Speaker 1: Okay, welcome to the crime pace of Botany Doesen Podcasts.
I'm so excited for this conversation. It's been three years
since we spoke. I'm here with Alexis Nicole, the notorious
Black Forager account on Instagram and TikTok And are you
in a Facebook doing all that stuff or what?
Speaker 2: I'm also on Facebook. I'm also on YouTube. I'm in
too many places.
Speaker 1: I'm happy because you're you're getting so many people. I
don't know, I mean, I every time your videos pop up,
they just they just make me feel so good. They
really do. It's you know, it's it's uh, that's.
Speaker 2: How I feel about your content. It makes me so
happy and also full of righteous anger, which is my
second favorite way to feel.
Speaker 1: I'm just this spiny little cactus, you know, I'm like ad,
It's so funny.
Speaker 2: You remind us those spiny little cactuses are just as
important as every other part of the DODA.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm yeah, I'm excited to have this conversation. Man.
So I just you know, I don't have any questions
written down. I just wanted to just I mean, I'd
like the conversations just sound like two friends talking and yeah,
and I mean some of your What really inspired me
to hit you up again was some of the posts
you've been putting up lately that are just all about
engagement with the living world. I saw another one from
Robin wall Kimer that she had like, uh, I don't know,
I saw like two weeks ago. It was kind of
the same thing. It was like she was talking about
having like a garden where it's like she was talking
about being in a garden somewhere and seeing, you know,
some kid get chastised for picking berries, and she was like,
I want a garden where kids are told to pick
berries and told to like get in and you know,
take like the you know, find all the dry the
hiss and fruits of some of these plants, or smell
the leaves or whatever, you know.
Speaker 2: Exactly shake some mountain mint seeds into their hands. Like
Because she made such a beautiful point, and her video
was part of the reason why I felt inspired to
make the one that I did, was she she puts
it so plainly, how are you supposed to fall in
love with the world if you can't eat berries? Like,
if you've never eaten a sun warmed black raspberry fresh
off the cane. There is like a level of love
and connection and just pure elation with the world around you,
but you haven't experienced yet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, I know, and that's that's what makes
me so sad for people. And it's you know, and
we should talk, we should mention to it's not just
about picking berries, but also taking for instance, the dry
stalks of you know, dead annual heli anthis species and
beating your friends with them and oh yeah, everything everything.
Speaker 2: Growing and a fallen oastage orange that is half rotten
at your younger sister. It's great. And then guirls will
have an easier time getting the seeds to eat them.
We're all connected.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the and it's the human plant mutualism. So
go out there and fuck up your dryer lint trap
with the seeds you forgot were in the back pocket
of your pants, you know, do it.
Speaker 2: I hope that its uh, some beautiful plants will take
off wherever your dryer ends up.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. Or like the vacuum, I empty my vacuum
into the yard. Now, I know there's stuff that's you know,
you never know. The soil seed bank in one zone
yard can be extensive, but so what do you butut
up to lately? How's it we haven't spoken of like
three years and like Instagram.
Speaker 2: But no, I feel like I you're one of the
people who I feel like I know what you're up to,
but exclusively through what you are posting on social media.
So when you reached out, I was like, ah, yes, perfect,
we can actually catch up in the way that humans
are supposed to grow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like, I like obsessively put stuff in Instagram stories,
like it's my frickin' journal, you know, like it's their
diary over here. It's I just I don't know why.
I just I figure if I put stuff out there,
maybe somebody will get something from it or get an idea.
Speaker 2: I mean, you're one of the people lately I have
been on telling people maybe this belongs in the journal
kick But for you, it's the opposite. You go ahead
and post whatever you want.
Speaker 1: To, Just put it out there. You know, I always
been shitcum posting. Now I didn't need to know that,
but you know, okay, whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but if it inspires somebody else to, if that's
like someone's foot in the door to becoming integrated into
their local environ, then I think a win.
Speaker 2: Is a win. I think a double is a w.
Speaker 1: Yeah. If I you know, if I make it to be,
you know that old I'm gonna be such a great
wing not old Italian man. I can't win it, but
but oh.
Speaker 2: My god, you're gonna be the coolest, funniest old man.
I feel like I'm either going to be like the
really sweet old lady who always has weird cookies, or
I'm gonna be like the scary hag at the end
of the lane. And I'm equally as excited for either of.
Speaker 1: Those scary hag. With the overgrown yard exactly surrounded by
all the lawns, surrounded.
Speaker 2: By all of the lawns, which is all who I
am in my city neighborhood here in Columbus.
Speaker 1: I bet you got a nice I beout you got
a nice yard, though, man.
Speaker 2: We we really love it. It's been a joy.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: There is a local landscaper who deals exclusively in local
eco type native plants named Michael Keeler, and he and
I have been having a lot of fun building out
plans uh and involving in a whole lot of fun
edible species. So we we followed your advice. We killed
my lawn in the front yard. We are getting ready
to transform the backyard into like a mini multi layer
food forest.
Speaker 1: That sounds am and I'm really.
Speaker 2: Excited about it. It's weird to have gotten to a
point in my life where I even and like lucky
enough to have some space our little like one fifth
acre parcel in the middle of downtown.
Speaker 1: Oh god, it's so important though. Yeah, I get distracted
just being in my yard man, and I get It's
funny though. I've done this for because I've done it
for other friends around my neighborhood. Because at this point
I'm like just curating my own botanic garden in my neighborhood.
Now it's like I've ran out of a full sun space,
so I need to start you know who else who
wants it done? And uh And the response.
Speaker 2: For everyone listening if someone in your neighborhood is like,
oh my god, here take these seats, it's because they
ran out of space in their yard and are spreading
their landscaping into your space. And I think you said that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's it's nice too, because I will like
go hang out in these yards like without saying hi
to the people are asking. I mean if they're home,
I'll go say hi. But you know, but it's you know,
and that's the way it should be. It's I get
a benefit from it too. And but when I've done it,
like I did it to this guy, my friend Hector,
who's an immigration attorney. He had no interest in plants
before whatsoever. And then now I get him texting me
randomly being like, Oh, You'll never believe what I saw
in my yard. Oh my god, look at this thing.
It's like some crazy auth or something or what you know.
Speaker 2: Yes, so it's the best feeling.
Speaker 1: It's spiritually healing, and it heals others as well, which
is yes, it feels great to see. So what is
what's around Columbus? Is it prairie in woodland or a
mixture of both them.
Speaker 2: We are, we are in this beautiful zone that I love.
Breaheading about to people where the eastern woodlands meets the
beginning of the prairie. You head literally twenty minutes east
of where I'm sitting right now, and you're in the
foothills of the Apple Atans. You head twenty minutes west
of where I am right now, and it's very it's
starting to look very flat. You're seeing a lot of
really fun your prairie dots, your different Helianthus species. It's
a really special place being right smacked out in the
middle of Ohio. So we kind of get the best
of both worlds. It's I'm I have fun with it
in a way that very few people, unless they all
spend an inordinate amount of time in the outdoors here,
they don't normally notice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's nothing like the prairie man, because it's I mean,
you know those those regions. Yeah, like being in Chicago,
you get those brutal winter months where you're just kind
of losing your mind and then you know, but then
you get this eruption, Like the amount of biomass that's grown,
that's produced in the prairie in the summer from all
those underground roots is I mean they start in main
and then you get this eruption to like eight feet
sometimes of all those cool grasses and sylphiums and all that.
You know, it's it's wild. You don't really get that
in a lot of other ecosystems around North America. You know,
the prairiees no that.
Speaker 2: They're really special. And I think part of the reason
why we don't even recognize that in the US is
because we've lost so much of our prairie to farmland.
You know, we don't people don't get to have hands
on experiences with a lot of prairie biomes anymore, which
is part of the reason why, at least in our
front yard, since we do get a good amount of sun.
And I was like, Oh, we're gonna skew prairie plants
for this front yard, and I just I love it.
The difference between first week of May to like second
week of June insane.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. It's nuts, like from the
spring ofphemerals and then you know when they come out,
when the leaves are off the trees in the woodlands.
At least that's what he used to feel. It's like
around Chicago and then and then the prairies. You just
got these little things and you come back in like
July and it's just this you can't see across it,
and it smells so good and it sounds so good. Guy.
I tell people being in the prairie and it's like
being in psychedelics. It's like it's like sensory overloading.
Speaker 2: It overwhelming. Well, it's sensory overload, smells and all of
the different colors of the flower petals and reflecting the
sunlight into your eyes.
Speaker 1: It kind of likes like, yeah, and some stuff is
blooming in May, and then some stuff is blooming in July,
and different species are blooming and it's all packed. It's
like all this diversity packed super tight, you know. And
that's why I like, I've been I've been doing this presentation.
I give where I shit on modern horticulture landscaping, you know,
which is mostly which is the stuff that's rooted in
like this weird aristocratic nineteenth century Europe and rich people.
Everything's like uniformly spaced, evenly spaced in a line and hedged,
and it just it's like the kind of landscaping that
makes me die on the inside. Looks like Minecraft. You know,
no no offense to's like Minecraft.
Speaker 2: The planet is supposed to look.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, and it's just and but again, that's what
you would expect from when there's no place to look
for inspiration in nature and reality. That's what you just do.
What what you're giving and what's around.
Speaker 2: You'll also put a boxwood that spells like cat piss
when the sun shines on it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, why do they do? There must be some urbiguari.
I don't know anything about that genus, you know. But again,
the stuff we see in horticulture isn't even the stuff
you'd see. And they're not the native boxwoods you would
see wherever they're native. It's stuff that's been a greenhouse.
That's what I try to tell people too. I'm like this,
these plants aren't even they're not only not the ancestors
aren't native, like they're from six thousand miles away where
they're probably very important. But these plants don't even exist.
They've been bread in a greenhouse over the last hundred
years for very gated leaves. Are they flower all the time? Oh,
they're just so you know, they can be hedged.
Speaker 2: Real they don't produce any fruit because fruit is messy, messy,
need to grow very evenly during the year. And yeah,
you're right, it's not even what those plants look like.
They wouldn't even serve a purpose. If you took your
boxwood hedge out of the ground and put it where
it's from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's it's it's weird. But again, I've tried,
I've trakened the stance where like it's fun to shit
on it, but when I'm trying to convince people who
are still into that, I try to be as kind
as possible and as polite and informative, you know. And
also if it's like city officials messing with me that
I'm just very persistent to the point that they just
get annoyed and eventually give up. You know.
Speaker 2: I'm just like, oh, I mean, you were asking what
I've been up to lately, and my entire spring was
being the native plant thorn in our city council.
Speaker 1: Oh no, here we go. What they do well?
Speaker 2: So last year they wrote us a ticket for one thousand,
two hundred dollars really because because we have a wild
front yard, because it doesn't look like a lawn. And
I was like, oh, well, you post the wrong sleeping there.
This is going to become everybody's problem until I connected
it with other people with these fantastic native yards that
are doing so many great things for their communities and
worked with my fiance who's an attorney, to like put
forth some protection for native plant and pollinator gardens our city.
You know, like a lot of blue lead cities loves
to boast that we're trying to be good for the environment.
Likes to boast that we're trying to increase archery, canopy,
trying to help the pollinators. And I'm like, okay, it's
time for you to put your money where your mouth is.
Speaker 1: Then yeah, yeah, they just don't know. They're just no,
they're just not aware. They don't know what's going on.
They don't know what's going on. That's what that's the
thing is, I think again, and I don't fall people for,
but we've all been brought up and doctrinated and is
strange from this stuff. And we've all brought up, been
brought up to think that the landscaping in front of
the wells Fargo is what plants should look like. You know,
where everything's hedged and they're all the same clone and
it's very neat and orderly. And then mulch has even
died because mulch, you know, to use natural wood chips
would be messy and you know that.
Speaker 2: It would look like nature. That's crazy.
Speaker 1: And I tell people too, like if you saw, if
you this, this reminds me of like a dog that's
got a nervous tick and like just keeps like neurotically
scratching itself, you know, or which you see sometimes okaya,
you know, if they get like separation anxiety, Like that's
what this reminds me of in humans, is like who
does this? Like that's psychologically it's not a good sign
if you need everything to be it's obsessive, compulsive's surly, yes, yeah,
and it and it's like, man, you are so you
need to go outside and you need to like go
get messy. You need to go walk through a prairie,
you need to go hike up a mountain. Something like
this is not normal to have everything hedged and evenly
spaced in the diaed mult It's not normal. It's it's
fucking weird, and we've normalized what's really really bizarre and
very unhealthy for us.
Speaker 2: Yes, and I mean not to get on like a
soapbox precariously balanced on top of the beautiful.
Speaker 1: Soak it on the soapbox, get on it, do it.
Speaker 2: But it's also classes as hell because who has the
money to be like hiring the landscapers to be keeping
everything beautiful in pristine and keeping your grass too. Oh,
the ruler says that your grass is a half inch
too high bad news bears like and not even getting
into the history. Like you mentioned before, the only reason
lawns even proliferated was people who were so rich that
not only did they have all this land for other
people to work on for them, but they had land
that served no purpose just to brag, Yeah, just to
be like, oh yeah, the marquee down the street has
just a big patch of flat grass in front of
his house. Damn, he must have money for days.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's a weird form of wealth worship. And
to me it's it's not. You know, it's because you'll
see comments sometimes from people, you know, bootlockers, being like, oh, no,
you're just you're just jealous. You just wish you had
money like that. No, I don't. I really don't like that.
Seems like a depoperate existence to me. I have lived
ten lives over I've seen all kinds of crazy shit.
I'm like, I could croak tomorrow and I'd be happy. Like,
I've done a lot of fun stuff in my life.
Those experiences no one can take away from me. What
do you have? You have like gold plated toilet seats
and you know, all this shit like that's and everyone
you speak to who knows extremely wealthy people, like I
have a friend who used to watch these kids. That
is some billionaire in Chicago. I don't know how he
got that gig. He's real clean cut, he never got
any tattoos. But and he tells me, he's like, you know,
he doesn't work for them anymore, So I don't think
there's any repercussions of me letting this cat out of
the bag. But he's like, they're fucking miserable. They are like,
and now the fun is getting a divorce. They fucking
hate each other. They're like, the kids are have all
kinds of like psychological disorders and are really and those
are the people who end up elevated in positions of power.
Speaker 2: But uh hey then want to reinforce the things that
they think are beautiful in their lives, which is sometimes
their area, and they don't even know how miserable it
could be making them, how much it could be contributing
to their new a state of mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah it's yesterday.
