It Could Happen Here - The Woods Are Bad

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

We chat with a Forester about the state of our woods and forests, how we got here, and how climate change is affecting them. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,

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Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, boy. It could happen here. That's the name of the podcast.

And I'm Robert Evans, the guy hosting the podcast. Who else is with me? Is it Garrison? Hello. Good morning, afternoon, evening, whatever. Garrison Davis? Yep. Not yet a Dr. Garrison Davis?

Not yet. Soon to be Dr. Garrison Davis. We'll see. But that's a story for another time. I don't know if you're gonna pass the the exam that i know you're gonna have to pass in order to to get through this class but yeah sure it's a little teaser for the future speaking of the future this is a podcast about the ways in which the future is going to be real fucked up and ways in which maybe we could try to

make it less fucked up um and today we have on a guest, Mr. Calvin Norman, who posted a thread on our subreddit with the very simple, very unsettling title, The Woods Are Bad. And Calvin, you want to introduce yourself, your credentials, and what you were trying to get across in that thread? Because I found it very affecting. Yeah, thanks, Robert. So my name's, like you said, Calvin Norman. I work in forestry. I've worked in forestry for a while now. I used to be an industrial forester in the Great Lakes region, so like Wisconsin, Michigan. Then I worked in the southeast. I did my master's down there. And now I'm in the Mid-Atlantic. So I've kind of been around the eastern United States. I haven't gotten out west yet. And I'm a certified forester forest or Canada certified forest. I got like a year left on that. So been around. I also do wildlife stuff. It's pretty fun.

And yeah, your, your thread, what I found interesting about, I have a good friend who is in forestry or was in forestry at least, and got their degree in that. And we were, we were out hunting in the Cascades a little earlier or a little later last year. And there was this wonderful moment. We'd been following a game trail up like this steep hillside and there's kind of a clearing where we were a clear cut but there's deep brush all around and we get to the top of this thing we look out and we just see you know these these rolling mountains of the cascades all covered in this the most the this lush beautiful greenery all these these pine trees and everything and my friend says to me

it's going to be totally different in 20 years um it's already a different forest than the one i grew up with and and that that is that is kind of the cliff's notes of what what you're you're getting to a lot of detail here and i'm wondering if you could just kind of like yeah start on that explain kind of what's actually happening uh in our woods or at least the woods that that you're comfortable talking about here it's a big well yeah yeah it is a big continent. And you have a pretty good international base. And I can't speak for the Europeans or the Canadians.

There's a whole different ballgame over there. And tropical stuff is just wild. Really cool, but wild stuff. So mainly talk about the U.S., mainly eastern United States. So if you look at the eastern United States, this is a forest that has never existed before in the history of the United States. So if you look at the Eastern United States, this is a forest that has never existed before in the history of the United States. Prior to like 1920, our forest was like, depending on the source you read, between 20 and 50 percent chestnut with other species mixed in

there. And now we have a mainly oak dominated forest. We lost all of our chestnut, chestnut blight. Out west, you've got a couple of other things going on, but fire suppression has just changed the forest there. Same here on the east coast and in the midwest. You used to see a lot more fires going through. I mean, some of that was lightning strikes, but no doubt a lot of it was intentionally set by the First Nations and people before, the people that we think of as the First Nations.

And that has mainly disappeared except for the southeast where virus never really stopped being in the ground, which is really cool. But even their species composition has changed dramatically. A lot of what we're seeing is, you know, changes in human management, but there's also a number of invasive species that have changed things, you know, like chestnut blight, emerald ash borer, Asian longhorn beetle is coming in. Those are just the pests, the understory and plants is a whole different ballgame. It's all not great.

It's all not great. I was talking with some colleagues at an agricultural show right before I posted that and we were talking about how the woods were bad. We very easily laid out a scenario where we lost most of our remaining dominant tree species. It was not at all hard to do. It took about two minutes. So not great.

