Episode 4 - Supporters: Plants

MB = Michelle K Berry

EW = Emily Wakild

JB = John P. Bieter

GV = Gabby Vanover

MB 0:00

Hello, my name is Michelle Berry.

EW:

And I'm Emily Wakild, and we are your hosts for More Than: a Podcast. We're both historians, but before you push stop, let us explain what kind of history we study. We're both environmental historians.

MB: 0:18

Oh dear, Emily, I'm not sure that that makes us seem any more interesting. How about this instead? Basically, we tell stories about the past and try to make sure that our stories include animals, plants, bugs, dirt, weather, and the like. And we have created this podcast to convince you that history and even nature are more than you ever thought they were.

EW: 0:42

We also both live and work in the U.S. Mountain West. Think of the region connected by the Rocky Mountains, where we've spent most of our lives. We met in graduate school and we've been friends for almost 25 years. In this podcast, we bring you stories about different parts of the ecosystems that you can find throughout the U.S. Mountain West, from the Sonoran Desert, where Michelle lives, to the Northern Rockies, where I live.

MB: 1:06

These stories have fascinating historical components and connections to contemporary issues. In addition to hopefully showing you how much more history can be, we also call the podcast More Than, because unlike typical history, we're going to put the morethanhuman at the center of each episode.

EW: 1:25

We are convinced that once you hear about the power the more than human has had in the past, you will love history and nature even more than you do now.

MB: 1:38

Now, each of the topics we have chosen has many histories, so we're only picking a few to focus on in each episode. But for many of the episodes, we'll also have a special guest or two to tell us even more about that particular topic. Join us as we explore more than you could ever expect to in a podcast about the environment and history.

Oh, good. All right. Well, it's good to see you. And today we are talking about our episode supporters, which are plants. So we're at that point in the building of the ecosystem of the Mountain West. And I am an unapologetic lover of plants. I think they are fascinatingly cool. Plants and insects are kind of my jam and cows, of course. So I'm excited about this episode. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. And I think for me personally, and I'm sure you're the same way... Oh, and I love birds too. Wait, maybe I love it all. [laughter] And I don't know, but I like plants because we can have such a close relationship with them if we choose to. We actually talked about maybe having a gardener on for this particular episode, although we shifted our focus a little bit, but we humans have been cultivating plants for such a long time and we have such a intimate relationship with them. And then they're... [non sequitur] Speaking of birds, they're really loud. So I'm hoping if everybody can hear it, that's not a sound effect. That's a real bird....But I think that even if you're not a gardener, even if you don't have a really intimate relationship with plants where you grow them or think about them or whatever, or you live in a high sky rise in a city and you don't have a lot of access to growing green things, I think they're around everywhere anyway. And if we just take time to notice them, we'll begin to realize how ubiquitous plants are. I had this huge cottonwood that grew on the farm where I grew up. And it's really interesting. The farm sold after we left to a single owner who then sold it and subdivided it. And this farm is kind of way out in the northwest part of the Grand Valley in western Colorado. And it's a fascinating look at development, right? And the encroaching ex-urban movement in all kinds of places in the Mountain West. We could go off about that as well. So I went out just to see the old homestead the last time I was back a couple of years ago. And in fact, yes, it's this ex-urban kind of development. But there's the Cottonwood, right? Still standing there. And at this point, it has to be 200 plus years old. And It's not next to a creek so it's mind-blowing how it has grown to the stature that it has. And it has an essence. And I think it's fascinating to think about the ways in which the farms that grew up around it, no one cut it down. And it's right in the middle. I mean, you had to kind of go around it to get to fields and dig the laterals for the irrigation ditches. And then it sold to someone else who was using land for something completely different, still left the cottonwood. Then this ex-urban movement and this small, development occurs and they still leave the cottonwood. And there's just this, you're going to talk about later in the episode, elder flora. And I think of that cottonwood and so many of the trees, especially that surround us that have this presence that maybe we don't notice all the time.

EW: 5:13

And they witnessed so much, right? Like all those things you described, like that tree bore witness and through the fibers of its being, the water it's intaking, the seeds it's producing, the cotton that it sends into the air, it's infiltrating all of those different things. So the plant is there supporting. And being part of that landscape and all of those different trends. transitions. And I think that's one of the coolest things about plants. I am not a good steward of plants in my own environment, as my husband will readily tell you. He does the death march every time I bring one home. And it's like, a sacrifice. I love them dearly, but I'm not good at caring for them. I'm not diligent about recognizing their needs....

