Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 128: The Death of Eastern Forests

Episode Date: April 16, 2023

tree machine broke deer machine working great though sign the petition to get railroad nationalization on the DSA platform: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfxbZ4Of1rChaibt_qnBDjS7UizVFGKOSlKk0UJRYIK-jT0mg/viewform Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

And we are recording a podcast with slides, I think everything's going, I think we should be good. Beautiful. Are you going to talk about the Amish? No. You've teased us with this image, with the Amish, well, two slides with the Amish on it, two episodes in a row. Okay, hello, and welcome to Well There's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosnick, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. All right, go. Hi, I'm Alex Coldwell Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now, my pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson, my pronouns are he and him.

We have a guest. We do have a guest. I'm Kevin, my pronouns are he and him. And you're just Kevin because of like, yeah. Yeah, why are you here, Kevin? Well, I am a forester and a wildlife biologist, and I'm here to talk about trees and forests. Cool. Now, what I thought, I thought the natural state of nature was this bucolic scene you

see in front of us. I'm going to, I'm naturally occurring grain silos, naturally occurring like rows of corn. On safe speeds of the GTI on this road. I mean, I kind of see a few natural things in there, but being the trees in the background, but the rest of that is, you know, horses are native to Europe or Asia, the grass is probably native to Asia and corn native to Mexico domesticated. So not a lot of native in there. Wow.

I did not know that. It looked so simply and off the land. Just a, just a indulgence for a second, what is, what is trees? What is the tree? What is trees? So the tree is, you know, as we define it in forestry, it's a perennial woody plant, so at least two inches of diameter at four and a half feet off the ground, it's at least 16 feet tall.

There, you could make an argument for tree friends being trees. I don't really buy that, you know, but I don't deal with tree friends. I've been let except palms and bamboo as trees. Those are grasses. Those are grasses. Come on. I was, I was sort of not expecting that to be like a height and weight requirement, so to speak, you know, like what class is another really controversial tree opinions out there?

Yeah. It's a science. You got to define everything. Everything is defined. Otherwise you can do the Socratic thing. Well, is this truly a tree? Is this, you know, shrub a tree? No, no, no.

It's a shrub. It's not a tree. If you have one of those trees that's been grafted together. Oh, it's a Mako plant. Yes. That would be like a featherless biped. Shut up. Thereby making it a man.

The sound you hear, listeners and dealers, is the sound of me leaving my house to go hit Ross with a two by four, although I'm not allowed to joke about that apparently. Is a two by four a tree? Was it tree? It was at some point. It's like tree body pops. And yet a piece of the false self, a piece of the true self exists in the false self. I say as I beat Ross to death with a two by four.

All right, well, we've now completed Analystic Philosophy. All right. Yes. Congratulations. Your packets are in the mail. So yeah, we have Kevin here to talk about how thoroughly we have fucked up forests on the East Coast. Yay.

I mean, no. It's a fun topic. I've been kind of fascinated by this ever since I heard about it the first time, but I don't know very much about it, which so I'm excited for this one. It's a fun time. It just keeps me up at night only a couple of days a week. The first we have to do the goddamn news. What's this?

Good news in my god damn news segments. Yes. Yeah. So Branson Johnson, the candidate that we like for Chicago Mayor is going to be the next Mayor of Chicago against the predictions of Laurie Lightfoot and every other professional idiot who called this one wrong. He buds more on. Yeah.

Because it turns out that people actually like when you make cities woke and soy and you defund the police and you, you know, are triggered and owned all of the time. He was. He is going to forcibly trans everyone in Chicago. That's my fetish commuting in the loop is going to look like a Gerard Butler movie now. Every single Chicago and will be killed at any moment and sacrifice has been noted. Yeah. This is a victory for the left, notably because his opponent Paul Valos was sort of like this

school privatization like school vouchers like gun for fire, one of the worst people. And yeah, absolutely. I saw the Chicago Tribune had a great headline just now about this, which is Branson Johnson. He thanked, he found room for God in his acceptance speech, but not for Barack Obama is very ungrateful of him. It's like, what? Huh? What?

What? What? Is Barack Obama bigger than God? So says the Tribune. Much, much like the Beatles. Yeah. I mean, the Tribune is one of the worst newspapers out there and historically has been, but Barack Obama, not bigger than God, I think, personally, much smaller than God.

So Chicago, you know, progressive Illinois, progressive site of the future, Pritzker Carnate. And, you know, fantastic work, all glory to particularly the the Chicago teachers union, who was like famously instrumental in this and also like one of the best organized unions out there doing it. I hope we get a repeat of this in Philly with Helen Gimm, who was also supported by our teachers union. You're ready for Gimm, huh? Yeah.

Yeah. I'm definitely going for Gimm. I think that there's, you know, we've got the mayoral, the field right now is 11 candidates. Yeah. There's fucking people who progressives. There's eight generics and there's one fascist. Oh, my God is the fascist. Oh, that's what's his face?

Brown something. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Jeff Brown. Yeah. Yeah. He owns a bunch of shop rights. Oh, yeah.

Of course he fucking does. I'm voting for Reinhardt personally, but I respect that you're going for you're going for Reinhardt. Yeah. Yeah. Reinhardt, you're going for the Elizabeth Warren of this race. Yes, I am. I've liked her.

One thing I will say, though, about Brandon Johnson is there was a story that the Chicago fraternal order of police like put out at the 11th hour to try and swing like nervous, squishy liberals. Hey, it has no home here kind of people back towards Paul, which was if Brandon is elected 800 to 1000 Chicago police department officers will resign overnight to which get going boys. It's time, you know, make it happen. Yep. That will make the inevitable remake of the Blues Brothers and much worse movie instead

of like, you know, 500 cars flipping over, it'll be like two. Oh, God. Yeah. I mean, Brandon Johnson Chicago, you don't even have a full SWAT team of guys to go like hurt and like repelled down the front of the daily center. Just one guy going like, Hey, stop that. Hey, cut that out. So I mean, a little pal car.

So much like Chase and Dan, I look forward to seeing how they how they fuck him over in office. Possibly, possibly he evades all of this and possibly he's like in contention for 2028. I don't know. But it's a good thing in the meantime. And good for Chicago. Good for the teachers. Thank you to them for dragging America City's kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

I just want to go ahead and defend Helen Gimm appearing at the Union League or no. I just that's the one I'm sitting on. That's like fine. You can just do that. I have no response to that that can air Semper, Brandon or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know who else was at the Union League, Abraham Lincoln, you know, both you and me

actually, we went for exactly yeah, you can't say anything. I don't think they'd let us in except for that architectural tour, but I just want to know what happens when they well, they got they got to have a portrait of Trump in there now. They didn't they were like, oh, yeah, because we went after it was like they're like, oh, yeah, we're definitely working on it. We're trying to find an answer to really capture essence when we went like they should have had one at that point.

Yes, it's true. Really trying to grapple with the like Trump face, you know, it takes a while. Yeah. Oh, fuck, we should have put in some notes about how he got arrested. We're like, oh, what should we put in the thing about this? Didn't we talk about that on the last last episode? I don't remember. He was going to happen.

But now he's been invited. It was going to happen. Yeah, we were right. We were right. We predicted it. Orange Man Arrested. This is another news item. Suck my butt.

Orange Man Arrested. I look forward to him like paying a fine for this in like 2026 after his appeals run out when he has been like elected God Emperor in the last election that the United States will hold. Pay a fine of $500. Yeah. Two days of community service. I do want the photos of Trump doing community service.

That's really funny. I watch Trump picking thing. Yeah. No, he's working in like a soup kitchen. I need those photos. That'd be really good. Well, you can always use an AI to generate them. I don't know, I'm morally opposed to it.

Yeah. Reasonable. Well. As long as I observe Trump's stakes, that would be more time. Trump's stakes were delicious and nobody accepted that. I don't accept that. Were they? No.

I'm fucking with you. Okay. I feel as if I've been rewarded for my skepticism. Yeah. I was about to say, it does not seem like, weren't they like, you bought them from the sharper image? No, you didn't. Was that true?

Yeah. No, I remember hearing that too. What? You get your like frozen stakes. Oh, no. He had also QVC. That makes it so much better. Yeah.

A package of meat coming from the president. Like things you could say like pretty much no later than the Coolidge administration. And like, you know, the president has rewarded you for your help with like the teapot dome scandal by, you know, shipping you some frozen stakes. But he brought back. You got a political favor from Coolidge by delivering him a chest freezer full of venison. My dad got paid like that one time. Didn't somebody send Taft like a raccoon or a possum to eat?

Yeah. They were trying to compete with the teddy bear, and it wasn't possum, but those stuffed animals didn't sell. I just read the bio biography of both the TR and Taft, and yeah, they were trying to like get his own teddy bear, but then it ended up being a possum, which scared the kids. I mean, it's the only native marsupial is it's neat until you put it on, you know, fuck Eagles put that on the great seal. Whoa.

Whoa. Whoa. Go birds. Possum with. Okay, fine. Yeah, go birds. You make a good point. You make a compelling point, but imagine like a spread possum with like a fistful of like

grain and a fistful of like a sheaf of arrows. I kind of like that. If you ever seen a possum skull, like just like the skull of a possum, their mouths are just jammed full of teeth. It's just so many teeth in there. There used to be a possum who lived underneath my porch. I saw him every once in a while. I was always happy to see him.

You know, national golf club that claims to be Philly, but it's actually in Pine Hill, New Jersey. That's not about right. Just learn that. Yeah. Um, anyway, anyway, in other news, uh, and it's done it again. Yes. Congratulations.

Yeah, the fucking Netherlands of Spoorwegen, I think, uh, don't quote me on that. The Dutch train never was able to pronounce it. They put a train on the ground that they, um, the spirit of haunts sort of like descended upon the Netherlands and they ran a high speed, uh, passenger train into like, uh, like a line crane, um, which nobody knows why it was there or, you know, why it ran into it, but killed like one person and you put it there and knows why it was there. Well, I mean, yeah, but he's not, you don't have to incriminate yourself if you're watching those like lawyer tiktoks, you know, that guy with two new rings on is telling him,

you know, you don't, you don't got to answer any questions. You don't got to consent to a search of your crane. Yeah, this is true. I do not consent to join her, um, yeah, but this is, uh, this killed like four people. Did it? Yeah. I mean, so like one when I, when I was one, I don't know, oh, one nasty wreck with a passenger train.

Hmm. Yeah. And this is like in between the Hague and Amsterdam, um, the shame, it's a great shame, um, but I've been carrying Donald Trump going for international war crimes. Yeah, international war crimes, tribunal at the international golf club. There is one in Scotland, uh, and there's one to buy apparently. I mean, we, we ran an international, like, um, criminal tribunal here for the, like the Lockerbie bombing future episode, I imagine, uh, so yeah, we made a bit of the Hague temporarily

Scotland for legal reasons, which is an interesting bit of like legal history of legal fiction. Yeah, um, like how the Amtrak Cafe car is Washington, D.C. Yeah. For legal reasons. Yeah. Also, so you can hold like international war crimes tribunals in the Cafe car. There's not much room, but they do try. You can do it really fast because high speed rail though.

Yeah. Yeah. Implying Amtrak is high speed rail. I was about to say, doing it on a long distance train, no problem. Do you imagine getting tried for war crimes on like the, uh, the Southwest chief or something? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Southwest chief would make more sense because it gets delayed so often. Yeah. The Southwest chief, the Sunset Limited, that's the one. Sunset Limited, yeah. Hey, I mean, if you can sign the album, it's just the world will want on a train car. Why not? Why not do this? You know?

Why not? Yeah. Yeah. Why not? I don't know. I've always wanted to take the Southwest chief. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, it's all I had news.

Yeah. Yes. Duh, duh, duh, duh. Norfolk Southern fucks up again. Anyway. Yeah. Every, every train on the ground is a Norfolk Southern joint. Yeah.

Yeah. What is the forest? Yeah. This is where Kevin takes over. All right. Thanks. Hey, before we jump into like I do the science thing where all of the opinions are my own and that representation of my employer, uh, who we're just not going to name.

You're not going to be disclosing that, uh, you, but it's not a representation of any employer's opinions. It's just you. No. No. Live and die on your own merits, Kevin. That's fine. I have scientific backing for 99% of this.

There's like one point where we'll get outside of the literature. So if anyone really has questions, they can email you guys for the citations. No, they can't. We're not doing your office hours for you. We're not like the, the, the exploitation of TAs in the podcast industry is getting reprehensible. Are we the TAs? Are we? Yeah.

Yeah. We're all of it. I think they were both. Yeah. Couldn't you get us because we're all management, but that's fine. Yeah. Actually, we have to live in podcast housing too. Yeah.

You guys get ahead. This is, this is, uh, for the engineering folks, this is your elective credit. So we're talking about trees. We're going to talk about forests, uh, forests are some of my favorite things. Um, we've defined a tree. Let's define a forest for fun. Uh, a forest is at least one acre of land that's at least 10% covered in trees that's not used for anything else, not urban or agriculture.

That is a forest. Um, you can have savannas that are forests. You can have like really dense forests that are forests. Everything that has 10% trees, forest. So that's what a forest is. So like the plot of land behind my childhood home that was in between two subdivisions was a forest. Yes.

Was it an acre? For this joke? For this joke? Yes. Was it an acre? Probably. Yes. That's a forest.

Yes. Uh, here's a fun one, uh, because of the UK, we have some really silly measurements in forestry. We use chains. We use links. What? To measure land. And we use tenths of inches to measure trees.

Why? Don't do that. Don't do that. This is your fault, Alice. I know. I know. And I'm, I'm saying don't repeat our mistakes. Don't use our fucking like, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's, you know, one tenth of a

yard arm to the hundred weight ass, uh, imperial measurement system. Well, also on the east coast, we use Mets and Bounds to define forest property, which is the worst. You're fucking what, dude? Uh, we use Mets and Bounds. It's a way of defining forest land where it's like, We don't have to do with this. What are Mets?

Yeah. So it's Mets. I own from the big tree to the stream over to the road. That's my land, um, which is a very silly way to do things. That's how you used to do things in like, you know, the 1500s. And then in America, because this is a good country, we invented the public land survey system in 17, in the 1780s and everything east or west of Ohio is surveyed in public land survey.

So everything is just in squares, which makes sense and makes sense. But here it's like, Oh, you got to follow this weird, you know, meandering set of directions from the 1800s to figure out where your property boundary is. My property boundary is from this tree that existed 200 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Please see my deed. Uh, don't worry about it.

You'll see the don't worry about a clause in my deed. So there's this fun. You guys read the Jack Frost poem, um, Oh, I forget what it's called, but you know, stopping by woods in the snowy evening. No, not quite that one. The other one where they're like walking and they're like walking by the fence and like fences make good neighbors. Yeah.

That's preambulation. So that's how you set boundaries and you agree on those boundaries under meds and bounds. Is a fun fact for you. We'll have some more coming up. Don't worry. Okay. So, um, let's get back to trees. Trees don't care about property.

