaker 1>you or how how you pronounced that, but I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you know it's just sk is one of those genero
<v Speaker 1>like oh it's a scale which species, I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>it's scae just it's just your scale what it's like.
<v Speaker 1>But there's still I.
<v Speaker 3>Mean the big one, the Kullo.
<v Speaker 2>That one you can tell because it's the thickest one,
<v Speaker 2>you know, Yeah, that one is easy to to know,
<v Speaker 2>but all the small ones.
<v Speaker 3>Man.
<v Speaker 2>Actually there's a paper and argentinan guy that made are
<v Speaker 2>a woman or no.
<v Speaker 3>They made the taxonomy and they are confused.
<v Speaker 1>You know.
<v Speaker 2>They need more studies to know when which piecies which.
<v Speaker 2>Actually in Chile here it's difficult because they they flower
<v Speaker 2>like its ten years, fifteen years, so you see the
<v Speaker 2>too sky flowers. It's hard, you know.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't see any flower match that you sawone with
<v Speaker 1>a with an inflorescence sound, and I didn't see any.
<v Speaker 1>My friend Nico sent me the key to the genus
<v Speaker 1>and I was like, yeah, I don't. It's like the keys.
<v Speaker 1>It's you know, right, like the characters may or may
<v Speaker 1>not be present when you're viewing, you know, when you're
<v Speaker 1>seeing this thing.
<v Speaker 2>But ecologically, to sky is very interesting because when there's
<v Speaker 2>a fire, to sky is like the first one to appear,
<v Speaker 2>you know, and it could last some years, like a
<v Speaker 2>whole section of a hill can be covered and to
<v Speaker 2>ska until the soil is healed to get the trees again.
<v Speaker 2>You know, it's h And also they they they flower
<v Speaker 2>all at the same time, like one species in one vallet.
<v Speaker 2>It will flower all at the same time.
<v Speaker 1>That's that's wild.
<v Speaker 2>That's crazy.
<v Speaker 3>You know, they die off all at the same time.
<v Speaker 2>So it's crazy to see that the landscapes changed a lot,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and how do they signal to each other? You know,
<v Speaker 1>what what queues are they really like that that triggers
<v Speaker 1>every individual to flower at the same time. But there
<v Speaker 1>are pioneer species basically.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they're pioneers. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>There were some cool spots we saw, well, I forget
<v Speaker 1>where it was we were. It was a higher elevation spot.
<v Speaker 1>We were at like seven thousand feet and there was
<v Speaker 1>just sca up there forming but it was forming these
<v Speaker 1>little patches. And then it was surrounded by Dyscaria, which
<v Speaker 1>is uh, what is that ramnacy?
<v Speaker 2>Yes, yeah, yeah, very pointy spiny planets.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, a lot of ramnassy up there. But but god,
<v Speaker 1>it was it was wild to see it. I was like, man,
<v Speaker 1>this is like an alpine bamboo. This is that's forming
<v Speaker 1>these little colonies on like what is an otherwise kind
<v Speaker 1>of barren slope near these geothermal areas, near this hot spring.
<v Speaker 2>It was in Tasmania and those places you don't get
<v Speaker 2>to scap.
<v Speaker 1>Uh no, no, there's you get that. In Tasmania you
<v Speaker 1>get a dominant One of the most dominant species is
<v Speaker 1>a sedge called uh oh god, spherrocephale. It's it's cyperasi.
<v Speaker 1>It's forget the name. I'd have to look it up,
<v Speaker 1>but but it's everywhere, and it's it's called like button
<v Speaker 1>sedge or something. I forget the I forget the name,
<v Speaker 1>but uh but it's everywhere and it forms these peat
<v Speaker 1>It's got really thick roots. And if the roots form
<v Speaker 1>like this peat like material, let me see what was it? Yeah, Jim, no,
<v Speaker 1>sheenas spirocephale. This is like the dominant gramminoid in Tasmania.
<v Speaker 2>So this was something you haven't seen before in other
<v Speaker 2>places uses the space.
<v Speaker 1>No, I mean I've seen SKA. I've encountered it in
<v Speaker 1>Brazil it like, you know, more music montane environments, but
<v Speaker 1>I've never.
<v Speaker 3>Or other or other bamboo species.
<v Speaker 2>That's my question, Like you see like other species behaving
<v Speaker 2>this way or do you think it's like kind of
<v Speaker 2>unique to these places.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know enough about bamboos. There's a name we
<v Speaker 1>get to ruinin area Gigantia, which is a bamboo in
<v Speaker 1>in uh North America. But but I think that's it.
<v Speaker 1>I think that's the only one. They call it giant kane.
<v Speaker 1>It's like it's very it's common among like like on rivers.
<v Speaker 1>It's like more of like a riparian plant. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>there's a couple other run also here.
<v Speaker 2>To I mean here culturally to ski is also so important.
<v Speaker 2>We were talking about this in is such a good
<v Speaker 2>construction material.
<v Speaker 1>It is. Yeah, it's I mean, it's the fuck. I
<v Speaker 1>bet they were, like, I bet some species were used
<v Speaker 1>as zeros. I mean obviously back in the day.
<v Speaker 2>No, no, I hear it was a spear, you know,
<v Speaker 2>the use of spears and yeah, a lot of Spaniards
<v Speaker 2>heads were put on these two gas and and show
<v Speaker 2>it around the villages, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, what was the The Mapuche were the dominant
<v Speaker 1>tribe down there right in like south of something.
<v Speaker 2>There's like nowadays they like get all together and say Mapuche.
<v Speaker 2>In the old days, there was like the Waches and
<v Speaker 2>in the north, and Mapuchas were more like in the south,
<v Speaker 2>especially in the Aracania region.
<v Speaker 3>And actually they have like the record.
<v Speaker 2>Of hanging on to the colonization, for they weren't weren't
<v Speaker 2>like totally colonized until like two thousands, I mean two hundred,
<v Speaker 2>two hundred and fifty years ago.
<v Speaker 3>You know.
<v Speaker 2>They stayed in Araucania and it was their place, you know,
<v Speaker 2>until Chile appeared. And then the Chileans entered with great
<v Speaker 2>force and horrible ways. But they hanged very long because
<v Speaker 2>they were five sty people, you know, they and they
<v Speaker 2>wanted to defend their land.
<v Speaker 3>You know.
<v Speaker 2>The Arabcarias were very important to them, especially because they
<v Speaker 2>ate you know, the pinions, the seed. So yeah, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>but nowadays in south central Chilla, like the Maputas are
<v Speaker 2>seen like the most important culture and they they're still
<v Speaker 2>hanging on, you know, but they're also like they were
<v Speaker 2>left with the worst spots, you know, like the nicest
<v Speaker 2>places are now like Pertavarda's places like this, you know,
<v Speaker 2>like near the lagoons like which people live, but they
<v Speaker 2>were like taking them out of the nice places step
<v Speaker 2>by step. Now a lot of them live like near
<v Speaker 2>the plantations, you know, in awful places.
<v Speaker 1>We went to the museum, that pre Columbian museum in Santiago.
<v Speaker 1>That was pretty dop. There was some cool shitting there.