MB: 6:00

I'm glad that you're better at that with your children, right? You seem to... You do recognize their needs. You've kept two of them alive. So that's good. Well done. [laughter]

MB: 6:12

I think your point about all of the ways in which they support us, I think we tend to forget about the plant foundation of so many medicines of medicinal uses of plants that are so historic and so that's sort of a, for lack of a better term, a folk understanding that a lot of us have lost because we're not as connected to wild plants or even to cultivating medicinal plants that I think a lot of indigenous knowledge continues to to pass down generation to generation. I'm sure our listeners will know even by now, and certainly as the podcast continues on, that I spent time in Taos, New Mexico, which is the home of the Red... Taos means the home of the Red Willow people. And the Red Willow, are all over the Mountain West, but do you have specifically the kind of Red Willow that they have in Taos in Idaho? Do you know? I don't know.

EW:

I will have to look now. I'm not sure.

MB:

Yeah, I don't know either. So I've never heard of it, but. I don't think so either, but I don't know. Anyway, in the winter in Taos, when the willow loses its leaves, you look across the landscape and there's just this brilliant red everywhere. And it's the red bark of the willow. And that is, that tree, those trees and those stands of willows that you can see all peppering the landscape all over the place are so essential. They are medicinal. They can help joint pain and menstrual cramps because they're basically anti-inflammatory and analgesic. But they're also like been used by the Taos people, by the Tiwa people, you know, for ceremony, for friendship. And then ecologically, they're so important. They support nest building of certain birds, they stabilize the soil. And so just that one species of plant is so essential to supporting people's culture, kind of an aesthetic beauty on the landscape. And then of course, real ecological, I hate this term, but real ecological services that allow life to continue in that particular biome, which is just, so cool. And so I think, again, some of us are very aware of plants. Some of us love plants, even though we're not aware of them like you. And I think it's fascinating to think about how we see them everywhere, but we don't often think of them. And we certainly don't think of them as relatives, as I think indigenous peoples would argue that we should, almost thinking of them as kind of "tree people." And It's funny to me, it always drives me crazy, when we've got kind of these dietary movements or animal rights movements, which I'm not taking a position one way or the other, but it's fascinating how much we don't talk about plants and their rights. You never hear of a movement where they're saying, don't eat plants, don't kill plants, the poor plants, right?

EW: 9:16

Yes, exactly. What about the plants and the plant-based diet, right? And all you've described about health is a broad relational health of the landscape, of the culture, of individual people, right? And the ways that plants support that health. And yet so much of our Western conversation about diet is so individualized around choices, right? And not about this bigger picture. And I think plants give us this opportunity to not just think about that health, but to think about other experiences that plants provide. And so trees, for example, as a sensory experience, if you take the time to let them be that way, right? The cottonwood blowing in the wind or the scents of a particular season The medicines you talked about were about all the different parts of a plant too. And we hear so much about people using parts of an animal for different things, but plants have parts too, whether it's the roots for tea or the leaves in a particular way. And we don't think about that as a whole and also how that whole kind of feeds into our own experience and understanding of the world, right? And so I think it's... interesting how some plants, trees in particular, as some of the longest lived of plants and the most stately on a landscape really mark time. And there are some interpretations by foresters and historians and just sort of general people about what it means to have a forest. And there for a long time were debates in ecology about the balance of a forest being something that's reaching equilibrium or that's constantly changing. But there's a German forester who worked in a German forest for most of the 20th century, Peter Wollemben, who says, actually, a forest should be interpreted as a grocery store or a warehouse, right? And that all all of the different plants are actually stealing from each other and trying to get an advantage over the resources that the others have. So it's not like necessarily a grocery store for us, but it's a grocery store in and of itself where the aphids are getting sap from a particular tree and then a tree is moving its roots faster to get to water ahead of a different species and so they can take it. Or the woodpeckers are breaking into the tree to get the cadmium that they need, which then gives more sap for the aphids. And so these sort of resources are a loaded word that might make us think of commodities and sort of extraction, but they're also relational in really interesting ways if we allow more than humans into that conversation of what their needs are and what their economies are of acquiring some of those resources.

