Transcript: Mr. Harmon Holiday Special (Part 1)

Good morning, and welcome back to the Late Start Show. We are here with legendary science teacher, Kilroyd Chairholder in Natural Science and Environmental Studies, and Outdoor Projects Advisor, Mr. Herman. How are you, Mr.

Herman? 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. time to be inside making a podcast.

It is. I mean, it's nice with the fire, too. Oh, 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 Norman Rockwell? that were 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 scene summer for youth. And 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 Yuclid, 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, where 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. The lake that caused the lake effect snow in the summer and the fall causes conditions like a microclimate where peach trees flourish. 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 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. with my brother and sisters, 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 in the equipment, but it was a real learning experience a piece of land that grow food 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 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 alive 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? We have 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. 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 Metroparks, where the school actually had a kind of contract with Sulphur Springs in South Chagrin Reservation, where we managed, we established, managed a trout population, probably the closest to any city in the country. Only 20 minutes from downtown, there was a pretty 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. Also on my father's side, I said I had the ideal youth. on the great lakes as uh sailors as engineers and captains so guess what a kid could at seven years old you're going to take a trip up the lakes on uh the the wolf the william wolf and my uncle fritz was chief engineer on the ship so as a kid to be brought uh onto one of these big or carriers you know are you familiar with uh lake boats no no you haven't ever seen them i might have seen either do you know where the i do rock and roll yeah yeah okay that big floating thing is a standard ore carrier. So I sort of grew up part of the summer on those things. And 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. magnitude of the Great Lakes and its 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. Steve Mathers is the name of one of the founding families because of the proximity of the Great Lakes and coal to 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.

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. There's no substitute for that kind of experience. We read about that in textbooks, but unless you have the personal immersion 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. 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 at Michigan. What was your biggest lesson or takeaway that you learned at Michigan? At Anarbor? Yep.

I was fortunate because of this background in, you know, farms, forests, fish, ships. So I really got going 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. 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. 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 couldn't get it off of the Google or the cell phone. 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 at Michigan about the sublethal concentration of acoly benzene sulfonate on crayfish.

Oh, you even remember that? Yeah, that was great. 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. It models after the ones that are in every city. It's just smaller.

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 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. 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 a head 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 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, 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 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 school 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 Lagler, 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.

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. 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, alkyl, benzene, sulfonate, on nerve firing in catfish. Why catfish? Because they have these external barbs, barbels. 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 case detergents that were still active, the detergents, I'm not sure whether You guys know how 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, is to have food plates. You go and put the detergent on it. It's magic. 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 that 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. And you were one of the many people in attendance that day.

So how did you hear about the school? Well, after my college, my first job in the college, because I was young and it 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. 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 it. 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 of Newfoundland that they were going to build the largest 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, I'm sure, some of our electricity here is from that project called the Churchill Falls Hydro 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, which starts in Oregon, but comes down through Northern California. of Chinook salmon, which is 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. salmon within the year?

Yeah, I have. 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, 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 that if they get out, and they do, the pen breaks, the seal opens, the seals come for them and tear their net, fish get out, 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 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 stocks 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 would They would be impacted for not being able to spawn upstream. So my job was just great. Work with helicopter crews in remote areas up in Labrador where imagine a river coming out of the country. You can drink it.

It's totally pure because there's just no civilization on it. It's wild. People move in on these rivers over time. 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 changing the whole culture.

So that's my job history. And then when that contract ended, I came back to Cleveland and I got a job at the Museum of Natural History 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?

No, it's fascinating. Rivers don't burn, but debris on top of it could burn. 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 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. 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 US Steel and Republic Steel at that time. And just the accumulation of organic matter over time methane. You remember your chemistry?

Yes. Okay, you know what methane is? Methane. It's CH4, right?

Four hydrogen and one kind of... Very volatile gas. It's the major part of your cooking gas. If you have gas at home, that's got a lot of methane in it.

And we're getting tons of it now from fracking in these oil wells. So it comes from the fermentation of organic matter. So imagine a hot summer, July, One of these big oar carriers I talked about, 500, 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 will burn. Meanwhile, as they make one of those critical turns, Cuyahoga means crooked. 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 making this turn, churning this propeller, which rotates close to the bottom, releasing all this membrane.

