Sashaying Around West Texas Sky Islands

<v Speaker 1>Welcome to another episode of the Crime Pace. A body
<v Speaker 1>doesn't podcasts. I'm in West Texas, just got here a
<v Speaker 1>couple days ago, got here like three in the morning. Boy,
<v Speaker 1>I had a I had a long spur when I
<v Speaker 1>wasn't getting any sleep for like a whole weekend. I
<v Speaker 1>did two two hour presentations on long killing last Saturday
<v Speaker 1>in Austin, and then killed the lawn and planted a
<v Speaker 1>whole bunch of shit in the ground in between that
<v Speaker 1>and just went to I just went to heart, man,
<v Speaker 1>you know. And uh, and then I slept. We were
<v Speaker 1>staying up late watching Western dramas on Friday night. That's
<v Speaker 1>why I didn't get any sleep. I don't know why
<v Speaker 1>the fuck I did. I don't know why I did that.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know why I did that. I need I
<v Speaker 1>needed to rest, you know, going too hard. Got a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of videos to edit and a whole bunch of shit,
<v Speaker 1>and then we're going to Costa Rica for this this
<v Speaker 1>tour thing on the eighth, which should be fun, should
<v Speaker 1>be nice to see the fun guy that are going
<v Speaker 1>off in the neotropical cloud force at nine thousand feet.
<v Speaker 1>And then I'm trying to do a fungal survey of
<v Speaker 1>the Davis Mountains tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes.
<v Speaker 1>But christ Man West, Texas has gotten a whole bunch
<v Speaker 1>of rain. I assume all that moisture is coming up
<v Speaker 1>from the Pacific from you know, south southwest, like off
<v Speaker 1>the coast of Sinaloa, but it could be coming from
<v Speaker 1>the Gulf too. Texas in general has just gotten dumped on.
<v Speaker 1>So it's very green right now. It's a very good
<v Speaker 1>time for plants. The presentations I gave in Austin, it
<v Speaker 1>was good. It was really nice. One was outside and
<v Speaker 1>I showed up. I thought it was going to be
<v Speaker 1>like a projector thing and they didn't have a projector.
<v Speaker 1>It was near the Elizabeth Nay Museum, and like old Austin,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like a nice, walkable neighborhood, not the car
<v Speaker 1>slum that most of Austin is, where you have to
<v Speaker 1>drive everywhere, even if it's even if you could walk there.
<v Speaker 1>Some neighborhoods in Austin, even if you could walk there,
<v Speaker 1>you're still trapped in a fucking car, like it's too dangerous.
<v Speaker 1>There's no sidewalks or there's a freeway in between. It's
<v Speaker 1>like a freeway in between you and the grocery store.
<v Speaker 1>Those drives, Now you got to drive a mile and
<v Speaker 1>a half down, do a U turn, come back way
<v Speaker 1>to three fucking lights in between. And you know, cars
<v Speaker 1>make people miserable. We didn't, we didn't evolve to spend
<v Speaker 1>you know, five hours a day in them anyway. But
<v Speaker 1>so it was an old It was like in this
<v Speaker 1>old part of Austin, kind of near where my friend
<v Speaker 1>Jim Mosseth lives. Professor emeritus emeritus emeritus. How the fuck
<v Speaker 1>you're supposed to pronounce I should have heard people pronounce
<v Speaker 1>that before me. It just means he's a retired professor
<v Speaker 1>at u T Austin, retired plant physiologist. But you know
<v Speaker 1>he moved there like forty years ago, before housing prices
<v Speaker 1>became totally inaccessible. Anyway. So the first, the first presentation
<v Speaker 1>I gave, I showed up and it was just outside.
<v Speaker 1>It was like they set up two tables for us
<v Speaker 1>to sell our merch, you know, thorn scrub benefit t shirts.
<v Speaker 1>And then all the shit I screenprint in my garage.
<v Speaker 1>And then James Peace was selling plants, you know, half
<v Speaker 1>the shit seeds I gave him, seeds I collect for
<v Speaker 1>a little nursery, and then and then it was just
<v Speaker 1>it was just basically speaking, it was just sitting on
<v Speaker 1>a limestone block speaking to fifty people in chairs outside.
<v Speaker 1>It was nice, man, It was actually ended up being nice.
<v Speaker 1>So I showed up. They didn't have a projector. I
<v Speaker 1>was like, all right, cool, just fucking wing it and
<v Speaker 1>talk my talk, and I had my little laptop there
<v Speaker 1>just in case, you know, to kind of give it
<v Speaker 1>some structure, so it's not it's not like this podcast
<v Speaker 1>where it's just disjointed rambling. But it was. It was
<v Speaker 1>really great, man, Like a bunch of people were stoked
<v Speaker 1>on it, and you know, I just I go through
<v Speaker 1>the whole thing. Why lawns are pointless even in areas
<v Speaker 1>where it rains a lot. You get you know, of
<v Speaker 1>course everyone knows about how it's stupid the water, this
<v Speaker 1>thing that if you're in a very you know, drought
<v Speaker 1>prone region like Phoenix, but they're also shitty on the
<v Speaker 1>East coast because the roots don't go very deep. I
<v Speaker 1>get into the route to shoot ratio. Why the roots
<v Speaker 1>don't go deep if you're keeping you know, a law
<v Speaker 1>perpetually bond's eye, because any grass species wants to grow
<v Speaker 1>and flower and a lot of people don't even know
<v Speaker 1>grass produces flowers, which is wild to me. But that's
<v Speaker 1>you know, that's I mean, I think people they come
<v Speaker 1>to a presentation I give probably no grass flowers. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, those aren't the people I'm trying to reach.
<v Speaker 1>I'm trying to reach people who are like total, totally
<v Speaker 1>new to this. So and then I get into just
<v Speaker 1>horticultural atrocities and the mind what I call the minecraft landscaping,
<v Speaker 1>like the video game landscaping of even uniform lines with
<v Speaker 1>even spacing and bunching colors together, all that shit that
<v Speaker 1>you see at like fancy botanic gardens a nice place
<v Speaker 1>to get kicked out of. You know, there saw a
<v Speaker 1>lot of that when I was at Atlanta Botanical Garden.
<v Speaker 1>It's crazy because Atlanta Botanic Gardens as a rep mutation
<v Speaker 1>because of this guy Ron Dieederman that worked there that
<v Speaker 1>you know, we're having a whole bunch of rare plants.
<v Speaker 1>Wild shit. They got an Amberella specimen, you know, the
<v Speaker 1>most the basic, most extant that is still in existence,
<v Speaker 1>flowering plant from New Caledonia, you know, really cool fucking specimen.
<v Speaker 1>They've got a whole bunch of new Caledonian conifers. They've
<v Speaker 1>got some cool stuff. But then you know they've also
<v Speaker 1>do this thing that I've noticed botanic gardens do in Chicago.
<v Speaker 1>Garfield Park up Botanic Garden did this for a while
<v Speaker 1>where they're like, I think they they feel like the
<v Speaker 1>plants aren't enough, or the administrators do whoever's in charge
<v Speaker 1>of there. They feel like the plants aren't enough, and
<v Speaker 1>they're not like focused on science. They're not showing people
<v Speaker 1>cool shit. Look at this thing. This is kind of
<v Speaker 1>this needum is intermediate between a conifer and an angiosperm.
<v Speaker 1>Or here's like a vanilla plant. That's pretty basic, you know,
<v Speaker 1>that kind of stuff. So they're like, well, what do
<v Speaker 1>we do to attract we need We need to just
<v Speaker 1>we need to get membership up. You need to get
<v Speaker 1>visitorship up. What do we do? Let's have a glass
<v Speaker 1>sculpture or a sound installation. Doesn't that sound great? And
<v Speaker 1>that's my white lady voice too. I had someone comment
<v Speaker 1>thing that that that was like a gay voice making
<v Speaker 1>fun of the gaze. The fuck. Where the fuck have
<v Speaker 1>you been? You haven't been listening to the fucking podcast
<v Speaker 1>for all right? I've been I've been hanging out with
<v Speaker 1>the gays for the last thirty years of my life.
<v Speaker 1>Go fuck yourself anyway, So yeah, so I don't know
<v Speaker 1>it was that's yeah, that's my rich white levoice. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I don't know why botanic gardens do that,
<v Speaker 1>because it's it's it's you know, I just kind of
<v Speaker 1>exemplifies how disconnected we are to begin with, right, But
<v Speaker 1>you see a lot of that shit. It's some of
<v Speaker 1>these botanic gardens. These I'm gonna plant everything in the line.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna group the colors together. Doesn't it look nice? Oh,
<v Speaker 1>I'm a plant. I'm playing with I'm getting creative now,
<v Speaker 1>I'm planting all these colors here in this color is here,
<v Speaker 1>and I the spacing's a little closer, it's a little
<v Speaker 1>tighter on this side. And it just you don't need
<v Speaker 1>to do that shit. You know, you put in cool stuff.
<v Speaker 1>You know you know something about plants or plant ecology,
<v Speaker 1>you'll know what the plant you know. And then you
<v Speaker 1>got to have the informational signs. It's really important, and
<v Speaker 1>everything's ship's got to be labeled. You got to have
<v Speaker 1>families on there. That's how people learn plant. I the
<v Speaker 1>you learn plant identification by going to a botanic garden,
<v Speaker 1>seeing a living specimen of some shit that you like,
<v Speaker 1>and then learning what fan being able to see what
<v Speaker 1>species it is and see what family it's in more importantly,
<v Speaker 1>and then if you see enough of that, you start
<v Speaker 1>to connect the dots. So these are the traits that
<v Speaker 1>place something in a family, which is you know, most
<v Speaker 1>likely flower structure, or it can be a certain kind
<v Speaker 1>of leaf venation. You know, in the case of Erythroxylum,
<v Speaker 1>the coca plant, they I think they all have those
<v Speaker 1>weird three veins, a center vein and then two kind
<v Speaker 1>of bow shaped parallel veins on either side, right, or
<v Speaker 1>you know, there's we could go down the list. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so I start talking about this kind of like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>there's one to do the botanic gardens, like the way
<v Speaker 1>you see Berkeley does it, where it's like recreating a
<v Speaker 1>cology and it's more like a museum showing people really
<v Speaker 1>cool plants. Then there's a whole other way where it's
<v Speaker 1>it's just you know, design emphasis ondesigned, which is that
<v Speaker 1>doesn't fucking mean and it's pointless, it's stupid, and don't
<v Speaker 1>fucking this isn't better homes and guards the better homes
<v Speaker 1>and gardens, botanic garden, you know, the East Coast shit,
<v Speaker 1>the rich luxury housewife shit. You know, trophy wife needs
<v Speaker 1>something to do in her free time. She maybe she'll
<v Speaker 1>fucking volunteer at an East Coast botanic garden, right doesn't.
<v Speaker 1>Another way it works like in a wealthy suburb. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so I go into that, and I've got some really
<v Speaker 1>hideous pictures of some of this shit that I'm talking about,
<v Speaker 1>the office park, landscaping, that stuff. And then I get
<v Speaker 1>into because I'm not a landscaper, I don't give a fuck.
<v Speaker 1>I don't care about any of that. I want to
<v Speaker 1>I want to bring nature home to steal a quote
<v Speaker 1>from Doug Tallamy, who I'm still amazed came on this
<v Speaker 1>podcast once. Because we have very different styles. He's a
<v Speaker 1>genteel offense to him. You know, that's a time and
<v Speaker 1>it's a time and a place for that. We're very different. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I take a swig of my green th forty, so
<v Speaker 1>I get into that, and then and then start showing people,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it could be it's a region specific presentation.
<v Speaker 1>Starts showing people what they could plant, like the cool
<v Speaker 1>natives that grow in their region that no one knows
<v Speaker 1>exists and no one's planting very few people know exist, right,
<v Speaker 1>And that's how you start. That's used that to cultivate
<v Speaker 1>a native plant movement. And what does that mean. It
<v Speaker 1>means just reconnecting people to the land that they live on.
<v Speaker 1>It's not just landscaping. Landscaping is for the rich. Gardening
<v Speaker 1>and landscaping, it's for now. This is something much more
<v Speaker 1>than it is recreating habitat. This is learning about the
<v Speaker 1>land that you live on. God, it just it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, it's h it's weird. It's a it's
<v Speaker 1>a blending of these two worlds. I feel like sometimes
<v Speaker 1>with this ship, you got like the better homes and gardens,
<v Speaker 1>you know, uh genteel, the you know, for the rich
<v Speaker 1>version of just who like can be into natives, but
<v Speaker 1>not they're mostly just into landscaping and design. Got that shit,
<v Speaker 1>which I don't really care about. I think it's cool
<v Speaker 1>when you see like a native plant garden that's been
<v Speaker 1>done nice like Michael Eeson does, that's awesome. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>and then it's a blend of like the people that
<v Speaker 1>are just in the native plants, those are the people
<v Speaker 1>I want to reach. But I mean, you know, you
<v Speaker 1>can do both, right, I'd rather like the people that
<v Speaker 1>are into the landscaping, garden design, all that stuff, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and charging seventy thousand dollars for an install or something.
<v Speaker 1>I'd rather they use mostly natives than not. And I'd
<v Speaker 1>rather they have an awareness of natives and not. But
<v Speaker 1>that's not my that's not the target audience I'm looking for.