Um, so we're going to talk about mainly forests in Pennsylvania. They're anarchists. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I'm proud of my, uh, woody neighbor by my woody friends. I'm insisting all trees are communists and they're the precise kind of communists that I am whatever it is that day.

No, that's wrong. Actually. Some of them are old growth forests and shove up your ass, Alice. Some of them are imperialists. Some of them are imperialists. We got to watch out. Yeah. I guess that I am that day.

Oh, God, you, the Leninist tree. No, you eat my butt. You have clonal and colonial trees like tree of heaven. That's death. Definitely an imperial street. Death, the tree of heaven. Okay. So landing on top of a cron stat tree, we're sending that we're sending the tree of heaven

to hell. I'm on the tree way. We'll talk about that more in it, you know, in a few slides, we'll talk about that. But some more. All right. So when we think about forests in the Eastern United States, we got to go back to the Wisconsin Glaciation because that's a couple of miles of ice that covered the East Coast from 70 or sorry, 7,000, 75,000 years ago to about 11,000 years ago.

So it's like, you know, most of the Eastern US covered in forest or covered, it's covered in forest today, covered in ice, like three or four miles thick of ice. Like what's not covered in ice is like, you know, you get a nice permafrost. So what you think of like Canada and the Canadian Shield Forest kind of look like today, that's what our forests used to look like, that weren't impacted by glaciers. So the forest that we see today is kind of new in a geological time frame. Man, remember glaciers? Yeah, we used to have those.

We used to have them. We don't have any more. It's going to be tough explaining those to people younger than us. Oh yeah, it's a shame. Okay, so the world used to be inhabitable and now it's not. Yeah. Gen Z doesn't remember when we lived under three or four miles of ice. Oh God, do you remember and the ice vampires?

Yeah. And then 9-11 happened. Yeah. And now I have to have a ticket just to look at the planes, a bunch of fucking Nazis. I have to take off my shoes to get on the glacier. That would be inadvisable, I think. I have a friend who just got back from time in Antarctica and it sounds like it's not a great place to live.

But you know who did live on glaciers for a long time were the various first peoples who used to live in America. So, oh wait, next slide please, sorry. Yes. All right, so America has been inhabited by people for a really long time. So you get your first peoples coming over like 16,000 years ago. So here, pictured here is the Meadowcroft site in Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh. I'm not an anthropologist or an archaeologist, so we're just going to like use the numbers

that they generate. I mean, you could be like, you're not expressing anyone's like official views. You could just lie very easily and be like, I am also anthropologist. We believe you too. We believe you too. Yeah. We're very malleable, gullible. I actually have seven PhDs.

I just have one, but it's my pretty huge dick and, okay, so this is Meadowcroft. They have found arrowheads here that date back to between 16,000 years ago and maybe 19,000 years ago or 13,000 years ago. I don't know. We know that there are definitely people in New Mexico, 13,000 years ago. So if we take those numbers, we take 16,000 to 13,000 years ago, that means people lived on glaciers for at least 5,000 years. We're talking...

Oh, man. Every time you think about the longer time scale of anthropology, it sucks to be like, oh, yeah, people not just lived entire lives, entire generations, 2,000 years of like, yeah, it's going to be, it's a glacier. That's what it is. Going to stay this way forever. And then you fast forward a bit because you get bored with the glacier and then Pittsburgh is there.

Yeah. What? What the fuck? Pretty quickly too. Yeah. We can jump from glaciers to Pittsburgh pretty quickly. Okay. So we've got people here, they're here for a long time, eventually the glaciers melt

and the forests go north. So by 8,000 years ago, you kind of see in Pennsylvania the forest that we're looking at in this picture. That's about when most of that shows up. We're going to talk about what happens, why this is only kind of a representation of what our forest should look like in a few slides. Because of that glacial retreat, we do have a few northern remnant species here that like, probably shouldn't be here, like Red Spruce. And then if you go into the Southwest, like Aspen is kind of a hangover for when it was

a lot more temperate down there and that's, that's having problems now from climate change. But this is how we definitely know glaciers were here in case anyone's like, oh, are glaciers real? It's like, well, we have a tree that probably really shouldn't be in most of Pennsylvania or wasn't glaciated. Terrainiously, a guy is building the pyramids and in the future Pittsburgh, a guy is telling his kid, you know, you got pronouns now, you don't even know what glaciers were like. So glaciers were fake.

This tree was introduced by the Tartarian civilization. Well, well, speaking of civilizations, next slide, please. Oh, it's a mistake. Oh, this looks like my palace in Civ 3. Interesting. And yet you live in society. Yeah. So do you guys know what we are looking at here?

Yeah. It's Cahokia. Don't look at the notes. We're looking. No, I knew this off the dome. This is, this is like a mound building, Mississippian civilizations, the largest, like, inhabited site in North America for like, until probably Philadelphia, like. And yet, and yet they did it in East St. Louis, the worst city in America.

Return with the V. Return to St. Louis to this. Build the mounds, rebuild the mounds. There were some mounds in St. Louis proper, but they were excavated for film material. Fuck. I hate to say that. There's one that has a house on top still. Oh, that's mega haunted. Yeah.

Yeah. That was a very haunted house. Yeah. Yeah. We went to Boy Scout camp in Wisconsin. We had a couple of mounds and they were really cool and they were very much a no-go place and there was lots of fun ghost stories about them. Mounds, barrows, kurgans, that's all, that's all mega haunted stuff.

It's fun that, like, the way these are accumulated is just like, you build a temple, you want to build a bigger temple so you build it around the first temple and you keep doing that a couple of hundred times until you get a mound with a temple on the top of it. It's great. Yeah. We've been doing it for a long time, doing it all over the world, classic dudes thing right there. Dudes just love it.

Well, I heard from the cultural tutor that actually this was all somehow related to the Egyptians who spread their culture. It's all sort of like one great tradition. The tradition of this is how you build stuff that doesn't fall down for a long time. Really relatively easy to make a big pile of stuff. Tell it to the Egyptian serfs before the introduction of serf and whatever. They figured out how to get that thing built out of stone real fucking quick. Somehow.

Aliens. Probably aliens, yeah. They listed the help of the aliens and you know what, we're barely doing that at all these days. I mean, pyramids couldn't be just a really cool shape that stays up for a while. That would be impossible. Impossible. No way.

No way. That would be resistant to most natural forces. So we have Cahokia. We have remnants of Cahokia, what hasn't been flattened and turned into St. Louis and other Western European settlement kind of things. We have lots of people in the U.S. I think the Mississippi Mound Building culture got into Pennsylvania a little bit, but we had a bunch of other cultures of people. I mean, we're talking again like 13 to, you know, 16 to 13,000 years of settlement.

So we're going to miss some folks in there. The archeological record is so good. The whole Book of Mormon happened in this period, too, like it's easy to get. The civilization sort of devolved into what we would now call the Natchez tribe, I believe. So that was sort of, they have sort of this distinct cultural legacy from like the Iroquois speaking or the Algonquin speaking tribes, which are further east, to my knowledge. Although calling them a Mississippian culture, although literally geographically historically true, does make me think of them all talking like folk on Lycon.

And I apologize for that, but I can't shake the idea of like being human sacrificed. Indigenous people's talking with the thickest draw you ever did here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get like the heart torn out of my chest and get like rolled down the mound, you know, by a guy who talks like folk on Lycon. Or even better, some guy in the Mississippi Delta, who's our subgroup of rednecks that only speak French. Yeah.

They speak a French form of Natchez, I don't know, I don't know where I'm going with that. The accent is found in the soil, it's endemic to the landscape, you merely adopt it. It takes, it becomes you. So we have people here, we got like, you know, depending on the estimate in North America, between 3,000 and 18,000 people before the Europeans show up. So we got a lot of people, you know, somewhere in the middle, right? Yes. Yeah, a million.

Did I say a million? You said thousand, which is like very funny to be like, yeah, we got like 18,000 dudes in North America. Well, that's how a lot of people think that we did, but it was pretty well settled, pretty well settled, pretty well happened, you know, habited and populated. There's some interesting work that's coming out now about how like the extinction curves and the amount of extinction that goes on kind of falls off right after the Ice Age. So, you know, you can make arguments that like, you know, maybe the First Nations like killed

off all the wildlife or the glaciers killed stuff off, but it seems like, you know, I kind of figured stuff out. So pretty smart, really good at managing the landscape around them. You know, they harvest trees to make these settlements, cut down trees to grow crops. You can read the Book of Mormon and find out exactly what went down with these guys. The First Nations is also really like burning stuff because it's fun and it's cool. Yeah, it's real. You make like big heaps of shit, you know, maybe do a little bit of human sacrifice on

the side and you set some big fires. I mean, that's a good time, right? Yeah. I'm not sure how much human sacrifice, you know, they did. I don't know. It couldn't tell you. I don't want to be... The Mississippian culture, I believe, did human sacrifice, but it was sort of unique

in North America in doing that. And to be fair, human sacrifices usually deserved it. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, you know, this is why the little life age occurred is, you know, they, you know, some of these cultures stopped doing human sacrifice and then the sun didn't come up as strong the next day. Yeah, exactly. You got to keep going, man. Yeah, that's a little life age right there.

We solved that one. Figure that one out. Exactly, we started to do all these kinds of military interventions and all of a sudden now we have global warming. We're doing too much of it now. It's just a fine, you just need just a light war on terror constantly, not a full global war. Well, a little bit.

It's like a flower war on terror. So they're out here managing landscapes. We know that they are, we know like, you know, Ohio and Wisconsin and parts of Pennsylvania, they managed specifically for burroke. It's got a really big acorn and it, you know, fruits regularly. It's what you call acorns fruiting or masting if you want to be cool. So it fruits or masts regularly and they used to eat that. I've tried acorns, not a huge fan.

I think it's kind of a cultural thing. What are you going to do? You get enriched flour and sugar that beats a lot of things in nature. It's also really good for wildlife. Oh, I love squirrels. Squirrels pretty tasty. Yeah. Squirrel is pretty good.

Yeah. Big fan. And then they burn it up pretty regularly. You don't have to like, you know, like process it and saliva or whatever either, which I bet is helpful. Yeah. I think you're just leeching water. Yeah.

I've only got acorns once. It's fine. So, so they managed to land for a long time and you know, they managed to every, the humans touched every acre and every foot of land in the United States, you know, for thousands of years, well before, you know, Europeans show up, but then Europeans show up. They do a couple of genocides, you know, I think that we can lines of lines up by Donkeys is a good series on the Kings, King Films war. Excuse me.

You can check out if you want to learn more about that like advertising my own podcast to me. Be part of this. Yeah. Hey, yeah. You got it. Yeah. So, so you check.

So you, so you do a couple of genocides, you kill them off. And then people Westerners, like they set going west and they're like, oh, like there's this whole wilderness thing. There's virgin forest, you know, this untouched landscape. It's not true. You just killed everyone who used to be there. And sometimes without knowing you were killing them, you like the disease comes ahead of you, kills a bunch of people, you all can see like a, a, a nicely sort of curated piece

of geoengineering or whatever, and you're like, man, it's crazy that God did this for us. Yes. Yeah. Well, it was really Francois kissing somebody like 10 years before who like, you know, moved smallpox all around. It's always really grim like any sort of like narratives, particularly in, in Mexico, if you, if you like read about the Spanish conquest where it's like all of the sort of like political

decision making there is like, yeah, it's going pretty well. One guy's got a cough. We're not going to worry about that. Yeah. And then you like, you lose the thread a bit, you fast forward a bit, everyone's fucking dead. The sun is as blood. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You go from like a population of like 35 million down to like handfuls. Craziness. Okay. And all of a sudden you don't have enough people to sacrifice and starts getting cold. That's what I'm saying.

See, you, you, your buddy and another guy, you're all looking at each other. All right. Who's going on the mound? He's being like human sack and rice coordinator for an indigenous civilization, just was like a flip board and a hard hat, like frotic and people be like, Hey, how are you feeling? Hey, you got to cut. Hey, are you tracking? Hey, I've got a bunch of thermometers around the, around the, the country, you know, it's

like, okay, okay, we got to kill a guy here. We got to kill a guy here. We got to not kill a guy there. Oh, no, no, no, no, that's no good. It's real bad. We got to kill. We got to sacrifice a couple of virgins calling a guy up. Hey, you know, I really, you really got to work hard on your quality control here.

I see you pulling the hearts out. You're getting one, two beats. You really should get at least five, six out of that heart. Send me the hearts, send me the hearts. Oshia, Oshia for a human sacrifice. You guys keep cutting their hands. Problem. Yeah.

You got to work the oyster glove. Yeah. You got to do a tiny scratch. You know, I, I, I got to, if these people had better administrative states, they would have, you know, they would have lasted longer. That's all. It's hard to do. It's hard to do human sacrifice.

It's hard to do human sacrifice, Oshia, when you're doing it in like knots and strings or like stone, like stone wheels. You really have to have like a paper industry. So really like help you with this and that's just like, not to get to like guns, germs and steel, right? But that's, that's one of the things that it's like, oh man, one of those innovations really hampers your ability to control your human sacrifice levels. When I say about using stone tablets or everything down, it's like, you know, when you get down

to it, you could just bring someone with a stone tablet. Yeah, that's true. One in doubt. Absolutely. Just mark a guy with a tablet. What are you going to do with paper? Give someone like a really bad paper cut? It's not going to be a paper cut.

So, so, you know, what a lot of people have locked in their minds is what these forests look like. It's not an accurate representation of forests. Really your age structure is probably 20% young forest. So young forest is a forest that's, you know, a field to like a 20 year old stand. So you have like thin trees in there. You see in these trees, but they're not like nice big trees. You have a mature forest, which is anywhere from 20 to 340 years old.

And then you get old growth. Old growth isn't defined by age. Age is just a number when it comes to trees. We have to remember that trees don't have time frames. They have sizes and maturities based on that. So, you know, old growth is like 400 years plus 20%. So you look at 20, 60, 20 on your timeframe or on your forest structure. And we can kind of figure this out through like, you know, wildlife populations, you

know, if everything was old growth, you wouldn't have young, successional forests, animals like rabbits, like grouse, you know, golden-winged warblers, those don't exist if you don't have young forest. So, we get, we know that there was stuff going on and also like disturbance happens in the landscape. Hurricanes come through and knock trees down. You get wildfires. You get bugs.

Somebody's got to come through and put in a cornfield. So, disturbance happened. Okay. Next slide, please. All right. There we go. Wait, more disturbance happens. Oh, that's bad.

Yep. Yes. Yes. Um, I think this is outside of the Johnstown area, actually, um, hence the flooding. Oh, sure. For more, please listen to, well, there's your problem episode on the Johnstown flood. Advertise my own podcast. At least two more episodes on different Johnstowns flood coming.

Yeah. We're going to keep, I had a conversation, I'm just going to go wildly off track here. I'm going to get this podcast over two hours if it kills me. I'm going to kill you. About a, like, what are we going to do when we get up to episode, like, 500? Like we're going to need to start, like, bribing people to, like, derail trains and cause industrial disasters. Yeah.