And then the West Coast, things aren't great either. And when you're talking about losing these species and stuff like the chestnut blight, where is that coming from? How much of that is sort of as a result of climate change know, climate change, like we're having a lot of tree species have trouble here in the West because of how much hotter the summers are and how much drier things have gotten. So how much how much of what you're seeing where you are is because there's been changes to the climate and how much of it is, you know, I guess kind of like globalism,

like people bringing in pests and bringing in blights and stuff from other areas and it spreads like wildfire. Well, I think that we're just starting to see the beginning of climate change, like driving species, you know, up the mountain, off the mountain, out west, and here, you know, out of certain regions. You know, as things are getting hotter and drier

or as, you know, climates are becoming more extreme, you know, here in the Mid-Atlantic, we had one of the wettest years on record. I think it was like five or seven whereas in the midwest they had droughts but before that we had two years of drought so you know it's it's more extreme and that's that's just starting to take part but the extinctions and near extinctions have been mainly due to non-native pests um and that's just most of it right there um just because we haven't really seen the start of climate change yeah yeah impacting diseases so like out west with the mountain pine beetle you're seeing more generations of mountain pine beetle come through i was just doing a

presentation for some folks in south dakota and something like a third of their total forest was impacted by mountain pine beetle geez and and what is that like when you actually talk about this, these beetles coming in, that's the kind of thing that even as we've gotten more comfortable talking about sort of the different kind of collapses spawned by climate change, I think that we tend to imagine more spectacular things, these giant sweeping fires that burn through huge chunks of states and these huge like environmental calamities. What is this? Like what happens when one of these beetles hits a forest,

one of these beetle species, obviously not like a singular beetle. Like what, what is actually like how quick is the effect and what kind of comes after that? Like I, I know there's sort of a shockwave. It's kind of like a bomb going off.

I'm interested in kind of tracing the root of that explosion, if that makes sense. Yeah. so it depends species to species. Chestnut plate was really fast, and it just seems to have torn through the chest denunciative range. So chestnut went from Florida to Maine, and out west like Tennessee kind of area there. And it just, you know, in something like 15 years, the entire species is gone. Emerald ash borer has taken a little bit longer. It got here in the 80s, started kind of going off in the mid-2000s,

and it's killed a couple of billion trees. So when that hits a small forest, if it's a beetle that kills pretty fast, like emerald ash borer, it gets into your trees. It starts with one or two, and then within four or five years, it's in most of them in a forest. And then with emerald ash borer, they're dead in five. Hemlock woolly adelgid is pretty similar. It'll just show up one day in a stand.

And then the hemlocks are dead within five, seven years. And, you know, sometimes you know what's going on, you know, because emerald ash borer is very clear science. And other times you don't know what's going on because the tree can't be so tall. And all of a sudden trees are getting thinner and thinner and then they're dead or you have pests like um oak wilt and that in that trees are dead you know in two months and then it spreads out like a circle you know it kind of exactly when you see like a bacteria like growth medium with the bacteria spreading out that's how oak wilt spreads and it's just like trees are dead, you know, two months and they spread out and out and out. It's scary sometimes.

Is there anything that can be, I mean, it sounds like with most of these cases, like with what's happened to kind of like the chestnuts and it's too late for a lot of that. Is there anything that can actually be done to stop this? Like, I know we have all these structures in place to try to stop the spread of invasive species, but like once they they're in there it kind of seems like usually we're fucked yeah yep that okay yeah once you get past it there's what's called the invasive species establishment curve

so it's an s curve and once you get like right like once it starts to take it up it's like oh well we're done here so uh let's let's start thinking about the future and as you lose more species like oh what do we do here or if you're like you know in the case of case of ash it's like this ash is going in a swamp i have nothing else that's going to grow here so uh now i just have an open wetland like i can't grow any native trees here we're done so the biggest thing is prevention like don't bring invasive species in or non-native species in i was uh talking to a lady a couple of weeks ago and she uh hasn't rolled or not she has hemlock woolly adelgina property

and she brought in a biocontrol or she assumed was a biocontrol from japan it's a beetle and yeah in this case it was one that had been tested and failed because it doesn't make it through the winter but you know stuff like that's like just just don't do that you know i appreciate the thought there but don't with some of these species we have you know you know like hemlock willia delg we have pesticides that work really well and you apply them only to the tree and so it's like all right i treated this tree this tree's good for seven years some of them like emerald ash borer you're done there's just nothing you can do so yeah it's uh prevention prevention and then you can quarantine but then you know it's like we're this county's done so we're gonna just try to

make sure that only this county dies oh jeez welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows.

As part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not.

Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they don't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head,

search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack B. Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep

into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting

and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.

Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep

getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. You mentioned a bit earlier, like thinking about the the future what does that actually look like when when we hit a situation as we have with a lot of these species we're like all right well this

shit's we ain't we ain't stopping this what is what like what do people like you do next like what is the next kind of step for the forests or is it just sort of a smoke them while you got them kind of thing uh sometimes it's smoke them while you got them so like beach bark disease is going through just roasting beach in the east coast it's going it's going to the midwest and so there it's kind of like well you know if it's in there and your beach are dying take them out and if they're not don't there's it's 99 fatal but there's one percent that can make it so you know like maybe we find that one percent emerald ash borer is 99 fatal but i've seen you know in the past couple years i've seen two that made it so you know like maybe we find that one percent emerald ash borer is 99 fatal but i've

seen you know in the past couple years i've seen two that made it so like if we don't cut them all maybe some will survive yeah theoretically we could then like clone or breed or whatever the trees that live and and a few generations have more of them um yeah if other shit doesn't happen yeah the chestnut project's been going on for the last 100 years, and it looks like it'll take another 40 more. That's a controversial opinion. Some people say it's faster than 40, but... Tell me about that. Oh, the Chestnut Foundation?

Really, it's a really neat thing. So there were some chestnuts that were found resistant in some planet outside the range of chestnut blight. And so the idea is they slowly started backbreeding, so they crossed in Chinese chestnut, which is resistant to the blight, which is ideas were they slowly started back breeding so they crossed in chinese chestnut which is resistant to the blight which is native to china and east asia and so they they crossed them in with the remaining chestnut with the hopes of you know kind of eventually breeding out the chinese but just maintaining the american chestnut and just getting that gene in there and

so they started that back in like the 30s and 40s when they realized what was happening. Well, today is 2022 and we are still without American chestnut in the forest. There are some backbred versions that are more resistant, but they will still get infected. I've been to a couple of chestnut nurseries where they're doing experiments. And it's sad because they'll get up and then they'll die.

They'll get up and they'll die. And it's like, oh, there oh there's two look there are two over there in the corner that made it and those get you know on to the next one but there is some work out of uh new york suny in new york where they um altered a chestnut and they put in um they they just they just changed the gene so the you know version that the gene that makes chestnut blight resistant is in that, and that's getting approved by the EPA, FDA, and USDA. Hopefully that gets approved. If that gets approved, we get real further along, because the resistant trees are not the same as the American chestnut. The resistant trees are shorter and more shrubby, and they don't fulfill the overstory canopy role that chestnut used to play. That's best case scenario.

Worst case scenario is you're like butternut, which was driven to functional extinction at the same time and we're just nowhere on that. Purdue's working on some stuff, but it's nowhere. They're not in the woods. Now, how much of like because i i tend to roll my eyes pretty hard when we're talking particularly about climate change and people are like well i think that science is going to save our asses from this one we're going to

we're going to develop some like miraculous carbon capture method and like at the last minute we'll we'll we'll be able to reverse everything and it'll be fine. I tend to roll my eyes at that. But this, and maybe I'm not, obviously I don't understand this at nearly the level you do, is this kind of a thing where if there's hope for a lot of these species and a lot of these biomes, it's going to be in stuff like we figure out how to hack these trees to keep them alive? And like, is that really kind of where we are? I know some very good tree geneticists and tree breeders, to where we are? I know some very good tree geneticists and tree breeders, but I don't think that they have the capabilities of, you know, coming up with trees that are resistant to all

of the various fungi and bugs that are out there. And even if they do, it's, you know, you have to get them out into the woods. You have to plant, we have like 740 million acres of forest. You got to get them out into the woods. You have to have the nurseries to get them out. There's, you know, even if you were able to create trees that were resistant to all of these pests, it would be impossible. So no, the only,

the only answer is, uh, don't, don't do climate change. And to the, the carbon capture perspective, um, the only machine that's going to capture the amount of carbon we need are

trees. I do, I do forest carbon stuff, which is a whole different episode. I want to, I mean, I'm, I'm very very i'm extremely interested in that because obviously like we've we've been supported by a couple of of companies who like one of the things they do to try to be nice is they'll they'll plant trees and stuff which is not useless but also a lot of people think that that's what rebuilding a forest is and like no forests are a huge part of the problem with why the West is so flammable is we chop down

all these trees and we grew back just the trees to chop them down again. And that turns out to not be resilient at all to anything because trees do not live on their own ever. Yeah. That's why it's a forest. It's not just, yeah, you're definitely right.