<v Speaker 1>Like the people that don't have a lot of money,
<v Speaker 1>that maybe want to kill their law, that want to
<v Speaker 1>do this on the cheap, but they just they want
<v Speaker 1>to connect to the land. That's the main thing they want.
<v Speaker 1>They don't want so much a nice design and installation
<v Speaker 1>they want. They want it's something that that mimics the
<v Speaker 1>land around It's going to teach them about the land
<v Speaker 1>they live on, you know. And that's the thing. You
<v Speaker 1>turn your yard and do a fucking laboratory, elaborate an
<v Speaker 1>ecological laboratory to learn about the natives around you. You know,
<v Speaker 1>maybe you plant some fucking food plants or some non
<v Speaker 1>native but non invasive shit that you happen to like
<v Speaker 1>that you want to learn about too, whatever you know.
<v Speaker 1>So anyways, but it was good. It was a good
<v Speaker 1>it was a good day. I mean, I was absolutely
<v Speaker 1>fucking wiped out, and I have trouble sleeping too, Like
<v Speaker 1>I can't turn myself off. I drink a shit ton
<v Speaker 1>of coffee and then I switched to the green tea
<v Speaker 1>later on, and then I'm just going and I've got
<v Speaker 1>this consistent, like dopamine drip from all the stuff I'm
<v Speaker 1>into and trying to do, whether it's plants or art
<v Speaker 1>or whatever the fuck. And then I just I can't
<v Speaker 1>turn it off, and I need to figure out a
<v Speaker 1>way to turn that off. Don't send me suggestions. I'm
<v Speaker 1>not looking for that. I'm just saying it's it's hard
<v Speaker 1>for me to to turn it off, you know. And
<v Speaker 1>maybe it is escape a little bit too from the
<v Speaker 1>fucking brutal reality. But we did have some wins lately though,
<v Speaker 1>at least in Texas well and nationally too. That talking thumb,
<v Speaker 1>the you know, Mike Lee, the senator from Utah that
<v Speaker 1>was pushing all the sell off of public land and
<v Speaker 1>probably doing it because he was getting paid. I guess
<v Speaker 1>he rescinded that whole scheme. For now. They're gonna try again.
<v Speaker 1>They've been trying this shit since the eighties. It's weird
<v Speaker 1>because I'm you know, I think the reason it was
<v Speaker 1>saved wasn't because of a bunch of you know, us
<v Speaker 1>lefty whiners. It was it was because he didn't listen.
<v Speaker 1>It was the hunting community. And this was one thing
<v Speaker 1>that was good that I could see left and right
<v Speaker 1>coming together on. And if they could do it for this,
<v Speaker 1>why can't they do it on other things like healthcare
<v Speaker 1>and you know, stealing the government back from corporations that
<v Speaker 1>own it. You know, But that's that's probably too much
<v Speaker 1>to hope for. In today's America populations. Education has been
<v Speaker 1>defunded for forty years, you know, and it's a growing movement,
<v Speaker 1>so people are a lot dumber than they probably used
<v Speaker 1>to be and more polarized too. That's what the one
<v Speaker 1>that's the one great tool of the oligarchs have social media,
<v Speaker 1>getting people. You know, there was Kyle Ibarger got featured
<v Speaker 1>in the New York Times. My friend Kyle Native Habitat
<v Speaker 1>Project got featured in New York Times. And I was
<v Speaker 1>looking through the comments, which was already you know, most
<v Speaker 1>of them were praising it was great. But then of
<v Speaker 1>course there's like the token Caucasian woman. Yeah, well what
<v Speaker 1>about bipoic Indigenous It's like, what about them? Like Kyle's
<v Speaker 1>talks about indigenous burning methods all the time, Like why
<v Speaker 1>do you have to take it there? Like you're just
<v Speaker 1>you're a pawn. You're literally acting like a pawn of
<v Speaker 1>the oligarchy, just spewing divisive shit out there, and of
<v Speaker 1>course like you're it's it's it's a fucking Caucasian woman lecturing,
<v Speaker 1>Like the exact reason I left the Bay Area, like
<v Speaker 1>I was sick of hearing Caucasian people, especially lecture others
<v Speaker 1>about racism. Like just fucking the overcompensation factor, the performative factor.
<v Speaker 1>Just take it easy. You don't need to do this.
<v Speaker 1>You really don't like this isn't this it's not gonna
<v Speaker 1>it's not going to show that you're a good person.
<v Speaker 1>So just take it easy. You're not educating. Did you
<v Speaker 1>just learn that the world is fucked up? Like why
<v Speaker 1>do you feel the need to do this? You just
<v Speaker 1>did you just do this? I mean I read people's
<v Speaker 1>history of the United States when I was fifteen. You
<v Speaker 1>just you just discovered you know, the reality, the harsh
<v Speaker 1>reality the history here or what like take it easy, man.
<v Speaker 1>This is not the way to change the world, you know.
<v Speaker 1>And I figure what she said was a comment that
<v Speaker 1>I was like, yeah, you're changing the world via the
<v Speaker 1>comments sectually, good job, you know, divisive trolling comments in
<v Speaker 1>the commentation anyway. But so the thing with the public
<v Speaker 1>lancell Left though, that was that was heartening to read.
<v Speaker 1>Was watching Yeah, I was watching Left there right, watching
<v Speaker 1>like all these I think, what was it like meat
<v Speaker 1>eater podcast some other guy. People were pissed. Man. People
<v Speaker 1>realized that this is and there were only a couple
<v Speaker 1>boot lick or comments too where it's will the federal
<v Speaker 1>goobibidudes too, bitch? No, no, no, this isn't like an
<v Speaker 1>a Reaganist you know, anti big government thing. Don't don't
<v Speaker 1>phrase it like that. The federal government doesn't own it,
<v Speaker 1>they manage it. You own it. The public owns it.
<v Speaker 1>And of course a lot of people in Texas and
<v Speaker 1>even on the East Coast have no idea. Look at
<v Speaker 1>a public lands map of North America and look, once
<v Speaker 1>you hit New Mexico, from New Mexico west and north,
<v Speaker 1>there's a shit ton of public land. It's incredible. Nevada
<v Speaker 1>has the most. And boy did I spend time in Nevada,
<v Speaker 1>wonderful moments of my life. Weeks of my life in Nevada,
<v Speaker 1>living out of the back of my truck, doing botany,
<v Speaker 1>scamming time off from the railroad. When I went out
<v Speaker 1>for shoulder surgery after dislocating my shoulder, that was a
<v Speaker 1>that was a guys, and I got, like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>four months off. Well, they wouldn't let me back for
<v Speaker 1>a while. They were they were up. Actually, just caught
<v Speaker 1>a big settlement for fucking people like that. The railroad
<v Speaker 1>did for uh, you know, not for fucking with people
<v Speaker 1>when they go out for like a surgery or some
<v Speaker 1>sort of disability thing and then trying to disqualify them
<v Speaker 1>from service. What a horrible company. Anyway, Well, the thing is,
<v Speaker 1>if they fire someone, then they can hire due to
<v Speaker 1>the contract agreements, they can hire a new hire brakeman,
<v Speaker 1>you know, at eighty percent of what what someone who's
<v Speaker 1>been there five or ten years would make. So I
<v Speaker 1>think that's why they want to do it. Anyway, But
<v Speaker 1>I spent a lot of time in event. I've spent
<v Speaker 1>a lot of time in Arizona. I've spent a lot,
<v Speaker 1>a shit, a ton of time in New Mexico. This
<v Speaker 1>is like twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, eighteen nineteen, and twenty
<v Speaker 1>twenty in all these places. A lot of time there,
<v Speaker 1>like weeks, like just just moving around slowly looking for
<v Speaker 1>plants in the mountains and just spending time. That mountaintop
<v Speaker 1>looks good, Let's go there, that hill looks cool, Let's
<v Speaker 1>go there. Look at this exposure of volcanic tough. Let's
<v Speaker 1>go over there. And you can go to all these
<v Speaker 1>places and there's no one there, and there's a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of wonderful plant species, and they're all different variations on
<v Speaker 1>a theme. Different species of Vissilia or ariagonum, different dyc's,
<v Speaker 1>different species of in Cilia or in Celiopsis gypsum endemics.
<v Speaker 1>Some of the Aregemenies, you know, our Gemeny California Californica
<v Speaker 1>bear poppy gypsum endemic grows on crazy soil outside of
<v Speaker 1>outside of Vegas on gyps some exposures outside of Vegas,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the different speed Yucca jaegaryana, the dwarf Joshua
<v Speaker 1>tree grown in southwest Utah. And the idea that somehow
<v Speaker 1>this would be sold off. First off, he was doing
<v Speaker 1>it under the auspices of affordable housing. There's more than
<v Speaker 1>enough housing. It's just owned by investors. You're in. You're
<v Speaker 1>not trying to create affordable housing. There's no money in
<v Speaker 1>affordable housing. You're trying to create luxury housing because you're
<v Speaker 1>a pig. So that right there. And then of course,
<v Speaker 1>if he's getting love, I'm sure he's getting lobbied hard.
<v Speaker 1>I mean the whole you know, it's all these dudes
<v Speaker 1>are so owned and bought already. It was crazy. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>it was nice to see a grassroots effort on both
<v Speaker 1>the left and the right that come together and do this.
<v Speaker 1>And of course, you know, you get down to it,
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure there'd be some shitty things people on the
<v Speaker 1>right could say, like, oh, yeah, these these laborers just
<v Speaker 1>want to go out there and just feel good about themselves.
<v Speaker 1>They just want to hike. They just want to what
<v Speaker 1>is act? Just want to You just want to feel
<v Speaker 1>good about yourself. I heard someone I used, this guy
<v Speaker 1>who had one foot in the grave and mentally obese man,
<v Speaker 1>you know, looked miserable in all other respects. One of
<v Speaker 1>the only people I worked with on a railroad who
<v Speaker 1>tried to talk to me about religion once and I
<v Speaker 1>had to tell him. I had to fucking interrupt and
<v Speaker 1>be like, look, man, stop, I'm trapped in this locomotive
<v Speaker 1>cab with you, and everyone knows you just don't talk
<v Speaker 1>about politics or religion on the road. I need you
<v Speaker 1>to stop. It's like sixty five. I wonder if he's
<v Speaker 1>still alive. Probably not. Didn't look like he would be.
<v Speaker 1>Didn't look very healthy anyway, but he was. He went
<v Speaker 1>off to me. He went off on a rant about
<v Speaker 1>that to me once. He's like, oh, these you know,
<v Speaker 1>these people from down south want to come up here
<v Speaker 1>to northern California and you know, spend two weeks in
<v Speaker 1>a place that we have to live, and shit the
<v Speaker 1>fuck up. They have fucking arguments. They're so elitist and
<v Speaker 1>and shitty, you know, so they can feel good about
<v Speaker 1>themselves by going out on a you. Yeah, you should
<v Speaker 1>do that too, buddy. Somebody ought to dose you, you know,
<v Speaker 1>straight bag over the head, dose you ether chloroform your ass.
<v Speaker 1>Drag you out to a fucking mount in the Klamath Wilderness,
<v Speaker 1>Give you a map, show you how to get home,
<v Speaker 1>make your walk thirty miles, you fucking pig. I get
<v Speaker 1>a little spicy, but uh, a connection to land that
<v Speaker 1>we all have as humans. I don't know how you.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know how you don't want that, you know, well,
<v Speaker 1>I do you. The culture you grew up in, doctor
<v Speaker 1>indoctrinates you to conquer and control it. But you know
<v Speaker 1>it's bad shit. It's just cultural indoctrination anyway. So that
<v Speaker 1>was glad to see that rescinded for now, but I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure they're going to come back at it at some point,
<v Speaker 1>you know. At first he tried to break it down,
<v Speaker 1>Mike leaded and say that we're only going to sell
<v Speaker 1>land within five miles of a of a population center.
<v Speaker 1>But that's you know, you give them an inch, You
<v Speaker 1>give them an inch, and they're they're going to take
<v Speaker 1>a mile. Four years later, I was surprised they put
<v Speaker 1>that into a budget built too, but it failed. So
<v Speaker 1>that was great to see. And hopefully it'll you know,
<v Speaker 1>if they try it again, and they certainly will, it'll
<v Speaker 1>it'll fail again. Not one acre, your fucking pigs. And
<v Speaker 1>then lastly, I was surprised this happened, you know, because
<v Speaker 1>I don't smoke weed. I don't I have no personal
<v Speaker 1>interest in this. I think weed can make people complete
<v Speaker 1>idiots too. You do it every day, you're forgetful, you
<v Speaker 1>get paranoid. A lot of you know, a lot of
<v Speaker 1>the quack science people on the permaculture hashtag not all
<v Speaker 1>permaculture lists, A lot of the quack science people in
<v Speaker 1>the permaculture front that are some wacky shit. You could
<v Speaker 1>tell they're just I wonder how much of that is
<v Speaker 1>due to the constant smoking of of cannabis. But it's
<v Speaker 1>a lot more pleasant to be around people like that. Well,
<v Speaker 1>I shouldn't say people like that. It's a lot more
<v Speaker 1>pleasant to be around, you know, daily cannabis users or
<v Speaker 1>someone who's just stoned than someone who's an alcoholic, like
<v Speaker 1>the talent. And also it's better for you obviously, like
<v Speaker 1>the alcohol is fucking brutal, you know, for true alcoholics,
<v Speaker 1>the alcohol is just a symptom of a much deeper
<v Speaker 1>spiritual sickness. Almostly these nice you know, a need for validation,
<v Speaker 1>lack of humility, uh you know, uh, lack of humility,
<v Speaker 1>trying to fill the hole where like true self love
<v Speaker 1>would be. You know, ego. Ego isn't self love, right,
<v Speaker 1>I should do a do it, I should do like
<v Speaker 1>a fucking emotional emotional coaching podcast sometime maybe I'll do that.