I had this thing that I was doing where I was, uh, like, calling myself an anarchist and telling people to 3D print train derailers that didn't really work out. Yeah. No, that was, that was us. We were just trying to, we were just trying to juice those numbers so we can get it off by Spotify. We did not know you were Naomi Wu from Shenzhen. I'm spending a lot of time in, like, in the gym on, like, Omde, you know?

Yeah. I, yeah, I just like, like, talking to Craig, she's like, well, like, the money's nice and like, you know, how long are you guys going to go? And I'm just like, until the people cancel all their Patreon subscriptions. Yeah. Until we don't make a single goddamn dollar. I mean, like, that's why I'm pleased to announce. I mean, the thing is right.

I enjoy doing this. I enjoy making the content. I enjoy hanging out with my friends for work. I enjoy that people seem to like it, but also I enjoy paying rent. Um, yeah. And I, I'm sure I've said this, I've told the story before, but like, kill James Bond, my other podcast. Uh, when I started doing that, someone told me, uh, it's so cool that you have, uh, like

a project with a defined end point because now nothing ever like ends. And I was like, yeah, for sure, then we ran out of Bond movies and I was like, fuck, we're, we're not, we're not ending the thing. We're just going to keep going. Uh, and I suspect this is going to be the same way this day are going to have to drag us kicking and screaming off the air. Oh yeah. Yeah.

No, absolutely. I, I will be down for the eggs, like real dregs. So I, uh, I got, uh, we got laid off a couple of weeks ago, uh, from my nine to five, uh, if you've got a job, uh, WTYP pot of Gmail hit me up, but, uh, I was talking to Roz and I was like, we were talking and it was just like hanging out. I was like, you know what's real fucked up is this is actually my job. Like I should be billing for this really. Hmm.

Yeah. Ow. Did, uh, was it pizza boy or milkshake? That was pizza boy. That cat. It's just a motherfucker. Oh, evil little shit. Yeah.

He, he's so funny because milkshake will like come up to you and be like, Hey, like you want to give me pads and scratches and you're like, yeah, okay. And then fucking pizza boy is just looking at you with the eyes of Satan. Exactly how much human sacrifice needs to happen in the United States. It's bras with pizza boy on his shoulder, like Iago from fucking Aladdin being like, no, no, those numbers aren't right. There's a reason the Egyptians did worship cats. Yeah.

Yeah. They were supervisors. Yeah. If, if I may be so bold, Alice, I think that the cars to episode of kill James Bond is perhaps the peak of podcasting. I don't think it really gets much better than that. Thank you so much. We're going to, we're going to take that, that sort of like quality and we're going

to like really like hammer it into the ground. We are extracting every drop of surplus value from that. Because I, it turns out I owe this guy called my landlord money to live in my apartment, even though it's Unbelievable. Absolute dog shit. So, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, who's among us? Who's among us? Yeah. Well, so I do something here. I chose the Johnson area because I used to work around the Johnstown area. Really great forest now, but when we look at this picture, not a lot of trees on that hillside. That hillside is pretty bare.

Yeah. It's the same kind of thing in Scotland. Yeah. Well, the same thing kind of happened there. Yeah. It's the same kind of thing there. I'm not super up on European forestry. I was in England this summer for a wedding and your, your forest made me sad, Ellis.

Maybe sad. It was like a wind row and they were like, this is a forest. And I was like, what? Yeah. What? This is a forest? Yeah. It's real sad.

I mean, one thing I will say particularly about Scotland is that we, we have our moments of sort of like reforestation and like rewilding and stuff and you know, it's been a mixed bag. We're not doing nearly as much as, as we should be of either, but you can get a couple of cool before and after photos where it's like the sort of moonscape gorse shit that we have like most of the country or most of the highlands on the one side and on, on the right, it looks like fucking, you know, Disney princess forest. It's great.

And it's like that, that, you know, took five years or whatever. And it's like, yeah, we could just do a bunch more of that. Trees are, if you could say one thing about them, they're very good at growing and they're very resilient. That's two things. You could say two things about trees. I think you guys use a lot of dug for out there though. So I would find native tree species, but hey, I'm a Scottish forester.

I work in, you know, in the Atlantic. So what do I know about Scotland? Okay. All right. Back on track. Yeah. Yeah. Getting back on track.

So, so we get these, we get these Westerns to show up. They farm differently, you establish a lot of fields. You do a lot of cutting, do a lot of burning. All of the old growth hemlock comes down. It comes down not for the wood, but for the part of the people now, waiting on for Sarah and get for Sarah to be invented. Other hemlock. You can just go to the chemist and like get some arsenic and, you know, just put it in

whatever. I'm not worried about it. I'm sure I could poison someone fine. We have a really nasty poison ivy rash. Oh, I'm hearing other poison ivy. The last time I got poison ivy, I got it on my eyelids. It was fucking horrible. Oh, fuck.

Jesus. So the last time I got poison ivy, I went to the doctor's office and I was leaking fluid down my leg and the admin was like, Oh, that's bad. And then the nurse came in and she was like, Oh, that's bad. And the doctor came in and he was like, Oh, that's bad. I was like, Wow, thanks guys. I'm leaking fluid under your floor. I didn't know that.

Yes, I concur. It's bad. It's fucking pain killers, please or whatever it is that I have to do and to give me some steroids, which was fun. Okay. So, so they cut down the hemlock, the Eastern hemlock, which is different from poison hemlock that we do have poison hemlock. Thank you, Europe.

We will get to invasive species later. So cut down the hemlock, they become tannins to tan leather. I'm not going to lie. Seeing that would probably make me cry. Just these huge trees can cut up just for bark and just, you know, huge trees left in the woods just for the bark. The biggest wastes after like using sequoias for toothpicks, right? Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot of things that I'd like to go back and time if I had a time machine to change a lot of things there. This is probably right up there. Right up there. I'm probably killing baby Hitler, but you do. Yeah, I was about to say maybe killing baby Hitler would be number one, but then we get to this.

Sure. Look, if I have a time machine, lots of other people have time machines, I'm not getting in a line to kill Hitler here going around the block and like a brown hour I'm in and like 1899. Is that a cat? Oh yeah. That's my cat. He's very upset.

Like close the door. Show us the cat. What's your house name? It's Bradley. It's not on video. Kevin, you don't have to show us the cat. Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, what?

What was Kevin has been compromised to a permanent and yeah, probably not. He's still there. He's blocking my access to the keyboard. Yeah, and he hates you very feline sort of dominated podcast. Okay. He's a little orange guy. You want me to turn my camera on? Yeah, just for a second.

Just for a second. Okay. This is Bradley. Oh, yes. He's my dumb guy. Aw. Oh, yes. He's adorable.

Okay. Thank you, Kevin. All right, we're good. All right, we're good. He's just so nice. I have a second cat, Belle, and she likes to pretend that she's unlike me, but she really loves me. But she likes my wife a lot more, such as the nature of cats.

That is how it works. That's why, you know, Roz's cats fight over his tummy. Yeah. If the year is 2023, tummies are now battlefields. Okay, Bradley, you have to get off the keyboard. Okay. All right. All right.

Doing great. Doing great. My apologies, Devin, for editing all the sound there. Okay. Okay. So we're cutting down the big trees. Hamlocks are going to make tannins. White pine is going to make Pittsburgh.

They're going to make the city of Pittsburgh. Or to make, Bradley, relax, buddy. Or to make ships. Very passionate about the city of Pittsburgh. Yeah. He really feels it. The white pine, you know, it's a really big, straight, tall tree. It's what we call a super canopy tree because it can get to be 150 feet tall.

And so you make mass out of that. And then the hardwoods in the forest, you turn to the side of the ship, you know, famously old iron sides, her sides have made of iron, made of eastern white oak growing here in the United States. So that's where all our forests go. And then we also make charcoal. This is kind of one thing that we forget about Pennsylvania, but we made a lot of charcoal in this state.

Yeah. I don't call it a Commonwealth. It's ridiculousness. Oh, fuck yourself. I was burping midway through saying that. So a charcoal hearth is a place where they burned charcoal. They burned wood to make charcoal. They ate a, one could use at least an acre of forest a day.

And like these things were active for decades. So they run through a lot of land. Every, almost every acre of Pennsylvania is clear cut between four and six times from like, you know, 1800 until today. It kind of depends on how close you were to a charcoal hearth. That's mostly for steel, right? Or is that? Yeah.

Yeah. A lot of it goes to steel. A lot of it goes to firing the lime or the coke kilns. And then you also got to cook with something too. So it goes into all kinds of stuff. Like a similar thing happens in Britain, I think. Hmm. Yeah.

I think it starts earlier. Well, unlike Britain, we're just built different. We could handle it. You can just keep going west, find more trees. You don't have to like divert heavily into a coal mining industry, you know. You just do that anyway. We got those two. Yeah, you did both.

Because that was sort of a maximalist country. Yes. And then you don't just keep going on coal, even though it's clearly done. You don't do that. That would be silly. Yeah, shut up. That would be silly. Yeah.

We're bringing an anchor site back. It's clean. It's clean coal, folks. Don't worry about the sulfur dioxide. I never do. By the end of the 1800s, you go from Pennsylvania goes from 99% force to down to 30%. Which is a lot of work for dudes with axes and saws. That's a lot of work.

You got to hand it to them. They went out there and they did that. And that's mostly young forest. There's very extraordinary little old growth forest left in the whole state. You know, you can count them off. It's like Cook's Forest, World's End, and a couple other spots. But very little is left. You also, in the process of, you know, civilizing the West, you exterminate wolves, mountain

lions, wolverines, almost kill off deer, and pine martins and fishers got exterminated and driven to extinction. We almost did that to turkeys and black bears too, but we still have turkeys, black bears, and deer. Luckily. You do a similar thing to the plant community. And so we're doing this for a good while until next slide, please. Famously, the Dust Bowl happens.

Me reaping, or rather me not reaping. Yeah. Yes. Yes. That would be the problem. That would be the problem. Now, obviously in Pennsylvania, you don't get, you know, as big of a problem, but you got a farm abandonment, and the really fun thing about Pennsylvania is the ground wants

to be trees. So the forest starts to bounce back until next slide, please. You get this. Does anyone know what this is? Oh, no. This is, this is a photo of like fucked up tree bark, but I'm pretending not to know because I'm not looking down at the notes. Yeah.

No, that's fine. This is some body horror right here. Yes. So this is chest. This is some body horror in trees, huh? I mean, they don't really have bodies. So yeah. No, but I mean, stuff like looks horrifying when you like it.

So mentally translate it to a human context because we're anthropocentric, you know, brained animals. Yeah. There's a really fun fungus. It's not, it's not oak apple. Sorry. It's not seed or apple fungus. It's not oak apple.

But there's one that looks like a, like an octopus is coming out of a tree. I'm forgetting the name is escaping me right now. There's some weird stuff out there with trees. But the trees aren't usually the ones doing it's usually stuff by attacking the trees. So this is chestnut blight. Chestnut blight is a non-native fungus. It's native to Asia. If anyone's really curious, though, weirdly, when you talk about invasive species, people

tend to get kind of racist. When you talk about invasives, they get into like the whole like, oh, like, you know, someone did this to us and like, usually no, usually like, it's the person who imported its fault. You know, no, no one in China purposely packed up a tree with blight and sent it over here. Or spotted lantern fly. Oh, we will get to that. Yes. We'll get to SLF.

We'll get there. Okay. So this shows up in 1905. And by 1940, maybe 1950, you know, pick your expert, all the chestnut, well, almost all the chestnut in America are dead. So we're going to have a really nice body count in this episode. So right now I'm going to win at, you know, total organisms killed. Like in between three and a half of four billion trees dead.

Jesus. And like chestnut was like had like a ton of like cultural valence to right. Like you use the chestnut for a bunch of stuff. It's good. Like a street tree and stuff. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

Mm hmm. Yeah. And that's what was written when it was native chestnut. Yeah. So you lose this incredibly valuable tree from, you know, a human perspective. The food is valuable. The bark was used in tannins. It was really important for wildlife species.

Also it was really great to fatten up pigs for free on, you know, just run them under the chestnuts when they're massing. And it's like massed it almost every year on like our oak species. Like white oak will produce acorns like almost every, like every eight years if it's not happy. So this is a huge loss. And the timber is super valuable. I found one report that estimated that in 1909.

I can't remember if it was the U.S. timber industry or just the Pennsylvania timber industry lost $20 million in 1909 dollars due to chestnut blight, which I converted it just for fun. That's about $594 million today. It was one year. So the loss of the species from the timber industry in practice, you know, incalculable. And the real question we get to start grappling here is how do you value a species? Well, I mean, we can put it like, we can tie it to the market there as we just did. We can see how much it makes, how much difference it makes to the big line, right?

Yeah, I mean, you could. How do you do it? I would like to know this is a serious question. I don't know. I couldn't tell you, but I spent a lot of time thinking about trees. So it's trying to figure that out. It's not great. We still have some chests on the landscape today.

They're kind of doing like the Tom Cruise edge of Tamara movie where they grow and they die and they come back and they grow and they die and they come back. We haven't found any that have been able to reproduce on their own. There are attempts at back breeding chestnut with Chinese chestnut. It kind of works. It kind of doesn't. There's a really promising modified chestnut out there, which we can talk more about if you want.

But I read an interesting article looking at like the sort of like hunt for like individual like survivor chestnut trees or like stands of trees and like trying to, you know, it like develops some kind of like indigenous chestnut resistance rather than like back breeding. And that's sort of like not working for the most part. Yeah. Every few months, people get really excited because they find a big chestnut. It's like they're out there.

You can find your chestnut that are either resistant or haven't been attacked for some reason. I don't care about the adults. What I care about is reproduction. If you look underneath those chestnut, you don't find reproduction. So it's not, you know, genetically transferable. Whatever is keeping that tree alive is not moving on to the next generation. And that's kind of a problem.

That's where like this whole thing is just kind of a waste of time in my, you know, personal opinion. There's always that one of the things that got me interested in the subject is my God, like a quarter of the forest was just murdered. And there's barely any like even cultural memory of it. Oh, it gets worse. Don't worry. I have, I have like way funner ones than just this.

It's going to get worse before it gets better. But that's in like four slides. That's not like four slides. That's why I drink at night. Anyway, and my drinking is maybe imperiled soon. We'll see. At the same time as you get chestnut bite, you also get butternut bite. So you have towns that are like named butternut.

You have butternut squash. It's named after the tree butternut or white walnut. Also dead. I've seen, excuse me, three white walnuts and they've all been in decline. So, you know, this tree is, this tree even has less cultural valence than chestnut. Like I used to hunt in a place called butternut and no one knew why it was called butternut. They were like, oh, it's just the, is it the squash? Like, no, it's the tree.

It's the tree. It's the tree. Gone. All right. Next slide, please. Okay. Okay. So the forest keeps growing.

The nice thing about forests, especially in the United States is they're pretty resilient. So we keep growing despite the loss of two pretty important, you know, overstory species. Like we said, chestnut made up anywhere between 20 and 40% of the overstory depending on where you are and who you believe. So we're down those, but we have mainly an oak hickory forest. Oh, we also lost the passenger pigeon, which has got some really interesting ecological impacts. Like the flocks are so big, they broke branches and they broke trees, which caused like holes

in the canopy for like oaks and stuff to recruit into. Really neat. That, that is, that is also a wild like loss right there. How do we lose the passenger pigeon? Billion of them, right? I think that was a multiple bill. Yeah. I'm sorry.

