Podcasts about ponderosa pine

When I turned twenty-one in 1994, I embarked on a 500 mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail across the state of Washington.  The Tread of My Soul is a memoir-meets-travelogue written from the trail.  Originally self published and shared with only a handful of family and friends, I recently dusted off the manuscript with the intention of sharing it with a new generation, on the 30th anniversary of its completion. Among black bears, ravens and Indian paintbrush, I grappled with the meaning of life while traversing the spine of the Cascade range with a handful of pocket edition classics in tow. Quotes from sacred texts, poets, and naturalists punctuate a coming of age tale contemplated in the wilderness.What follows is Part 1 of the book, squared off into four long Substack posts. For this first post, I'm also exclusively including Pacific Crest Trail Soundwalk, featuring a binaural field recording captured while hiking the first few miles on the Pacific Crest Trail up out of the Columbia Gorge in Washington. (If you haven't already, feel free to tap that play button at the top of the post.) The 26-minute composition cycles a triad of parts inspired by the letters PCT: part one in Phrygian mode (in E), part two in the key of C, and part three with Tritone substitutions. The instrumentation is outlined with Pianet electric piano, and colored in with synthesizer and intriguing pads built with a vaguely Appalachian mood in mind. It's on the quieter side, in terms of wildlife, but all in all, I think it compliments the reading. It concludes with a pretty frog chorus so, like the book, I'm making it unrestricted, in the hope of enticing some readers to stick with it to the end. If you prefer, you can find The Tread of My Soul in ebook format available for free right now on Apple Books or Amazon Kindle Store (free with Kindle Unlimited, points, or $2.99). If you read it and like it, please feel free to leave a review to help others find it. Thank you. So, without further ado, here we go:The Tread of My SoulComing of Age on the Pacific Crest Trailby Chad CrouchACT 1(AT RISE we see TEACHER and STUDENTS in an art studio. It is fall term; the sun is just beginning to set when class begins. Warm light washes the profiles of eight classmates. The wood floors are splashed with technicolor constellations of paint.)TEACHERHello. Welcome to class. I find role taking a tiresome practice so we'll skip over that and get to the assignment. Here I have a two-inch square of paper for you. I would like you to put your soul on it. The assignment is due in five minutes. No further explanations will be given.STUDENT #1(makes eye contact with a STUDENT #4, a young woman. She wears a perplexed smile on her face.)TEACHERHere you go.                                    (hands out squares of paper.)(People begin to work. Restlessness gives way to an almost reverence, except STUDENT #5 is scribbling to no end. The Students' awareness of others fades imperceptibly inward.  Five minutes pass quickly.)TEACHERTeacher: Are you ready? I'm interested to see what you've come up with.                                    (scuffle of some stools; the sound of a classroom reclaiming itself.)TEACHERWhat have you got there?STUDENT #1Well, I used half of the time just thinking. I was looking at my pencil and I thought…                                    (taps pencil on his knee, you see it is a mechanical model)this will never do the trick. The idea of soul seemed too intense to be grasped with only graphite. So 1 poked a pin sized hole in the paper and wrote:                                    (reading voice)“Hold paper up to sun, look into hole for soul.” That's all the further I got.TEACHER                                    (looking at student #2)And you?STUDENT #2                                    (smiles)Um, I didn't know what to do so all I have is a few specks where I was tapping my pen while I was thinking. This one…                                    (she points to a dot)is all, um, all fuzzy because I was ready to draw something and I hesitated so the ink just ran…(Students nod sympathetically. Attention goes to STUDENT #3)STUDENT #3I couldn't deal with just one little blank square.                                    (holds paper up and flaps it around, listlessly)So I started dividing.                                    (steadies and turns paper to reveal a graph.)Now, I have lots of squares in which to put my soul in. I think of a soul as being multifaceted.TEACHEROkay.  Thank you.  Next…                                    (looking at student #4)STUDENT #4                                    (without hesitation)I just stepped on it.(holds paper up to reveal the tread of a shoe sole in a multicolor print.)The tread of my soul.•     •     •            The writing that follows seems to have many of the same attributes as the students' responses to the problem posed in the preceding scene. While I have a lot more paper to work with, the problem remains the same: how do I express myself?  How do I express the intangible and essential part of me that people call a soul?  What is it wrapped up in?  What doctrines, ideologies and memories help give it a shape?            I guess I identify mostly with Student #4. Her shoe-print “Tread of My Soul” alludes to my own process: walking over 500 miles on The Pacific Crest Trail from Oregon To Canada in the Cascade Mountain Range in Washington. In trying to describe my soul I found that useful to be literal. Where my narrative dips into memoir or philosophy I tried not to hesitate or overthink things.  I tried to lay it all out.            Student #1's solution was evident in my own problem solving in how I constantly had to look elsewhere; into nature, into literature, and into symbology to even begin to bring out the depth of what I was thinking and feeling. Often the words of spiritual classics and of poetry are seen through my writing as if looking through a hole. I can only claim originality in where I poke the holes.            As for Student #2, I am afraid that my own problem solving doesn't evoke enough of her charm. For as much as I wanted to be thoughtful, I wanted also to be open and unstudied, tapping my pen. What I see has emerged, however, is at times argumentative. In retrospect I see that I had no recourse, really. My thoughts on God and Jesus were molded in a throng of letters, dialogues, experiences, and personal studies prior to writing this.Finally, in the winter of my twenty-first year, as I set down to transcribe this book, I realize how necessary it was to hike. Student #3 had the same problem. The soul is complex and cannot fit into a box. Hiking gave me a cadence to begin to answer the question what is my soul? The trail made me mindful. There was the unceasing metaphor of the journey: I could only reach my goal incrementally. This tamed my writing sometimes. It wandered sometimes and I was at ease to let it. I had more than five minutes and a scrap of paper. I had each step.•     •     •            The Bridge of the Gods looks like a behemoth Erector set project over the Columbia River spanning the natural border of Washington and Oregon. My question: what sort of Gods use Erector sets?  Its namesake actually descends from an event in space and time; a landslide. The regional natives likely witnessed, in the last millennium, a landslide that temporarily dammed the Columbia effectually creating a bridge—The Bridge of the Gods. I just finished reading about why geologists think landslides are frequent in the gorge. Didn't say anything about Gods. How we name things, as humankind, has something to do with space and time doesn't it? Where once we call something The Bridge of the Gods it has been contemporarily reduced to landslide. We have new Gods now, and they compel us to do the work with erector sets. Or perhaps I mistook the name: It doesn't necessarily mean Gods made it. Perhaps Gods dwell there or frequent it. Or maybe it is a passageway that goes where the Gods go. It seems to me that if the Gods wanted to migrate from, say, Mt. Rainier in Washington to Mt. Hood in Oregon, they would probably follow the Cascade Ridge down to the Bridge of the Gods and cross there.            If so, I think I should like to see one, or maybe a whole herd of them like the caribou I saw in Alaska earlier this summer, strewn across the snow field like mahogany tables. Gods, I tend to think are more likely to be seen in the high places or thereabouts, after all,The patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament behold the Lord face to face in the high places. For Moses it was Mount Sinai and Mount Nebo; in the New Testament it is the Mount of Olives and Golgotha. I went so far as to discover this ancient symbol of the mountain in the pyramid constructions of Egypt and Chaldea. Turning to the Aryans, I recalled those obscure legends of the Vedas in which the Soma—the 'nectar' that is in the 'seed of immortality' is said to reside in its luminous and subtle form 'within the mountain.' In India the Himalayas are the dwelling place of the Siva, of his spouse 'the Daughter of the Mountain,' and the 'Mothers' of all worlds, just as in Greece the king of the gods held court on Mt Olympus.- Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue            These days Gods don't go around making landslides every time they want to cross a river, much less perform a Jesus walking on the water miracle. That would be far too suspicious. Gods like to conceal themselves. A popular saying is "God helps those who help themselves." I think if Moses were alive today, Jehovah would have him build a bridge rather than part the waters.            Someone said, "Miracles take a lot of hard work." This is true.•     •     •Day 1.Bridge of the Gods.Exhausted, I pitch my tent on the side of the trail in the hot afternoon and crawl into to take a nap to avoid the annoying bugs.My sweat leaves a dead person stamp on the taffeta floor.Heavy pack.  A vertical climb of 3200 ft.Twelve miles. I heaved dry tears and wanted to vomit.Dinner and camp on a saddle.Food hard to stomach.View of Adams and gorge.            Perhaps I am a naive pilgrim as I cross over that bridge embarking on what I suppose will be a forty day and night journey on the Pacific Crest Trail with the terminus in Canada. My mother gave me a box of animal crackers before my departure so I could leave “a trail of crumbs to return by.” The familiar classic Barnum's red, yellow and blue box dangles from a carabineer of my expedition backpack            As I cross over the bridge I feel small, the pack bearing down on my hips, legs, knees, feet. I look past my feet, beyond the steel grid decking of the bridge, at the water below.  Its green surface swirls. I wonder how many gallons are framed in each metal square and how many flow by in the instant I look?How does the sea become the king of all streams?Because it is lower than they!Hence it is the king of all streams.-Lao-tzu, Tao Teh Ching            On the Bridge of the Gods I begin my quest, gazing at my feet superimposed on the Columbia's waters flowing toward the ocean. Our paths are divergent. Why is it that the water knows without a doubt where to go; to its humble Ocean King that embraces our planet in blue? I know no such path of least resistance to and feel at one with humankind. To the contrary, when we follow our paths of least resistance—following our family trees of religion, learning cultural norms—we end up worshipping different Gods. It is much easier for an Indian to revere Brahman than it is for I. It is much easier for me to worship Christ than it is for an Indian. These paths are determined geographically and socially.             It's not without trepidation that I begin my journey. I want to turn from society and turn to what I believe to be impartial: the sweeping landscape.            With me I bring a small collection of pocket books representing different ideas of the soul. (Dhammapada, Duino Elegies, Tao Teh Ching, Song of Myself, Walden, Mount Analogue, and the Bible.) It isn't that I want to renounce my faith.  I turn to the wilderness, to see if I can't make sense of it all.            I hike north. This is a fitting metaphor. The sun rises in the east and arcs over the south to the west. To the north is darkness. To the north my shadow is cast. Instinctively I want to probe this.•     •     •Day 2.Hiked fourteen miles.Three miles on a ridge and five descending brought me to Rock Creek.I bathed in the pool. Shelves of fern on a wet rock wall.Swaths of sunlight penetrating the leafy canopy.Met one person.Read and wrote and slept on a bed of moss.Little appetite.Began another ascent.Fatigued, I cried and cursed out at the forest.I saw a black bear descending through the brushBefore reaching a dark campsite.            I am setting records of fatigue for myself. I am a novice at hiking. Here is the situation: I have 150 miles to walk. Simple arithmetic agrees that if I average 15 miles a day it will take me 10 days to get to the post office in White Pass where I have mailed myself more food. I think I am carrying a sufficient amount of food to sustain my journey, although I'm uncertain because I have never backpacked for more than three consecutive days. The greatest contingency, it seems, is my strength: can I actually walk 15 miles a day with 60 pounds on my back in the mountains? Moreover, can I continue to rise and fall as much as I have? I have climbed a vertical distance of over 6000 feet in the first two days.            I begin to quantify my movement in terms of Sears Towers. I reason that if the Sears Tower is 1000 feet, I walked the stairs of it up and down almost 5 times. I am developing a language of abstract symbols to articulate my pain.            I dwell on my condition. I ask myself, are these thoughts intensified by my weakness or am I feeding my weakness with my thoughts?            I begin to think about God. Many saints believed by impoverishing their physical self, often by fasting, their spiritual self would increase as a result. Will my spirit awake as my body suffers?            I feet the lactic acid burning my muscle tissue. I begin to moan aloud. I do this for some time until, like a thunderclap, I unleash voice in the forest.            I say, "I CAN'T do this,” and "I CAN do this," in turn. I curse and call out "Where are you God? I've come to find you." Then I see the futility of my words. Scanning the forest: all is lush, verdant, solemn, still. My complaint is not registered here.And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies            I unstrap my pack and collapse into heap on the trail floor, curled up. I want to be still like the forest.            The forest makes a noise: Crack, crack, crack.            I think a deer must be traversing through the brush. I turn slowly to look in the direction of the sound. It's close. Not twenty yards off judging from the noise.            I pick myself up to view the creature, and look breathlessly. It's just below me in the ravine. Its shadowy black body dilates subtly as it breathes. What light falls on it seems to be soaked up, like a hole cut in the forest in the shape of an animal. It turns and looks at me with glassy eyes. It claims all my senses—I see, hear, feel, smell, taste nothing else--as I focus on the bear.And so I hold myself back to swallow the call note of my dark sobbing.Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?Not angels, not humans and already the knowing animals are aware that we are really not at home in our interpreted world.- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies            Remembering what I read to do when encountering a bear, I raise my arms, making myself bigger. "Hello bear," I say, "Go away!"            With the rhythm of cracking branches, it does.•     •     •Day 3.Hiked thirteen miles.Descended to Trout Creek, thirsty.Met a couple en route to Lake Tahoe.Bathed in Panther Creek.Saw the wind brushing the lower canopy of leaves on a hillside.A fly landed on the hairs of my forearm and I,Complacent,Dreamt.            I awake in an unusual bed: a stream bed. A trickle of clear water ran over stones beneath me, down my center, as if to bisect me. And yet I was not wet. What, I wonder, is the significance of this dream?            The August sun had been relentless thus far on my journey. The heat combined with the effort involved in getting from one source of water to the next makes an arrival quite thrilling. If the water is deep enough for my body, even more so:I undress... hurry me out of sight of land, cushion me soft... rock me in billowy drowse Dash me with amorous wet...- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself            There is something electrifying and intensely renewing about swimming naked in a cold creek pool or mountain lake.I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect; "renew thyself completely each day; do it again and again and forever again."- Henry David Thoreau, Walden            Is bathing, then, a spiritual exercise?            When I was baptized on June 15, 1985 in the tiled pool of our chapel in the Portland suburbs, I thought surely as I was submerged something extraordinary would happen, such as the face of Jesus would appear to me in the water. And I did do it—I opened my eyes under water— but saw only the blur of my pastor's white torso and the hanging ferns that framed the pool. I wondered: shouldn't a ceremony as significant as this feel more than just wet? I'm guessing that most children with exposure to religion often keep their eyes open for some sort of spectacular encounter with God, be it to punish or affirm them. (As a child, I remember sitting in front of the television thinking God could put a commercial on for heaven if he wanted to.)            Now, only ten years after I was baptized, I still keep my eyes open for God, though not contextually the same, not within a religion, not literally.            And when I swim in a clear creek pool, I feel communion, pure and alive. The small rounded stones are reminders of the ceaseless touch of water. Their blurry shapes embrace me in a way that the symbols and rites of the church fail to.I hear and behold God in every objectYet I understand God not in the least.-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself            And unlike the doctrines and precepts of organized religion, I have never doubted my intrinsic bond to water.And more-For greater than all the joysOf heaven and earthGreater still than dominionOver all worlds,Is the joy of reaching the stream.- Dhammapada, Sayings of the Buddha•     •     •Day 4.Hiked fourteen miles. Climbed to a beautiful ridge.Signs, yellow and black posted every 50 feet: "Experimental Forest"Wound down to a campground where I met three peopleAs I stopped for lunch."Where does this trail go to?" he says. "Mexico," I say."Ha Ha," says he.Camped at small Green Lake.            My body continues to evolve. My hair and fingernails grow and grow, and right now I've got four new teeth trying to find a seat in my mouth.            I turned twenty-one on August sixth. On August sixth, 1945 a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The world lost more people than it made that day. When I was born, I suspect we gained a few.            I'm an adult now, and I'm not sure where it happened or why. I wonder if someone had to stamp something somewhere because of it? A big red stamp that says "ADULT".  It was a blind passage for me—just like those persons who evaporated at ground zero on August sixth, 49 years ago.            I do feel like I just evaporated into adulthood. I am aware of the traditional ceremony of turning twenty-one. Drinking. Contemporary society commemorates becoming an adult with this token privilege. Do you have any idea how fast alcohol evaporates? I am suggesting this: One's response to this rite rarely affords any resolution or insight into growth. Our society commemorates the passage from child to adult with a fermented beverage.            I wanted to more deliberate about becoming an adult. Hence the second reason (behind a spiritual search) for this sojourn into the wilderness. I took my lead from the scriptures:And he was in the desert forty days... He was with the wild animal and the angels attended him.- Mark 1:13            Something about those forty days prepared Jesus for what we know of his adult life.I also took my lead from Native Americans. Their rite of passage is called a vision quest, wherein the youth goes alone into the depth of nature for a few days to receive some sort of insight into being.            I look around me. I am alone here in the woods a few days after my birthday. Why? To discover those parts of me that want to be liberated. To draw the fragrant air into my lungs. To feel my place in nature.…beneath each footfall with resolution.I want to own every atom of myself in the present and be able to say:Look I am living. On what? NeitherChildhood nor future grows any smaller....Superabundant being wells up in my heart.- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies•     •     •Day 5.Hiked to Bear Lake and swam.Saw over a dozen people. Eighteen miles.Watched raven fly from tree and listened.Found frogs as little as my thumbnail.Left Indian Heaven.            Surprise.  My body is becoming acclimated to long distance hiking. I know because when I rest it is a luxury rather than a necessity.            The light is warmer and comes through the forest canopy at an acute angle from the west, illuminating the trunks of this relatively sparse old growth stand. I am laying on my back watching a raven at his common perch aloft in a dead Douglas fir.            It leaps into its court and flap its wings slowly, effortlessly navigating through the old wood pillars. The most spectacular sense of this, however, is the sound: a loud, slow, hollow thrum: Whoosh whoosh, whoosh....  It's as if the interstices between each pulse are too long, too vacant to keep the creature airborne. Unlike its kind, this raven does not speak: there are no loud guttural croaks to be heard.            Northwest coastal tribes such as the Kwakiutl thought the croaks of a raven were prophetic and whoever could interpret them was a seer. Indeed, the mythic perception of ravens to be invested with knowledge and power is somewhat universal.           My raven is silent. And this is apt, for I tend to think the most authentic prophecies are silent, or near to it.Great sound is silent.- Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching            The contour of that sound and silence leaves a sublime impression on me.•     •     •Day 6.Hiked twelve miles.Many uphill, but not most.Met several people.One group looked like they were enjoying themselves—two families.I spent the afternoon reading my natural history book on a bridge.Voles (forest mice) relentlessly made efforts to infiltrate my food bag during the night.            I am reading about how to call a tree a “Pacific Silver Fir” or an “Engelmann Spruce” or “Western Larch” and so on. If something arouses my curiosity on my walk, I look in my natural history book to see if it has anything to say.            Jung said, "Sometimes a tree can teach you more than a book can."            Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha was enlightened beneath a fig tree.            I read that a 316-year-old Ponderosa Pine east of Mt. Jefferson bears scars from 18 forest fires. Surely that tree taught us one thing a book couldn't.  All things are clues. Everything is part of a complex tapestry of causality.            The grand design behind these mountains has something to do with plate tectonics. Beneath me the oceanic plate is diving beneath the continental at twenty to sixty degrees putting it well under the coastline to where it partially melts and forms magma. This has been happening for millions of years. Every once and a while this magma channels its way up to the surface, cools and turns into igneous rock. Again and again, this happens. Again and again, and yet again until a mountain is made; a stratovolcano.            Meanwhile, on top, water, glaciers, wind, and sun are trying to carry the mountains away grain by grain. Geologic time is as incomprehensible as it would be to imagine someone's life by looking at his or her gravestone. These mountains are gravestones.            Plants fight to keep the hillsides together. Plants and trees do. But every summer some of those trees, somewhere, are going to burn. Nature will not tolerate too much fuel. New trees will grow to replace those lost. Again and again. Eighteen times over and there we find our tree, a scarred Ponderosa Pine in the tapestry.            And every summer the flowers will bloom. The bees will come to pollinate them and cross-pollinate them: next year a new color will emerge.            And every summer the mammals named homo-sapiens-sapiens will come to the mountains to cut down trees, hike trails, and to put up yellow and black signs that read Boundary Experimental Forest U.S.F.S. placed evenly 100 yards apart so hikers are kept excessively informed about boundaries.            Here I am in the midst of this slow-motion interplay of nature. I walk by thousands of trees daily. Sometimes I see just one, sometimes the blur of thousands. It is not so much that a tree teaches me more than a book; rather it conjures up in me the copious leagues of books unwritten. And, I know somewhere inside that I participate. What more hope could a tree offer?  What more hope could you find in a gravestone?•     •     •Day 7.Hiked twenty miles in Alpine country near Mt Adams.More flowers—fields of them. Saw owl. Saw elk.Wrote near cascading creek.Enjoyed walking. Appetite is robust.Camped at Lave Spring.Saw six to ten folks.Didn't talk too much.            Before I was baptized, during the announcements, there was a tremendous screech culminating in a loud cumbf! This is a sound which can be translated here as metal and glass crumpling and shattering in an instant to absorb the forces of automobiles colliding.            In the subsequent prayer, the pastor made mention of the crash, which happened on the very same corner of the chapel, and prayed to God that He might spare those people of injury.            As it turns the peculiarly memorable sound was that of our family automobile folding into itself, and it was either through prayer or her seat belt that no harm came to my sister who was driving it.            Poor thing. She just was going to get some donuts. Do you know why? Because I missed my appointment with baptism. There is time in most church services when people go to the front to (1.) confess their sin, (2.) confess their faith in Christ as their only personal savior, and (3.) to receive Him. This is what is known as the “Altar Call”. To the embarrassment of my parents (for I recall the plan was for one of them to escort me to the front) the Alter Call cue—a specific prayer and hymn—was missed and I sat expectant till the service end. The solution was to attend the subsequent service and try harder.            I don't recall my entire understanding of God and Jesus then, at age eleven, but I do remember arriving at a version of Pascal's reductive decision tree that there are four possibilities regarding my death and salvation:1. Jesus is truly the savior of mankind and I claim him and I go to heaven, or2. Jesus is truly the savior of mankind and I don't claim him and I end up in hell, or3. Jesus isn't the savior of mankind and I die having lived a somewhat virtuous life in trying to model myself after him, or4. Jesus isn't the savior of mankind and I didn't believe it anyhow.            My sister, fresh with an Oregon drivers license, thought one dose of church was enough for her and, being hungry, went out for donuts and failed to yield.Cumbf!            Someone came into the chapel to inform us. We all went out to the accident. The cars were smashed and askew, and my sister was a bawling, rocking little lump on the side of the street. We attended to her, calmed her, and realized there was yet time for me to get baptized. We went into the church and waited patiently for the hymn we had mentally earmarked and then I was baptized. I look back on the calamities of that day affectionately.Prize calamities as your own body.- Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching            Those events that surrounded the ritual decry a ceremony so commonplace one often misses the extraordinariness of it; of humanity; the embarrassment of my parents; the frustration and impetuous flight of my sister; and the sympathy and furrowed brow of our pastor. These events unwind in my head like a black and white silent film of Keystone Cops with a church organ revival hymn for the soundtrack.  There was something almost slapstick about how that morning unfolded, and once the dust had settled and the family was relating the story to my grandmother later that day, we began to find the humor in it. Hitting things and missing things and this is sacred. All of it.Because our body is the very source of our calamities,If we have no body, what calamities can we have?- Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching            Most religions see the body as temporal and the soul as eternal. Hence, 13th century monks cloistered themselves up denying their bodies space and interaction that their souls might be enhanced.            I see it this way: No one denies their bodily existence, do they? Look, your own hand holds this book. Why do you exist? You exist right now, inherently, to hold a book, and to feel the manifold sensations of the moment.            If this isn't enough of a reason, adjust.            I've heard it said, "Stop living in the way of the world, live in the way of God."            My reply: "Before I was baptized, I heard a cumbf, and it was in the world and I couldn't ignore it.  I'm not convinced we would have a world if we weren't supposed to live in the way of it."Thanks for reading Soundwalk! This is Part One of my 1994 travelogue-meets-memoir The Tread of My Soul. This post is public so feel free to share it.Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Or find the eBook at Apple Books or Amazon Kindle Store. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadcrouch.substack.com/subscribe

This was recorded on a quiet spring night in a Ponderosa Pine dominant forest in the McCloud flats area of Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Siskiyou County, California. The night started of breezy, then gradually became calm and quiet until dawn when birds began to sing. I recently got a job that's going to make it difficult to get out and do as much field recording as I'd like. I still plan to keep sharing recordings with you, but they won't be coming out nearly as frequently as they have in the past. For that reason I have ended monthly support for the podcast through Spotify Podcasting, and I ended monthly support on Patreon. There are only a handful of you, but I have been extremely grateful for your support over the months and years, thank you so much for your kindness and generosity. There is another handful of you that have made one time donations through my website, I am extremely grateful for your kindness and generosity as well, thank you. Kelly Rafuse (@soundbynaturepodcast) • Instagram photos and videos (1) Facebook Sound By Nature Podcast I hope you enjoy this recording. Please do something today that helps protect and preserve the natural world for future generations. Thank you for listening. Stay healthy, stay safe, stay sound.

