Transcript: Mr. Harmon Holiday Special (Part 1)

Good morning, and welcome back to Late Start Show. We are here with legendary science teacher, Kilroy shareholder in natural science and environmental studies, and outdoor projects advisor, Mr. Harmon. How are you, Mr.

Harmon? I'm very cold today, but otherwise I'm fine. We've just had a lake effect incident in our area further east. We couldn't even drive, so it's a good time to be inside making a podcast.

It is. I mean, it's nice with the fire, too. It's amazing, so warm. Well, everyone at U.S. knows all about your experience in the science field, especially your trout.

What most people don't know about is about you and your background, and in this episode we really want to get into and explore more of that. So to start this off, what was your childhood like? I had, are you familiar with the Norman Rockwell paintings that were a tradition on the Saturday evening? Post Magazine for years?

No, not really. Oh, well, Post, Norman Rockwell would paint scenes of America, and there would be farm folks on one cover, then they'd be down, somebody down in a steel mill. He loved painting people at their work, and one of the pictures that he chose was the ideal summer for youth, and it's a picture of a bicycle. It's a picture of a bicycle on a dirt road in a rural area with a boy, with a dog at its side, paddling or peddling forward with a string of fish on the handlebars.

So that kind of summarizes my youth. I was born in South Euclid, Ohio, but my father was fortunate in getting his desire to get a farm. After World War II, land was relatively cheap. Out in Lake County, we're north of Route 20, the soils were perfect for grapes and apples, and we were trying in Ohio peaches, which is a tree, I know you all know what peach trees are, but they're way out of their range as a tree here.

They do well from the North Carolina down south, but up here it was an experiment. So the various lake, the very lake that caused the lake effect. Now in the summer and the fall causes conditions that are like a microclimate where peach trees flourished. So we had a really great farm, and the beauty of it was the house was right on the edge of a hill looking over Lake Erie.

So I had this great lake in front of me. In the back, there was a spring that fed the water to our house through a pipe that attached a cistern. A cistern is a... A stone built basin that fills with the spring, and then water comes out of it, went through a pipeline to the basement, and then it was pumped through the house.

That was our water supply. But it also supplied beautiful cold water for a pond, which we had trout in. So out in the front of the lake, the house, there was Lake Erie, which is famous for its walleye and its perch. And I certainly, with my brother and sisters, took advantage.

I took advantage of that fun, fishing out of a boat out in Lake Erie. And then every once in a while, my mother would get a taste for a trout dinner, and we could go back to this pond. The peach harvest was tough. The farm was not run just by us.

We had a cooperating farmer who had time and the equipment, but it was a real learning experience to have a piece of land that grow fruit. And then the ponds that supplied fun and fishing and food from the table for that. And so it really started when I was about eight years old, a magazine called Boy's Life, which I think is still around. It is still around.

Sort of the publication for the championing the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts. There was an ad in there one time about my birthday time that advertised fertile incubated brook trout eggs. They were from Pennsylvania. You could order them through the mail.

You had to come down to the post office to pick them up because they were live tissue. And we hatched them on an irrigation pump down by the pond, and it worked great. This is what started the whole thing about, wouldn't that be great for a school to have a trout hatchery? Not because just the trout is kind of cool to have in a pond for somebody who loves, to eat them and catch them, but because of all the science that's involved to do that.

There's water chemistry, there's geology, there's physics. And indeed, the hatchery that we have at university school champions all of those features. We have water from a lake, a pond that runs throughout the year, and over the years, we've been able to hatch and raise trout here. That have gone into several projects over the years.

In the beginning, it was kind of humble, and then it grew into a supply of trout work at Cleveland Metro Parks, where the school actually had a kind of contract with Sulphur Springs and South Chagrin Reservation, where we managed, we established and managed a trout population probably the closest to any city in the country, you know. Only 20 minutes from downtown, there was a pretty, a flourishing trout population. Now going back to your childhood, did you have any teachers or role models in your life that really made you want to go into science? Well, it evolved with a lot of things.