Speaker 2: I sat on a log near a creek picking wood
metal stems and just like scraping fiber, saying hello to
all of the daddy long legs walking by noticing the
influx of box elder bugs like we always get this
time of year before our first frost, and just noticing things,
and I felt lighter than I have felt for months.
Is that also because maybe I hadn't touched my phone
in two hours?
Speaker 1: I got it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that probably has something to do with it too.
Speaker 1: But just going outside that's why I'm you know, outdoor
education for kids has got to be the way, man.
I think, like especially vital because I can't sit still
as it is, and to I remember being like six
and seven and just being like, oh my god, this
is torture. I don't want to be in school. I
don't care about this. I'm not excited. I'm getting no
dopamine from any of this at all, you know. And yeah,
letting kids go like running a patch of woods or
a prairie for like two hours would be so and
teaching them about what's there and encouraging them to lift
their blogs and look for bugs and you know, take
these grass and try these grass blades and try to
make a a you know, a little bracelet out of
it or something like that. Cat. That's so important, man,
that's so important.
Speaker 2: I mean, I was, I was really lucky and that
there was a lovely, very hippy, dippy Montassori School that
I attended from age three to age twelve, and every
day regardless of whether it was rain or shine, unless
there was like real inclement weather, because we do be
getting tornadoes here in Ohio. You were outside, you know,
rainy day, you dressed for a rainy day, and we
had woods that we kind of just got free rain up.
You know. Teachers would make sure no one jumped off
the monkey bars and broke their arm, which like did
happen sometimes, but kids are are malleable, they're strong. Everybody
bounces back. I didn't know anyone who broke the arm
on the monkey bars who did not do the monkey
bars again after their art was.
Speaker 1: Fel Oh, that's good, that's really good.
Speaker 2: And we just build. We used to just build forts.
And the crazy thing about being allowed to just build
forts is you very quickly as a child, start learning
what all of the different tree species are, because you
start learning which ones are good for building you which
ones aren't. Yeah, we were like stabbing o sage oranges
for glue to glue like wood peel shingles from black
cherries to put onto our little forts and huts. We
knew that the bark on the outside of the non
native honeysuckles was really flexible, so if you needed cordage
to tie something, you could peel some of that off,
like it was. I didn't realize how much of my
botany education started so early, just because we were outside
all the time and our tea. We're willing to answer
questions for something we were curious.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, were they showing you this
stuff or were you I mean, oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And I mean also at the school, like you take
your first intro to potany class in the third grade.
Speaker 1: God damn it. What is it is? Is that that's
a Monossory thing or what.
Speaker 2: It's a Montessori thing to be really integrated into outdoor spaces.
I just did a top at the Montsory School of
Denver two weeks ago, and they also have these beautiful
outdoor play spaces with like raised beds integrated into the
play areas where kids are hanging out, filled with both
like native and non native vegetable species. So kids are
getting really hands on from the jump. And I do
think that there's a reason why when I switched from
monasory to my college prep, very regimented. You are outside
for like fifteen minutes a day max. For your lunchtime.
High school. I got really depressed, really fast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because you're trapped under the fluorescent lights, you know.
Yeahs smells like floor cleaner. Yeah, okay, that's amazing. I
always because I've always joked too, I mean only partially joking,
Like geologic timeline. Teach that shit in second grade, you know,
but intra plants are the foundation of life on earth?
Why is it not taught how to identify them, like
just basics and like some of that's what a plant
family is, you know, and how like what they do
they rolling plant ecology, that kind of thing, Like why
is that not taught in grade school? It's kind of weird.
Speaker 2: I only wish that we had done more geology because
we did have a pit lovingly called the clay pit,
and if you dug down deep enough, you would start
finding like fossilized corals and trilobbes and the rocks and
the consistency of the clay would change. And that's the
thing you notice as a kid. But a lot of
our teachers were like, we know plants, we do not
necessarily know the theological.
Speaker 1: History of the grounds of your yeah, because I was Yeah,
because most of the Midwest is limestone underneath or sandstone.
I remember. I remember seeing the limestone pits like on
the side of Interstate fifty five in Chicago, and I
was a kid. I mean, like, you know, my mom
would be like, that's all former ocean floor, and I
just I couldn't wrap my head around that. That was too.
It would have been nice for someone to.
Speaker 2: Explain that well, that your mom knew that and told
you that though at like a good young age when
you're really curious about these.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean she was a public school teacher, so
I mean, yeah, it was you know, that stuff is
so important some context for that, because I can't. I
just can't. I can't imagine what it's got to be
like growing up alienated from any of that, from going outside,
from plants, from you know. And that's kind of what
I am always ranting about too. It's like you look
at some of these you know, quote communities because they're anything,
but you know, like from when you're flying over them,
like the suburbs of Houston or something, and you're like,
oh my god, it's there's like there's nothing around there.
It's just cul de sacs from like a couple miles
and then it leads to like a shopping center with
a big parking lot, and that's got to be such
a hard place to grow up in because there's nothing
real around there. There's nothing left of the native landscape.
There's no there's you know, this this piece of this
essential piece of the human experience for the last however many,
you know, million years, three hundred thousand years as a species,
but we were, you know, running around naked hominids before that. Yeah,
it's just missing. Now it's missing, and now you just
grow up and you know, it's just video games.
Speaker 2: I think so stressed out.
Speaker 1: Now, Yeah, yeah, of.
Speaker 2: Course feels like nothing makes me feel aged more than
suddenly realizing that I am the adult being like, I'm
worried about the children I am. I'm worried about all
they're all on screens. And I mean part of it
is there was kind of a degree of freedom and
the outdoors that I think was already on its way
out when me and my younger sister were kids in
the nineties and the early aunts where you could tell
your parents, I'm like riding my scooter to my friend's
house down the street and we're going to go play
flashlight tag in the woods, like I'll be back before
dinner time, Like let's think our watches. I'll be back
before before dinner. And kids don't really get to do
that as much anymore. Not a lot of them are
in living in spaces where they have access to cool,
wild green spaces to play, and the world is terrifying. Now.
I understand parents not wanting to let their kids be
outside by themselves and have that independence, but I also
think that it's really vital, and so I don't even
know how to reconcile that, which is why I do
not have children, because I think I would be way
too stressed out every single day about being like I
need to keep you safe because I built you from
cells in my body, but also I want you to
be happy and feel like an independent human being. And
I'm having a lot of trouble reconciling those feelings, which
and I know for you, I'm preaching to the choir.
And but that's like a really big reason why me
and my fiance are worried about having kids.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's you know, on one hand, you don't
have to worry about polio anymore, at least for the
time being.
Speaker 2: But true love that. I love that my child will
not get the consumption and die at age six.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, the world is I mean, yeah,
you know you hear. Especially it's the development in the
last twenty years in this country. Depending on where you live,
it's been so bad, man. I mean even in Texas,
in Florida, there's nothing left. I talked to old, older
people that are older than me or my age all
the time that say that, yeah, the woods we used
to play in behind my house are gone now and
there it's like a strip mall or you know, there's
no But that's again, that's what you that's what that's
what you expect from a society where the dominant culture
has no reverence for these things. And that's kind of
what I've been talking about lately too. It's like, you know,
the EO. Wilson idea that you know, the laid biologists,
it's like half earth like leave set half of it aside.
It's a living machine. You know, you may not. You
don't need to turn everything into you know, a single
use for humans strip of land like it's a living machine,
it's a functioning ecosystem. Manage it, but just don't develop it,
you know.
Speaker 2: Exactly, And we're allowed to see value in something that
hasn't been developed. That is the thing that it is
so hard to get people to wrap their heads around,
is there is inherent value not just for other members
of the ecosystem, but also for us in those quote
unquote undeveloped spaces, which you know, even saying that, you
can get into a whole other conversation about how these
spaces are descended from spaces that were being cultivated nine
times out of ten exactly by the indigenous groups that
were here before us. In fact, a book that I
just finished reading, feed Us with Trees by what is
it Elsbeth Hayes talks a lot about these maintained, functional,
but also very like calorie giving ecosystems that had been
specifically built to exist in for us to get things from,
while also not disrupting the general flow of the ecosystem
for other animals, for fungi, for insects, and how people
got here and we're just like, nah, that don't look
like farm raise it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just complete shortsightedness and oblivious obliviousness and a
little bit of arrogance too.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 2: When you look at some of the journals of especially
some of the Spanish conquistadors when they first were making
their way to like the southeastern United States, they would
write in their journals about how insane it was, how
productive these spaces were in terms of food. They'd comment about, oh,
the mulberries, the per simmons, the grapevines, the nuts everywhere,
And then after these beautiful, flowery descriptions would be like, yeah,
so what obviously means that God wants us to be
here and inflict all of our practices onto this layout.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's I look at that, and I look
at some of the behaviors of the the quote leaders
of the dominant society we live in. I'm like, where
does this? Where? How did this? How do we get here?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: Is this lead poisoning that happened a few hundred years?
Speaker 2: Is it the micro is it.
Speaker 1: Like inbreeding by like the monarchies or something like? How
did we? How did this happen? Like how do you.
Speaker 2: I'd love to blame the habsburg for this.
Speaker 1: I love like how do you see this this? I mean, God,
what I would what I would, what I would give
to be able to go back in time and just
see some of the places in this country and see
what they look like, you know, God, But that's that's
the thing is. You know, you live on a place,
you live at the land, and you work with it
instead of against it, instead of trying to you know,
subdue it and control it. You're going to figure things out.
You know, you're going to create these wonderful places. You're
paying attention to things. You've got innate respect for them
just on their own existence, not because you know they
necessarily provide something for you. You just it's you're going to
learn how.
Speaker 2: Affect them and their own like right to exist, their
own agency as another living thing. Yeah, instead of only
viewing it through the lens of either a this has
to be extremely productive for me and other humans or
B this is like a nature museum and we can't
touch it. And that's I mean, the other side of
that is it makes me really deeply sad to see
this general distrust of ourselves and our fellow humans when
it comes to nature. Yeah, that was the main argument
that a lot of really wonderful, very kind, very thoughtful
people were making in the comments of that post, I
made generally saying like, I hear you. I do agree
we need to be interacting with nature more. But surely
you must understand that if people were allowed to forage
places that we would absolutely decimate them and absolutely wreck them.
And I don't think that's our default setting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think it is either, I think, but
you know, and I understand why they think that. I
think it's me again. It's that Murian view that like, oh,
if just hands off, let it be, then'll touch it.
Just hands off, and you know, it'll take care of itself.
We can. It's like, no, man, that's not how it works.
Not it's get in there, but pay attention and a
little bit of humility and a little bit of respect
will go a long way, and the living world will
teach you. I know that sounds fucking woo, but I'm serious,
it does. There's so much to gain just from paying
attention to this stuff and getting that dopamine release that again,
you've been getting for hundreds of thousands of years as
a species from exactly And that's why I make no shit.
I think that's Honestly, the reason so many people are
fucking losing it today, from mass shootings to road rage
to just whatever addictions they have. Uh, it's because of this.
It's because we've were so estranged and alienated from this
world where the dominant society we live in is killing it.
This mentality we have is killing it. But it doesn't
have to be that way, It really doesn't, you know,
it's no, it's the least. The least you could do
is kill your lawn plants of native plants, or just
go if you don't have a lawn, go out there
and just start collecting seeds. Fuck up your dryer, Fuck
up your dryer lint trap, you know, I mean, if
you want to remember to take them out before, but
you're going to always forget a little bit, you know,
take the seeds out before disperse them.
Speaker 2: A moment for a moment of silence for everyone with
a child under the age of tens lent traps, especially
in the fall when I do my acorns, and all
I get our parents being like, so, you're telling me
my child's pockets this time for year are youthful.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 2: And the thing that I want to ask people is
why is your child the only one who's filling their
pockets up with it. Yeah, exactly, why are you not
partaking in the limbs?
Speaker 1: Man? I was. I was going through my daughter's backpack
the other day, like putting putting her lunch in there,
and like, she's got all these papers gen in there,
and she had like a shit, you god, like forty
hirt pebbles stashed in the back. She had like like
a pound and a half of these. I was like,
what are you doing? Like what I mean, this is great,
but like, can we can I take these up? Can
we put them in this in the garden over here?
It's you know, oh yeah, sure, that's okay. You know,
it's like you have.
Speaker 2: To have felt pretty proud though.
Speaker 1: I did. I did.
Speaker 2: That's a beautiful moment.
Speaker 1: I flew back from California two days ago with fifteen
pounds of marble limestone and Mom's a night that I
just picked up. I was like, I don't know why
I'm doing. This is insane, it's hurting my back, but
these are really cool. And then I'll you know, I'll
write with a little sharpie on them where I got
them and the date and everything.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean that is our way yesterday at
one of the woods that I love going to this
time of year, they're doing some maintenance and they cut
back some oceage orange trees and one of the logs
was just really calling to me, and their wood is beautiful,
and so I was like, well, I'm carrying this log
to my car. Now. I don't know what I'm gonna
do with it, but it belongs to me.
Speaker 1: That's well. It's good heart scaping too, because man, down here,
I'll just put logs around, especially because we got this
public garden. We started near this public golf course, and
I always worry it wouldn't even be like malicious intent,
but people just love to mow, and I always worry
they're gonna like, yeah, come in one day. So you know,
i'll set up little booby traps whatever, just the and
so I'll put logs in there and make it a
little harder for them. And so anyway, and I'll just
use logs because they're good habitat. You know, you see
the beatles killing in them and the little piles of sawdust.
It's like, okay, something's using that. And so I lifted
this big hackberry log up and they were like these
giant like rhinoceros beetle larvae underneath the six of them. Yeah,
like it probably weighed together. They would have weighed half
a pound. They were juicy, man, you know.
Speaker 2: But I love love lifting up a good log or
a big fallen piece of bark and just seeing what's
going on under there. It's life's little pleasure.
Speaker 1: Your sequels, I bet where you are because you guys,
get enough moisture. You probably see salamanders sometimes.
Speaker 2: Yes, I was just talking to folks yesterday evening at
a community knitting night because I am just leaning into
being old, especially during the winter, and I was like, okay,
we got to get a gang together in February to
go out at night down in the southeast and help
these like amphibians cross the roads so people don't run over.
Who's with me? And weirdly a lot of people want
to go guys are crossing about it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah for salamanders or what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when they're going to their vernal pools to get
ready to do their business.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's really cool though. I mean, that's just
cool to see that kind of thing, to see, you know,
like a mass movement of all these you know, animals
you don't normally encounter, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Because they're usually so hidden, and I mean, and those
are my favorite kind of animals. Like, I'm also obsessed
with our Southern flying squirrels, who are our most populous
squirrel in Ohio, but no one ever can sees them
because they're noternal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've never seen one. God, I forget those guys
are even around. That's fucking dope.