This was recorded on a spring day in the forest near White Deer Lake, a seasonal lake in Shasta-Trinity National Forest. The lake is large and shallow when full, but only lasts a couple months in spring before drying up entirely. It's surrounded by coniferous forest of Ponderosa Pine, Lodgepole Pine, and White Fir. At the time I made this recording there were only a few small pools of water left. I arrived late in the morning and the sky was blue and sunny above, but clouds were beginning to build all around. I set up the microphone in the forest not far from the lake under a dense bunch of young White Fir trees which provided shelter from rain and wind when the storms eventually passed overhead. The clouds continued to build until the first rumbles of thunder were heard in the distance. The chirping calls of Mountain Chickadees and Dark-eyed Juncos are heard along with other birds, and frogs can be heard in the distance in the remaining pools of the fast drying lake. As the storms moved closer, gentle rain began to fall and a light breeze blew through the trees above. The thunder became increasingly loud and powerful until it passed directly overhead. Recording by Kelly Rafuse

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com.   S4E31 TRANSCRIPT: ----more----   Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark, Yucca: And I'm Yucca. Mark: and today we are fortunate to have with us Susan, who is a new member of the Atheopagan Society Council, and we're interviewing the new members of the Council over the next... A couple of months or so the ones that, that want to be interviewed, just to get to know them and find out what their thinking is about all this stuff we're doing. So welcome, Susan. Susan: thanks for having me on. Yucca: And some of you who watch the YouTube channel may recognize Susan from there, who's been, who's part of the media team, and has been making excellent videos. Mark: Yes, yes. Susan is the glue on of the media team. She holds us all together. Yucca: which is not always easy appreciated with all of the emails that have been chasing us down to make all our schedules work, and yep, Susan: I try to balance it so that everybody doesn't think I'm super annoying, but helpful, not annoying. Mark: So far, so good. So, Susan why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to atheopaganism and, you know, all that good kind of stuff. Susan: Yeah. Well, the short answer like it seems a lot of people is COVID brought me to atheopaganism. I, and I do have a short video, I think it's the first one that I did on the YouTube channel if anybody wants to check that out of my, my non theist upbringing and, and this kind of channel, so I'll, I'll make it a short version, but I live in the Midwest, in Ohio, and I've lived here my whole life, and I was raised without religion, but also not specifically atheist either. It was just sort of, we didn't talk about it. I didn't know the difference between a Republican and a Democrat until I was in high school because it was just, you know, I was left to my own devices. And I appreciate that for, for some things. There's definitely parts of me where I'm like, well, it'd be nice to have a little bit more direction. And I, we're kind of taking that track with our, with our daughter. I am, I'm married and I have six, soon to be seven year old, and kind of navigating that that space. My husband was raised Catholic, so we're kind of marrying together. He, he likes to call it ethnically Catholic, because he doesn't believe any of the stuff there, but so yeah, we, I, from a, Medium age started dabbling in stuff about the time when I was, you know, I'm an 80s baby. So by the time I was in high school, it was late 90s. And all of the witchy stuff started showing up all over the Barnes and Nobles. I'm like, Ooh, what is this? And especially the tarot card section with lots of stuff to touch and play with. So I I explored that area and the pagan, which at that time, at least, you know, Wicca was the super dominant thing in, at least that was publicly available. And so I dabbled in that for a while, and I kind of got It's like, this is fun, but I also don't really believe in this whole, you know, people try to rationalize it with, oh, it's the energy, and you're affecting the energy, and I was like, yeah, yeah, that, that makes sense, sure, and I, you know, doing the little, the little lie to yourself thing for a while. And then I kind of walked away from it for a while and just didn't, didn't bother with my, my spiritual life for a while until I got married. And we wanted to have a community for our child to grow up in so we joined a UU congregation, Unitarian Universalist, and they have, in our particular one, a fairly decent showing of pagan folks. And so I kind of picked that back up and we had a little bit of a range from full capital W witch to people who I think, you know, if I talked to them long enough about atheopaganism, that would be more up their alley but didn't, you know, know the words for it at that time. So it kind of came through there and then COVID hit and, you know, that community was sort of, sort of gone. But I was on the board and I was doing all of these committees and doing all the, I was doing all the work of being in a community, but not getting the community out of it. It was also right after we had merged. So my, my group went from 40 to 60 members to 200 and some people. And I didn't know all these people I was doing the work for and it just kind of, I kind of drifted away and was I was focusing more on what is it that I do believe in, since I had spent so much time just defining what I didn't believe in, and I found, kind of simultaneously, Druidry, which is something I'm, I'm pretty involved in, is my personal path, but also atheopaganism, and actually found I found out about atheopaganism through a blog whose, I can't remember what the blog was about but there was sort of an about me page and the person was describing, yeah, I don't really, you know, believe in the metaphysical part of this, but I still think it's really helpful check out atheopaganism, I'm like, yes, thank you, I will, and signed right up on the spot and I remember I read the, the principles And I don't know what bits of the, of the pages, but I remember running to my husband and being like, oh my gosh, I found them. I found my people. They're here, they exist. , I found it. I didn't know this was the words I needed, but I needed the word these words, you know, there's the validation of other people Yucca: was that during lockdown or was that a little bit afterwards? Susan: That was, I think, during lockdown 'cause I remember. We had still the the Earth centered group at my UU congregation was trying to do monthly Zoom get togethers, and I remember one of them, I was just, like, very excited to share with people that I had found both atheopaganism and the Druid organizations that I had joined at the same time, so. Mark: Well, that's very cool. I, I always love hearing these stories 'cause people, you know, people come to us through all different kinds of ways and and there is very commonly that I found them. They, they exist. I'm not the only one I am feeling which. I actually share, even though, you know, I, I wrote the essay in the book and stuff, because when other people started showing up, I, similarly, I was like, oh, I'm not the only one, there's more of us. This is great. So, very exciting. Well, it's great to have you with us, Susan. Thank you so much. So, You've just joined the Atheopagan Society Council and and you've been helping with the media team for a while. You're a very organized, get it done kind of person, which is really great.  Susan: Thanks. Mark: so, I don't know, what are your thoughts about this community and where we're going and, you know, what things would you like to see happen? You know, like new programs or any of that kind of stuff, if you've thought about it. Susan: I think my main thing that I want to see is that I hope you're going anywhere soon, but, you know, I want to make, I want to show up so that down the road we don't trickle and fade away when, you know, you, Mark, or, you know, the, the original set of people doing the council you know, are gone or, or, you know, have to be pulled away for whatever reason. I just don't want it to, to fade and be the thing that, that used to be really great for a while and then just nobody could keep up for it, keep up with it. And so that's something I'm interested in is, and I don't know what that looks like. I don't know what infrastructure we, you know, are going to end up with to make that be something that really sticks and stays and has standing. I imagine it'll be Getting a lot of volunteers and getting a lot of structure in place for volunteers so that people, you know, we don't avoid burnout. And that's I know, that's one of the things that we're talking about at the council meeting coming up. But that's, that's kind of my priority. But I am excited about the idea of getting more, not necessarily content, but getting more things in place for people to do in person, even if it's not with other people, but just more of an idea I was in a sorority in college and it was a One of the things that I thought was fun about that is that there were certain things that you did and you're, you know, it's, you know, a secret and secret rituals that everybody does, but you knew that even though you went to a different school than this person that you maybe met down the street and they went to school. different school, but they were still part of the same sorority as you. You knew they had the same ritual as you, Mark: hmm. Susan: and I love that we have so much open endedness of, you know, build your own adventure within atheopaganism. I think it might be fun to get something in place that is something we can all share, or those who are interested can all share, and like, I don't know if that looks like a standard ritual format or something, which is what some other organizations do, like some of the druid organizations, I mean, what they have. Here's our official format, and I don't know that that's something that we would really want, but something that has that feel to it, that essence of, hey, here's how you can feel a part of this, On your own, but still together kind of a feel. I think more of those kinds of things would be. And I think that would help a lot of people who seem to be clamoring for structure, you know, there's definitely the people in the community who are like, I am totally happy to do this by myself and come up with my own thing. And that's great. But then there seemed to be a lot of people who want a little more hand holding with their practice too. Mark: Mm hmm. Susan: So that's kind of, Yucca: of the insights that you have that I've really appreciated is that you're a fellow parent with, with a kiddo in the same age range and it's been nice to have someone to bounce off some of that, you know, how do we make that feeling available for, for kids who are growing up in this community? Because that's something that, for me, growing up as a pagan kid, there wasn't really anything for us. It was like, it was all the grown up stuff, and we were just sort of, you know, put it at a third wheel, right? And I think that it'd be nice for our community to have something a little bit more, more community for the kids as well. And I know that not everybody has kids in the community, but that's something that... There definitely are, there's quite a few of us, so, Mark: hmm. Sure. Susan: yeah. Yucca: something that you've brought that I've really valued, Susan. Mark: Yeah, I mean, I don't have kids, but I, I absolutely support that. I think that having activities for families that that work for the adults as well as for the kids is something that I really would like to see us have more of. Yucca: Mm Susan: Especially for parents who maybe only one of them is into it. My husband is very supportive and so, Mark: Mm-hmm. Susan: I, I know that I'm lucky in getting the amount of participation that I do, and there's plenty of people who are parents who it's very one sided and, you know, they may not get the, the family feel, like we can, I at least can say this is what we're doing as a family, but if you don't even have that, it can, it could be really nice to have. That feeling with other people, Mark: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We're gonna be talking about some ideas for that at the upcoming council meeting on Wednesday.  Yucca: And those are quarterly meetings. Mark: yes, Yucca: We do them after each solstice and equinox. Mark: yeah. So I'm, I'm pretty excited about some of those ideas. Some of them could be a lot of work to implement. But once they kind of got up and rolling, I think there would be so much excitement about... The activities themselves that that there would be a lot of, that that momentum would create the excitement that would create the volunteerism to keep it going, if you know what I mean. So, let's see first of all, I guess, do you have questions for us? Susan: man I feel like I'm trying, I'm trying to think of questions you haven't already answered on the podcast before or things that Mark: Oh, don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. You're, you're, it's okay if it's been asked before, that's, that's perfectly all right. Susan: No, I just mean, I'm like, I feel like I'm like, no, they said they answered that question for me before because I've, I've tried to keep up on it. I don't know that I've listened to every episode, but,  Yucca: we certainly do have folks who've done every single episode, but we have a lot of people who kind of come in for a few episodes, and then out, and then people who just find the podcast, and lots of different listening styles, or people who've listened for every year. But how many years are we at now? Mark: We're in season four, Yucca: Yeah, Mark: so. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's closing in on 200 episodes, I think. So it's, it's a, a chunk of work and time if you really wanna listen to all of them, which is why we, we do an episode for every Sabbath every year. We don't just say, go and listen to last year's, you know, Mayday episode. Instead, we do a new one every year because we've got people that are new to the podcast and you know, the stuff may be new for them. Uhhuh Yucca: Well, and it's a Susan: And hopefully there's something changing. Yucca: I'm curious to go back and listen and be like, did I even say remotely the same thing? Probably. But, Mark: you know, Susan, you were talking about a shared ritual. And what immediately popped into my head is the pouring of a libation, which is a very old, I mean, the Greeks used to pour libations, you know, in honor of their gods and stuff. And I wonder if we might have something like that, that would be kind of a shared atheopagan ritual that everybody would do to do that kind of offering to the earth. That might be kind of neat to put some, put some ritual trappings around and turn into something that we all share. Thank you. Susan: Yeah. And maybe I'm thinking do it on a, have it as a day that's not necessarily one of the spokes of the wheel, if you will. So it's, we're not interrupting anybody's already scheduled programming for this thing, like an extra, maybe it's on Earth Day or something, you know, like a, Yucca: Pi Mark: Huh. Susan: people won't already have their own set Mark: Huh. Yeah. Yeah. I'll think about it. I love the idea. Yeah. The equivalent of an atheopagan secret handshake. Uh Yucca: Hmm. Susan: Another thing I've been thinking about that I would be, I would love to do, at least for myself someday, is there's been a lot of chatter in the community lately about atheopagan saints, and I'm, I recently picked up from my friend who's in one of my druid groups, a Celtic Catholic set of prayer books, and it's kind of like a daily prayer thing, and I know that, I don't know a whole lot about Catholicism, but I know there's like a saint for every day, and I think it would just be fun to have a, like a solid atheopagan devotional kind of a thing, right, with Like, oh, today is, and I was, I started collecting things, so there's a day in February, I don't remember which day, it, of course, because everything, you know, gets mushed around with, over time and history, but I want to start celebrating Fornicalia in February, and for the Thank you. ancient god Fornax, who was in charge of baking bread in ovens. And it's like a day that you clean your oven and bake bread in it. So I'm like, Ooh, this might actually motivate me to do the thing that I don't want to do if I make it into a holiday and say, this is the thing that we're doing. Yucca: Very practical, right? Mark: you said Fornicalia, I went in an entirely Susan: Yeah, that sounds fun. It's less fun than you think. But bread Yucca: that day is in February, isn't it? The 14th? Isn't that day already in February? The 14th? Susan: Fornacalea is like the Like the 28th or something. I'll look it up and put it in Mark: think you may be thinking of Lupercalia. Susan: I'm going to find it. But yeah, it's, I have it as the 17th in my calendar, but you know, Mark: The day to clean your oven and bake bread in it. I love it. Susan: Yeah. Now I just need another one, you know, six months hence, so that I clean it more than once a year, but that's optimistic Yucca: Could there be, could there be one for air filters, too? Susan: yeah, right. That can be our shared ritual is clean your filter Mark: is replacing your, your air filters. Yeah. I love that. I, I love, I love the idea of I mean, I have so many regular observances that I do just for myself, and I never, you know, I'm, I'm very careful, I don't, I don't want to prescribe them for anybody else, you know, it's like, this definitely is a choose your own adventure kind of thing. Thank you. Religious path. It's like build what works for you, but it would be nice to be able to offer to people, you know, here's this compilation of, I don't know, five days every month or something that are special days that are the birthday of some significant, you know, scientist or innovator or creator in history and little bit of history about him and something that you can do, pour out that libation. You know, in honor of, oh, I'm spacing on the name. I just shared on Facebook to my friend group a a biography of this woman who actually figured out that the universe was mostly made of hydrogen. And I don't remember her name, but she's responsible for us understanding what the universe is made of. And she didn't even get any credit for it. Her somebody else published the results. You know, pretty typical for women scientists in the, in the Susan: hmm. Yucca: Yeah, yeah, I don't know, I don't know who that is, right? Which, itch is a problem that we don't know that. Mark: yes, yes, well, I'm going to look it up right now. So this, Susan: yeah, people really liked the 13 different atheopagan principles applied to the moon cycles, and that's great. It's, it's an offering, not a prescription, and, and people are just like, oh yes, thank you, give me, give me ideas. Yucca: yeah, maybe, I mean, when you were talking about those things, like a daily Right? Like a book that you read about, your little paragraph. I know a lot of different religions do that, and things that are totally secular, too. Like just a daily something. You know, I certainly use those in my practice that are just, they're really nice, right? It's just like this little thing, and it's like, oh, okay, cool. Just kind of think about this for the day, Mark: little Susan: Mm hmm. Yucca: right? And you take it or you don't take it, but it's kind of nice to have, to see how it just fits into whatever your experience is. And even if you use the same book more than one year in a row, like, by the time you get back around to May 14th or whatever it is, like, you've had the whole experience of a year and you're gonna see it in a different way, it's gonna fit into your life in a different way. Mark: mm hmm, Cecilia Payne, Yucca: Pain, okay. Mark: Cecilia Payne. Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Really amazing. Susan: Well, that's an idea for if we for, for listeners, one of the things we're thinking about maybe doing is the scout program. If we have that, we can have that as the capstone project for somebody Yucca: Yeah. Susan: her a plaque. Mark: Yeah. Yeah, that would be great. Some kind of a memorial. The person who figured out what the universe is made of probably deserves some kind of recognition. Yucca: Do podcast. Susan: Yeah, I don't know if it's a good idea. Yucca: And I know we have, there's not, like things aren't set in stone, but what, when you say scout, like, what are you talking about? Susan: yeah, well at least it was sort of talked in the community about this. I think it would be fun for adults too, but like, it's hard to, as a parent for me at least my husband was an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scout program, but I know, and I know that they have made some reforms and some steps in the right direction, but for me it's still not enough to feel comfortable enrolling my daughter in it and I have reservations about Girl Scouts for different reasons. Capitalism, and genderification, and just different things that I'm just not, there are certainly troops that I'm sure do a wonderful job, and there are certainly troops that don't but Yucca: A lot to navigate though. Mm-hmm. Susan: It's, yeah, it's a hard thing to navigate and I don't want to start it and have it come crashing down on her. So, and I think we sort of chatted in the community about this being a common thing and I had posted a few things a few months ago asking people about spiral scouts, which is a more pagan oriented group. And so now the, the scuttlebutt is, you know, maybe we can be an atheopagan chapter of that. Maybe we can create our own thing, like what is and what would be a nice thing. But a lot of parents have commented on it and said, Oh, yes, please sign me up. Dude, let's do this. Mark: hmm. Susan: We can't necessarily do things in person, not for logistical reasons. I'm very fortunate that I have A handful of atheopagans right near me. It's really great. I think I'm the only one with, with kids that I'm aware of, but it's not the case for a lot of folks. Mark: Yeah, I mean, we are, we're spread pretty thinly. So, our, most of our opportunity for face to face stuff comes through mediation like this, like Zoom. But that said if there Thanks If Spiral Scouts can be done in a way where there's like, kind of a learning chapter set of activities that get sent to a family, either as a PDF or in a physical package or, you know, however that works, and then, you know, all the different families that are doing it can do that and then come together over Zoom and kind of share their experience and show off their cool thing that they made and all that, I think that would be a really wonderful thing both for kids and for parents. It'd, you know, be a real, you know, wonderful thing to share with, with your kids, I would think. Yucca: I know my kids are definitely excited about the idea of badges , because they see that in, in the media of, there's so many different things where it's like, where it has that setup, like, oh, the comic, you know, the, like lumber Janes for instance, and there's like badges in that and the oh, what's it called? The, there's a Netflix show. Susan: Hilda? Yucca: Hilda, yes, with this, with the I'm forgetting the name of their scouts, but they had, it was named after a bird, right? And so they see that and they're always like, I want badges for that, right? So I'm sure they would be very enthusiastic about anything badge related. Mark: I really like that the Spiral Scouts has kept the badges but gotten rid of ranks. Yucca: Mm. Mark: So there's, there's no hierarchy of, you know, in the Boy Scouts you start out as a tender foot and then you work your way up through all these levels until you're an Eagle Scout, right? And, you know, some of the stuff in there is very useful and wonderful stuff to do. I mean, you have to do a community project in order to become an Eagle Scout, and those are, you know, it builds a sense of responsibility to the broader community, which is great. But the rank thing, I mean, I was big into Cub Scouts. My, my Cub Scout shirt looked like a a Latin American dictator from the 1950s. I had so many pins and badges and medals and it was ridiculous. The thing must have weighed five pounds. And I was really into that. But when I got to Boy Scouts, suddenly it was like paramilitary training and I just didn't want any part of it. It was, you know, it's like lining up for inspection of your uniform and stuff like that. It was, Hmm. Not, not my idea of a good time. So, no ranks in in Spiral Scouts. Just skill attainments. Susan: That's what I think my little one would be interested in too is just the gamification of learning life skills. Mark: Mm hmm. Susan: That's what I would love badges too. I would love a an adult 13 principles and four pillars set of badges and you do, I don't know what it is, like you do a small project for each one and you get a badge or, I don't know, honor system. Mark: we should absolutely do that. Just, just create a, a checklist of things that you do for each of the, the principals and then, you know, we'll have badges made and or, you know, or people could download the the... The software for the patch sewing machines, and then they could go, go to a local producer and have the patches made for them bunch of different ways we could do that. Well, I really have my mind spinning around all this now. It's going to be terribly disappointing if we decide we can't do it. But Yucca: Well, there's also, we can always, you know, spiral back around to ideas too, because we have to, we have to look at what, you know, what can we currently do, and what are the priorities of the community at the time, and see how things go. So, so Susan, if you were talking about the future, right, what would be your fantasy for 50 years from now? What would you hope to see? What would atheopaganism be in, you know, 50 years? It's, it's not us on the council anymore, right? Definitely other Mark: And I'm dead. Yucca: Maybe, hey, you might hang in there. Maybe, Mark: 50 years from now, I would Yucca: maybe medical technology will change. Mark: eleven. Yucca: Oh, that's a great Bilbo, right? Okay. Susan: As my, my daughter says, when you're 100, you're compost. Yucca: so what would you hope? Just, just fantasy, right? What would, what would we look like? Susan: I mean, I would love to see us be at the scale of, like, UU, where maybe, you know, there's not necessarily Church building on every corner kind of a thing like you get with, you know, your Baptist churches and your Catholic churches and all that kind of stuff, but I would love to have expanded enough that we have so much in person opportunity, and maybe it's not, you know, a congregation where everybody comes together on Sundays or that kind of thing, because I don't, I don't know that that's a right fit, but just to have, I don't know, your local atheopagan community center place that everybody comes together for their monthly meeting or whatever it is, but just more, just more. I think I would just love to connect with more people, because I think there's so many, there's definitely people, at least in my life, who are happy just being atheists, and that's fine for them and that's great, they can enjoy that, but I think that there are a lot of people who I know who could benefit from something like this, and anybody that I've talked to for more than two minutes Where I've been had a chance to answer their questions about it because you just say the words and they're like, that doesn't make any sense. Why would you do that if you're an atheist? Right? Then they're like, Oh, okay. Yeah, I can see that. I understand. I understand why you would want to do that. And I think maybe a lot of people who are trapped. who feel trapped by atheism or who feel trapped by more traditional religious practices would find peace and joy with us. And I think, I don't know, I'm sure everybody feels this way about their own religious path, but I feel like if there were more of us, then the world would be a nicer place. But Mark: Yeah, I like to think so. We're we're, we're, we're about people being happy and the world being a better place. It's kind of hard to go wrong with those as your touchstones. It's God, it's, you know, we're doing this strategic plan in the Atheopagan Society, which by the way we created so that atheopaganism would have a container that could persist past me or anybody else, any other individual. You know, that's, that's why the society exists. And my book, I'm, I'm willing the rights to my book to the society. So, you know, that will always be available to atheopagans in the future. But I was saying, we're doing this strategic plan for like the next two or three years because it's hard to imagine much beyond that. So thinking about Yucca: So I said fantasy. Yeah. Mark: yeah, 50 is like mind blowing. I can't even, can't even get my mind around that. Yucca: I have a 20, Mark. Mark: 20, 20 years. What would happen? Well, for one thing, we would have enough of us that there would be opportunities for regional gatherings in a lot of places, you know, maybe two, three regional gatherings in Europe maybe one in Australia and so more opportunities for people to meet in person and You know, because that's really the gold standard of relating, right? I mean, it's wonderful that we have these tools to be able to communicate across distance, but there's nothing like being able to actually just sit down next to someone and have a conversation. I'm hoping for a lot more of that. Speaking of which, we have the Suntree Retreat coming up again in 2024, and we will soon start taking deposits to reserve space. Yucca: That is less than a year away. Mark: it looks like, yes, it's less than a year away. It's about 11 months away. And so we're working on what the content of all that's going to be. So that's locked in place. And now it's just a matter of, you know, figuring out the pricing on everything, and looks like the admission prices for, for the event and all the meals combined will be about 250. And then lodging. And lodging is as cheap as, and it can be more if you have a space in a cabin. Yucca: Mark, we're losing you into the robot. Mark: People should be able to do this event. How's that? Can you hear me now? Yucca: We can hear you now. You're frozen. Yes, now we can hear you. If you'll start again with people should be able to. Mark: Okay. Go to this event for less than 400 plus transportation. Yucca: Okay. Than 400 plus transportation. Mark: yes. Yeah, that, that's, I'm sure that that's going to be possible. In fact, it'll be... It's possible to go even less if you tent camp, so it's a good, good time to go tent camping. Tent camping only costs like 20 bucks for lodging for the whole three days. So, you know, if you set up your own tent or we can accommodate I think one RV Yucca: And that should be late summer, early fall weather wise, so that's a good time of year for it. Mark: Yes, yes, and, and unlikely to be, to have any rain. We actually got really lucky in May of 2022 because it snowed at La Forêt the week after we were there. Yucca: Wasn't it snowing several hours after we finally left? Mark: I don't know  Yucca: I know I was, as I was coming, I thought there was snow and then certainly as I was coming down, headed south down by the Rockies, it was raining, which was blessed because it was, we'd been having those horrible fires in New Mexico at the time and it was just raining the whole way Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: But I think that they were getting more rain than I was getting as I was driving down, or I was driving up, but down south. It's confusing. I think. Susan: yeah, Mark: Well, we have the big the big hall, Ponderosa. If it does, that isn't a problem, but the weather should be beautiful. I, I looked up the, the average weather in Colorado Springs that first weekend in September. I think the high average is 75 degrees or something. It's just perfect. So, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: should be really great. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: we're already talking about what all the content of things is going to be, and we'll put out a call for presentations and workshops in a couple of months, and before we know it, we'll be in Colorado Springs. It'll be, you know, with, with, with the gang. Yucca: Ball's rolling. Yep. Mark: Yeah, Susan: excited. I've already planned for it. So Yucca: Will the kiddo be coming? Mark: That's great. Susan: I think it's going to be all three of Mark: Yeah, is your hood Susan: they're not going to do all of the things, but Mark: There are beautiful places to go right around there. Garden of the Gods and Rocky Mountain National Park. Just gorgeous, gorgeous places to go. So if they like hiking in the outdoors there are lots of opportunities for them to enjoy that as well. Susan: yeah, and we might do, we might do tent Mark: Yucca, were you saying something? Yucca: oh, I was gonna say my, will at that time be five, almost six and eight year old will be joining me. Last time it could only be the, the older, but the, the youngest is, is excited for that rite of passage to get to go to, they call it the Ponderosa Pine, so, cause of the lodge, Mark: Huh. Nice. It's so great having her there. That was just wonderful. Yucca: Well, she'll be excited about the idea of more kiddos. I think there were other parents who had, who were there last time who were like, Oh, I should have brought mine. Right? But they didn't know that it was gonna, there were gonna be activities. So we'll have more activities for little people next time. So we'll have a little gang of them running around. Mark: Huh. Yeah, I think for some of the parents, because it was a first time event and they didn't know what to expect and, you know, pagan events can be pretty raucous sometimes, they kind of wanted Yucca: Yeah, we lost you again, Mark. You said they kind of wanted. Mark: to do, you know, reconnaissance first, go in and check out what this was going to be like. Can you hear me now? Yucca: Yes. We can hear you. Okay. So you were saying some parents, sometimes they can be a little ruckus y. Ruck that wasn't the word. Mark: Well, yeah, I mean, you know, pagan festivals can be, you know, kind of uproarious and sexy and, and, you know, lots of, you know, carousing, and I think some parents were kind of leery of that and wondered what the tone of this was going to be like, and, you know, after having been there and discovered that we were able to have a good time without things sliding over into inappropriate conversation. Boundaryless mess that that it's a fine place for their kids to come, and I, I really encourage parents to come. Tickets will be actually, I think we said that Attendance was free for those 10 years old and younger, and tickets are discounted for those 16 and younger, or under 16. So, yeah other than having to get a bed for them if they're, if you're not tent camping kids should be very affordable to bring, Yucca: Was there anything else that you'd like to talk about or share, Susan? Anything you think that people should know about you? Mark: anything you'd like to say to the community. Yucca: Yeah. Mm Susan: I guess I'd like to say, tell us what you want to see, because You know, I think you both have mentioned this before about the podcast, but it's true of the YouTube channel too, is there's only so much creativity, the same, and there's so much overlap with both of you being on the the YouTube media team as well, like, there's only so much creativity we all have, so please tell us what it is you want to know about, what you want to hear about, what kind of content You, you want to see so we can get that out there you know, I, I generated when we first, when first I first got involved with the YouTube channel, I generated this big old list of, oh, here's a bunch of ideas and now I don't know if any of them are in the comments. Not resonating with me, or at least I'm like, oh, I'm not the right person to talk about that particular topic, but I'm like, what am I, I'm supposed to write a video. I don't know what I want to talk about. I guess that's, this is why maybe some of the days, even though I'm the glue on, my things are a little bit late later than they're supposed to get to, to the right people. But yeah, let's, let us know what you want to hear about. I'm, I'm happy to I'm Write stuff or record stuff or be in front of people and but I don't know what it is people want to hear about so Tell us Mark: Yeah, yeah, I really echo that, because after four years of producing these, new topics can be challenging. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: It's, when we think of one, it's like, oh, oh, a new topic! We can do that! It's very exciting. It's a little easier in October, because we've got Ancestors and Death and Dying and Decomposition and Hallows and all those things. But for much of the rest of the year, we're... We could really use input on, you know, what kinds of things you'd like to hear about. Yucca: Especially like in July, like, hmm, what do we talk about? Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Because this time of year, yeah, October, and then we're going into solstice coming up, and yeah, Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: busy next few months. Mark: Well, Susan, thank you so much for joining us today. It is wonderful to have you on board and to have you be a part of the community. And Yucca: Thanks for all the cool ideas today, too. Susan: Thanks. Yucca: think about. Mark: Absolutely. Susan: I'm good at ideas for fun things and not so much the follow through, so. Yucca: Oh, that's not true! You make the follow through possible! Mark: Even if that were true, it's still a really important role. You know, being, being a creative person who comes up with cool ideas, that's really important. So, we need cool ideas. Susan: I'm hoping that, you know, eventually we're going to hit a critical mass of people in the community that somebody, you throw out an idea and somebody's going to grab it and just run, who, you know, has the skill set and. I hope. I guess that's another thing I want to tell people is if you feel like you want to contribute something, please do. Like, I just showed up one day and was like, hey, I can help with things and now I'm on the media team and now I'm on the council. So don't be scared. Mark: Absolutely. Yucca: Well, thank you so much, Susan. Susan: Thanks for having me. Mark: Yeah. Thanks so much. We'll see you next week, folks.    