I had, also on my father's side, I said I had the ideal youth. My father's family were mostly on the Great Lakes as sailors. Sailors as engineers and captains, so guess what, a kid, at seven years old, you're going to take a trip up the lakes on the Wolf, the William Wolf, and my uncle Fritz was chief engineer on the ship. So as a kid, to be brought onto one of these big oar carriers, you know, are you familiar with lake boats?

No. No? You have never seen them? I might have seen them.

The Mather? Do you know where the Rock and Roll Hall is? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. It's a standard oar carrier. So I sort of grew up part of the summer on those things. So indeed, even after high school, I didn't want to go to college right away, so I, because of those connections, got a job right away on one of these freighters.

So I worked for two years. What a way to grow up, and you do grow up by taking a job on one of these things. It's a fantastic experience about the magnitude of the Great Lakes. And it's region, a good kind of prep for the economics of this area.

Why are we prosperous here? Why is university school here? Largely because of the Great Lakes and the iron ore trade that Cleveland hosted. Indeed, Cleveland still has famous steamship company headquarters, Pecans Mather.

There was a student here last year who graduated whose father was in that company called Pecans Mather. Indeed. Pecans Mather is the name of one of the founding families. Because of the proximity of the Great Lakes and cold of the south, iron ore in the north, and in Michigan, lots of limestone, what are those three ingredients?

Iron. Iron and steel. And then Detroit, of course, takes the steel and makes the automobile. So all of that coincided with my youth on these ships.

I got all these stories. And... The work on the farm was a pleasure. And then all of the exciting things about catching fish in Lake Erie, raising fish in a pond, getting involved in farming.

And it sounds like those were educational experiences for you. Oh, that's... There's no substitute for that kind of experience. We read about that in textbooks.

But unless you have the personal immersion in the work... You can't understand the real access. You can memorize some of the facts about an industry, but unless you do it, you really don't understand it. Just as you're doing here, you wouldn't understand the electronics of things like I would.

I wouldn't understand how to set this up. It's a marvelous demonstration of how you guys fit in with the modern technology. And so you did end up going to school up in Michigan. What was your background?

What was your biggest lesson or takeaway that you learned at Michigan? At Ann Arbor? Yep. I was fortunate because of this background in farms, forests, fish, ships, so I really got going.

And when I was working on the lakes, I realized I was not ready for college right away. It's the best thing I ever did. And I would recommend that to anybody in high school. That if you don't feel that you have...

That you have a passion for some kind of direction, it's a waste of money because a lot of guys would go and if you party and just look at it as a party time, it really is a handicap. It doesn't build your self-confidence, but I had to wait until I got my confidence on this ship business that I entered the school and I entered what is called the School of Natural Resources, which they are famous for. They have a section on water. They have a section on water.

The science of water, wildlife, forestry. And then next to them, there's another school called the School of Public Health, which deals with water sanitation. I found that the best memories of the school are the professors that I had in those two schools that I had enrolled in. And it was at a time there were no cell phones, of course.

And when you did research, you had to go and really go into journals in libraries. You had no... You couldn't get it off of the Google or the cell phone. Yeah.

You know, kind of going into that research idea, we actually were able to pull from your youth... We were actually able to pull your paper that you had written about at Michigan about the sublethal concentration of alkali benzene sulfonate on crayfish. Oh, you even remember that? Yeah, that was...

Yes. That was an ingredient of detergents. It's still around. It had caused the problem of foaming in sewage plants.

I'm not sure... It should be an absolute that everybody in this school knows how our waste treatment plant operates. And it models after the ones that are in every city. It's just smaller.

So, in Ann Arbor, they had a sewage plant that worked in hand and glove with the School of Public Health, and the research that I did after in the graduate school was on the impact of this ingredient that was used in soap, the formation of soap then, on aquatic life. You know, in that same paper, one of the things that you also brought up was how thankful you were for your professors. I know you brought up just earlier that some of your professors in Ann Arbor were some of your favorite of all time. Yeah.