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, 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 our environment get so bad that a river would catch fire. However, that same summer, you don't see this punched into the story. you had caught fire, same purpose, same cause, and Milwaukee River on Lake Michigan. So it was untenable.

We've got to stop this. So this is really what energized 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. 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 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 class, 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 by 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. The rest is history.

He said we need somebody to take this new campus which has actually unparalleled natural resources around it. Your background tells me that you would do 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. You know him? Well, we're going to ask you a question about him. Massey was a great guy.

He was really in love with the athletics of the Outward Bound program. You know about Outward Bound program? It's a program that 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, take on really arduous natural challenges. Like, for example, John would have a rope strung across the pond this time of year. He would tighten it with a powerful hand tool called a come-along, which is a hand winch, so you get it really tight. 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 set 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 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. It's unforgiving. That's the way it is. Water 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. your whole body in there and your heart will just slow down. Anyway, John would have guys in the program, outdoor projects combined an athletic component, outdoor bound, and I was a farmer, 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, boat. They got a good coat on it. 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 guy.

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, they're like, oh, this piece of cake I 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 want to 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. I'm sorry. They welcomed you to use the land for things like that. We have cross-country guys running to the Case Western Reserve farm.

You know about the farm across the road? 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, a kind of 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. 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.

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, there used to be cattle in there. 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 uh like in england you know you know the hounds are out just like in the movies you've seen that stuff um that was seen as uh 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 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, the characterization of our different moods, you know, like, oh, what are some of them? phlegmatic characterization of your temperament.

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 aggressive, you have a lot of energy. So he combined a lot of physical energy and was a great storyteller. So he would come to classes, sometimes tell kids stories and 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?

Oh, yeah. And the other enemy general was Rommel. 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. 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 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 called two-week mini courses. Teachers were encouraged to develop a two-week course, a short 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 there. 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. Mass and 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. 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. plan so that's where we found two things that you really could have anchor 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 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. we've created what was seen as the most magnificent contribution to really our type of civilization was the mobility of getting around in an automobile. Automobile means by yourself. Just go on any freeway at five o'clock, six o'clock in the morning, and that's all over the world. So the exhaust from these vehicles are now a global problem. about it well it made engines more efficient automobile internal combustion is at its peak of of of technology it can't go much further it's to combust something as a power 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 depression, 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? 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'd take a growth ring and we'd find out the volume of the wood on the stem of the tree. We'd find out the volume produced by a cubic 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.

All that wood and leaf material, 40% 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 here. 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 43,000 square foot square, You know, like three parts of that football field. Those are three acres down there, I think.

Maybe two. The amount, if those trees, this old growth forest, persist, it's over 2,000 pounds a year. So we have 229 of those. 129 of them, we could say, is in a leafy forest. So simply multiply 129 times 2,000, and you come out with the pounds, or tons of CO2, that's just one forest.

So now you know the argument that keeps coming up on Google, anything about forests, saving forests, our lungs of the planet, the forest sucks in bad stuff, actually uses bad stuff to make material, cellulose, wood. So these things are coming to a head before you get out of college. So I'm talking about opportunities for careers 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, well used materials to make products and services. You're not gonna 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, 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're 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 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 everybody else. It's just we should have some more time to consider things that lead to your judgments and conclusions about the environment.

I mean, you can't, you know, the money we invest in stadiums and celebrities, you know, football players get millions of dollars for kicking a ball. And this guy's down in some lab and, you know, struggling for a payment to do research on. So it's a balanced thing. Everything isn't a balanced thing.

I just think our culture is a little bit out of balance with its priorities. ignore that these problems really exist and just say, well, jobs are the only, we just need more jobs. We'll 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 air unbreathable, which it is in some places. We talk about these issues when we're doing these projects and this sequestration project. 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? 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 is with her class has picked and then I within a 30-foot radius from that center and 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? Oh, 500 square feet. And so that will be a standard. Every year they will 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. 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 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. you