<v Speaker 1>That's a good one where there. Do you know where
<v Speaker 1>their era carriers in the in the valley between naw
<v Speaker 1>A Buddha and Congio.
<v Speaker 2>I think I searched this, but I think, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>I think not in the central valley. But Akaria did
<v Speaker 2>grow a lot, because you see Aurcaria now and you say, oh,
<v Speaker 2>this is a high attitude three, you know, but it
<v Speaker 2>grows some one hundred meters lower, you know. But I
<v Speaker 2>don't think it reached the central valley, you know. But
<v Speaker 2>nowadays it's like it's it's uh, it's what's left, you know. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>because it's crazy. All the Aracaia trees you see, they're
<v Speaker 2>really old. So it it's crazy to see so much
<v Speaker 2>old growth forest inca like all around you in those
<v Speaker 2>highest places.
<v Speaker 1>Massive they were saved and covered in that that usnia.
<v Speaker 1>That liking is like, that's like the cherry on top
<v Speaker 1>of the sunday Man. That's the most incredible. It makes everything.
<v Speaker 2>It's like creepy, but in a good way.
<v Speaker 1>I love it. Oh, it's psychedelic. It makes the whole
<v Speaker 1>like landscape in front of you just look wild.
<v Speaker 2>Just moved with the wind. Yeah, it's so beautiful enough
<v Speaker 2>for us, I mean until it is so like iconic,
<v Speaker 2>you know, like it's like one of the most iconic
<v Speaker 2>trees and it's part of the culture nowadays, like people,
<v Speaker 2>I love it.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't know it was fire adapted too. Supposedly it's
<v Speaker 1>fire adapted. It's got that thick bark. Yeah, yeah, I
<v Speaker 1>mean that's what it's what niko It said, there's like
<v Speaker 1>a history of fire. I thought that thick bark was
<v Speaker 1>more of a you know for cold, but I guess
<v Speaker 1>there's history of fire. But the bark, those plates and
<v Speaker 1>they look like the plastrons on the shell of a
<v Speaker 1>tortoise or something. Those plates on the bark.
<v Speaker 3>Look like it's like a complete dinosaur.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I mean some of them are like some are
<v Speaker 1>like ten centimeters thick. It's so it's crazy, man, It's
<v Speaker 1>it's a really thick bark.
<v Speaker 2>But you went to Gongiyo, you saw the like the
<v Speaker 2>really huge one yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, a millenario yeah. And there's one in uh now
<v Speaker 1>a Buddha. Two. There's a couple of really huge ones
<v Speaker 1>in now a Buddha that are just I mean, you
<v Speaker 1>can't like it's one of those places you go to
<v Speaker 1>and if you're if you're not a jadrul, you stand
<v Speaker 1>at the base of thing. You just stare at it
<v Speaker 1>for like ten minutes. You're like, man, what the fuck?
<v Speaker 1>What is what is this living thing in front of me?
<v Speaker 1>This is insane. This is a fucking dinosaur. This tree
<v Speaker 1>is a dinosaur.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I've heard a lot of stories of Chilean
<v Speaker 2>people when they go abroad and they are taken to forests,
<v Speaker 2>they say, what this is it? Expecting so much more?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah? Yeah, the Allerses, I mean you lived on Chilaway.
<v Speaker 1>The Alersas are mostly gone on ChIL Away. Huh yeah.
<v Speaker 2>You there. To get to them, you have to put
<v Speaker 2>boots and walk some days in the mud. It's great.
<v Speaker 2>I didn't win there. You know. I go with the
<v Speaker 2>guide because it's so easy to get lost. There's no
<v Speaker 2>real trails, you know, you have to go like opening
<v Speaker 2>the forest, but you can from the highway in the
<v Speaker 2>lowlands you can see and the altitude, you can see
<v Speaker 2>all the alert trunks that were burned, you know, because
<v Speaker 2>before when they wanted to cut a forest first, they
<v Speaker 2>burned it.
<v Speaker 1>You know, yeah, yeah, you saw me and they saw me.
<v Speaker 1>That thing about the Germans, right, that was it was
<v Speaker 1>German and it was it was that what it was
<v Speaker 1>German immigrants burning a lursay for because you when we
<v Speaker 1>were some smart I mean.
<v Speaker 2>That was two things, like the government started to bring
<v Speaker 2>Germans but also the government itself to open the land.
<v Speaker 2>They were Yeah, I guess some Germans also did this.
<v Speaker 2>They were just burning it, you know, because at that
<v Speaker 2>time that saw it, they saw it as something infinite,
<v Speaker 2>kind of infinite would so they just burned that. They
<v Speaker 2>didn't see any purpose to leave the forest besides doing cattling,
<v Speaker 2>you know, and some agriculture. So these fires, some of
<v Speaker 2>them lasted for months.
<v Speaker 1>You know. I didn't mean to single out the Germans.
<v Speaker 1>That was you know, that was unfair of me. They
<v Speaker 1>get it a lot. You know, a lot of people
<v Speaker 1>have no problems sometimes with the Germans, but I don't.
<v Speaker 1>I just want to put that out there. But the uh,
<v Speaker 1>the because you said you sent me those foot I
<v Speaker 1>still didn't look at them yet because I was in
<v Speaker 1>the middle of doing all this shit and running around.
<v Speaker 1>But it was about the fires that were set because
<v Speaker 1>I remember we were at we were at a lerce
<v Speaker 1>costero and we were on a hillside and there was
<v Speaker 1>pilgeriodendron growing there too, not a hillside like the top
<v Speaker 1>of a hill that was really boggy. It was really
<v Speaker 1>bizarre beautiful. There was pinguicula there, there was pilgerodendron and
<v Speaker 1>a lers growing together. The pilgerodendron didn't get taller than
<v Speaker 1>like two meters. And then we were in another spot
<v Speaker 1>where it was a bog where the pilgerodendron was like
<v Speaker 1>forty feet tall, you know, like twelve fifteen meters. It
<v Speaker 1>was large, but it was growing in a depression like
<v Speaker 1>in a bog you could tell it stayed wet. But
<v Speaker 1>in this boggy hilltop it wasn't getting that tall. But
<v Speaker 1>the alerse got kind of tall, and then you would
<v Speaker 1>look out across this valley and there was just tons
<v Speaker 1>of dead gray lers, trunks.
<v Speaker 2>Most probably most probably were the fires.
<v Speaker 1>That's grist. So I'm so confused about the ecology of
<v Speaker 1>the Alertsa ecosystem because alersa are not shade talerant like
<v Speaker 1>redwoods are, but they need a lot of water at
<v Speaker 1>the same time, so they're growing in like like really
<v Speaker 1>boggy areas where it's wet, but it's nutrient poorest so
<v Speaker 1>they don't get smothered and shaded out or what. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Actually in Til I heard a lot of stories that
<v Speaker 2>the the Alersas grow on the lowlands on the on
<v Speaker 2>the spacnum. I don't know how you call it the
<v Speaker 2>moss yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you call the bug.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, yes, phagnum yeah, like sphagnum.
<v Speaker 3>They grow on the box before like the squishes.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. And and you're right, like if the two skak
<v Speaker 2>covers the forest, the alersay is not able to grow,
<v Speaker 2>you know. Yeah, it's they need some sunlight.