<v Speaker 1>Just kidding. But ego is not true self love, right.
<v Speaker 1>Ego is just compensating. It's fake, it's phony, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>having to compare yourself to others. All this shit, all
<v Speaker 1>the bitterness, all this stuff you see in drunks like
<v Speaker 1>that comes out six months after they walk in the
<v Speaker 1>rooms and start getting sober. Right, all that shit, right,
<v Speaker 1>Alcoholics is a symptom of that. But it also kind
<v Speaker 1>of allows it too. It allows it to get that bad.
<v Speaker 1>It allows the spiritual sickness to get that bad. And
<v Speaker 1>so you you know, people walk in they're like, I
<v Speaker 1>just think I got a drinking problem, and then later
<v Speaker 1>on they learn a lot more about themselves and they realize, wow,
<v Speaker 1>I was fucked up, Like I was a toxic motherfucker
<v Speaker 1>ten years ago. I'm still kind of an asshole, much
<v Speaker 1>less so than I was. But you know, the the drinking.
<v Speaker 1>That's why when you just quit drinking and you're not
<v Speaker 1>actually dealing with your shit, going to therapy, taking psychedelics
<v Speaker 1>in a fucking you know, therapeutic setting, or with the
<v Speaker 1>just with the intent of looking in at yourself and
<v Speaker 1>having a bad trip and dealing with all your bullshit.
<v Speaker 1>All that's self honesty. When you just quit drinking, It's
<v Speaker 1>why they call it white knuckling. It You just fucking
<v Speaker 1>grasping a goddamn steering wheel trying to stay on the road.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>Oh fuck, I just hope I don't go off the
<v Speaker 1>shoulder and down the cliffs. Spirally. You just quit drinking
<v Speaker 1>without dealing with your shit, you're gonna you're gonna go
<v Speaker 1>back to fucking boozing and being an asshole, and you're
<v Speaker 1>not gonna be a better person. There's no self betterment
<v Speaker 1>there anyway. I don't have any experience as a pothead,
<v Speaker 1>so I can't really say it, but uh what it's
<v Speaker 1>what what you know? Cannabis, which is more of like
<v Speaker 1>a psychological addiction, is like But I will say it's
<v Speaker 1>much more pleasant to be around, to be around people
<v Speaker 1>that just smoke a lot of weed. You can still
<v Speaker 1>piss your life away, you can still be lazy and
<v Speaker 1>not get things done, you can still be a space
<v Speaker 1>cadet most of the time. It gumes up the gears
<v Speaker 1>of the mind, et cetera. But you're not gonna be
<v Speaker 1>a drunk, and you're not You're probably gonna have a
<v Speaker 1>little bit longer a lifespan. So it was disheartening to
<v Speaker 1>see Ku Kluuk's Colonel Sanders, that is Lieutenant Governor Dan
<v Speaker 1>Patrick whose real name is Dan Goeb, who used to
<v Speaker 1>be I didn't know he had an extensive career is
<v Speaker 1>a right wing talk radio host. Did you know that?
<v Speaker 1>You can see it in his jowls. But anyway, he
<v Speaker 1>was pushing this this anti THHC bill where I guess
<v Speaker 1>there's small amounts of THHC were legalized through a federal
<v Speaker 1>I'm probably gonna fuck this up, but small amounts of
<v Speaker 1>THHC were legalized through a federal farm bill. Yeah, that
<v Speaker 1>was it, Okay. The federal farm bill that legalized HAMP
<v Speaker 1>and by extension, HEMP drived THHC, specifically delta nine THHC
<v Speaker 1>at a concentration of point three percent or less on
<v Speaker 1>a dry weight basis is the Agriculture Improvement Act of
<v Speaker 1>twenty eighteen, also known as the twenty eighteen Farm Bill.
<v Speaker 1>So because of this, it's why you can get like
<v Speaker 1>these five milligram THC phizzy drinks at the fucking bakery
<v Speaker 1>here and Alpine or they got gummies whatever, and five
<v Speaker 1>milligrams if I have one of those, that'll set my
<v Speaker 1>ass back. I cracked one open last night. I could
<v Speaker 1>drink half of it because I don't really like being high,
<v Speaker 1>but it got me to relax and actually turn off
<v Speaker 1>my brain for a minute, and it was nice. So
<v Speaker 1>and I'm grateful to have that. And I know so
<v Speaker 1>many drunks too that have said I quit drinking so
<v Speaker 1>much because I can smoke pot or I can eat
<v Speaker 1>a gummy or something whatever. So it's not necessarily my
<v Speaker 1>cup of tea, but it's much and it's much safer
<v Speaker 1>to be around that than people that are getting DUIs
<v Speaker 1>and driving hammered and shit, you drive, you drive behind
<v Speaker 1>someone who's stoned. Right still, they might wait a little
<v Speaker 1>bit longer at the light, they might go a little
<v Speaker 1>bit slower, they might do weird shit, but they're not
<v Speaker 1>gonna be ripping around corners and swerving, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's just it's much better for society. And there's some
<v Speaker 1>alcoholics that are never going to walk in those doors
<v Speaker 1>of AA. They're never gonna do it. Maybe they will
<v Speaker 1>five ten years down the line, whatever, but the next
<v Speaker 1>best thing, but they know they got to quit drinking
<v Speaker 1>to the next best thing they can do is cannabis.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, dan Patrick had this real heart on for
<v Speaker 1>all this stuff, and he was framing it this is
<v Speaker 1>this uh oh, we're protecting the children thing, and nobody
<v Speaker 1>bought it. It was kind of funny, man, no one
<v Speaker 1>bought it. People again, left and right came together and
<v Speaker 1>then I don't know what happened if someone paid the
<v Speaker 1>governor of Texas Abbott, who's you know, mostly a complete
<v Speaker 1>asshole on all other fronts, but he vetoed it last minute,
<v Speaker 1>which was great to see. It was you know, it's like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>this is well, that kind of puts the nail in
<v Speaker 1>the coffin. If this failed, maybe it's you know, one
<v Speaker 1>step closer towards uh, you know, if Texas is gonna
<v Speaker 1>has the potential of legalizing this, maybe we're one step
<v Speaker 1>closer to making it more accessible to people, and especially
<v Speaker 1>all the you know, veterans or people who get PTSD
<v Speaker 1>or have other valid health issues where they needed So
<v Speaker 1>I was grateful to see that. I was surprised I
<v Speaker 1>had given up. I was like, this fucking backwards ass
<v Speaker 1>state they're going to you know this it's already over.
<v Speaker 1>But I think what it was. I think it was, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>mostly just the culture war issue. I think that's why
<v Speaker 1>Dan Patrick had such a heart on for it. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>he really does. He looks like a meaner Colonel Sanders,
<v Speaker 1>because you know, Colonel Sanders is a branding logo. He
<v Speaker 1>doesn't look mean. He looks like he's kind of jolly
<v Speaker 1>and she he's probably still a you know, plantation owner
<v Speaker 1>and a pig, but but he's kind of jolly. Dan
<v Speaker 1>Patrick doesn't ever look jolly. He looks like he's fucking
<v Speaker 1>miserable and dying inside. Anyway. So after that, I went
<v Speaker 1>to uh, this couple's land in Kendall County or or
<v Speaker 1>was it Benderic anyway, right on the border of Kendall
<v Speaker 1>and Bendera County, like like northwest of San Antonio, and uh,
<v Speaker 1>there were I found her. I had found her barium specimens,
<v Speaker 1>herbarium records of called tinas Abba vedas the American smoke tree,
<v Speaker 1>which of course I've been you know, fixating on quite
<v Speaker 1>a bit for the last few months because it's it's
<v Speaker 1>so rare and it's not grown and it's not grown
<v Speaker 1>enough it should be. It's a fucking beautiful tree. It's
<v Speaker 1>got like glaucous blue leaves. They smell really good. Supposedly
<v Speaker 1>it's got a little bit of You Russia All in it,
<v Speaker 1>or or at least the non native one does. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know if the native one does too, but I
<v Speaker 1>would assume so, because you know, third of the plants.
<v Speaker 1>It's a very common it's a very common phyto chemical.
<v Speaker 1>It's a very common compound in that family, in anacardiac,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm sure it's in many of the plants. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I know it's in like a third of the plants
<v Speaker 1>to varying degrees. You know, it's probably for It's obviously
<v Speaker 1>sticks around evolutionarily because it's got anti fungal benefits or
<v Speaker 1>anti herbivore benefits. I think it's anti fungal. I might
<v Speaker 1>be wrong on that. I don't know. I haven't looked
<v Speaker 1>into it, but I think You Russia All protects maybe
<v Speaker 1>helps protect new growth against damping off or rotting. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know what effects it has on insects, but either way,
<v Speaker 1>it's you know, the fact that it causes contact dermatitis
<v Speaker 1>and people is clearly just a bipride. It's clearly not
<v Speaker 1>the evolutionary benefit. It's not the adaptive benefit of the
<v Speaker 1>compound and the plant just happens, just just coincidence. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know why this species is so rare. It grows,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's supposedly someone wrote me saying it grows
<v Speaker 1>near above a dam in Missouri. It grows on a
<v Speaker 1>limestone escarpment above a dam in Branston, Missouri. Was that
<v Speaker 1>right table rock dam? I think? But it likes thin,
<v Speaker 1>soiled areas. And when we finally encountered a single specimen
<v Speaker 1>later that day growing on a one lane, beat up
<v Speaker 1>dirt road, totally vacant on that edge of the balcone's escarpment,
<v Speaker 1>I saw why it was growing on a south facing
<v Speaker 1>road cut on basically pure limestone, with all the typical
<v Speaker 1>cast of species christic Tinia mexicana, Dammianita, which doesn't also
<v Speaker 1>doesn't get plant enough measure. If you went to a
<v Speaker 1>fucking depress strip mall in Austin or San Antonio and
<v Speaker 1>you saw damniannito, you saw chris Actinia mexicana with those
<v Speaker 1>fragrant leaves and the little yellow you know a plant
<v Speaker 1>that you know has relationships with a host of other organisms,
<v Speaker 1>insects and fungi and probably you know, root bacteria, non
<v Speaker 1>nitrogen fixing. But there's plenty of microbes in the soil.
<v Speaker 1>We're just starting to understand. And you know, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>a again, it's a piece to this machine. I always
<v Speaker 1>put it like that. It's a piece of this living machine.
<v Speaker 1>Imagine if you saw that on like a Median parking
<v Speaker 1>strip in the strip mall. The strip mall is still there,
<v Speaker 1>The retail economy is still there. The increasingly dumber American
<v Speaker 1>populist is still there. The increasingly more unhappy and miserable
<v Speaker 1>populace that doesn't have healthcare or education and isn't getting
<v Speaker 1>you know, fair wages, is still there. But you've got
<v Speaker 1>at least a piece to the living machine. And I'm
<v Speaker 1>not being satirical. You know, the instructions for living are
<v Speaker 1>in in nature. They're in I don't even like that
<v Speaker 1>word nature is, you know, but that shit's important. You
<v Speaker 1>think it doesn't matter, You think all that background, You
<v Speaker 1>think it's just decoor. You think it doesn't affect you.
<v Speaker 1>You're wrong. You know it subconsciously affects you. You live
<v Speaker 1>in an ugly, fucking, miserable place. It's disconnected, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>going to affect you, right, Why do you think Airbnb's
<v Speaker 1>feel so depressing? All that gray, the plastic flowers, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the uh the pier one imports decoor. I stayed in
<v Speaker 1>an Airbnb and uh, where was it? I think it
<v Speaker 1>was in Las Cruses. This lady went all out. She
<v Speaker 1>had a free to callo obsession made for a nice house,
<v Speaker 1>felt very homey, felt very cute. I liked it. You know.
<v Speaker 1>The coffee was really kind of lacking, but that's okay.
<v Speaker 1>It was in beautiful LUs Last Cruses. A in a
<v Speaker 1>bad town, you get a nice little you know, you
<v Speaker 1>move into a nice little Hispanic neighborhood and crusaders in
<v Speaker 1>a little little house. You know, everyone's pretty chill. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>there's a lot of barking dogs outside, but otherwise that's
<v Speaker 1>my kind of neighborhood. Anyway. Fucking burritos are expensive, though,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know what's up with that. We went through
<v Speaker 1>a takoia and it was lacking, it was lacking, and
<v Speaker 1>it was expensive. But that's inflation. What the fuck? That's
<v Speaker 1>America in the It's America in this day and age.
<v Speaker 1>You know, someone told me my friend Priya has moved
<v Speaker 1>back to Toronto. She says that she's you know, I
<v Speaker 1>get Toronto of burritos like twenty bucks. The fuck? Why
<v Speaker 1>is Toronto so expensive? It's Toronto. It's miserable, no offense.