Speaker 2: Really, Oh my God, please come visit, especially if it's
during the winter. I will go and lovingly hit a
tree snag with a stick so we can see them.
Speaker 1: So you will go, what, you spook them, and then
you spook them and then they take off or what.
Speaker 2: And then they go hi. And then sometimes they'll go
and glide to another tree snag, or they'll just well,
they'll go to another tree snag, realize it's just a
person with a stick, and then go back to where
they were.
Speaker 1: God, that's hilarious. Man. What time of night you got
to go out to see him?
Speaker 2: Usually just a little ways into the evening. The sun
sets so early now, especially in the winter time, so
like nine nothing crazy.
Speaker 1: That's crazy. I didn't know they were that abundant out there.
That's cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Oh my gosh, it's fantastic. One of my favorite
winter activities is there's a professor, doctor down Altov here
who's all of his study is around southern flying squirrels,
and he lets volunteers go out with him during the
winter to do box checks at all of the boxes
that he has set up all around the state of Ohio,
which I think is so cool. I would love to
see more professors just letting regular regular people participate in science,
especially what it has to do with their local ecosystem.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Man, I remember when I was in high school
this this Uh, I don't know if I told you
this before, but I remember this. We had this one
We took an ecology class and this this this teacher.
We came in one day and he's like, oh, we
got a great field trip today. We're going to do it.
And I was like, you know, He's like, I wasn't
planning on it, but I just saw this fresh roadkilled deer.
We're gonna go get it in the van and then
take it to this empty field and then come back
on Monday. And you know, so this this is fucking
hilarious too. He took us in a van. We went
and you know, with like garbage bags, picked up this
carcass and it had already started to stink. It was.
It was horrible. It smelled terrible. But he was like,
fuck it, we're doing this. And there were probably twelve
of us in this class and this big you know,
one of those old Dodge vans were cod like smell
the gas we was coming up through the floorboards and
so we're all like gagging in there with this dead
deer in the back. And then we go and take
it to this fields a minute drive. We're all laughing
about it, like, oh you know, and then we put
it in the field and we come back in two
days and it's it's all just like the vultures just
picked it clean. It was, but it was an excellent
ecology lesson. It was like, oh wow, yeah, that's actually
pretty cool.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 1: I didn't expect that they picked it clean. Man, two days.
Speaker 2: It was nuts two days, I mean. And that's the
thing we gotta be. We gotta be more hands on
with nature, including the stuff that we conventionally considered to
be gross.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's I will say, though, man, it's pretty
I have a lot of hope like me and al
Scorch just did this tour, this killer Lawn tour around
which was I just kind of like last minute. I
was like, I wonder we could do this, let's plan it.
And like the amount of enthusiasm I saw. We went,
you know, from Chicago to Saint Paul, Omaha, Lincoln, Kansas City,
and then Fort Worth, and like the amount of enthusiasm
I saw among people was nuts. Mean, we like two
hundred and fifty people come out to Kansas City. Like
people were just excited and they're just excited. People meet
each other there and like planning other meetups and shit,
and it's it's amazing. It's such a great thing to
I see that, and I'm like, God, that's so this
is like such a growing community of people, and there's
so many people that are into this and it's so
positive and feels, you know, feels so good to see.
It's like maybe they're you know, maybe there's a little
bit of hope. I think there's a lot.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think everyone kind of like hit a
point in this loneliness epidemic where people are realizing you
need community, you need connection to something bigger than yourself
in order to feel whole, to feel more fulfilled, and
so it's been really cool to see communities starting to
sprint up, especially around native plants. I was in Montana
and Missoula this past summer gathering sand cherry's in a
Costco parking lot, and I was like, I'm gonna tell
people where they are because I can't take all of
these and it's actually kind of cool that they're landscaping
with nade of plants and I won't for people to
get to be hands on with this. And I heard
that later that night after I posted the video, a
whole group of people converged on the Costco parking lot
after it closed and they made friends with each Other's cool,
and I'm just like, yes, good, perfect. I didn't even
intend this.
Speaker 1: What are sand fairies? Really quick?
Speaker 2: Oh? Maybe a sand plum? Sand plum. It's one of
the prunises and it is cherry sized, but it is
definitely probably considered a plum. It's prinice. Oh give me
a second.
Speaker 1: They were landscaping with these things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but they were landscaping with them.
Speaker 1: Oh that's cool. Oh that's great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like and it makes sense. They're made like
they are attuned to that environment. They were doing way
better than any of the landscaping plants around any of
the other adjacent buildings that were non made.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the natives. And it's crazy like natives and cultivation,
you know, in cultivated areas are often in way better
shape than you might even find them in out in
habitat because they're getting you know, they're getting there's probably
an irrigation system nearby. They're getting maintained somewhat. I mean
it's and they're great seed sources too. Like when you
see people, That's why I always think to them, like
all the all the like strip mall, parking lots, all
the like areas around irrigation, uh or what is it
like you know, the reservoirs when they got to put
the what am I thinking of the when they build
a pond like next to a parking lot? Yeah, yeah,
I forget what.
Speaker 2: That little drainage pond a little.
Speaker 1: Yeah like around that Just why can't you just put
natives around there, especially like in the prairie regions. You know,
I saw that.
Speaker 2: Someone has tossed some of our Nlumbo lutea are native
lotuses seeds into some of those little like pond ditch
drained areas around one of them all north of the.
Speaker 1: City retention ponds, that's what is Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, retention ponds. Y Yeah, and I'm like, good, perfect, Yeah,
there you go.
Speaker 1: See. Yeah, human human human plant mutualism. Someone was exactly
maybe someone just took some seeds and threw them in there.
You never know.
Speaker 2: Exactly, You never know. But it could have also been
a bird, you know, but I like to believe that
it was a silly goose human maybe the same person
who has been putting philosophy ovoid spores and the woodchips
in front of city Hall.
Speaker 1: Okay, we got to talk about, Yeah what was this
because I know they grow on Ohio, but they yeah,
they really come up. They come up in the landscaping
in front of the city hall.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah. That was a fun little thing that
happened a couple years back here in downtown Columbus. But
they grow everywhere, like our whole city is crisscrossed with
rivers and creeks and full of box elders, which is
one of I believe they're like preferred wood substrates. It's
when they break down and you know, get little chippy
pieces where it floods, and so we just got a
ton of them. Earlier this year, I saw a kid's
playground that was full of them, and I was like, oh, oh.
Speaker 1: That's so funny. I just take those stembuts, Just take
those stem butts and stuff them in the mulch somewhere. Yeah,
it was, it was. It was like that in the
Bay Area too, with Silasi b Leni. But hey, they're
doing a service. They're turning chips into dirt, you know, So.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, they're working hard.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, the name. I mean, that's the thing
I always tell people about natives too, is like we
can just look, we just got to change our perception
of what's beautiful because it's been it's been all warped
from you know, growing up in this society that's estranged
from biological and ecological reality. You know, we think plants
that have they need that variegated leaves and they need
the flower all the time. Whatever. It's like, my whole
perception of what's beautiful has changed. I look at the
you know, the typical strip mall landscaping now, and it's
repulsive or like wealthy garden landscaping is like a like
a rich person's garden. It's horrible. Yeah, it's not attractive
to me. It looks weird. And then I spend time
in nature and that's what I want to look at.
And so you know, you start putting those plants in,
you know, and they're all either easy to grow from seed,
there's genetic diversity, and there's a you know, if one
dies from a disease, they're not all going to die.
There's a little bit of diversity in there. And then
they just they were so low maintenance too, but again
that's bad for the comet.
Speaker 2: That's the way that I've been able to sell it
to a lot of my neighbors is, you know, in
high summer and we are we are just finishing year
three of some pretty bad drought conditions here in central
Ohio over the summer, and it's it's that is a
perfect time to lovingly remind your neighbors you would not
need to be out here watering your lawn. Yeah, you
replaced your lawn with some native plants, maybe not all
of it, maybe just a little bit of it. And
that is a nice way to sell it to Also
during the mowing seasons and the spring and the fall.
Another great time to be like, well, it wouldn't just
be no mow may if all of your yard was
native plants, it'd be no mo the whole year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you shouldn't. You shouldn't have to, I mean
having to apply fertilizer all the time and your fungus
sides or something that's not normal. You shouldn't have to
do that.
Speaker 2: You know, you do that, then that is bad for
us too. Nine times out of pens and leaping into
our groundwater like it just it's so wild. Someone in
my most recent leave the Leaves video was saying like, well,
if you left the leaves on your lawn, you could
mow over them first to break them up in the
smaller pieces, and then you could apply this phosphorus fertilizer
and then you could do this and then you could
aerate it in the spring and then you could do that.
If my comment was or you could just get rid
of your lawn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, really, you're self The time I did, I did
this video with this uh this like native landscaping company
called Symbiosa's Texas out here, and I was talking about
we're on like these like really barren, hot, dusty Calichi
hills in the juniper woodlands on the Edwards Plateau just
west of Boston, Texas. And I'm you know, I'm looking
at the plants there and they're incredible, Like these things
are just built for the for the heat there, like Galfimia,
this member of the malpiggy a c with these cool flowers.
It's got this big root in Stilingia. You know, all
this stuff that's got big roots, and like some of
the liatris there are just tough as nails, like growing
out of bare of limestone in one hundred degree heat.
And I and on the video, I'm like, look at
this stuff, and like look at how look at this.
This isn't soil. There's no soil here. This is just
limestone that's slowly weathering from the acidic rain and just
creating this powder. And they're the powder beneath that powder
is just this rock. Like the Why would you try
to plant the crape myrtle here? They didn't evolve in
this crpe myrtles. Crape myrtles are I'm a.
Speaker 2: Smoke tree here. Why do you want to watch those
non native plants slowly die?
Speaker 1: They're probably important where they're native. I mean, I know
they are every plant this, but here they're not you know,
crate birtles. You goinda have to irrigate it. And then
I had like some guy common thing and it turned out,
of course he was like a soil like a like
a soil salesman. His business was like like rehabbing soil
for agriculture. Well, that makes sense for agriculture when you're
growing stuff, but if you just for background landscaping or something,
and he's like, no, man, you can fix that. You
just have to amend it with phosphorus and and uh,
you know, you could put some biochar in there. And
I'm like, you don't need to do any of that.
Speaker 2: That's the point.
Speaker 1: You don't need to do any of that. You have
all these cool oaks and junipers and all these cool
perennials that are I mean, look at the flowers on
like a liatris. Why do you want to change that?
Speaker 4: Just leave it.
Speaker 1: They're the tools that came with the land. It's like
the pizza exactly. It's like having a car and like
buying a new car and being like, well I could
I could swap this piece for this, and you don't
need to. It's fine, Just leave it alone. You know,
you don't need to do that, Just leave it alone,
working thus alone, just learn to respect the pieces that
came with the car that you know.
Speaker 2: Yes, that was part of our talk with city hall
because the big issue that kept coming up from their
end was well, these yards look beautiful when things are blooming,
like we just have issues with things that are not
blooming or things that are seinessing. And I was like, well,
that's how nature works.
Speaker 1: Where do you think they get the energy to bloom
from having green leaves like that?
Speaker 2: We can't just keep chugging for an entire years. It's
just not possible. And I think we have to start
reframing what we consider to be pretty, what we consider
to be an attractive yard. And then I mean we're
still working on talking to them about whether or not
people have to clean up their stems after plants have sinessed,
because that's really important overwintering habitat for so many different species.
And uh, and we're working, We're working on it. We'll
get there. I'm just glad that native pollinator gardens are
legal in my city. Yeah. I wanted that's the thing
that wasn't true.
Speaker 1: I wanted to I wanted to ask you about that.
So getting into that, if we could talk about that
for a little bit, what what exactly happened? When did
the when did the when did the first start? And
then how did it all go and progress?
Speaker 2: So there. For the last couple of years, there have
been a lot of rumblings as people, not not just me,
but a lot of folks around the city who have
been working on restoring the ecology around their homes have
been getting hit with these crazy fines. After you know,
one personnickety neighbor calls three one one on them. Uh,
here in the city, if someone calls three one one
on your yard, Uh, they have to come and check
it out. And the folks who work and checking it out,
and this is absolutely no dig on them, Like they
didn't go to school for botany. That's not usually what
their training is. That is not what most of their
day consists of going and fixing things around the city
and making sure that things are working to their best potential.
So they get to a yard, they see a bunch
of plants that they can't recognize, and they see that
it doesn't look like a kempt lawn with beautifully shaped
hedges and that's what they've been told constitutes a good yard.
So they immediately write you a ticket. If you're lucky,
you can contest it. And some people have had success
with that, some people haven't. And so this past year
a lot of folks started lobbying our city council, especially
because we have someone on city council currently who loves gardening,
and we were like, that's our way in, that's are
in talked to him and so we did, and he
started meeting with members of the community and hearing everybody out,
and then invited us to speak in at city Council
at City Hall and the chambers in front of folks
who kind of plead our case, which was a crazy
thing to have to do in retrospect, but I'm really
glad that we all did it. You know, people brought
photos of their yards and got to tell stories about
kids in their neighborhood getting this hands on education with
native plants that they wouldn't have received otherwise, talking about
the species that they have noticed. That was one thing
that I really harped on was I've been keeping track
of the animal and you know, insect biodiversity in our
front and backyard since we moved into this house in
twenty twenty one, and the explosion in biodiversity after the
first year of having all of these native plants in
the front yard and building my little like trough pond
in the backyard was insane. It doubled the species that
we were seeing in our yards. Yeah, butterflies and moss
that I had never seen before here in downtown we
were suddenly starting to see because our yard, another neighbor
halfway down the block, another neighbor another block down, all
within a year had replaced our front yards.
Speaker 1: Oh that's so great, that's so cool.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I always talk about too. I mean because people will say, oh, well,
you know the snakes and the rats and mosquitoes. I said, no,
they don't. You know why, because that's the way an
ecasst the works. There's other things that keep those in check.
Speaker 2: Balance it out exactly.
Speaker 1: For like eighties eighties of jypdi are always there where
there's people. They've been co evolving with people for the
last thirty thousand years. That's like the tiny mosquitoes that
cause I don't know, if you get them up there,
we get them down here in the lower latitudes, and
they're they're horrible, and they show up. They don't show
up because of the plants. They show up because there's
people there, you know. But you know what will show
up because of the plants is all the things that
keep those in check. Like I was in the Upper
Amazon of Ecuador in February and I went there and
I was like, I'm gonna get deng gay, I'm gonna
get fucking marked by these mosquitos. Whatever it's worth it.