<v Speaker 1>It was. It's a really peculiar and cool habitat. And
<v Speaker 1>then Alersa and Dino. Uh what is that like? Because
<v Speaker 1>we went we just went to like the main tree.
<v Speaker 1>They had the lake off access. You couldn't get to
<v Speaker 1>the top, but you could see a bunch of Alersas
<v Speaker 1>on the ridge. There's have you been there? There's more
<v Speaker 1>there's older ones up top right.
<v Speaker 2>No, I've been to other parks that have a lot.
<v Speaker 2>I have to Pumlin that it's a little bit south.
<v Speaker 2>It's I don't know if you know the owner from
<v Speaker 2>Patagonia made a lot of parks in southern Chile.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, and I've seen that. I've seen the documentary
<v Speaker 1>on that guy a while ago. Yeah, there's so you
<v Speaker 1>but what is it like further south? I mean, is
<v Speaker 1>there like are there still big ass old alers trees
<v Speaker 1>and where there's like a number of them, like not
<v Speaker 1>just one because in a coster you walk.
<v Speaker 2>You can see them by the highway and in this park,
<v Speaker 2>you are in the highway, you stopped and you you
<v Speaker 2>walk like five minutes and you can see big alerses.
<v Speaker 2>But they say that the most old alertas are like
<v Speaker 2>maybe they don't know where they are yet because they
<v Speaker 2>the log was so heavy that they are like in ravines,
<v Speaker 2>you know, like very far. You have to walk a
<v Speaker 2>lot of days to get to the really old alerts,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I was going to say, do you think there's
<v Speaker 1>areas where you could I mean like remote areas where
<v Speaker 1>they weren't able to get in and log where there's
<v Speaker 1>still like a forest of really large two or three
<v Speaker 1>or four meter diameter trees.
<v Speaker 2>What we were talking before, like the mountains saved some
<v Speaker 2>of this ecosystem and some of the biggest trees you
<v Speaker 2>can see anchilla. They're like in places that you know,
<v Speaker 2>it was hard for them to get caught, or they
<v Speaker 2>were not like tubular perfect trees. There were more deformed.
<v Speaker 2>So some of the deformed trees they left it there,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, where it's just so steep, it's so rugged
<v Speaker 1>and steep and steep places.
<v Speaker 2>It's also must be really difficult to get to one
<v Speaker 2>of these to discover new big trees. You know. But
<v Speaker 2>I think if in California they discover these hyperion three
<v Speaker 2>three here, we must have a lot of big annessas
<v Speaker 2>that haven't been discovered yet.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, I'm sure when you look at a map of
<v Speaker 1>southern Chile and you see how much is carved up
<v Speaker 1>with all those fjords and and and estuaries, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>I mean to get like, once you go south of
<v Speaker 1>Puerto Mont you gotta take what like five different ferries
<v Speaker 1>to get to the very end of the the road, which.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, actually yeah something like that.
<v Speaker 1>Where where is where is that highway end? Where is that?
<v Speaker 1>I got to look at a map. Somebody sent me
<v Speaker 1>photos of some really wild ass plants from the Andes
<v Speaker 1>Way further south of Puerto Mound. Where does that road end,
<v Speaker 1>you know.
<v Speaker 2>Fuck, I don't know specifically, but then you have to
<v Speaker 2>cross to Argentina at some point, you know, no ship
<v Speaker 2>really yeah, yeah, Chile is not connected through a highway.
<v Speaker 1>You know.
<v Speaker 2>There's a lot of places that, I mean, at some
<v Speaker 2>point you have to to cross to Argentina and then
<v Speaker 2>you can cross again to Chile. But is especially in
<v Speaker 2>this part full of fjords, that it's really really hard
<v Speaker 2>to make a highway and and there's no people there,
<v Speaker 2>so there's also no not much reason to do it.
<v Speaker 1>You know that it's the fucking end of the world
<v Speaker 1>down there, man, it really is. It's where there's sidewalk,
<v Speaker 1>so fucking cool where yeah, yeah, it's all ferries. Man,
<v Speaker 1>you need ferries to get every wow geezeh.
<v Speaker 2>I mean you live for tomato and you have to
<v Speaker 2>take a ferry right away, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, you go south of Alers Andino National Park
<v Speaker 1>and then there's like a small stretch of what is
<v Speaker 1>that the highway Route seven, Highway seven, and then you got.
<v Speaker 3>To get the highway.
<v Speaker 1>Highway is a Cardadero whate okay, yeah yeah, and.
<v Speaker 3>This part also it's like a jungle.
<v Speaker 2>You know, if you want to walk where there's no path, man,
<v Speaker 2>it's crazy. You will get lost so easily. You have
<v Speaker 2>to go with a machete. It's especially in the Sus
<v Speaker 2>it's impossible to gross so and I think it's a
<v Speaker 2>good thing. It's helping to prefer more these places, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but then there's alpine areas like volcan what is it?
<v Speaker 1>Chai tan? Chai tan? Yeah, how do you pronounce it?
<v Speaker 1>You know what? You know what it is? That volcano?
<v Speaker 1>I'm looking at a satellite.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there's a big pink over.
<v Speaker 2>There, the Cordillera. It's a lot. It's not so high,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's.
<v Speaker 1>It's a big pink volcano of andesite surrounded by temperate rainforest.
<v Speaker 1>It looks incredible. Jesus, Yeah, I see where over there,
<v Speaker 1>I see where that guy real or preserved all those parks. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and you could see everything's just been carved up by glaciers.
<v Speaker 1>Holy ship, there's all these cirques and valleys and Jesus man.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, over there you can see the actually the over
<v Speaker 2>there was like the the frontier of the last ice Age.
<v Speaker 2>For example, the half of Chiloe was with ice and
<v Speaker 2>the other half was not, you know. Yeah, and this
<v Speaker 2>and these big lakes also format when the glaciers retreated, you.
<v Speaker 1>Know, Jesus, Oh my god, man, oh Higgins. Yeah, that's
<v Speaker 1>what it was via oh Higgins. Have you been down
<v Speaker 1>that far before?
<v Speaker 2>No? I haven't been so far away yet.
<v Speaker 1>Via oh Higgins. Their parquet Cerro Santiago, It's wow, Jesus man,
<v Speaker 1>that's insane.
<v Speaker 2>Say over there they have like the the most awesome
<v Speaker 2>lass landscapes. But for me also it's like one part
<v Speaker 2>of the crazy capitalism that we have here. So for us,
<v Speaker 2>it's so expensive to go to the south, you know,
<v Speaker 2>rent the prices for us are crazy, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, I'm sure everything is just price gouched probably.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean yeah, And for me, I have a
<v Speaker 2>little bit of rage because of that, so I don't
<v Speaker 2>move so far. For example, last year I went, I did.
<v Speaker 2>I did a research and said, man, it's cheaper. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>it's the same price to go to Brazil, to go
<v Speaker 2>to Patagonia, you know, So I said, okay, I'll meet
<v Speaker 2>a new landscape in Brazil. Yeah, but yeah, it's so
<v Speaker 2>fucking expensive for us.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. If I yeah, I think the thing, if I
<v Speaker 1>was going to do it, I get like a van
<v Speaker 1>that could sleep in and then just stock up like
<v Speaker 1>a prepper and cans of fucking you know, just like
<v Speaker 1>have on my own food, so I could just I
<v Speaker 1>was entirely self contained, and I was only getting rabbed
<v Speaker 1>for gas and the occasional hotel the wash.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but also Chilas it's so fucking huge, that means
<v Speaker 2>so long. You know, for us, it's okay, it's normal.