Who were some of the people that really made you who you are today, and really guided your research? Oh, at university? Yeah. Well, the guy was named Clarence Vells, was the head of the School of Public Health.

He was one of the most understanding professors. If you had had in graduate school, the people that I had gone to graduate school were on a fellowship, so we had to account not only for grades, to keep our grades up, but also to justify the... To justify the expense that the U.S. government had paid the school to start a program that I participated in. So there was a lot of pressure to perform, and the faculty, with a new program like this, they would kind of allude to the fact that they were students along with us, and that gave you a fling.

Of course, in a research level at a school... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You don't have that here. You don't have that time. You're going through introductory courses, and except in your... You can take Anderson Scholars and those things.

It takes a lot of effort. There, you get a lot of time for your research. In fact, you will spend days at it, and unlike here, you'd have classes that don't meet every day, so you have a staggered schedule, right? Some days you're off, but then you have to work in your lab.

So, you know, I'm not saying that high schools should model it. It should introduce you at least to the lifestyle of that education type. The other school, a great guy, a pair of guys from, actually, Switzerland and Austria. So I had a professor named Carl Logler, and Carl knew...

Could read five languages. He was one of these international guys. He was from Switzerland. He could speak German, French, and Italian, and, of course, English.

And it seemed that English was absolutely flawless and unaffected by knowing all these other languages. It was truly amazing to see somebody that could master five languages, but he did. They could read them, and they could speak together with them. And that international flavor gave them a cosmopolitan view of the world.

And I think that my work in natural resources was that, at the initiation of what has become now the Environmental Protection Agency, the work I did was in conjunction with people who started that program, and the work that they do is absolutely essential in a world where chemicals are rife in every environment, air and water. So anyways, Clarence Fels at Public Health, Carl Logler, and John Bardock. John Bardock was an amazing man. He was a neurophysiologist.

He worked in the medical school and the natural resources school. He worked on the neurology of the effects of this detergent component, alcohol, benzene, sulfonate, on nerve firing in catfish. Why catfish? Because they have these external barbs, barbels, you know, they have the whiskers, which are not feelers.

People call them feelers. They're also, they're tasters. And these taste buds are very delicate structures, multiple cells in a rosette inside of a pit, and chemicals that hit the membranes on these cells, fire nerves. So if you expose them to various harshness, in the case of detergent, you're going to have a lot of detergents that work still active.

The detergents, I'm not sure whether you guys know how a detergent works. There's an oil-based portion of the molecule and a water-based one. The water-based end will tie in with minerals in tissue, and it will float it away. So that's the whole idea of cleaning.

Cleaning is to have, you know, food plates. You're going to have a lot of food. And you're going to have a lot of things. Yeah.

If you go and put the detergent on it, it's magic. It goes away because the fat base part of the molecule goes into the fat and carries that away. So you have a bipolar, you know, it's one dissolves in mineral water and the other dissolves in oils. And you were able to become a faculty of a school around 50 years ago when the U.S.

Hunting Valley campus opened and had its first day of classes. You were one of the many people in attendance that day. So how did you hear about the school? Oh, well, after my college, my first job in the college, because I was young and was adventuresome, there were all these jobs that opened up in Canada for natural resource people in the Atlantic provinces.

I don't know whether you know about Newfoundland, Newfoundland, or people say Newfoundland, but it's spelled like Newfoundland. It's the oldest part of North America that can claim early explorers. Spanish were there. Of course, they were in the south in Florida and so forth.

But the Portuguese and the Spanish used, knew that as early as 1550 that the Grand Banks, which are the shallow areas offshore from New England all the way up to Newfoundland, was the most incredible abundance of codfish the earth ever saw. The fishery there began around 1550, 1560. Boats from Europe sailed to the banks to fill their holes with cod that was salted and went back to Europe. But anyway, that job opened up there based on the declaration.

It was the declaration of Newfoundland that they were going to build the largest hydroelectric system plant on a river system in Labrador. You've heard of Labrador? I've heard of it, yeah. Labrador is off the north coast of Newfoundland, it goes up.