There's cool plants. And I went there and I got
I got bit like twice. I got bit twice. And
I was like, there are all the mosquitos. It rains
every day, there's water everywhere. And then I listened to
the frogs at night and I was talking to an
arpetologist and there's like, yeah, we have like five thousand
species of frogs here, you know. And I was like, Oh,
that's where all the mosquitoes are going. That's why they're
not you know. But then you clear the forest, you
destroy the habitat, the mosquitoes come back really quick.
Speaker 2: They're still there because you're still there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the things that the things that's you know,
so that eat them don't And that's kind of explaining
that to you know, people at city Hall, and you're right, yeah,
it's like a glitch in the system. They don't know.
They don't know what these plants are. They don't go
out into nature. There's nowhere they can experience it, and
so they just don't know. And that's kind of what
I had to do it too, just really polite and
I'm like, okay, well, come to my yard. Why do
you think it's weedy?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 1: You know? They couldn't really, they just kind of stuttered.
I was like, I know every genus and species of everything,
and the law specifically says no plants can be over
twelve inches unless they're cultivated. But these are all cultivated
and altivated.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I put them here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can prove it to you. I ask me
what anything is here? And I did that. I was
really nice. I did that for like a month, and
they just said, mister Santo, don't worry about the sectation.
They just gave up. They were like, fuck, this guy's
too annoying and he obviously knows what he's talking about.
I don't want to bother with this, and so I
just keep it hedged so they, you know, can't complain
it's going in the street and whatever, and yeah it's nice.
And the same thing. I get distracted walking to my truck.
I see so much cool stuff. I've got like an
ininapp survey just from my yard.
Speaker 2: Yes, oh my, my poor fiance. Every time we're in
a rush to go places, will literally have to physically
put blinders up on the sides of my face because
he knows what out fail. I will notice something in
the yard that I will want to go and pay closer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, it's hard. It's hard. That's and that's
the way it should be. It's like put it right
where you could see. It's why when people they're like,
I want to kill my lawn, I'm like, do the
front yard, because that's where you have to walk. Yeah,
you know exactly.
Speaker 2: That's make sure you see it, and that's where you'll
you'll notice the difference so much more, you know. Are
We have a neighbor across the street who when they
moved in, was not super keen about our yard. And
they finally came over yesterday to come and talk, and
I got to point at all of the different species.
I got to give them one of our may pop
fruits because somehow it's November and we haven't had first
cross yet, so my may pops are still chugging, still
go in. I think we have two more fruits. We're
still gonna We're still gonna get fully right from this
guy before we get our first frost on Monday, which
is insane. And when he left, he's like, I really
like what you're doing here, yes, And I was like,
if you really like it, you know, you can take
a couple of the seeds out of this maypop and
put them in the raised bed in your front yard.
You know, the vines will climb up your porch. You'll
have beautiful flowers full of like carpenter bees and butterflies
all summer and then it dies back to the ground
every winter. Yeah, nice and easy.
Speaker 1: You recruited him. That's great. You're slowly recruiting him. You're
working on that's what we need to do. It's seriously,
it's like that is.
Speaker 2: Slowly, but surely. I mean in the politeness, it works,
and some people get mad at me on some people
litimately get mad on the internet when I try to
bring people in, whether it's about getting hip to native plants,
whether it's about realizing some of the inherent racism in
our outdoor spaces. Trying to bring people in with politeness
and kindness. I thought people get mad at me, being
like they don't deserve that. You know, we all have
the Internet. Everybody said no by now, and I'm just like,
when has that attitude?
Speaker 1: When has it ever worked? It's counterproductive. It's probably a cio.
If anything, it's probably a syop.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's it's like, because it's so good at fracturing and
dividing and going and totally totally sawing off the branch
that you're clinging to, you know, it doesn't work.
Speaker 2: Sise Lee.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was so.
Speaker 2: I mean, I I try to be like, Okay, people
can want the same things that I want and want
to go about them in different ways. But one of
these people was literally so persistent that I was just like,
it's given plant energy. It's like and not cool plant,
It's giving someone planted you into this conversation to try
to fracture the community energy.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I mean, and you know, with like political like,
I've got my strong opinions. I don't need people to
agree with them at fucking all. All I need you
to do is kill your fucking lawn and plant this
stuff and not met with me for planting it, and
you'll get you'll start getting that dopamine dripped too. I
know you will at some point. There's no way you
can resist it. It's in your fucking genome. You know,
we're all human. It's been there for a long time.
You know. That's all I need. It's like it's you know,
it's And.
Speaker 2: Once they get a little taste, it's like a domino
effect and it starts fought like they start wanting to
feel that about so many more aspects of their life.
That's the type of thing that like makes people jump
ship from hyper conservatism and hyper individual worsout.
Speaker 1: Or shitty job.
Speaker 2: I think that makes people leave that stuff behind.
Speaker 1: Yes, it does exactly, because it's it's it's it's addictive,
and it feels good and it's fucking positive too. It
feels really good to be around that stuff. And I mean,
I've gotten a lot of people just write me being
like you're the reason I got into botany, I got
into plants. I'm like, fuck, that's great. That's that's all
I fucking need. Do you know this could die happy?
That's that's great. That's you know, get onto this stuff.
It feels good. It saved me, it'll save you too.
I mean it really, I was a I was a
fucking miserable fuck. I think quitting alcohol also helped me too,
but you know I was. This stuff really did man,
It's so and I've seen it do it to so
many people.
Speaker 2: I mean, I have always had like a relationship, I
feel with my local surroundings with plants. You know, my
mom is an avid gardener. Our whole family like really
pride themselves and spending a lot of time outdoors. But
after I graduated from college, in which I was also
very disenfranchised, because when I started my degree, originally in
environmental engineering, I was like, oh, this is perfect. I'm
going to be outside like building these beautiful systems that
help keep our environment intact. And They're like, nah, you're
going to be in an office or you're going to
be in a lab. And I was like, oh my god, wait,
I've made a huge mista. And so I left college
really sad and really depressed and really disenfranchised with just
the world as a whole, and finding my way back
to ecology into native plants and to foraging. I think
really kind of saved my life. Like before I started
just blogging to keep track of all of the foraging
that I was doing and all the rabbit holes i'd
go down about the plants that I was working with.
I had an eating disorder. I was extremely depressed. Like
my mom made me start going to therapy, which a
black mom making you, who's a boomer making you go
to therapy a thing that they famously do not believe
actually work.
Speaker 5: You know, it's bad because like and when they're like, nah,
maybe you do need to talk to someone about this,
and just slowly.
Speaker 2: Tapping into that kind of like childlike wonder and childlike
curiosity and getting kind of the education that I thought
I was going to get an undergrad on my own
by just like going university libraries, going to the public library,
and the community around native plants especially. I really think
it saved my life, honestly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's so you got you kind of when you
graduated from college, you were kind of bummed, like not bumped,
but I mean you were not set up, You were
not already into this. It kind of took getting out
of that and getting back outside and getting more into plants.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I kind of had resigned myself to I'm never
gonna I'm never going to have a job that brings
me to I'm never going to have a job that
I feel like is contributing to the greater good for anything.
You know, I was doing like data and QA analyst
jobs for a while right after college, like and for
a fast and like for a company that participated in
fast fashion. So I actively felt like I was going
against all of my ideals and everything that I wanted
to see in the world. And I kind of had
just been told that, you know, that's the way the
cookie crumballs. You want to make a living, you want
to be able to afford your rent, you got to
play the game. And I guess I kind of decided
I didn't care about playing the game anymore. And I
was like, oh, it means that I have to move
back in with my mom. It means that I can
look back in with my mom.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I just I feel like I got very lucky
that people resonated with the content that I was making
and really resonated with strengthening their connection to the world
around them through foraging through food. Because I mean, just
like Robin Wilkomer said, you know, how are you gonna
fall in love with the earth if you don't eat theories.
It's a really good way to not even insidiously, but
like a little bit sneakily, get people in on on
taking good care of the spaces around them and seeing
that there is this value that they never knew was there,
and realizing that they're not the only ones who can
benefit from it, and wanting to be able to help
lots of things benefit not just themselves. It's it's sneaky,
it's but in the best way possible. And I got
really lucky that people resonated with that and that I
guess I have like more energy than any human should,
which is what I am told frequently by people who.
Speaker 1: Wanted But you just start so you just you were
working the job you hated, and you just thought you
could you quit it? Or were you just going up
making time to go outside and do the things that
you love because they felt good.
Speaker 2: I was making time to go outside and and do
the things that I loved. When I had my my
worst job, my job I had immediately out of college
for about a year or so. I remember I was
like probably at one of my lowest points and you
know that cool thing that boomer parents do when they're
just like, go take a walk. Yeah, I'm just like,
I don't think taking a walk is gonna fitch this mom,
But if it'll, if it'll get you to take me
being sad seriously, I will. And I for the first
time in a long time, just paid attention to a
lot of the plants that were growing in my little
suburban called sac at that time, and it was like,
huh oh, I do accidentally feel better. And so for
a while. Then I left that job and I was
working a marketing job that I did, I did enjoy.
I loved the people that I was working with. I
had a really fun team full of really like minded people,
but all of us kind of had these other passions
on the side that we didn't bring to work with us.
My boss was literally also a forager who was cultivating
native plants on the balcony of her fifth floor walk
up in Manhattan Wild, and I thought she was just
the coolest person. She still is the coolest.
Speaker 1: We were living in New York.
Speaker 2: I was back and forth between Columbus and New York
at that time, and one of the few things keeping
me tethered to Ohio was like the lack of green
space access if I was going to be living in
New York proper, that was that was a really hard
sell for me. Yeah, and she was running this cool
blog called Garden Cocktails, and she was like, oh, you
also love these things. Just start just start writing about
the things that are making you happy, you know, post
some pictures on on Instagram.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's great, man, that's great. Yeah, it's so.
I think that's the best. Like advice for people who
are like in a job they dislike is like just file, like,
take a walk and go outside. Just start paying attention
to it, or don't just pay attention to something out there,
but just make sure you get out there. Like you
may not want to do it at first, but go
drive to like a trailhead, go drive to some you
know something, and just go take a walk and just
just being away from people and having like clean air
would be nice. And then maybe you ready, yeah, and
then maybe you just start paying attention to some of
the stuff that's growing around you and taking pictures of
it so you could reference it later if you figure
out what it is or not whatever, do whatever, just
get out there. And eventually it'll it'll, it'll tick, something'll
catch you, you know, it'll hook you. I was working for
the railroad and I just, uh, I would just you know,
I would go to all these hiking spots and I
didn't know much about the plants out there, but I
know it just felt amazing to be out in these places.
And so I was like, I'm just going to keep
doing this. And then suddenly I was trying to scam
time off work so I could go farther out, you know,
go drive, going.
Speaker 2: To ask like when I transition happened for you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like twenty nineteen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen,
the railroad started doing this thing, this policy called precision
Scheduled railroading, which just sounds like gobbledegook. It's like words,
it doesn't mean anything. What it means in actuality is
that we're going to cut costs. We're gonna screw over
our customers and our employees to please the shareholders. And
so you know, if there were like six jobs in
a yard, like switching jobs, we're going to cut it
to four and then pile the existing work onto the
remaining four jobs. So you guys are going to be
here longer and working harder. And so, you know, I'd
always been good at scamming time off work because we
all knew the company didn't care about us, and that
was kind of solidarity. It was a cool you know,
whether someone was left left leaning or right leaning, or
whether they were whatever their background was, wherever they came from.
Everybody kind of hated the company, which is.
Speaker 2: Honestly and sometimes that little bit of community within a chology.
Speaker 1: But it's wild though, because the work wasn't that bad.
The work was fun, but the company was terrible, and
it was I kept on thinking, I'm like, God, if
this company knew how much their employees hate them, why,
Like this is the most this is not the most
sensible way to run a company, like you generally want
your employees to like you, because you know, we would go,
we would get over time. We'd go park the locomotive
siding and go to a Takorea and sit down for
two hours on overtime. Like that's how much we hated
the company, I know. But anyway, so I started just
getting time off and going out and it was, you know,
cow I was living in California. They've got a bunch
of nice stuff out there, a bunch of nice areas
to go to, and so that was oh yeah, just
started getting me help put around twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen,
because I started there in two thousand and six. Twenty eighteen,
twenty nineteen, I was like, I got to get out
of here, man, this is this company is just it
just got too shitty and the managers were harassing people
and it was a very antagonistic spot. And then I
was the same thing. I was just recording stuff that
I saw because I wanted to share with people. It
was so cool, and yeah, people liked it. And then
someone was like, you should put these on YouTube because
I was just doing Instagram stories, you know, and they
disappear after a day, and I was like, well, YouTube's
kind of a cesspool. The comments are you know, it's
just a toilet, but whatever, it's maybe you're right, you know,
these the last longer and some of these plants I'm
singing are pretty rare and the habitat may not even
be here in thirty years. So started doing that and
then yeah, people liked it, and I was like, okay,
I'll keep doing this, and then I just I just
went down a wormhole. Once I got away from the railroad,
now I could do this full time, and I just
learned so much more just by asking questions and paying attention.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and I and thank goodness that you do.
And that's that person was just like put these things
on YouTube because my like one of my favorite things
about traveling and going to all of these events is
hearing who else within kind of like the science education
community at large online people also love and it is
almost always you. It's like you and all wards from ologies.
Everyone is just like, oh man, you know cui pace,
but botany doesn't. That got's so cool. And I was
like that die is so cool.
Speaker 1: I just tell you that I just want to, Like,
I just want There's just so much to learn out there,
and it's it is, it's like understanding how this wonderful.
Speaker 2: Reason I'm afraid to die is that I'm afraid I
won't have time to learn everything that I want to learn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like I want to. I'm trying to teach
myself blues piano now, like which has no relations to
plants at all. But but you know.
Speaker 2: Okay you say that, but okay, it's it's a long
stretch because I grew up playing the piano, and when
things make sense musically in your mind, they also kind
of make sense mathematically in your mind. That connects to
the sciences.
Speaker 1: Yeah, lately.
Speaker 2: Everything is connected. I was just ranting with one of
my ecologist friends yesterday about how the biggest lie that
any of us were sold growing up is that the
arts and science are two things that should main separated
from one another instead of being so intrinsic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, totally connected. They're both so, I mean, they're
so important. Yeah, who would? Why would? Yeah? I never
thought about that. That is kind of you need. You
need a background in one to have a good footing
in the other, you know.
Speaker 2: For Yeah, I think the people who make huge splashes,
whether in the science community or in the arts community,
almost always also have some sort of affinity for the
other one.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And art is so important for happiness too, man,
it really, Yes, it's so and just like expression, and
it's it's this fundamentally human thing. You can't just have
this totally rigid world with you know, where it's all
just data and numbers and statistics without any like fun
in it, you know, without.