My terminology was not great. We killed them. They were driven to extinction. Sorry. No, you're fine. We murdered all of them. It's grim to think that we're going to do this with a bunch of like more important to us cuter, more memorable species, but all of the orgueries from like previous experience

shows that we won't remember or care and, you know, be like, yeah, polar bears, whatever, you know. Yeah. I mean, we did with the Great Ock. We had the Carolina parakeet. We did it with the Ivory Bill Woodpecker and we did it with the passenger pigeon. Carolina had parakeets? Yeah.

The Carolina parakeet. There's the only parakeet native to North America. Wow. It was really neat. Really cool bird. You can see some skins that they have at the National History Museum. That's depressing. Yeah.

I like parakeets. I read ahead in the notes. So that only gets worse. Yeah. Yeah. I told you I drink at night. This is not always fun. Sometimes I get to have fun, but not most days I have a bad day.

I hear that. Okay. So our forest keeps growing. And now we are going to jump forward to today just to kind of place us in time. So today as you look at your average Pennsylvanian forest, this is kind of what it looks like. It's an oak hickory forest. It's pretty mature. It's 60 plus years old.

There's very little future forest out there when we look forward to, you know, what your next generation of forest is. You've got like 7% young forest and we want to be a 20. The other problem is, is if you are an organism that likes a young forest, like a golden wing warbler, you've got nowhere to live. If you are the monarch butterfly who wants to live on milkweed, milkweed does not grow in a closed canopy. You don't have plants to live on, you don't have anywhere to live, you die.

So. Well, the housing crisis, you know, I guess everyone, I was about to say. If you just zoned for forest, it would be fun. You got to do it. You got to zone for young forest though. We can't zone for this mature forest, you know, this, you know, historical properties. Got to go. Got to go.

So you can make young forest by harvesting old forest. The thing when you harvest the forest, you cut the trees down and you're trying to let the trees underneath them grow, your next generation of forest. So when we look at what's underneath those trees, here we have a really nice regen pocket. You have little trees in here, they're going to take over. It's not representative of most of Pennsylvania's forest. Next slide, please. And this is why this is a white tail deer motherfucker, you got to, you got to stop killing.

It's time to start killing. You little bastard. You ruined my garden. We're coming for you. And Bambi's mom, we're going to raise you from the dead and kill you again. Yeah. This is right next to a highway. So that one really just wanted to jump in front of a truck and get killed.

Deer, deer are absolutely suicidal, like, oh, for sure. So a friend of a friend of my husband's, his parents had like a yard with a ravine off to one side of it and they built a wall covering that ravine, you know, so as you didn't fall on the ravine and deer used to like, deer can jump remarkably high for one thing. So they would just like get in over part of this wall, you know, not related to the ravine to eat the flowers, grass, whatever, kill all the plants in the garden by pissing on them. And then the second you notice that there are a shitload of deer in your garden, you

like flip the lights on every deer goes, oh, fuck, I'm going to die runs, sprints in the direction of the wall, jumps over it directly into the ravine. It's like a buffalo drop. It's littered with deer carcasses and you just have a ravine full of dead deer next to your house. And you're just like, what the fuck? And this happened like regularly. Deer are not smart animals.

No, no, no, no, no, Liam and I witnessed the deer run into I-95 and get just trucked by an SUV. Yeah. It was weird. And we didn't get killed because of my tremendous driving. Yes, this is true. Liam is very good at driving slow down. Here's my deer car story.

One time I was driving in missions over peninsula and I was driving to go to a race. I was running and it was a running race. And in one like three hour drive, I killed two deer. Wow. Good for you. Yeah, you got to kill one of them with a duel. Basically. So the first one was a little fawn that was a little bit slow and I broke its back leg.

I could feel like it crunch underneath the wheel and like there are wolves and winter up there. So that one wasn't going to make it to the winter. It's fine. You have competitive mortality. It probably wasn't going to make anyways. And the second one, that one just, it was just like, I'm done with life because it just put his head down in front of the bumper of my Jeep and it was just like toast.

Just neck snap. Didn't even damage. Well, I broke, I cracked the headlight. I had no damage on the car but it was like, what did you do, buddy? No one made you do this. Deer are fucking stupid. If there's one thing you need to know from this podcast is that deer are fucking stupid. And you also have, you also have to like, Bambi did a disservice to deer control by making

deer cute. They're like, terrifying animals. They can, they can fuck you up to like, if you're just on foot, they can like their sharp hooves, they can trample you fucking stab you and shit. But also the other thing about deer is that it's one of the rare times when having a cool time with firearms is a socially responsible thing to do because hunting deer can be like one of the only ways of stopping them from overpopulating, killing all the plants and trees and then starving to death.

You need, you need to have a gun that also fires Agent Orange. When I was a child, I ran into a, I ran into a deer on my bike. I like how flat that was, but he just ran out into the bike trail at South one, South Run Recreational Center in Burke, Virginia. There's a steep downgrade. You could ride your bike down. It was really fun. I got to the bottom.

There was a deer that just ran out into the trail and then I smacked right into the side of it and I fell over and the deer fell over and the deer got up and ran away and I got up and was like, you fucking bastard, little seven-year-old Roz, just like you piece of shit. I think we only fell over so the thing is, right? We can't always rely on what else happened again when I was commuting to work when I was 22 or so. I was at Cobbs Creek Park.

I did not run into the deer, but I almost did. But we can't rely on outside things like Roz on a bicycle or wolves that we've reintroduced or whatever. You got to get out there and you got to do the cool thing and you just got to have your personal vendettas against deer. No, Alice, in all seriousness, that's the main reason why I hunt is my hunting ethic is not about harvesting venison, not harvesting deer to eat, which is tasty and I like it, but it's for the forest.

I'm a wildlife biologist. I have the whole degree and the certifications or whatever, but I'm really, I'm a tree guy at heart and so I just go out there and I try to kill deer for the forest. In Pennsylvania, we got between one and 1.5 million deer, but you got to kill antlerless deer, so this one got to go. You got to kill 40% of antlerless deer annually to make an impact on deer populations. Yeah. Yeah.

They're good at that. Wow. They're good at that one. Yeah. Well, so if you think about the life history, the ecological history of deer, they had a couple of big predators. You had wolves, mountain lions, also called cougars, catamounts, pumas, they have like four different common names, all the same cat.

You have wolves, cougars, and humans. Those are your three main deer predators and we have eliminated two of them. Wolves and mountain lions aren't coming back to Pennsylvania any time soon. No. Probably not going to come back at all. Tool using ape, Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 and we can use it for good by killing a lot of deer more efficiently than a mountain lion could. I think you could give a mountain lion an AR-15 and couldn't do shit with it.

Yeah. Now that you know, they'll evolve. Well, and so here's where I'm going to put a plug in. If you don't feel comfortable around guns, do you don't have to use guns? You can use crossbows. I use crossbows. I like it a lot more than my rifle, to be very honest. It's quiet, it's lighter, and it's free to shoot.

Because every time I pull the trigger, it's like, that's 250. That's 250. That's 250. Plus, you're like the biggest reason I don't shoot a lion. You lead into the environment as well. Oh yeah, I use non-led ammo. Which like the fucking firearms industry is like badly slacking on, is my understanding. Like both availability of and development of lead for ammunition.

The availability of ammo is tough. They're really sort of focusing not on the hunting industry, but on the mass shooting industry, which I think is a mistake. You can mass shoot deer and people will call you a hero. Yeah, us. You can be as anti-social as you like about deer hunting. Big fan. I'm a big fan of it.

I do it for the forest. Genuinely though, whenever gun control comes up, you get democratic politicians to be like, we don't want to sort of impinge on the rights of the honest, upright, you know, outstanding American sportsman or woman who, you know, goes out and like shoots one or two deer and like, you know, makes, you know, cooks the venison or whatever. No, we shouldn't be encouraging that. We should be encouraging the sort of the cultural rancidity of American firearms culture deployed exclusively against deer.

I shot 40 deer in a day. Yeah. We already did that against like, we did that against bison and like we got to redress that injustice by doing it against a species that actually has it coming for once. Yeah. I mean, depending on who you talk to, probably would beat bison back was barbed wire. They did a lot of the damage on bison. They do that in New Zealand because the only native mammals in New Zealand are like three

species of bat. And so they'll do a lot of aerial gunning on like stags and some of the other species out there. Oh, yeah. They're really into it there. Fucking, yeah. Like, I mean, it just, I think, I think it's sort of like a pale overmatch for like helicopter. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. You're a servine, right? Like you're a deer with like two brain cells bang together and we're going to get to the what those brain cells are doing in the rest of this slide. But like, and then a guy in a helicopter comes and shoots you with a gun. Like that's, that's beyond an outside context problem. That's thereby saving you from dying from a prior disease or a kid or whatever. Yeah.

I would say that we put a, we put a pin on the prior disease. We come back to that in like three sentences. Mm hmm. Okay. Well, we can get into chronic wasting disease discourse in a moment. We got to finish it. It gives me nightmares. Oh, yeah.

Oh, you and me both. Yeah. You and me both. We had more than a few, not sleepless nights, but sleep interrupted nights because of it, but we'll get there. That's a later thing. That's a, that's a three minutes from now question. So we have this year on here.

What are your thoughts? Wow. Hey, hey, you know what's, you know, it's a fun thing to deploy against someone who's got a health anxiety is diseases that like whose transmission is extremely resilient and whose symptoms are extremely nebulous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's real fun. Written in the nineties going to be paranoid about that for the rest of my fucking life. Oh, I'm so. I mean, on the bright side, there's nothing you could do about it. Yeah. Yeah. That's it.

It takes usually 50 years for symptoms to manifest or no, I don't think maybe it's 20 years. I can't remember exactly. No one knows. Double digits. No one, no one knows. Which is. Mm hmm.

We are all controlled by the prior. I would simply not have my proteins unfold. That's what I would do. What we've got to do as a policy prescription here is kill a lot of deer, not eat the meat and like be it be the vegetarian deer mass shoots. I do this. I do this for ethical reasons. I say as I read loads, put it all on a 20 you got to be at least using a 30.

God six. Also in Pennsylvania, this is the other thing that gets me about hunting discourse. In Pennsylvania, you have to use either pump action, lever action or what is my bolt action guns. You can use semi autos. No, you can't. We're very weird about it. Yeah.

It's fine. Like if you're going to shoot a deer, it takes a while to deal with them after you kill them. So you really only need one shot. It's usually fine. Let's get a buck. Let's have fun here. Yeah.

Okay, so you've been overpopulated for a long time, like 30 plus years in Pennsylvania. So they've eaten through everything. I mean, I'm talking like, like we had like lists of like what is non preferred browse with deer aren't going to eat because they have small stomachs so they can't eat everything. Like elk will eat grass. They're a lot more like cows than deer, deer or what we call selective browsers. And so they've selected through everything they like to eat. They're getting into the stuff they don't like to eat.

They're changing the forest. It's like a dominance of the forest, but you go from like oak, oak hickory stance to just like sweet birch because they don't like sweet birch, which is a problem that we'll discuss later. We've lost a lot of shrub layer in our forest, which has caused a reduction in bird populations. So if you're wondering where somebody like, like the bird decline goes to your clarification or we're redoing the forest to avoid deer or they've just chewed through everything. Oh, they've eaten it all.

Yeah. Yeah. No, no, the, the, a lot of the regeneration is right there on the screen than that one and it's friends. Hmm. Okay. So now they're eating things that they don't want to eat like we've discussed for the last time.

And it's the only way we can control deer is hunting, particularly with antlers deer. If you don't like guns, that's fine. It's called archery equipment in the US. I don't think you can use archery equipment in a lot of European states and countries. It's not legal here. I don't know why. About hunting anything like that is not, it's not legal here. And we have like less restrictive farm laws for hunting than people tend to think, but

like still quite restrictive. Honestly, my crossbow is the same knockdown power as the rifle. It's fine. It's fine. It's humane. It's when they don't have a heart. You were hearing it here first from a leftist podcast folks, even if you're a vegetarian or vegan, it is still your duty to go out and kill animals.

Yes, your moral duty. And we are not joking about that in the end, but like deer specifically like, oh, yeah. Yeah. No, according to the dictates of your own sort of like local, wild life, or forestry authority. Okay. Yeah. Sure.

Whatever. Do like guerrilla gardening, but let's just like kill any deer you see. I would say legal and ethically harvest them, but you know, it's each their own, each everyone has their own set of ethics. I can't dictate this point and they're fucking up the forest so badly that like a sort of like a forestry biologist is like, yeah, no, you can fucking war crime him if you want. Whatever. I'm the deer commissar.

Not one step back. So we have the Amish do some really interesting drives which are not always fun to be around if you're not part of the drive. That's a later, that's a, that's a, that's a different story for a different time is what that one is, but there's a lot of lead flying in deer season if you go into some places with some people, the commissar is less of a joke than we would hope it would be. Okay.

So, so we, we had mentioned chronic wasting disease. How much do you guys want to get into chronic? I do chronic stuff. We could talk about it. We can not up to you. Yeah. Yeah. We've talked about prions before because we talked about them on God, when did we talk

about them? When did we talk? Was it there? 25 episodes? I think it was. I think it was. Yeah, it came up when I was talking about proteins with Tom. So a prion is like a misfolded protein, it gives the wrong instructions and like it's

not like it's not like a virus, it's not like a bacterium that, you know, they have kind of a way of persisting on things and in things and have a very sort of like long latency between when they're around and when you start to like notice the effects for the effects are horrifying. Yes, correct, Ellis, you get bonus points today in your podcasting class. Yes. All that's right. Possible to achieve, normal to want.

Yes. Okay. So to add on, so we, there are a couple of other known prion diseases, there's Scrapey, which is found in sheep and goats. For a long time, we didn't think it could move to humans, but we now believe it can move to humans. We've had a case of, you know, we call it in humans, it manifests as Crum Helps Yacups disease, which is CJD, if you look it up.

So we haven't linked a case of Crum Helps Yacups disease to Scrapey. The fun thing about the prion, oh, let me step back. So prion protein is a highly conserved gene across most mammal species. In what the prion protein does for us, there's a lot of things, we're not exactly sure all the things it does. We believe it moves copper around the body, we believe it has stuff to do with sleep regulation and, you know, dealing with hormones and all kinds of, there's like three or four other things that I can't think of off the top of my head.

I have a whole other hour of presentation we could do chronic on. That is a very black pilling conversation. If we would choose to have that as a, you know, we could talk about it later, but basically what happens is when you're, when, you know, it misfolds, you slowly get this cascading effect of like, it just doesn't work and then aggregates and then it tells you're like a couple of misfolded prion protein, misfold the rest of your prion protein and your brain falls apart. You get holes in your brain.