It follows all the way into the Arctic. And a major river draining that thing was captured, was to be captured for hydro that would have. And sure, some of our electricity here is from that project called the Churchill Falls Hydro Development. So it was a real adventure job.

I was with the crew to measure fisheries resources in rivers that were going to be negatively affected by the hydro plant. And as you know, maybe you're reading about today about the removal of dams everywhere on rivers, especially in the west coast, a famous river called the Klamath. Klamath, which starts in Oregon but comes down through Northern California, at one time had the largest run of Chinook salmon, which is, it's celebrated as having the highest omega-3 oils of any animal. So you go to Heinen's here and take a look at the fish market.

You guys, that would be a good thing for you to do, to see, number one, the publication of where the fish came from. That's by law now. Whether it's wild or farm-raised, that's a big deal now, aquaculture that raises salmon. Have you had a salmon within the year?

Yeah, I have, yeah. Do you know whether it was farm-raised or wild? See, you want to know those things now. There's a big issue.

We have a recent graduate from here, Charlie Stewart Bates, who is the chief pathologist, fish pathologist, for the state of Washington. Which is a number of salmon rivers. So he's hired by, he went to school here, his senior project was working on trout here, and he's one of the guys that literally went, got a career here to go into fisheries studies. He works on the health management of farm-raised salmon, which are incarcerated in huge pens.

Imagine a pen the size of our football field. Yeah. Which sits in, is anchored offshore in the ocean in some fjord all the way up the coast. And these fish now pose some new challenges for fish health generally.

And because of our knowledge about genetics in animal husbandry now, there's a big concern that farm-raised fish have such a narrowed genetic fingerprint. Yeah. But they get out. And they do.

The pen breaks. The seal opens. The seals come for them and tear their net. Fish get out.

They breed with the wild fish. And many biologists think that's a negative for keeping a vigorous wild population. So when you go to Heinen's and you look, you'll see salmon. You'll see salmon from Chile.

You'll see salmon from the Pacific coast, from Canada. You'll have it from the east coast. But it has to have farm-raised or wild. So that you can make the choice.

And there's all kinds of studies on what are the benefits of wild fish over the other. So it led to, for me, the business was at the early start of this, before there was even major culture of salmon, the rivers that were growing these for wild sex were being compromised by hydro. So what's hydro? I mean damming up rivers to get a hydroelectric production.

So you're trading energy for electricity to run this and this for fish. So the fish would be, they would be impacted for not being able to spawn upstream. So my job was just great. Worked with helicopter crews in remote areas up in Labrador where, imagine a river coming out of the country.

You could drink it. It's totally pure. Because there's just no civilization. It's wild.

People move in on these rivers over time. At one time the river here, the Chagrin, was just like that when Moses Cleveland came. Before that there were Native Americans here. But they were more part of the wild system than the, you know, changing the whole culture.

So that's my job history. And then when that contract ended. When it came back to college. Yeah.

In Cleveland. And I got a job at the Museum of Natural History as a interpreter in the science department and a researcher. And we did some stuff on Lake Erie, the Cuyahoga River. You may know the Cuyahoga River became the focus for legislation that formed the EPA because the river burned.

You heard that story? Yes. I did. Yes.

Do you really understand what happened? Yes. Well, the first thing, rivers don't burn. But debris on top of it could burn.

And a combination of years of neglect of allowing industries to literally discharge raw waste into the Cuyahoga River because of jobs and good industry and we needed water. There's no, there's no lack of understanding why these big industries want to be on large water supply. They use tons of water. A ton of steel requires about 10,000 gallons of water for a ton of steel.

So Lake Erie's there. Water is taken from the lake. The river was used as a waste channel. So it got so bad that the organic matter that accumulated in the shipping channel, you understand ships would go six miles up from Lake Erie with iron ore to the steel mills.

Cleveland cliff steel mills now was U.S. steel. And republic steel at that time. And just the accumulation of organic matter over time produced a lot of methane. And you remember your chemistry?

Yes. Okay. You know what methane is? Methane.