Speaker 2: Any joy, without any soul and that I mean, it
goes back to what we've been talking about this whole time.
It's right up there with lawns, like lawns and AI
data centers. Do not a community made.
Speaker 1: The fucking AI data center. That's yeah, that stuff gets
this dough pick man.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, those things are crazy. And you know that,
like that bubble is about to burst when even rural
communities in Ohio that some of these places are trying
to move to are voting now, are like, uh no,
absolutely not.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, do you want this thing that's big, ugly
and loud and is going to drive your electricity prices up?
Unto you don't it's gonna be good for They can't
even say it brings jobs in. It doesn't. There's exactly
because it doesn't. It's thethesism of just that's a big
thing up by you. I don't. That's it's I think
it's down here Texas too, but not around I live
right on the Mexican border, so's there's not too many
around here yet.
Speaker 2: But uh oh, they're trying to make really big inroads here.
And you know, of course we used to be a
swing state. We kind of don't we have we haven't
earned that in a while, and so are very conservative,
very right leaning government is trying to court all of
these AI companies and all of these tech companies, and
it is kind of really encouraging to see that one
thing a lot of us can agree on, regardless of
political affinity, is that we're not out here about to
shoulder the energy bills for like a handful of people
to get somehow even richer than they already.
Speaker 1: All yeah, yeah, And you know it's I mean, obviously,
the any politicians that are behind that, against what their
constituents want, they're just getting paid off. They're getting It's
totally self serving somehow. That's what's so sleazy. Man. It's crazy.
Like I was in Florida two weeks ago looking at
some of the sand hill communities out there, fucking insane.
It's so cool. It's like a it's like a humid
desert with this nutrient poor sand. It reminds me the
Lake Whales Ridge, reminds me of some of the stuff
I've seen in like Mina Shariahs, Brazil. Like this nutrient Yeah,
the sand looks like sugar. It's like this bleach white
sugar sand. And then there's all these insane plants there,
and it's all fire adapted. Everything there's fire adapted, and
like short interval fires too, like two three years, you know.
And they've got like big xylopodium, like these big woody
roots that they can, you know, re sprout from. And
like when you burn the landscape there, everything ends up
looking so much better. Like the plants thrive, they just
take off. Whereas because they still get sixty inches of
rain a year, but they've got this dry season kind
of like the tropics do, which is kind of what
central Florida is, and so the winters are dry, but
it's still like ninety degrees and so, you know, but
then you've got sixty inches of rain a year. But
then it's on this sand. It's like a former It's
like basically the Appalachian Mountains weathered down over millions of years,
washed out to the Atlantic, and then the Atlantic at
some point in the last however many million years washed
all that sand up into these dunes, and so there's
all these endemic plants there. I'm going off on a
rant there. I'm sorry, but it was just so.
Speaker 2: No do it. It's reminding me that when I was
in Miami for Art Basle, which I had no business
being at love here. That the only moment of joy,
the only like little bit of solace I found in
that city that I am very much not built for
was the Simpson rockland Hammock Preserve, which is this tiny
nature preserve hidden right in the middle of downtown Miami,
where it is all of these sand adapted and like
all native mostly threatened trees and shrub species. And I
remember just like stumbling upon it walking in and the
temperature immediately dropping fifteen degrees.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, the transpirational cooling and just the shade,
and it's it's crazy. I mean, that's how I was
talking about like native plants as infrastructure on this post
a couple of weeks ago, because it's like, you know,
even if you think plants are quote woke and you
hate you know whatever, I mean, I live in a
state where reading is woke and going to therapy is
what you know, you think plants are woke, like and
it shouldn't be politicized. But even if you think that,
like they're doing so. They're doing a service by by
cooling the landscape, preventing the heat from the sun from
hitting the ground and warming up all that concrete. You know,
that giant island of asphalt and concrete that you've created. Well,
now that's not getting charged up by the sun, so
it's not going to continue to radiate heat until two
in the morning after the sun goes down. And also,
you know, they're preventing flooding for when it does rain
because the roots break up the soil and make it
poorous like a dry sponge. And you know the transpirational
cooling from the leaves, I mean those little gas pores
you let out moisture, it goes to a gas state
that takes energy, whereas I mean that's how a swamp
cooler works. You know, It's like, even if you don't
like plants like you want them on, it doesn't make
any sense to have these median strips where it's just
mode lawn. Have it being native plants. You know, the
sides of a strip mall or a retention pind have
be native plants. It will cool every thing down. And
also it'll probably be covering fucking butterflies. And if you
don't like butterflies, you got something wrong with you, you know,
you really you don't.
Speaker 2: Like butterflies, then you might be past fixing.
Speaker 1: I can't.
Speaker 2: It might be where I'm just like, uh oh, this
one's broken.
Speaker 1: Beyond Stephen Miller. Probably just like butterflies.
Speaker 2: Honestly, I would not be surprised to Miller. You have
twenty four hours to respond.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it'd be fun to man. That guy needs to
get dosed, you know. I mean, I believe there's hope
for everybody. But you know, anyway, but I came home
from uh, I came home from see this is the
way my mind works. I'm already ping ponging all. I
forget what I was fucking talking about. We'll get back
to it in a minute. But I came home speaking
of butterflies last week, and then I got this plant
that's a member of the Astraraci, you know, with the
just which related to Joe Pieweed, And it was in
my yard and it was covered all that it was
covered in monarchs. The monarchs were going yeah, and I
was just like immediately like, oh my god, that's so
nice to see. I'm so glad I came home to that.
Whatever I was thinking about before, it doesn't matter. I'm
just gonna stare at this and lurk, yeah, so and
showing people that they're just like you know anyway, Okay,
I remember what it's talking about. So Florida, like the
corruption and I apologize for this, uh this this ramp,
but the corruption was nuts. Florida has all this cool
shit and then but there's been so much development there
because all the politicians there man are so own and
like I was hanging out with my friend Lily and
her friend Valerie and they were telling me about you know,
the levels of corruption are just insane, like stuff stuff
you would expect in like a Banana republic where these
developers just own the politicians. There's you know, the politicians
getting these positions where they install developers in the fit
the Wildlife Commission. You know, these people that have no
backing in science, no backing and even hunting or going outside.
They're just developers, you know, they're just these ledges are
now like in charge of management decisions or you know
what little state parks remain like that that is insane,
like how do you even? That's so corrupt, like there's
no oversight, like how do you even? And Florida has
biological riches like beyond belief, like there's so many plants
that only grow in Florida. They don't cur anymore there.
Speaker 2: I don't know, like it just makes you go, like,
how do we how do we start untangling that? You know?
And I mean I guess for both of us it's
not necessary. I mean we're not Florida residents, but like, yeah,
how does a plucky, you know, hopeful Florida residence start
the process of that uncoupling before we lose things that
we can literally never get that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you just show people, look, this cool
stuff is where you are. It's really amazing, and by
the way, it's threatened by this, and then you start
talking about the levels of corruption and you get people
to show up, you know, but there's a lot of
and there's a lot of people in Florida that are
really showing up and are pissed off about But you know,
that could be anywhere. I mean, that's what like Mike
he was doing with the public lands that that you know,
the guy that looks like a thumb from Utah. He
looks like a he looks like a thumb.
Speaker 2: He does look so much like a thumb. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but he was you know, his he's still coming
at it again. Now he's got some other public lands,
you know, border security. He tried the like we're doing
this for affordable housing thing, which was so like, man,
are you really this Like this is such bullshit? Are
you really this cynically you think people are going to
leave this? But and that failed, Like even the hunting.
The hunting community was really the the you know, the
demographic that's helps you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and when you anger the hunting community as like, oh,
well you messed up, you messed up because now we're
allied together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it was really cool. It was one of
those things you're seeing people from normally wouldn't work together
working together to defeat these anti public lands. But anyway,
now he's got another one up that's a border security
anything within one hundred miles of a border, and they're
considering like Lake Michigan a borders. So everything in Chicago
is like, you know, yeah they can, they can build
roads through wilderness areas. They're trying to do this, so
hopefully it'll fail again, but it's it's just crazy, man.
It's that they're never going to stop, like you've already
taken so much, like just stop, like can there be
a moratorium and any more development and protect this stuff.
And also like we need to understand how it works.
It's why like funding sciences and ecological studies and surveys
and all this stuff is so important right at the
same time, everything's and my.
Speaker 6: Thing is, I'm just like we we in most of
our cities, we are not out of space, Like why
are we not just rezoning things for more dense living,
for more apartments so we don't feel like we constantly
need to be over developing some of the few wild space.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, and that's.
Speaker 2: The d makes no sense. But then you start angering
the the nundies and then and then that's when we
get fractured, and then that's when we have problems.
Speaker 1: But that's the thing is like I think, you know density,
but with you know, every four blocks there's a block
of just native green space where people can actually go in.
It's not off limits. You want to get people's asses
in there, get them in there to engage with it.
But you know that will and that will lighten the
load of the quote density, but also just not when
you've got density, you don't need as much car car space,
parking lots. Yeah, all that you can walk places. It's
good for your health too, Like heart disease is a
big problem in America. You think they might be related
to being trapped in a car and sitting down not
moving for three hours.
Speaker 2: Hours a day. Exactly. Yeah, And I feel very lucky,
like we're our neighborhood honestly does not get a lot
from the city. I joke, but it's not a joke
that like we're the sacrificial lamb when the city floods,
like we literally get walled in by the flood walls.
It has historically been a very poor and thus very
diverse neighborhood, and somehow we lucked into having these pocket parks,
like every other block, every other street running off of
our main street. And it's crazy how the houses that
are along the pocket parks get so they're so much cooler,
they get so much additional shade during the summertime. Seeing
the kids running through the pocket parks just like playing
catch or kickball, people walking their dogs, people just sitting
at the picnic tables underneath you know, the giant basswood
tree in one of them, just enjoying being outside. And
I just don't understand why we aren't doing that everywhere?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, Well that's what I wanted to ask
you too, cause I'm just curious what you think. But
you know, for kids that are growing up, like teenagers
that are growing up in some of those like cul
de sec communities that are alienated from all this stuff
and it's hard to get anywhere without a car, what
do you think, I don't know. What do you think
can give them hope? What do you think can get
them out?
Speaker 2: Like? What?
Speaker 1: I don't know? I guess because that's like that's who
those are. The people I feel bad because they didn't
choose that man, their parents just you know whatever, they're
just ended up there. You know, they're growing up in that.
I wonder that I worry about those kids, you know, like,
how do you just like life is so cool? Life
can be full of such wonderful things, and you're probably
there's a lot of depression, there's a lot of anxiety,
Like get people to go out and partake in these things,
or at least if you're going to be starting at
your screen, use it for you know, whether it's following
nature accounts or you're looking at an out or just
asking questions like what are the cool plants that grow
in this area or in this area or what you know,
I don't know. I mean you've got the library in
your pocket, Like the phone can be cool, if it.
Speaker 2: Can be a good thing, I think not like you
just mentioned, is so important for gtting people's foot in
the door and kind of sparking this interest and sparking
the realization that you can be in a city, you
can be on a cul de sac in the middle
of suburbia and still have biodiversity around you. To an extent,
I love suggesting to people try downloading AMAT and just
open the explore tab and see if anybody has logged anything.
Speaker 1: Around it, if it's something.
Speaker 2: You've ever seen before. Oh, it's the coolest. I love
it so much. And I'm like, if you, if there's
nothing in your neighborhood, go out and log like two
or three plants. That makes you immediately have to start
paying attention because you have to start telling the difference
between a couple different plants. Take a picture of it,
see if you can figure out what it is. If
you can hee it out with between their suggestions and
comparing it to pictures on the Wikipedia pages. It's such
a great tool for inspiring curiosity.
Speaker 1: And if you're looking.
Speaker 2: I think people were like told to not be curious
after we're not kids anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's depressing too, Like when when people stop
being excited about like finding roly Polly's under a rock,
that's why. No, it's like they've fully been They're in
the matrix now, you know, like you gotta get them
pick up. But I tell I tell people, you know,
if you live in one of these cul de sects
that you know it looks like these housing pods everywhere.
If you live like when you're looking at it from above,
you're trying to find a spot to go, just pull out,
look at like Google satellite maps and look for like
power line easements or sides of railroad tracks or the
edge of a retention pond. Like there's gonna be places
where the mowers can't go and where people aren't gonna
bother to spray herbicide or try to trim things up,
and you're you're gonna find stuff there. There'll probably be
a mixture of natives and invasives, but they're at least
they're they're feral or they're wild. They're not you know,
this weird minecraft landscaping and just look what's there. You
never you'll never guess maybe what what things might be
using those quote nether regions of human infrastructure like those
are those are.
Speaker 2: And then they can be like you following your footsteps,
gather a couple seeds and bring them home. Maybe put
a couple of them into the ground in the backyard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, or just disperse them to places like along
fence lines, places where you know they're not going to
get mowed and no one's gonna no one's gonna, you know,
bother them whatever. So it's there's cool, Yeah, there's I
just want to get people excited about this stuff. I
just want people to realize, like I see kids who
are like depressed or anxious, and it's you know, just man,
there's it gets better. There's no reason to feel that way.
There's this is such a wonderful fucking place to be
on this planet, and you know, we have such treasures here.
You just got to go out and find it. They
may not be in your immediate area because of what
the society we live in has done, but you can
you can get away from that, and they're out there
somewhere you know, and.
Speaker 2: It's so easy to get lost in spiraling about what
we have lost instead of celebrating what we do still have.
And that sorrow, I think is also very dangerous because
sorrow is immobilizing. Sorrow makes you feel like you can't
do anything but mourn and be sad. And yeah, when
you get out in nature, you see that there are
still beautiful things to take care of, there's still beautiful
things to protect. Yeah, and everybody go touch a blade
of grass, well not a blade of oh maybe a
native grass and big bluestem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, go touch it. Go find some andropogan God, the
fucking andropoguans in Lake Wales Ridge are insane. They're like waxy, man,
they're like icy blue. It's it's crazy. That's such crazy
shit down there in Florida, like these. The andropogon diversity
is insane. There's like twelve species anyway. Really, yeah, it's
it's crazy. I'll send you some pictures later. It's yea.
They're like it and they're blue. They're like then there's
wax on the leaf plads you look at like the
base of the plant. They're like these four five foot
six foot tall grasses and then you look at the
base of the leaves and they're like icy blue. Like
it's like, yeah, it's it's the.