On this episode we begin with Peripheral People surviving a Live Event Exploration. Needing burly men to build stages. The "Missing" at Large. Unassuming students and augmented plagiarism. Deprogramming epileptic willpower. The Role of Ministers. Following the vibrational grooves. Resurging secret histories in the New Dark Age. The Serpent Jaguar Priests. Bypassing semantics with multi-media communications. Exercising Dream and Memory to change your life. Running into Ponderosa Pine lessons. Getting unstuck from the floor. Sharing an ensemble of strangeness.    Then we move on to clear scenarios being the key to good communication. The Tempo of Psychic Metabolism. We go further into the Phonebooth to discuss the benefits and restrictions of fluidity and integrity. Judo Inversion Techniques. Feedback Belief Systems and Extrapolating Interiority. Leveraging the sentience of language. "The Ham Pounder Impersonators". Keeping personal records and studying your experiences. Deciphering dreams through emblem and ceremony (narrative). Pineneedle Complaints and Animal Statue Escapes.    Finally, we wrap up with dream resources being occluded by the near waking experience. Early Dreaming Moments. Tuning out the Waking Chatter. Being on orange alert to incoherent frameworks of consciousness. An interrupted pitch to Robert Redford on a bustling set. Thanks to Nick Searfoss for the summary!   (The picture for this episode requires a bit of explanation...it is allegedly a photo of the mythical "Loveland Frogman" peeking out of a river. It is episode-relevant.)

randallshansen.comhttp://www.triumphovertraumabook.com/ I am Dr. Randall Hansen, and I am an educator and advocate for healing trauma -- and helping you a life of truth, health, peace, and joy.Big News! Check out my latest project -- a new book that focuses on a variety of healing stories through psychedelics. Read more about it here: Triumph Over Trauma: Psychedelic Medicines are Helping People Heal Their Trauma, Change Their Lives, and Grow Their Spirituality. Curious about why I wrote the book? Read my Questions & Answers Interview.I am a passionate educator and entrepreneur -- I have taught at the college-level for most of my life and I am also the CEO/CMO and Publisher of EmpoweringSites.com, a collection of websites designed to empower people to lead more successful, happier lives. I am also the founder (and former CEO) of Quintessential Careers, which I sold to LiveCareer in 2015.I have been empowering people my entire adult life -- focused on helping them lead better, richer, happier, and healthier lives. In fact, empowerment is a key part of my professional philosophy statement.HEALING the world is my agenda. My current areas of passion center around healing: nature, food, exercise, prayer/meditation, wellness, love, and psychedelics and entheogenic plant medicines.My new goal in life: Become a superhero for HEALING... and for living a life of joy, peace, and health.I have loved nature and conservation my entire life, including traveling to state and national parks, improving the health of a 40-acre Ponderosa Pine forest, serving on the board of a Conservation District, and volunteering with other organizations that promote good stewardship of our open spaces.Thanks to Jesse Gould of Heroic Hearts Project, I became aware of the healing potential of psychedelic and plant medicines. If you are unaware, we are finally discovering the unique properties of these psychedelics to help people suffering from a variety of conditions, including PTS, addiction, depression, anxiety, cluster headaches, and much more. (The research is so very promising, which is why I am writing the book on the subject.)I recently finished a 2.5-year, criss-crossing nationwide trip in which my wife Jenny and I had two goals: First, we wanted to blog (JenRanAdventures.com) about national wonders (parks, forests, monuments, and the like), organic and natural farms and ranches, and wonderful small cities and towns. Second, we wanted to find the ideal place to live, teach, work -- a community that includes a college with a vibrant business/marketing program for me, a focus on veterans for Jenny, and rural enough so that we could own about 15-30 acres of land -- and we found that in NE Washington, just north of Spokane. We have recently finished building our dream home. (Yes, during the pandemic!)Finally, I am a published author, with several books, chapters in books, and hundreds of articles, both academic and practical. (You can find some of these publications listed/linked here, but also on my EmpoweringSites.com network.

randallshansen.comhttp://www.triumphovertraumabook.com/ I am Dr. Randall Hansen, and I am an educator and advocate for healing trauma -- and helping you a life of truth, health, peace, and joy.Big News! Check out my latest project -- a new book that focuses on a variety of healing stories through psychedelics. Read more about it here: Triumph Over Trauma: Psychedelic Medicines are Helping People Heal Their Trauma, Change Their Lives, and Grow Their Spirituality. Curious about why I wrote the book? Read my Questions & Answers Interview.I am a passionate educator and entrepreneur -- I have taught at the college-level for most of my life and I am also the CEO/CMO and Publisher of EmpoweringSites.com, a collection of websites designed to empower people to lead more successful, happier lives. I am also the founder (and former CEO) of Quintessential Careers, which I sold to LiveCareer in 2015.I have been empowering people my entire adult life -- focused on helping them lead better, richer, happier, and healthier lives. In fact, empowerment is a key part of my professional philosophy statement.HEALING the world is my agenda. My current areas of passion center around healing: nature, food, exercise, prayer/meditation, wellness, love, and psychedelics and entheogenic plant medicines.My new goal in life: Become a superhero for HEALING... and for living a life of joy, peace, and health.I have loved nature and conservation my entire life, including traveling to state and national parks, improving the health of a 40-acre Ponderosa Pine forest, serving on the board of a Conservation District, and volunteering with other organizations that promote good stewardship of our open spaces.Thanks to Jesse Gould of Heroic Hearts Project, I became aware of the healing potential of psychedelic and plant medicines. If you are unaware, we are finally discovering the unique properties of these psychedelics to help people suffering from a variety of conditions, including PTS, addiction, depression, anxiety, cluster headaches, and much more. (The research is so very promising, which is why I am writing the book on the subject.)I recently finished a 2.5-year, criss-crossing nationwide trip in which my wife Jenny and I had two goals: First, we wanted to blog (JenRanAdventures.com) about national wonders (parks, forests, monuments, and the like), organic and natural farms and ranches, and wonderful small cities and towns. Second, we wanted to find the ideal place to live, teach, work -- a community that includes a college with a vibrant business/marketing program for me, a focus on veterans for Jenny, and rural enough so that we could own about 15-30 acres of land -- and we found that in NE Washington, just north of Spokane. We have recently finished building our dream home. (Yes, during the pandemic!)Finally, I am a published author, with several books, chapters in books, and hundreds of articles, both academic and practical. (You can find some of these publications listed/linked here, but also on my EmpoweringSites.com network.

This was recorded in the middle of a warm, sunny, and breezy day during my camping trip at Ahjumawi Lava Springs State Park at the end of April. I was walking along the Lava Springs Trail between the Horr Pond Campground and Crystal Springs when I happened upon a mother Black Bear and her cubs. I saw the mama bear first walking through the thick undergrowth more than hundred feet away. Upon seeing her I clapped my hands a few times to let her know I was there. She stopped and looked in my direction for a moment before making her way towards a large Ponderosa Pine tree. It was then that I noticed her cubs climbing the tree. They stopped about twenty-five or thirty feet up where a large branch jutted out from the trunk. The mother got to the bottom of the tree and began to climb up towards her cubs. She stopped about ten feet below them and made some interesting and peculiar sounds. I luckily had my parabolic microphone with me and was able to record from a safe distance away. I wouldn't have heard any of this with just my ears since the bear was so far away, but the parabolic mic does an excellent job of capturing sounds from a distance and worked really well for this recording. I hope you enjoy it! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/soundbynature/support

The Ponderosa Pine is Montana's state tree. It is a magnificent conifer with long, well ordered needles. Recently hail damage and disease have challenged Ponderosa Pine in the Flathead area. Come along with FVCC's Christina Relyea as we talk about a new project to find out more about this towering monarch.

The Pioneer Store was built by Mr. James Dalglish in 1880. He had come to the southwest from eastern Canada to improve his failing health. He built the large, log building of hand-hewn Ponderosa Pine logs harvested from the mountain forests to the west of present day Chloride. By late 1880, the building was completed and The Pioneer Store opened for business. Mr. Dalglish operated it throughout the Silver Boom years of 1880 through 1897, carrying all the goods needed for the miners and their families. The store stocked all manner of household goods, including food for residents and their animals, clothes for the entire family, mining equipment and tools, and ranch equipment and supplies. Wagons, buggies, and other large items could be ordered, as well as such specialty items as brides' trousseaus. A United States Post Office was established in the front part of the store building in 1881, and a newspaper, The Black Range, began publishing weekly from the upstairs rooms in 1882. The large safe in the store building served as a local Bank for the remote mining operators and for the scattered ranches. It also served as a ‘Pawn Shop', as records show “--- $2.00 loaned on watch in the safe." When the Silver Boom ended in 1896, Mr. Dalglish leased the building to others who continued its operation until 1908. At that time, the building and its contents were purchased by the U.S. Treasury Mining Company. That company soon became the property of the James Family, who had arrived in Chloride in 1882. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/loren-alberts/message

This week the Gamekeeper crew talks with noted South Dakota Game, Fish, and Parks Senior Biologist, Dr. Chad Lehman, about the turkeys found in his state. We learn about how important the Ponderosa Pine is to the tough yet beautiful Merriam's turkey, hear about previous restoration efforts, and learn about the Black Hills and what to look for if you're planning a trip to hunt Merriam's.  Chad is a great guest and the topics vary widely during the conversation. Listen, Learn and Enjoy. Support the showStay connected with GameKeepers: Instagram: @mossyoakgamekeepers Facebook: @GameKeepers Twitter: @MOGameKeepers YouTube: @MossyOakGameKeepers Website: https://mossyoakgamekeeper.com/Join the Gamekeeper Field Notes Newsletter: https://bit.ly/GKField_NotesJoin Mossy Oak's Weekly Newsletter: The Branch Have a question for us or a podcast idea? Email us at gamekeepers@mossyoak.com

What began as a hike to enjoy an early autumn afternoon transformed into a mission to sow and grow a stand of Pinus ponderosa from seed. I had become enthralled by this possibility as I traversed miles of trails shaded by canopies of pine in Missoula's Rattlesnake Valley.

This recording was gathered on a rainy winter night in the dense forest near the Pacific Crest Trail in Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Shasta County, California. The wind was calm and the rain fell steadily on the snowy forest floor. This is the first part of an all night recording. During the second part of the night the wind picks up and the rain becomes heavier; you can hear it in the next episode. I made this by using the tree ears recording technique, in which a microphone is placed on either side of the trunk of a tree, in this case a Douglas Fir. I protected the microphones from the rain by making a little cover using boughs from the recently downed top half of a nearby Ponderosa Pine, which had been broken off by powerful winds during one of the many strong storms that recently battered the area. I set up the mics and recorder just before dark, then came back and retrieved them the following morning. Upon my return I was very happy to find everything dry and unharmed by the rain. At 1:06:24 you will hear a tree fall in the distance, if you listen closely. I could really use your support. Please consider helping this podcast get made by making a donation, becoming a Patreon supporter, or becoming a monthly supporter through Anchor. You can do so by visiting the following links- https://soundbynaturepodcast.com/donations/ https://www.patreon.com/soundbynaturepodcast You can become a monthly supporter at Anchor by clicking the link at the end of this podcast description. Thank you to my current and past monthly supporters, those of you that have made one time donations, and my supporters on Patreon. I truly appreciate your help! You can see pictures of the area this was recorded, as well as pictures from other locations I have gathered recordings, by visiting the Instagram and Facebook pages for the podcast. You can find them by searching @soundbynaturepodcast. Questions or comments? Send me a message on Facebook or Instagram, or email me at soundbynaturepodcast@gmail.com I really hope this recording brings you a little peace and provides you with a brief respite from the many stresses of everyday life. Thank you very much for listening. Stay healthy, stay safe, stay sound. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/soundbynature/support

Their height and orange-brown bark, scaly and large-patterned, drew me to them, but I knew little else about them.

Pine (Pinus spp.) gives us so many gifts beyond its timber. The needles, pine resin, bark, and pollen are all potent herbal medicines. While towering ponderosa pine trees are not often thought of as herbs, this is powerful plant medicine. The land that my husband and I live on and caretake is filled with ponderosa pine trees and in this episode, I share my love for these majestic plants. I also explain how to make two versions of pine needle tea. One can be potent herbal medicine. The other is more of a crowd pleasing tea that can be enjoyed whenever you feel like sipping a bit of the forest.After listening in, you'll know:► What's a sign to rouse your inner skeptic when it comes to superfood claims?► Are pine needles from any pine species safe for tea-making?► Is it better to harvest young pine needles or older ones—and why?► How to harvest pine needles sustainably (and when not to harvest)Show snippet: “Pines are towering gifts of this earth whether they are providing us shelter, warmth, food, or potent medicine.”----Get full show notes and more information at: herbswithrosaleepodcast.comTo sign up for the Rooted Medicine Circle wait list: https://bit.ly/3PTaAaRGet instant access to your FREE ebook all about pine: https://bit.ly/3BLuzClFor more behind-the-scenes of this podcast, follow @rosaleedelaforet on Instagram!The secret to using herbs successfully begins with knowing who YOU are. Get started by taking my free Herbal Jumpstart course when you sign up for my newsletter.If you enjoy the Herbs with Rosalee podcast, we could use your support! Please consider leaving a 5-star rating and review and sharing the show with someone who needs to hear it!On the podcast, we explore the many ways plants heal, as food, as medicine, and through nature connection. Each week, I focus on a single seasonal plant and share trusted herbal knowledge so that you can get the best results when using herbs for your health.Learn more about Herbs with Rosalee at herbswithrosalee.com.----Rosalee is an herbalist and author of the bestselling book Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients Into Foods & Remedies That Heal and co-author of the bestselling book Wild Remedies: How to Forage Healing Foods and Craft Your Own Herbal Medicine. She's a registered herbalist with the American Herbalist Guild and teaches many popular online courses. Read about how Rosalee went from having a terminal illness to being a bestselling author in her full story here.

This was recorded on a cold and blustery autumn day at the foot of Mount Shasta in Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Siskiyou County, California. The wind blows steadily through the tops of the tall Ponderosa Pine, Douglas Fir, and White Fir trees in the surrounding forest, with gusts swirling down now and then to rustle the dry leaves of the California Black Oak trees under which I set up the microphone. Oak leaves can be heard falling to the forest floor after they've been freed from their twigs by the wind.  This location is a little over two miles outside of the small town of McCloud, in which I live. I am fortunate to live in a place where I can be immersed in nature after only a short walk out my back door. This was my fourth try at getting a long recording that didn't contain frequent air traffic. My previous attempts have had commercial jets and small planes passing loudly overhead every five or ten minutes. And though there is a little air traffic on this recording, it isn't nearly as loud or frequent as the previous attempts. I hope you don't mind it too much.  A lot of time, effort, and work goes into gathering these recordings for you, and I can really use your help. I am committed to keeping this podcast free to hear, and free from advertising, so the only help I get in making this is due to the kindness and generosity of you, the listener. Please consider helping me out by making a donation, becoming a Patreon supporter, or by becoming a monthly supporter through Anchor. You can do so by visiting the following links- https://soundbynaturepodcast.com/donations/ https://www.patreon.com/soundbynaturepodcast You can become a monthly supporter at Anchor by clicking the link at the end of this podcast description. Thank you to my current and past monthly supporters, those who have made one time donations, and my two supporters on Patreon. I truly appreciate your support! You can see pictures of the area this was recorded, as well as pictures from other locations I have gathered recordings, by visiting the Instagram and Facebook pages for the podcast. You can find them by searching @soundbynaturepodcast. Questions or comments? Send me a message on Facebook or Instagram, or email me at soundbynaturepodcast@gmail.com I really hope that, wherever you are in the world, you are doing as well as you can. Thank you very much for listening. Stay healthy, stay safe, stay sound. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/soundbynature/support