It's CH4, right? It's four hydrogen and one carbon. Very volatile gas. It's the major part of your cooking gas.

If you have gas at home. Yeah. That's got a lot of methane in it. And we're getting tons of it now from fracking in these oil wells.

Do you know? So it comes from the fermentation of organic matter. So imagine a hot summer, July, one of these big ore carriers I talked about, five, 600 feet long, assisted by two tugs, churning up that channel, which is only to accommodate a boat that drops 24 feet. The propellers churning, disturbing that bottom, breaking a crust on the bottom, up comes methane.

And methane, of course, is volatile, it'll burn. Meanwhile, as they make one of those critical turns, Cuyahoga means crooked, the river means crooked in Indian, and a bayou has a lot of floating debris kind of glued together by waste oil, oil, crude oil. So no one knows exactly, but the scenario would be a sailor on the fantail of the big ship. He turns, churning this propeller, which rotates close to the bottom, releasing all this membrane.

He was probably smoking, threw a butt, this huge flame, which would have terrified you, licked across the river's surface, not burning water, but burning methane that had come from the mud. That heat was enough to ignite the oil slick. The oil slick then pressed against the dock, started the dock on fire. The dock then transferred to the warehouse, get the picture?

So that was it. Mayor Stokes, the mayor of the city at that time was Stokes, and he said, that's it. This will never happen again. And that incident led to cynical references to our area as the mistake on the lake.

Did you ever hear that? I have, yeah. Yeah. That's where it came from.

The mistake was that we would let it get, our environment get so bad that we wouldn't be able to do anything about it. That's where it came from. We didn't know that a river would catch fire. However, that same summer, you don't see this punched into the story, the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia caught fire, same purpose, same cause, and Milwaukee River on Lake Michigan.

So it was untenable. We got to stop this. So this is really what energized the EPA to start making these regulations that have been constantly complained about as if it's impending on profits for big industry. And it does.

You know, you have to, it's any more than you don't want a toilet in your house. So this has caused a lot of the controversy you see today about the environment. Also air now, about carbon dioxide in the air, which is a heat gas. So this gets, you had the question about how I got my...

Yeah. ...interest. So the museum, I led a field trip here by a class from university school, which was then up on, in Shaker, the upper classes. And a teacher named Kaz DiBiasio, who's famous here for being a great guy. He brought a class down and they were just ready to move to this campus because everything was down in Shaker then.

Right. In 1969. So he said, you're interested in these subjects. Our headmaster would love to talk to you.

Well, I did. I went out and talked to Roland McKinley and the rest is history. He said, we need somebody with it to take this new campus, which has actually unparalleled natural resources around it. Your background tells me that you would do well.

Yeah. And you should be doing well here to run some kind of outdoor program. At the same time, there was a man who had just been out of the army. He was in Vietnam, John Massey.

John Massey, yeah. You know him? Yeah. We're going to ask a question about him.

I mean we went... Yeah. Massey was a great guy. He was really in love with the athletics of the Outward Bound Program.

You know about Outward Bound Program? No. No. A program usually goes in the summer.

It's by region. It's all over the world. It challenges young people, boys and girls, men and women, to take on really arduous natural challenges. Like, for example, John would have a rope strung across the pond this time of year.

And he would tighten it with a powerful hand tool called a come-along, which is a hand winch, so you get it really tight. And then he would string a looser line above that for a hand grip. So then this is before the ice would form. It was November.

The water is still cold. It's in the 40s. I don't know if you've ever been in 40-degree water, but it's not like 40-degree air. You can sit around here and see.

It's 17-degree air, and you showed me you didn't even think you needed a coat. But if you fall in water that's less than 60 degrees, your body is losing heat like crazy. And at 40, if you look at the Navy survival charts for water temperature survival, at about 40 degrees, you really have about 20 minutes of activity, and that's it. And then you're finished.

And it is unforgiving. It just does. That's the way it is. Water transfers heat, absorbs heat so fast.

It's millions of times more active than the air on your body. Imagine. I mean, just immerse your hand in ice water for a while. But have your whole body in there, and your heart will just slow down.