<v Speaker 1>I went through Toronto once in two thousand and six.
<v Speaker 1>I was on a freight train stopped there for a day.
<v Speaker 1>That was enough for me. But then we spent a
<v Speaker 1>day or two in the train yard in Capriola, Ontario,
<v Speaker 1>picking wild blueberries, and we went to a museum and
<v Speaker 1>learned about the Sudbury Crater. Nice time I should go
<v Speaker 1>back to Sudbury. Would they let me into Canada? And
<v Speaker 1>I'm getting fucking lost here. The point is, we were
<v Speaker 1>looking at Katinas Abba Vedas, we were looking at American
<v Speaker 1>smoke trees. This guy hit me up via email, shut
<v Speaker 1>out the pole and said, I got some property here.
<v Speaker 1>You want to come look at it? I said, fuck yeah.
<v Speaker 1>I never pass up a chance to look at private
<v Speaker 1>property in Texas. We went out there, surveyed. I immediately
<v Speaker 1>got a stiffy for all the wonderful limestone endemics that
<v Speaker 1>I was seeing madrones on his property. Madrones growing forty
<v Speaker 1>minutes away from San Antonio, Texas, Madrones. But again on
<v Speaker 1>this thin soiled limestone. Why is nobody studying the importance
<v Speaker 1>of soil fungi and soil microbes on thin soiled limestone.
<v Speaker 1>The lawn that I killed in round Rock had eight
<v Speaker 1>inches of soil. When I was digging holes, and I
<v Speaker 1>could dig a quick fucking hole with a sharpshooter, it
<v Speaker 1>takes me twenty seconds. And planting all these plants in
<v Speaker 1>I would dig in con Kong, I'd hit that, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the shovel hits what feels like concrete. And I'm like,
<v Speaker 1>why the fuck is there a building phone in the
<v Speaker 1>middle of the yard. And then I realized it's not
<v Speaker 1>the building foundation, that's the limestone. The limestone is right
<v Speaker 1>up at the service. When they built this neighborhood. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know if they had to import soil or what,
<v Speaker 1>because this is I don't think this is the native soil.
<v Speaker 1>It looks like black land prairie soil, and the limestone
<v Speaker 1>is right there. But also all the plants on plant
<v Speaker 1>that are going to be happy. It's a pig and shit.
<v Speaker 1>And I did plant Damia nita in that yard, and
<v Speaker 1>I did plant Vernonia lindheim arai and Garia, Lindheim Ray
<v Speaker 1>and all these cool Texas natives. You know, those are
<v Speaker 1>the pieces that formed there what make Central Texas central Texas.
<v Speaker 1>And it's the same stuff I was seeing on this
<v Speaker 1>property that we got invited to go look at, and
<v Speaker 1>it was really fucking wonderful. Man, it was great to
<v Speaker 1>go up. We went up on these hills, you know,
<v Speaker 1>these mazes the way limestone erodes, it looks like these
<v Speaker 1>curvy bendy maces, you know, or the way it weathers rather.
<v Speaker 1>And then it's got a thin soil, a thin soil covering,
<v Speaker 1>and there's Qurcus lacy i and Corcus buckley eye. There's
<v Speaker 1>another oaks species I haven't id'd yet. There was a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of great stuff there, and you know, it was
<v Speaker 1>raining on us, but it was fucking still really cool
<v Speaker 1>to see. And then I get up to the top,
<v Speaker 1>and you get up to the top and there's a
<v Speaker 1>kind of serious rich in baky eye and the lace cactus.
<v Speaker 1>I guess it works the way the spines are stappered
<v Speaker 1>around this stem this hedgehog. Heckt the stem they kind
<v Speaker 1>of look like lace, sure, all right, not so spiny,
<v Speaker 1>just forming more of a net and then there was
<v Speaker 1>Cora phantas salkata up there too. Looks like a little
<v Speaker 1>golf ball with spines growing on thin soiled limestone. The
<v Speaker 1>nostoc was happy. The cyanobacterial film just a photosynthetic bacteria
<v Speaker 1>that makes this greens, not like film. I'm always talking
<v Speaker 1>about it in videos. That was really wonderful to see,
<v Speaker 1>really cool plant community. We saw sylphium. What sylphium was that?
<v Speaker 1>I think it was Sylphium ragula, but that's common around
<v Speaker 1>Austin again, very sandpaper like leaves called scabbard scabbard leaves,
<v Speaker 1>and it's growing in a really hot, dry place. It's
<v Speaker 1>like a hot dry tolerance sylphium. I had James with
<v Speaker 1>me too, so he got stoked on that. He's like,
<v Speaker 1>I want to get sea to that. That's a you know,
<v Speaker 1>heat tolerant sylphium. All these underappreciated plants that, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the native plant movement in Texas is kind of just
<v Speaker 1>getting going. It's just getting going last five ten years.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, there's people who've been into this for forty years,
<v Speaker 1>but it's only really lately it seems like it started
<v Speaker 1>really especially taking off, and thank god, you know, stop
<v Speaker 1>planting the crape myrtles. People still get so defensive about
<v Speaker 1>the crpe mertles. They love their crape myrtles here. I
<v Speaker 1>don't get it. They're so fucking gaudy and tacky, man,
<v Speaker 1>But they're not Nandina domestica, which is, you know, crpmurtles
<v Speaker 1>at least have a hard time being invasive, especially on
<v Speaker 1>thin soil limestone. They need more water than that. And
<v Speaker 1>they all look great now too, because or they look healthy.
<v Speaker 1>Not great to me. Great would be you know, chopped down,
<v Speaker 1>but all the crapeburdles and all of a sudden look
<v Speaker 1>good now because they've been getting like we've got like
<v Speaker 1>eighteen inches of rain there in the last since January.
<v Speaker 1>So I'm kind of like fucking because I mean, they
<v Speaker 1>don't they're not. They don't do well, especially like in
<v Speaker 1>San Diego, a lot of places out west, unless they're
<v Speaker 1>on irrigation. They don't like hot, dry summers from a
<v Speaker 1>place to gets forty sixty inches rain. But anyway, Nandina
<v Speaker 1>domestica is the bad one. That's the one that's that's invading.
<v Speaker 1>It's just the bottom of the barrel. Basic bitch, home depot,
<v Speaker 1>garden center, garbage you know, it's like when you don't
<v Speaker 1>know what the plant, you're like a landlord. You're like
<v Speaker 1>a slum lord. You're rent in your place off for
<v Speaker 1>too much money. And you got to do the landscape,
<v Speaker 1>you know, with the plant. You hire a fucking shit
<v Speaker 1>bag landscape where he doesn't carry either. You just you
<v Speaker 1>just maybe he's a very nice gentleman. He's just just misinformed.
<v Speaker 1>Don't give them the benefit of give them the benefit
<v Speaker 1>of the doubt. And so they don't know what the plant.
<v Speaker 1>They plant, like a hedge of Nandina's or something. But
<v Speaker 1>then these birds dispersed, you drew, I think they're droops.
<v Speaker 1>So they droops are berries. They're probably droops only one
<v Speaker 1>seed inside. You know, they end up they end up
<v Speaker 1>invading the Garia and Juniperus ashy i and uh ther
<v Speaker 1>Mattophylum woodlands, and that make the Central Texas Edwards Plateau
<v Speaker 1>what it is. And so anyway, I killed a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of nandina too. It was nice. Just sawed it down
<v Speaker 1>at Javier's rental. You know, I came back and he
<v Speaker 1>was out of town. He won't care, he won't give
<v Speaker 1>a shit. I'll cut this down, we'll rip them out
<v Speaker 1>with a pickax because they spread by rhise on. I
<v Speaker 1>guess and uh, and we'll plant some sonizos, some lucophylums
<v Speaker 1>or something. You know. Luco Filum is kind of basic
<v Speaker 1>bitch too, but at least it's native and it looks great,
<v Speaker 1>and there's insects that eat the leaves that are supposed
<v Speaker 1>to eat the leaves, native insects, and it flowers as
<v Speaker 1>happy as a pig. And shit, that's that's one of
<v Speaker 1>the best plants to plant in Central Texas. The Leucophylum
<v Speaker 1>Protestants Texas sage not in the stage family at all,
<v Speaker 1>same order, but the flowers are like these little preper
<v Speaker 1>You get leucophile and minus in West Texas too. That's
<v Speaker 1>a fucking banger which someone grew that. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>you can plant that in July in full sun and
<v Speaker 1>water it in and it's fucking it does great. It's amazing.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, so cut down some nandina, learn what it
<v Speaker 1>is and cut it down. I went to fort Worth
<v Speaker 1>Botanic Garden. I love sharing this anecdote because this is
<v Speaker 1>so depressing and I hope it changes. But I remember
<v Speaker 1>I went to fort Worth Botanic Garden in twenty twenty
<v Speaker 1>because Britt had just I don't know if they had
<v Speaker 1>just moved there, Botanical Research Institute of Texas had just
<v Speaker 1>moved there and uh or moved into the same building.
<v Speaker 1>I forget what. Anyway, I was going there to look
<v Speaker 1>at Botanical Research Institute of Texas and they had they
<v Speaker 1>had Siberian elm and Nandina Domestica planted his specimen trees.
<v Speaker 1>Talk about depressing, like you imagine paying I don't know
<v Speaker 1>what they're charging fifteen twenty bucks, you know, get into
<v Speaker 1>the botanic garden and you see Nandina Domestica planted in
<v Speaker 1>the beds. Oh god, that's brutal. That is so terrible.
<v Speaker 1>Oh hey god, just what a You've been robbed of
<v Speaker 1>an opportunity to learn, you know. But again, that's the
<v Speaker 1>that's the way you view plants, right, It's this background
<v Speaker 1>greenery for a fucking wedding photo or a corporate event. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>So we're at this this land, this parcel land going
<v Speaker 1>basically up these small mess We didn't find any catainas
<v Speaker 1>because it it grows in Pipe Creek nearby. I guess
<v Speaker 1>there's a Texas Parks and Wildlife Park called Kowalski or Kowanowski,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, it sounds like a Polish name that's
<v Speaker 1>opening soon. I guess they let people in in April
<v Speaker 1>because there were a bunch of observations on Ininet from
<v Speaker 1>that from that area, from that portion of land, but
<v Speaker 1>it's not open now. So and then there was urbarium
<v Speaker 1>collections from Pipe Creek, from Creek Ranch, which is now
<v Speaker 1>owned by some fucking sketchy holding company. I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>but it grows in the area, and so once I,
<v Speaker 1>you know, you learn the habitat, like a Bull Creek
<v Speaker 1>Park in Austin, it's growing on thin soiled limestone in
<v Speaker 1>the upper reaches. So this is a very heat and
<v Speaker 1>drought tolerant tree, it seems like, at least in the humid,
<v Speaker 1>relatively music region of central Texas up to Missouri through Arkansas,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. So once you learn the habitat, then you
<v Speaker 1>know what to look for. And so I, you know,
<v Speaker 1>after a few minutes of being there, I was like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I'd be surprised if it was here unless we come
<v Speaker 1>up on like a you know, a river cut or
<v Speaker 1>something like a spot where like the creek has been
<v Speaker 1>cutting through a limestone mesa on a south facing wall
<v Speaker 1>on you know, a south facing edge of the mesa,
<v Speaker 1>and there's no soil there, and then maybe it can
<v Speaker 1>maybe you know, it's growing in a place that can
<v Speaker 1>avoid competition. Not a lot of stuff can get big there.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't like tis. At Saint Edwards University where which
<v Speaker 1>is in Austin, someone had planted two or three of
<v Speaker 1>these smoke trees and I saw it after I gave
<v Speaker 1>the presentation in their little courtyard near the science building,
<v Speaker 1>and there was a bunch of fucking ceilings coming up underneath,
<v Speaker 1>which someone should dig up, hopefully someone that works at
<v Speaker 1>the school. Maybe they could sell them or so. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, but someone who's concerned should should dig them up.
<v Speaker 1>But do it in the winter when they're deciduous and
<v Speaker 1>temperatures are cooler. You know, it's there's a time to
<v Speaker 1>dig whatever, because they're not going to be able to
<v Speaker 1>get big. They're growing underneath like a sable and something.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's too shady there. But it's cool to
<v Speaker 1>see that those trees are obviously producing fruits and seeds
<v Speaker 1>and that they're fertile, so they must have you know,
<v Speaker 1>because the trees are dioecious. I think so they're trees
<v Speaker 1>are either male or female, and and that they're there,
<v Speaker 1>there's enough trees that they're producing seeds. Got to get
<v Speaker 1>there and collect seeds at the right time. I didn't
<v Speaker 1>see any seeds on any of the trees. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if they already fell off or what, but it
<v Speaker 1>was fucking great to see. So we grabbed some cuttings
<v Speaker 1>from those trees too, and then I left them in
<v Speaker 1>Hoavier's fridge. So so I gotta get them next the
<v Speaker 1>next weekend and bring him to James so we can
<v Speaker 1>root them. Because that's a tree man. That's that's it's
<v Speaker 1>such a fucking beautiful tree and it's it's so rare
<v Speaker 1>and they're so cool, and uh, I would just you know,
<v Speaker 1>that should be much more common than it is. But again,
<v Speaker 1>we need a wholesale nursery. We need someone who's independently
<v Speaker 1>wealthy and doesn't have to, you know, worry too much
<v Speaker 1>about whether this thing generates enough revenue the first year
<v Speaker 1>or two until it can get going. Momentum can get going,
<v Speaker 1>and just start a wholesale nursery and grow, you know,
<v Speaker 1>flats of plugs like eight inch deep plugs twenty to
<v Speaker 1>a flat forty to a flat whatever like Pizo Nursery
<v Speaker 1>in Illinois does.