<v Speaker 2>I mean you've come from the US that it's even bigger,
<v Speaker 2>you know. But the distances are also crazy, you know. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>go to to some places.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, character Australa. I'm looking at that right now. That
<v Speaker 1>is like that's the end of the world. Jesus, there's
<v Speaker 1>probably are.
<v Speaker 2>And also and also I don't think there's a there
<v Speaker 2>as it's only in the Los Lagos region, like Chilo.
<v Speaker 2>It's like the final part of that latitude is like
<v Speaker 2>the end of.
<v Speaker 1>There's pill Gero Dendron down there, though I know Piller
<v Speaker 1>Dendron was way south Man.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and oil Oilar arguments is that the biodiversity starts
<v Speaker 2>going down over the like the lichens and the most
<v Speaker 2>go crazy, but the bus plants starts the biodiversity.
<v Speaker 1>So if you get like the biggest nerds, they'd be
<v Speaker 1>having a blast down there. But anyone else who's into
<v Speaker 1>a little yeah yeah, allers is the last observations on
<v Speaker 1>I net are down by check ten. Yeah yeah, all right,
<v Speaker 1>well uh okay, But going back to the forest, like
<v Speaker 1>around you like plants like ex Toxicon punctatum. That was
<v Speaker 1>a weird one. I thought was really cool to see
<v Speaker 1>Citronella mukaranada. You said, Citronella mucranada is kind of endangered.
<v Speaker 1>Why is that?
<v Speaker 3>Because they're so scars.
<v Speaker 2>You know, you do see one over here, one over there,
<v Speaker 2>but you don't see patches of Cinderella karnata. You know,
<v Speaker 2>there's so each population. It's very few in DVDs, and
<v Speaker 2>it's always separated from the other population, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, cardiac Terra deacy is the family. That's a fucking
<v Speaker 1>weird one. Aquafoli, which is the that's the aquafolia, So
<v Speaker 1>that's like the that's like the namesake order of Yuruba
<v Speaker 1>mate ilex. The hollies are in family Aquafolia ce.
<v Speaker 3>Oh really, I don't.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know if you remember I told you the
<v Speaker 2>story that at some point the Chilean governors wanted to
<v Speaker 2>stop importing from Argentina and start drinking. Now I understand.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I wonder, I bet it's got caffeine. Does it
<v Speaker 1>have caffeine? Let me look that up. But that's a
<v Speaker 1>that was a taste.
<v Speaker 2>It sucks.
<v Speaker 1>Really, what does it taste like?
<v Speaker 3>Like some random plants?
<v Speaker 1>You know, like just like you're like eating leaves, You're
<v Speaker 1>just like yeah.
<v Speaker 3>And also there's so spiky.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know that was cool.
<v Speaker 3>Ladies will get spiked.
<v Speaker 1>Remember we saw that that's spontanea the e fulgens, and
<v Speaker 1>but it was growing like draping off of a cliff
<v Speaker 1>high up and it didn't have those You were like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>the leaves on this are different. And then but I
<v Speaker 1>didn't know because that was my first encounter with it.
<v Speaker 1>And then we saw it and saw it in the South. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and it was fucking it was It's like spiky European holly.
<v Speaker 1>It's like crazy leaves much different.
<v Speaker 2>For me, it was crazy because I've seen this plant
<v Speaker 2>so many times in the South and when I saw
<v Speaker 2>it the first time I saw it in South Abion, man,
<v Speaker 2>it looked like it was another plant. And also the
<v Speaker 2>flowers were were like longer and thinner.
<v Speaker 1>What do you think that is is that just as
<v Speaker 1>the as the it means it just normal heteroblasty, like
<v Speaker 1>as the tree gets older and gets above the height
<v Speaker 1>at which herbivorous can chew on it, then it just
<v Speaker 1>it stops producing sharp leaves or what.
<v Speaker 2>No. I think think maybe it's a latitude thing, maybe
<v Speaker 2>because in the South they all have really but you're talking.
<v Speaker 1>About this or that's fun.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, I think that must be the latitude because
<v Speaker 2>in the South that plant is very common, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and it always has these very pointy leaves.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So but actually I want to take some samples and
<v Speaker 2>talk to uh buttanist or something. Maybe it's I don't know,
<v Speaker 2>subspecies or something.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that was. It was really cool to see, and
<v Speaker 1>it's it's one of the more dominant plants too, Like
<v Speaker 1>when you go when you go to like it now
<v Speaker 1>all Buddha was everywhere in the understory. It's everywhere, and
<v Speaker 1>it alers costero to columeliac order brune alis, which I
<v Speaker 1>think is sister escaloni ales. But that's a common I
<v Speaker 1>mean that What is tell me about that plant, like
<v Speaker 1>the Despontanea, is that you got these red flowers bird pollination.
<v Speaker 1>They're like two or three inches long, very spiky, holly
<v Speaker 1>like leaves that are glabrous and evergreen. What is it?
<v Speaker 1>Was it like when you were in that all the
<v Speaker 1>edible stuff was this? Was there any edible use for
<v Speaker 1>this or what? No?
<v Speaker 3>I think it has some magical uses, but edible.
<v Speaker 1>Or witches are into it. They're like they're doing potions
<v Speaker 1>or something. Okay, yeah, cool family though, I mean that
<v Speaker 1>was that was a really fascinating thing for me, was
<v Speaker 1>to see these lineages that are just completely foreign to me,
<v Speaker 1>you know, in North America, or to any North American bondanists.
<v Speaker 1>But but yeah, citronella. I wish we would have seen
<v Speaker 1>more than just that that little one.
<v Speaker 2>But they it's hard to see the big trees. It's
<v Speaker 2>hard to get to them. I haven't seen a big
<v Speaker 2>one in santal And yet.
<v Speaker 1>Really they're mostly further south.
<v Speaker 2>Or or no, their central region tree. Yeah, weird, very endangerous. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and then one of the trees. If you want to
<v Speaker 2>take like a a permit to gout your forest and
<v Speaker 2>they find these trees or fuck you know, so.
<v Speaker 1>If they ever come for the forest, you go you
<v Speaker 1>start planting citronella mucrona.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, yeah, good thing to do, the.
<v Speaker 1>Go more and then go moore Tega too. That was
<v Speaker 1>one I wanted to see because that's a really weird
<v Speaker 1>that's one of those Magnolia lineages. It's in its own
<v Speaker 1>monotypic family, right, and uh, but that's it's rare as hell?
<v Speaker 1>What's what's up with that tree? Why is it rare?
<v Speaker 2>It's true. I mean, all the trees that we have
<v Speaker 2>here that have big fruits are rare. I think because
<v Speaker 2>of the natural propagators. The animals are not here anymore.
<v Speaker 2>You know, this fruit just falls and stays there. We
<v Speaker 2>have this also with Potaia splendors.