Yeah. No, it's yeah. That's, that's a, yeah. So planting, there's not the infrastructure to plant our way out of climate change.

There's not the land. It's just impossible. And so even, even if, even if there were the infrastructure in the land, we don't have the time. Because, you know, trees take time to grow. They work on a different time scale than humans do. Even your, your shortest lived tree is 60, 80 years. Yeah. And it is one of those things where i mean we we have this is what we taught we kind of started this new season which is forever with which is that like there's no there's nothing we can do that will stop us from continuing to face worse and worse because like consequences of climate change because the carbon

has already been emitted right you can't just pull it out warming is going even if we were to like make very revolutionary changes tomorrow there's still some degree to which it's going to get worse um but when it comes to like within your field what like carbon capture using trees and stuff can you talk to us about like what that actually looks like as opposed to sort of the we'll plant a tree for every dollar you spend kind of thing um so yeah i actually i actually can it's i do a lot of my work about yeah forest carbon stuff so yeah basically the idea is to make sure you have the the best way to get carbon sequestration of the forest is to have a healthy functioning forest and that's you know kind of where these pests and climate change are interfering with that and so you know to maintain a healthy functioning forest. And that's kind of where these pests and climate change

are interfering with that. And so to maintain a healthy functioning forest on the East Coast, some of these you need to have fire. Some of them not, some of them are too wet to burn. And then harvesting needs to take place in some of these. Some of these don't need to be harvested. Again, we're talking millions of acres of forest here, so we're gonna be incredibly broad.

And we gotta keep invasives out you need to keep forest pests to a minimum and then make sure that you're managing the forest you know as best as it can be managed and i say managed this is not something new humans have been on the east coast since you know it depends on the artifacts you want to look at and what archaeologists you want to trust but like 25 to 20 000 years ago and the last glaciers left the east coast 18 000 years ago so we had people here before the glaciers were gone so these forests have never not had humans hands on them and never not been touched and managed by humans um and you know we got to make sure we're doing the best we can you know some of that means

that we're managing forests with what's best for the, you know, that means managing forests for what's best with the forest in mind, not what's best for the end of the quarter, what's best for your, you know, bank account. That's hard to do because forests are getting more and more expensive to manage and to, you know, manage this thing. But here in the East Coast, we got to do a lot of fencing. We got to keep deer out of forests because their populations are so high. It's just ridiculously high and they're never going to come back down you know we have to

spray invasive species we have to pull invasive species you got to go through and you got to make sure you know you're preventing all those kinds of stuff and so it could take you know you can if you do a good shelter wood you can like make forty thousand dollars out of it and then you could put all that money back into growing your next generation of forest so forestry is really going from a profit making venture in a lot of cases to like you're barely making money or you're you're like breaking even or losing money it's it's no longer you know if you really want to do it great you're not always making money which is hard for people to get their head around yeah i mean it's the kind of thing that in a reasonable world huge amounts of money would be diverted to from other things.

Like, I don't know, F-35s. I feel like you guys could do a lot with one F-35 worth of cash. I feel like that would solve almost all of our problems, yeah. Because the problems that you see in forestry don't cost a lot to fix, but it costs a lot for a forest owner, be that an agency or a person. It costs a lot. owner, be that, you know, an agency or a person. It costs a lot. Yeah. It's like all of the issues around climate change kind of all circle around like growth-based economics. And a lot of like, nothing has a shared root cause, but they all have this similar aspect to them where, yeah, every part of them gets worse by the extreme focus on economic growth at all

costs. And that suffers, that makes everything and everyone suffer. So it would be nice if, since we have a government, it would be nice if they would give more funding towards stuff like this type of forest management, which I know they do some, but a fraction of it compared to what they give to the Pentagon, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, even big, you know,

forestry is technically agriculture, but even corn and row agriculture gets a lot more money. Yeah, corn has massive subsidies compared to everything else. Yeah, like the NRCS, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, they do a lot with farm agriculture, and, you know, it's very difficult for forest owners to get that kind of money into forest. If we could get,

you know, that money, it would be a game changer, but we're not there. Uh, there is some change being made in the administration, but yeah, that's like 2022, 2024 stuff. And that doesn't help. Doesn't help today. It doesn't slow down pests today. You know, you can't un-kill trees. Yeah. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show.