<v Speaker 2>Shinada, Tomit Tubaville, you know Sinata, Tomit Tuberville shinned to
<v Speaker 2>Tommy Tuberville. He took five hundred thousand dollars in bribes
<v Speaker 2>from the oil and gush lobby. Then he tried to
<v Speaker 2>shit on this tenants rubber down and see if he
<v Speaker 2>could take it inside his buckering recutum. It was made
<v Speaker 2>out of money. Senate to tomm At Tuberville. The climate,
<v Speaker 2>he says, a climate cris It is a hooks Tomic Tuberville,
<v Speaker 2>Tommy Tuberville, what's going on?
<v Speaker 1>I'm back. I took a little We took a little
<v Speaker 1>sachet through the Davis Mountains yesterday through the private, mostly private.
<v Speaker 1>That Davis Mountains is a tragedy of West Texas. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it really is. And there's enough gates and gate keeping
<v Speaker 1>among some of the bonders here, the higher uh, the
<v Speaker 1>higher ups to get you know, it's the gatekeeping comes
<v Speaker 1>out of insecurity. I think it's when people get really insecured,
<v Speaker 1>they need their egos, they need to get sucked off
<v Speaker 1>figuratively speaking, and they're not getting sucked off. Enough, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the genuine passion and love for the science and the
<v Speaker 1>escape from the human tumors. Not enough. They need to
<v Speaker 1>get their egos sucked off a little bit, so they
<v Speaker 1>do the you know, the gatekeep. But there's enough figurative
<v Speaker 1>gates in Texas, and there's there's enough physical gates in Texas,
<v Speaker 1>and there's many figurative ones too. Anyway, the Davis Mounds,
<v Speaker 1>it's like entirely off limits except for a couple of
<v Speaker 1>roadside spots, and even then there's public roads that go
<v Speaker 1>up through some of these residential areas. It's weird. It's
<v Speaker 1>funky up there, man, it's weird. There's a lot of
<v Speaker 1>old people, lots of abandoned houses. And there was like
<v Speaker 1>a standoff in the nineteen nineties some right wing nut
<v Speaker 1>job with a bunch of guns. I can get down
<v Speaker 1>with a gunsting the right wing nutjob thing. Not really,
<v Speaker 1>not really my style, but anyway, he uh, he held
<v Speaker 1>off a bunch of cops when it wasn't over anything
<v Speaker 1>cool either. He just didn't want to pay his taxes.
<v Speaker 1>He was whining about paying his taxes. Oh God, this
<v Speaker 1>little puppy just farted. Jesus Christ, what the fuck, it
<v Speaker 1>sounds like one of it smells like somewhat open end
<v Speaker 1>up a gas station bathroom drain. I don't know how
<v Speaker 1>he did they did he. I think he should already
<v Speaker 1>already let him out anyway. So the Davis Mountains, uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's it's like a sky island in West Texas.
<v Speaker 1>There's there's a bunch of cool plants up there. That's
<v Speaker 1>why I wanted to go there. And a friend invited me.
<v Speaker 1>He's got a little cabin and uh. And then we
<v Speaker 1>just went gallivanting around looking at looking at stuff. We
<v Speaker 1>found two old stone matates like they look like a
<v Speaker 1>gravestone kind of but they're smoothed out, polished. They don't
<v Speaker 1>you know, they're not jagged rocks. They obviously look like
<v Speaker 1>they've been worked by people. And then they've got little
<v Speaker 1>divots on the inside of them. If you want to
<v Speaker 1>know what I'm talking about, look at that uh that
<v Speaker 1>spirit I cave video I did two years ago from
<v Speaker 1>West Texas, a place I'll probably never be allowed to
<v Speaker 1>go again because it's owned by some rich freak billionaire
<v Speaker 1>And I only got in because I was a friend
<v Speaker 1>of a friend of the many archaeologists working at the site,
<v Speaker 1>and that spot got like looted. They were like they
<v Speaker 1>were fucking hawkys taking mummies out of there in the fifties.
<v Speaker 1>You know, maybe Tommy Tuoberville's great grandpa was in there,
<v Speaker 1>pillars in that cave. He paid forty in the right Tommy,
<v Speaker 1>where the fuck is Tommy Tuberville from? Someone needs to
<v Speaker 1>make a Tommy Tuberville dildo, you know, like a get
<v Speaker 1>this fucking guy. Man, Where did these fucking guys come from?
<v Speaker 1>His face is like the color of a pizza. Jesus,
<v Speaker 1>Tommy Tuberville, tim My fucking Alabama. Here's Tommy?
<v Speaker 2>Is he?
<v Speaker 1>No? He is? He's coached. Tommy Tuberville. You were sitting
<v Speaker 1>up from my Alabama used to get fucked in the
<v Speaker 1>gas station bathroom. Old Tommy tubervillet his fucking look. Got
<v Speaker 1>his fucking guy. You pink ride. He's like a little
<v Speaker 1>pink ride with a flabby turkey neck. God, these you
<v Speaker 1>should be banned from running for politics if you're age
<v Speaker 1>seventy year older. Just fucking no. Go sit on a
<v Speaker 1>beach somewhere, Sit the fuck down, Go smoke a Dubey
<v Speaker 1>had Okay, you don't like smoking pot, You have to
<v Speaker 1>smoke pot at age seventy, right, and so you hit seventy,
<v Speaker 1>you're forced to just smoke weed on a beach somewhere.
<v Speaker 1>If you're a politician, No, sit the fuck down. Go
<v Speaker 1>sit down on the beach, relax, do your golf game.
<v Speaker 1>Whatever the fuck. Dumb shit they would have. What did
<v Speaker 1>old honkys do? They did no offense to any old
<v Speaker 1>honkys that aren't like this. By the way, I'll be
<v Speaker 1>an old honkey one day. Anyway, time at Tuberville, got
<v Speaker 1>I just I saw a video of this guy that
<v Speaker 1>just fucking pissed me off. It was like this fucking
<v Speaker 1>this relict, this relic of a bygone area era that
<v Speaker 1>the America is still desperately trying to cling to define,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and did complete denial of the reality. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>So in the Davis Mountains, we're going around, we found
<v Speaker 1>this cave. It was like a It wasn't like a cave.
<v Speaker 1>It was like a little divot in this rhyo light,
<v Speaker 1>maybe twenty feet long, six feet tall, and there were
<v Speaker 1>stone matats and they were little grinding they had like
<v Speaker 1>on the embankment of the cave maybe three feet up
<v Speaker 1>they had I don't even know how old. That's crazy
<v Speaker 1>to think how old this is too. It could be
<v Speaker 1>five hundred years, could be three thousand. They had kind
<v Speaker 1>of grinded into the embankment and they were a little
<v Speaker 1>There were like five little looks like I don't know
<v Speaker 1>what do you call them grinding stones. They're like divots.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a cup. It looks like a cup in
<v Speaker 1>the rhyolight. But there were small ones that looked like
<v Speaker 1>maybe they were mixing pigments. And there was a big
<v Speaker 1>one that was pretty deep. And these are they were
<v Speaker 1>all filled in with pack rad shit. But those matates
<v Speaker 1>were fucking nuts. Man. It was cool to see the
<v Speaker 1>actual pounding stones weren't there anymore. But they were like
<v Speaker 1>these pizza box sized six inch thick pieces of stone.
<v Speaker 1>They looked like granite, so they were obviously carted in
<v Speaker 1>from somewhere. Who to fuck carts those things too? Like
<v Speaker 1>when these groups would move, God, what I would do
<v Speaker 1>it to just be able to go back in time
<v Speaker 1>and like hang out with them, assuming they weren't pissed off.
<v Speaker 1>They wouldn't have been pissed off. You know. This is
<v Speaker 1>before any euros Gate came over and gave us a
<v Speaker 1>bad name. It was like fifteen hundred years ago. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you get to you know, you get an average size
<v Speaker 1>little wop in there. You know, I couldn't speak to them,
<v Speaker 1>but I'd hang out with them, do it. You know
<v Speaker 1>I could do. I can pantomime really well and just
<v Speaker 1>talk to them, hang out with them for a few months,
<v Speaker 1>learner language, you know, and just see how they move
<v Speaker 1>through the landscape and the plants they use. And god,
<v Speaker 1>it's so it's so incredible to think about, and what
<v Speaker 1>a beautiful area it must have been back then. I
<v Speaker 1>gotta say it was looking rough when we were there.
<v Speaker 1>There were a lot of dead pondies, a lot of
<v Speaker 1>dead ponderosa pines because this Davis Mountains whole, all of
<v Speaker 1>West Texas has been in a brutal drought for the
<v Speaker 1>last decade, right like far below average rainfall totals, and
<v Speaker 1>then in the last month and a half it's just
<v Speaker 1>been pissed on like storming, flooding, gets you know, the
<v Speaker 1>fucking rivers here are still draining. It's really cool to
<v Speaker 1>see and everyone I talked to Powell at the you know,
<v Speaker 1>the curator at the your burium at Seul Ross or
<v Speaker 1>Eastern or anyone they're like, this is what it used
<v Speaker 1>to be like twenty years ago. You get these monsoons,
<v Speaker 1>these these afternoon rainstorms every afternoon, and since I have
<v Speaker 1>been coming here the last four years, it's just been
<v Speaker 1>windy as hell and dry. You'll get like a half
<v Speaker 1>inch of rain. Half inch of rain is something that like,
<v Speaker 1>oh wow, we got a half inch of rain. It
<v Speaker 1>was a big deal, you know, But it's got pissed
<v Speaker 1>on lateies. So like that all this stuff was waking up.
<v Speaker 1>But you can still tell. There's dead trees everywhere, dead madrones.
<v Speaker 1>The Davis Mountains like many sky islands, and for those
<v Speaker 1>of you who don't know what a sky island is,
<v Speaker 1>it's literally an island in the sky. It's a more music,
<v Speaker 1>higher rainfall containing plants that normally are not found in deserts. Right,
<v Speaker 1>it's a it's an island in the desert. It's a
<v Speaker 1>sky island, and it's a island of a more music
<v Speaker 1>plant community in an ocean of lower, lower, lying, lower
<v Speaker 1>rainfall desert. And so that's what the Davis Mountains are.
<v Speaker 1>They got an observatory up there. You know. It's uh,
<v Speaker 1>there's public roads you can drive on, but again it's
<v Speaker 1>like it's Texas. Everything's private. So you know you're driving around,
<v Speaker 1>someone's gonna come sniff on you with your down up here,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, you tell them, I'm just out here
<v Speaker 1>looking at stuff. I'm a biologist and botanist whatever. Better
<v Speaker 1>not to say bodanist because I think they probably associate
<v Speaker 1>that with a tree hugger. You know, it's a cultural
<v Speaker 1>that you gotta work around, the cultural retardation. Some people
<v Speaker 1>don't like when I say that word retard, but I'm
<v Speaker 1>I've been. I try not to use it too much
<v Speaker 1>just because it can be a little crass, but I do.
<v Speaker 1>The thing I like about the word retard is no one,
<v Speaker 1>no one's actually gonna use it against someone who's mentally
<v Speaker 1>disabled unless you're a complete sociopath. It's not like other
<v Speaker 1>slurs that have actually been weaponized, right, No, who the
<v Speaker 1>fuck would actually make fun of someone who's mentally disabled?
<v Speaker 1>Who wouldn't you know, why would not use compassion? You know,
<v Speaker 1>you'd be a fucking sociopath. But also, the thing I
<v Speaker 1>like about it the most is like it's the people
<v Speaker 1>that are really upsets are the kinds of like like whiny,
<v Speaker 1>you know, stiff, stodgy, generally Caucasian, always Caucasian actually from
<v Speaker 1>academic academia or over educated of some kind, stiffs who
<v Speaker 1>are gonna like really like they bristle it hearing it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and then they're like they have to speak up,
<v Speaker 1>you know, filter, they have to put you through the filter,
<v Speaker 1>you know. And those are the people I don't like.
<v Speaker 1>I don't don't. I don't care if their values are
<v Speaker 1>the same as mine. I don't care if they I
<v Speaker 1>like their ideology or agree with it. The way they
<v Speaker 1>behave sucks. And they're also what's what's they're responsible for
<v Speaker 1>ruining a lot of American culture too. They really are,
<v Speaker 1>They really fucking are just as much as the fucking
<v Speaker 1>mega moron, you know, whatever the fuck this I mean,
<v Speaker 1>because really, in a period of cultural decline, you got
<v Speaker 1>dipshits and idiots on both sides. Certainly ones more virulent
<v Speaker 1>than the other, you know. Certainly one is you know,
<v Speaker 1>trying to you know, steal from the poor to give
<v Speaker 1>to the rich much more. They both do it, but
<v Speaker 1>the least both political parties. Let's not get into it.
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to talk politics. But anyway, so you
<v Speaker 1>get this thing where it's like no one can imagine
<v Speaker 1>the private property here is no one can imagine that.