<v Speaker 1>Mm hmmm.
<v Speaker 3>I don't know if you know this tree?
<v Speaker 1>No, what is that? But how do you spell it?
<v Speaker 1>Pot p o U t e r puteria. Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I see it. Okay.
<v Speaker 2>So they say that this kind of fruit was eaten
<v Speaker 2>by by not dinosaurs but megafauna. So it's naturally it's
<v Speaker 2>a tree that it's scarce. And also the natural range
<v Speaker 2>of the gombrtega.
<v Speaker 3>It's right where the pine seas.
<v Speaker 2>Are, you know, so it was rare before, but now
<v Speaker 2>it's rare because it's naturally system has been devastated, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it was it had the misfortune of growing and
<v Speaker 1>what would become one of the most densely populated regions
<v Speaker 1>of Chile.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so especially for the pine plantations, because these songs
<v Speaker 2>are not so I mean, there's a there's a latitude
<v Speaker 2>where we have like these very endangered trees between Maule
<v Speaker 2>and Araucania. You know, you have Gortega, you have Pavia puntata.
<v Speaker 2>You know if you saw that one.
<v Speaker 1>I think we I think I saw Petavia puncta. Yeah
<v Speaker 1>where where?
<v Speaker 2>What?
<v Speaker 1>What family is that? You know?
<v Speaker 2>Uh, let me see it? Family that that's as cars
<v Speaker 2>as you know. Also the the I mean it's also
<v Speaker 2>it's in this like lat range from right.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah. Yeah, that one you have also.
<v Speaker 2>In in Tasmania or New Zealand. Right.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's another one of those Cantwana and Connifer lineages.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah okay, but for you Connifer loving guys, that wasn't
<v Speaker 2>so cool, right.
<v Speaker 1>No, it was it was cool.
<v Speaker 2>No.
<v Speaker 1>I was stoked to see it. I mean all those
<v Speaker 1>things I want to you know, I try to take
<v Speaker 1>I go and I see them and I take as
<v Speaker 1>many photos of as many different aspects of a morphology
<v Speaker 1>as possible. So I have like a bank you know
<v Speaker 1>of a photo bank that I can reference later. God
<v Speaker 1>more Tega I had seen in before because they have
<v Speaker 1>one U see Berkeley Botanic Gardens. But I really wanted
<v Speaker 1>to see the habitat. But you know then I had
<v Speaker 1>heard it's like kind of out of the way and
<v Speaker 1>it's surrounded by uh it's not flowering now and it's
<v Speaker 1>surrounded by pine.
<v Speaker 2>Hell, so man, it's it's over the I mean, now,
<v Speaker 2>Buddha is a dream compared to where Gomrtega grows. It's
<v Speaker 2>actually you see the pine sea and got the Gomortega reserve.
<v Speaker 3>Man, it's just like not even an entire hill.
<v Speaker 2>It's like the the house of one hill, you know, Jesus,
<v Speaker 2>And I think, like, how can the state cannot like
<v Speaker 2>expropriate some territory to make like a to make this bigger?
<v Speaker 1>You know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's it's like an army. It's being surrounded by
<v Speaker 2>the pines. But this echo, this ecosystem is really wet,
<v Speaker 2>you know, So I think restoration wouldn't be so hard,
<v Speaker 2>you know, because has all the humidity from the from
<v Speaker 2>the coast.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I was gonna ask, I mean, why is nobody
<v Speaker 1>grown and like we're storing it somewhere else, or planting
<v Speaker 1>the ship out of it, or even just you know
<v Speaker 1>what I mean, if it's a rare plant, just propagate
<v Speaker 1>the ship out of it and introduce it. There's cultivation too.
<v Speaker 2>There's people doing this. But as I was telling you,
<v Speaker 2>this range of in the middle of the Mediterranean climate
<v Speaker 2>and the temperate first climate is like a rare place
<v Speaker 2>where there's not all the people go straight to the south,
<v Speaker 2>you know. Yeah, the people or people do restoration near Santiago,
<v Speaker 2>you know, but this is like kind of a forgotten place,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're selling it on rare palm seeds
<v Speaker 1>really yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it's like this European
<v Speaker 1>seed distributor that they sell like rare shit for really
<v Speaker 1>expensive you know amount.
<v Speaker 2>Actually, they say, if you eat the fruit of the
<v Speaker 2>of the go marchega you it's like a drug you
<v Speaker 2>get drunk or something. Really yeah, and it's it's awesome.
<v Speaker 2>It's like a queen's you know, it tastes really good. Queens.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it's really really good.
<v Speaker 1>It's crazy. Why does nobody growing.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, it's it's really it's really hard to grow.
<v Speaker 2>I forgot to tell you before. It's a tree. One
<v Speaker 2>of the most hard to grow trees, and it's very sensitive,
<v Speaker 2>like you have to grow it and it's distribution range.
<v Speaker 3>If it's not, it's that it dies.
<v Speaker 2>You know. You have to grow it in the coastal range,
<v Speaker 2>like in that kind of latitude because it's very sensitive,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, I mean they're but they're growing it. You
<v Speaker 1>see Berkeley. I don't know if they have two trees
<v Speaker 1>or what like, if you know, if it needs out crossing,
<v Speaker 1>I assume it probably does. It's always better for a.
<v Speaker 3>Genetic Berkeley what kind of climate has.
<v Speaker 1>It's Mediterranean climate, but they irrigate, they have a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of stuff. They've got massive gunners there too.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but I think you saw that here, like the
<v Speaker 2>botanical park. See, it sucks, you know, it really sucks.
<v Speaker 2>In Santiago, we had, like in the nineteenth century, I
<v Speaker 2>mean beginning of the twentieth century, we had they had
<v Speaker 2>a botanical park where they grow plants from Confernandez or not.
<v Speaker 2>You heard of Confernando?
<v Speaker 1>Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, there's some weird show.
<v Speaker 2>The biodiversity over there is crisis. So we have this
<v Speaker 2>really cool Now it's abandoned, you know, and you cannot
<v Speaker 2>find like a good as any capital seat in the world.
<v Speaker 2>You cannot find a good botanical garden in Santiago.
<v Speaker 1>It's crazy what happened White, you know, there's I.
<v Speaker 2>Think, I don't know, maybe they think that national parks
<v Speaker 2>are enough, so the government doesn't put resources and they
<v Speaker 2>have to you know that there's some but they don't
<v Speaker 2>have resources.
<v Speaker 1>That sucks. No, man, That's like that's where you need
<v Speaker 1>it the most, you know, and you need one that's
<v Speaker 1>not like you know, pretty garden beds for old ladies
<v Speaker 1>to go, you know, get their pictures taken and no
<v Speaker 1>offense to the old ladies of course, but but you know,
<v Speaker 1>but you need it. That's like one that's dedicated to
<v Speaker 1>native plants. You get a nice fucking informational kiosk and
<v Speaker 1>people who are really good at growing the natives there.