Summary: Did you know that Arizona is home to 13 different species of owls? Join Cheryl and Kiersten as they talk about these amazing feathered residents.   For our hearing impaired listeners, a transcript of this podcast follows the show notes.   Show Notes: www.avibirds.com/owls-of-arizona/ www.a-z-animals.com/blog/true-owls-vs-barn-owls-what-are-the-diffrences/ Owling: Enter the World of the Mysterious Birds of the Night, by Mark Wilson   Liberty Wildlife: (480)998-5550 2600 E Elmwood St. Phoenix, AZ 85040 https://Libertywildlife.org Background bird song:  Naturescapes Backyard Birds www.naturescapes.com Our email address, please reach out with comments, questions, or suggestions: thefeathereddesert@gmail.com   Transcript   Host Voice: Welcome to The Feathered Desert a podcast all about desert bird feeding in the Southwest region of the United States. (Various bird calls play)   Cheryl-Intro:  Welcome to The Feathered Desert! Arizona is a haven for birdlife.  It is a state with a multitude of diverse landscapes that range from deserts to conifer forests, to incredibly very different types of landscaped mountain ranges.  It has breathtaking canyons, riparian areas with cottonwoods and willows very much untouched by man.  This landscape diversity supports a very diverse selection of birdlife including (are you ready) thirteen different owls. I was floored! I thought maybe six species but no it's thirteen. That's why it's in two parts.   Kiersten: Few general facts: Owls live in a variety of habitats.  For every type of bird habitat there is an owl that fits into it. Owls are nocturnal raptors, specialized for hunting in the dark, and are equipped with excellent night vision; but there are a few owls that are active during the day. There is always an exception to the rule! To be more specific: Diurnal-by definition diurnal means happening or active during the daytime.  Animals that are diurnal are usually awake and active during the daytime. Burrowing Owls, Short-eared Owls, Snowy Owls Crepuscular-cre-pus-cu-lar: means relating to twilight, referring to animals that are active in the twilight—active at dawn and dusk.  A few of our owls that do that are Northern Pygmy Owl and Ferrugious Pygmy Owl Nocturnal-done, occurring, or active at night. Northern Saw-whet Owl, Barn Owl, Boreal Owl One of my favorite things about owl is that they all have specialized feathers for silent flight.  That mean you will not hear them ehThat being said: the tiny Elf owl is the nosiest when in flight.  That is saying quite a lot. You'll probably just barely hear him as he flies overhead. Which is interesting because it hunts insects, and some insects can hear. It begs the question of why this owl evolved to be a little bit louder than other owls but is so small.   Cheryl: I don't know but I thought it was interesting!   Kiersten: Like most birds, owls have 4 toes on each foot.  2 toes point forward and 2 toes point backward.  However, owls have a special ability -they can swing one of their back toes to the front.  Helps it to grip wiggling prey.  Ospreys, woodpeckers, and parrots can do this as well. Owls have good spatial memory, probably better than us, for sure better than me!   (Cheryl and Kiersten both laugh)   Kiersten:   Owls carry detailed mental maps of their surroundings.  This helps an owl remember where things are and where they left things. Which is super important!   Cheryl: It is because they store food! Who knew?   Kiersten: Yeah! There are 19 species of owls that breed and nest in the United States and Canada.  13 of these species may be found in Arizona!   Cheryl:  So, Owls are split into two family groups. Every time I do research for a podcast I learn so much that I didn't know! The first group is Strigidae-which are true owls and the Tytonidae-the Barn Owls. True Owls VS Barn Owls some of the differences are Physical Appearance:  Many true owl species have ear tufts on their heads covered in feathers.  They have large heads, round facial discs around their eyes.  They have yellow or orange eyes. Barn Owls have a great heart-shaped facial disc.  Presence of long strong legs with powerful talons. Dark eyes and the absence of ear tufts. They have ears but not tufts. Calls:  True owls make hooting calls.  Barn owls don't hoot, rather they make eerie-sounding screams. Habitats:  True owls are found worldwide except in Antarctica. Barn Owls occur everywhere except in the cold temperate, and Arctic regions.  They prefer open places and live away from humans. Kiersten: They are found on every continent!   Cheryl: Behavior:  True owls exhibit nocturnal behaviors and have specialized morphology for their wings. Barn Owls are nocturnal birds. Color:  they have brown or gray vertical markings, and their underbellies are usually white. Barn owls are usually an orange-black color.  Their breasts are white. Hunting Styles:  True Owls are mostly seen by people as tame since they show no movement unless you  are very close to them.  They are ambush predators. Although they are elusive they are relatively not shy towards people.   Kiersten: Yes, but were not saying for you to go up to one because they are not tame! They are just good at their jobs which is to be calm and still and ambush prey or fly away.   Cheryl: Right! Barn Owls are opportunistic hunters.  They fly in open areas gliding across the low grasses locating prey by sound. Lifespan: Ture Owls lifespans very depending on the species, on average these owls have longer lifespans than Barn Owls.  Barn Owls live 5-10 years and that is being generous. They can live longer in captivity.   Kiersten:  The Great Horned Owl- Great Horned Owl is Arizona's largest and most widespread owl.  Known as the “Tiger of the Sky”, the Great Horned Owl is probably the most familiar to our listeners of all the Arizona owls.  We both have them in our yards. This owl has mottled grayish-brown feathers on its wings, head, and body. It has pale cream to white underneath with brown barring, and it has a reddish-brown to gray facial feathers, and a white throat patch. This will all be hard to see in the dark but if you catch them in a flashlight or see them in a tree during the day you might get to see the colors better. Great Horned Owls have long feathers covering their legs and feet. Great horned owls are 17-25 inches in height.   Average weight of an adult is 2.6 – 3.5 lbs.  The females will be larger and heavier. The wingspan of this raptor is on average 3-5 feet across. That's a nice wingspan!   Cheryl: That's also pretty heavy for an owl!   Kiersten: Yep! Great Horned Owls are highly adaptable birds with an incredibly diverse diet comprising of over 200 species of mammals, and 300 species of birds, invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians and fish.   Why pick just one thing when you have all this stuff to eat? Why not just eat it all   Cheryl: (laughs) I don't think we missed anything on that list!   Kiersten: The favorite meal of these birds are skunks.  I mean…yeah?   (Both co-hosts laugh)   Cheryl: Well skunks are cute.   Kiersten: They are cute! And the owls keep their population in check. The Great Horned Owl is the only owl to regularly eat skunk. I think they may not have to best sense of smell, if they don't mind eating skunk!   Cheryl: (laughs)   Kiersten: Great Horned Owls do migrate.  They live in their territory their whole lives.  Historically, they were once intensively hunted.  Their feathers a really beautiful and there is always the myth that they eat your sheep, which is completely false. They are not s bog enough bird to do that. But now the biggest threat is indirect poisoning by harmful rodenticides. Which is a terrible shame! For more information on that, please, reference our Rodenticide: A Deadly Decision podcast. Fun Fact:  Great Horned Owls will defend their nests fiercely by hooting, hissing, grunting, and screaming. It is quite terrifying to see! You don't want to encounter this!   Cheryl: They really do impress me. Every time I encounter one or watch them on a webcam.   Kiersten: They really are impressive. These are the ones that have that wise look on theor faces. The one that the phrase wise old owl comes from but…they are not wise. They're great at being owls bt not great problem solvers!   Cheryl: (laughs)   Kiersten: One other thing about the Great Horned Owl. They are definitely one of the owl that have ear tufts. We are not exactly sure why they have ear tufts. Some scientists say it's for checking the changing wind, or they are used to make decisions on the wing but we not entirely sure what they are for. But the tufts are just feathers not ears. They have ears but the feathers that stick up are not their ears.   Cheryl: Sometime I think it's for communication between owls because they can flatten them or hold them up straight. They do things with them if you ever have the opportunity to watch them.   Kiersten: That's a good thought! Owls are solitary hunters, so they could potentially hurt another owl. I don't necessary want to cozy up to my neighbor that might kill me! So maybe they are used to communicate from a distance.   Cheryl :  And with eye color. All 19 different owl species have a different eye color and scientist don't know why! Mabe it's for communication as well.   Kiersten: Maybe!   Cheryl: Barn Owl The Barn Owl is an unusual beauty.  It is a medium sized owl with a heart-shaped face and a characteristic pale speckled plumage.  The upperparts are rusty brown with dark patches.  The face and underparts range from cream to white.  It has slender, feathered legs and long broad wings that enable sharp, agile movements.  This owl is 13-15 inches in height.  It weighs about 1 -1.5 lbs.    Kiersten: The female is definitely a bit bigger. The females need more weight to incubate eggs and more skeletal width to lay eggs, but of all the raptors they have the least difference between male and female.   Cheryl:  Barn Owls wingspan is 31-37 inches across.  Barn Owls occur in the open grasslands, farmlands, open meadows in woodlands and woodland edges. They are nocturnal.  Barn Owls roost or nest in old buildings, barns, silos, steeples, sheds, mine and well shafts, tree cavities, caves and stacks of baled hay.   It is an unmissable bird.  Look out for a flash of white in the open country at night.  Barn Owls has an undulating flight pattern.  They hunt by gliding low above the ground using sight and sound to locate prey.  Barn Owls have asymmetric ears which means one ear is a little higher than the eyes while the opposite one sits a little lower than the eyes.  This helps Barn owls to quickly and accurately locate faint sounds.  The sounds strike each ear at slightly different times. One Barn Owl will eat 8 mice/voles a night.   That's 2,920 rodents a year.     Kiersten: That's good rodent control, right there!   Cheryl: Barn owls have been known to stockpile prey animals, especially, during nesting season.  Barn Owls are typically solitary birds but will live in pairs.  Barn owls are non-violent, altruistic and family-oriented birds.  Barn Owl siblings care for one another while they are together. Barn owls often are the victims of vehicle collisions, but their greatest threat is indirect poisoning by harmful rodenticides. Kiersten:  This is the Flammulated Owl   Cheryl: I'm gla you said that word!   Kiersten: It's not a pretty word. (laughs)   Cheryl: I don't know who names these birds!   Kiersten: they could have picked a prettier word, for sure! This little owl has flame-like markings on its wings, for which it is named.  However, grayer variants lack this feature.  Its plumage is a mix of dark brown, gray, buff, and white providing the perfect camouflage.  It has large, dark eyes, and small ear tufts that are often held flat against the head.  It is 6-7 inches in height.  Weighs about 1.5-2 ounces and has a wingspan of 14-16 inches across.  Flammulated Owls are migratory.  Wintering here in Arizona from September-March.  Flammulated Owls can be found in Arizona's old Ponderosa Pine forests, Douglas Fir, and mixed conifer forests, and in amongst the Aspen trees at higher elevations.   Flammulated owls are considered the most abundant of the forest dwelling owls in Arizona.   These owls are heavily dependent on mature forests.  Habitat loss and rodenticides are the greatest threats to these owls.it vocalizes with twittery noises, mews, and in hoots.  Smaller than the Western Screech Owl this little owl often roosts in old woodpecker or sapsucker holes.  Flammulated owl eats insect like grasshoppers, crickets, beetles, spiders, ants I can't believe they eat ants, that seems like a lot of work for such a small reward, dragonflies, and moths. Probably one of their favorite is those big, fat moths in the silk moth family. That would tide you or for days.   Cheryl: I was surprised at what insects they eat because they are nocturnal. The dragonflies.   Kiersten: Dragonflies might be easier to catch at night though because they'll be stationary.   Cheryl: I don't know how they do it!   Kiersten: Me neither but they always seem to know what they are doing!   Cheryl:  Whiskered Screech Owl I think this one is so cute. I remember watching a video of one and thinking how cute he was and then it snatched a hummingbird! Then I thought he's not so cute anyone!   Kiersten: (laughs) Predators always do that to us!   Cheryl: (laughs) The Whiskered Screech Owl is named for the wispy bristles at the base of their beak.  It is a small owl with streaked plumage and a rounded head with short ear tufts.  There is a gray morph and rufous colored morph.  It has golden- yellow eyes and a yellow-green bill.   I also found it interesting that owl beaks can be different colors! Its height is 6-8 inches, and it weighs 2.4-4.2 ounces.  This owl's wingspan is 16-20 inches across. These owls inhabit southeastern Arizona in the dense oak woodlands and mountains forests of the Madrean Sky Island Mountain Range.  The very southeastern tip of Arizona.  They are active from dusk through the night.  They mainly prey on arthropods, including locusts, grasshoppers, crickets, beetles, moths, caterpillars, centipedes, spiders and scorpions. I always like a bird that can catch a scorpion! They occasionally hunt small mammals and small birds.  Your best chance to look for Whiskered Screech owl is in the Sycamore groves alongside canyons in the popular birding area of Madera Canyon.  Listen for the evenly spaced boo-hoots of the small owls.   That's just four of the thirteen owls we have in Arizona. Part two is coming soon! Please I would just like to remind everyone that the Phoenix Valley is home to a great raptor rehab facility.  Liberty Wildlife offers rehabilitation to injured raptors such as the owls here in Arizona.  So, if you would like a close -up with an owl you may visit their education center for a tour.  If you find an injured owl please keep visual contact with the injured bird, and call Liberty Wildlife.  A volunteer will come out and rescue the bird.  We will include Liberty Wildlife's contact information in our show notes. Stay tuned for part two coming in the near future!

Track list - Ponderosa Pine Mix - feat. Jeff Haze ******************************************************************************* 01. Ken@Work - Space Dancing (Original Mix) 02. Da Lukas - Back for More (Walterino Remix) 03. Live For Love - Traveler (Original Mix) 04. LeBaron James - I Was Thinking Disco (Original Mix) 05. Paolo Bardelli, Simone Bardelli - You Got It (Nu Club Mix) 06. Risk Assessment - Want You Back (Club Mix) 07. Stewart Birch - Young & Foolish (Original Mix) 08. Samo - Attracted To You (Original Mix) 09. Adri Block, Paul Parsons - We Wanna Make U Move (Nu Disco Club Mix) 10. aspen bizarre disco - Oh Get It (Original Mix) 11. Block & Crown - Stand Up & Sing (Clubmix) 12. Block & Crown - Tossin' & Turnin' (Clubmix) 13. Block & Crown, Paul Parsons - Looking For Love (Nu Disco Club Mix) **************************************************************************** After his excellent house classic set Jeff Haze compiled another deep and soulful mix for us incl. tracks by artists like Paolo Bardelli, Block & Crown, aspen bizarre disco and many more. ____________ Support the Deep House Cat on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deephousecats/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwcUSe8m5Q1-qZcZ1w8MejA/feed Mixcloud Select: https://www.mixcloud.com/DeepHouseCatShow/select/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deephousecatshow Twitter: https://twitter.com/deephousecat #deephouse #ponderosapine #soulfulhouse #disco #housemusic #weekend #deep #house #djset #djmix #podcast #djlife #djs #radioshow #music #freemusic #new #newepisode #electronicmusic #houseisafeeling #nightlife #underground #love #party #dance #chicago #club #ibiza #beats #instamusic

Blissful climbs up the Mogollon Rim and it's filled with pines, snow, and melting snow.In this episode:Blissful is reminded that if you sleep right next to a river, your tent will be soaking wet.It's an easy rise through deeply shaded Ponderosa Pine next to the rushing East Verde River, the same one crossed in the deserty Mazatzals. After a rocky rise, the Mogollon Rim is revealed, frozen footprints through snowy drifts lead the way across icy streams. Soon, it's up and out of this lovely canyon to a flat walk through deep water and mud, a miserable messy walk to a quiet spot under pines, after a bit of trail magic. MUSIC: Poema del Pastor Coya by Angel Lasala as played by Alison Young, flute and Vicki Seldon, pianoSupport the show

After Blissful takes a forced break due to snowy weather, it's a sparkly day of gorgeous skies and sticky mud. In this episode:Blissful rides with a trail angel and three hikers to the Early Bird Cafe where someone pays for her breakfast. Her second hitch moves on before the door is closed, but gets her to the Highline Trail in Ponderosa Pine.The air is clear and fresh, sparkling with big clouds creating shadows on the vast forest-covered mountains. The mud gives way to pine needles and red rock under the red rock Mogollon Rim.She's surrounded by birds all the way past streams, finally meeting the East Verde River, the same from a few days ago, where she camps. MUSIC: Poema del Pastor Coya by Angel Lasala as played by Alison Young, flute and Vicki Seldon, pianoSupport the show

Blissful climbs steeply up into the Four Peaks Wilderness, where she camps right on the edge of a cliff.  In this episode:After sleeping on a wee bit of astroturf at Roosevelt Lake Marina next to the highway, Blissful hitches to the Vineyard Trail. The wide open trail climbs up past Saguaro and myriad wildflowers, including thousands of Mexican Poppies. Water sources are far apart on the Mills Ridge Trail requiring big ascents with stunning views of the lake over 3,000 feet below. All alone except for two tourists and one backpacker coming the other way, she sidles the peaks on a balcony walk finding a perfect flat spot under one lone Ponderosa Pine in snow.MUSIC: Poema del Pastor Coya by Angel Lasala as played by Alison Young, flute and Vicki Seldon, pianoSupport the show

1. Dust 2. Navajo Ethnobotony: Utah Serviceberry, Cliffrose, Ponderosa Pine 3. Hogan 101 4. Pet Peeve: Chipping, Chopping, Glueing 5. The Story of Bill Tibbetts 6. The Two Utes --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

This was recorded on a rainy morning in late spring beside Bigelow Meadow in the Bigelow Meadow Botanical Area, Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Siskiyou County, California. The recording starts as the dawn chorus was well under way and just as the rain began to fall. This recording was made tree ears style, with a microphone placed on either side of the trunk of a small Incense Cedar tree growing beneath a large Ponderosa Pine amongst a cluster of Quaking Aspen. There is some air traffic on this recording. Please support this show! Your contribution helps make this podcast possible. All contributions go directly towards producing these recordings and providing you with natural sound. If you enjoy the podcast please show your appreciation and make a donation at https://soundbynaturepodcast.com/donations/. If you'd like to become a monthly supporter you can do so by clicking the support link at the end of this podcast description, by visiting the donation page on the podcast website, and now you can support me on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/soundbynaturepodcast I'd very much like to thank my monthly supporters on Anchor, those of you that have donated both recently and in the past, as well as my one Patreon supporter. You truly are helping to keep this podcast going, and I greatly appreciate your help. Recently, with your help I was able to acquire a pair of Lom mikroUsi omnidirectional microphones, which I used to make this recording. Thank you!!! You can see pictures of the area this was recorded, as well as pictures from other locations I have gathered recordings, by visiting the Instagram and Facebook pages for the podcast. You can find them by searching @soundbynaturepodcast. Questions or comments? Send me a message on Facebook or Instagram, or email me at soundbynaturepodcast@gmail.com I hope wherever you are listening that this benefits you in some small way, that it inspires you to get outside and into nature yourself, and also to protect and preserve our fragile natural world any way you can. I am also hoping for an end to all war and conflict around the world, and an end to the tragic mass shootings that happen with disturbing frequency in this country. Thank you very much for listening. Stay healthy, stay safe, stay sound. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/soundbynature/support

In a Western ponderosa pine savanna, tall pines dot an open, grassy landscape. A Western Bluebird flits from a gnarly branch, as this Cassin's Finch belts out a rapid song. The trees here grow singly or in small stands. Upslope, the pines become denser, mixing with firs. Downhill, the trees give way to an open grassland. The open structure of this savanna, found on mountain slopes from the Rockies to the Cascades, results from recurring natural fires. Fast-moving blazes sweep through, burning the low vegetation but sparing the larger trees, which are protected by very thick bark. After a fire, grass and wildflowers re-grow quickly. Learn more at BirdNote.org.

This was recorded in the middle of a clear and calm night at the Bigelow Meadow Botanical Area in Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Siskiyou County, California. It was late enough that there was no air traffic and no sound from the distant highway, therefore this recording is free of noise pollution. Listen for the sound of pine cones as they occasionally fall from the nearby Ponderosa Pine tree. This recording is a part of the same recording session which the previous episode came from. With the help of my daughter Sierra and her excellent choice of recording location, we set up the recording rig on the evening prior to this recording and recorded all night and into the next morning. Please donate! Your contributions help make this podcast possible. All donations go directly towards producing these recordings and providing you with natural sound. If you enjoy the podcast please show your appreciation and make a donation: https://soundbynaturepodcast.com/donations/ If you'd like to become a monthly supporter you can do so by clicking the support link at the end of this podcast description, or by visiting the donation page on the podcast website. It's the best way to support the podcast because it provides me with a reliable resource which I can draw from to help me provide you with these recordings. I'd really like to thank my monthly supporters and those of you that have donated both recently and in the past. You truly are helping to keep this podcast going, and I appreciate each and every one of you. You can see pictures of the area this was recorded, as well as pictures from other locations I have gathered recordings, by visiting the Instagram and Facebook pages for the podcast. You can find them by searching @soundbynaturepodcast. Questions or comments? Send me a message on Facebook or Instagram, or email me at soundbynaturepodcast@gmail.com I am still hoping for a swift end to Putin's war against Ukraine. The unprovoked imperialistic aggression is utterly unjustifiable, and the ongoing intentional killing of innocent civilians is truly beyond the pale. I hope that the international community does all it can to put an end to this senseless assault against Ukraine and its people. PEACE FOR UKRAINE NOW!!!

January 17, 2022 — Neighbors and bird-watchers successfully faced down PG&E to defend a bald eagle's nest in Potter Valley last week. On Wednesday night, Tim Bray, a kzyx programmer and member of the Mendocino Coast Audubon Society, sent out an alert that PG&E planned to cut down the aging Ponderosa Pine that contains the nest, located on a road that runs parallel to the Eel River, not far from Van Arsdale Dam. Bald eagles are no longer on the endangered species list, though they are federally protected. PG&E biologists monitor the area extensively, as part of the licensing requirements for the Potter Valley Project, and their records show the nest has been used since 2011. It is common for bald eagles to build alternate nest sites, and according to PG&E, this pair last used its other nest in 2016. Locals, including Joseph West, a tenant on the property hosting the main nest, say it's been there for decades. “Lately, I've been watching them for seven, eight days, bringing material into the nest,” he reported on Thursday. “I've seen the female sitting above it quite often, looking down into it. They've definitely decided that this is where they want to spend their nesting season. They've been using this tree, I'd say three out of five years, for the past 25 years” But the tree is in decline and close to a distribution line, which PG&E argued posed an imminent fire threat. Joseph Seidell, another tenant on the property, reported the company for poaching. “We're in full belief that this is a nesting pair, there could be eggs in the nest, they haven't told us that there's not,” he explained early Thursday. “So therefore I felt impelled to make a claim that these birds were going to be killed, or poached…and I was able to call CalTip and report that PG&E was going to take this nest down.” He also hired an independent arborist who examined the tree and concluded that, while it does show signs of a beetle infestation, it shows no signs of structural deficiencies and is a good candidate for mitigations other than removal. Earlier this month, PG&E applied for and received an emergency permit from U.S. Fish and Wildlife to remove the tree before breeding season started on January 15. The property owner, who did not want her name used, complained that the timeline to make a decision was unfair and she wanted to see the permit, which she never did. West summed up much of the general feeling, saying, “Our whole issue is, why did you wait for so long, and why now, that they're nesting, is this such a big deal?” The presence of the nest does constrain other tree work in the vicinity, according to PG&E spokeswoman Deanna Contreras. While all work is not prohibited, crews would have to use hand tools or low-decibel chainsaws. “During nesting season, there are federal guidelines that we need to follow when it comes to bird activity in an area, yes,” she confirmed. On Thursday morning, a chipper crew and a PG&E biologist arrived with a printout of the email exchange between PG&E personnel and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist, explaining why she agreed to grant the permit. Kate Marienchild, author of “Secrets of the Oak Woodlands: Plants and Animals Among California's Oaks,” was on hand with some friends. As the chipper truck idled on the other side of the locked gate, Marienchild provided a naturalist's description of what happened next. “I just saw an adult bald eagle land on a nest on a tall pine tree on the north side of the Eel River in Potter Valley, and perch on that nest for about five minutes, and then fly off,” she reported, within moments of watching the eagle soar off toward the river. The crew turned around and drove off in the direction they came from, as Marienchild laughed and cheered. But it wasn't Saturday yet. By 9:00 Friday morning, about 15 neighbors were on the scene to help the tenants block the gate. But crews never arrived. An outreach team, consisting of Contreras, an arborist, and the biologist, tried to persuade Seidell to open the gate, at one point saying that, if the tree remained standing, the company would cut the power. The tenants were unfazed. They have generators, backup generators, propane, and wood stoves. Also, Joseph West explained, “I have an attorney who says that the facts are that PG&E can be sued heavily for turning power off after leaving it this late to do anything about this tree. And we have an arborist who says it's not an immediate threat anyway. An independent arborist. Not one of the tame PG&E ones.” His brother Paul added that he believes, “that this is just their standard threat to have their way and get their tree service in here to cut the tree and to intimidate the residents.” Seidell said he would rather not have to use a generator, but that the sacrifice was worth it. Marienchild was not on the scene that day, though a field representative from Senator Mike McGuire's office did make an appearance. Both Marienchild and Bray had come to terms with what appeared to be the inevitable outcome. They both pointed out that eagles are making a comeback, and agreed that this pair might have a good chance of using the other nest site this year if the pine came down. And, though she would prefer the tree live out its natural life, Marienchild suggested that it might actually be better for the birds to get started refurbishing their alternate nest while they are still relatively strong and in good health. Bald eagles add to their nests every year, and it's not uncommon for the nests to get so big and heavy, they break their supporting limbs and fall to the ground. Nevertheless, by 1:00 on Friday afternoon, after several rounds of attempting to persuade the property owner, tenants, and supporters to open the gate, Contreras announced the company's determination. “We're not going to cut the tree today,” she declared. She confirmed that PG&E will also not apply for another emergency permit from U.S. Fish and Wildlife during nesting season, saying, “We've all determined that after the 15th, it just wouldn't be in anyone's best interests, because of nesting season.” McGuire weighed in on Friday night, issuing a statement saying, “We appreciate all sides coming together to resolve this situation. Rightfully so, there was a lot of concern among Potter Valley neighbors and community members. I'm glad the eagles can now start the nesting season in peace.” Seidell plans to use the reprieve to study the viability of the tree and look into what it would take to bury the line going past it. His work on this is not done, “but I'm so happy that we were able to stand as a community for this, ” he said, shortly after learning that the tree would remain, at least until the end of summer. “The birds can rest easy today in their nest…I'm pretty happy. I feel like crying.”