<v Speaker 1>You're just out the suspicion, in the paranoia. I've rant
<v Speaker 1>it about this before, you know. Whereas like in Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>someone finds you on their property, they don't automatically assume
<v Speaker 1>the worst. They ask you what the hell you're doing.
<v Speaker 1>You tell them and then they either leave you alone
<v Speaker 1>or they hang out with you for the next couple
<v Speaker 1>hours if they have time, and show you, you know, fosis,
<v Speaker 1>cool fossils they found on their land. There's some cool plants.
<v Speaker 1>They're like, a cool you know whatever, right that happened
<v Speaker 1>to me, And that's happened to me a number of times,
<v Speaker 1>you know, Baha and fucking wahaka or wherever, and they're
<v Speaker 1>you're curious. You talk to him and they're like, okay, cool,
<v Speaker 1>you can hang out here for a while. Or they'll
<v Speaker 1>be like no, it's not this is I'm doing something
<v Speaker 1>with this or whatever. But they're always nice. They're never
<v Speaker 1>this paranoid. You know, double digit IQ, you must be
<v Speaker 1>doing something wrong, like the guy had in uh in
<v Speaker 1>Southern Brewster County. Guy freaked out. He told me I
<v Speaker 1>was stealing because I was collecting seeds from Caste list
<v Speaker 1>the wordy I and he just seemed I mean, he
<v Speaker 1>just seemed like a miserable, fucking alcoholic. Like a lot.
<v Speaker 1>There's Alcoholism's bad out here, you know. It's the culture
<v Speaker 1>of West Texas is not my favorite. It's not my favorite,
<v Speaker 1>I'll be honest with you. A lot a paranoia, suspicion,
<v Speaker 1>people shit talk on each other. I just see it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, whether it's like on the Facebook town forums
<v Speaker 1>or whether it's a I mean, there's a lot of
<v Speaker 1>unhappy people who probably need a lot of therapy. I
<v Speaker 1>think you need a lot of therapy. Fuck it, dose them, dose,
<v Speaker 1>give them, give them dosed therapy. You know, you're working
<v Speaker 1>out forty to fifty years of undiagnosed mental trauma, untreated
<v Speaker 1>you know, ego disturbances and self hate and insecurities and these,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the typical it's just all part of the
<v Speaker 1>same poison we have here in mainstream American culture. Okay, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, this this archaeological site was incredible, and it
<v Speaker 1>made me think, Man, if you sifted through see I
<v Speaker 1>think it's important to respect the culture that these artifacts
<v Speaker 1>came from. But I also think it's really there's a
<v Speaker 1>lot of insight that's worth getting from this, and there's
<v Speaker 1>a way to ethically do that to still get that
<v Speaker 1>insight and study things, you know. But if I fucking
<v Speaker 1>hate people who go to places like that and take
<v Speaker 1>stuff too, that's such a dick move, right, leave it there.
<v Speaker 1>Right when you take it, You're you're stealing information. First off,
<v Speaker 1>it's not yours, it's it belongs to the culture that
<v Speaker 1>it came from, in this case, the hu Monols. Who
<v Speaker 1>knows how old that is. But also you know you're
<v Speaker 1>you're stealing. It's you're stealing from the commons. You're stealing
<v Speaker 1>knowledge from the comments about people who lived on this
<v Speaker 1>land and inhabited it. It's all part of the human story.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, But I bet if you sifted through that
<v Speaker 1>you'd find god knows how many flakes and other whatever,
<v Speaker 1>you know. But I just love thinking about what what
<v Speaker 1>that landscape must have been like back then, Probably much
<v Speaker 1>more pleasant to live in, much more wildlife. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the hockey death cult hadn't come and you know, shot
<v Speaker 1>most of the most of the predators and wildlife, and
<v Speaker 1>uh man, I don't know, it's yeah, but the landscape,
<v Speaker 1>you know, was still recovering. And that was something I noticed,
<v Speaker 1>is like there was dead trees everywhere. And then the
<v Speaker 1>feral donkeys are really bad there too, which look, I
<v Speaker 1>love donkeys as much as anyone, but there's too many
<v Speaker 1>of them and they destroy the landscape, you know. And
<v Speaker 1>and frankly, some of the animal lovers, some of those
<v Speaker 1>people freak me out. I think they're sociopaths, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I think they're hiding they have, a lot of them
<v Speaker 1>i've met have a hate for humanity, which I don't have.
<v Speaker 1>Actually love people as individuals, they're fun. The human behavior
<v Speaker 1>when it's in groups bums me to fuck out. I
<v Speaker 1>avoid at all costs, but you know, and it's predictable.
<v Speaker 1>But individuals, that's where there's hope. You know, individuals who
<v Speaker 1>defy the conformity and really you know, go about the
<v Speaker 1>purposes of self insight, learning who they are, self education,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. But some of the animal people, really have
<v Speaker 1>you see them in like the comments section or the
<v Speaker 1>ones that I've met. I just hate people. I hate them,
<v Speaker 1>you know. So whether it's the feral cat people, some
<v Speaker 1>of the horse people, and I fucking love horses, some
<v Speaker 1>of them are definitely mentally ill. There's definitely some mental
<v Speaker 1>illness among that contingent. But uh, you know, I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if you have to call the feral donkeys or
<v Speaker 1>what you could ster a you know, waste tons of
<v Speaker 1>money doing that, not catch all of them and then whatever.
<v Speaker 1>But I think you know, round them up, take them
<v Speaker 1>to a petting zoos somewhere. That would be the ideal
<v Speaker 1>thing if you could do that. I don't know how
<v Speaker 1>you could do that, though, you know, it's hard, it's
<v Speaker 1>rough terrain. Shooting them certainly seems easier. It sucks, but
<v Speaker 1>you know, they're really destroying the landscape, and they're they're
<v Speaker 1>doing it to the Mojave too. And all the botanists
<v Speaker 1>and friends with that have surveyor jobs out of the
<v Speaker 1>Mojave note it. They see the intense damage that's done.
<v Speaker 1>And there's no predators to keep them in check. It's
<v Speaker 1>just simple ecological math, right, same thing that's happened to
<v Speaker 1>the deer in most of Central Texas. There's no predators.
<v Speaker 1>There's a few people hunting them, and so they just
<v Speaker 1>decimate the landscape and then they end up getting hit
<v Speaker 1>by cars, you know, causing accidents. But anyway, so the
<v Speaker 1>feral donkeys are bad in the Davis Mountains. They're doing
<v Speaker 1>a lot of damage, but there's still a ton of
<v Speaker 1>cool plants. You know. I would have loved to see
<v Speaker 1>it even in like the nineteen forties or fifties. I
<v Speaker 1>bet there was. It was just in much better shape. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>there's madrones up there. There's Qurcus rugosa. I don't know
<v Speaker 1>the common name of Corcus rugosa. It's a beautiful oak
<v Speaker 1>with leathery coriaceous leaves that are that are obovate and
<v Speaker 1>and have this beautiful yellow pubescence on the under side
<v Speaker 1>and kind of like ruffled margins. It's a beautiful fucking tree.
<v Speaker 1>I've grown up before. I used to have one in
<v Speaker 1>my yard in Oakland. They got they got a bunch
<v Speaker 1>at uc Berkeley Botanic Garden. It's very common in Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>It goes from Sky Islands in Sonora. There's even some
<v Speaker 1>in southern Arizona, and the sky Island's up there. I
<v Speaker 1>think I'm Mount Lemon. Corcus hype lucoids is up there too,
<v Speaker 1>or hype Luca what is it? Corcus hype luca? I
<v Speaker 1>forget anyway, hype lucoids. I think that's up there too,
<v Speaker 1>And that's also in the Davis Mountains. You know, beautiful
<v Speaker 1>oaks and they're they're getting kind of snuffed out. They're
<v Speaker 1>not doing very well. The populations are small. They've been
<v Speaker 1>hit really bad by out Arcto Staffalos pungons. I think
<v Speaker 1>that's the only spot in West Texas and only state,
<v Speaker 1>in only spot in Texas that Arcto Stapflos pungens the manzanita.
<v Speaker 1>It looks like a mini madrone with smaller leaves, still
<v Speaker 1>has that beautiful red bark. Related to madrones. Arcto Staphlos,
<v Speaker 1>of course, is a huge genus with you know, ninety
<v Speaker 1>six taxa in it. Most of the diversity is in
<v Speaker 1>central coastal California, but I mean they're everywhere. It's a
<v Speaker 1>fucking great genus. They associate with a lot of cool
<v Speaker 1>basidio my seat ectomicrohizol mushrooms. But Arcdor Staphfalos punges is
<v Speaker 1>in the Davis Mountains. It's on U, it's on I
<v Speaker 1>think the boy Scout Camp property up there. But you
<v Speaker 1>know it's there's no way to get to it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>unless you like helicopter in and then steal your trespassing
<v Speaker 1>so uh but like, you know, these these these literal
<v Speaker 1>sky islands, there's so much cool stuff, tons of madrones.
<v Speaker 1>There's Mandavilla hypoluca there, which is a really cool, you know,
<v Speaker 1>moth pollinated member of apossan ace and it's got narrow leaves.
<v Speaker 1>Mandavilla has three species in it in Texas, maybe more.
<v Speaker 1>I know Lenugenosa, which we get in South Texas. I
<v Speaker 1>got that in my front yard. I got. There's Mandavilla macrosciphon.
<v Speaker 1>You know, there are these small woody shrubs with these
<v Speaker 1>really beautiful white flowers that bloom at night, pollinated by
<v Speaker 1>moths and like many moth pollinated flowers that kind of
<v Speaker 1>smell like jasmine. Ecaveria is strict. The flora was blooming.
<v Speaker 1>That was a really cool one. That's a big rosette.
<v Speaker 1>They can get big, man, I didn't realize how big
<v Speaker 1>they can get. It's, you know, Ecaveria. It's a succulent
<v Speaker 1>rosette forming succulent relatives of a lot of the quote
<v Speaker 1>succulent plants. You know, like you look at the tag,
<v Speaker 1>it's just such succulent that you could buy. Like the
<v Speaker 1>home despot garden section. There's a native one Ecavera is
<v Speaker 1>strict the flora. And you know, you've got Dudleya, which
<v Speaker 1>is related to Ecoveria, but that's the California version adapted
<v Speaker 1>to a different precipitation regime. DUDLEYA huge genus in California,
<v Speaker 1>lots of different species, goes on down into Baja too,
<v Speaker 1>and you get one or two species in Arizona. That's
<v Speaker 1>as far east as they come. They're mostly adjusted to
<v Speaker 1>winter rain like California is. But then Ecavaria is adapted
<v Speaker 1>to winter, dry summer rain like most of Mexico is.
<v Speaker 1>And that was going off. He's setting up these eighteen
<v Speaker 1>inch inflorescences of pink flowers, beautiful plants. Supposely you can
<v Speaker 1>take the leaves off, like the basal leaves off. You
<v Speaker 1>gotta get the whole bit, just like you can do
<v Speaker 1>with pinkuicula, and you can root them. You just put
<v Speaker 1>it in soil and you let it root, or just
<v Speaker 1>I think laying it on top of soil. It'll send
<v Speaker 1>roots out of the bottom of that leaf base. You know.
<v Speaker 1>And I've seen them. They're not uncommon in West Texas,
<v Speaker 1>but whenever I've seen them in the last year or two,
<v Speaker 1>they look like shit because we've been in such a
<v Speaker 1>bad drought and these were all juiced up. Going off.
<v Speaker 1>There was tons of mushrooms coming up. Lepiota saw a
<v Speaker 1>couple of amonitas, tons of kylanthoid ferns, the fuzzy ferns,
<v Speaker 1>the desert ferns, and kylanthoid E subfamily Meriopthus astro Leapis
<v Speaker 1>Bomeria hispota. Really cool fucking ferns. I think I just
<v Speaker 1>killed nine, by the way. I germinated some astro Leapis
<v Speaker 1>from spore and I had him at seventy five degrees
<v Speaker 1>in my house under lights under that spider for spider
<v Speaker 1>Farmer makes this great shelf light like eli ed thing.
<v Speaker 1>They sent me one, and uh, it's great. It's like
<v Speaker 1>a it's like right next to my bookshelf. It's like
<v Speaker 1>six feet tall too, And so I had him under
<v Speaker 1>there with a They were in a ziploc bag, but
<v Speaker 1>the ziploc bag was open and they were just starting
<v Speaker 1>to get some height on him, and then I brought
<v Speaker 1>him up. I was going to give him to James,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know why, just to put in his greenhouse,
<v Speaker 1>and I fucking they started to die immediately, like the
<v Speaker 1>increase in heat, and I think they weren't getting as
<v Speaker 1>much light, like they need a lot of light they do,
<v Speaker 1>and that was that was perfect. Those is that the
<v Speaker 1>spider former lights. I think it's like eighteen thousand lux
<v Speaker 1>or something, so not as strong as direct hot sunlight,
<v Speaker 1>but u but like perfect, you know, perfect for growing
<v Speaker 1>kinlanthoid ferns. But yeah, the cicadas were out, it was loud,
<v Speaker 1>the creeks were flowing. Everything was green. It was a
<v Speaker 1>beautiful time. And I wo just I took his We
<v Speaker 1>didn't you know. We walked like three and a half
<v Speaker 1>four miles, but it's up and down and through some
<v Speaker 1>fucked up terrain and over rya like crags and shit.