<v Speaker 1>And it's an exit to conservation source and also a
<v Speaker 1>seed source. They're basically producing seeds for horticulture to get
<v Speaker 1>the native plants back into into the native you know,
<v Speaker 1>into the like gardening and landscaping in the region. I
<v Speaker 1>mean that is like the most it's one of like
<v Speaker 1>the most pressing needs for every region is to have
<v Speaker 1>like a native plant botanic garden that's dedicated to educating
<v Speaker 1>people about the plants that grew there before the sprawl
<v Speaker 1>took over, you know, because that's how you connect people
<v Speaker 1>back to land, you know what I mean.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, it's like it's like a showroom for the
<v Speaker 2>nights violversity that we have here exactly.
<v Speaker 1>It's a museum and a living museum people.
<v Speaker 2>It's not that there's not capable people, you know, it's
<v Speaker 2>just resources.
<v Speaker 1>Resources, and yeah, the money and you know, convincing people
<v Speaker 1>that it's.
<v Speaker 2>To do shopping malls here with here the shopping malls
<v Speaker 2>grow like fungus, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Oh god, Yeah, it's the consumerism. It's like the consumerism
<v Speaker 1>plays into the most like bottom of the brainstam basal
<v Speaker 1>primate urge. You know, it's a and it leaves you
<v Speaker 1>feeling so empty, you know, when you're doing like shopping
<v Speaker 1>and consumerism is therapy. It's like, you know, you might
<v Speaker 1>as well just do fucking heroin. It's like it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's maybe not you know, you die a little bit
<v Speaker 1>faster Heroin, but but it's it's basically the same thing.
<v Speaker 1>It's like you're not going to fill the hole within
<v Speaker 1>yourself you're not gonna fill the void by buying ship
<v Speaker 1>you don't need. But that's that's what we were basing
<v Speaker 1>our economies on a lot of them. Now, all right,
<v Speaker 1>well before I'll let you dip out here. But archidasaphyle
<v Speaker 1>excelsum that's another really rare one I want to talk about.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's a Barnet dizyoid. It's a it's in a
<v Speaker 1>sunflower family. It's like the most basal sub family. Weird, weird.
<v Speaker 2>That's a very rare one. Yeah. And also it's endangered,
<v Speaker 2>just as the Gomortega. And I don't know why it's
<v Speaker 2>so scarce this one. I don't know, because this has
<v Speaker 2>flying seeds. It should have like more success this person itself.
<v Speaker 2>But it's it's similar to Gomrtega. You can only see
<v Speaker 2>like a few places where it's surrounded by pines or
<v Speaker 2>surrounded by houses. Deforestation, you know.
<v Speaker 1>So, yeah, there's some in La Campana.
<v Speaker 2>Right.
<v Speaker 1>How far is La Campana National Park from Santiago.
<v Speaker 2>It's like one hour and a half something like this,
<v Speaker 2>so one hour you yeah, but you have to like
<v Speaker 2>really look for them. You know that it's not here.
<v Speaker 2>They don't in the national parks. They don't have much
<v Speaker 2>sick signature or anything. You have to go on an
<v Speaker 2>adventure to look for it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they're not there's and there's not many trees, right,
<v Speaker 1>there's not many individuals.
<v Speaker 2>I know, there's not many individuals.
<v Speaker 1>Are there? Are there?
<v Speaker 2>Actually? For my for my project that I give it
<v Speaker 2>to you, the the Chilean Trees Guide. One one really
<v Speaker 2>cool botanist gave me the like a pinpoint and it
<v Speaker 2>was in between men. It was a really small ravine
<v Speaker 2>in between two in between plantations. But it was just
<v Speaker 2>one row of trees, you know, like only one row,
<v Speaker 2>and then the next trees were pines. It was like
<v Speaker 2>asphyxiated with pines, you know, crazy.
<v Speaker 1>The fucking pines there everywhere.
<v Speaker 2>We all we go back to this all the time. Yeah. Well,
<v Speaker 2>one good thing about these fine seas is that you
<v Speaker 2>have like a sheetload of sui Us fungus that here.
<v Speaker 2>People do have an economy for them, you know, people
<v Speaker 2>that grow that lives near these plantations, gather forests these
<v Speaker 2>mushrooms and it's like the typical mushrooms that you can
<v Speaker 2>buy in the supermarket, right, you know, like.
<v Speaker 1>Bow leaves and chantrails and everything. But they're all invasive though, right.
<v Speaker 2>No, no, but you know how we don't have chanters,
<v Speaker 2>nothing fancy, only suit us luteos and a couple more.
<v Speaker 2>You know, we don't see ones.
<v Speaker 1>But they're not native fungi though, right.
<v Speaker 3>No, no, they're not native, not at all.
<v Speaker 2>But they're edible and they're and they're appeared by thousands,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's full of them on the season.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah that's cool at least. Yeah that but but going
<v Speaker 1>back to the archid, I mean, how tall were the
<v Speaker 1>trees that you saw?
<v Speaker 2>They were like fifteen meters more or less.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so this is like a this is like a
<v Speaker 1>fifty foot tall member of the sunflower family that's got
<v Speaker 1>woody bark. Yeah, archied asaphylind But then archidesa flain Diekantois
<v Speaker 1>is everywhere. That's a very common one, right, Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>It's more southern. And this is very very typical, you know, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>very similar. Yes, it's the same general.
<v Speaker 1>It's a more southern. It's so it's adapted to like
<v Speaker 1>a more music like a wetter climate, whereas excelsum is
<v Speaker 1>more adapted to like the the Mediterranean style climate of
<v Speaker 1>near the Santiago area.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but anyhow, I think this is because it's so scarce.
<v Speaker 2>Also maybe in the past there were more of them,
<v Speaker 2>but yeah, it needs it also needs humidity. You know,
<v Speaker 2>it lives like on the on the bottom of the ravines.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and just to develop. Meant if anything where you
<v Speaker 1>didn't you weren't able to get any flowers where you
<v Speaker 1>like to see what the inflorescences look like.
<v Speaker 2>No, no, no. When I went the like the the
<v Speaker 2>branches were very high, you know, and I think it
<v Speaker 2>wasn't time for flowering. But in the places you've been, Like,
<v Speaker 2>have you seen any other like aster trees like that
<v Speaker 2>grow so big?
<v Speaker 1>Uh? What was it we saw? Yeah, there was a
<v Speaker 1>small one. It was anti what is it antiogony? How
<v Speaker 1>do you pronounce it? There was one, only one we
<v Speaker 1>saw in uh in a Lerce costero, hold on, I
<v Speaker 1>could tell you it was. I think it was a mutissioid.
<v Speaker 1>I love the mutissioids, which is all all the composits
<v Speaker 1>down there, mostly mutissioids. They're fucking beautiful. The real flower
<v Speaker 1>structure so unique too, Like you could tell it's a
<v Speaker 1>mutis look at the flowers, You're like, oh, this is
<v Speaker 1>like a mouth doesn't look like a five.
<v Speaker 2>Like actually, for my project that I'm like digitalizing the
<v Speaker 2>leaves then with DCI. Man, it's impossible. It's like fused
<v Speaker 2>with the stem and.
<v Speaker 3>It's like wavy. It's a really tough one.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah it was. Yeah, okay, it was a Christiane,
<v Speaker 1>a Christie Simosa. I want it. We saw we saw
<v Speaker 1>a this genus with you, but not this species, different
<v Speaker 1>species Christiana. Yeah, see yeah Christiana. Yeah, it didn't take
<v Speaker 1>you a lot up. But I was a little one.