Speaker 2: Fun gloccous color that you get when things are have
that nice waxy coating.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it's me. It's hard out there and you're walking,
you're walking around on that white sand and it's like
reflecting back at you, you know, like like it's intense,
it's hard. It's a harsh environment. That's you get a
lot of cool stuff. But anyway, but yeah, I'll get
you know, I get these people asking me sometimes and
I don't know what to say to them because I
could rant about it forever. But that young people, they'll
be like, how do you see all this stuff, like
all the destruction or just the whatever dumb shit you know,
our society is doing right now, our civilization? How do
you see that and not get depressed? I'm like, I
don't know, man. I I see so much beauty around me,
and that's what I intentionally put around me, whether it's
my front yard of the place I go to, and
I guess maybe I've just got perspective. The geologic timescale.
I always tell people it's really important, you know this
is a blink of an eye. This is we're not
going to win this war We've waged on nature. I
guarantee we might win a couple of battles, but we're
not gonna win. And so I think, you know, just
it's not about I don't know. You can't have this
short Try not to have this short sighted view, you know,
take a long term, long game view, and just do
what you can. It's fun, you know, but don't don't
do what you're doing with you know, the the end
in mind, Like, oh I'm doing it. It's a means
to an end. Do it just because it's it feels great.
It feels so good. I was like, even before we
get on the phone, I was like planting shit in
my neighbor's yard. They said I could, They said I
could plant some stuff. I was like, you don't know what,
you just invite it in man, it's you know this
is But yeah, I don't know. I think there's there's
so much good ship out there and what we're what's
going on, so.
Speaker 2: Much to hope for, and like, I don't know, sometimes
I do get a little depressed about it. But yeah,
one thing I've worked on for a large portion of
my adult life is asking myself, like how much time
I'm giving myself to wallow and whether or not I
feel like I'm getting anything productive. Like if I get
upset or angry about something, sometimes that's a really good
motivator for me to like get boots on the ground,
spread some seeds in some spaces, go learn about a
new to me species. I've been trying to use it
as a reason to go and get excited and find
something to get happy about instead of just like letting
myself wallow for an extended period of time. But I
but I have to be really deliberate about it, and
I have to be able to catch myself and like
self parent and be like, okay, girl, let's cry for
an hour and then let's maybe try something out.
Speaker 1: I mean, the wallowing is important for a little while.
You gotta feel. You got to feel your feeling, your feeling. Yeah,
you gotta feel your feelings. Don't suppress that shit because
that doesn't go anywhere good either. But uh yeah, man,
I it's yeah, I think that's a good tactic. Get out,
just let it feel it for a minute. Then you
got to go out and fall in love with the world.
Speaker 2: Again exactly kind of. I mean, before we started recording,
I was telling you I'm going on this journey of
like fibercrafting from wild plants netals all around the world,
All sorts of different species of metals have a really
long history of being used for their really strong and
like kind of silky bast fibers. And we have wood
netals what is it lappertea cana dency that are native
here and their fibers are beautiful. And I love clothes self.
You know, admittedly, I'm not going to say that I
I am not a fool for a good article of
clothing on the internet, because you can go to my
page and see for yourself.
Speaker 1: She's got a night profession.
Speaker 2: I just I love a good dress. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
It's a fun way to express myself. It's one vice
I've left myself in this world. And but I also
know how much, especially fast fashion is imperiling so many
parts of this planet. And for me, that journey has
looked like, oh, a couple of years, I started like
very deliberately phasing out like polyester out of my wardrobe.
And thankfully, I'm very lucky and privileged to be in
a position where I can be preferential and be like,
now I'm trying to play the natural fibers game, trying
to not be putting microplastics into this into the world
every single time I wash my clothes, which is like
crazy to think about that. We're all just doing and
it's real normal. And but now I'm like, Okay, I
really want to see how much effort it takes for
a person to just be fully responsible for a soul garment.
It's probably gonna be like a scarf. I'm gonna be
real honest with everybody right now. I'm not gonna be
like that cool artist Eve who is going and trying
to grow an entire dress out of flax as she
grew in her front yard right now.
Speaker 1: Damn, where was that?
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. She lives in Vermont and she's trying
to go from putting the seeds in the ground to
a dress in fifty two weeks. She does weekly updates
and it is like my.
Speaker 1: Super Bowl man, And that's linen. That's COMFX is comfortable
flax and hamper like the most comfortable fibers.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's amazing. It gets I mean, with all of
our plant fibers. They get softer the longer that you
wear them, the longer that they get to have a
life with you, the better they become as a garment.
It's crazy that that's like not what everyone is preferential towards.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, really the polyester thing is yeah, man, it's
that's it.
Speaker 2: I thought I was just a sweaty girl. I thought
I was just a sweaty Also.
Speaker 1: Speaking of dryer lind traps though, you remember that that
you could sometimes remember as a kid, you could take
some of that and light it on fire and it
will go up, like that's all the polyester. That's like, man,
it's fine.
Speaker 2: And Scouts like I was a girl Scout and they
were telling us to use that stuff was fire starter
and I'm just like, oh my god, damn at least
so much so much microplastic.
Speaker 1: Wait, so how do you make fibers out of it?
So what is the process? Because I'm actually interested in that.
It's a gave fiber, I mean banana fiber. You know,
if you ever get a chance and you and you're
in Chicago, go to the Field Museum and they got
a whole fucking room of plant fibers, Like in glass
cases with different plant families. Oh my god. And they
got the Well Witchy a diorama in there too, like
a diorama for well Witchy. You know that that weirdest.
Speaker 2: Chicago was way too close of a drive to me do.
Speaker 1: It. And I worry because it's just it's called like
the Hall of Botany. I worry that that, and it's
like in the corner of the museum. I worry they're
gonna like get try to get rid of it someday
because it's it's not enough of a draw or you
never know. All it takes is one administrator or someone
an administrative position to change.
Speaker 2: The term something's not important.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they as much as I love animatronic dinosaurs, you know,
maybe it's not worth shuttering the Hall of Botany for
you know, but another one. Yeah, but it's not. It's
so it's such a cool fucking exhibit, man, they've got
I mean, it's really and they've got great models of
plants in there too. It's it's really fucking cool.
Speaker 2: I gotta go with the that's so cool. I've been
going now trying to find just a compendium of you know,
as complete a list of all of the different fiber
plants that were used by you know, as many different
groups across North America as I can find. But unfortunately,
because fibers are so delicate, a lot of them don't
last the test of time. And because fibers and clothing
have been considered like women's work for so much of
human history for a long time, that's not even like
a thing historians were paying attention to when they were
trying to gather information from, you know, who is you know,
the people who are left of all of the different
indigenous tribes and bands across the Americas. And so it's
hard to find that information. I mean, it's even hard
to find that information for like Western Europe.
Speaker 1: It's such fascinating stuff. Yeah, I was looking up because
I was curious. I bought some like bracelet at a
market for like two bucks in the in the Amazon
and Ecuador, and I was gonna, I just I don't know.
It was like two bucks, and it was it was
all native plants. It was like the the bactress, the
native palm was the fiber. And then there's legume seeds
in there. One of that, you know, some of the
legumes produced those red seeds. They look like coral beans.
They're really toxic. Yeah, but they've they were using those as.
Speaker 2: They made sick jewelry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I was like, this is fucking beautiful. I
don't even really wear it. Where's any jewelry? Oh, but
this is just the cool bracelet. I'm just gonna get
it just to hang. And and then that got me
into thinking about, like, man, how do they make these
fibers because this is not this is like in a remotere.
This is not They're not ordering shit out of a
shipping container from China to make this stuff. This is
locally produced. And so I was looking up like the
twining basically spinning individual fibers together and then trying to
get them. It's a you know, it's a process. You
spin the fibers with your hands individually clockwise, then you
wrap them around each other counterclockwise and let go and
they anyway. But it was fascting stuff. But I wanted
to ask you though, like with the wood nettles, how
do you how do you put it together? Like how
are you? How are you? How's it going?
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, well I've been at it for a
couple of weeks now, everyone except for people who specifically
work in fibercraft has been confused. In my Instagram stories,
one person's like, are you making paper question mark? Are
you getting fiber to eat? Question Mark? And so what
I what I've been doing is gathering chunky wood netal
stems as they are sinessing after they've already dropped their seeds.
I'll go out with one gloved hand, one not gloved hand.
I'll cut them off at the base so I don't
disrupt their root system. Use my gloved hand to kind of,
you know, go up the stem to break all of
the try cones, because I'm not trying to be more
in pain than I already am from the handful of
splinters that I get from this process. And in my opinion,
I think wood metal stings hurt way worse than stinging netalstad.
Speaker 1: To which they are related. Yeah. Same family, yes.
Speaker 2: Yes, same family. We love all of our sweet stinging
tamat friends, and I have been processing them green. So
I will take them home. I will hit them with
a huge mallet going up the stem to split them,
peel the bark off of them, and the bark will
contain all of those fibers. I will hang up the
bark strips to dry for at least twenty four hours.
Then I will there's a process called scutching where you
use a butter knife. Back in the day with flax,
they used to use these sick, giant wooden swords and
run it down the bark fibers to dislodge all of
the kind of dried pecked in all of the barkie bits,
to just expose these really beautiful silky fibers. And then
I'll brush them a couple of times, separate the long
fibers from the short fibers. And then I'm also learning
how to spin on a spindle, a drop spindle, so
I can hopefully make a good amount of thread and
then weave it into a small garment, hopefully before the
winter is over.
Speaker 1: And how did you it's how did you learn this?
Speaker 2: Good? Well, I had a grammy that used to spin
my uh put. My paternal grandmother used to spend a
little bit when I was little, and I remember being
entranced by that work. And when I got older, when
I was in like Scouts, and when I was a
camp counselor, I knew about using nettles for just making
rough cordage nothing you'd want to wear against your body,
but you know, still taking advantage of those fibers. So
I have a little bit of knowledge going into it.
But I have been pouring through fiber history books. I
just read someone's dissertation on flax and metal usage in
northern Europe and in Northern Africa. I have been watching
a lot of very quiet YouTube video and then just
going and getting my hands thirty and trying things and
seeing what works and what doesn't. I've been taking notes of,
you know, what processes seem to yield longer fibers versus
shorter ones, softer fibers versus coarser ones, hoping that I
can land on a solid process. So hopefully next season,
as the nettles are starting to siness, I can gather
even more, have a solid system put together, and oh no,
maybeest or something. I just I want that physical, visceral
reminder of how much time and energy goes into a garment,
because regardless of whether I'm the one who's doing it
or not, it's still happening. Yeah, there is a degree
of new that is needed for processing fibers that machines
cannot do yet fully. So garments are always going to
be a very human, very hands on process. Whether that
is someone working in you know, a union shop in
southern California, or that's someone working in a sweatshop in Bangladesh.
Like someone is responsible for the garment that you are
wearing right now, and I just want to be able
to step into those shoes and to hopefully be responsible
for a couple more of the garments that I own.
I've always loved sewing, but fast and sense is real weird.
So I've grown up making a lot of my clothes
since I was a kid, and I this just feels
like the next logical step for a very strange and
illogical woman.
Speaker 1: What a way, What a way to bond with the
plant though too. I mean, man, that's that's you know, making.
Speaker 2: Trying to notice nuances in this plant that I've known
for decades now that I have never noticed. I mean,
making having to be this hands on.
Speaker 1: Making fiber is a really essential tool too, you know,
if like just making rope or anything like that. I've
you know, I saw someone do that with a gave once, and.
Speaker 2: So agave fibers are so strong, agave and yet the
fibers are so cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm still kind of like, I'm still I
don't understand. That's the thing I want to ask you.
I guess I too. Is you got like La Portia Cana?
That is? How tall? Is it? Get? Like three four feet?
Five feet?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the tallest ones I've been finding have been maxing out.
I've found a couple that are like five feet tall,
but they usually max out between three and four And.
Speaker 1: So you've you've you got to get them at the
right time of year when it's still soft, right, and
then how do you get the fibers together to make
a longer fiber from if it's only in three to
five foot sections.
Speaker 2: So that is where spinning it comes into play, because
cotton is, you know, one of the most widely used
fibers on the planet, and cotton it's what is it?
It's ply length like length of each fiber is usually
only a couple of inches, and so it's the speed
at which you are spinning and joining those fibers together.
You're essentially trying to space out a couple fibers to
twist up at a time, and you don't want them
to be perfectly lined up with each other. You want
them to be getting kind of tangled and for you
to be making this continual pull of like fibers that are,
you know, ones a little bit above this one, this
one's a little bit below that one. To try to
get an even thread with all of them, you're essentially
spinning them to get them to tangle up with one another. Yeah,
it's so neat and like. The spinning wheel is also
just like a cool and crazy invention because plant fibers
don't want to tangle up with each other as much
as wool. Wool has tiny little microscopic like there they
look like little zigzags when you zoom in on them,
whereas plant fibers are relatively smooth and straight, so you
need a really fast spin speed to make a good, strong,
consistent fiber.
Speaker 1: I see what I see it is now Okay, I
looked up spinning wheel for fibers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and now I got you.
Speaker 1: Now I get Fuck that's cool, man. I tried to
take there's feral hemp all over like Western Iowa, Nebraska,
and I tried to take some. I just like wadded
it up into a ball. It's like still on the
floor of my truck somewhere. But I was so curious.
Speaker 2: Probably wet that and still like roll it between your
hands a couple of times to break up.
Speaker 1: Oh, get away, okay, get fibers out of them, get
it wet to make it more pliable. Yeah, I don't know,
fucking hemp isn't more common because it's I bought a
hemp shirt was at like a Goodwill in Vancouver and
it was the most comfortable thing. It breathed so well.
It was way more comfortable than cotton. But you can't
find hemp anywhere. It's like sixty bucks for a T shirt.
It's crazy.
Speaker 2: Oh god, I know. And it's wild because it is
a that is a pretty like set it and forget it.
As far as non native plants.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's feral, man, It's everywhere. Over in the
over Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa. We were on the border of
we were going to this like Bison Preserve on the
Less Hills in a broken kettle. That was an amb
of it. In western Iowa right on the South Dakota
border on the river, got a fucking beautiful area, man.
And yeah, there was just like feral hemp everywhere. And
I was like, why is this not more common? Why
are there like hemp fiber farms. Wish there were.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I'm starting to see as I'm getting more
into fibercraft, a lot of these local regional fiber sheds
that are encouraging people to find out what fiber plants
both are native and feral in their areas and encouraging
them to work with them more.
Speaker 2: You know, it's fewer things are better, you know, foot
carbon footprint wise, as much as you know the carbon
footprint system is not perfect. Then sourcing you know, food
or clothing from the place that you're living in.