I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.

Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear

to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I guess, is there anything that you're optimistic about within your field right now? I think that would be handy, both in terms of like is there

any sort of is there a light at the end of the tunnel um because uh i'll admit like when i think about not having the forests that's pretty much the most black pilling thing i can imagine like for myself like that's the that's the thing that i have trouble coping with emotionally more than anything else there's lots of horrible things about what's coming but that's the one that like really scares me the most yeah i don't think we're gonna lose forests as a thing they're just going to become you know if without things being done they're gonna become less they're gonna be fewer of them and they're going to become much less diverse and functioning you know for a lot of these you know invasive species be they plants you know especially invasive plants we have a lot of we know how

to control them i was just writing a thing about controlling wavy basket grass wavy leaf basket grass it's a new invasive species to my area it's highly controllable and we know how to do it it's just again a question of people you know getting out there and money to do it. You know, if we have the people and the money, we can solve that problem. Oh, also, if we stop, you know, bringing that in, that'd be even better. We, you know, actually took, you know, IPM, not IPM, but quarantine and pest management seriously. And, you know, people like stop throwing, you know, their local plant out into the park just because, like, I don't want to kill it. Let it be free. Don't do that.

Goldfish, don't throw them in the lake. That's why you have huge goldfish coming out of Lake Florida. Don't just cut pets loose and stuff like that. If we could get a lot of that under control, we'd be in a lot better place. Again, I don't think they're forced to disappear in the future unmanaged. I think they just become fewer, less diverse, and less fun yeah and then you lose species species based on them like birds you know wildlife all that kind of stuff and also i mean one of the things that

also they have to become less accessible both because there will be less of the man as things get more fragile like how else do you keep some of these invasive species out but keeping people out, which is, I think, a bad move for a lot of reasons. But I don't know. I also don't know. Like, is it possible to have a global society where there is not just trade, but the movement of people on a wide scale and not have this kind of shit crossing? scale and not have this kind of shit crossing right like that's when i think about as someone who's more or less an anarchist when i think about the only things that a border should exist to do it's it's keep stuff like that out but i just i don't know how possible that is like a lot of this stuff is i mean is this the kind of thing that's just spread by carelessness because it kind of seems like it can be spread to by people who think they're taking care yeah and both is the answer uh there's some very good research out there about the you know relativeness between global trade and you

know invasive species but that also you look at like colonialism and colonial societies there were these things called introductory societies oh i'm getting the name wrong but basically they're clubs it's like all right i would like clubs of people like i would like to see yes new place i live in like the old place like the european starling was introduced in new york because you know one guy wanted to see all the birds of shakespeare in america christ oh i get an even better one for you the uh moth formerly known as gypsy m's the only time I'm going to say that word, is now found in America because of this

one guy. I'll put the name in the chat for you so you can say it, because I know how much you love saying French names. Oh, ha ha! Ha ha! Here comes the wave of comments about our anti-French racism. Oh, no, no no this guy deserves it

yeah oh i know it doesn't matter we still get okay well nobody does about my italian accent no it is it's just the french it's just the french once again the italians deserve it as well yeah but please tell us about at the end yeah so so this guy uh he was a he's a french scientist he left france he came to the u.s for a little while he got in massachusetts he was also also an amateur entomologist oh boy and he was like oh you know what i think america needs is i think they need a silk industry now they have a native silk it doesn't produce good silk it doesn't breed fast so he brought in the uh lematra i gotta do the scientific name because we changed the name on it because the common name is a slur so we're not

doing yeah so lematra dispara uh so so he brought this this moth in from europe uh and he he started trying to breed these two moths which are not related at all it didn't work obviously and then he just kind of you know he went he went off to be an astronomer and he just let these moths go in his backyard. And he didn't tell anyone they were there. And then all of a sudden these things escaped and now they're killing trees, you know, across the eastern United States and they're in Washington, Oregon. I think they're in BC a little bit too.