Hello Interactors,The first year of Interplace is nearly complete. I want to thank everyone who supported me through 2021 by subscribing, reading, listening, commenting, and sharing. I also want to thank the London Writers’ Salon and all faithful writers who showed up on Zoom with me every morning at 8:00 Pacific time. It brought companionship, accountability, and miles of smiles.Evolutionary biologists call interactors the individual traits that are so uniquely beneficial that they lead to natural selection. You are my interactors ­– special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. Thanks to you, that journey will continue through 2022. I’m keeping to the same structure, but may summon the courage to do occasional interviews as well.A year ago I kicked off Interplace. In the winter I wrote about human behavior, then moved to cartography in the spring, physical geography and the environment in the summer, and economic geography this fall. This is post number 50 and the last of 2021. Should Interplace 2021 be a book, it would be comprised of four sections, 50 chapters, nearly 740 pages, and over 130,000 words. To celebrate, I thought I’d share excepts from the most read posts from each of the four seasons. I also included titles and links to all 50 pieces at the end.But before I start, I thought I’d share a quote from the legendary leader the city of Seattle was named after, Chief Si'ahl (siʔaɫ). These words appeared in my first newsletter and continue to serve as an inspiration for Interplace today. They’re worth sharing again as we reflect and contemplate the constellation of interactions with people and place we all had throughout 2021 and imagine what’s ahead in 2022.“Humankind has not woven the web of life.We are but one thread within it.Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.All things are bound together.All things connect.”And now, excerpts from the top four most read Interplace posts of 2021.WINTER: BEHAVIORTake Your Head for a WalkYour brain makes maps on your behalf. But if you want a good one, take a hike. Your brain will love you for it, and your future self will too.It turns out walking and cognitive mapping are mutually dependent systems that are only optimized when done together. Driving or riding as a passenger are poor substitutes for enhancing our interactions with place. In the words of neuroscientist, Shane O’Mara,“The brain’s navigational and mapping and memory systems are so intertwined as to be almost one and the same. Walking to somewhere depends on the brain’s navigational system, and in turn walking provides a vast amount of ongoing information to the brain’s mapping and navigation systems. These are mutually enriching and reinforcing systems.”Our cities don’t make it easy to walk. A century of car culture has kept people from interacting with place. We can deduce from the research I’ve cited, that this is a bad thing. Not only do we have a biased and hazy image built in our minds of the environment in which we live, sitting in a car or a chair does not facilitate happy thoughts.We all succumb to what these two Iowa State researchers referred to as the ‘dread effect’. The thought of expending more energy than necessary can make one dread walking. It’s all too easy to tap a destination on Google maps, hit the ‘walking distance’ tab, shutter at the time and effort it would take to walk, and then grab the keys and drive there. But since Covid hit, I instead grab my headphones, take a step, and feel the cells in my brain come alive. I am interacting with place, with a smile on my face, as a cranial cellular symphony traces a map of the space.SPRING: CARTOGRAPHYYou Are What You MapHow triangles, topology, quadrangles, and cartography yield maps that can skew both messages and timeThe Renaissance accelerated the field of cartography. This was an era of discovering new knowledge, instrumentation, and the measuring and quantification of the natural world. Mercator’s projection stemmed from the invention of perspective; a word derived from the Latin word perspicere – “to see through.” European colonial maps were drawn mostly to navigate, control, and dominate land – and its human occupants. We have all been controlled by these maps in one way or other and we still are. Our knowledge of the world largely stems from the same perspective Mercator was offering up centuries ago. The entire world sees the world through the eyes of Western explorers, conquerors, and cartographers. That includes elements of maps as simple as place names.Take place names in Africa, as an example. The country occupied by France until 1960, Niger, comes from the Latin word for “shining black”. Its derogatory adaptation by the British added another ‘g’ making a word we now call the n-word. But niger was not the most popular Latin word used to describe people of Africa, it was an ancient Greek derivative; Aethiops – which means “burn face”. If you replace the ‘s’ at the end with the ‘a’ from the beginning, you see where the name Ethiopia comes from.There’s another Westernized place name just west of where the Dakota and Lakota people thrived called Gannett Peak. It’s the tallest mountain in the state of Wyoming and is part of the Bridger-Teton range. I’m sure you’ve heard of the more popular neighboring range, the Grand Teton’s; another notable (and sexist) French place name which means – ‘Big Boobs’. Gannett Peak is named after Henry Gannett – the father of American mapmaking.He was one of many geographers throughout the history of western colonization. Sure he was more influential than most, but they were all tasked with the same thing. Whether it was triangulating British territories in India, finessing French regions in Africa, or delineating Dutch districts in Brazil they were all measuring, mapping, and manipulating how others should see the world. It’s the paradox of mapmaking. No matter your intent, whatever line you draw will reflect the bias you bring.Mercator was biased by perspective because that’s what the culture of his time led him to do. Gannett mapped natural occurring features of the land because the mapping of minerals and other natural resources was in high demand. Iowa was named Iowa because that’s the word they knew. Even attempts to counter-map the dominance of cartesian colonial cartography can’t escape its own bias. Nobody can. But we live on a melting planet, so our days remain a few. If we’re going to survive this calamity, we must see that our thoughts are skewed. So the next you look at a map, consider its point of view. If we all do this together, we can invent a world anew.SUMMER: ENVIRONMENTCalamity in KlamathMukluks suffer over water for suckersCalifornia’s fires have claimed two million acres. Ten percent of the sequoia population was taken by a single fire; trees that have been on this planet for thousands of years – gone. It’s so dry in southern Oregon’s Klamath valley that wells are drying up. Homeowners are having to drive for their water. The county has ordered cisterns from as far away as Oklahoma, but are running up against shortages of rain barrels due to choked supply chains and increased demand.The Klamath valley has seen its fair share of emergencies, but every generation seems surprised. And sometimes apathetic. The first occupants of this area were the Klamath Tribes: the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin-Paiute people. They were sometimes referred to as mukluks or numu – the people. People, while differentiated by name, are still animals. And like our multi-legged, finned, scaled, and winged companions, we are an integral part of the environment. This was, and remains, a pan-Indigenous concept that deserves reminding. The Klamath Tribes embraced this belief in a shared communal slogan, “naanok ?ans naat sat’waYa naat ciiwapk diceew’a “We help each other; We will live good”By the 1950s the Klamath Tribes became one of the most prosperous tribes in America. In keeping with their traditional ways, they owned, managed, and sustained the largest stand of Ponderosa Pine in the West. Driven by a self-sufficient determinism millennia old, they were the only tribe to make enough money to pay the United States Government for the services their people utilized. But their success made them a target. The Klamath Tribes stood out. Having demonstrated just how profitable their land could be, it was time the United States took even more than they had a century prior.On August 1, 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 was issued by the United States Congress announcing the official federal policy of termination. The resolution called for the immediate termination of the Klamath Tribes. Included were the Flathead, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa, along with all tribes in the states of California, New York, Florida, and Texas.Between 1945 and 1960 Congress terminated more than one hundred tribes and small bands, 11,500 Indigenous people lost their native legal status, and over one million acres of land lost its trust status. Not a single tribe has improved economically since, while corporations have profited handsomely.I’m convinced that a combination of traditional knowledge and new science, technology, and invention will yield the best path forward for managing our global climatic conundrums. But we can’t just tech our way out of this. We’re going to have to change our food habits, reduce extractions, eliminate commercial and consumer waste, and overhaul the global food system.The dam has been cracked, but it needs to be broken wide open. All living organisms depend on water. They depend on us. Let’s listen to the ancient words of the Klamath people: When we help each other, we will all live well.FALL: ECONOMICSCryptocurrency, Euro-insurgency, and Economic UrgencyUntangling economic supremacy through heresy while offering an alternative destinyCryptocurrency was invented to circumvent the juggernaut that banks, governments, and credit card companies hold on the currency market. But the more it gets legitimized as an alternative currency, the more interested these traditional institutions become. For example, one form of cryptocurrency rising in popularity are stablecoins. It’s a digital currency that can be converted into ‘real’ money and is issued by the very institutions the inventors were hoping to circumvent. It seems there is no escaping Western economic dominance.The truth is, alternative currencies and economies exist all around us and have for centuries. For example, in a district of central London call Brixton, where David Bowie once lived, shops no longer accept the British Pound. Instead they take an alternative currency called the Brixton Pound that features a picture of Bowie on a paper bill that is as nicely designed and proportioned as Bowie himself.Many schemes like this exist outside of the Western world too – and they’re often not tied to the dominant currency system. For example, there’s a settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya called Bangladesh. Not to be confused with the country of Bangladesh. It was named after an early settler who unexpectedly packed up and moved to Bangladesh never to return. The area was hence called Bangladesh. It’s a poor informal settlement made of self-made homes and little to no infrastructure, yet is home to over 20,000 people. They work at nearby industries at the fringe of Nairobi doing odd jobs regularly paid workers refuse to do.Many are well educated, but work is intermittent and there are more qualified workers than there are jobs. It leads to extreme poverty, apathy, and strife. One local teacher in the Peace Corps, Will Ruddick, became frustrated that he was graduating kids with no where to go. He said many of whom were more skilled academically than many he’d witnessed at Stanford. Ruddick happens to also have a PhD in econophysics – a branch of economics that draws inspiration from the field of physics. He began wondering how he could devise a way for residents in areas like Bangladesh to earn consistent wages doing meaningful work in their community. He wanted ways for them to create and share in their abundance, take charge of their own livelihoods, and build a self-sustaining economic future.American economic geography professor, Eric Sheppard, from UCLA offers that because Western style capitalism relies on “uneven and asymmetric connectivities” that end up “driving uneven geographical development”, we’ve arrived at a place where the dominant global economic scheme of globalization has failed “at scales ranging from the globe to the neighbourhood.”Instead of propagating or placating a dominant global economy, what if we acknowledge, embrace, fertilize, understand, celebrate, and experience alternative economies embedded within or on the fringe of the establishment, like those Ruddick has pioneered. After all, these are economies that have been forged through the interaction of people and place whose shared histories have, as Sheppard says, “found them encountering, rather than propagating, Capitalist economic development.”Following is an index of all the pieces I’ve written over the last year. Thanks, again, for the support. I’ll see you all next week and next year. FULL LIST OF INTERPLACE 2021WINTER: BEHAVIORTHE INTERACTION OF PEOPLE AND PLACE My First Subscribers Raccoons Destroyed My LawnWhat the World Needs Now is LoveThe Lone Star Is in a Frozen StateWASPs and Weeds Gone WildA Computer on Every Desk and a Car in Every GarageBill and Brad's Excellent AdventureTake Your Head for a WalkSPRING: CARTOGRAPHYI'd Rather Be Spinning LogosA Groma from Rome Finds a New HomeA Nation SquaredMiami Priced, Ohio DicedGuns, God, and GoldMake Your Own Survey in Under a DayYou Are What You MapThe U.S. Census: Mapping a Sense of UsBoomtown MapsWinning Over the Windy City with WatercolorsMaps as Logos; Atlases that ImposeSpring 2021 Cartography ReviewCul-de-sacs, Caucasians, and the Kansas Garden CitySUMMER: ENVIRONMENTThe Obscene ManA New Chapter to Behold as the Network of Life UnfoldsRuckelshaus and Hickel Get us Out of a PickleBig Science Meets Big Ecology under the Big SkyMuggy Conditions, Buggy Coalitions, and Collegiate AmbitionsNature, Nurture, Math, Art and VirtueAn Olympic Sized MetabolismAn Ancestor's GardenSolar Powered Imperialist AddictionsCharlie Watts and the Strange AttractorCalamity in KlamathDitches, Wells, and Dams. Riches, Cartels, and Scams.Lay Dung; Feng ShuiFALL: ECONOMICSThe Wealth of GenerationsSpace Cadets and the Earthy CrunchiesOnly a Nobody Walks in L.A.From a Shoe Lust Hit, to 'Just Do It'.Harder, Better, Faster, StrongerHitler and the Capitalist's FixSupply Chain Pains as China GainsBond, Bezos, Gates, and MuskBlack Friday and the Christmas Creep: Part 1Black Friday and the Christmas Creep: Part 2The ‘One Click Buy’ Empire Needs an UmpireHoops, Groups, and Feedback LoopsCryptocurrency, Euro-insurgency, and Economic UrgencyWINTER: BEHAVIOROh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, Your Story Has Many Branches Subscribe at interplace.io

 Warning! About Pine Tea:"Most pine trees can be used for pine needle tea, but not all. There are some that are poisonous or toxic. Those you want to avoid include Lodgepole Pine, Monterey Pine, Ponderosa Pine, Norfolk Pine (Australian Pine), Loblolly Pine, Common Juniper, and although not a pine, Yew." -www.SurvivalResources.comTry using an app like vTree to make a positive ID."https://www.lauradenhertog.com/blog/164467/how-to-make-evergreen-tea-and-instantly-improve-your-healthTo eyeball the beautiful art of the tea-swilling creatives I interviewed for this episode check out the blog post here.Feeling extra charming?  Keep me company on my mad research journeys and become a subscriber here. You'll receive my Writing Academy for Heart-Centered Artists series,  as my thank you.Dreamt of writing a book this year and need help from tea? I got you. Check out this super popular Charmed Studio post: Outline Your Book in 7 Mornings, With 7 Cups of Delicious Tea: Discover the Tea Method.From the top tea head book list:1. The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo (O'Keeffe's favorite.)3. Tea for Three: The First Three Tea Shop Mysteries (in the incredibly popular mystery series) by Laura Childs6. Herbal Tea Gardens: 22 Plans for Your Enjoyment and Well-Being by Marietta Marshall MarcinMy popular O'Keeffe the Thief Podcast: What Georgia Stole and WhyMeditations For Artists: Reduce Your Fear and Ignite Your CreativityRay Bradbury's Magic Cabinet: Why Clutter Clearing is Overrated for ArtistsFor a transcript go here: https://thecharmedstudio.com/how-tea-helps-artists-and-writers/Tea photo Thanks to photographer Denys Gromov.

From the Ponderosa Pine-covered mountains in the Great Basin to the arid Mojave Desert and all the sagebrush and grass in between, Nevada's ecosystems are diverse and fire behaves differently across these regions, both historically and today. The guests on the latest episode of the Living With Fire Podcast “Regime Change: History of fire ecology in Nevada,” explain why fire is an important process in Nevada, how scientists study fire, and why understanding the history of fire can give scientists and land managers useful clues to help them manage landscapes today.Guests:Alexandra Urza, research ecologist with the U.S. Forest ServiceStanley G. Kitchen, research botanist with the U.S. Forest ServiceMatthew Brooks, supervisory research ecologist with the Western Ecological Research Center

Ponderosa Pine, a favorite among mill shops.

Hello Interactors,What a wild water filled week. From too much water coming too fast to not enough coming too slow, the United States is bearing witness to the schizophrenic behavior of an angry imbalanced ecosystem. Our mother earth isn’t the only one with schizophrenia. The United States, and other eco-wrecking countries, can’t decide if Indigenous people — the historical stewards of this planet — should be silenced and contained or begrudgingly ordained as the knowledge keepers and leaders of how best please our angry mother earth.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…IN COMING It was eight o’clock on a sunny morning when Kelly Minty Morris received a notification on her phone that read “extreme alert”. A missile was headed straight for her. This must be some mistake, she thought to herself. This was something that she didn’t think of having to deal with in her country. She and her husband were in Hawaii where he was about to compete in a 100 mile trail running endurance race called the HURT100. Missiles can bring a whole new level of hurt; but, as she looked around, to her surprise, nobody was scrambling or panicking. Not even herself. They all believed it must be some kind of blunder.There is no mistaking that this summer has had its fair share of climate scares. The Northeast have had nothing but rain all summer. Just this week New York’s Central Park was dowsed with six inches of rain in as many hours. A once in a 500 year event. The Northeast continues to be battered by wind and rain killing over a dozen people in its path. It’s the fallout of hurricane Ida, the fifth most severe hurricane on record, that slammed Louisiana’s coast earlier in the week but was barely phased by its landfall. Now a new hurricane is brewing as climatologists predict a 60% chance that more extreme hurricanes will follow this year. Meanwhile, water in the west is wanting. California’s fires have claimed two million acres. Ten percent of the sequoia population was taken by a single fire; trees that have been on this planet for thousands of years – gone. It’s so dry in southern Oregon’s Klamath valley that wells are drying up. Homeowners are having to drive for their water. The county has ordered cisterns from as far away as Oklahoma, but are running up against shortages of rain barrels due to choked supply chains and increased demand.Kelly Minty Morris sat for a half an hour, there in Hawaii, fretting. But she was more concerned with the lackadaisical response to an incoming ballistic missile than the actual damage it may inflict. “It really did feel surreal,” she said. “I wasn’t panicking, I wasn’t anxious, I wasn’t upset, my brain kept telling me, ‘This can’t be real, this can’t be real.’” And then it happened. Another text buzzed her phone. The alert was a mistake. A state employee had pushed the wrong button. I suspect that’s a former state employee.Kelly left that incident reflecting on the collective apathy she witnessed. She began to wonder what it would take to get people to actually act in the face of an emergency. Upon her return home to Oregon, she vowed as a Klamath County Commissioner to put steps in place that encourage people in her area to respond appropriately to an emergency. She said, “You don’t want to be waiting for an actual emergency to then figure out what you should have done.” KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MANThe Klamath valley has seen its fair share of emergencies, but every generation seems surprised. And sometimes apathetic. The first occupants of this area were the Klamath Tribes: the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin-Paiute people. They were sometimes referred to as mukluks or numu – the people. People, while differentiated by name, are still animals. And like our multi-legged, finned, scaled, and winged companions, we are an integral part of the environment. This was, and remains, a pan-Indigenous concept that deserves reminding. The Klamath Tribes embraced this belief in a shared communal slogan, “naanok ?ans naat sat’waYa naat ciiwapk diceew’a “We help each other; We will live good”These people did live well. For thousands of years area bands and tribes — bound by loyalty and family — fished, hunted, farmed, and ranched the land in a perpetual act of reciprocity that respected and honored the land and its occupants. From the marshy banks of Oregon’s Klamath Lake and up the Sprague Valley, south along the rivers feeding California’s Lower Klamath Lake, across the lava beds and all the way down to Shasta Mountain, the Klamath tribes prided themselves on their industriousness.But by the 1800s, the word industrious took on a different tenor. The industrialist fueled American imperialism swaggered on to the scene with their own slogan: No thanks, we’ll help ourselves; so that we will live good. In 1826 The Hudson Bay Company trappers invaded Klamath territories and conflicts ensued. By 1838, the company had made maps of the region making it easier for John C. Frémont to lead an expedition into the area in 1843 as part of the country’s doctrine of Manifest Destiny. If you’ve even been to California, you probably have seen Fremont’s name. In addition to the city of Fremont in northern California, there are dozens of streets and places that bear his name. He was a civil war general; one of four appointed by Abraham Lincoln. He was also the first nominee to run for presidential office by the Republican party. But he was decommissioned by the military in 1856 for his ‘unorthodox ways’. Ten years prior, on April 6, 1846, Fremont massacred between 120-200 Indigenous people on the Sacramento River. A month later, May 12, 1846, led by his trusty scout Kit Carson, they raided a Klamath village killing over fourteen people. Kit Carson had been killing and scalping Indigenous people from Colorado to California for nearly twenty years by this point. His first was when he was nineteen years old in 1828. After two decades of wars waged against the Klamath Tribes by the United States, they agreed to a treaty in 1864. In exchange for the 22 million acres these people had cared for over thousands of years and for hundreds of generations, the United States granted them the right to continue to hunt, fish, and gather within a designated 1.2 million acre reservation. Less than one tenth of their land. The treaty also included rights to the water. Article 6 of the treaty read:“To each head of a family shall be assigned and granted a tract of not less than forty nor more than one hundred and twenty acres, according to the number of persons in such family; and to each single man above the age of twenty-one years a tract not exceeding forty acres.” The treaty was ratified in 1870. With a signature at the bottom of a string of legalese I can barely understand, these people lost nearly 99 percent of their land and ancestral heritage. The dispossession created tension between the Klamath and Modoc leading to the Modoc War between 1872-73. The Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin people mostly remained loyal to one another; and they remained industrious. As part of the treaty, the United States agreed to provide services and support aimed at assimilating these native people into Western culture and livelihoods. Article 5 of the treaty states:“The United States further engage to furnish and pay for the services and subsistence, for the term of fifteen years, of one superintendent of farming operations, one farmer, one blacksmith, one sawyer, one carpenter, and one wagon and plough maker, and for the term of twenty years of one physician, one miller, and two school-teachers.”Elders encouraged young people to learn the new ways of living and farming; including farming timber. By 1870 they constructed a lumber mill and began selling timber back to settlers. They even sold lumber to the United States to build Fort Klamath – a U.S. military outpost used to deter attacks from Indigenous people on encroaching settlers.KILL THE TRIBES, STEAL THEIR MONEY By the 1950s the Klamath Tribes became one of the most prosperous tribes in America. In keeping with their traditional ways, they owned, managed, and sustained the largest stand of Ponderosa Pine in the West. Driven by a self-sufficient determinism millennia old, they were the only tribe to make enough money to pay the United States Government for the services their people utilized.  But their success made them a target. The 1950s marked the beginning of the Cold War as communist paranoia swept through the United States. The reservation system the government had thrust upon Indigenous people was suddenly deemed communist. These people, and their alien ways, were seen as anti-American. Worse yet, most tribes were dependent on a central government – clear evidence of communism. This is the same central government that stole their land, attempted genocide, and forced the remaining survivors onto reservations. America was also building highways at this time and needed land; they were selling cars and needed oil; they were building atomic bombs and needed uranium; and they needed money to fund wartime debt and nation building of countries we had destroyed or help to destroy in two World Wars. The United States surveyed the country in search of valuable land and resources and the reservations and treaties they had invented were getting in the way. They needed that land to tax, sell, and exploit for natural resources and money. In the words of former Cheyenne Senator from Colorado, Ben Nighthorse Campbell:“In Washington’s infinite wisdom, it was decided that tribes should no longer be tribes, never mind that they had been tribes for thousands of years.”In 1952 the House of Representatives issued Joint Resolution 698 which called for a list of tribes to be terminated. The focus was first on tribes that had demonstrated self-sufficiency, had been adequately acculturated, and were willing to accept the termination of federal assistance. The Klamath Tribes stood out. Having demonstrated just how profitable their land could be, it was time the United States took even more than they had a century prior. On August 1, 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 was issued by the United States Congress announcing the official federal policy of termination. The resolution called for the immediate termination of the Klamath Tribes. Included were the Flathead, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa, along with all tribes in the states of California, New York, Florida, and Texas.Between 1945 and 1960 Congress terminated more than one hundred tribes and small bands, 11,500 Indigenous people lost their native legal status, and over one million acres of land lost its trust status. Not a single tribe has improved economically since, while corporations have profited handsomely. In 1970, President Richard Nixon – an unlikely preacher of morality and legality – issued this statement of repudiation to Congress:“Because termination is morally and legally unacceptable, because it produces bad practical results, and because the mere threat of termination tends to discourage greater self-sufficiency among Indian groups, I am asking the Congress to pass a new Concurrent Resolution which would expressly renounce, repudiate and repeal the termination policy as expressed in House Concurrent Resolution 108 of the 83rd Congress.”Since the end of termination, as of 2013, “78 of the 113 terminated tribes have been recognized again by the United States government and 35 now have casinos; 24 of these tribes are now considered extinct; 10 have state recognition but not federal recognition; and 31 are without land. GAMBLING OUR EXISTENCEIn 1974, a Federal Court ruled the right of the Klamath Tribes to their Treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather. They also ordered that the tribe be consulted on land management matters that may infringe on their Treaty rights. In 1986 the Reagan administration restored their Federal recognition, but did not return their land. They were then asked to come up with a plan for how to remain self-sufficient if they were to remain in the area. They were determined to honor their commitment to their ancestors who, like them, cared for the land they lived on for thousands of years. And already demonstrating their ability to coexist with colonial settlers, they also wanted to adhere to their belief, “We help each other; We will live good.” So they proposed building a casino. In 1997, 45 years after termination, and the Reagan administration’s approval allowing tribal casinos, they opened the doors to the Kla-Mo-Ya Casino. While casinos indeed infuse money and resources into challenged tribal communities, there’s also evidence casinos lead to gambling addictions – especially among economically vulnerable residents – including aging tribal elders.The Klamath Tribes water rights are front and center as wells run dry in the Klamath River basin. For millennia, people of the Klamath Tribes celebrated the return of fish in the spring after long harsh winters had drained their food supplies. Two of the most prominent species they welcomed home were the c’waam and koptu – also known as Lost River and suckers. Since 1991, the number of juvenile c’waam has all but vanished. In recent years, Klamath tribal biologists have begun a program to rebuild their populations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started their own program in 2018. But it may be too late. Over 75% of the fish habitat is lost. Dams have reduced their territory, runoff from agricultural chemicals have polluted the waters, and irrigation systems have drained the marshes they need to survive. The same marshes the Klamath people had cared for and depended on for generations – alongside their finned friends. The federal government has been working with the tribe to rehabilitate the marshes by pulling water from the lake. But with extreme drought conditions, there’s little water to go around.As residents and ranchers see their wells and irrigation pipes dry up, they’re calling on the government to release more water from the lake. But both the state of Oregon and the U.S. Federal Government have determined the Klamath Tribe has superior rights to the water. The last time conflict over water rose to this level was back in 2001. That was when three White men drove through a local town firing 12-gauge shotguns yelling, “SUCKER LOVERS.” The local sheriff called it an act of terrorism. Surely Klamath County Commissioner, Kelly Minty Morris, has prepared her community for this “extreme alert." I’m afraid not. Once again, Kelley has been taken off guard echoing the same words she used just three years prior when dealing with the thought of an airborne missile attack. “This is something that you don't really think of having to deal with in a country like ours," said Klamath County Commissioner Kelley Minty Morris. "It's unimaginable to me even though it's going on right in my community." Having to drive for water is not something people like Kelley are accustom to, but the descendants of this land’s caretakers have been doing it for hundreds of years. Just ask residents of America’s largest nation within our nation, the Navajo Nation. To combat the spread of Covid-19 that ravished this area, hand washing stations were installed that people had to drive or walk to just to wash their hands.It can take two hours to drive to the nearest voting box in Navajo Nation. But that didn’t keep the U.S. Supreme Court from recently upholding voting rights legislation in Arizona that will make it even harder for these people to cast a vote for change. The judges 6-3 vote claimed a two hour drive doesn’t exceed the “usual burdens of voting.” That’s what systemic racism looks like.I don’t mean to diminish the suffering of people in Klamath County, including Commissioner Morris. Human suffering knows no history, social standing, or ethnicity. After all, some of the ranchers and residents who need the water are also Klamath Tribal members. Water will become increasing scarce in the arid West. It’s time we stop pretending we can build more housing developments, plant more lawns, water thirsty crops, feed more cattle, frack more gas, green more greens, sprinkle more sprinklers, or build more dams. It’s clear the climate will change faster than our behavior, but we don’t have time. The recent IPCC report highlights water as a pressing global issue. It warns that in addition to increased rainfall like we’ve seen in parts of the United States recently, droughts will also increase in some regions, fire weather will become more frequent, and oceans, lakes, rivers, and ponds will become warmer and more acidic. Since 1991, the Stockholm International Water Institute has been studying water governance, transboundary water management, water and climate change, the water-energy-food nexus, and water economics around the world. They remind us that by 2050, our plant could be home to 10 billion people. Even as populations grow, the amount of freshwater remains constant. Here are five ways they recommend we avert a global water crisis:VALUE WATERIf we increase the value of water, we will reduce use and pollution. All sectors of society must learn to manage water in a way that strengthens the water cycle.SHARE WATERCompetition over water will only increase, so we need to manage it together. The better prepared we are for erratic rainfall, droughts, and floods the better we can handle the fallout.TRANSFORM AGRICULTUREAgriculture must be massively transformed. To avoid mass hunger from degraded lands, we need to make freshwater available for alternative uses – food production practices today account for 70 per cent of freshwater withdrawals. Those practices are the main drivers of water pollution and global warming. RESTORE ECOSYSTEMSA mass extinction of species, like the threatened c’waam, koptu, and salmon, could threaten human existence. We depend on healthy ecosystems for food, water, and livelihoods. By protecting and restoring ecosystems we can limit climate change, stop the loss of biodiversity, and improve water security. BUILD RESILIENCEDroughts, heat waves, floods, and rainstorms are expected to become more frequent and more severe. All sectors of society need to redesign for resilience. Communities that protect their local watersheds and manage forests in a way that improves groundwater recharge tackle several of the world’s greatest challenges simultaneously. It’s taken a team of Western educated PhDs and three hundred years of ‘enlightenment’ to arrive at five things the Indigenous populations around the world have known for thousands of years. We chose, and continue to choose, to silence them. But the tide is turning. I’m convinced, as these Swedes are, that a combination of traditional knowledge and new science, technology, and invention will yield the best path forward for managing our global climatic conundrums. But we can’t just tech our way out of this. We’re going to have to change our food habits, reduce extractions, eliminate commercial and consumer waste, and overhaul the global food system. The dam has been cracked, but it needs to be broken wide open. All living organisms depend on water. They depend on us. Let’s listen to the ancient words of the Klamath people: When we help each other, we will all live well. Expanding on the words of Kelley Minty Morris: we don’t want to be waiting for the edge of human extinction to then figure out what we should have done to avoid it. Subscribe at interplace.io