MB: 12:19

Yeah, I love that. And I think it's, the whole resource mentality that is so ubiquitous in our dominant culture. Even in resource in management of the more than human, right. It's staggering to me that we continually need to think about the ways in which we take stuff as a species from our ecosystems and specifically plants. And yet it's interesting how our consciousness doesn't really, and our structures don't allow us to see it. So if you actually go to an actual grocery store and you walk in, you're going to see disembodied plants everywhere, their connection to an actual plant in an actual ecosystem is invisible. I always think it would be so cool to have like a, like an ecological museum in the store. And some stores, some natural food stores, I won't name any, but they can do something like, oh, this is locally grown, or they source where the plant is from. But they don't actually source, I mean, the product, so like an apple, this apple was grown in Mexico, but they don't actually show an apple tree. They don't show where the tree is actually in space in Mexico. They don't show the people who tend the apple tree and make sure that it grows. They don't show the workers who take the apples or run the machines that harvest the apples. And so the actual process of being in relationship to plants, especially as sources of food and medicine for us, is invisible. And it's hard to have a relationship with something you can't see. And so it's just kind of interesting to me to think about what would it be like if when we walked into an actual grocery store, we were aware that even the cardboard that holds the cereal, the cereal itself, of course, is from grains that are plants. And what if we thought, oh my God, also the box, the box is also coming from plants. And if we just, even if we just switched our understanding of that, I wonder how much more dynamic the grocery store might be and how much more intentional we could be in thinking about our relationship to plants.

EW: 14:25

And I think there's something really interesting in what you've described that also echoes in our cultural moment about loneliness, right? And about how isolated people feel. And they're isolated not just from other people, but they're isolated from this incredibly dynamic world around them. And what you've just described, I think, in the grocery store is absolutely the case. And and maybe the one where sort of repairing that vision might also build a community around thinking about how plants do support our lives and maybe we could be more reciprocal in thinking about that. There's other research too, really in the last two decades or so that thinks about forests as communities in themselves that actually communicate. And so a lot of this work, I honestly don't understand because it has to do with the chemistry of different plants and it sort of traces the molecules of different plants into different beings. So like from the fungi into the plant's root system and then out into the atmosphere and thinks about that as communication and connection and a way that trees are warning other trees, for example, that wasps are coming or a way that the mushrooms are finding new places to colonize. And that interaction, which is both in the soil and airborne, I think is another really neat way of thinking about how even though plants don't really move they're still communicating with each other.

MB: 16:10

That's cool yeah love it that's so cool! oh I love trees!

EW: 16:13

[laughter] I know. They're so neat. While the world changes around them and those cycles move and the ways that tree holds different memories for not just people, but the other beings, the coyotes that have gone up to it and know that it's there. And the sort of need for multi-generational species, I think, is another way out of this loneliness paradox.

MB: 17:08

And I think when we move away from an ag-based society where land and ways of living with and on land, we got kind of disconnected from that in interesting ways. And so generational knowledge even is still somewhat food-based. I think a lot of intergenerational knowledge that gets passed down in Western culture is through like recipes and cooking and that sort of thing. Whereas back, you know, in ag-based societies, that knowledge is going to get passed down about when to plant, how to plant, what happens when the locusts come, and how you can know that they're coming, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that you're absolutely right that that intergenerational knowledge and communication and thinking intergenerationally about change over time, that's what we do as historians, is so important. And I think we're trying very hard in our podcast not to talk too much about teaching, because we want this to be about the morethanhuman and history combined. And you and I could go for hours about teaching, but we've done a really good job so far of not talking too much about it. But today, on this episode, we're going to have one of my current undergraduate students as one of our guests, and we're going to interview her about her work with trees. And that's a really good example of just thinking about the importance of generational communication and of thinking about the ways in which just having lots of different aged perspectives makes a community more diverse, more knowledgeable, and more vibrant. Just like in a very healthy forest.

EW: 18:48

Absolutely. I'm so excited to have that conversation. And it makes me think of this other representation because trees and forests are also these metaphors culturally in our lives. And one of my favorite trinkets, in my house that I've had for almost 20 years, it's a souvenir from when my husband and I lived in Mexico City for a year. And it's called an árbol del vida or a tree of life, which is this particular type of clay pottery that comes from central Mexico. The Puebla region is known for its pottery. And these trees of life are often gifts to people on their wedding or when young people come of age and start their new household. And they represent all of the different things that a tree shades, but also all of the interconnections between them. So it's literally like sort of a tree that has all of these branches and all of the branches have symbols on them. They have hearts, they have animals, they have people. It's on the forefront of my mind because my kitten just pushed it off the top shelf. Huckleberry is such a naughty kitten. She's so naughty. And so we've slowly been gluing it back together. And I've been carefully thinking about all of the little pieces and the metaphors that are built into this. Like it really is a tree of life. It provides protection and shelter. It supports all of these different pieces of it. But in the end, it's that metaphor and that symbol that is so widespread. Once you know what they look like, you see them all over in Mexican representations and religious symbols. And there's a very complex story of what came before the Spanish came and what's persisted after. But they're really sort of a ubiquitous symbol of the way that trees are woven into people's lives. But trees also are material things, right? They're not just these artifacts and these symbols. And one of the most interesting things I think about trees is how they grow. So let me ask you a question, Michelle. If I put a tree at chest height, say into that cottonwood on your farm, and then I came back in 10 years, where would that nail be?