Anyway, John would have guys in the program, outdoor projects, and combine an athletic component, outdoor bound, and I was a farmer. You know, the fish farmer, the maple syrup, which were evident as good anchor programs for having land like this. Am I making sense? You are, yeah.

So John would have these guys. He'd go out on the boat, the little boat. They got a good coat on. Okay, Billy, it's your turn.

Oh, piece of cake. And this was strung across the pond right where the dock is, okay, across to some trees over there. And I can remember the first. Get on there.

And what happens, John knew this, as you get further and further from the anchor point of the line, if you just start a little bit, the rope starts to get waves. Do you picture it? Yeah. And meanwhile, like, oh, this piece of cake.

I'll just hold on to this. But now it really gets going. And you can't believe it. After a fashion, they let go and fall in the lake.

So John would pick them up. Okay, go on inside. Change your clothes. Come back, try again.

If you wanted a credit for the program, you had to cross the lake. And they did. It was the coolest thing I ever saw. I didn't believe you would go back and do it.

But they did. They loved it. So John read that kind of thing. We did a lot of things like orienteering.

And we got over into other properties. I don't know if you know this, but most of the people around the school, they have large tracts of land. They welcome kids coming there, or at least they did, you know. I'm sorry.

Oh, good. They welcomed you to use the land for things like that. Like we have cross-country guys running to the Case Western Reserve farm. You know about the farm across the road?

Okay, so that expanded the scope of our outdoor resources to do these things. Okay, that's a long-winded answer to a question that was very simple. You know, you were hired by a man, Headmaster McKinley, who actually is the namesake. Of me and Jack's own house.

And you were also kind of with John Massey. What was kind of like that environment like when university school was still there? Because, I mean, I barely can believe the fact that Roland McKinley is something that we both share kind of a tie with. But what was the environment like all those years ago?

Well, you know, you mean the school environment? Yeah. The outdoor environment was similar, you know, it was trees. And McKinley was in love with the new campus.

He had, you know, he had come to the school while it was still the entire school in Shaker. And an alumnus that was not under him as a student, but who was very much in love with the schools and his success in life, which he tied a lot to going to this school. And George Enos owned this property. So there were about 229 acres here that went along with that barn there.

That barn was built in 1909. So the Enos family, you know, the big barn? Yeah. There used to be cattle in there and horses.

Of course, Hunting Valley was famous for people that had the wherewithal, they would have horses and you could ride. There was a hunt in the valley, you know, the hunting valley. Like in England. You know, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, you know, the hounds are out.

Just like in the movies, you've seen that stuff. That was seen as appropriate for people of wealth, you know, to emulate English countryside. Yes, that's the way we are. Despite the fact that we separated from England, we love their traditions, right?

How ironic. Anyway, McKinley was dynamic for every department. He was. He would come around, and if you had a problem in your class, you'd hear about it from him.

He was constantly in the halls. He was what you would say, managing business, walking around. And you could either be afraid or anticipating, anticipatory, that his head is going to come in your room one time, you know. And I think of so many incidents where he gave the blessing, and his character was very, I don't forget the names for the characterization of our different moods, you know, like, oh, what are some of them?

The phlegmatic characterization of your temperament, your temper. They call them the tempers, whether you're phlegmatic or... I can look them up here. Yeah.

I know the one, you know, whether you're... You're aggressive, you have a lot of energy, and so he combined a lot of physical energy and was a great storyteller. So he would come to classes, sometimes tell kids stories that related to what they were doing. He was in World War II in North Africa, and he was in the Eighth Army with General Patton.

You've heard of General Patton? Yeah. Oh, yeah. And he was the other enemy general was...

Rommel, you know, that was Hitler's great desert corps. Doing a paper on him right now. And he would be driving vehicles in that battle. He told us many stories about that.

It made a kind of a personal atmosphere for the school, you know. And there wasn't so much stress on these testings. So there were times, and teachers were largely, in my memory, like I was, were encouraged to develop your own curriculum. So you were hired to the school because you had a box of knowledge.