<v Speaker 1>How big this is?
<v Speaker 2>They say it's a small tree, but they say it
<v Speaker 2>grows till six meters but I've never seen such a
<v Speaker 2>big one. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>This thing was like three meters tall by three meters
<v Speaker 1>wide and had really lenate leaf undersides, like really really wooly,
<v Speaker 1>which was yeah.
<v Speaker 2>But it doesn't develop like a real thick trunk, you know,
<v Speaker 2>It's always remains like thin.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, man branched. Yeah, it was cool though. I mean
<v Speaker 1>it was one of those things you see and even
<v Speaker 1>before I saw the flowers, I'm like, this is probably ESTRACI.
<v Speaker 2>I was asking you, like in other parts of the world,
<v Speaker 2>like have you seen the asteracia like big vascular plants?
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, yeah in Brazil. In Brazil, there's a ton
<v Speaker 1>of diversity in the Vernonia tribe. Well, I think it's
<v Speaker 1>Arimanthus is one of the genera, and they formed these
<v Speaker 1>big trees that get to like fucking you know, ten
<v Speaker 1>meters tall. Yeah, really cool. It's and that the flowers
<v Speaker 1>are like wild, they're you know, they're like pinkish purple,
<v Speaker 1>but like they're little mini sunflowers with no no rays,
<v Speaker 1>no ligules, and they're all aggregated together in these heads
<v Speaker 1>so that there's like one hundred flowers and this small
<v Speaker 1>little structure. Yeah, they're really cool. And they get big too.
<v Speaker 1>I mean they're like you know, for a asta, they're
<v Speaker 1>like thirty forty feet tall, ten meters tall.
<v Speaker 2>So so the other day I found that paper on
<v Speaker 2>the trees of that island I was talking to you
<v Speaker 2>about in Brazil, in La Grande. Yeah, it has like
<v Speaker 2>two hundred and more lived the trees. But you look
<v Speaker 2>also you look these trees on Google and there's no
<v Speaker 2>no images.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, Brazil, nothing's documented there. That was what was cool
<v Speaker 1>to see in Chile was that there was way more
<v Speaker 1>of a presence of native plants and like the dominant
<v Speaker 1>popular culture there than I saw in Brazil.
<v Speaker 2>Also, I think here also there's there's a lot of
<v Speaker 2>like people is on the Internet all the time. So
<v Speaker 2>when you look for plantilem plants and Wikipedia, you get pictures,
<v Speaker 2>you get a lot of information. But you look plants
<v Speaker 2>from other parts and there's nothing. Some of them doesn't
<v Speaker 2>have Wikipedia entries. So I think that's crazy. Like and
<v Speaker 2>now I understand Brazil, Like if you want to learn, like,
<v Speaker 2>how do you do it if there's no photos, there's nothing.
<v Speaker 1>There's no field guys, Yeah, there's no there's no access, man,
<v Speaker 1>it's just it's just academics. There's a lot of good
<v Speaker 1>bondanists in academia and Brazil, but there's not like there's
<v Speaker 1>no access to information in the popular culture.
<v Speaker 2>So you have to like, oh, maybe this information is
<v Speaker 2>like they have it like in the botanical garden.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, they've got a cool botanic garden and a
<v Speaker 1>cool orbarium. But uh, in a lot of like I
<v Speaker 1>think there's a lot of like literature like obscure books
<v Speaker 1>that are produced by universities, but there's nothing. You go
<v Speaker 1>to a bookstore in Brazil, there's nothing. You're not gonna
<v Speaker 1>find anything.
<v Speaker 2>And yeah, I have the same thing.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah have you you haven't want the what you haven't
<v Speaker 1>been to Wan Fernandez Islands, have you? No?
<v Speaker 3>No, that's no. I wish.
<v Speaker 2>This is one of my dreams. I have a friend
<v Speaker 2>that went there. Man, it's crazy. We have so many
<v Speaker 2>crazy man, a weird species, giant gunera, like a lot
<v Speaker 2>of over there, a lot of mirtasi trees that dominate.
<v Speaker 2>It's crazy, like huge, also huge assis.
<v Speaker 3>I think this is common in islands.
<v Speaker 1>You know, Oh there's over there gunner is that I
<v Speaker 1>wonder if that's an endemic. I think it is.
<v Speaker 3>Then almost everything that grows there is endemic.
<v Speaker 2>It's crazy. You believe they have a record in Confernandez.
<v Speaker 2>It's like I think by square meter. I think it's
<v Speaker 2>one of the most bioleverse places because they say the
<v Speaker 2>island was much bigger in the past, so it has
<v Speaker 2>been shrinking, so the so the biodiversity has been like
<v Speaker 2>compacted together.
<v Speaker 1>You know, there's Dicksonia's, there's tree ferns, dendroceris, little realis
<v Speaker 1>was a weird it's that orange flower probably bird pollinated.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, remember, like that's the more emblematic one because like
<v Speaker 2>on the verge of being extinguished, you know.
<v Speaker 1>I mean you can buy it in cultivation in the
<v Speaker 1>Bay Area of California. Now it's a it's a chickory,
<v Speaker 1>but it's a giant one, you know, because these little
<v Speaker 1>herbs get to islands where they don't have any herbivores
<v Speaker 1>and they can.
<v Speaker 2>Get big, like yeah, get it, get huge, right yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Selection allows them to just get huge. It's like a
<v Speaker 1>typical trade of of island biogeography for plants around Ochagavia
<v Speaker 1>Elegance Merk, Eugenia Fernandeziana.
<v Speaker 3>I have a field guide of the I will send
<v Speaker 3>it to you.
<v Speaker 1>You can go. I mean you can go there too, right,
<v Speaker 1>Like there's flight I saw there's like flights and ship
<v Speaker 1>like it's like, yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you can go there, no problem. Yeah, there's the
<v Speaker 2>flights there, there's a boat they go there. Yeah. But
<v Speaker 2>most the people that go there, it is like for
<v Speaker 2>scientific I mean my friends that have went there for
<v Speaker 2>scientific research and stuff like that, you.
<v Speaker 1>Know yeah yeah yeah, so they're like and it's.
<v Speaker 2>So stupid man. And then in the Confernandos, the exotic
<v Speaker 2>plants there are straying everything are native Chilean plants, you know, crazy.
<v Speaker 1>Oh the ones I want, like the invasives and want Fernandez.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, a lot of them are native Chilian plants.
<v Speaker 2>They took their Jesus and and the rabbits are so
<v Speaker 2>are fucking everything.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's the fucking rabbits. Why would you bring rabbits man.
<v Speaker 2>Because you can eat them? I understand that. Why would
<v Speaker 2>you take you somewhere free food?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah? Yeah, they are eighty anthem Chileans. You know that fern, right,
<v Speaker 1>the tree fern. No, it's a it's a little fern,
<v Speaker 1>but it's it's like a little maidenhair, but it's like
<v Speaker 1>a Xeric. It's like a Xeric maidenair. It's like a
<v Speaker 1>drought tolerant maidenhair with these really incredible yellow undersides.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, it's really nice, ye call them yeah on
<v Speaker 2>the bottom.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that was That was another cool one to see.