MB:

I'm going to say it's going to be in the same place.

EW:

Exactly. Trees grow. They don't move. And so there's this really interesting permanence about trees that stays on our same level. And that's one reason they've been used historically to post signs, because if you put a sign there, it's not going to go up the tree. It's going to be there for 200 years. And one of my favorite stories about how trees have been the bearers of these material signs has to do with immigrants in the Intermountain West. Basque immigrants from the northern areas of Spain moved across the Intermountain West in the late 19th and early 20th century. And many of them took up sheep herding and became shepherds in various places. And they encountered cottonwoods like you described and also groves of aspen trees, both of which have really light bark and so are conducive to carving and to putting signs in. And so I have this amazing colleague, a historian, John Bieter, here at Boise State, who, with colleagues at the University of Nevada, Reno, and some librarians, have been cataloging these tree carvings. They're called arborglyphs because they are carving in a tree. A glyph is a symbol. And there's more than 25,000 of them across the West in these trees and they're long lived and they tell really interesting stories. So we're also going to talk a little bit with John about how you interpret this really neat historical source and the ways that it can be used. I am so excited to welcome John Bieter, who is a professor of history here at Boise State where he's been since 2004. I'm really lucky to call John a colleague, and I've long admired his work on Idaho. He published a book in 2015 called Showdown in the Big Quiet, and it's about Owyhee County, which is a county in southwestern Idaho, a county that's larger than most states on the East Coast, and it's a really neat exploration of government and myths and land and immigration. And John is an expert on Basque history and also on arborglyphs. So I'm so excited to talk with him about these tree carvings, this really unique historical artifact. So welcome, John. Glad to have you here.

JB: 23:38

It's good to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

EW: 23:40

Absolutely. So could you tell us a little bit about how you came to study arborglyphs?

JB: 23:46

Sure. The professor from the University of Nevada, Reno, Dr. Hoshimaya, originally from the Basque country and an immigrant himself, began to study these because he was a hiker and kept getting up into the hills and realized that they were really one of the primary ways that sheep herders were marking where they had been and communicating with other sheep herders. And so he started the research of that. I got fascinated by a presentation, fascinated about the topic in a presentation that he gave. And then he worked in California and Nevada. And so I got to work here in Idaho.

EW: 24:23

And bringing some of that research up here. So tell us a little bit about the Basque diaspora and why Basque people came to be sheep herders in the Intermountain West in those places you just listed?

JB: 24:37

Yeah, it's a good question. So initially, it's the gold rush that brings them, like so many other immigrant communities. Originally, it came up from Argentina, so it was a secondary migration. They land in California, and they really don't work too much in gold, rather, searching for gold. What they do is something much more stable, and that is feeding all the people who are coming to work in the gold rush and make their millions or make their fortune. And so they ended up working in the sheep industry. It didn't require any education. It didn't require money any English, any language requirements. And many of them came from an agrarian background in the Basque country. So the combination of that meant by the late 19th century, they were migrating primarily to California, Nevada, and Idaho, but also throughout other places, other states in the American West. And sheep breeding became the option. And we just don't have the numbers. But for example, Idaho has... about 2 million people. But at the heyday during World War I, we had 3 million head of sheep here in Idaho. So the numbers are enormous. And that's just one state. And so that's how they really ended up populating. That was the opportunity that they had in the American West.

EW: 26:01

And so you mentioned that arborglyphs were a form of communication. Can you sort of walk that walk us through that? So how does a sheep herder communicate with an arborglyph? And what does that mean?