Speaker 1: But also just learning about I mean, like learning to
connect with the place that you're living in too. Like, Yo,
this came from the land around my house, like, and
I know the species I was there. It's a it's
got to feel fulfilling as hell. What are you gonna
do a video on like spinning yet? Yeah, that would
be really cool.
Speaker 2: I'm working. I'm I'm gonna do, like I'm accounting to
do a full YouTube video, which is very hard, very
hard for me. Every time I see how quickly you
are crank about videos, I'm just like that is insane.
But last time I did a horizontal YouTube video, it
was only five minutes long. And it took me two
weeks to make le to edit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just edited on my phone. I use an
app called inshot. That's like, yeah, I paid twenty bucks
once and I'm feeling in a lifetime. It's fucking great.
It's so easy. But I hate editing.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've still got videos from Chile and Florida and
all this shit to edit. I'm just like at I
can't sit still. I got too much going on. But
the fiber I had this. I had this guy. The
last podcast I did was with this guy, Cyrus Harp,
who's like a paleo forager. And you know, I'm not
into a lot of like I'm not into like forging
a lot. I'm always interested in at the botany, but
for me, I just you know, it's not not necessarily
my thing. But this guy's stuff is all through the
context of like Native American ethnobotany and recreating how things
were made and which is fucking fascinating. And he was
so yeah, and he was using he was talking about
using Yuka fibers and all these other fibers for making
his own for like making a bow or just making rope.
It was really fascinating stuff. Yeah, so it's kind of cool.
I was, you know, just talking about this last week,
but I think that, man, it is really interesting. It is.
It is super interesting to be able to see a
plant and know what it can be used for. It's
not just like oh can I eat it? Or is
it medicinal? But like, yo, you can make stuff out
of this, Like you can make clothing out of this.
This is a great you know again, it's just that
more that connecting with the living world around you. It's
fucking amazing, man.
Speaker 2: And all of the different ways that you can do it.
I just think, you know, the more connected you get
to feel. Also is Cyrus's page Paleo Foraging, because that
is one of the pages that I've been looking at
for like fibercraft inspiration.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The work that he's doing is so cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, he's really cool guy, like really like humble,
you know, down to earth and just super knowledgeable, but
also like being like, yo, this isn't I didn't just
come up with this, Like other people were doing this
for thousands of year doing this work, and like here's
respect to them. Yeah, like here's some respect to them,
to the ogs, you know, and and uh, it's fascinating because.
Speaker 2: I mean that's another reason why I like working with
the wood metals is cool. But also depressing, is I mean,
so much of the culture of the Eastern woodlands was
just absolutely decimated during colonialism. Like it's you know, it's
a joke, but it's not a joke that it's like
it took them until they reached the Mississippi River to
be like, oh they're people. Yeah, yeah, danger that's on us.
Speaker 1: And it happened. It happened before. I mean so much
earlier in the history of this country than like the
tribes out west, you know, because they landed on the east,
the Europeans land on the east first, and just got
right to work.
Speaker 2: You know, there's not right to work, and so there's
so there are so many gaps in the ethno botanical
history and so many patches of the eastern side of
the country. And so it's one of those things where
it's like, well, we know that wood metals were being
used for fiber and for cordage, but we don't really
have a lot of great examples, like extant examples to
be able to point to that could also give you
a lot of visual information about how it was spun
if it was being spun with other fibers, like what
kind of applied twists? So are we talking about with
these fibers. It's it's pretty heartbreaking, and part of me
is always like so happy and a little envious that
the further out west you go, the more of that
information has managed to stay intact. Of course, in a
good and perfect and just world, all of that information
for everybody you could still right intact.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the information I mean about the ethyl
botanical uses, but also just how to manage the land man, like, yes,
like the fire suppression. That was the dumbest shit that
these the arrival settlers did, like just suppressing fire, like
you know, you've got sixty inches of rain a year
man in most the East coast, like stuff grows so
fast and you're just so fast. Yeah, and then you
add an invasive species too, and you get the sheep,
you get what I call the shitty woods. It's just
smothered woods. And then there's ticks everywhere because you're everywhere,
you're not burning, and the predators are all gone, and
there's deer. There's too many deer, and so there's yeah,
there's ticks there ticks a butt. I mean, that's why
you know there's all these like forced to be vegan
restaurants I read about in northeastern Massachusetts, like in Cape
Cox because everybody has alpha goal.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's where my family, That's where my family
is from, and Yew and Martha's Vineyard. Now you will
go to restaurants, we'll see, you know, the little like
V with a leaf for vegetarian or vegan, but you'll
also see a little tick logo for alpha gol because
so wide spread. Yeah, I mean, just so people will
know because not. I mean, there are a lot of
like sneaky things that alpha gl will also make you
have a reaction to some seaweed proteins and polysaccharides.
Speaker 7: Hell, and so it's it's so crazy, and it's like
the answer, the answer is right there, and it is
fire based.
Speaker 2: Hands on land Man.
Speaker 1: Does anybody talk about because I've like, that's actually part
of the reason I've avoided the northeast except for the cities.
Does anybody talk about that up there? Like, yo, maybe
we need to start burning again like that.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's definitely a conversation that happens within like
naturalist circles. But you know, one of the things that
is sometimes a blessing and sometimes a curse about states
like Massachusetts is the bureaucracy is so hard to wade
through to be able to get the permission to do
things like that on public land. Yeah, on like mass
autobonn Land, like these are things that my friends who
work at like Felix neck on Martha's Vineyard, which is
a beautiful piece of land. Like they know that fire
suppression is the reason why a lot of these issues
are happening, but it's just the hoops that you'd have
to go through in order to be able to do
so are so daunting.
Speaker 1: Yeah. God, they could change everything there in a decade
if they just started burning, just doing learning to do
control burns. And it was part of the popular culture.
Like you don't even care about plants, you don't care
about the wood, but you just know we got to burn.
It's just burned. If you have to burn or else
the ticks get out of control and the invasions get
out of control, and you can't walk through the woods,
you know, without getting stuck on something or without getting
a tick on you. The tick situation there is insane, man,
I mean it is.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's awful, and it's only it's only getting worse.
I I was driving to go see my mom. Got there.
It's a long drive from here, and you have to
you know, it's like planes, trains and automobiles. You take
a really long drive and then you have to take
a faery and then it's you get there. I'm so
happy to be there geting my mama. Hug. Look down,
there's already a tick on my leg. I just got here.
Speaker 1: You don't even have to go into the woods. There everywhere,
you don't even have to go into the woods. It's
like it's like that in parts of Chicago.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: There was this forest reserve on Ogden Avenue I used
to go to, and it's the same thing. It's it's
like understory is just invasive honeysuckle and buckthorn, and they
don't burn. And I think they started masticating, like they'll
go chew up the understory, but you know, and then
it's just hardwood forest. But it's like God that they
could just burn, you know. I remember going off. I
stepped off the trail to piss once and just came
out with like six ticks on me, and I'm like,
what the fuck, Like, what the are you fucking kidding me?
Like where are they like carabeaning out of the trees,
Like where are they?
Speaker 2: You know, are they waiting? Are they just sitting there
with a little bib tied on?
Speaker 1: And they're right, yeah, but there's deer everywhere. It's over deer,
and they haven't.
Speaker 2: It on the vineyard. I mean, once again, blessing and
a curse was being overwhelmingly blue. And it's a thing
that I'm like, one of the things that I've grown
to be appreciative of, even as a vegan here in
Ohio is that there is a much bigger hunting culture
here than there is on say, Cape Cod and the
islands in Massachusetts, and all of the predator species are gone.
So the deer gpulation is insane. I know because I
have to hear about it every time they eat my
mom's yuka shoots before they blew.
Speaker 1: Or they wreck a car. It's like that here in
parts of Suextas. I mean, I hit I hit a deer.
It was in a rental car locally, it was two
years ago, and it like just ran out in front
of me, like I didn't like looks like it.
Speaker 2: Was I mess up your car.
Speaker 1: They den It was like it was like a kama
kazi just for the hood. It was like, buddy, what
are you doing? You know, come on, man, So you
got to pick up this this phenomenon, This is a
real thing, you know. But yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Me.
Speaker 1: I wonder about that with the Northeast, like are they
ever going to start burning up there? Is it just
going to become part of the culture where like, you
have to burn. It's just what you have to do
if you live here.
Speaker 2: It's just what you have to do unless you want
everybody to be kicking it with a red meat plus
other things allergy.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, and so you know the burning, that's what
I'm curious about too. It's like, yeah, I mean, like
I was saying, the burning practices of Native people on
the East Coast, like what were they Like, God, if
you could just go back to the time and talk
to them about like.
Speaker 2: Only because you know, it can't be the exact same
as some of the still extant practices that we see
in the Pacific Northwest, but I would love for there
to be able to be some sort of facilitated information exchange.
Like there are some really amazing Indigenous live groups out
in Oregon, like the wagon Burners best name ever.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good.
Speaker 2: And to be able to have them go and work
with like other Indigenous communities, Like it would be so
cool to have them be able to fly out and
meet with like the Aquinna and the tap equticc Wampanog
communities on the Vineyard on the island. Yeah, to just
be like, here's what we're doing out here. Maybe let's
have a conversation about what that could look like in
these spaces too, if those communities, if those communities wanted that,
I just I think that would be amazing. And it's overdue.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's long over too, man. I mean it's
the thing. At some point, it's like what are you
gonna do? You just gonna let like this red meat,
this red meat analogy. I mean, it's it's better for
the planet, honestly, if everyone's you know, vegan or not
eating as.
Speaker 2: Much continuing to mow down. Yeah, swath, But.
Speaker 1: I think people I think people should have a choice
about it. But Alpha Gal doesn't give you a choice.
It just says, guess what you're vegan now or you're
gonna be pissing out your ass, you know, and exactly
extreme dietary, you know, extreme gastro intestinal pain. I think
it's gonna have to crack at some point, man. I mean,
they're gonna have to take it up.
Speaker 2: But you know, the burning important is gonna get alpha
gal and then suddenly the flood pates are gonna be
open for conversations. Yeah, what the heck are any we
can do about that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the burn intervals, i know, out west were a
lot longer, like a lot more The fires were a
lot more spaced out than in the East, if that
makes sense though, because it's so there's so much more
rain in the east, I mean in the east.
Speaker 2: So the the Yeah, the growth in the like under
bits of the canopy, it happens so fast. Yeah, you
see that in people who are like manually going and
removing glossy buckthorn uh non native honeysuckle bushes. It's like
it's crazy work because you will be doing it again
in like a year.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it comes back so quick. Yeah, it's it's
you know, and you can see it in a lot
of the plants too, Like a lot of plants, like
the seeds won't germinate without smoke. They won't Like, we
know these things evolved with fire.
Speaker 2: We know that it's and I think that there are
even some native species that are kept in better control
with fire. Like The Northeast also has crazy poison ivy.
Poison ivy is on, Like fuck every thing.
Speaker 1: You're reminding me of all the reasons I don't go
out there. Oh God, you're welcome.
Speaker 2: I know. If you ever need a reason to not visit,
uh Martha's vineyard, it's the poison ivy and the deer
ticks literally everywhere.
Speaker 1: I need to get up there. At some point, I
get people like getting mad at me, like, man, why
don't you just why do you avoid the Northeast? When'd
you come up here?
Speaker 2: You know? Like, well, if you ever want to go
to the vineyard and need a place to crash and
let me know.
Speaker 1: I'll take you up.
Speaker 7: I will just like.
Speaker 2: Every article of clothing and what is it like parma
thren before leaving the house.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess that's what you'd have to do. Yeah,
I want Man, we have to check how Maine the
geology and Maine looks really, the.
Speaker 2: Geology in Maine is amazing but also the ticks are insane.
That's where some of jests family, my fiance's family is,
and it's oh, I mean the nature is stunning. The
geology is amazing. The confluence of the two. Getting to
see like what seaweed species correspond to, like what sort
of rocky outcroppings you're seeing on the coast. That's another
thing that's made me go, I need to know more.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about I wanted to ask
you about seaweed. But yeah, we're already two hours. But yeah, man,
I mean next, Oh.
Speaker 2: No, we have to talk a guy.
Speaker 1: Well, well we could talk a little bit about seaweed
because I know I saw you posting stuff from the
Pacific and then also from the let's get into it.
What's up with the sea?
Speaker 2: Do it? Let's do it. I have had a bit
of an unhealthy obsession with seaweed ever since I was
a kid. Like I said, my mom's family is the
like Cape Cod area. They've been there, oh my god,
for like the last four hundred years, which is like
as a family of color, kind of like an insane
thing to say that is also fraught with a lot
of pride and a lot of sadness, and so I
just I, you know, it's normal in our family to
get like thrown into the ocean at age one or
two and being like, well, you'll learn to swim, and
just spending a ton of time socializing with family at
the beach in the ocean. You know. I'd spend my
summers out there, and we'd just be on the coast,
you know, hanging out eating peebee and jays and drinking
polar seltzers with our cousins most days of most days
of the week. And when you're near the ocean that much,
you start noticing the things that live there, like the seaweed. Granted,
as a kid, I was like, well, there's a seaweed
that you can eat in like the seaweed salad that
they sell at the fish market. And then there's this
seaweed that I throw at my sister because it's funny.
And I was not connecting those two things until I
got to be an adult and I started looking into
just seaweed as a regenerative food source, as a zero
input food source, started reading up on how popular it
used to be on both sides of the Atlantic. We
hear so much about you know, Pacific seaweed culture. Thankfully,
a lot of it is still you know, intact on
the uh you know, in Asia and China and Japan
and Korea and and even like moving southward into like Indonesia,
we know that they have a robust culture around eating
seaweed and the aquaculture of it. And for me growing up,
I was like, oh, that's crazy, because we have seaweed too,
and why didn't we develop some sort of like sushi
adjacent thing in the Atlantic. And what I grew up
to figure out was that very much did happen with
Atlantic lava, which is in the same genus but different species,
the same genus Porphyra as nori in the Pacific was
a really popular food stuff, both for indigenous groups on
our side of the ocean and especially in Wales, where
lava bread, which is made out of that seaweed, is still,
you know, historically significant part of their food systems. And
I was like, oh, so, why don't we talk about it?
And for some reason, eating seaweed after the Victorian era
kind of just fell out of fashion. It had a
really big boom because they were into jiggly desserts in
Europe in the Victorian era, and they were like, how
are we gonna set this either with gelatin, which was
expensive at the time, with swim bladders of fish, or
with chandras crispus, irish moss seaweed, which is where we
still source karraghinan for a ton of different products all over.