So it's called the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy is what these diseases are. What is a goddamn fuck? Don't worry, I got you. I got you. So a transmissible means you can transmit it, spongiform means your, it becomes a sponge and then sepulopathy is a brain thing. So your brain becomes a sponge. That's medical talk for it.

So CWD is a transmissible is a TSE is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy for cervids. Their famous ones are Kuru, famously showing the book of Eli and mad cow disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Once again, in sepulop, spongiform encephalopathy means brain becomes sponge. Famously brains should not be sponges. As Alice is terrified of. Yes. I'm terrified of all of these, right?

Yeah. So the thing is that the bovine BSE, which leads to variants CJD is something that came up because for a long time in like factory farming of beef in the United Kingdom, we would feed cows the like brain master of other cows, which is like a bad thing to do. Right. Yeah. But it saved, it saved some money and we had a few cases of people's brains falling apart and the government sort of like went heavily and on like everything is fine.

And this was the nineties. This was 30 years ago. So far, single digits, low single digits, getting away with it, triple, triple 200. Really? Jesus. Okay. Oh, well, yeah. Alice, you're screwed.

Disregard that. Yeah. But like the other thing is that that long latency that I mentioned is it is impossible to predict and could be 50 years, could be 60 years. And so like a lot of the, as I understand it, the health surveillance in the UK is just like, there may just be this thing just waiting to like go off and like a bunch of people's brains just turn to sponges. Yeah.

That's probably how the trans panic got started is appearing in people's head. Well, I mean, this is the other thing. And this is the other thing that's like very, very troubling if you have a sort of a health focused anxiety disorder is disorders of the brain, sort of very nebulous, very multifarious symptoms, particularly with encephalopathy is like you look up this stuff and like impossible to diagnose in a living person. You can diagnose it post-mortem. Symptomatic diagnosis is somewhere on a spectrum between emotional changes, whatever that means,

and death, right, and like that's, you know, he's kind of like very, very difficult to, you know, respond to that there's no like treatment for any of this aside from palliative care. And even that's, you know, I'm not saying much when someone's brain is turning to sponge. And Oh yeah, it came over. Yeah. And all of this is like

Some kind of like filler in there, you know, fill in the holes, patch it up with some bondo, you know, perhaps make it more rigid. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing about this is the the transmissibility part, which is the prions have a way of just surviving on stuff like surgical instruments. I'm gonna fight for one second.

They don't survive because they're not alive. They just exist. Exists. Yeah. Very difficult to get rid of. Yeah. Yeah. And this is another thing where like now we would tend to dispose of surgical instruments

and we would like also clave things and we would just not reuse things. That was not the case for a long time. And so one of the potential things to worry about is not just, you know, you ate a burger in Britain in 1997 or whatever, but like you had surgery in Britain at any point until we started doing that. And like, you know, just like a long chain of causation goes all the way back to like cow eating cow brain. All of this is fucking terrifying.

So just to drive a little, just a little like, little, little like button on top, just a little like little something extra here. There's a famous case in prion circles, which are not circles you really want to hang out in. They're kind of not fun places all the time. So there was a person who had surgery, they had brain surgery because, you know, they had a prion disease and the doctors weren't super sure what it was. So they had brain surgery, personally died of, you know, the CJD, the equipment went

in to store, you know, it was clean, went to storage for a couple of years. Someone else had to have brain surgery at that hospital. They got the brain surgery equipment back out and the person who they did surgery on got, you know, a prion disease from the equipment, even though it had been cleaned, put into storage for several years, cleaned again, then used. Yeah, it's real not fun. The other really not fun part of CJD, or sorry, chronic wasting disease is it persists unlike, you know, BSE, it persists in the soil, said, you know, a deer can get chronic

wasting disease not from just interacting with other deer, but from eating plants that have taken up the prion protein. Yeah, this is the fun part. What if the most ubiquitous wildlife in your region all had prions? This is what we're dealing with. Okay, so here's the deer, I gotta, I have to do this, this is where we're gonna step right outside of the scientific literature for a moment, for a moment, because we don't know if chronic wasting can jump the species barrier, the species barrier appears to be

very high, chronic has been around since the 60s, no one has gotten a prion disease from chronic wasting disease. We haven't seen elevated levels of prion diseases in areas with long term chronic wasting disease, but this is where my brain goes to instantly, you have a free ranging wildlife species that likes to eat corn that has a prion disease, hangs up in cornfields, and that prion can be transmitted through plants. Still in the blank, and the other fun thing is the prion persists on basically every material for a long time.

Excuse me. Yeah. I mean, the good news, the good news is, I am desperate for your good news here, Alice. Okay, I'll do my best to put an optimistic slant on this, which is two things. One of them is concrete and backed by the scientific evidence. The other one is cope, right? So which one do you want first? Oh, both.

Give it to me. I'll give you the cope one first. Okay. This is an active locus of study, right? And like a lot of resources go into this, perhaps not as much as should. But when you consider that, you know, we did manage to shake off a potentially civilization ending pandemic with a lot of people dying, but we, you know, did stop it dead in its tracks on no notice.

You can kind of go, hey, you know, maybe fucking, you know, if we're putting all our hopes in carbon capture on the basis that like someone will come up with something, it's not unreasonable to like confront something as terrifying and be like someone will come up with something. Because maybe someone will. You don't know. Yeah. Someone will make the brain more rigid. That's the curfew.

And one, the, the sort of like the same one, the, the other one is if you take the sort of like most frightening option, which is the people who get like CJD or VCJD, like now the past 20 years are sort of the early adopters, right? And they're just the like, you know, crest of a wave that is coming. If you still get, you know, 40, 50, 60 years out of it, there's worse deals. It's a horrible way to die, but like 50 or 60 years of like otherwise dormant quality of life is like, you know, yeah, you know, that's very, the other feels so good. Thank you.

If you get the prion, you have 50 or 60 years in which to buy an AR and kill every fear you see. Yeah. Welcome to hell, Bambi. This is how I usually wrap up my C, CWD talks is it hasn't made the jump, it has made the jump in lab animals, but we have cured cancer a number of times in mice and in monkeys and we still get cancer. So because you can do something in a lab does not mean you can do it in real life.

You know, so we got that going for us, the species barrier is high and we got that going for us. Now, because this keeps me up at night, I will be going to there's a national CW, international CWU conference. So I'll be going to that because this just keeps me up at night, but don't find me there. Do not look for me, by the way, no, I guess, I guess the other thing is to say that like you have to rest like at the end of the day, I'm deploying all of my weapons of talking therapy here that I've learned against this, because the facts as we've established them

are fucking terrifying, but sometimes part of being a person is you learn some terrifying facts and then you still have to get up the next morning, right? And we don't want you to kill yourself because you listen to this podcast. So we want you to kill deer. Yes, exactly. You have to find purpose in other things like killing deer, but be also at some point you just have to take shit as it comes like that that's just a sort of like that's a serious coping skill we all need to have as shit gets worse is just the ability to gaslight yourself

and go, okay, whatever, I still have work in the morning. The other really fun thing that you can do, I'm not a creative writer, but if you if you wanted to do some really fun creative writing as you could like, you know, write a dystopian future where people have gotten it's jump the species barrier and that would be a very interesting, you know, and novel science sci-fi thing. Okay, that's been fun. Let's talk about some other fun stuff. Fucking like your your your poor prions that all of their heat has been stolen by the fungus

guys who also have plenty of reasons to terrify you but have just like monopolize the discourse on this one, you know. Yeah, I mean, last of us come on, Zambieland came out earlier, I'm sure that was BSE not really an accurate representation of how prions, you know, manifest in humans, but Zambieland did it already. Okay, next slide, please. Yes. Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks, you get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting

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It's official will there's your problem podcast stance that you should kill every deer you see. That's right. That's right. As a precaution or as, you know, revenge, depending on how you feel about it. Yeah, revenge. Let's be clear. Whatever, whatever, whatever floats your boat, whatever kills your deer I'm fine with.

As long as it's legal and ethical, I'm cool with it. Happy for you. I encourage you. Love to see you out there. I'll take you out myself and teach you how to kill them. So this plant that we are seeing is not native to the United States. However, this picture is taken in Pennsylvania. This is Japanese stillgrass.

This is what we call an invasive species. So there are lots of non-native plants that you can find in America. You can find all kinds of like eggplants and broccoli and all that kind of stuff. Those are non-native plants. An invasive species is a non-native plant that can replicate itself outside of captivity for 10 plus years, can expand and it does damage either socially, economically or ecologically. Like cuddly, right? It's been a lot of invasive species.

All right. So what was that? Oh, it was like, like, like cuddly. That's the classic one, right? Oh, yeah. Cuddly is the classic. I would, I would like... What's the East German like communist invasive species, milkweed or hogweed?

We've given you guys hogweed. You gave to us, we gave you milkweed. We also gave you guys black locust. It was imported intentionally. And then you didn't, the Germans didn't quite figure out that it was going to go and it went. Yeah, it's a problem. Yeah.

It's a problem there. Hogweed is the one that kills you if you touch it, right? I don't think it kills you. It's just, I think it's an, you're out, it's, you know, a big like itching thing. That's more of a farm thing. I don't deal with farms. They've tried to eradicate it from the United States, but there's like three plants outside of the Israeli embassy that they have not been able to kill yet.

So the thing with invasive species, I have this layer in the slides. So we'll talk about it now, is that we like to bring them in. We do this to ourselves most of the time. This is not like... That's what really hurts. Yeah. Yeah. We do this to ourselves.

And then we don't pay attention to these non-native plants until they become a problem. So like with, you know, this is an insect, but with spy lander and fly, we knew about it when it showed up in the port of Philadelphia. We knew about it when it got to Pittsburgh and we just didn't do anything. And when I say we didn't do anything, I'm looking at the railroad's didn't do anything. They just didn't take biosecurity seriously because they're like, we are, you know, a tier one railroad. We do what we want.

Yeah. Meanwhile, I was stopping them as fast as I could. Yeah. There's a very fun study about the relation of spy lander and fly invasions and findings in railroads. It's like 90 plus percent. But I will say one thing in the defensive class on railroads, you kill a shitload of deer.

Yeah. Yeah. You can, you can, you regularly see one of those big locomotives with like a pink mist on the front of it. They'll kill a moose. They'll kill a moose. They'll kill a moose. I've heard tell of their moose in the rut.

Sorry. What was that? I said, they'll kill a car and its occupants. They'll even try for Ohio. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to say critical support for trying to kill Ohio, but like, not a huge Ohio fan, not a huge Ohio fan, but not critical support.

Ohio's don't hurt Ohio anymore. It's already Ohio. So we have 140 non-native invasive species, terrestrial plants in Pennsylvania. We got a lot of them. We are at a really fun intersection of three major ecosystem types. We have the Appalachians. We've got some of the Southwest and the Coastal Plain around you guys in Philly. And then we have the Northern Forests in the Northern region up by kind of Erie-Caine area.

So that's where we get all the non-natives. We also have a couple of really fun things. So invasive species are directly linked to international commerce and shipping. So we have the Port of Philly. We got Baltimore right there, and then we also have New York is pretty close. So we get all of the invasives. We get them all. Fun thing for us.

Yeah. Whoa. Sorry. I'm still thinking about prions. No, it's okay. Don't worry. I just wanted to think about them too much. All right.

So invasive species are a problem. They prevent you native plant growth. They also hurt wildlife. Nothing can eat this. Ghosts don't even eat silkgrass. They don't like it. It's too much. It's got too much silica.

Bog turtles cannot climb through this. It is too thick for them because they're just little guys here at home. Just Google Bog turtle. Maybe definitely nice and drop in a picture of Bog turtle. They're cute little guys. Oh. Yeah. They're just cute little guys.

They're just little buds. He doesn't know what a prion is. No, no, and he's not going to get infected by a prion because he's a reptile. Yeah. So we're all fucked for that. Like he's good. You know? Yeah.

I've seen one of these guys before. Yeah. They're cool. They're neat. Oh yeah. They're just cute little guys. But they can't move this. It's too thick for them, especially when they're little guys.

Like when they're just hatchlings, can't move through it. They die. All right. So two things. Kill every day you see and like get a scythe. Just a scythe. Yeah. Yeah, just like a flamethrower, you know?

Well, maybe we're talking about Agent Orange. Yeah. That was nice. You know, not a fan of chemical companies. You know, Bayer took part in the Holocaust. Dow did Agent Orange. Mostly, we try to control these through chemical means because that's really the only thing that works on a lot of these.

So you got to get out there and spray with chemicals. If bio-controls work, they wouldn't be so invasive. Purple loose strife has a bio-control that works. Not weed does not have any bio-control that works. Purple grass does not have any. You really got to get out there and spray these things. Kind of the only thing that really works. Yeah.

Yes, that's fun. Got to hit them with the old roundup. Yeah. Yeah. Well, usually we use... So in forestry, we use glyphosate and triclopyr for the most part. Here you would use sulphametron, which is not roundup. Roundup is a glyphosate.

And those are actually really tame chemicals when it comes to pesticides, not a chemist forester. So if you want to get into chemical discourse, you guys go off. No, no, no. That's fine. I'm still thinking about it. I don't know. Oh, not about it.

That's going to be that. I'm still thinking about prions. Yeah. Yeah. Frito. Frito. You're going to leave that behind, Alice. We're past prions.

I'm doing my best here. We moved past the prions. Leave them behind. We're going to find something where... What's the minister in 1992? I am about to tell you what the death of a couple more billion individuals catch up. Come on now. OK.

OK. Mass deaths. Mass deaths. Yeah. I guess this is... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I guess it's hundreds of thousands for sure. Potentially billions. OK. Moving on. We're talking about the loss of genuses in a second. So the other really fun thing about invasive species are because deer eat most of the forest. There's a lot of open niches. And so the invasions come up because you got nothing left out there except for what deer

don't eat. There's some really interesting research about how non-native honeysacals are changing the colors of cedar wax wings and they're becoming not sexy to female cedar wax wings than males. And so reproduction is going down because they can't eat or because the females don't have sex. Yeah. Yeah. These are also useless to native insects.

Yeah. Oh, I've podcasted already for an hour this morning. Come on. Catch up guys. All right. Next slide. I'm doing good. This has the energy of being like...

I feel like I'm being led through the forest on like a guided hike. You know? Yeah. I'll do that. I'm struggling for breath, baby. Come on. I can do like 50 of those a year. This is nothing.

Yeah, it shows. We're getting started. I'm seeing a lot of fuzzy caterpillars here. I'm a real fun guy outside of my work. My work is not fun. Okay. So Liam, you guys might know, Liam and Justin, you guys might know what this is. What is this?

This is a lot of fuzzy caterpillars. Yeah. So this is Spongymoth. It had a previous name, which we're not going to mention on this podcast. Oh, is it Racer? That's a slur. Oh, yeah. It really is.

Okay. Can you tell me... Satisfying my curiosity and we have dev belief, but what was the... J-moth. Oh, okay. Okay. Oh, I heard of that. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. I was renamed to Spongymoth. Roma people moth. Well, so it was renamed to Spongymoth to be in line with what the French call it. So there's one French asshole that we have to blame for this, actually. This guy, 18 Truvallu. I'm probably saying the last name wrong, but you know, whatever, fuck him.