How would you teach that to anybody? Young people, old people. And so a lot of courses. We had a lot of elective type things.

We also had scheduling that made more time for you. We had trimesters instead of semesters. You know about that? Yeah, they still have that.

The lower school. Yep, down at the Shaker Campus. Right. Well, we had them here.

And after the, I think it was the first trimester, we had what were called two-week mini-courses. So teachers were encouraged to develop a two-week course, a short course. And, of course, you could use field trips. You could go.

So that's how it started. It has become more, I would say, traditional to have expanded competitive sports, which we had from the beginning. But it didn't have the energy it does now. A lot of kids weren't in it.

It wasn't a big deal. And so we had a lot of time for exploring the campus and having field trips, important field trips. You know, Mr. Madison, you were actually able to explore all the outdoor regions of this campus.

And really kind of just make all of these different programs, such as the Maple Sugaring Program, which were in this room. Well, of course, I didn't do it alone. A lot of people were involved. And I must say, today, it's harder to get people to see the value of putting your time in all of these things.

John Massey and my first reception from McKinley was, we hired you guys because of your background. So John had a natural resource background from Colorado, and I had it from Michigan. And so he saw these things. Oh, we have all this land.

We have this water. Do something with it. Drop a plant. So that's where we found two things that really could have anchored things.

Maple syrup was a fantastic annual activity in the forest, which was self-sustaining. If you did it right. You didn't kill the forest. It's not like logging.

You know, oh, we got you guys. Go cut a couple of acres a year, you know. No, it was something that had a background where you required a science understanding, you know, botany. Each of the sciences is in each of these key programs.

So we have the physics here is all the physics of water, you know, sap, boiling points, density, all these terms you used in textbooks. But here you need them. You need these things as measurements for your product. So I don't know if you were in here when we go through the whole thing.

There's the cycle. The whole year is involved here. Getting fuel, which today burning of wood is seen as negative because it produces a lot of carbon. We're taking all the carbon those trees sucked up and throwing it back in the air.

And this is part of the problem of our elevating temperatures. In the summer, nobody really had bought this yet. It's so big we can't put our arms around it. What are we going to do?

I'm not going to give up my car. You're not going to give up a car. You can't. The way the world has worked before, in just 100 years, we've created what was seen as the most magnificent contribution to really our hyper civilization was the mobility of getting around in automobile.

Automobile means by yourself. Just go on any freeway at 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock in the morning, and that's all over the world. So the exhaust from these vehicles are now a global problem. What do we do about it?

Well, it makes engines more efficient. Automobile internal combustion is at its peak of technology. It can't go much further. It's to combust something as a power source.

You're going to have an exhaust. And there's only so much you can do with the exhaust before you negate the whole idea of power in the engine. So maybe you know how engines work, you know, the cycles of fuel intake, compression, explosion, and then exhaust, each cylinder. So we calculated, you know, here how much in outdoor projects we do a thing called carbon sequestration.

Have you ever heard of that word? Yeah. We can take a chunk of forest, give you each a tree, and using trigonometry and a little bit of calculus, you can do a very good picture of how much new wood was put on that tree in one summer. So if we go out now, we measure what happened last summer.

We take a growth ring, and we find out the volume of the wood on the stem of the tree. We find out the volume produced by cubic foot. If we take a foot of space around the branches, we'd find the leaves would be collected. And because leaf material and wood material are all cellulose, we could come up really carefully.

Forty percent of all that wood and leaf material, forty percent of it is carbon. The rest is oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, that trace things. And by doing this annually, we can see how much carbon is absorbed by one acre of woods per year. What do you think it is?

I don't even know where to guess. It's over 2,000 pounds per acre per year. So in one acre, which is, you know, 43,000 square foot square, you know, like three parts of that football field, there's three acres down there, I think, maybe two, the amount of those trees, this old growth forest, persists, it's over 2,000 pounds a year. So we have 220 acres. 129 of those, 129 of them we could say is in a leafy forest.