And so for a second it got really popular. It
was a way for like women to make money because
they could just like hang out in beachcomb and I
guess their husbands didn't hate that, and then they'd get
to sell it to confectioners to make cool things with.
And then it just kind of faded away. And that
makes me sad because I think seaweed is so cool
and it's not being a plant but being very plant
adjacent and a lot of the ways that it behaves,
and there's so many different.
Speaker 1: Kinds and it's delicious when you spice them and you
put salt them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so good, So many different delicious kinds. There's like
dolls and pepper dolls which end up tasting like bacony
when you toast them or fry them. We have all,
you know, a ton of species of kelps, which are
fantastic for flavoring soup rops or even making a seaweed
salad out of them. I like to pop them into
the air fryer with a little sprits of oil and
then they turn into little crunchy kelp chips. That's what
they're so good. Oil.
Speaker 1: What do you use? Just olive oil or what?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Usually just olive oil, sometimes avocado, really whatever I
have on hand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because that stuff is expensive. We just got an
Asian food market down here, and it's like, I'll buy
that stuff, but.
Speaker 2: It's still expensive to buy the imported stuff. One. Yeah,
if you're near an ocean, there's a lot of seaweed
near you. Granted, you do also have to pay attention
to things like your water safety levels, but people get
really worried about that, and I'm like, well, I have
one step ahead of you, and by me, I mean
the fishing industry. They have to be keeping track of
the health of these waters too, for the sake of
their businesses. So at least when I'm foraging seaweeds, whether
it's when I'm with my family in Massachusetts or chest
family in Maine, it is really nice that you can
just be like, well, are the fishermen and the shell
fishers getting food out of the ocean here today. Yes, okay,
then I feel more comfortable doing that.
Speaker 1: So you're mate, you're mostly looking for like fecal coliform
bacteria that might be in the water for like red
tide stuff, red tide. Yes, yeah, okay, yeah, you got.
Speaker 2: You gotta be very wary of both cases. And in
Maine it's usually much kinder because the water is holder
and there's just less industry and less sewage going directly
out into the ocean. Whereas on Martha's Vineyard, I'm just
giving you all the reasons to not visit one of
my favorite places on Earth. Every time it rains too much,
the sewing's overflow connects to wear the ocean.
Speaker 1: Oh they used to Yeah, they used to do that
in Chicago Lake Michigan. The yeah, and then you get
ship water.
Speaker 2: Yes exactly. And so that's ookie, spooky, bad and scary. No,
but you said you should still go to Martha's Vineyard.
It's a beautiful place. But there's no antips.
Speaker 1: Oh god, the tax, there's no uh, there's no seaweed
that's innately toxic.
Speaker 2: Is there are those seaweeds that would be growing in
nothing that's going to be toxic in a way that
would hurt you badly. There's one type of help, acid
help that when it's cell walls are broken, it does
initiate a chemical reaction that creates a tiny bit of
sulfuric acid, but nothing that's going to like cause long term,
extremely painful damage. But most seweet species are edible. The
ones that aren't edible are typically because they're just too
calcium rich to be comfortable to eat. Like they're tough,
they're gonna hurt your teeth.
Speaker 1: So what's the tissue made out of? Is it cellulose
or is it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is. It is a lot of cellulose, just
like what you will see in plants, but they build
up in a lot of different ways. They tend to
be a bit more protein heavy than your average you know,
leaves and stems that you're seeing on land plants. They
of course don't have roots in their place. They have
hold fasts, which don't absorb anything. They just keep them
anchored onto rocks. They're going to be absorbing their nutrition
directly from the sun and the water around them, so
they are still photosynthesizing just like plants are, even though
they are. They are different, and I have to be
that annoying person that's just like macro algae colon. They're different.
Every time that I switched to talking about them after
mostly talking about plants.
Speaker 1: Yeah, phylogenetically they're cool though, too, because I know it
like brown, brown algae, red algae and green algae are.
Speaker 2: Not green algae.
Speaker 1: They're not closely really, they're not closely related.
Speaker 2: No, they are not, which is mind blowing. How long
ago I mean, you're talking about us, you know, the
time of humans really being the blink of an eye
and the history of this planet. Nothing reminds me of
that more than how far back you have to go
to find a common ancestor for red, green, and brown seap.
Speaker 1: What are you caryotic life of it? It's like one
point six billion years or two bills or something.
Speaker 2: They yeah, somewhere in that range. And that's just that's
so old, it's so you can't even fathom it. You
can try, but I just I can't wrap my head
around that much.
Speaker 1: Time life beginning to see. Yeah, and these are there,
these are very old lineages. It's a that's one and they.
Speaker 2: Really found their niche and they and they're like, okay, cool,
We're good.
Speaker 1: It's wild to think about because some of the plant
you know, like fightapra irish potato blight and the same
and then the sudden oak death. They're both fightastra. I know,
those are a member of the brown algae clade. Like
they're not fun yeah, which is fun.
Speaker 2: It's so wild. And I always love talking to the
folks who study fung i. AM always jealous that you
and Alan Rockfeller get to hang out so much because
gotting to talk to them about the evolutionary history of
fungi is so cool and crazy. Yeah, and they also
probably get just as annoyed as I do about people
classifying macro algae as plants, as people classifying fungy as.
Speaker 8: Play Oh my god, yeah that is like you crack
open like old, old the taxonomy or biology books from
like eighty years ago, you know, and you'll see it
in there and you're like, man, what is this really?
Speaker 1: But they're they're both, I mean they're both like fungy
and algae are both. Really they're both really old, and
they're both really bizarre, at least when you're coming at
them from a botany standpoint. You're like, these things what
are they? How the fuck does it? You know, like,
how does it evolve? I had someone on my friend Julia,
we were talking about she studies protus and and this
is like a year or two ago, and we were
just talking about the whole the whole tree of life,
and there's I've really got a myopic lens on it.
You know. I'd like to think I know a lot
more than I do, but I really it's just there's
all these other things out there, and plants are a
tiny part of it, and these other things that you
don't really pay attention to, and algae are one of them.
I mean that's I'm I kind of want to learn
more about them because I think it would probably blow
my damn mind.
Speaker 2: I have been saying for years that at some point,
when Jeff and I are up in May, I want
to just invite all of my nerdy plant friends up
so I can give all of you guys the bug
of also being nerdy about algae. Here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, there, you know, there's there's some there's some
weird stuff going on over there. I mean that alone,
when you learn like this, this notorious plant pathogen is
technically an algae and not a fungus. It makes you
wonder what other things might be out there that, you know,
what other weird forms might have this lineage might have
evolved to. But yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I know, And when I hear about that, I also
I don't know. I also wonder. I'm like, oh, maybe
in algae is the answer to some of the to
some of the blights that we are dealing with. Like
it just yeah, it just makes you start thinking about
how much we still don't know because we've learned so
much just in the last eighty years. Yeah, just said,
And I hope that I am still around to see
just like what we're doing in another fifty or sixty
if I'm so lucky.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I always think about that with you know,
with especially with ecology, like there's all these different relationships
that we don't know exists yet. Like I'll look at
a plant and I'll try to find out what pollinates it,
and there's nothing out there on it. There's no research
you could look google scar there's nothing there's We think
it might be this, but we don't really know. I mean,
the connection between insects and plants and the deep ties
going on there, there's still so much that's not known.
And that's just even in the United States. You go
to place is where they're more remote, like say Ecuador, or.
Speaker 2: Still so much to be found, so many species we
haven't even seen or classified yet.
Speaker 1: And how about how they're like evolving together too, like
the relationships. You know, that's what blows my mind. I mean,
it really is. It's like a living machine and we
have no clue how more than half the pieces in
it work, like how they're operating, and then.
Speaker 2: We just throw a wrench into it without knowing how.
Speaker 1: They're we could get rid of it. How about a
cattle pasture here? How about that? Or a data center
or a housing subdivision. And yeah, it's it's frustrating, man.
But I think, you know, I see I see stuff
like the I see a lot of hope. I see
a lot of positive reason for hope. Just in the
terms of too. People are just.
Speaker 2: In terms of awareness, and people who maybe thirty forty
fifty years ago would not have wanted to go into
the sciences felt comfortable going into the sciences. Who are
And as that space becomes more diverse, people are asking
different questions and noticing different things. I mean, I think
you know. Robin wal Kimmer of course, speaks to this
in Braiding Sweet Grass, with her entering wanting to answer
the question of why asks and golden rd so frequently
grow near each other and look so beautiful, And you know,
fifty years ago that is not a question that you
could ask in a scientific concept. Yeah, And when she
was first starting her education, that was something you couldn't
ask in a scientific contry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she got shut down. Yeah. I remember reading that. Yeah,
and I was like, that's a fucking great question. Who
would shut that down? What kind of stiff would shut
that down?
Speaker 2: So I can't wait. I can't wait for so many
more people to ask those questions and just blow the
front door off of what we even think we know
about ecology and how so many different living beings relate
to each other.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think the other thing too. I mean,
there's a lot of you know, obviously a lot of
social media and phones and cause a lot of problems,
but man, like they can do a lot of good too.
You've got the library in your pocket now, And I
see I see this kind of dismantling of this like
hierarchy of class in terms of the natural sciences, where
it's like, oh, you're gonna take out all this money
and go to school and blah blah, Like no, man,
maybe you could just you know, go for a degree
in electrical engineering and then just you know, on the side,
you know, because it's a trade, then on the side
just fucking dive into you know, being a community scientist
studying bugs or just you know, getting into native plants
around you whatever. Like it's so accessible to more people
now and this kind of horn and toyty Ivory tower
shit is kind of fading, like you cut, people are coming. Yeah,
people can really you don't need you don't need that,
Like you don't need that. I mean I didn't. I
don't even have a college degree. I dropped out of college.
Speaker 2: You know. Fuck I mean, but neither does Sam Sayer
and you too are some of the like Key are
some of the people that people turn to about native
plants and native ecosystems. Now. It's just like it's it's
so excited to see.
Speaker 1: It just takes asking questions. It just takes asking questions
and going out there and like, you know, if you
don't know something to me, like I don't know shit
about that, I want to learn that's it's you know, yeah,
it's it gives me. It does give me a lot
of fucking hope.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: There's so many people out there that are just like
random schmucks like me who're just into this stuff now.
And it's that's how you bring the living world back,
you know, because it's the death cult is trying to
get rid of it. Man. It's just yeah, they don't
know any better. But but yeah, there's there's so much hope.
So anyway, well, I guess we cut it short there.
I love talking to you, Thank you so much for
being down to do this.
Speaker 2: So I love talking to YouTube Julie. It's always so
great when we get to catch out.
Speaker 1: And I love seeing your videos and it's yeah, it's
you know, it's a it's a it's definitely a good medicine.
It's a cheer upper.
Speaker 2: So hey, that's exactly how I feel about you right.
Speaker 1: Back after all right, man, well thanks a lot. I
appreciate you. Lecxis Nicole, And are you gonna be uh
are you going to be out like you're giving talks now? Right?
I mean you I assume you travel all right, I've.
Speaker 2: Been I've been giving lectures I've been giving talks and
plant walks. Things are about to slow down just because
you know, in a lot of the country the plants
are about to be dormant for the next couple of months,
which I love. It means I get to put my
feet up and like, I don't know, finish a book
for once.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you got a book in the works. That's great,
that makes me well.
Speaker 2: And yeah, so my my book will will be out
by this time next year, which is insane to think about.
I just started seeing some of the uh the actual
design of the pages for the first time, and it's
crazy that it's real, because I think a lot of
people were like, I don't know if she's ever going
to finish that book. It's me. I'm people, do you
get a title happy Snacking Don't Die. That's amazing, you know,
people to snack happy. But I'm also like, hey, hey,
I do need you to know that they're they're there's
some fine print at the bottom.
Speaker 1: Of the fact. That's perfect. God, I love it. Man,
are you but if people want to go see you
talk anywhere? Is there do you have like a list
of places you'll be speaking anywhere? Or a website or anything,
or oh.
Speaker 2: My gosh, I am working on getting that up as
like a pinned post on my Instagram page. And keep
an eye out because I guess pre orders are probably
going to be starting in like the next couple of
months for the book, and I am planning on going
on a book tour. So also, please do not hesitate
to let me know where you think I should go,
or I will just go to the places.
Speaker 1: That I know. God man, that's kind of makes me
so happy. It makes me so happy. Now you're putting
on a book and you're going to be on tour too,
I want to come see you speak.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, that would be a dream. If you
ever wanted to do an event together, I would love that.
Speaker 1: Yes, oh yeah, that'd be a great idea. Actually we
could probably find out the dream.
Speaker 2: I can bring people my my weird little wild snacks, cake,
warm turkies, so like a Laffel's made out of honey
locust beans.
Speaker 1: Damn, or like a walk like a plant walk or something. Yeah, fu,
that'd be fun. Oh great, Yeah, well let's yeah, let's
try to make it happen next year. They'd be cool,
that'd be really enjoyed. I love that so all right,
well before.
Speaker 2: The book comes out in September, I am purposefully taking
it easy. So book tour does not like end my life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, man, especially if you being on the road.
How long are you going to Are you gonna go
out for a little bit at a time and then
come back and then go out again. Are you going
to try and do one long book?
Speaker 2: Probably going to do like one one long book tour,
which yeah, very scary for me to think about. But
I'm always tired until the second that I walk into
the room and I get to start talking to people,
and then my energy always just skyrockets because the plant commune,
he's amazing. We're a fun bunch. Yeah.
Speaker 1: People get excited, man, God, I got I bet people
go go bat shit on your at your events too,
because people are there's so many people that be excited
as how to see you and you're just so high
energy anyway. But definitely make sure you take a day
off every couple of days too, so you can you know,
you don't get burnt out. I mean, I don't need
to tell you that. You know that, but I learned
that the hard way. I was going every day and
I was like, fuck, I needed.
Speaker 2: I know you. I was gonna say, are so busy?
You're here, there, and everywhere, and then you're in a
different country and you're posting all of these videos. I
frequently find myself wondering when you find time to relax.
Speaker 1: I need to just I don't think I do. I
don't know. I hang out with my kid and then say,
it's like hanging out with my kid and doing like
fun stuff. That's like my relax time. You know.
Speaker 2: Oh well that counts as relaxing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, but she's pretty high energy too, so I
don't really fuck hard to keep up with her. But anyway, well,
thanks so much. This is This has been great talking
to you boys.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. It was so great getting to
chat today. I was just like flowing by.
Speaker 1: So it's always yeah, man, I was. I looked and
I was like, oh two hours ship. That was fast. Anyway,
all right, Alexis, thanks again.
Speaker 2: Of course, talk to you soon.
Speaker 1: Okay, talk to you soon. Take care, bye bye