He imported this species, all right. So... He was less racist about naming it than us. He's French and they're, you know, Roma people. So let's not... Yeah. Getting too much credit. Yeah.

Yeah, let's not get into that. So they... He brought this... He brought Spongymoth to the U.S. because he wanted to hybridize it with some native moths that we have and create a silk industry. In the 1700s, this will surprise you, but European moths and American moths, not related, didn't work. So he gave up on the experiment.

He just let them go and then he went off to become like pretty important in early astronomy. Huh. Who would just already be like a Renaissance man at that point, literally. Well, not literally. Oh, yeah, for sure. Like, he has lice, but like... I'm just gonna go import something else next, like elephants or lions or something. So Homie walks away from these, they escape.

If you look up Spongymoth, there's some really interesting pictures of like guys way out on the tips of these branches trying to pick these caterpillars off, excuse me again, surprisingly, trying to pick off and squish individual caterpillars when they have a population of this size does not work. There's really no control for these. These will defoliate entire mountain sides. We saw some bad defoliations this year. I'm expecting to see some more next year.

And again, this will surprise you. Trees don't like it when they lose all their leaves, tend to die. Can we not import like another deadlier invasive species to eat them? Oh, yeah, like the Simpsons bit. The mongoose, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a native virus and we're going to get to how this all falls apart in a second.

So there's a couple, you might be able to see it in the video, you can definitely see in the presentation. There's a couple of caterpillars that are kind of flipped over. So the ones that are flipped over in like a reverse V, those have this virus. That makes their intestines explode and spread the virus, it's a native virus. And then the ones that are just dead and kind of have like a regular dead to the tree, those have gotten BT, which is a native, I can't remember if it's a bacteria or a fungus. All right.

Don't, don't, don't quote me on this one. Two potential apocalypses right there. Yeah. So, so it kills them and we can spray insecticides. We spray BT, which again, native fungus. We spray mimic, which is an insecticide. The problem is to control spongy mouth populations, you have to get 99% kill, which is difficult to do.

It seems ambitious. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't really, you know, you can knock down populations, you can't eliminate it. I just keep spreading. And the other thing is these guys fly. Not just like when they're mossed with this caterpillar, it'll throw strings out and it'll fly down the mountain.

I used to see these guys all the time back when I was a kid and riding on the Washington Old Dominion Trail. Yeah. So it's kind of a boom and bust cycle. Some people will tell you they're naturalized. I don't think they're, they're just incredibly damaging, but this is just one of the invasive insects we have. So next we get into, here's where I promised you millions and hundreds of millions of

death. Here, here it is. Oh yeah. Let's go. Let's get some mega deaths. Yeah. Oh wait, no, no, no. Don't go forward.

Go back. Go back. We're sticking with the invasive insects. Okay. Yeah. Climate change doesn't really hit us too hard yet. We have amryl dashboard driving ash to extinction across the state. We have pumpkin ash, green ash and black ash, 99% fatal in green ash, 98% fatal in pumpkin

ash, and 88% fatal in black ash. So that whole genus is headed right towards functional extinction. And then if you look across the U.S., we're probably going to lose like 2 billion ash. So fuck. That's the genus out the window. I hear about diseases like this, and I'm kind of like, why hasn't this, why haven't we had a disease like this kill all of the humans? You know?

Well, COVID sure tried, bud. I tried, but it wasn't very good. I'm back to the cope thing. Medicine. Like, we invented like systems of like diagnosis and treatment and quarantine and shit like that. I mean, the only upside to EAB is it's 99%, 99.99% fatal. So you can find that.001 tree that's not killed.

They're having some success regenerating some ash in parts of Michigan where it's been for a very long time and they've managed to establish some parasitords. Is that possible for everywhere? I don't know. I don't know. Okay. So that was EAB. Next we have, I'm sorry, that's just it.

There's no out. The next is Hemlock-William-Delgid. So Hemlock is our old growth forest condition. Important to keep streams cold. Hemlock-William-Delgid kill hemlocks of five to seven years. Moving its way rapidly across the state. This is not the first time I've said it, it won't be the last. I don't think, I think if things don't change soon, we're looking at the functional extinction

of hemlock within 20 years. So functional extinction means. Oh, like 20 years time. We'll have some, we'll have some bigger problems, maybe. We'll know if we're fighting on disease. Yeah. Maybe. So, so functional extinction is different from like total extinction.

So there will still be some on the landscape, but not enough to do their ecological role. So Hemlock, write that one off. Put that one in the bin. Oak wilt is picking up oak wilt of non-native fungus, excuse me, we also have beach bark disease and beach leaf disease. Beach bark disease is an insect and two non-native fungus that kill mature beach. Beach leaf disease is a really new one. It's a nematode and potentially something else that kills small beach.

So we're just squeezing beach right out of the forest. We just. I have a question. Head of right for death. Yeah. So my question is, say we made this like priority number one, like everyone in the field had all of the resources, like imagine like Apollo program investment in like reversing this. Would there be like, what could be done?

Could anything be done? Is this just like locked in, like. Yeah. So, so for some of these were done, like it's gone, it's escaped, like EAB, there's no, that the gene's out of the bottle there, Hemlock will adulthood, there's no putting that one back. Like Asian longhorn beetle, it's a related, you know, it's a non-native beetle, boring beetle kind of related to emerald ash borer and it attacks more species.

We've put a lot of money into containing that pest and we've done pretty well so far. It has, you know, it's gotten out a couple of times, but we found it and we're killing a lot of it where it is, where it's gotten out. So, you know, if you get on it fast, there's potential to stop these kind of things. The real answer is just don't bring it in, like just take biosecurity very seriously and just don't bring it in and you stop the problems. Make everywhere Australia. Got it.

Yeah. Yeah. No, unironically, yes. Well, you know, on that front, you know, Australia got its own things. In a couple of ways. Yeah. So, going back to species we've lost, we've already lost butternut, talked about chestnut. American elm has been hammered with Dutch elm disease and then here's another fun disease

that you might not be super familiar with. It's elm yellows, which is a phyoplasma, a kind of bacteria that has like no cell wall or membrane. This is also fucking weird, but I'm looking at the forest and just like screaming, just be normal. I thought this was fucking trees and shit and it turns out that there's like biologically interesting stuff happening. Yeah.

There's a whole ecosystem behind, you're now seeing the forest for the trees. Yeah, I don't like it. I want to go back. The method of transmission for like Dutch elm disease has always confused me because we used to have like five big elms in the Woodland Cemetery right near where I live and they all got Dutch elm disease at the same time and there was no elms anywhere nearby them and they had to cut them all down and it was like, where did this come from? Oh, Dutch elm, I think that that one is either associated with a borer or just kind of floats

on it. Oh yeah, I'm just looking up. It's associated with a native borer beetle. So we have just native insects, they're just flying around, just getting after injured wounded trees until they'll pick up the fungus, fly over and jump on the next tree and infect it. Same thing with Oakville. Damn.

I'm still thinking about prions. Yeah. The thing is, the thing is right, the prion conference, when you go to that, that's going to be, I think there's an important sort of thing you can graph here for conferences, which is, importance to risk of civilization ending versus consumption at bar afterwards. So if the astrophysicists who are worrying about asteroids slamming into earth, I'm drinking a lot. It's all good.

Not going to worry about the asteroids. If the encephalopathy guys are hitting the bar pretty hard, that's where I'm going to sort of focus my anxiety. Well the deer guys do drink pretty well and they party pretty hard. So it's a good time if you go to a deer conference. I can't recommend it enough if you get a chance to go to one. It's a great time. By Allah, I have seen prions caused solely by pictures viewed on the internet.

This is exactly the kind of unconscious thought OCD would give me. So thank you. All right. I'm off with prions. Next. So basically the point, oh, then we also have Laurel Wilt disease, which is on the horizon. Luckily it's not going to kill overstory trees. It kills all members of the family's loraceae for you plant nerds out there.

So in Pennsylvania, that spice bush and sassafras for avocado heads, it does kill avocados. And it's moving towards avocados in the US. Hey, but once it kills every avocado in the US, millennials will finally be able to buy a house. It's going to burn. I fucking wish. So what trees will we have left? That's a great question.

Fuck. It looks good. That's a species so old, it's outlived most of its pests. Eastern white pine looks OK. Some of the poplars look all right. Yeah. We have like 100 tree species and I just named three, OK, like this is a, this is why we're having the episode here.

It's not like commercially farmed spruce pine fir and that's it. Oh, we can use spruce pine in Pennsylvania. It doesn't work here. Well, those trees aren't important to like anything to do with the climate or anything. We don't need them. Oh, we're going to get to that in one second. The nice thing is white oak is not impacted by oak wilt and it's not impacted by any besides spongy moth.

Many of the insects that we've listed so far and that is key to making bourbon key. You literally can't make bourbon without white oak problem with white oak is I dear fucking love it. But they do. Oh, yeah. So if you just kill the deer, kill all of the deer, we really can't have a sense of one or not. Yeah.

No, I'm not doing it to preserve bourbons of likes. I hate bourbon, but like what is what that's insane. No, no, no, the taste of bourbon has this kind of like sour corn mash taste that I really don't like. I would rather just drop whisky. I mean, it's good. Yeah. No, it has like a really, for some reason, it's like maybe I'm like one of these people

for whom coriander tastes like soap or something. But the aftertaste, like bourbon has a serious, serious aftertaste for me. Like I drink bourbon. It's all like in like taste for the next day. That's why it's good. Have you tried the drink of the people, which is, you know, a Kentucky mule, bourbon with a little ginger beer in there, a little bit of lime. It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter with mixing it. It doesn't matter what bourbon it is. You're like a man. And you can do like a mint julep. That's always a nice. Right. Right. Whisky doesn't do that to me.

You know, like any kind of it's the only spirit that does that to me. But like not only does it give me like the horrible aftertaste, but like I drink bourbon and no matter how much or how little I drink, I have like a two day hangover. And I have, I have no idea why. So bourbon and I do not get along because you're a giant little poop pants cry baby. Well, here's the other fun thing that the reason that you need to care about that anymore, but I do. No, you're not.

The reason you need to care about white oak, you know, is because it makes all of your other brown liquors. Brown liquors. Now they age in oak barrels, except for Scotch, which also has peat in it. But who wants to drink, you know, dead plants when you could have me. I want to. I want to drink the scotch. Yeah.

No, come on. I risk Whisky aged in white oak barrels because it's a very good and tasty oak. You know, you have three. It's better. We're going to. This is now liquor talk. Second. I like my taluska.

I like to, you know, I like to taste the shit that like earth see the caveman died in like a burning down hospital. Yes. Yeah. I want to drink like Tolland man. You know, sometimes a nice smoky scotch is fine. But so white oak is, it's got Tyloses in it, which are these little bubbles in the fibers that prevent liquid from moving through it.

So if you want to age liquid for a long time, white oak is very good, which is why you legally have to use white oak to make bourbon. You can only use the barrel once. And then after you use that barrel, they sell it to like all of the other liquor distillers and agers out there because it's a very good barrel and it's tasty. So like I was in Scotland this summer, I was in a distillery and I saw white oak. I like went up to the wood and I was like, Hey, I know that I grow that here in Pennsylvania. Yeah.

So we lose white oak, the, the quality of spirits and wine across the world is going to suffer. You have to go back to vodka with good gin here in Philadelphia by Philadelphia distilling this aged in they make whiskey bourbon barrels. Yeah. Let me get that kind of that nice flavor blue code. If you're looking for blue gin, yeah, it's very good. I think with the bourbon guys say like 70% of the flavor from in bourbon comes from

white oak. So else where you might not like is the flavor of white oak. Are you anti tree? I think I may be anti tree. I think I might have to double her alice, Bambi Coldwell Kelly. Yeah. That's right. She's very over here.

She's not justice. She anti tree. She's pro deer. Yeah. Pro peatlands. Boo. Listen, without, without peatlands, where is, you know, where are you going to get poets writing about peat cutting?

And that's like a good 5% of the Irish economy for like until they got into real estate. Well, and now they're putting trees in the peatlands because that's where farmers don't want to farm. And so they're putting trees on it. In college, I had a job with this Forest Service initiative where I was dissecting frozen blocks of peat from around the world. And we were weighing what was peat and what was planted in there. Looking back on it, I definitely should have had some kind of mask on because like, who

knows what is throwing out of those peat blocks? Oh man. Oh God. Just like dudes, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So next slide.

Let's, let's get on to our favorite thing. I'm doing exotic, Brian. Yes. So this is climate change here. We're talking about climate change. I'm sure everyone knows about the climate crisis. Climate changing. It's kind of us anymore because I'm mostly worried about the prions.

Yeah. Well, hey, you know, to each their own, I'm not, I'm not a climate change fan, what we're expecting in Pennsylvania is our winters are going to get warmer. We got like no snow this year that stayed where I'm at. We're going to get hotter summers. We're going to get more 90 degree summers. This climate is better for invasive species because our plants are not adapted to it. It's more stressful in the native plants.

We're going to see how native plants and invasive species interact in one second. Just for, I'm not a physical scientist. Again, I'm a tree guy, but just for one, like just look into how this impacts the physical science. A hot air holds moisture longer. So we have more moist air, but less moisture in the soil, hence the crack soil photo. But because it's hot trees are, they're, they're photosynthesizing more. They have increased transpiration, so they're sucking more water out of the ground, which

means they shrug them more in droughts. Also means that aquifers get filled slower. Just one, one impact. Less snow is not good for most of our tree species. They're used to having a blanket of snow on them in the winter. Snow is a really good moderating factor for the climate. It also protects you from seed predators and sapling predators. It's really fun.

Sorry. Keeps kids out of school. Yeah. I don't know what the dang zoom kids be on the phone these days. You know, my God, that's the worst thing that I think has ever happened to kids is they don't have snow days anymore. Yeah. It's, it's inhumane.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, I'm not, I'm not really fucking with you. No, right. I agree. Yeah. A snow day is a snow day.

You shouldn't have to go back to school. You shouldn't have to do online school. Bad for teachers too. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. For sure. For sure. Okay, so let's see how invasive species and tree stress and climbing all interact.

Next slide, please. So oh, I have fun animations from this one. So in forestry, we'd like to do these triangles. So give me an animation. I don't think we can do that. Kevin. Is it going to work? Probably not.

It almost never does. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Take that. Okay. So this is Hemlock, Eastern Hemlock or Canada Hemlock. It's a secret canadensis, if you want the botanical name.

So Hemlock likes a cool, dry climate. We are, as I said before, going to a hot, moist climate. All right. So it likes moist soil, doesn't like it when it's not moist and cool. Okay. So the Hemlock is getting stressed from climate change. Next. Give me a click.

Yeah. Okay. Now, this is in this picture. Again, I'm not sure how it's going to show up in the video. Hopefully it shows it perfectly. You can see little cotton balls on the branch. Those are Hemlock woolly adelgid, non-native invasive insect, kills Hemlock in five years. These were kept in check.