So simply multiply 129 times 2,000, and you come up with the pounds or tons of CO2. That's just one forest. So now you know the argument that keeps coming up on Google and everything about forests, saving forests, our lungs of the planet, the forest, sucks in bad stuff, actually uses bad stuff. So you take material, cellulose, wood.

So these things are coming to a head before you get out of college. So I'm talking about, you know, opportunities for careers to really get involved with this world health, natural health of the earth. And most people don't understand it. It has to do with social systems, capitalism, we'll use materials to make products and services.

You're not going to stop it. What you do is modify it so that we can live with it. What's the other part of the equation? Growing populations, wars, social unrest.

Brazil is looked at as the lungs of the earth, and it's being, you know, there's no really effective enforcement of not cutting, you know, and there's buyers everywhere. And there's people that will buy stuff and have no conscience at all. About this business. So you are challenged with a lot of things here.

And this school can give you the best background with this, with this, where it's placed, you know. And why do you think it's so important for kids like us to be involved in those programs? Well, you should be involved in a lot of things. And some people say, well, natural resource people don't like sports.

No, it isn't we don't like sports. We do. We play sports like crazy. Like, you know.

Crazy like everybody else. It's just we should have some more time to consider things that lead to your judgments and conclusions about the environment. Because, I mean, you can't, you know, the money we invest in stadiums and, you know, celebrities, you know, football players that get millions of dollars for kicking a ball. And this guy's down in some lab and, you know, struggling for a job.

Yeah. He's trying to do it for a payment to do research on. So it's a balance thing. Everything is in a balance thing.

I just think our culture is a little bit out of balance with its priorities. And to ignore that these problems really exist and just say, well, jobs are the only we just need more jobs will do anything to get more jobs. We can't just do everything. Anything.

We can't dump in the rivers anymore and cause river fires. We can't keep dumping in the air and making you a living. On that. making air unbreathable, which it is in some places. We talk about these issues when we're doing these projects and this sequestration project.

And Dr. Lau has one of the best programs now. She was able to get our school registered with the Department of Agriculture as a forestry research area. So we're open to some grants in the future for guys like you who want to do some research on some of these issues like carbon sequestration.

Could you make a better determination of it? We have, I think, 12 stakes out in our property everywhere. And maybe you've heard of this. Have you ever taken ecology in your class?

No. You know what ecology is. It's the relationship between organisms and their environment. So it's physical environment and chemical environment and animals and plants.

That's simply what it is. That's why you need biology one to appreciate it. Okay. So we have these stations that Dr.

Lau with her class has picked. And then within a 30-foot radius from that center, everything in there is identified. And when you get trees, you have to know the trees now to this time of year by bark. Just as we're measuring the growth, of cellulose on trees for carbon sequestration.

She's measuring the growth on trees for the total biomass within that, I forget how many, do pi r squared. So radius is 30 feet times pi. Can you do it? You're not 90.

Oh, 500 square feet. And so that will be a standard. Every year they will do a study to see how much trees in the forest are going to grow. And they're going to do a study to see how much trees in that plot have grown.

Now this is in conjunction with all over the world in different forest types. You know, up in the Alps, Europe, Brazil, the tropical, anywhere, west coast, chaparral forest, dry, the ones that are burning right now. So that knowledge about the growth rates of trees over time gives us a picture of the health of the environment in a lot of ways. It also is a basis for a platform for research you can do.

So we're not going to make this a university, this place. It's called university school. But it's not a university. You can't just have separate departments and spend all your time doing research on one little problem, but very deeply.

That's what you do when you go to college. And preferably today, even here, you don't get your passion. You're a good way to start here with this stuff. But then by the end of the year, you're going to be a university student.

And so you're going to be a university student. And so you're going to be a university student. And so you're going to be a university student. And so you're going to be a university student.

And so you're going to be a university student. And so you're going to be a university student. By the time you get through the second year of college, you pretty well know what you want to do. And then maybe graduate school with that.

Well, you know, I know we're getting at the halfway part. So we're going to go rebuild the fire and we'll be back in the next episode.