<v Speaker 1>All right, well, I guess I'll let you go now.
<v Speaker 1>I really appreciate the time, thanks Manarah. Yeah, is there
<v Speaker 1>anything else? Is there anything else you want to talk about?
<v Speaker 1>And you're how can people find you on the intergram?
<v Speaker 1>It's Atlas dot Nativa.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, at last dot not you. That's the instagram we are.
<v Speaker 3>Well.
<v Speaker 2>This year we will launch a lot new guides. Actually
<v Speaker 2>I'm doing a guide of the Enemy of the Exotic
<v Speaker 2>I mean urban trees that we have in Chile and
<v Speaker 2>it's crazy, man, like ninety percent of the species are
<v Speaker 2>I guess this is everywhere, but I think it Chila
<v Speaker 2>is even worse. Like in Santiago. You get so little
<v Speaker 2>native trees that are planted that are part of the landscaping.
<v Speaker 2>If you have been around the world, I think this
<v Speaker 2>is it's like this everywhere, right.
<v Speaker 1>It is wild. Yeah, it's like this human urge that like,
<v Speaker 1>oh no, we can't use what's growing here already, we
<v Speaker 1>need something exotic, which is like but then there's the
<v Speaker 1>ship you plant this all garbage. It's like already in
<v Speaker 1>hortoric culture. I call them, yeah, the horticultural atrocities where
<v Speaker 1>the natives, the natives you have don't grow anywhere else,
<v Speaker 1>and they're so fucking incredible. I quick pretend think you're
<v Speaker 1>somewhere else, you know, Like I did see a lot
<v Speaker 1>of kilaha and Cryptocarria alba, and.
<v Speaker 2>These are the common, common native ones. There's many reasons.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, they grow slow, obviously, but also a lot
<v Speaker 2>of native chile and flora doesn't.
<v Speaker 3>Like it die off with the with the pollution. You
<v Speaker 3>cannot stand it.
<v Speaker 1>The fucking car thing is yeah, that's I wonder how much.
<v Speaker 2>People people love, people love Acasia albada.
<v Speaker 1>That's one of the worst. That's terrible. Yeah, man, plant,
<v Speaker 1>But then you got a cavan and the all the
<v Speaker 1>cooled senna, like the native senna's there.
<v Speaker 2>Like they grow they grow slow, you know, I mean
<v Speaker 2>the senna, I don't know how fast it grows, but
<v Speaker 2>like Kelly Cavin, grows really slow, so people and it
<v Speaker 2>has spines, so people just don't like it. In Santiago,
<v Speaker 2>it's especially worse. They did a study. I think it's
<v Speaker 2>an eighty five percent of the plant of the trees
<v Speaker 2>are exotic. Yeah, because for example, in the south of Chile,
<v Speaker 2>you do see a lot more native trees in the streets.
<v Speaker 1>You know, yeah, yeah, the t yeah, the Tricho serious
<v Speaker 1>Chilo ancestor Lucos steely whatever they're calling. And now I
<v Speaker 1>mean I think is like that's that crew there that's
<v Speaker 1>like a native Santiago plant. I'm surprised they don't And
<v Speaker 1>they're beautiful. When that flower, they're fucking huge, like huge flowers, Like,
<v Speaker 1>I'm surprised they don't plant those more commonly in I'm
<v Speaker 1>hoping it's change though, Like maybe I'll go back and
<v Speaker 1>you know what.
<v Speaker 2>It's the part at least the government is changing a lot.
<v Speaker 3>They're doing a lot of like Miawauqi forest, you.
<v Speaker 2>Know, yeah, this kind of first. Yeah, they're doing a
<v Speaker 2>lot of these kind of forest finance by the steak,
<v Speaker 2>especially in Santiago. So yeah, now nowadays you can see
<v Speaker 2>a change very slow, but you can anyways, you can
<v Speaker 2>see a change in new parts and this kind of stuff.
<v Speaker 2>They do put a lot of more native species, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and especially because there's no water left, so it's also
<v Speaker 2>like a strategic measure, you know, like we need trees
<v Speaker 2>that we don't have to put water every day on it,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but I think especially too, it's so important to
<v Speaker 1>connect people back to the land that they live on
<v Speaker 1>and the things that evolve there over hundreds of thousands
<v Speaker 1>of years. You know. That's yeah. So and changing the shift,
<v Speaker 1>changing the focus on plants from is it medicinal? Is
<v Speaker 1>it edible? Is it pretty? Whatever? That means too? Is
<v Speaker 1>it native here? How is it related to the soil,
<v Speaker 1>the climate, the geology, the pollinators, the insects, the life here?
<v Speaker 1>Like the living machine is the local biosphere? Like that's
<v Speaker 1>what we need to shift our focus from. And that's
<v Speaker 1>the same reason I used to hate botanic gardens because
<v Speaker 1>the ones I grew up with in Chicago on the
<v Speaker 1>East Coast were like the bard Rich housewife. Botanic are like.
<v Speaker 5>My husband's a family law attorney and I need something
<v Speaker 5>to do. Well, my husband's at work and the kids
<v Speaker 5>are at school, so I go to you know, and
<v Speaker 5>then it's like, you know, and so that was the
<v Speaker 5>and it's like, oh, that's like we played the garden
<v Speaker 5>bed with one hundred of the same.
<v Speaker 1>Flower because it's colorful and there's no connection to anything else,
<v Speaker 1>Like you don't have any connection to the land, there's
<v Speaker 1>no you know what I mean.
<v Speaker 2>And so yeah, and I think also it's part of us,
<v Speaker 2>our story, you know, like all the indigenous people use
<v Speaker 2>these trees. They absolutely the common names for it. And
<v Speaker 2>it's what makes every space, i mean, every spot on
<v Speaker 2>the world like a special your native flora, and that
<v Speaker 2>gave you, gives you identity. It's so important to have
<v Speaker 2>a relations with that instead of something that has nothing
<v Speaker 2>to do with your history. I think that's as really
<v Speaker 2>it gives you a purpose of living, you know, like us,
<v Speaker 2>like we're through plants, you know, like it's it can
<v Speaker 2>be not only like a hobby, it can be a lifestyle,
<v Speaker 2>you know, be in touch with your with your local biome.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Plants define place like nothing else does,
<v Speaker 1>you know, especially in an age where like you can
<v Speaker 1>go to a shitty big box store outside of Santiago,
<v Speaker 1>or you can go to a shitty big box store
<v Speaker 1>outside of Houston and it's got the same feel. It's
<v Speaker 1>like just depressing consumerism. But then when you see the
<v Speaker 1>plants there that are unique to that area, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and how that biosphere evolved in that place over time,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's so it's so unique and special. And everyone
<v Speaker 1>is different, you know, each each of these regions is different.
<v Speaker 1>So well, thank you.
<v Speaker 2>Man, Yo, you're welcome. You're welcome to a pleasure to
<v Speaker 2>talk with you. And I don't know, I hope you
<v Speaker 2>come again to Chile soon.
<v Speaker 1>I'll be back, man, I'll be back probably probably next
<v Speaker 1>year or some all right, man, have a good and
<v Speaker 1>have a good Michael Thinker
<v Speaker 2>Okay, all right, see you bye,