It was first introduced in the 60s. It was kept pretty well in check by cold winters. So you get a negative four, a couple of negative four days that kills like 80% of the population. A negative 30 day kills 90 plus percent of the population to 100%. So cold days, keep those in check. For our European folks, that's Fahrenheit, right? You double it and add 30. We're below zero.

We're below zero Fahrenheit. So I think this is kind of when they merged together. Yeah. That's like, well, yeah, they'd merged together at negative 40, I believe is the point. Yeah. Negative 31 is pretty close to negative 40. Right, negative four Fahrenheit is like negative a million degrees Celsius. I'm going to punch you in the face.

I don't think they have those temperatures. In the defense of Fahrenheit, it was like written down and like codified as a measurement system before Celsius. Well, it's objectively better, but yeah, it's not, that's not what it is. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Are you still speaking English over there?

Are you? That's crazy. I like it when water at sea level boils at 100 degrees and freezes at zero. Yeah. That's good. You need to switch to the best temperature measurement, which is Rankine. I've never heard of that. Rankine is, you know how there's the Kelvin scale, right, which starts at absolute zero?

Rankine is the same thing, but with Fahrenheit degrees. Alpha fucks sake. Jesus Christ. Yeah, take that. Yeah, fuck you. We'll show you. Make our own measurement scale. Okay.

Now, we have one more. This is a triangle. So we're going to see the triangle. Rankine, one more fun fact, died in Glasgow. He was very Scottish. Oh, yeah. Well, Rankine and Kelvin, both like the University of Glasgow guys, I believe. Those guys, they like fought each other, you know?

Lord Kelvin a bitch. Okay, so here is your other part of the triangle is that the hemlock really does just do much, much better under climate change. And we're now seeing massive hemlock mortality, which contributes to climate change because our big hemlock, hemlocks, which are a great storage unit of carbon, big trees store carbon for a long time, really get a point out of atmosphere, atmosphere, dead. Well, yeah, that's it. To the tune of like millions, right?

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't not even once. Okay. So let's put this all together and let's see how it interacts in an eastern forest.

Next slide. So this is a bunch of plants. This looks like a, you know, something, maybe a forest. I don't know. Actually, I do know. Spoiler. I took this picture. So this is, this is no longer a functioning forest.

There are like two native plants in this picture. So there's the, Roz, if you could just like draw a little circle, or Justin, if you could draw a little circle over the, that branch that's hanging out. Oh, this guy. Over. Yeah. There's one native plant and then there's kind of a little canopy left in the black cherry that's just touching that branch.

Is that up here? Yeah. Yeah. Right there. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The rest of the plants in this photo are non-native invasive. Cool. Everything else here is, is it, is non-native. Lighted dead sticks on the ground as well. Yes. Yeah. It's getting closer to like a scrub. And of course, we don't want no scrubs.

Yeah. Yeah. Because the scrub is a biome defined by lack of trees, meaning that the soil is drier and there's a risk of fire that's known in France as a maquis. I, yeah. I would, I would actually, this is a thing that I'm working on. I feel like I just got my ass kicked. I would call this a zombie forest.

No, I got that on the tweet. Oh. Cool. Okay. So this, this on the surface, it looks like it's a living forest, but when you push on it, it has no soul. There is like two trees left in this forest. Anything else is dead stems that are overrun with Oriental bittersweet in mile a minute.

So to the uninitiated, it looks like a functioning forest. It's not nothing. Nothing here is native. This will be the future condition of this forest until the dead trees fall down, in which case it'll just be, so we see in this photo, some autumn olive, multi-flora rose, and a couple of species of non-native Barbary. That'll just take over. The dead tree standing will eventually fall down.

What happened here, this is in Western PA, right up against the Ohio border, is this is a forest that was ash and black cherry. The ash was killed by the aforementioned emerald ash borer, and the black cherry died just due to natural mortality. It can only live to be 120 years old. So it died, and then what came in, what just took off following the failure of ash was all these invasive species. Now the dead sticks that we see are the landowner trying really hard to knock back the invasive

species, but this is going to take like a decade of work to knock back the invasive species, and then you have to keep the deer out to get the natives on the ground. This is the worst case scenario. This is what could happen to eastern forests without action. So if you just want to put your hands up and let Jesus take the wheel, Jesus was a carpenter like, you know, AD, he's not a good driver, this is where we go. Also like cutting down a lot of trees, you have to imagine. I'm here for cutting down trees sustainably.

It's cool that this photo is now apocalyptic to me, when going through the notes, I was like, oh cool, pretty. Yeah, no, no, no, this is actually not, this is very much not. My grandmother's house in Enfield, Connecticut, there was this big, dead tree in the back, and we wanted, my dad and my uncle were like, we got to get rid of this big, dead tree. Because well, they didn't know it was dead at the time, but what they did know is there's huge boys and ivy vine surrounding it. And then I realized before they were going to cut it down, it was dead, and the only

thing that was keeping up, it upwards the poison ivy vine. So a really fun way to differentiate poison ivy from Oriental bittersweet is that Oriental bittersweet will wrap very tightly around a tree and strangle it, as you can see in a lot of these trees, whereas poison ivy has these like, hairy roots that come off the vine that attach it to the tree, it's also a branching vine, it gets kind of ugly, doesn't branch, it gets out there. Yeah. Okay.

But so we have actually beaten Mother Nature, there's a concept in the forestry called succession, which is like, you go from shade intolerant grasses, to shade intolerant trees, to shade tolerant trees, to more shade tolerant trees, to old growth, and then back to early successional species. This will go nowhere. We beat Mother Nature, this is the end of the line, this is an ecosystem that has never existed. This has no value for native wildlife.

If you are a native insect, you can't eat any of these plants. Our invasive honeysuckle supports no native insects, whereas native oak species can support 400 plus species of, excuse me, native lepidoptera, which are moths, are moths and butterflies. Honeysuckle supports none. So this is just no value. If we're thinking about this from a forestry perspective, no value, we're thinking about this from a wildlife perspective, no value, if you're thinking about this from a carbon sequestration perspective, no value, because like, all of these little stems are going

to rot very quickly and they cannot sequester as much carbon, cannot sequester and store as much carbon as the cherry that we see in the right foreground of this photo. So this is not what we want. This is a failure. This is bad. Okay, next slide. I try to be a little bit positive. So here I'm going to be a little bit positive.

We can regenerate forests with a lot of effort. So here we see a deer fence. This keeps the deer out. The landowners here, they had foresters come in, they had a logger come in. They did a very intentional harvest and they were able to, on the left, successfully regenerate a forest. It takes money, time and effort to do this. It costs about $80 an acre to spray herbicides.

This fencing now costs $7 a linear foot to put up because of steel prices. It used to cost $2, but then steel prices went up. And you don't see a return like these landowners will never see a return on this investment. Those trees are going to take at least 80 years to mature. So under the system of capitalism that we have today, this is a terrible investment. This is a bad investment. They're losing money on this. However, they're doing their right thing ecologically, biologically for human health, wildlife health.

But yeah, I mean, you can regenerate forests if you try. And if you work hard, but if you don't, you don't. I'm going to put my lips directly on the microphone here. Climate Stalin. If you're willing to wait to see results until after you are dead, well, it's just the business of forestry. You're always working for not the person after you, but the person like two generations after you.

This is a 120 year business. Every step you make is looking for 120 years. It's hard for people who don't think about trees to think in that time frame. That's the time scales we're thinking. But again, this is where we get to have a really fun capitalism discussion. Under our system of capitalism, regenerating this forest is very, very, very difficult. Because you have to put a lot of money in upfront and you will probably never see the financial return on this.

Oh, sure. Yeah. There are programs like the Contration Reserve. Sorry, what was that? I was like, can you trust the guy who comes after you and the guy who comes after that to continue the program? Probably not. That's great.

That's a great question. I've lived in New Zealand 10 years and Pennsylvania is eight years. So you're looking 10 ownerships. Yeah. Yeah. So capitalism, folks. Capitalism was the real enemy all along. Stalin.

Climate. Stalin. Yes. You need at least two or three climate Stalin's in success. You need a climate Stalin, a climate cruise chef, then climate has to falter revisionism. I was going to say climate Tito. A long climate guarantee. Let me get a climate Tito, actually.

I like that kind of one. And then finally, degenerating into climate Gorbachev, you have climate Pizza Hut and then that leads you straight through to climate Yeltsin. Climate. Yeah. I don't even know what that is. We invade Mars or something. I feel like...

Stop that, Elon. Yeah. Mars is historically Russian. Yeah. Doing a land acknowledgement on Mars. Oh my gosh. Yeah, this land is traditionally unknown bacterial land. Yeah.

Yeah. Or Mark Wahlberg. I don't know. I think it's increasingly obvious that if you want to have any kind of sustainable future for humanity, you have to act unilaterally in ways that capitalism disincentivizes. And I don't know how you do that. I don't know how you make any politician do that other than redacted, redacted, parody, redacted, and even that may be too light.

Not that it matters because of the prions. So... Well, I mean, we're just hoping, we're putting our faith in the species barrier, or just the next slide for me. We're going to try to be hopeful in the end here, because this is a solvable problem. These are outside of the genus loss. I don't know what you call the loss of a genus. The loss of a species is extinction.

Loss of a genus is an unknown thing, but it's happening. I can show it to you. We just saw the loss of a genus. But anyway, that's a word I haven't... We haven't figured out yet, but we... Meta-extinction. You know, there's like Xenocide, but again, that's one species. That was like too cool of a word.

What do you call it when you lose a genus? What's the word? We're doing it. We're killing them. So this is a timber harvest that has been done. Again, you can manage, and we have good regeneration in here. We have nice oak regeneration in here. You can manage forests.

You can do it. In most forests, it takes work. In some, like this one, it's a beautiful site, and it didn't take a lot of work. They're like, this is a solvable problem. This is not a disaster where we walk away and be like, well, I guess we just don't fly jets into railcars or whatever that was. Was the skyline thing? I guess we just don't do that.

This is... We have people who are trying hard on this. I think there's only been two incidents of a plane flying into a train, one in the 30s and one fairly recently, I want to say. The trams. It was a tram. It was a sky tram. Whatever.

The sky trolley. Whatever. I'm a tree guy. I want to fall back on this. This is, for the most part, a solvable problem. With invasive species, we know how to manage them. It does cost some money, and it also costs not bringing in that pretty flower you saw on the internet.

If Mimosa is native to Africa, it can stay in Africa and be happy there. You have very nice plants where you live. You have very nice dogwoods in the US, in the UK. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. We got... That's an incredibly managed landscape right there.

I have fallen down drunk in a field in Europe, or sorry, in England, and I don't remember a lot from that, so couldn't tell you what I found on the ground. Oh boy. Reasonable. Reasonable. We all have been drunk in fields. Yeah. But in my defense, who starts a wedding at noon and doesn't serve lunch?

Oh no. No thanks. It's not my fault. It's not my fault. It's my experience. It's not my fault. The ultimate enemy, the rural bucolic wedding venue. Oh, fuck off.

Get married to the cynic. Yeah. I want to take a bus. I want to take a bus. Yeah. Okay. So that's me. This is the terrible travesty that is coming at us very slowly.

It's a scene in Austin Powers where he's driving at the steamroller at the guy. The steamroller at the guy. Yeah. What was incredibly frustrating recently was I was at a conference with some forest landowners and professionals, and they were like, oh, how do we marketize this? How do we marketize this? It's like, what if we just give you guys money to do good forestry? What if that though?

What an interesting idea. I can't hear you over the sound of the, you know, cap and trade carbon credits that we're doing. Oh, I'm going to be very honest. I also do that. And that's a second episode if you want to do that one. Oh, God. I would love to at some point.

Actually, that sounds like a trash future episode because that's economy happening. Yes. Well, you guys make, it's your show. You tell me what you want to do there. But I do that as well. You can read my work on that else. You know where to, you know how to look me up. Yeah, yeah.

Suddenly. Okay. I actually, we'll talk about that later. I don't want to identify myself too much. Okay. So, solvable crisis coming up for us. We could pay people. We actually even have the functions.

It's called the conservation reserve or preserve program, CRP. It's run through the natural resource conservation service, the NRCS. We just have to turn that fire hose from just farmers onto forest owners. It's like, this is an incredibly solvable problem if we at all think about it. President Biden, please redirect your fire hose. Yeah. Western forests are another, like the Western forest fires, another incredibly solvable problem.

Hmm. Again, we're just talking money and trees and the problem is, and I'm sorry to keep harping on this, we have expected that forests are a revenue generating thing. And for a while they were, but they're now reaching the point because we have stressed them so much that they are not necessarily that sometimes you have to pay for them. And it's okay because they do lots of good things for us. We're going to take it from a market perspective. Me as a guy who loves trees, it's like, we could just, it's fine.

It's fine to pay for trees. I love them. Mm-hmm, people love them in general. You know? Yeah. Is that like in terms of logging or just like in terms of like letting the forest be what it is? Oh, okay.

So this is, this is a very easy trap to fall into. Can you go back to our, go back to slides. Okay. So this, this is what happens if you don't manage forests. This is the Jesus take the wheel moment. So there's this idea there. It's called proforestation, which is like the nature knows how to handle itself. And we have long since passed nature knowing how to handle it.

If you know, you believe in mother nature as a concept, which it's, it's just that's a human invention. Um, you know, our native species can't compete. They can't handle these non-native invasive species. They can't handle climate change and they can't handle how we've changed the environment. And we, you know, as humans know how to manage this landscape, we've always managed this landscape. So if you had to hand off the wheel, you know, you, if you take away management, that's never

happened in the history of these forests. That's where we started talking about the native people. So this force has always been managed and it always needs to be managed because it's always like, excuse me, that's how the system has evolved. I hate to talk about forces systems, but you know, they've always had humans who have always been doing things. So you have to keep doing things. Otherwise, the wheels fall off.

So even if it doesn't like necessarily pencil out on it. On a balance sheet, it still, it, it makes sense to do this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, once again, how do we value a species? How do you value? I know Nestle claims to value clean water, but we'll see how do you value clean water? How do you value seeing wildlife?

How do you value the air around you? How do you value not being able to grow anything other than spruce behind fur? Which you can't grow here in Pennsylvania. It's too hot. This is true. You can't do it. You can. They've tried to grow red pine here.

It doesn't really work for most of Pennsylvania. Are soils wrong? Yeah. No. So that's, uh, that's the end there. And also we don't need to like, like try to figure this out. Like we have people whose whole life is managing these, these forests to regenerate and grow themselves.

Like that's why I got a job. We have books written on this shit. We got books. We got the, the Germans invented forestry as a profession, but people have been doing it in, you know, the world since there've been people. This is not a new thing. This is an Emily several problem with money. Uh-huh.

And therefore climate Stalin. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's me. Well, what did we learn? Thanks so much. Um, I'm terrified of like five more things.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm scared of several more things than I was on the other baby. Yeah. It's a way to be. It's a way to be. It helps you sleep at night.

Yeah. The thing is I got a nice big glass of bourbon now. Yeah. Well, I don't stop using good, you know, American forest products because the second you start using like paper made from like eucalyptus fiber, like that's just straight up deforestation. Oh, God. All that comes from the tropics. Like Brazil eucalyptus is native to Australia.