Great. Yeah. That's such a good parallel, like a parallel to the invasive species that is french people that really really does just tie up all all aspects of that yeah amazing i uh it makes me think a lot everything you're saying about kudzu which which is in the i i've heard some people say they're getting a handle on it i don't know how to evaluate that at the moment but when i was last living down there it was just like devouring the entire

southeast yeah you can handle it again if you want to spray it yeah you could you could get what's called a chew groove so a bunch of goats you can get a handle on it but again that's money and effort so it's just a question although you do get delicious delicious goat meat oh my gosh i tell you what the people who do goat invasive management, they have it made. What they do is they rent goats out to people. They get paid for the goats. And they also get their goats fed. So when they slaughter them, they didn't even pay. That's a good business model.

As someone with a couple of goats, that does sound like the dream. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. They don't work on all the invasive species. I do. There are folks. No, they probably don't eat those beetles, huh? No, no. They also don't like plants with th invasive species i do there are folks no they probably don't eat those

beetles huh no no they also don't like plants with thorns on them either no and it's very few goats can handle an entire french person either so really yeah we can't we can't trust the goats to solve all these problems for us it is nice that they're helping um i don't know so i i try to are there things either in terms of like it acts people can take or probably more more realistically organizations people could support that you think are actually helping try to stop as much of the woods from going bad as fast or reverse the the some of the stuff we've been talking about today like how how can we, we try to have some, some room for people to do something. If,

if there is anything people can do other than check your fucking shoes for Beatles, when you come back from wherever, burn all of your clothing, anytime you leave the state. Okay. That's, that's a good start.

That's a really good start. Not even to say sometimes it's the County. Go one. Stop. When you go on a road trip, you stop your car at the county line and you roll it off of a cliff. Fill it with Tannerite

and just let it burn. But don't push that into the woods. We've seen that, how that works. Not into the woods. No. No, into the ocean

where everything's fine. Yeah. That's what they say about the ocean. Going great. I tell people I work between the farm field and the stream.

I don't do stream or water stuff because there's chemistry in there, so I don't do stream or water stuff because there's chemistry in there so I don't know what happens over there that's fine I assume everything is great there it does seem to be going fine I think the best thing that you could do

as an individual is don't cut random stuff loose learn the plants of your area learn what's around you and what should be there and when you see something that shouldn't be there and you know it's an evasive remove it where legally possible obviously don't go into like someone's like arboretum and it's like pull plants out no that'd be real bad burn down small farms wherever you find them

oh man the egg people would not be happy about that. But yeah, I mean, I'm not going to say anything. So I think, you know, learn plants, trees is neat. And then if you, you know, think of, if you're thinking about like, you know, how can you help manage forests? You know, if you, lots of people either own forests or know people who own forests and, you know, encourage them to get a forest management plan or land management plan and get that. And then also if you got a lawn, your lawn out again where possible and use native plants i do i do some and you know some lawn change stuff and it's just frustrating the amount of

lawns out there it's like you know one of these people one of these reasons we're losing so many you know birds and we have fewer birds and bird species because like they they can't eat grass you see these things eat fruits and insects and seeds, which you don't get in grass. So, you know, if you don't own a forest, that's fine. And I'm, I'm a huge advocate of that. I try to be on the show and people, again, we always get this thing where there are people who will critique when we talk about some of these small scale solutions. It's like, oh, you know, turning your, turning your lawn into a permaculture garden with local species isn't going to, like, produce enough food to feed your family.

It's like, no, it's not about that. If you could get a couple of thousand people to do it and they convince another couple and, like, so on and so on and so on, then suddenly if you're increasing significantly the amount of carbon sequestered by that lawn and you're also making a better habitat for birds and whatnot that that scales that is a thing that scales if we got a significant number of people with lawns to replace them with something like we're talking about fucking kill kill that grass that almost certainly isn't fucking native to your area plant stuff that is and and and try to reintegrate at least your lawn back into the local ecology if you got a million americans to do a version of that you that's not an insignificant thing um yeah yeah and it is something that you can do in a lot of states there's programs to support it the in my state there's a program specifically for like

changing lawns over and that program is backed up they are out of money until 2024 they spent it all already there's definitely interest there um again give them an f-35 let them sell it to whoever whoever anyone gets it if they want it it just goes up on craigslist all right yeah put it on craigslist cash yeah give it to the highest bidder yeah um the other thing you could do is go outside like support your local land management agency most of these like forest service and Service, they depend on money spent by users. So go spend money at the forest. The other thing people can do...