 Welcome to Montrose Fresh, from The Montrose Daily Press. It's FridayAugust 20th and we're here with local news, events, announcements, jobs, and more that matter to us here in Western Colorado.    Today - Colorado 135 was closed overnight between Wednesday and early Thursday while law enforcement agencies negotiated the surrender of a man suspected of pointing a gun at a Gunnison County Sheriff's Office deputy.   Today's episode is brought to you by Elevate Internet. Whether it's for your home or your business they offer the best speeds at the best price. Right now, if you refer a friend you can get $25 off! Give them a call for more information at 844-386-8744 or visit them at www.elevateinternet.com.   Now, our feature story…   Colorado 135 was closed overnight between Wednesday and early Thursday while law enforcement agencies negotiated the surrender of a man suspected of pointing a gun at a Gunnison County Sheriff's Office deputy.   Brad Fortener was eventually detained on suspicion of first-degree assault, menacing and prohibited use of a weapon. Formal charges are pending and case documents and attorney information were not immediately available.   Sheriff John Gallowich said that shortly after 5 p.m. on Wednesday, deputies were informed that a man had threatened to kill “potheads”. When a deputy arrived, the man could be seen in his home, holding what appeared to be a handgun.   Gallowich alleged the suspect pointed the weapon at the deputy, who took cover and summoned help.   Other GCSO deputies arrived, securing the area with assistance from Mt. Crested Butte Police Department, Colorado State Patrol and the Gunnison Police Department K-9 unit.   For safety reasons, the highway was closed at about 6 p.m. Fortener surrendered shortly after 12 a.m. on Thursday and the highway reopened about 30 minutes after that.   To find out more about this story visit us at montrosepress.com.     Now, some local history. This week's local history is brought to you by England Fence. England Fence is family owned and operated, and they're ready to help you build your dream fence, archway, gate, or deck. Give them a call at 970-249-4430, or head over to their website englandfence.com.   Did you know that Loghill Village borders Ridgway State Park and Eldredge, though there is no direct road access between the two? The nearest town is actually Ridgway which can be seen from its position on the mesa.   The town is covered in large Ponderosa Pine trees, piñons and junipers. Wildlife is abundant with a fairly large population of Mule Deer, Elk, Bobcats, Lynxes, Black Bears, wild turkeys and an occasional sighting of mountain lions. Almost 1,000 feet higher than Ridgway, the types and sizes of flora vary greatly. For example, Aspen trees are seen here and there on the mesa, as opposed to the lower Ridgway valley where they are scarce.   -   Before we go, a quick announcement on an upcoming vaccine clinic...   Montrose County School District and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment are collaborating to host a COVID vaccination clinic at Montrose High School on Wednesday, September 1 from 3 to 6 p.m.   The school district is focused on pre-registering students and parents with a goal of 100. Parents will need to provide consent for children under the age of 18.   The CDPHE is funding and operating the clinic, which will be distributing the two-dose Pfizer vaccine. Another event is scheduled four weeks later for the second dose.   And while many employers — including Walmart, the Pentagon and Aurora Public Schools — have already mandated vaccines for some workers, the Montrose district is not planning to require the vaccine for students and employees.   Right now, the vaccination rate in Montrose County is lagging behind the statewide average, with only 46% of residents 12 and older fully vaccinated. Just over half have received at least one dose. To learn more visit us at montrosepress.com -   That's all for today, thank you for listening! For more information on any of these stories visit us at montrosepress.com.   And don't forget to check out our sponsor, Elevate Internet. Visit them at elevateinternet.com to learn more.   For more than 137 years, The Montrose Daily Press has been dedicated to shining a light on all the issues that matter to our community. Go to montrosepress.com to subscribe for just $1.99 per week for our digital edition. You'll get unlimited access to every story, feature, and special section. Thank you and remember to tune in again next time on montrosepress.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. Support the show: https://www.montrosepress.com/site/forms/subscription_services/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week we head out west and marvel at the orange-clad giants of the pine world, the ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa). We dive into one of the most interesting weather phenomena in the world, the rain shadow effect, and chat about how seemingly unrelated patterns of geology and weather change who grows where. Then, you guessed it, we ruminate on the nature of sasquatch. Completely Arbortrary is produced by Alex Crowson and Casey Clapp Production Consultant - Oliviah Franke Artwork - Jillian Barthold Music - The Mini Vandals Find additional reading at completelyarbortrary.com Follow our Instagram @arbortrarypod --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/completely-arbortrary/support

Episode 14:  A man named Rufus catches onto a psychopath's hints of atrocities and acts in a heroic manner. The story is preceded by a verbal book report that Tim gives without the listener's consent. It is Tim's podcast and he shall do as he pleases, including record boring episodes that few will enjoy. Tim got the idea for this story after reading 3/4 of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. In the first part of the episode, Tim discusses why this and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov are the two novels he has recently quit near their culmination. He also discusses Donald Trump's appearance in American Psycho, and why Patrick Bateman might hold our intellectually inquisitive leader in such high regard.~Albert sat in the restaurant booth waiting for the dish from his appetizer to be taken away and for his main course to be brought. Not that he would eat much of it anyway. It would be absurd to spend 3,000 dollars on a suit, a suit from an expensive brand mind you, just to gain a gut that would make said suit not fit right. Albert picked a piece of lint off of his expensive suit, the jacket and pants from Tommy Mountaintigger and the vest by Kanye Vest, and flicked the lint onto the floor. His shoes were sewn from the skin of a tiger's bladder, from the designer, Franz Plantzienstein, also known as Poochi.Sharing the table with Albert were two other men also in suits from similarly expensive brands. One was wearing a combo by Ralphie Lauren, and the other was sporting a mish mash of pieces from Douglas Fur, Ponderosa Pine, with shoes by a plain old Christmas tree. These two men sat across the table from Albert. Albert looked at them through his expensive pair of non prescription glasses, from the designer Tina is Cray, and nodded to himself when he felt assured that his suit was indeed the most expensive of the three. ~For other resources, visit timdrugan.com.

in the Whitter Narrows Recreation Area --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pause-music/message

Today we celebrate one of Alabama's first botanists and the poet who went by the pseudonym AE. We'll also learn about Wood Expert and xylotomist ("xy·lot·o·mist") who solved the crime of the century. We celebrate one of the 20th century's leading landscape architects. We also celebrate the Dog Days of summer through poetry. We Grow That Garden Library™ with a book about plant passion and inspiration in order to "Cultivate Green Space in Your Home and Heart." And then we'll wrap things up with the story of a touching 2014 botanical art installation around the Tower of London. But first, let's catch up on some Greetings from Gardeners around the world and today's curated news.   Subscribe Apple|Google|Spotify|Stitcher|iHeart   Gardener Greetings To participate in the Gardener Greetings segment, send your garden pics, stories, birthday wishes and so forth to Jennifer@theDailyGardener.org And, to listen to the show while you're at home, just ask Alexa or Google to play The Daily Gardener Podcast. It's that easy.   Curated News New National Wildflower Network Opens Major Routes Across UK for Pollinating Insects | The Independent "A national network of linked wildflower highways has been launched this week to provide more habitat for the UK's vital pollinating insects, including bees, butterflies, hoverflies, and moths. The newly completed B-Lines network for England has been launched by conservation charity Buglife with support from Defra. The scheme will create a vast interconnected web of potential and existing wildflower habitats across the whole country. Catherine Jones, pollinator officer at Buglife, said: "A complete England B-Lines network is a real landmark step in our mission to reverse insect declines and lend a helping hand to our struggling pollinators. We hope that organizations and people across England will help with our shared endeavor to create thousands of hectares of new pollinator-friendly wildflower habitats along the B-Lines." Buglife is asking people to grow more flowers, shrubs, and trees, let gardens grow wild and to mow grass less frequently, not to disturb insects, and to try not to use pesticides. Almost 17,000 tonnes of pesticides are sprayed across the British countryside each year. The country has lost 97 percent of its wildflower meadows since the 1930s and 87 percent of its wetlands. Both of these habitats support a huge array of wildlife."   Alright, that's it for today's gardening news. Now, if you'd like to check out my curated news articles and blog posts for yourself, you're in luck, because I share all of it with the Listener Community in the Free Facebook Group - The Daily Gardener Community. There's no need to take notes or search for links - the next time you're on Facebook, search for Daily Gardener Community and request to join. I'd love to meet you in the group.   Important Events   1901   Today is the anniversary of the death of botanist Charles Theodore Mohr. Although he was born in Germany and educated in Stuttgart, Charles became one of Alabama's first botanists. He emigrated to the United States in 1848. A trained pharmacist, Charles traveled the world before settling in Alabama, and he especially enjoyed collecting plant specimens in Surinam. Charles's travel log shows that he even participated in the California gold rush and lived Mexico, Indiana, and Kentucky before settling in Alabama. In 1857, Charles started Chas. Mohr & Son Pharmacists and Chemists in Mobile, Alabama. Charles spent his entire life collecting and organizing his specimens. In fact, by the time his book on the plants of Alabama was published, Charles was seventy-seven years old. After Charles died, his herbarium specimens were donated to the University of Alabama Herbarium (15,000 specimens) and the United States National Herbarium (18,000 specimens).   1935   Today is the anniversary of the death of the poet George William Russell, who went by the pseudonym AE. Russell attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. There he met a lifelong friend - the poet William Butler Yeats. Russell became the editor of The Irish Homestead. His famous quotes include the following: "Our hearts were drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see." "You cannot evoke great spirits and eat plums at the same time."   1967   Today is the anniversary of the death of Wood Expert and xylotomist Arthur Koehler. Xylotomy is preparing little pieces of wood and then examining them under a microscope or microtome. Koehler worked as a chief wood technologist at the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. Koehler's expertise led him to become one of the very first forensic botanists. When the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in 1932, a homemade ladder was used to access the nursery. Koehler, along with 38,000 others, sent letters to the Lindbergh's offering prayers and assistance. Yet Koehler's expertise would become the linchpin to convicting the man accused of the crime, making Koehler one of the world's first official forensic botanists. Forensic botany is simply using plants to help solve crimes. Three months after the crime was committed, samples of the ladder were sent to Koehler. Koehler studied the pieces through his microscope discovered that four different kinds of wood were used to make the ladder—Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine, Birch, and North Carolina pine. In an interview with the Saturday Evening Post, Koehler was quoted saying, "I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but I have specialized in the study of wood. Just as a doctor who devotes himself to stomachs or tonsils … so I, a forester, have done with wood." A year later, Koehler was invited to see the ladder in person, and that in-person visit was revealing. Koehler discovered the ladder was handmade. He measured each piece to the nose, getting exact measurements. He understood how each piece was cut, how the pieces would have fit into a car, and then assembled at the Lindbergh home. Incredibly, Koehler was able to determine the origin of the piece of North Carolina pine used to build the ladder - it was sold in the Bronx. Ransom notes from the case lead police to hone in on the same area. Koehler was convinced the suspect would have the woodworking tools required to build the ladder. In the Lindbergh case, the wood from the ladder helped identify a carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann. When the police arrested Hauptmann, they not only found $14,000 of ransom money but the evidence Koehler could link to the ladder: the saws used to make the cuts, the particular nails used to build the ladder and a missing floorboard from Hauptmann's attic that was clearly used in the construction of the 16th rail of the ladder. In fact, when the rail was removed, it slipped perfectly back into place in Hauptmann's attic - right down to the nail holes and nails on the board. Koehler estimated the chances of someone else supplying the lumber for the ladder to be one in ten quadrillions. Koehler's knowledge and testimony during the trial were vital to Hauptmann's capture and conviction. The "Crime of the Century" solved by carefully studying the only witness - a "wooden witness." It was Arthur Koehler who said, "In all of the years of my work, I have been consumed with the absolute reliability of the testimony of trees. They carry in themselves the record of their history. They show with absolute fidelity the progress of the years, storms, drought, floods, injuries, and any human touch. A tree never lies."     1996   Today is the anniversary of the death of one of the 20th century's leading landscape architects, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe. Jellicoe was multi-talented, but his true passion was landscape and garden design, which he described as "the mother of all arts." He was a founder member of the Landscape Institute. Over his 70-year career, Jellicoe designed more than 100 landscapes around the world. Jellicoe designed the John F Kennedy memorial site by the River Thames in Berkshire. Jellicoe's final and most ambitious project was the Moody Gardens in Galveston, Texas. Jellicoe imagined a design where visitors could walk through the history of the landscape, from the Garden of Eden and the gardens of ancient Egypt to a design inspired by Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain (1924). As the Moody Garden website acknowledges, "It was the culminating work of his design career but has not, as yet, been implemented. We live in hope." Jellicoe's favorite garden was the gardens he designed in Hemel Hempstead. Jellicoe designed the Hemel Hempstead Water Gardens to improve the quality of life for the townspeople. Jellicoe designed a canal with dams and little bridges to take visitors from the town parking lot to shopping. Jellicoe designed the canal after seeing one of Paul Klee's paintings of a serpent. Jellicoe said, "The lake is the head, and the canal is the body," wrote Jellicoe in his book Studies in Landscape Design. "The eye is the fountain; the mouth is where the water passes over the weir. The formal and partly classical flower gardens are like a howdah strapped to its back. In short, the beast is harnessed, docile, and in the service of man."   Unearthed Words Here are some words about the Dog Days of summer - which officially started on July 3 and runs through August 11.   How hushed and still are earth and air, How languid 'neath the sun's fierce ray - Drooping and faint - the flowerets fair, On this hot, sultry, summer day. — Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon ("Lew-Pro-awn", Canadian writer and poet, An Afternoon in July   Cool in the very furnace of July The water-meadows lie; The green stalks of their grasses and their flowers They still refresh at fountains, never dry. — John Drinkwater, British poet and dramatist   Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world. — Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic, and writer   A ladder sticking up at the open window, The top of an old ladder; And all of Summer is there. Great waves and tufts of wistaria surge across the window, And a thin, belated blossom. Jerks up and down in the sunlight; Purple translucence against the blue sky. "Tie back this branch," I say, But my hands are sticky with leaves, And my nostrils widen to the smell of crushed green. The ladder moves uneasily at the open window, And I call to the man beneath, "Tie back that branch." There is a ladder leaning against the window-sill, And a mutter of thunder in the air. — Amy Lowell, American poet, Dog Days   "Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it." — Russel Baker, American journalist and satirist     Grow That Garden Library How to Make a Plant Love You by Summer Rayne Oakes This book came out in July of 2019, and the subtitle is Cultivate Green Space in Your Home and Heart. Michael Brune, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, said, "I don't care what color your thumbs are —Summer Rayne Oakes will not only inspire you to connect with nature by taking care of plants but open your eyes to how even the humblest of them take care of us." Summer keeps over 500 species of live houseplants in her Brooklyn apartment. She's an environmental scientist, an entrepreneur, and (according to a New York Times profile) the icon of wellness-minded millennials who want to bring nature indoors. The book is 208 pages of plant passion and inspiration. It covers both plant styling and care. You can get a copy of How to Make a Plant Love You by Summer Rayne Oakes and support the show, using the Amazon Link in today's Show Notes for around $15.   Today's Botanic Spark 2014   The outdoor public art piece called Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red was installed in the moat around the Tower of London. The work commemorated the centenary of the outbreak of World War I and was made up of 888,246 ceramic red poppies, one for each British or Colonial serviceman killed in the War. The title, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, refers to the first line of a poem by an unknown soldier in World War I. For this magnificent piece fo public art, Paul Cummins designed the ceramic poppies, and Tom Piper handled the conceptual design. Almost one million of Paul's ceramic red poppies appeared to burst forth from the Tower and then flow across the moat. Poppies seeped out of the Weeping Window and cascaded down a wall. Almost 20,000 volunteers helped with the installation. And, although it was started on this day in 2014, it was not completed until November 11 of that same year.

I realize you are very excited to get going in your own garden. But don't forget to schedule some time this spring to visit other gardens. The gardens of friends, neighbors, or public gardens can provide you with inspiration and teach you something new - even when you didn't think you'd learn anything. #BTW This entire week, April 27-May 4, is Historic Garden Week at Monticello ("MontiCHELLo”) in Virginia . If you visit today, April 30, you can learn more about their flower and vegetable gardens.      Brevities   It's National Raisin Day.  California is the biggest supplier of the sun-dried grapes. The California Associated Raisin Company (later known as Sun-Maid) was created with the idea for an ingenious co-op and the credit for this novel approach went to vineyardist, oilman, and attorney Henry H. Welsh. Welsh came up with the idea for a three-year grower contract, subject to a two-year renewal, binding the raisin grower to deliver all of his crop for a guaranteed price.  Naturally low in fat, raisins contain healthy nutrients... unless you're eating the yogurt- or chocolate-covered raisins. In their natural state, they are good for humans, but not for dogs. Small quantities of grapes and raisins can cause renal failure in dogs.     #OTD On this dayin 1789, Washington was sworn in as the first president of the United States.   A gardening President, George Washington oversaw all aspects of the land at Mount Vernon.   Washington had a personal copy of Batty Langley'sNew Principles of Gardening. Inspired by the 18th century author, Washington adopted a less formal, more naturalistic style for his gardens and he supervised a complete and total redesign of his Mount Vernon.   On Mount Vernon's website, they review in detail the four gardens that make up Washington's landscape: the upper (formal) garden, the lower (kitchen) garden, the botanical (personal or experimental) garden, and the fruit garden and nursery.      #OTD On this day in 1873, bryologist William Starling Sullivant died. Sullivant was born to the founding family of Franklinton, Ohio. His father, Lucas, was a surveyor and had named the town in honor of the recently deceased Benjamin Franklin. The settlement would become Columbus.  In 1823, William Sullivant graduated from Yale College, his father would die in August of that same year.  Sullivant took over his father's surveying business, and at the age of thirty, he began to study and catalog the plant life in Central Ohio.  In 1840, he published his flora and then he started to hone in on his calling: mosses. Bryology is the study of mosses. The root, bryōs is a Greek verb meaning to swell. It's etymology of the word embryo. Bryology will be easier to remember if you think of the ability of moss to swell as it takes on water.  As a distinguished bryologist, Sullivant not only studied and cataloged various mosses from across the United States, but also from as far away as Central America, South America, and from various islands in the Pacific Ocean.  Mosses suited Sullivant's strengths; requiring patience and close observation, scrupulous accuracy, and discrimination. His first work, Musci Alleghanienses, was: "exquisitely prepared and mounted, and with letterpress of great perfection; ... It was not put on sale, but fifty copies were distributed with a free hand among bryologists and others who would appreciate it." In 1864, Sullivant published his magnum opus,Icones Muscorum. With 129 truly excellent illustrations and descriptions of the mosses indigenous to eastern North America, Icones Muscorumfixed Sulivant's reputation as the pre-eminent American bryologist of his time. In 1873, Sullivant contracted pneumonia - ironically, an illness where your lungs fill or swell with fluid - and he died on April 30, 1873.  During the last four decades of his life, Sullivant exchanged letters with Asa Gray. It's no wonder, then, that he left his herbarium of some 18,000 moss specimens to Gray's beloved Harvard University.  When Gray summoned his curator at Cambridge, Leo Lesquereux, to help Sullivant, he wrote to botanist John Torrey: "They will do up bryology at a great rate. Lesquereux says that the collection and library of Sullivant in muscology are magnifique, superbe,and the best he ever saw.'"   On December 6, 1857, Gray wrote to Hooker, "A noble fellow is [William Starling] Sullivant, and deserves all you say of him and his works. The more you get to know of him, the better you will like him."   In 1877, four years after Sullivant's death, Asa Gray wrote to Charles Darwin. Gray shared that Sullivant was his "dear old friend" and that, "[Sullivant] did for muscology in this country more than one man is likely ever to do again."   The Sullivant Moss Society, which became the American Bryological and Lichenological Society, was founded in 1898 and was named for William Starling Sullivant.     #OTD On this day in 1943, the noted botanist who became president of Huguenot College in South Africa and founded of the South African Association of University Women; Bertha Stoneman died. Born on a farm near Jamestown, New York, the Stoneman family had many notable achievements. Her aunt, Kate Stoneman, was the first woman admitted to the New York State bar, another aunt became the first policewoman in Buffalo, and her uncle George Stoneman, who was a general in the American Civil War, became the 15th governor of California. (Ronald Reagan being the 33rd, and Arnold Schwarzenegger being the 38th.)   Bertha Stoneman completed her undergraduate and doctorate degrees in botany at Cornell University in 1894 and 1896, respectively. She jumped at the chance to lead the botany department at Huguenot College, a women's college in Wellington, South Africa. More precisely, Huguenot College was the only woman's college on the African continent. Later she would recall,   "It was the courtesy, culture and hospitality of  certain Africans that held me... there."   The college called on Stoneman to not only teach botany; but also zoology, mathematics, logic, ethics and psychology.   Stoneman's textbook, Plants and their Ways in South Africa(1906), an instant classic, was widely assigned as a textbook in South African schools for several decades.   Surrounded by the new and exciting flora of South Africa, Stoneman set about building a herbarium for Huguenot. She either went out herself to collect specimens, or she sent others to add to the collection.   When talking to Americans during visits home, Stoneman praised South African plant life, saying: "South Africa provides 42 species of native asparagus. Why should it not be cultivated as a vegetable?  ...There are fine citrus fruits, avocado, pears, figs, mangoes, and paw-paws... You need not seek employment.  Employ yourself. Come soon, and you will be warmly and courteously welcomed." Stoneman was a wonderfully engaging teacher. As Carolize Jansen wrote in her blog, "If Bertha Stoneman were my biology teacher at school, maybe I would've considered choosing the subject for the final three years. In the opening chapter of Plants and their ways in South Africa, a 1906 textbook for school biology, her introduction ranges from the baking of bread to the Wonderboom in Pretoria, with a final encouragement regarding Latin names: ‘‘...the reader may skip any name in this book longer than Hermanuspetrusfontein.” Stoneman was good at many endeavors. Her Cornell Delta Gamma biography noted, "She entered with enthusiasm into all phases of [college] life, seeming equally at home on the hockey-field, as captain of a team, or in dramatics, writing, and coaching plays... We... are not surprised to learn that she has written many a song for Huguenot College, including its "Alma Mater."   Thanks to Google, I was able to track down the lyrics to the song - although one word had a transcription failure. I edited the text as best I could. [Tune—“ Sweet and Low."] Joyfully, joyfully, ever of thee we'll sing,  Loyally, loyally, honor to thee we’ll bring : “ Earnest for truth " shall our life’s effort be.  Time shall unite us still closer to thee, [Wisdom] from thee shall come. Lend thy beams afar. Shine, thou brilliant Star, Shine. Thou our Queen, pure, serene. Ever our hearts wilt cheer. While with thee never we  Danger or care shall fear. Knowing our sorrows, thou’lt help us to bear.  And widen rejoicing, our joys thou wilt share. Thou, our noble Queen. As we honor thee, we shall sing of thee. Praise.   Stoneman was tremendously proud of her scholars. Among her notable students was South African botanical illustrator, Olive Coates Palgrave (noted for her richly illustrated 1956 book Trees of Central Africa) and British born, South African mycologist and bacteriologist, Ethel Doidge.   Twenty-four years after arriving in South Africa, Stoneman became president of Huguenot University College. She retired twelve years later. She requested that her ashes be returned to the United States upon her death.     #OTD It's the birthday of botanist and USDA agronomistSamuel Mills Tracy, born in 1847. Born in Hartford, Vermont, Tracy's family eventually settled in Wisconsin. At the start of the Civil War , he enlisted with the Union Army, served with a branch of the Wisconsin Volunteers. After the war, he started farming; but then a year later, he decided to go to college. Tracy wound up getting a Master's from Michigan State Agricultural College.  By 1877, Tracy secured a Professor of Botany spot at the University of Missouri. A decade later, he was hired as first Director of the Mississippi Experiment Station.  Tracyis perhaps best known for his two works Flora of Missouri and The Flora of Southern United States.  Today, the Tracy Herbarium, at Texas A&M is a special part of the department of ecosystem science and management. A research plant collection with close to 325,000 specimens, it hosts the largest grass collection in Texas and across much of the southern U.S.     Unearthed Words #OTD On this day in 1827, Scottish botanist David Douglas (Sponsored by Sir William Hooker), took a break from collecting for the Royal Botanic Institution of Glasgow.   His was lagging behind the others in his party as he was making his way through the Athabasca Pass west of present day Jasper, Alberta, Canada. On a whim, he decided to abandon the trail and ascend the northern peak of Mount Brown in deep snow.    Here's what he recorded in his journal: After breakfast at one o’clock... I became desirous of ascending one of the peaks, and accordingly I set out alone on snowshoes ... The labour of ascending the lower part, which is covered with pines, is great beyond description, sinking on many occasions to the middle. Halfway up vegetation ceases entirely, not so much a vestige of moss or lichen on the stones. Here I found it less laborious as I walked on the hard crust. One-third from the summit it becomes a mountain of pure ice, sealed far over by Nature’s hand ... ...The ascent took me five hours; ... This peak, the highest yet known in the northern continent of America, I feel a sincere pleasure in naming Mount Brown, in honor of Robert Brown, the illustrious botanist... A little to the southward is one nearly the same height, rising into a sharper point. This I named Mount Hooker [after his sponsor, William Hooker] ..." Douglas' trip was a success; he collected over 200 new plants. Douglas was the first Englishman to bring back cones of the Sugar Pine, the Lodgepole Pine, the Ponderosa Pine, and, of course, the Douglas-fir. Within a year of his return in 1827, they would all would all be growing in English gardens and on Scottish estates. Special Note: The Douglas-fir is not a true fir, which is why it is spelled with a hyphen. Anytime you see a hyphen in the common name , you know it's not a true member of the genus.   Book Recommendation   Mastering the Art of Vegetable Gardening: Rare Varieties - Unusual Options - Plant Lore & Guidance – by Matt Mattus Mastering the Art of Vegetable Gardening is your "201" level course in cultivating produce. Expand your knowledge base and discover options that go beyond the ordinary! Prepare to encounter new varieties of common plant species, learn their history and benefits, and, most of all, identify fascinating new edibles to grow in your own gardens. Written by gardening expert Matt Mattus, Mastering the Art of Vegetable Gardening offers a wealth of new and exciting opportunities, alongside beautiful photography, lore, insight, and humor that can only come from someone who has grown each vegetable himself and truly loves gardening.       Today's Garden Chore Diversify your tulip plantings for next Spring: If you garden south of zone 7, try Tulip Turkestanica.   You'll find a sudden soft spot for the early blooming, sweet little-faced tulips. Not your typical tulip, this is a species tulip. Species tulips are the most perennial of all tulips. They are petite, long-lived beauties, ideal for rock gardens, or the front of borders. They are adorable in containers and must be protected from freezing north of zone 7. Like daffs, they look amazing planted right in the grass. Such pretty little blooms!       Something Sweet  Reviving the little botanic spark in your heart   When I was researching Mount Vernon, I was struck by Washington's intentions and methods.   He was naturally curious and wanted to see what plants would be able to survive in the harsh climate of Virginia.   Of his four gardens, Washington referred often to his favorite of the four gardens, the botanical garden, during his lifetime. He called it "the little garden by the salt house," or rather fondly, his "little garden." Washington used the botanical garden as his trial garden; testing alfalfa and oats which, he happily surmised correctly, would increase the productivity of his fields.     Thanks for listening to the daily gardener, and remember: "For a happy, healthy life, garden every day."