JB: 26:17

So the herders are following a transhumance process, which means they're down in the valleys during the winter months and then trailing up to higher elevations as snow melts and as it becomes accessible and as grazing opportunities present themselves. And so when they have time on their hands, I think they do something that's just very human. And that is, right, you want to make a mark. In this case, they literally do. They take knives or they take nails and they begin to carve into trees. The most common thing that we see is names and dates. The next one is hometowns. And you have a sense that it's just something in us as humans that we wants to create, when we have some time, wants to create something, wants to kind of literally kind of mark. They were most of the time absolutely by themselves. And so this was a chance for them to just make their mark, also to communicate with herders that were coming behind them. Sometimes they'd leave messages. Things get developed from there. But I think it really is making a mark and then communicating eventually kind of different ideas and all kinds of things that you find on the trees that are out there.

EW: 27:34

So tell us a little bit about your favorite arborglyphs. I know you've seen thousands of these, and you just described for us some of the contents, but what are the ones that sort of stand out to you?

JB: 27:47

I think some of my favorites, one is a poem. I can't imagine how much time that the herder took to write a poem. It's about six stanzas. It's really a piece of art. That's one of my favorites. I'm also really super interested because many of them were here during the Franco era, consequently in Spain. So when politics were so tense over there. And so they're writing about political slogans here in Idaho for which they would have been arrested in the Basque country, it's an interesting window. There's a real common theme around homes and their home. So there's a lot of different, the Basque word for it is baseri, which is their home. And it's so important because that's how they actually get their name. They get their name from the house. Like they don't name the house, the house names them. And so you can see the importance of that because it ends up on so many different trees.

EW: 28:55

Fascinating.

JB: 28:55

Yeah so there's there's all kinds of other things that they end up a number of them um they actually carve women carvings of women not surprising because there are these lonely men up in the hills and so um that's also another thing but there's there's a lot of different things politics and religion and uh you name it it's there the human experience comes alive on trees.

EW: 29:20

It's so interesting. Tell us a little bit about the mechanics of how these carvings work.

JP: 29:26

Yeah. I think one of the things that surprised me the most is that it takes time. So they carve and they don't carve out of the tree. They make small lines in the tree. So again, a knife, a nail. So you don't see it. You don't see it until that scarring that's in the tree heals. And that's at least a year. Year and a half for that. So it's like the slowest, slowest, you know, kind of reveals itself in this really long, painstaking timeline. It's not the immediacy that we have. It takes time. But it's beautiful because when you just carve it out and you make big swaths of it, it's really hard to read. The bark grows together and it's really hard to see. But the ones that are really good, you'd be amazed what they can do. It's really art. In fact, there's some scholars that have come from the Basque Country and are just looking at it through the window of art.

EW: 30:30

Oh, that's fantastic. So it's not an instant Instagram, right? It's like a very slow gram. Yeah. So, yeah. Tell me a little bit more about what you and your colleagues are doing with the catalog of these trees. Are you making a map of where some of them are, or you have a sense of the places and why there's an urgency around doing that now?

JB: 31:00

Yeah, that's, again, a really good question. We're losing so many of them just because aspens don't last - shelf life of maybe 100 to 120 years. But we're reaching that spot where the peak immigration, the trees that were carved are disappearing. Climate change, fires are making it even more threatening. So the first thing we're trying to do is just try and capture as many as we can. Then there's some interesting things that go along with it. It really is, I think, an educational opportunity for the kind of saying goes is that there isn't anybody in the Basque country who doesn't have an uncle or a cousin that came to the Americas. But they usually, you know, they didn't send a whole lot of letters.

EW: 31:45

Right.

JB: 31:46

So the communication, this is one of the ways that they kind of communicate or see where their uncle or grandfather or whoever it was worked. So we're doing some connections of families and provinces and areas over there with different groups in different regions here. We're also creating a virtual grove. So we're taking carvings, doing 360 renderings of it. And then with that, creating a grove, which gives people that can't physically get up there an opportunity to see it. And then we see all kinds of educational opportunities, both in the Basque Country community and in the American West, when I say we, it's Boise State University, University of Nevada, Reno, and California State University, Bakersfield. These have been the three that we've formed this arborglyph. And it's gone all different ways. The Basque government has asked us to create an exhibit for in 2026 for over there. So all kinds of things.

EW: 32:55

Oh, that's fantastic. And one last question, John. Is there any parallel of this elsewhere in the world? I know the Basque diaspora is big, but they went everywhere. Are arborglyphs unique to our Mountain West region, or are there other?