<v Speaker 1>It was brutal. And then my friend who I was
<v Speaker 1>walking with, Brad, I looked at it at the end
<v Speaker 1>of the day, we were chilling on his little porch
<v Speaker 1>and I looked and saw I'm like, oh shit, this
<v Speaker 1>guy is where he's wearing moccasins. He's wearing like just
<v Speaker 1>like leather wrapped around his feet. And I was like, man,
<v Speaker 1>how the fuck he did that whole hike? And He's like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I've been I started barefoot running like three or four
<v Speaker 1>years ago, and he's not one of those people that
<v Speaker 1>you know consistently tells you about it. You know, you
<v Speaker 1>get that he's just you know, he made no mention
<v Speaker 1>of it. And then I realized later, I'm like, god damn.
<v Speaker 1>Then it made me think I'm wearing these steel toe
<v Speaker 1>boots because I think they just give me better traction,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm just used to it because that's what the
<v Speaker 1>railroad used to get us. You know, they'd pay for
<v Speaker 1>half of it, You pay for half. They're somewhat comfortable,
<v Speaker 1>but they're also heavy as hell, and so I was
<v Speaker 1>hiking in these things and I realized, like, man, this
<v Speaker 1>is that dude's foot must be so like the musculature
<v Speaker 1>must be so different from mine. It must like it
<v Speaker 1>must be he must have such a perfectly sculpted foot,
<v Speaker 1>which is what humans evolved with, probably less knee pain
<v Speaker 1>because when you're running barefoot, I guess the most of
<v Speaker 1>the shock goes right you're running on the you walk differently,
<v Speaker 1>you walk more on the ball of your foot, and
<v Speaker 1>so you're not doing heel strikes, and so that the
<v Speaker 1>shock hits you much differently, and it's you got better shocks,
<v Speaker 1>you know, It's like a car with better struts. Using
<v Speaker 1>the arch of your foot kind of is like the
<v Speaker 1>struts on a truck the shocks on a truck to
<v Speaker 1>absorb most of the shock. But I don't know, maybe
<v Speaker 1>one day I'll do that. Certainly does seem like it's
<v Speaker 1>more pleasant, you know, for your knees and posture, and
<v Speaker 1>you get you just get better developed muscles. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>a plant that I was kind of surprised to see
<v Speaker 1>up there that I had never seen before was Aspacarpa
<v Speaker 1>hortella and it's you know, it's like most members of
<v Speaker 1>mal piggy acy. You see those flowers and they're unmistakable.
<v Speaker 1>All male piggy as have flowers that look like that
<v Speaker 1>five distinct petals. They look like a paddle, so they're
<v Speaker 1>tapered at the end. I guess they call it a
<v Speaker 1>pedal claw. And then they've got these little glands at
<v Speaker 1>the base of the flower that produce oil. Right, Galfimia
<v Speaker 1>and Gusta folia and the Edwards Plateau around the Austin
<v Speaker 1>area produce the same kind of flower. You know, a
<v Speaker 1>lot of the I was seeing a shit ton of
<v Speaker 1>malpigs malpiggy ac in Mina's your eyes. Brazil. It's mostly
<v Speaker 1>a subtropical family, but you get a couple that that
<v Speaker 1>they have distributions that extend into temperate latitudes. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, ask a couple hotel. I had to figure
<v Speaker 1>out what it was malpiggy a c. Because you don't
<v Speaker 1>normally see many members of malpiggy Ac in West Texas.
<v Speaker 1>So I went to sw Biodiversity Dot Oregon was looking
<v Speaker 1>through robarium collections for the family malpiggy Ac for the
<v Speaker 1>county jeff Davis County, and came across it and I
<v Speaker 1>was like, that's it. That's the that's the fucking that's
<v Speaker 1>what I saw. That's wild. It's a new one for me.
<v Speaker 1>You know, like inch wide ovate leaves, they're opposite and
<v Speaker 1>uh it's a little herb with probably a large root underground.
<v Speaker 1>And it's probably been most of these, like most things here,
<v Speaker 1>has been dormant for for a year or two, if
<v Speaker 1>not longer, since the last time they got a good
<v Speaker 1>already rain. Saw Adelphia Infesta too. I don't know why
<v Speaker 1>they call it infesta. It's a cool little photosynthetic stemmed
<v Speaker 1>so just green stems and kind of negligible leaves with
<v Speaker 1>you know in the Buckdorn family, so tiny white flowers
<v Speaker 1>maybe size of a marble, smaller than the size of
<v Speaker 1>a marble, five petals, nothing too showy, but a distinct
<v Speaker 1>scent to it, making me think maybe because of that
<v Speaker 1>scent in the white flowers, maybe it's fly pollinated, had
<v Speaker 1>kind of like a starchy smell to it. And then
<v Speaker 1>the oaks, we didn't see any of the super cool
<v Speaker 1>oaks like Corcus rugosa. I think there's one more that's
<v Speaker 1>pretty rare, but we saw that the Qrcus and Morii
<v Speaker 1>in Hypoluchoids, which is my one of my favorite like
<v Speaker 1>bright white, silver undersized, beautiful fucking oak, and I came
<v Speaker 1>across one that uh Adam Black told me is a
<v Speaker 1>it's a hybrid between gravesy eye and Hypoluchoides. It looks
<v Speaker 1>like hype Luchoids has got that white pubescents that's silver underside,
<v Speaker 1>but then it's got teeth to it, really beautiful fucking
<v Speaker 1>oh and apparently it's it's you know, reproducing readily by
<v Speaker 1>acorn up there. I'd love to get some acorns of
<v Speaker 1>that whenever, whenever they pop. But again with like with
<v Speaker 1>most of the stuff up there, it's all private, so
<v Speaker 1>you have to you know, getting access as a pain,
<v Speaker 1>total pain in the ass, and everyone's paranoid nuts too.
<v Speaker 1>It was wild to see that because of the the
<v Speaker 1>drought and the amount of oaks that had died up,
<v Speaker 1>their oaks and madrones, you know, when they die and
<v Speaker 1>then suddenly this ground is exposed to sun. What ends
<v Speaker 1>up thriving and taking over this what the my friend
<v Speaker 1>was calling cat claw plant. But it's Mimosa bionciphera. It's
<v Speaker 1>a white flowered mimosa. It's you know, cat claw I
<v Speaker 1>normally think of as the genus Senegalia, from the same
<v Speaker 1>family Mimo soidy, it's a mimosa. It's got little so
<v Speaker 1>it's got little like powder puff inflorescences, like the flour
<v Speaker 1>the flowers are mostly when that quote powderpuff, what you're
<v Speaker 1>seeing are the filaments from the stamens and the petals
<v Speaker 1>and sepals are very reduced. And then those anthers just
<v Speaker 1>stick way out there and they've got to smell to them.
<v Speaker 1>The flowers do, and you've got all, you know, eighty
<v Speaker 1>flowers grouped together in a little spherical inflorescence looks like
<v Speaker 1>a little ball, you know, misk Texas, Ebony, Guahio, mimosa.
<v Speaker 1>All the members of mimo Soiti, the Mimosdi subfamily, do this. Caleiandra.
<v Speaker 1>It's the common name for that fairy duster some shit,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, some stupid common name. Fairy duster. Ah, yes,
<v Speaker 1>fairy duster, a name I would never a word I
<v Speaker 1>would never in a million years using my day to
<v Speaker 1>day life. But it's so much easier to say than Caleandra,
<v Speaker 1>of which there's you know, dozens of species of Calandra,
<v Speaker 1>so you know the genus now you know, you know, oh,
<v Speaker 1>this is a Calandra. This is probably a Calandra took
<v Speaker 1>it looks like a Caliandra. A fairy d fuck out
<v Speaker 1>of here, oh my god, that you know. I'm not
<v Speaker 1>against all common names, just the misleading and stupid ones.
<v Speaker 1>And fairy dust there's certainly one of them. Feather duster,
<v Speaker 1>feather what did feather balls? What is it called? Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>So there was this Mimosa by in siffer Its white
<v Speaker 1>flower of mimosa, with these really mean claw It gets
<v Speaker 1>to like three or four feet tall, thrives in full sun,
<v Speaker 1>nitrogen fixing roots, and so these were kind of taking
<v Speaker 1>over and they were really abundant because the last two
<v Speaker 1>three years of drought with you know, minimal rainfall that
<v Speaker 1>they've got, and this plant's been able to thrive while
<v Speaker 1>the oaks have been dying and the madrones have been dying,
<v Speaker 1>and these massive ponderoses have been dying. How many ponduroses
<v Speaker 1>were there? You know, what did the composition of that
<v Speaker 1>forest look like when those stone grinding matatees were brought there?
<v Speaker 1>You know, it must have looked night and day. It
<v Speaker 1>must have been much more wooded, much more music, much
<v Speaker 1>more pleasant. Probably grizzlies there. Probably where there grizzlies in
<v Speaker 1>West Texas, I had imagine, So why, why the fuck not?
<v Speaker 1>What would have stopped them from getting there?
<v Speaker 2>You know?
<v Speaker 1>Probably you know, millions of bison in the state back
<v Speaker 1>then too. I love thinking about like that, man, God damn,
<v Speaker 1>but now, you know, at least we got BUCkies in Walmart.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, isn't there a middle ground? Isn't there like
<v Speaker 1>a middle ground between you know, dying of polio and
<v Speaker 1>completely fucking the landscape into a coma so that it's
<v Speaker 1>one of the ugliest landscapes in the first world, and
<v Speaker 1>you've created this populace of complete you know, entitled angry
<v Speaker 1>miserable morons, you know, who vote against their own interest.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, maybe no offense entitled angry miserable morons.
<v Speaker 1>You know, It's not their fault for being stupid. It's
<v Speaker 1>just everyone's a victim of the culture that they grow
<v Speaker 1>up in. Right. Most people are, I hate to say it,
<v Speaker 1>it's predictable. Most people don't go anywhere else, you know,
<v Speaker 1>psychologically or intellectually speaking. They just the carpets laid out
<v Speaker 1>in front of them. Their path is already chosen by
<v Speaker 1>their culture, and they follow that. You grow up in
<v Speaker 1>a garbage culture, you're gonna chances are most of what
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna put out there, most of what you're gonna
<v Speaker 1>take in, is garbage, right, I guess for that reason,
<v Speaker 1>I'm glad I got into punk rock when I was young.
<v Speaker 1>I already hated everything, you know, I already hated society
<v Speaker 1>when I was twelve, right, twenty years of doing stupid
<v Speaker 1>shit though, you know, I certainly anyway, So, yeah, it
<v Speaker 1>was it was God, it was so fucking cool. It
<v Speaker 1>was so wonderful to be there. So and we you know,
<v Speaker 1>just just I just touched on a smattering of the
<v Speaker 1>biological diversity there, and you could tell that you'd see something,
<v Speaker 1>but you wouldn't see a lot of it, like I
<v Speaker 1>saw hissperidantis. It's a purple flowered you know, native mustard
<v Speaker 1>relative Brassic casey. I mean four petals for sepals, six stamens.
<v Speaker 1>The shape of the sepals have a certain look to them.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>You know it's a mustard when you see it and
<v Speaker 1>you see the fruits on one that's already gone, the fruit,
<v Speaker 1>these long stileaks. You know it's a mustard family. But
<v Speaker 1>I only saw I mean it's a common plant. It
<v Speaker 1>should be. I only saw a few of them. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's just I think the drought just hit those mountains
<v Speaker 1>so bad that it's taken I mean, it's still taking
<v Speaker 1>a while for stuff to come back. You know, what
<v Speaker 1>didn't die was able to just actually go dormant, and
<v Speaker 1>the roots didn't die. What didn't die, you know, or
<v Speaker 1>what did dye that you know, that population is just
<v Speaker 1>you hope that there's a good a good soil seed
<v Speaker 1>bank that stuff can regenerate from. But then you've got
<v Speaker 1>these I mean hundreds of feral donkeys that just come
<v Speaker 1>by and mow everything down every couple months, you know, so,
<v Speaker 1>and you couple that with extended drought and you could
<v Speaker 1>just start to see the landscape changing. You know, the mimosa.
<v Speaker 1>The donkeys obviously don't hit the mimosa. It's got thorns
<v Speaker 1>on it and it can take the full sun. So,
<v Speaker 1>you know, you lose a lot of the oak diversity,
<v Speaker 1>the cool oaks up there, of which there's like four
<v Speaker 1>or five species. And then, of course, since the oaks
<v Speaker 1>are ectomicro hizol, when those die, you and how you're
<v Speaker 1>changing the you know, the microbial community. A lot of
<v Speaker 1>those ectomicro rhyzol fungi can't thrive anymore since their host
<v Speaker 1>trees are gone, and you start to see what's happening.