A partly cloudy and warm spring afternoon beside a mountain spring in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Shasta County, California. I recorded this right where it burst forth from the ground in a tall stand of old growth Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine, Incense Cedar, and Sugar Pine. The Black Oaks, Pacific Dogwoods, and Bigleaf and Vine Maples in the understory had yet to leaf out, and the first fern fiddleheads had only just begun to unfurl in this beautiful and secluded area of densely forested mountains located a short distance from the Pacific Crest Trail. The spring, one of several in the area, forms the headwaters of West Trough Creek, a cold and shady tributary of Squaw Valley Creek, itself a tributary of the McCloud River. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/soundbynature/support

Hello monkiis, I am psyched that by publishing this episode, I have achieved my goal of creating 12 podcast episodes in 2019. Sweet! I purposely set the bar a little low knowing that I could achieve this goal with relative ease and that would motivate me to create even more content. It's pretty interesting how even though I know I am basically 'tricking' myself, it still works. I recorded this episode out in a Ponderosa Pine forest, in the dark, just outside the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I was at a campground preparing to run the Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim. Basically, you start at the South Rim, run 24-miles over to the North Rim, turn around, and then run 24-miles back. This totals out to 48-miles and over 10,000 vertical feet of climbing. It would be the perfect 'Misogi'. I first heard about this wild concept in Outside Magazine. In the article, Kyle Korver, an NBA basketball player and a group of friends are on a boat off the California coast. Their Misogi was to carry a 70+ pound rock under water for 2-miles. The took turns relaying the rock as far as they could go and eventually, they completed what felt like an impossible task. I didn't need to read much farther to be enticed. The article came out in 2014 and I was already attempting Misogi-esc challenges, but I didn't yet have a name for those endeavors. As soon as I heard of the concept of the Misogi I have fully adopted the principles as my own. The whole concept is to expand your imagination for what is possible. If you complete what once was thought to be an impossible challenge, what are your true boundaries? What I also love about the concept is that it is relative. The challenge is purely subjective and thus anyone can take on a Misogi of their own. It's also less above the physical challenge and even more so, the Misogi emphasizes building mental strength and fortitude. It's not something you do every week. So far, I've been attempting a Misogi about once per year. Enjoy! The monkii family wants to know, what is your Misogi? Click here for the Misogi Outside Magazine Article. www.monkii.co Questions/comments/howls?info@monkii.co

A little bit about pine and peppermint. Links: https://www.aidazea.com/ https://www.etsy.com/shop/AidaZeaArts http://www.saramariemiller.me/ https://www.instagram.com/aida.zea.arts/ https://www.instagram.com/thymeinthestudio/ https://www.instagram.com/saramariestudio/ Donate here: https://simplecast.com/donate/6016 music by Komiku

SUBSCRIBE: WWW.EARTHREPAIRRADIO.COM In this episode we explore the climatic design tools used by Dave's Permaculture design firm, Terra-Phoenix. Dave has been planning Permaculture properties all over the world and has developed methods for assessing the "climate analogue" of an area. He uses his climate analogue identification process to find other places in the world with remarkably similar conditions. This has enabled him to create plant assemblages that are productive and resilient, building designs that are appropriate and efficient, and master plans that will withstand the test of time. We discuss climate change forecasts, invasive and rampant species, and much more! Dave's show links: Practical Permaculture Book Link http://www.timberpress.com/books/practical_permaculture_home_landscapes_your_community_whole_earth/bloom/9781604694437 Terra Phoenix Design Link http://terraphoenixdesign.com/ Fruit Trees and More Custom Propagation Nursery - Bob & Verna Duncan in Coastal B.C. http://www.fruittreesandmore.com/ ForeCASTS Project - Climate Change Tree Maps (note: some links don't seem to work...i.e. Ponderosa Pine) https://www.geobabble.org/ForeCASTS/atlas.html Holdridge Life Zones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdridge_life_zones Köppen Climate Classification System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification Nature Conservancy's Climate Wizard (Change Prediction Maps) http://www.climatewizard.org/index.html Scale of Permanence-based Site Analysis & Assessment guide from Jacke, et. al. rejiggered by Dan Halsey and Mark Krawczyk - Shows how predicted climate is an important part of the research process. https://southwoodsforestgardens.blogspot.com/2012/07/scale-of-permanence.html Dave's full bio: Dave Boehnlein serves as the principal for Terra Phoenix Design. He received his B.S. in Natural Resources & Environmental Studies from the University of Minnesota. Dave is also the education director at the Bullock's Permaculture Homestead on Orcas Island where he lived for seven years. With varied backgrounds such as organizational leadership, internship/apprenticeship program design, and trail work Dave brings a unique set of skills to the Terra Phoenix team. In the rainforests of Central America Dave learned about permaculture and tropical agroforestry systems. From there he went on to learn a wide variety of design and implementation skills with the Bullocks. Dave's freelance teaching services are highly sought after by universities, nonprofits, and other organizations. He offers Permaculture Design Courses through Bastyr University's Holistic Landscape Design Certificate Program and Alderleaf Wilderness College's Wilderness Certification Program. Dave is a member of both the Cascadia Permaculture Institute and the Permaculture Institute of North America. He holds a diploma in Permaculture Education and seeks to mainstream permaculture design with integrity. To that end, Dave teamed up with landscape designer and author, Jessi Bloom, and illustrator, Paul Kearsley, to write Practical Permaculture, an excellent entry-level permaculture design text. In addition, Dave is passionate about plants, especially weird but useful ones. Ultimately, Dave just wants to make the world a better place and eat really good fruit while doing it. Dave is particularly interested in education, the mainstreaming of sustainability, and keeping things organized.

Perhaps you have heard me mention that I used to be a park ranger. During my eight years as a Park Ranger, only once did I see an event that shocked everyone who saw it. Children gasped. Parents turned their heads. A baby cried. You wouldn't believe me if I told you that a Park Ranger caused the commotion. The shocking event happened at the end of an interpretive hike on a trail in the Little Spokane River Natural Area of Riverside State Park. Twenty kids and their parents joined Park Ranger Joseph Felgenhauer and me for a hike along the meandering river. Ranger Felgenhauer led the group using words to guide their steps through the forest. He talked about trees. He talked about the river. He discussed the native history of the area. He pointed out signs of wildlife. He encouraged kids to touch leaves, trees, rocks, and bugs. He explained the value of connecting to the natural world. At the end of the hike, as we approached the parking area, he pointed out deer droppings to the kids. He explained how to tell what type of animal the scat had come from. Ranger Felgenhauer then reached down, picked up two deer droppings, and popped them in his mouth. “It tastes nutty” was all Ranger Felgenhauer said about it before leading the group down the short trail to the parking area as he finished his interpretive hike. No one in attendance heard another word after “nutty”. The crowd was still buzzing with what they had seen as they climbed into mini-vans and SUVs. Here is what the crowd did not know. For several weeks, Ranger Felgenhauer and I had it on our calendar to do an interpretive hike with a group of school kids. Left up to me, I would have conducted the hike based on my knowledge and experience in that area of the park. Ranger Felgenhauer took a different approach. Joseph is a champion interpreter and he would not give an interpretive walk without knowing every turn and curve that his guests would walk. He wanted to see what they would see before they saw it, so he could tell a story about it. The morning of the scheduled hike, Joseph and I had visited the Natural Are where the hike would be. We walked the trail and Joseph took note of interesting trees, plants, and rocks. He planned what he would say at each viewpoint along the river. He paid special attention to coyote scat alongside the trail, knowing it would present an opportunity for a story. When the kids arrived we lead them on the predetermined route along the river. Ranger Felgenhauer hit each practiced point right on queue. He stirred enthusiasm in the kids and answered every question. At the coyote scat, Ranger Felgenhauer had each kid examine it. He explained what you can learn from scat; what the coyote ate and how long ago the animal had been there. Finally, towards the end of the hike, Ranger Felgenhauer discovered the deer scat under a young Ponderosa Pine tree. The kids leaned in to hear what then Ranger would teach them. And then Joseph ate deer droppings. It was something that none of the kids, or their parents, will forget. Joseph Felgenhauer and I worked together only a few months. I left Riverside State Park for another park and soon after Joseph moved on to another career. Even after I left, the way Joseph conducted the interpretive hike stuck with me. Joseph knew knowledge does not have the same impact as preparation. Preparation was the key to delivering a great experience to families who took time out of their day to go on a walk with us. Joseph did not just lead a hike and talk about what showed up before us. Each stop was a deliberate effort to educate the kids. Each viewpoint had been pre-selected to offer the best opportunity for a story. Interesting trees and large rocks had been chosen as highlights because they would create the most curiosity from the kids. And the coyote scat played into the story of the day. It offered an educational stop and made the kids consider what they can learn from scat. It played right into Joseph's finale of eating deer dropping. You see, the finale was deliberate, just like the rest of the hike. Joseph knew by doing something that would WOW the kids they would remember the hike. The precise spot and timing of that event had been planned. Earlier in the morning, when we had walked the trail, Joseph had sprinkled Raisinets on the ground under the pine tree. Ranger Joseph Felgenhauer knew how to deliver a memorable customer experience. Jeff Noel talks about going the extra inch beyond what customers expect. For Joseph Felgenhauer, the extra inch was as simple a couple of raisinettes. Joseph Felgenhauer taught us that preparation is the key to delivering a memorable customer experience to your customers. You can prepare like a park ranger, too. Here are the three steps you can learn from Joseph to deliver some WOW to your customers; See what your customers will see. How do you do this? Park in the parking lot and walk into your business. What did it look and feel like on the way in, beginning with the walk through the parking lot? Visit your website and look for information people would commonly be looking for, like your contact information, or even what you do. Call your business. Look at the ways customers interact with you and walk through it like Ranger Felgenhauer walked the trail before he had a school group with him. By walking the trail ahead of time, Joseph knew where the landmarks were. He knew when to tell stories. He even knew when to tell kids to watch their step. You have to begin by walking the same path your customers are going to walk. It doesn't matter if you are a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker. Know your stuff. I mentioned that ranger Felgenhauer knew that preparation trumps knowledge. True enough, but he also knew what he was talking about. He didn't talk about oak trees while standing next to a Ponderosa Pine. He didn't talk about a black bear's diet when the group was looking at Coyote Scat. First, Joseph walked the trail to know what his customers would experience. Then, since he knew his stuff, he was able to know where stories could be inserted into the hike. He knew this rock outcrop offered a view of an Osprey nest and it would give him an opportunity to talk about how an Osprey turns a fish when it carries it back to the nest. How can you do this? Once you know what your customer will experience, you can make sure the right information is in the right places. Sometimes it could be something as simple as having the hours of operation on your door. It could be having the right words in the mouth of staff that customers will interact with. It could mean having well-writtenwords on your website. It means understanding where to include information to enhance the customer experience. Add the WOW. Ranger Felgenhauer would not have been able to wow his customers if he had not prepared. He did backstage work so he could delight people when he was onstage. Well, I am not really sure if anyone was delighted when he ate deer poop, but people did say WOW. Because Joseph already knew the trail, he already knew what the group would see, he already knew what stories they would hear, he understand exactly how to deliver WOW. It was timed perfectly so the group was talking about what happened as they walked back to the car, and probably talked about it on the way home too. How can you deliver WOW? You don't have to eat anything gross. You don't have to go over the top. Add something a little delightful that other people are not doing. Dan Miller often includes mints in the box when you order books or other items from him. Look at what others are doing and do something different. Or do what they are not doing. Open an hour earlier, close an hour later. Return phone calls. Or answer your phone. Not many people answer their phone anymore. You will likely know what to do to add WOW if you have followed the first two steps. If you have walked the path your customers will walk, you will know when you have the opportunity to go the extra inch to delight and even WOW a customer. All it takes is to go a little further than what people expect. Jeff Noel introduced me to the idea of going the extra inch, but I am so taken by it I am going to adopt this idea. Isn't it encouraging to know you don't have to go an extra mile to delight people? All it takes is an extra inch. And we can all stretch one more inch, right? One inch is all that separates you from the competition. And when you go the extra inch enough times, you are a foot ahead of everyone around you. Preparation is key to show you have mastered your message. I know what question you probably want to ask me, so I am going to go ahead and answer it. No, Ranger Felgenhauer did not tell the group that it was raisenettes he ate. Everyone went home thinking he had eaten deer droppings.

"Ponderosa Pine", a story about critters and homes by our friend percussionist Cory Hills!

Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy & Management in the College of Natural Resources at UCB talks about his work in wildfire and forest management research. Wildfire suppression history and current policy is discussed.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:00:30] [inaudible]Speaker 2: welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on KALX Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. My name is Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Scott Stevens and associate professor in the Environmental Science Policy and Management Department of the College of natural resources at UC Berkeley. This interview is prerecorded and edited. We're here with [00:01:00] Scott Stevens and Scott, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Well, wanted to ask you about your research in wildfire management and forestry management and have you described the arc of your research over your career and where you're at now?Speaker 3: Well, I started here at Berkeley in 2000 actually, I was a graduate student here from 91 to 95 so I was phd student here and I came back to Berkeley in 2000 really started to work on [00:01:30] kind of looking at the effectiveness of different fuel treatments that can be used to try to reduce fire hazard and maybe reduce the negative impacts of wildfire on forest. So we started a project with a bunch of collaborators all over the United States that were the fire and fire surrogate study. That study looked at trying to reduce fire hazards in forest at once. Burn frequently with mechanical methods alone, prescribed fire methods alone, combination mechanical followed by fire and that controls. [00:02:00] And that study also had a pretty broad suite of ecological variables including soils and vegetation, insects, economics, some social fire behavior. So it tried to look at the stand scale, a hundred acres, 50 acres.Speaker 3: If a manager wants to go in and actually modify vegetation to try to reduce that potential for bad wildfire effects, what ecological similarities are different, just might be with all those treatments. That went on for about five years. And we have a research for us at Berkeley called [00:02:30] UC Blodgett forest, which is up near Georgetown campus. Got that donated to them in 1933 so it's a fantastic place to do your research. We did that work, um, in kind of with a bunch of other people in different states. Even this was a national study that included about 13 states. Each of us kind of doing a similar exercise, so you went through that funded by the u s joint fire sciences program. More recent research has moved away from kind of the stand level of trying to go to Morton landscape level. So happens when you actually [00:03:00] think about reintroducing fire into landscapes that have had fire exclusion for maybe a century and then maybe do that repeatedly over an area and look at the patterns of burning severity, mortality patterns, what's the size difference between landscape and stand?Speaker 3: That's a great point and the standards I think are on the order of 2050 a hundred acres or so and the landscape work we're doing now is much, much larger. It's 5,000 maybe to 25,000 acres, [00:03:30] so really, really watersheds or pieces of watersheds and sometimes even small watershed inside a large and really much, much larger kind of more of a functional unit where people might work in terms of planning at a landscape scale further work down the road. Now it's kind of changed a little bit also into fire policy. That was something I've always been interested in trying to understand how science actually interact with policy, how a policy is formed, trying to maybe look at some objectivity and some of the fire [00:04:00] science research. It could maybe help inform policy, not really shape it completely, but informant most recently we've worked with Australians on the policy of urban interface fire areas.Speaker 3: So this has been an interesting um, kind of partnership because Australia and us have a lot of similarities in fire policy and the urban interface and also some real market differences. And probably the, maybe the, the final area is trying to understand, um, dynamics also in struggling. So we've actually moved away from the forest [00:04:30] and moving into some struggling systems, chaparral, try to understand kind of the dynamics of fire and how you might modify fire behavior and m chaparral systems, which are really, really different than, um, say, um, force. So when we continue, I've got a great group of graduate students in my lab and um, all those folks have done great work. So it's a, it's kind of a group effort.Speaker 2: And the research proposals that you write, are you responding to requests from the field, so to speak, or are you driving [00:05:00] some of the subject matter?Speaker 3: Well, what's happened in my program, there's a program called the U s joint fire sciences program, which is funded by the US Department of Agriculture in the u s department of Interior. And they put out a call for proposals every year in the fall. They just came out here recently and they actually put on their website the areas they're most interested in. So most of my research proposals is when I look at those calls, I look at the USDA, look at maybe another competitive research grant [00:05:30] proposal system, look what's being proposed, and then see how that Meld with the interest I've had maybe in the last few years and tried to say, oh, there's an opportunity, we can do something. Um, let's go ahead. It's interesting. One thing has happened is the success rate on the proposals has gone way down in terms of percentage, but this started around 97 98 or percentage of successful proposals. Maybe about 40%. Most recently it's going between 10 and 15. So it has gotten more competitive to get the um, the research proposals [00:06:00] funded.Speaker 2: Is there a general consensus within the research community, a fire, wildfire management community on what the best practices are, where the research should be going?Speaker 3: Well that, there is, I think a lot of consensus with some debate. Um, what's happened in the joint fire sciences program, which I think has happened too many research programs, United States that I'm aware of is calls used to be a little bit more broad in terms of what they were asking for. Kind [00:06:30] of more of a broad question and then maybe you could come up with many different ideas that might fit that question. And I've seen more and more of that. The questions seem to be getting more and more narrow. And I think in some cases they're probably tied to um, you know, entities such as, um, organizations that need information they think is really, really important. Um, maybe also this evolution of science where more certainly known, there's probably young questions are getting maybe more focused in some ways. I think that's a lost opportunity because it allows certainly you to look at what's [00:07:00] being proposed and see if you fit it, but it also doesn't allow maybe the more general research to happen that maybe isn't a tie to an exact objective. And I, I know NSF National Science Foundation does that better where you're able to put in a proposal that may meet that objective, but also it doesn't have to really directly be on right on top of it for a short term, particularly in the fire science research community, we're talking about both Australia, Europe and the United States. More and more research is actually being targeted to questions that managers have on a time scale, [00:07:30] probably less than five years.Speaker 2: What do you see as the time frame that you would need to have for having an impact on a large forest ecosystem?Speaker 3: Well, I think the timeframe for a large one is, is going to be decades. And then continuous, um, places that we've worked at were fire has been reintroduced saying you sent me a national park since about 1974. Um, lightning fire milliwatt creek basin has been allowed to burn kind of unabated with a little bit of suppression for [00:08:00] the last 35 years or so. And it really took decades for that place to be sculpted by fire once again is before 74 fire was excluded and Yosemite really for a hundred years. Totally. So when fire gets back into those systems and seeing the patterns that we see today for some papers with Brandon Collins and others, it really has started to really have an incredible impact the dynamic on that forest. But it took, you know, 2030 years or so. And then when we do things on the other side mechanically, [00:08:30] when we try to maybe reduce fire hazards with mechanical means, thinning, chipping, things of that nature, there are, I think, similar timeframe.Speaker 3: You're talking about decades because the project sizes are so large and one of the big challenges is so much area that really does need some treatment for both fire and also restoration versus what is able to be done annually. And that's really a huge disconnect. What can be done is a tiny drop in some ways connected to what really needs to be done. So I think they all say that it's going to be a [00:09:00] longterm view decades and decades. And once you kind of get into that philosophy of management, you're changing your learning. Since forests never are static, they're always changing. Sense of that means a manager is going to be basically doing things continuously forever.Speaker 4: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:09:30] [inaudible] [inaudible]Speaker 2: uh, to put it in perspective, the idea of forest management and fire abatement, was it about a hundred years ago that the, the process of trying to put fires out began?Speaker 3: It sure was. It was really about 1905 is one of the forest service was created by Congress. And when the forest was created, they really had a few really critical missions put out by the, [00:10:00] um, the congress and also from the president. One was to try to safeguard the timber resources for the nation and try to actually create it to continuous supply timber. The other was actually create continuous and good quality water supplies. So even back in 1905 they were talking about water. There was actually enacted debate in the early 19 hundreds whether or not fire was seen as a menace or possibly couldn't be used as a tool. The debate went on for several years. In fact, California was a big part of that debating particular private land [00:10:30] owners of forest around lake Amador and other places. After a little bit of debate, some study, it was decided that fire was the enemy, both from a water standpoint, timber stand standpoint and Ryder early 19 hundreds 1910 1905 we really have a national fire suppression policy that happens in the western us. The southeast United States continues to debate longer. They have a much longer kind of connection to fire on land based on just immigrants and other things down there and they basically [00:11:00] didn't take the western line for a long time, but around 1905 we really do see an active fire suppression system and things like federal dollars from Congress actually having to be procured to states only. They actually adopted policy.Speaker 2: That's what's built up this incredible amount of fuel. And density of forest in North America that has created a real hazard for wildfire. But then you were saying that in the past 20 [00:11:30] or 30 years that's been rethought and now fire is allowed in areas and there's active management to try to remove fuel than that. You're starting to see the effects of thatSpeaker 3: currently actually has quite a history in this. There was a professor, Harold Vizquel Isabel came here in 1947 and he retired about 1972 so he was one of the earliest that basically started to ask those exact questions, is fire always the enemy? Can we use it actually for some purposes that actually would make sense? Do [00:12:00] we always want to exclude it? You know? So Harold had his career really during that time and there was massive debate and also a massive bias to fire me. Always the enemy. He had a thick skin. Yeah, he was basically, I'm beat up in political settings from comments and written comments, but he persisted and um, did a marvelous job and it has changed. It has changed. It's been slow. It's been really slow. You know, most areas in California, since we're in a Mediterranean climate, really [00:12:30] did have fire at really, really short intervals in the past, say maybe 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.Speaker 3: So we have a lot of places that used to burn with a lot of frequency, very, very common grasslands. You know, um, woodlands, the Savannah Woodlands, Oak Woodlands, many of the forests, mixed conifer, Ponderosa Pine, even wetlands from native American burning. So there was a great area of California that used to burn. Very, very common. And then there are other places in California, high elevation [00:13:00] forests, um, Alpine environments, deserts like the Mojave desert were fired, we think was actually a pretty minor factor maybe once in awhile, but maybe on a century scale. So we really had the gamut here. We had some that burned very, very frequently and others that had very, very little fire. And as you alluded to, the places that used to burn frequently, you take fire out for a hundred years. Those are the places that changed. And it's also past management such as harvesting the way we've harvested, forced partially cut force and left a lot of fuel on the ground that has also had [00:13:30] a profound impact.Speaker 2: And so is there within the community a bit of debate really just around the edges of the issue or are there some people that really have very different takes on, on how management should be done?Speaker 3: You know, there are apps, there are, there are. Both are absolutely both. Um, there are some, there's a debate going on in California right now about high severity fire. So the eye high severity simply means that you killed the majority of you overstory. So when a forest, you're killing maybe 75% [00:14:00] of the overstory or more to the fire, that causes great change. And interestingly, some people would argue that maybe there's too much high severity fire in California because of the fuel build up in the other things we alluded to, others actually may argue that they're sufficient or there's actually a deficit. That high severity fire working on our forest is not a bad thing. And it actually is something that maybe some people argue is an a low number. Science tries to come in and help inform that debate. And it's not [00:14:30] easy because we don't have a lot of good data to understand what high severity fire really did in most of our forests.Speaker 3: In California, we have a few places. Um, one is that Illinois at basin and Yosemite that's been working at least for the last 35 years with unabated fire in there, Brandon Collins led him to work at high severity fire at least in the last couple of decades. Brian, 15% of the landscape, so about 50% of it burning when it burns very frequently every 10 years. Every 15 years is really killing majority of trees. [00:15:00] But at what spatial scale? That's another good question. It's just not how much percentage, but how is it distributed? So the high severity fire there, most patches are less than say five acres in size with many on the order of one acre in size. And then there's a few, a few out there, maybe 200 acres, very few. Um, so the distribution of severity on that landscape is also incredibly important. And there's no doubt that when we look at some of our contemporary wildfires, like the moonlight fire and some others in California we've [00:15:30] had in the last seven decade or so, that the patches of high severity can be a thousand acres, can be maybe even a little larger.Speaker 3: And the patches down in that one acre realm are almost intimate because there just don't exist. So that's one area. It's great debate. The other great debate really is whether or not when forest service goes in to federal land and tries to reduce fire hazard, should they really just focus on fire hazards alone and then try to work with those? Or do they [00:16:00] also added maybe a commercial tree harvest that can supplement the costs of that, maybe make it then available over a larger land basis versus just getting money from Congress to do it. So that's another real real debate is whether or not federal lands in California of the forest service should they actually have an objective that maybe a second tier objective, the fire objective, maybe it's number one, but then maybe the second objective is also removing some green timber that could help pay for their treatments on them around.Speaker 3: That's [00:16:30] a, that's a fierce debate and how does that fit into the roads? No roads debate as well. That's a good question because the road, no road to me is also another one that exactly connected to it because some would argue that we need these roads to access these forests to then somehow do a treatment to then reduce their hazard. My answer to that is somewhat is that there are so many wroted acres in California, millions and millions and millions of acres that are rooted already and many of those millions of vast majority, probably 90% of [00:17:00] the treatment. So I think where the roads are, yes. You think about maybe some of those treatments like mechanical prescribed, burning, chipping makes a lot of sense, but I can't imagine myself saying we need to road areas that are unroasted so then we can do the mechanical work when we have such a base already that needs to be worked and we can't even touch it. I think the unroasted areas, if they're remote, we should basically allow more managed wildfire to work those landscapes.Speaker 4: [00:17:30] [inaudible] you are listening to Spec a l x Berkeley.Speaker 3: In your research, are you actively seekingSpeaker 2: new technologies and capabilities to extend your understanding of what's going on in the forest?Speaker 3: We do use a lot of different technologies to try to help us understand [00:18:00] the forest and one is spatial data, so the idea of you're getting data over large areas like we alluded to, maybe a 15,000 acre area, you know that's a big area at 20,000 acres. It's just impossible to go out there and do some sort of field sampling that you're going to be able to get some information over such an extent. But you can go out certainly and do some field sampling with a stratification maybe based on forest type or aspect or slope. And then use things like a geographic information system or remotely sense data from satellites [00:18:30] and space than to try to use your field data and combine it with that remotely sense data. It actually create a map, like a spatial map of the area that we're interested in. So that spatial data, you know, the remote sensing technology to work on spatial data, just critical, critically important. And even the technology of just instruments we use in the field nowadays to measure things like heights, diameters, um, reflectance of vegetation, things of that nature. All of that is just incredibly useful. So the technology continues [00:19:00] to help us try to make assessments at broad scales and also try to answer questions sometimes that aren't easy.Speaker 2: Are you using a quantitative modeling? To some extent,Speaker 3: we sure do. And then the models are just critical in some ways. The fire models are ahead of things like ecosystem models. You know, fire is really a physical process. It really is about combustion oxidation. Fire modeling really began in earnest in this country in the early seventies mostly Missoula, Montana, [00:19:30] and has certainly been able to kind of change over time and we're continuing to try to make it better. But the fire models we have today actually do a pretty good job, not perfect job, but a pretty good job of actually forecasting on a gis landscape work. Fire's gonna move in a landscape. How fast is it going to move? Maybe what kind of flame lights might you expect so that those modeling systems are really used a great deal in our research to try to understand that probability of fire occurrence. What happens to that probability?Speaker 3: Let's say if you treat 20% [00:20:00] of the watershed and reduce the hazard, what happens to the probability of the areas that are treated? What about the 80% that are untreated? It turns out they can also have a reduction in probability. The ecosystem models are so much more challenging than you're asking what happens to the soil? What happens to water, what happens to wildlife habitat. So those become much more challenging that basically, um, generate and also tests. So the fire modeling in some ways is well ahead of those because I think it's more of a physical known system even though there's great [00:20:30] research to try to make it better. But the firewall that we have today a pretty good,Speaker 2: and then there's also the idea that the forests in the equator equatorial area are much more valuable than the, the forest north and south of that area. What sort of feeling do you have about that?Speaker 3: I think that's Friday and that and the carbon debate, that's a really interesting, um, separation because people have shown really conclusively that, you know, removing forest in the equator area is that dramatic [00:21:00] reduction in carbon sequestration. Also the sustainability of those sports. So I think the carbon question when we look at the equator is really clear about trying to keep forced, forced to keep forest alive. Right? Keep that force there and let it allow it to sequester carbon, hold it. But then when we move away from the kind of the equator, we go up into places that are more temporary. Like California. Here we have fire that works on landscapes, fireworks on landscape, just done in the past. It continues [00:21:30] today, fires different, but it's still a big issue. So there I think the debate becomes not just trying to keep Forrest at forested, but also what kind of forest have the ability to hold onto carbon.Speaker 3: It's a question for the long term and then you go to the boreal and my goodness, the boreal forest and now been shown like in northern Canada and Russia, some of the biggest carbon stocks in the planet. These are huge, enormous areas. And actually we know this year Russia had one the biggest fire years in [00:22:00] his history. So talk about, you know, the context of fire and climate is profound and fire force and boreal is going to be the most sensitive to climate change. People have already forecasted that. I think it's already been seen. Temperatures are up even more severely in the boreal regions versus down here and the temporary. So those places should probably be even more important to understand in terms of the dynamics of carbon and fire and forest and even we are a, so how did you get started in science? What was it that got you interested in [00:22:30] becoming a scientist?Speaker 3: It's a great question. It's one that's hard to answer. I mean my background has always been kind of curious about scientific things. I actually had my undergrad degree and masters degree in engineering. I grew up really in a forestry family, my grandfather and my dad and uncles working around forest. But I think for me being so close to it for a while, not for my whole life, but while young childhood life who was so close and I really enjoyed it, but it was also something that I took for granted, right? That just didn't think it was something they wanted [00:23:00] to study and pursue. And somehow I was interested in kind of technology engineering, still got into engineering field. Then I started actually contemplating doing a phd. Then this realize what discussions with my wife, Mary and others that I was so much more interested in the natural world.Speaker 3: So once I started to actually study that, which actually happened at UC Davis in 1988, it just lit a fire. I mean, I didn't, at that time I wasn't really gonna study fire, but it lit a fire and me just a curiosity. This idea of um, natural [00:23:30] systems on soils and plants. I'd never studied any of that in my previous career. It was just, it was just fascinating to me. Then I just decided, um, I thought I'd come down and meet a couple of faculty here at Berkeley at the time, Bob Martin, um, learned that he actually had a bs degree in physics. So in some ways we had some similarities and they just realized that the kind of the quantitative engineering world had some real connections to the natural scientists. And it was really where my heart was. There's no doubt about it. Great. Well thanks very much. [00:24:00] You're welcome.Speaker 4: [inaudible]Speaker 5: special thanks to Gretchen Sanders before editorial assistants, one occurred during the show is from a low star David Alpha and titled Folk and Acoustic. It's made available [00:24:30] via creative Commons license 3.0 Patrick. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We're happy to hear from our listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot Cadillacs had yahoo.comSpeaker 4: [00:25:00] [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy & Management in the College of Natural Resources at UCB talks about his work in wildfire and forest management research. Wildfire suppression history and current policy is discussed.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:00:30] [inaudible]Speaker 2: welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on KALX Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. My name is Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Scott Stevens and associate professor in the Environmental Science Policy and Management Department of the College of natural resources at UC Berkeley. This interview is prerecorded and edited. We're here with [00:01:00] Scott Stevens and Scott, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Well, wanted to ask you about your research in wildfire management and forestry management and have you described the arc of your research over your career and where you're at now?Speaker 3: Well, I started here at Berkeley in 2000 actually, I was a graduate student here from 91 to 95 so I was phd student here and I came back to Berkeley in 2000 really started to work on [00:01:30] kind of looking at the effectiveness of different fuel treatments that can be used to try to reduce fire hazard and maybe reduce the negative impacts of wildfire on forest. So we started a project with a bunch of collaborators all over the United States that were the fire and fire surrogate study. That study looked at trying to reduce fire hazards in forest at once. Burn frequently with mechanical methods alone, prescribed fire methods alone, combination mechanical followed by fire and that controls. [00:02:00] And that study also had a pretty broad suite of ecological variables including soils and vegetation, insects, economics, some social fire behavior. So it tried to look at the stand scale, a hundred acres, 50 acres.Speaker 3: If a manager wants to go in and actually modify vegetation to try to reduce that potential for bad wildfire effects, what ecological similarities are different, just might be with all those treatments. That went on for about five years. And we have a research for us at Berkeley called [00:02:30] UC Blodgett forest, which is up near Georgetown campus. Got that donated to them in 1933 so it's a fantastic place to do your research. We did that work, um, in kind of with a bunch of other people in different states. Even this was a national study that included about 13 states. Each of us kind of doing a similar exercise, so you went through that funded by the u s joint fire sciences program. More recent research has moved away from kind of the stand level of trying to go to Morton landscape level. So happens when you actually [00:03:00] think about reintroducing fire into landscapes that have had fire exclusion for maybe a century and then maybe do that repeatedly over an area and look at the patterns of burning severity, mortality patterns, what's the size difference between landscape and stand?Speaker 3: That's a great point and the standards I think are on the order of 2050 a hundred acres or so and the landscape work we're doing now is much, much larger. It's 5,000 maybe to 25,000 acres, [00:03:30] so really, really watersheds or pieces of watersheds and sometimes even small watershed inside a large and really much, much larger kind of more of a functional unit where people might work in terms of planning at a landscape scale further work down the road. Now it's kind of changed a little bit also into fire policy. That was something I've always been interested in trying to understand how science actually interact with policy, how a policy is formed, trying to maybe look at some objectivity and some of the fire [00:04:00] science research. It could maybe help inform policy, not really shape it completely, but informant most recently we've worked with Australians on the policy of urban interface fire areas.Speaker 3: So this has been an interesting um, kind of partnership because Australia and us have a lot of similarities in fire policy and the urban interface and also some real market differences. And probably the, maybe the, the final area is trying to understand, um, dynamics also in struggling. So we've actually moved away from the forest [00:04:30] and moving into some struggling systems, chaparral, try to understand kind of the dynamics of fire and how you might modify fire behavior and m chaparral systems, which are really, really different than, um, say, um, force. So when we continue, I've got a great group of graduate students in my lab and um, all those folks have done great work. So it's a, it's kind of a group effort.Speaker 2: And the research proposals that you write, are you responding to requests from the field, so to speak, or are you driving [00:05:00] some of the subject matter?Speaker 3: Well, what's happened in my program, there's a program called the U s joint fire sciences program, which is funded by the US Department of Agriculture in the u s department of Interior. And they put out a call for proposals every year in the fall. They just came out here recently and they actually put on their website the areas they're most interested in. So most of my research proposals is when I look at those calls, I look at the USDA, look at maybe another competitive research grant [00:05:30] proposal system, look what's being proposed, and then see how that Meld with the interest I've had maybe in the last few years and tried to say, oh, there's an opportunity, we can do something. Um, let's go ahead. It's interesting. One thing has happened is the success rate on the proposals has gone way down in terms of percentage, but this started around 97 98 or percentage of successful proposals. Maybe about 40%. Most recently it's going between 10 and 15. So it has gotten more competitive to get the um, the research proposals [00:06:00] funded.Speaker 2: Is there a general consensus within the research community, a fire, wildfire management community on what the best practices are, where the research should be going?Speaker 3: Well that, there is, I think a lot of consensus with some debate. Um, what's happened in the joint fire sciences program, which I think has happened too many research programs, United States that I'm aware of is calls used to be a little bit more broad in terms of what they were asking for. Kind [00:06:30] of more of a broad question and then maybe you could come up with many different ideas that might fit that question. And I've seen more and more of that. The questions seem to be getting more and more narrow. And I think in some cases they're probably tied to um, you know, entities such as, um, organizations that need information they think is really, really important. Um, maybe also this evolution of science where more certainly known, there's probably young questions are getting maybe more focused in some ways. I think that's a lost opportunity because it allows certainly you to look at what's [00:07:00] being proposed and see if you fit it, but it also doesn't allow maybe the more general research to happen that maybe isn't a tie to an exact objective. And I, I know NSF National Science Foundation does that better where you're able to put in a proposal that may meet that objective, but also it doesn't have to really directly be on right on top of it for a short term, particularly in the fire science research community, we're talking about both Australia, Europe and the United States. More and more research is actually being targeted to questions that managers have on a time scale, [00:07:30] probably less than five years.Speaker 2: What do you see as the time frame that you would need to have for having an impact on a large forest ecosystem?Speaker 3: Well, I think the timeframe for a large one is, is going to be decades. And then continuous, um, places that we've worked at were fire has been reintroduced saying you sent me a national park since about 1974. Um, lightning fire milliwatt creek basin has been allowed to burn kind of unabated with a little bit of suppression for [00:08:00] the last 35 years or so. And it really took decades for that place to be sculpted by fire once again is before 74 fire was excluded and Yosemite really for a hundred years. Totally. So when fire gets back into those systems and seeing the patterns that we see today for some papers with Brandon Collins and others, it really has started to really have an incredible impact the dynamic on that forest. But it took, you know, 2030 years or so. And then when we do things on the other side mechanically, [00:08:30] when we try to maybe reduce fire hazards with mechanical means, thinning, chipping, things of that nature, there are, I think, similar timeframe.Speaker 3: You're talking about decades because the project sizes are so large and one of the big challenges is so much area that really does need some treatment for both fire and also restoration versus what is able to be done annually. And that's really a huge disconnect. What can be done is a tiny drop in some ways connected to what really needs to be done. So I think they all say that it's going to be a [00:09:00] longterm view decades and decades. And once you kind of get into that philosophy of management, you're changing your learning. Since forests never are static, they're always changing. Sense of that means a manager is going to be basically doing things continuously forever.Speaker 4: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:09:30] [inaudible] [inaudible]Speaker 2: uh, to put it in perspective, the idea of forest management and fire abatement, was it about a hundred years ago that the, the process of trying to put fires out began?Speaker 3: It sure was. It was really about 1905 is one of the forest service was created by Congress. And when the forest was created, they really had a few really critical missions put out by the, [00:10:00] um, the congress and also from the president. One was to try to safeguard the timber resources for the nation and try to actually create it to continuous supply timber. The other was actually create continuous and good quality water supplies. So even back in 1905 they were talking about water. There was actually enacted debate in the early 19 hundreds whether or not fire was seen as a menace or possibly couldn't be used as a tool. The debate went on for several years. In fact, California was a big part of that debating particular private land [00:10:30] owners of forest around lake Amador and other places. After a little bit of debate, some study, it was decided that fire was the enemy, both from a water standpoint, timber stand standpoint and Ryder early 19 hundreds 1910 1905 we really have a national fire suppression policy that happens in the western us. The southeast United States continues to debate longer. They have a much longer kind of connection to fire on land based on just immigrants and other things down there and they basically [00:11:00] didn't take the western line for a long time, but around 1905 we really do see an active fire suppression system and things like federal dollars from Congress actually having to be procured to states only. They actually adopted policy.Speaker 2: That's what's built up this incredible amount of fuel. And density of forest in North America that has created a real hazard for wildfire. But then you were saying that in the past 20 [00:11:30] or 30 years that's been rethought and now fire is allowed in areas and there's active management to try to remove fuel than that. You're starting to see the effects of thatSpeaker 3: currently actually has quite a history in this. There was a professor, Harold Vizquel Isabel came here in 1947 and he retired about 1972 so he was one of the earliest that basically started to ask those exact questions, is fire always the enemy? Can we use it actually for some purposes that actually would make sense? Do [00:12:00] we always want to exclude it? You know? So Harold had his career really during that time and there was massive debate and also a massive bias to fire me. Always the enemy. He had a thick skin. Yeah, he was basically, I'm beat up in political settings from comments and written comments, but he persisted and um, did a marvelous job and it has changed. It has changed. It's been slow. It's been really slow. You know, most areas in California, since we're in a Mediterranean climate, really [00:12:30] did have fire at really, really short intervals in the past, say maybe 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.Speaker 3: So we have a lot of places that used to burn with a lot of frequency, very, very common grasslands. You know, um, woodlands, the Savannah Woodlands, Oak Woodlands, many of the forests, mixed conifer, Ponderosa Pine, even wetlands from native American burning. So there was a great area of California that used to burn. Very, very common. And then there are other places in California, high elevation [00:13:00] forests, um, Alpine environments, deserts like the Mojave desert were fired, we think was actually a pretty minor factor maybe once in awhile, but maybe on a century scale. So we really had the gamut here. We had some that burned very, very frequently and others that had very, very little fire. And as you alluded to, the places that used to burn frequently, you take fire out for a hundred years. Those are the places that changed. And it's also past management such as harvesting the way we've harvested, forced partially cut force and left a lot of fuel on the ground that has also had [00:13:30] a profound impact.Speaker 2: And so is there within the community a bit of debate really just around the edges of the issue or are there some people that really have very different takes on, on how management should be done?Speaker 3: You know, there are apps, there are, there are. Both are absolutely both. Um, there are some, there's a debate going on in California right now about high severity fire. So the eye high severity simply means that you killed the majority of you overstory. So when a forest, you're killing maybe 75% [00:14:00] of the overstory or more to the fire, that causes great change. And interestingly, some people would argue that maybe there's too much high severity fire in California because of the fuel build up in the other things we alluded to, others actually may argue that they're sufficient or there's actually a deficit. That high severity fire working on our forest is not a bad thing. And it actually is something that maybe some people argue is an a low number. Science tries to come in and help inform that debate. And it's not [00:14:30] easy because we don't have a lot of good data to understand what high severity fire really did in most of our forests.Speaker 3: In California, we have a few places. Um, one is that Illinois at basin and Yosemite that's been working at least for the last 35 years with unabated fire in there, Brandon Collins led him to work at high severity fire at least in the last couple of decades. Brian, 15% of the landscape, so about 50% of it burning when it burns very frequently every 10 years. Every 15 years is really killing majority of trees. [00:15:00] But at what spatial scale? That's another good question. It's just not how much percentage, but how is it distributed? So the high severity fire there, most patches are less than say five acres in size with many on the order of one acre in size. And then there's a few, a few out there, maybe 200 acres, very few. Um, so the distribution of severity on that landscape is also incredibly important. And there's no doubt that when we look at some of our contemporary wildfires, like the moonlight fire and some others in California we've [00:15:30] had in the last seven decade or so, that the patches of high severity can be a thousand acres, can be maybe even a little larger.Speaker 3: And the patches down in that one acre realm are almost intimate because there just don't exist. So that's one area. It's great debate. The other great debate really is whether or not when forest service goes in to federal land and tries to reduce fire hazard, should they really just focus on fire hazards alone and then try to work with those? Or do they [00:16:00] also added maybe a commercial tree harvest that can supplement the costs of that, maybe make it then available over a larger land basis versus just getting money from Congress to do it. So that's another real real debate is whether or not federal lands in California of the forest service should they actually have an objective that maybe a second tier objective, the fire objective, maybe it's number one, but then maybe the second objective is also removing some green timber that could help pay for their treatments on them around.Speaker 3: That's [00:16:30] a, that's a fierce debate and how does that fit into the roads? No roads debate as well. That's a good question because the road, no road to me is also another one that exactly connected to it because some would argue that we need these roads to access these forests to then somehow do a treatment to then reduce their hazard. My answer to that is somewhat is that there are so many wroted acres in California, millions and millions and millions of acres that are rooted already and many of those millions of vast majority, probably 90% of [00:17:00] the treatment. So I think where the roads are, yes. You think about maybe some of those treatments like mechanical prescribed, burning, chipping makes a lot of sense, but I can't imagine myself saying we need to road areas that are unroasted so then we can do the mechanical work when we have such a base already that needs to be worked and we can't even touch it. I think the unroasted areas, if they're remote, we should basically allow more managed wildfire to work those landscapes.Speaker 4: [00:17:30] [inaudible] you are listening to Spec a l x Berkeley.Speaker 3: In your research, are you actively seekingSpeaker 2: new technologies and capabilities to extend your understanding of what's going on in the forest?Speaker 3: We do use a lot of different technologies to try to help us understand [00:18:00] the forest and one is spatial data, so the idea of you're getting data over large areas like we alluded to, maybe a 15,000 acre area, you know that's a big area at 20,000 acres. It's just impossible to go out there and do some sort of field sampling that you're going to be able to get some information over such an extent. But you can go out certainly and do some field sampling with a stratification maybe based on forest type or aspect or slope. And then use things like a geographic information system or remotely sense data from satellites [00:18:30] and space than to try to use your field data and combine it with that remotely sense data. It actually create a map, like a spatial map of the area that we're interested in. So that spatial data, you know, the remote sensing technology to work on spatial data, just critical, critically important. And even the technology of just instruments we use in the field nowadays to measure things like heights, diameters, um, reflectance of vegetation, things of that nature. All of that is just incredibly useful. So the technology continues [00:19:00] to help us try to make assessments at broad scales and also try to answer questions sometimes that aren't easy.Speaker 2: Are you using a quantitative modeling? To some extent,Speaker 3: we sure do. And then the models are just critical in some ways. The fire models are ahead of things like ecosystem models. You know, fire is really a physical process. It really is about combustion oxidation. Fire modeling really began in earnest in this country in the early seventies mostly Missoula, Montana, [00:19:30] and has certainly been able to kind of change over time and we're continuing to try to make it better. But the fire models we have today actually do a pretty good job, not perfect job, but a pretty good job of actually forecasting on a gis landscape work. Fire's gonna move in a landscape. How fast is it going to move? Maybe what kind of flame lights might you expect so that those modeling systems are really used a great deal in our research to try to understand that probability of fire occurrence. What happens to that probability?Speaker 3: Let's say if you treat 20% [00:20:00] of the watershed and reduce the hazard, what happens to the probability of the areas that are treated? What about the 80% that are untreated? It turns out they can also have a reduction in probability. The ecosystem models are so much more challenging than you're asking what happens to the soil? What happens to water, what happens to wildlife habitat. So those become much more challenging that basically, um, generate and also tests. So the fire modeling in some ways is well ahead of those because I think it's more of a physical known system even though there's great [00:20:30] research to try to make it better. But the firewall that we have today a pretty good,Speaker 2: and then there's also the idea that the forests in the equator equatorial area are much more valuable than the, the forest north and south of that area. What sort of feeling do you have about that?Speaker 3: I think that's Friday and that and the carbon debate, that's a really interesting, um, separation because people have shown really conclusively that, you know, removing forest in the equator area is that dramatic [00:21:00] reduction in carbon sequestration. Also the sustainability of those sports. So I think the carbon question when we look at the equator is really clear about trying to keep forced, forced to keep forest alive. Right? Keep that force there and let it allow it to sequester carbon, hold it. But then when we move away from the kind of the equator, we go up into places that are more temporary. Like California. Here we have fire that works on landscapes, fireworks on landscape, just done in the past. It continues [00:21:30] today, fires different, but it's still a big issue. So there I think the debate becomes not just trying to keep Forrest at forested, but also what kind of forest have the ability to hold onto carbon.Speaker 3: It's a question for the long term and then you go to the boreal and my goodness, the boreal forest and now been shown like in northern Canada and Russia, some of the biggest carbon stocks in the planet. These are huge, enormous areas. And actually we know this year Russia had one the biggest fire years in [00:22:00] his history. So talk about, you know, the context of fire and climate is profound and fire force and boreal is going to be the most sensitive to climate change. People have already forecasted that. I think it's already been seen. Temperatures are up even more severely in the boreal regions versus down here and the temporary. So those places should probably be even more important to understand in terms of the dynamics of carbon and fire and forest and even we are a, so how did you get started in science? What was it that got you interested in [00:22:30] becoming a scientist?Speaker 3: It's a great question. It's one that's hard to answer. I mean my background has always been kind of curious about scientific things. I actually had my undergrad degree and masters degree in engineering. I grew up really in a forestry family, my grandfather and my dad and uncles working around forest. But I think for me being so close to it for a while, not for my whole life, but while young childhood life who was so close and I really enjoyed it, but it was also something that I took for granted, right? That just didn't think it was something they wanted [00:23:00] to study and pursue. And somehow I was interested in kind of technology engineering, still got into engineering field. Then I started actually contemplating doing a phd. Then this realize what discussions with my wife, Mary and others that I was so much more interested in the natural world.Speaker 3: So once I started to actually study that, which actually happened at UC Davis in 1988, it just lit a fire. I mean, I didn't, at that time I wasn't really gonna study fire, but it lit a fire and me just a curiosity. This idea of um, natural [00:23:30] systems on soils and plants. I'd never studied any of that in my previous career. It was just, it was just fascinating to me. Then I just decided, um, I thought I'd come down and meet a couple of faculty here at Berkeley at the time, Bob Martin, um, learned that he actually had a bs degree in physics. So in some ways we had some similarities and they just realized that the kind of the quantitative engineering world had some real connections to the natural scientists. And it was really where my heart was. There's no doubt about it. Great. Well thanks very much. [00:24:00] You're welcome.Speaker 4: [inaudible]Speaker 5: special thanks to Gretchen Sanders before editorial assistants, one occurred during the show is from a low star David Alpha and titled Folk and Acoustic. It's made available [00:24:30] via creative Commons license 3.0 Patrick. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We're happy to hear from our listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot Cadillacs had yahoo.comSpeaker 4: [00:25:00] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How is the Ponderosa pine able to grow throughout the American West? Well, the secret to the tree's success is how well it has adapted to fire. Join Park Ranger Haley Bercot as she describes the unique ways in which the Ponderosa pine is able to protect itself from fire. But, what about people, what about those of us who live in these fire prone ecosystems? What about our homes? Our belongings? Our lives? We’re not naturally adapted to fire, but I think we can make a start by following the example of the Ponderosa Pine. Ponderosas protect themselves from fire with their armor of thick bark. We can do the same by using fire resistant building materials in our homes, and surrounding our homes with a defensible space.

Bonanza chronicled the weekly adventures of the Cartwright family, headed by wise widowed patriarch Ben Cartwright (played by Lorne Greene). He had three biological sons, each by a different wife: the oldest was the intelligent and moody Adam Cartwright (Pernell Roberts); the second was the fun and lovable Eric, better known to viewers by his middle name: "Hoss" (Dan Blocker); and the youngest was the hotheaded and impetuous Joseph or "Little Joe" (Michael Landon). The family's cook was the Chinese immigrant Hop Sing (Victor Sen Yung). The family lived on a thousand-square-mile ranch called "The Ponderosa", on the shore of Lake Tahoe in Nevada; the name refers to the Ponderosa Pine, common in the West. THIS EPISODE: The Saga of Annie O'Toole adapted for radio from Bonanza aired October 24, 1959. Annie O'Toole and her father head out to the Washoe Diggings after her boyfriend, Swede Lundberg, returns with the deeds to two mines. Annie takes one of the deeds in return for the grub stake she gave Swede. Upon her arrival in Nevada, her father dies and she meets up with the Cartwrights. Against Adam's advice (and with his help), Annie decides to open up a restaurant to supply meals to the hungry miners. Things seem to be going well until Swede shows up with another man who claims that Annie's mine is his.

Bonanza chronicled the weekly adventures of the Cartwright family, headed by wise widowed patriarch Ben Cartwright (played by Lorne Greene). He had three biological sons, each by a different wife: the oldest was the intelligent and moody Adam Cartwright (Pernell Roberts); the second was the fun and lovable Eric, better known to viewers by his middle name: "Hoss" (Dan Blocker); and the youngest was the hotheaded and impetuous Joseph or "Little Joe" (Michael Landon). The family's cook was the Chinese immigrant Hop Sing (Victor Sen Yung). The family lived on a thousand-square-mile ranch called "The Ponderosa", on the shore of Lake Tahoe in Nevada; the name refers to the Ponderosa Pine, common in the West.THIS EPISODE:Enter Mark TwainOctober 10, 1959Samuel Clemens arrives in Virginia City to write for the Territorial Enterprise at the same time a crooked politician tries to lay claim on the Ponderosa.