You cut down the rainforest to grow it there. I thought they put a whole bunch of eucalyptus in California or is that something? Oh, yeah. No, no, no, they did that. And also Spain and it causes forest fires out there. The fun thing about eucalyptus is it's a fire dependent species. Explodes too, right? Well, yeah, they emit oils that burn kind of like citrus.

You know, if you like squeeze like an orange rind that light on fire, eucalyptus emits a similar oil because it wants to burn. It yearns for death. It yearns for a really hot death because it's the only thing that can survive that fire. It's a fire dependent species. It's also a water hog. Yeah, we haven't even discussed forest economics because we don't need to.

Trees are funny. Yeah, we got to get you back on to talk about like forest fires in California. That's a solvable problem. We solve that problem in the forest literature in the 80s. Yeah, move out of California. There you go. You're in California. All right.

Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands for danger. G'day. Hello. This is already promising. Hello to the members of my favorite podcast, Justin, the explainer, Liam the Shouter, Alice, the best one, and Devon, the editor. Don't fuck yourself.

Nothing for the best. I don't know. I don't know if I've... No, you don't. You don't get any. You'd like heat off of this. I don't know why I'm the best one. I feel like I haven't really been pulling my weight on this one because I've been too

terrified. No, you've been doing good. I was pretty grossed in the story, honestly. Yes. Yeah. It was really interesting. We get guests who are too good. We've got to get, like, the worst guests.

Can you get the worst guests? Or worse at your job? Or worse at explaining your job? Well, thank you. How else would you not go over and over? I don't know. Yeah. Do you mind being not as good at your job so that we can, like, you know...

Get a guest. No, I really love trees. That's the whole thing. Like, I've talked for, like, today, four hours plus on trees, and I could go for another hour and a half. All right. Well, I can't. So let's wrap this bitch up.

Yeah. I want to talk about cargo fast. We got to get a guest who hates us. We'll get, like, I don't know, a fucking glimmer. Oh, we could get Hayden Clark, and we could get that clinical urbanism guy. When we do the Monongahala Liberoisa, that you will get a guest who hates you, don't worry about that. Yeah, well, they lost, so...

Yeah, I was about to say. We're going to be the ghost of 1877. I know we were on the wrong side, but still, they lost. Yeah, stay on your side. That's the whole fucking Susquehanna's Ford, buddy. All right, let's do this. Come on. If you're listening to this, you're about to hear a story from the world of motorsport,

where time is a flat circuit with history repeating as often as, in this case, the cars race by. In the late 2000s, a European formula race was red flagged when a recovery vehicle was hit by a race car. In 2014, Jules Bianchi, I'm assuming that's Bianchi, right? Yeah. I think so. Yeah.

He died when he was hit by a recovery vehicle. In 2023, I witnessed a near miss along these lines. This safety third is brought to you by poor communication and understaffing. Now, motorsport is inherently dangerous, but this incident was appalling and nearly catastrophic. It does not say that on the ticket. This moment happened at the Phillip Island Classic, a four day historic racing festival. Fun. Yeah.

I volunteered for all four days and had a headset to help me with my role, which was tuned into the standard race control comms loop. Several comms loops are involved with a race meet, or at least the ones I've been to. Race control handles general communications with a race control talking to the scrutineers, noise, scrutineers. That's a cool job title. That's a cool job title, yeah.

Sector marshals, boundary riders, and so on. Also a cool job title. Sounds like a Western thing, you know? But not the communicators in charge of the flag points. Having good communications between flag points and race control is vital to safe and efficient operations. So communicators at flag points at Phillip's Island have a separate comms loop, which rather than using wireless headsets, uses hard wired headsets connected through an in-ground network

to ensure minimal issues. It's handy. Imagine if you're like, you have to wave like a red flag so as a guy doesn't get killed and you just hear the, like, Bluetooth, like, low battery. Yeah. It's like, oh, fuck. The communicators have the task of quickly updating race control on important stuff like cars passing under red or yellow flags, oil on the track, and crashes and breakdowns,

which is of course all vital. They must warn race control and other communicators at different flag points of crashed or stricken cars so those flag points can act accordingly and races can be neutralized if necessary. So you don't run a bunch of cars into the back of someone else. Yes. There are also comms loops for emergency recovery and administrative personnel, but not all volunteers have headsets. At my flag point on the day in question, there's myself, a flag marshal without a headset, a

communicator, and a sector marshal overseeing all of us. In other words, we could hear the two most important comms loops and often shared information to keep everyone on the same page. Now, I should give a quick note on flagging in motorsports between two flag points. So the right hand pocket is the top and the left hand pocket is the bottom and then there's a, you know, this green, you know, that's, yeah, so on and so forth. Yeah, I have a silly question. I've been to like two NASCAR races and been very drunk because that's what you do at NASCAR

races. But you had to have headphones on even in this stand. So like they have like ear protection on. It just doesn't connect. Yeah. No, you just have like, whatever, but like no radio and that right. It's like three more dollars for, oh God. And this is, uh, this is some kind of vintage motorsport thing, which I assume is a little

bit more. Volunteers. Janky. Yeah. Yeah. Janky is the word. Yes. Mm-hmm.

So I mean, the secret hidden truth of this is that almost a sport is janky as fuck. One being like, you know, billion dollar business that is primarily still jank. I figure if you're doing vintage motorsport, um, you know, everyone there is like, okay, this is going to be a little bit janky because we are racing cars from 50 years ago. Yeah. Made out of asbestos. Yeah. James Hunt pissed himself in here.

Yeah. The racing. Sterling Moss, you son of a bitch. I'm getting old enough car. You could say this machine killed fascists. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, probably.

Why is there an imprint of Nicky Louder's face in the inside of the windshield? Oh, God. Shut up. Wait, I thought Nicky, Nicky Louder lived though. He did. But like, he got, he got dinged up slightly. Why is there an imprint of Nicky Louder's helmet in the windshield? Yeah, that's fair.

Shut up. Shut up and read the goddamn fucking scene though. It's so long. It's only a page and a half. That's longer than we say to make them. Let's go. That's a good point. Yeah.

I should give some a quick note on flagging in motorsports between two flags. Flagging in motorsports. For example, four and five. Any yellow flag incidents are the responsibility of the preceding flag point, which would be the four. Turn five is after the incident and can only wave a green flag to let the competitors know the track is saved after that point. Oh, it's block signaling.

Okay. Yes. And the cars in question, partially because their speed made the situation more dangerous and partially because they're really cool. They belong to the big ticket group for the festival, group Q and R racing and F 5000 F one and invited. I don't, I don't know what that is. I know the fastest, loudest and most spectacular group for the event, a Skoll bandit Indy

car. Yes. 1985 Ferrari F one car check, James Hunts, Heskick, he didn't piss himself in that. Along with other incredible machines, including several F 5000s, which are, you know, 70s formula muscle. They are the most difficult to drive and not the most reliable and it was a breakdown which led to our incident. A car pulled off to the drivers right after turn rot one just before flag point 2.1 coming

to a stop in the infield. This meant that flag point 1.2 should have put out two yellow flags, especially when a recovery vehicle drove across the infield from flag point 2.2 to tow it away in what's called a hot recovery. However, due to a lack of volunteers, there was no one at 1.2. In this case, I barely understand what's going on here. Okay. Okay.

So, so like, uh, oh, God, right. So 1.1 is up here, 1.2 is down here. Yeah. The car is coming in from like 1.1 down to 1.2. And then in between 1.2 and 2.1, one of them comes off, right? Right. Apparently stopping down here. Yeah.

This is the worst error I've ever made. So, so your man at 2.1 then has to like signal to 1.2 to put out a caution flag ahead of it because like if you put out a flag at 2.1, it will be too light. It will have already gone past the thing, it has to go to the, the like flag point before the accident. Okay. Now, due to a lack of volunteers, there was no one at 1.2. Oops.

In this case, 1.1 should have worn the drivers of the recovery, but due to the track's geography, they could not see the broken down car or the recovery vehicle. In my position, which is down here, we had a good view of what was unfolding and immediately grasped the danger of the situation and our communicator informed 1.1 of the recovery and told them to put out the yellow flag. At 1.1, there was a communicator and a flag marshal with a wireless headset tuned into the race control channel like myself and the flags did not go out. Oh, no.

The recovery vehicle pulled up in front of the broken race car and two men got out protected by nothing else but high vis, shirts, and gloves. Oh, no. That's pretty good protection. It's pretty good protection, but you're doing like, you're doing like line side like train stuff without like any sort of like protective signals or like, you know, it's fun if you're metal detecting like in an urban place. Jeremy Clarkson told me all I need is high vis and I'm good.

Okay, buddy. Yeah. As mentioned previously, they were on a separate comms channel and would not have started that recovery without permission from race control and would have been informed that the race was ongoing and they were going to do a hot recovery. Everyone at my point was worried, but we were following procedures and only our communicator can could contact 1.1 and tell them about the situation, which he did again, and the flag still did not go out.

Without knowing for sure, I believe the communicator at that point wasn't talking to their flag Marshall, although I can't fathom why not? They're into like a Regency costume drama situation. Yeah. When the field appeared barreling towards turn one in a tight group, thousands of horsepower and millions of dollars with an apex speed at turn one of about 150 mile an hour, none of them would have expected the recovery happening in the dangerous position because there were no flags.

At a full racing speed, the biggest dangers were a car running wide at turn one or lead car balking at the site of the recovery and being hit by a car behind it, setting off a chain reaction. The cars screamed towards the recovery and passed it by just as quickly without incident. Then 1.1 put out the double yellows as it should have done much earlier. Cool. Okay. Right after it stops massoring.

Everyone at my point took a deep sigh, then complained to each other about how dangerous the moment was as the recovery vehicle towed the stricken car away. Just like to critique the author for a moment is my job is to. The cars didn't balk, you know, they're not an object, the driver has the balk. The driver has the balk. Yeah. And if it's a horse, it should just be shot, you know, the horse discourse is the only thing.

Yeah. Kill any horse you see. Got you. Yes. That is here. Yeah. We didn't get into Feral Horse discourse. This is not the place for it yet.

We passed it. But yeah, I have lots of thoughts on Feral Horses. Oh my God. All right. Yeah. We're going to have to have you back on. What animals don't you want to kill? I mean, like, muskrats are cool, beavers are nice, beavers for wolverines, fishers, most

bird species. Most birds. Yeah. What about wolves? Yeah, what about what about like wolves, like wolves are neat. I have no interest in killing wolves. What about like a possums? I think possums are good.

Oh, fine. Yeah. No, I only kill things I would eat. I would eat a horse in case you were wondering. Okay. I've eaten a horse. That's fine. Yeah.

Yeah, this sounds about right. Apparently it was discussed in a debrief among senior officials that night, but it wasn't mentioned in the next day's general briefing. I was left feeling a bit disgusted and I realized I could have done more and I could have and maybe should have hit my radio button and demanded or pleaded with race control to put up flags at 1.1 and I will do so next time. I was genuinely scared that I was going to see a car spear off and kill people. Yeah.

You got to go up the chain of command for that, I guess. Yeah. Man, why would they just not speak to each other? When it's literally your job, what were they doing in there? Jacking it. Jacking it? You think? You think that's a jacking it situation?

Okay. Oh, it's jacking it. Lack of object permanence. I can't see the problem there for I am. Cargo fast? Yeah. Right. Yeah.

I'm sticking with jacking it. I'm sticking with jacking it. You know what? I'm sticking with jacking it. We're jacking it. That's how I just take my dick out. Yeah. Anyway, stay safe and keep podcasting.

It's my favorite podcast and an extra bit. If you think this wasn't Australia enough, the Hesketh hit a wallaby in a practice session. How are we feeling about killing wallabies? Well, well, so in the U.S., kill them non-native in Australia, fine. No opinions. And by hit, I mean, the subsequent cleanup was stopped after the larger parts of the corpse had been removed, and the Hesketh was also a lot more red than it was the lamp before.

Wait, wallabies aren't big animals. Don't worry about it. I guess they're just sort of misted, spiritualized, Australian deer, just the hulling itself in front of this thing. I'm sure an Australian deer is like a kangaroo. It's a kangaroo. Yeah. Wallabies are marsupials just like kangaroos.

All right. I don't know what a wallaby is. How big is a wallaby? Yeah, I'm like, I guess it's, I only know it is a wallaby, not as an animal, a wallaby. It's like 30 pounds. Not the shoes. It's three feet and heights up to 25 pounds. It's a little guy.

Oh, pretty close. Oh, he's a little motherfucker. It's like hop right in front of the thing and just get dusted. Yeah, again, like animized. Yeah, turned into Chucky Varanarra Swamp wallaby. Oh, I fucking what a weird looking animal. The thing Jimmy Costner almost got killed by. What?

How? No, that's something different. Oh, that was the, that was the Jimmy Carter almost swam for a giant swimming rabbit. Yeah, we do have swamp rabbits and I have seen them try to swim across large rivers and they do it very well. No, thanks. But you don't even care if you're hunting him with like beagles. So just jump right in the river and just deuces.

Good for that. Man, try and try and kill the president. All right. Are we done? Under express instructions by Devin to not give them another three hour episode. Yeah. That was safety. I promise you like an hour and 15 minutes.

Shake hands for danger. All right, cool. Our next episode is on Chernobyl and I wouldn't have any commercials before we go. Yeah. We have a new PO box address. We'll update it in the fucking video description, send us shit or don't. I don't care. The PO box works now.

But it's a new one. It's a new. I gotta go to fucking KNA, bro. Oh my God. People, people shouldn't find me, but I do have to do this one thing. There's a little podcast probably no one has heard of it. It's this thing called Boon to Vista and it's the month of April. I do need to plug the podcast Boon to Vista.

Oh, yeah. Wonderful podcast, especially if you spend a lot of time thinking about the death of multiple species and you'll pick me up every now and then. Check it out. Yeah. I was listening to the Boon to Vista. I'm a train intro yesterday and it drove me mad because I was trying to figure out how the DB class 101 is three phase and I realized that this was apparently that's only in the

traction motors and it gets single phase from the overhead wires. Anyway. Those are all words. I'm sure they mean something to somebody. I'm just saying like if you like sometimes get depressed at work and like occasionally listen to an episode, the same episode back to back, it's fine. It's a great podcast. Go for it.

Check out the podcast, Boon to Vista. I own a coffee cup from them. Co James Bond, Lions led by Donkeys. I have a commercial. What? Dude. Okay. So I have some colleagues who are attempting to get a petition signed to get put up for

a vote, additions to the DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, explicit mention of nationalizing the railroads. Right. Okay. And this is something which I think is probably not so controversial among her. If you are a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in good standing, you can just sign this. We'll put a link in the description.

Yeah. And that would be voted on at the next convention and you know, they'll figure it out there. So that's my commercial. That's my commercial. Beautiful. Wow. We went to hours, 40 minutes on this. Okay.

I'm sorry, Devin. Sorry, Devin. You're the best. Yeah.