<v Speaker 1>You're getting a completely you're turning more into like a
<v Speaker 1>desert mountain, less of a sky island and more of
<v Speaker 1>a desert mountain. So the whole reason I wanted to
<v Speaker 1>go to the Davis Mountains in the first place was
<v Speaker 1>to study, to take photos of and maybe collect some
<v Speaker 1>of the fungi that are going there, because there hasn't
<v Speaker 1>been so far as I know, a proper fungal survey
<v Speaker 1>of the mushrooms that occur there, the fungi that occur there,
<v Speaker 1>and I know there, I knew there'd be a lot
<v Speaker 1>of michael Rhizol species due to the oaks and the
<v Speaker 1>madrones and the pines, but it seemed like, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>there were a lot of mushrooms coming up, but it
<v Speaker 1>was still pretty early. A lot of stuff wasn't flowering
<v Speaker 1>yet or was just starting to flower. And uh, and
<v Speaker 1>it's such a big fucking mountain range, and it's so
<v Speaker 1>it's all divided again. It's like access is impossible, like
<v Speaker 1>so many places in West Texas. And so that means
<v Speaker 1>that not only is the body of knowledge compromised, and
<v Speaker 1>it's it's hard to study and you have to get act.
<v Speaker 1>It's just a fucking nightmare. But also of course people
<v Speaker 1>are cut off from their own land and have no
<v Speaker 1>idea what grows there. It's all just because someone put
<v Speaker 1>their name on it whatever. You know, a lot of
<v Speaker 1>these parcels aren't even owned or aren't even occupied. The
<v Speaker 1>thing I really want to see there, though, is that
<v Speaker 1>Arcto Staffalos pungeins now Arcto Staffelos pungeons again, a species
<v Speaker 1>of man's in needa. It's one of the most widespread
<v Speaker 1>species next to Arcto Staphalos uva ersy. Arcto Staphalos uva
<v Speaker 1>ersy grows along the shores of Lake Michigan and many
<v Speaker 1>other high latitude places. I think it's circumpolar. I think
<v Speaker 1>it grows in Europe too, as you would expect from
<v Speaker 1>higher latitude plants, you know, I mean closer to the pole.
<v Speaker 1>You know, the distance between areas of longitude are a
<v Speaker 1>lot shorter. So anyway, but archdo staphlos ubercy yet grows,
<v Speaker 1>Wisconsin grows, and fucking I think it's even in Indiana
<v Speaker 1>along the shores of Lake Michigan. I don't know, but
<v Speaker 1>pungens is the next most widespread one common throughout western
<v Speaker 1>North America. I've seen it in Nuevo Leone growing on
<v Speaker 1>gypsum down there, you know. But I really like this
<v Speaker 1>Texas disc junk like I would love to get that
<v Speaker 1>into propagation. And you know, Mike Easton's already trying to.
<v Speaker 1>I guess he visited and took some air layered cuttings,
<v Speaker 1>you know for San Antonio botanic arm But man, I
<v Speaker 1>would love to maybe get some seed. It can be,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like many of the Arctostaphalos are. They're hard.
<v Speaker 1>They're hard the German a. You need a smoke treatment
<v Speaker 1>or scarification. The seeds are very long lived. They're called
<v Speaker 1>manzanitas because the berries look like like little apples, and
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's like madrone, it's got that weird fungal
<v Speaker 1>association and the roots don't have they lack root hairs,
<v Speaker 1>so they're much more sensitive roots than most plants. They
<v Speaker 1>lack root hairs. They can do that because they rely
<v Speaker 1>on micro rhizo fungi for most of their nutrient acquisition.
<v Speaker 1>So you know, manzanitas are hard to grow, but they're
<v Speaker 1>not impossible. There's a couple that are, you know, common
<v Speaker 1>in cultivation in California. Doctor Herd is a cultivar. I
<v Speaker 1>think that species is actually Arctostaphalos manzana. What does the
<v Speaker 1>species in doctor Herd? I think the species is manzanita.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, madrones aren't that impossibly that it's just hard.
<v Speaker 1>It's a thirty foot tall madrone at Suos University in Alpine,
<v Speaker 1>Texas madrone. So it's totally doable. But again, you need
<v Speaker 1>to get sourced. You need to source materials somehow, so
<v Speaker 1>you know, that'd be a fuck, and that's a huge
<v Speaker 1>disc junk. That's like the equivalent of that deming that
<v Speaker 1>Cook's Peak Arizona cypress population in southern New Mexico, Like
<v Speaker 1>the nearest population of pungens is like three or four
<v Speaker 1>hundred miles away. So these are place to see relics.
<v Speaker 1>They are relics of a much different time and there
<v Speaker 1>was probably I mean, that's not even the highest point
<v Speaker 1>in the Davis Mountains where it grows on the northeast
<v Speaker 1>side near the boy Scout Camp. You can look on
<v Speaker 1>sw Biodiversity Dot Oregon final old orbarium collections. The last,
<v Speaker 1>the latest one is from the late eighties. But it's
<v Speaker 1>not even the highest point. That's just kind of where
<v Speaker 1>it ended up. I don't know what specifically about that
<v Speaker 1>northeastern flank of the Davis Mountains, but goddamn, that would
<v Speaker 1>be a cool one to see and collect the specimen
<v Speaker 1>of and try and get seeds of it. And I bet,
<v Speaker 1>I bet there's probably gonna be a bunch of fruits,
<v Speaker 1>you know, ready in a few months. So and that's
<v Speaker 1>not even Nature conservd that's not even on the Nature
<v Speaker 1>Conservancy land. You'd have to hit the hit up the
<v Speaker 1>boy Scout Camp who owns this scout camp, you know,
<v Speaker 1>maybe go there August. I presume being a scout camp,
<v Speaker 1>they're probably busy for the summer, but maybe in the
<v Speaker 1>down season, the off season, like September, you go out there. Anyway.
<v Speaker 1>In other news, South Texta's been getting hit with a
<v Speaker 1>ton of rain. We found a baby horned lizard at
<v Speaker 1>Thorn Scrubs Sanctuary, which was a god that was really
<v Speaker 1>exciting to see, like a tiny one. I didn't even
<v Speaker 1>see it. Aaron saw it. I was showing him a
<v Speaker 1>little peyote in the ground and there was this tiny
<v Speaker 1>fucking Fryina soma there. It was wild. It was so
<v Speaker 1>cool to I mean, they blend in so well. It
<v Speaker 1>looks like it's almost like it's a different ecotype, like
<v Speaker 1>they blend in more with the substrate of that fine
<v Speaker 1>silty calichi clay soil. And there's lots of barren soil,
<v Speaker 1>like it's so hot. That's the cool thing about thorn
<v Speaker 1>scrub is there's whole patches where it's just barren, there's
<v Speaker 1>nothing growing. And that's why buffalo grass has been such
<v Speaker 1>a bummer, because it's just it invades so effectively and
<v Speaker 1>then it's able to colonize those barren spots where there
<v Speaker 1>might otherwise be cacti or or whatever cacti if anything.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I remember showing up to the Rio Grand
<v Speaker 1>Valley in twenty fourteen and going to Chihuahuah Woods and Mission,
<v Speaker 1>which is just a mess. Now. Nature Conservancy was running
<v Speaker 1>it for a while, kind of neglected it and abandoned it,
<v Speaker 1>and then it got taken over by the Butterfly Center
<v Speaker 1>and they're still they're kind of neglecting it. Last I checked.
<v Speaker 1>Needs a lot of maintenance, that needs you know, invasive removal.
<v Speaker 1>But god, I saw some of the coolest cactus populations there, man,
<v Speaker 1>Maalaria hyder i. Huge clumps it kind of serious pentalofus,
<v Speaker 1>huge clumps of it, barren soil in between that just
<v Speaker 1>turns to mud whenever it gets wet. And then there
<v Speaker 1>were just these massive clumps of cacti. And then I
<v Speaker 1>think the pigs have mostly uprooted most of those, and
<v Speaker 1>then the buffalo grass moved in and it's just been
<v Speaker 1>it's been brutal. It's been brutal to watch. But but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that barren soil, there's a bunch of that at thorn Scrub.
<v Speaker 1>It's so nice. Man, there's parts of thorn scrub where
<v Speaker 1>you can see what the thorn scrub habitat used to
<v Speaker 1>look like, like we have there's buffalo grass on the margins.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna have to tackle that at some point, probably
<v Speaker 1>just weed wag it and then spray it after we
<v Speaker 1>weed wag it. But uh or maybe I guess we
<v Speaker 1>could use a grass selective herbicide, but god damn, you
<v Speaker 1>need a lot. And I don't know. I don't know
<v Speaker 1>too much about the grass selective herbicides or toxicity or
<v Speaker 1>any of that, but so I'm not sure how much
<v Speaker 1>I want to spray. But you know, there's areas in
<v Speaker 1>the inland from the road where you can actually see
<v Speaker 1>what thorn scrub habitat should look like. You know, these
<v Speaker 1>like there's God, there's I found this one spot. There's
<v Speaker 1>this massive like sixty feet wide by twenty feet tall,
<v Speaker 1>not too tall, branches early and maybe not even twenty
<v Speaker 1>feet tall, maybe like twelve feet tall, and maybe it's
<v Speaker 1>maybe it's forty feet white. Maybe I'm embellishing a little bit, probably,
<v Speaker 1>but under this one misky there were like thirty tiny
<v Speaker 1>payote ceilings, dime sized payote ceilings, and it's a gentle slope,
<v Speaker 1>so you could see all this when the water moves,
<v Speaker 1>it's moving downhill and it brushes all the dead misky
<v Speaker 1>leaves and duff. They'll be like a stick laying across
<v Speaker 1>the ground and the water pushes the duff up against that.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's flowing, but it must be in most
<v Speaker 1>of the area is a gentle flow, but it's definitely flowing.
<v Speaker 1>You can see where the water's pushed little beaver dams
<v Speaker 1>of debris up, and that's where these little payote ceilings germinate.
<v Speaker 1>And it's in the shade. It's not you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>hot as balls, but it's in the shade. It's like
<v Speaker 1>a bright shade, but it's still the shade. It's such
<v Speaker 1>a cool it's such a unique habitat. I put something
<v Speaker 1>on the face crook page didn't take like a proper
<v Speaker 1>ass video. I've been kind of flaking on and uh
<v Speaker 1>doing you know, anything but short videos lately. It's just
<v Speaker 1>been I've been I've been doing short form content, you know,
<v Speaker 1>for the for the zoomer generation with no attention span.
<v Speaker 1>We're all just stuck into these phones. God, it's fucking
<v Speaker 1>it's like to like shake myself out of it sometimes.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, Yeah, so there was a fring of soma
<v Speaker 1>there and then we've just been monitoring everything. We got
<v Speaker 1>that other pig. We need more, we need to get
<v Speaker 1>more traps, and then we're applying for grants for fencing
<v Speaker 1>and uh and probably a grant for one or two
<v Speaker 1>more pig traps. I mean, the idea, the ideal thing
<v Speaker 1>to do would just be have like have four of
<v Speaker 1>these these cage traps across the property. Because there's still
<v Speaker 1>coming and there's pig. It's gonna be just a constant thing.
<v Speaker 1>You just got to keep trapping them and shooting them,
<v Speaker 1>trapping and shooting them, and they just they do so
<v Speaker 1>much damage. Huge clumps of peyoti uproaded, huge clumps of
<v Speaker 1>Mammalaria spherica and hyder eye uprooted. They eat the roots
<v Speaker 1>on nose, but immensely destructive animals. Anyway, I'm gonna get going,
<v Speaker 1>I said, I got, I got a bunch of shit
<v Speaker 1>I gotta do. I gotta take off and we're going
<v Speaker 1>to Costa Rica and the eighth for this this expedition,
<v Speaker 1>this this fungal it's like a fungal survey. I'm gonna
<v Speaker 1>be there for plants, but mostly it's going to be
<v Speaker 1>to see what mushrooms are coming up in the cloud forest.
<v Speaker 1>And then I'll be speaking with Alan Rockefeller at the
<v Speaker 1>New Mexico Mycological Society in Cloudcroft. What is it July
<v Speaker 1>thirty one through like August second or third. And then
<v Speaker 1>maybe I might go to Colorado for a minute because
<v Speaker 1>there's a fungus fare there. I might be just tagging
<v Speaker 1>along with him, with Alan and Mandy for a while,
<v Speaker 1>and then I don't know, and then I'm gonna be
<v Speaker 1>in Illinois at some point in early September, and then
<v Speaker 1>I think headed up to Minnesota in mid September. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, man, I have to have to look. I
<v Speaker 1>don't even know where I'm going anymore. Just have it
<v Speaker 1>written down and where am I going today? What I
<v Speaker 1>do it next week? What I have to do. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you can if you want to support Thorn Scrub. We're
<v Speaker 1>selling shirts forty two bucks free shipping. I mean five
<v Speaker 1>bucks of that is shipping, and then the rest all
<v Speaker 1>goes to Thorn Scrub. I don't take any of that.
<v Speaker 1>It's a direct benefit to the nonprofit. And what else.
<v Speaker 1>I think that's it. There's a bunch of other shit
<v Speaker 1>going on too. I got a book coming out in
<v Speaker 1>April and a bunch of other stuff as well. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know Davis Mountains. You ever get a chance
<v Speaker 1>to go inspect the Davis Mountains, do it in Sky Island,
<v Speaker 1>West Texas. You know, there's God, there's so much, so
<v Speaker 1>much out here to still be documented and recorded. Really
<v Speaker 1>exciting stuff, really cool again. It's just accesses everything, right,
<v Speaker 1>there's no public land here anyway. It's all I got
<v Speaker 1>have igress your day, go fuck you up by