Wash your fucking boots first, though. Oh, yeah, definitely that. And don't bring shit in. Don't bring your weird thing in, like your weird plant, because you don't want to kill it. Yeah, your entirely seed-based diet. Yeah. If you hunt, hunt great that supports conservation if you don't want to hunt you can still buy duck stamps and

these other things that support wildlife management in the u.s wildlife is is funded by the users so those people who buy guns and ammo and you buy archery equipment and you buy hunting licenses so if you want to support wildlife the best thing you can do is buy a hunting license even if you don't hunt that's it's kind of counterintuitive but it's the core of the north american model of wildlife yeah yeah that's a really good point and it is one of the it's also one of those areas when we talk about ways in which theoretically there's room to build re inroads between left and right in this country. Conservation and hunting should be one, right?

And there are hunters on the right who are actually talking a pretty good, like reasonably about conservation. Like it is an area of shared interest. Everybody likes wild places. So just quote unquote wild. We just talked about how none of them are actually wild. They've all existed with human beings for forever. But like, yeah. We like, we like the outdoors.

Yes. The outdoors. Yeah. Well, and what I, you know, people ask me like, so I hunt,

I have my crossbows right over there. Oh, sweet crossbow. Yeah. Get a hold on a second. Yeah. You don't have to get a gun. I have been wanting to get crossbow pilled for a while now.

Oh yeah. I wouldn't mind getting crossbow pilled myself. Get a shoulder holster for a crossbow? There we go. Oh, yeah, that's great. Oh, that's dope. Get a crossbow. No, this is not a super expensive one, but it's pretty much a rifle.

Yeah, I mean, ballistically, at the ranges you use them, there's not any meaningful difference, really. Yeah. And if you're a person who doesn't like guns, at the ranges you use them, there's not any meaningful difference, really. Yeah, and if you're a person who doesn't like guns and doesn't trust yourself around them, they're very safe. So yeah, get you one of those if you want. It's a fun time. I also like it a lot more than my guns, because it doesn't recoil. But that's enough about that. Well, that's great. Is there anything else you wanted to get into calvin before we kind of roll out today uh you touched on forest carbon stuff

that's a whole yeah a bunch of stuff on that that's a whole other world i am interested in talking more about that but perhaps we should do a have a dedicate an entire thing i mean we should definitely dedicate an entire thing that's an, we should definitely dedicate an entire thing to that. It's an incredibly important subject. Yeah. And I think there's a lot to say about how different indigenous groups have been like up in the Northwest in particular, we have a lot of kind of tribal efforts at, at stuff like not just with the,

with the forest, but also with like the coastline and whatnot and rebuilding certain populations along the coast. In the Midwest, when I'm just a great job with forest management, I am actually doing a webinar thing about one of our forest pests and we're having them come talk about their management well we invited them i'm not actually sure if they're going to do it yet but the practice we use is based on what they use out there so yeah it's it's really cool what various first nations

do super great yeah i just want to plug trees yeah neat learn your trees dope my favorite type of tree probably the redwood used to live in arcata go running in them every day um i know that's kind of a cliche answer what's your what's your favorite tree uh this is one behind me here no one can see my background uh it's white oak you can't make a bird without white oak so yeah yeah that is an important tree forest products are like one of the only things that supports forest management. It supports forest. So don't be afraid to use sustainably managed wood and wood products. Find a good bourbon company.

It's a diverse system, but it's capitalism. And drink a shitload of bourbon. Always a good call, really. All right. Well, Calvin, Norman, any last pluggable to plug? Plants. If you want to learn plants, that's great. If you want to learn about what's going on in your native areas around you, there's lots of groups that do that.

Your local extension service helps you out with that. Most of their stuff's free, so plug that. Yeah, go outside and plug that. I don't do Twitter. Good. Yeah. All right. Well, go outside. Hug a tree. Calvin Norman, thank you again so much for coming on. If you want to see Calvin's original thread, just type in The Woods Are Bad and It Could Happen Here Reddit or just go to the It Could Happen Here Reddit and scroll down a bit. You'll find it. That's going to do it for us today.

Until tomorrow, go out into the woods. go out into the woods, but wash your fucking boots first. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media, visit our website, cool zone media.com, or check us out on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here. Up monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories

inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite your podcast. of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral.

We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle.

Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him.

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