JB: 33:16

For the Basque, they are. We don't see them anywhere else. They went to Australia. Actually, they worked as sugar cane cutters there, but we don't see them doing any kind of carving. The only spot that we've found so far connected with the Basque, there's arborglyphs there all over the world, but the ones that have been connected with Basque in the Basque diaspora is really just here in the American West, which makes it even more unique, I think, for us and makes it important to try and capture all that we can before they're gone.

EW: 33:45

And that's because of the aspen trees that they carved them in?

JB: 33:49

It is. It is the aspen trees and the combination of the herding that they were doing. It all kind of combines to make it a unique artifact.

EW: 34:00

Yeah. And such a neat example of the ways that, that sort of more than human parts of our world keep track of human time and human memories in really dynamic ways. Thank you so much, John.

JB: 34:13

It's been a pleasure. Thanks again.

MB: 34:14

Yeah. Okay. So that was, amazing. Thank you! It's so interesting because I did not know I mean, I sort of knew, of course, you see, you see modern examples of arborglyphs, right? You see people who go, oh, John loves Mary, you know, out in wherever, Coronado National Forest. No, we don't have many aspens. How about Carson National Forest? Yeah. So every time I see them, I'm annoyed by them because I'd see it as defacing, but man, now maybe I will think about them as modern arbor glyphs. So yeah. There you go.

EW: 34:46

And they're dying, right? They're sort of fading away in time. And so documenting them and capturing them, I think, is really neat. And so thinking about tree rings as telling time, and then the arbor lyphs as sort of marking immigrant time, I think is really interesting. There's this amazing study by Jared Farmer, an environmental historian, called Elder Flora. And Elder Flora captures what he's looking at. He's looking at older trees, sort of statesman-like trees across the world. And he calls them charismatic mega flora to play on the sort of animal parallel there where signature species like the redwoods of California or the alerce of South America can live 2,000 years. And there is something similar with whale ear wax. You can actually sort of count how long that whale has swum in the ocean by counting the rings in the ear wax, which is sort of fascinating. But there's something about the rings of trees. [Michelle "yuck"] And super gross. It's super gross, right?

MB: 36:16

Yeah. Why is earwax so gross to me? It just is. I don't know why.

EW: 36:22

Yeah, I'm not sure I would want to be the one counting the rings or playing with the chemistry in the ears, right? Pack rat middens, especially in deserts and tusks and other things that sort of have a dendrochronology to them. But the trees do it in a really charismatic way that's so stately and just sort of so obvious.

MB: 36:43

Yeah, I love that. And it's so interesting when we talk about how trees don't move, and they don't. Individual trees don't move. But forests really do, right? And we can think about the different land uses, different changes in ecosystems by watching how trees advance and retreat based on land use and about the presence of animals and, of course, human-animal husbandry, humans' interactions with livestock and other kinds of domesticated animals. Ungulates, etc. But it's fascinating to me because we're sort of trying to think with our listeners about trees as sources, about trees as archives. And in fact, they are because we can ask if the older trees are on this edge and then we have a bunch of younger trees that have moved into a grassland space, how did that happen? Why did that happen? What does that movement of the perimeter of the forest tell us about environmental change over time? And in the journal, Forest and Conservation History, in the 1990s, geographers and statisticians, interestingly, not historians, at Montana State did a really pretty great historical study on trees. And they use the term invading grasslands as a result of grazing both cattle, sheep, but also horses. And we'll talk about grazers in another episode. But I think what the conclusion of this study in Southwestern Montana tells us is that maybe no more than human actor is more obviously intertwined with all the other beings than plants. And their existence, depends on so much of what other beings do, right? Humans, livestock, insects, pollinators, et cetera, and birds for that matter. And in the study, it was so cool because they take photographs from 1927 and then they compare them with photographs taken in 1981 and they go, wait, there's clear evidence here of substantial increases in the geographic extent of trees along this lower forest border of this range. And they go on to talk about how all of the use of the grasslands has an effect on the trees and vice versa, because once the trees advance, that decreases space for grass to grow. And so the study, I think also, even though they're not historians, shows the richness of environmental history of the kinds of research that we have to do to get at and find some of these stories. And even some of the drawbacks, some of the difficulty in finding the sources, they relied on, the coring of trees. They relied on oral testimonies later in more modern times, they relied on written records from ranchers about what was happening with the grasslands. It's fascinating. And they, of course, could find out more specifics later in the 20th century. It was harder to find stuff for the 1920s and 1930s. But anyway, just not to geek out too much, but it's fascinating to think about how do we know what we know about change over time and specifically about how trees, forests in particular, move and change. And one of the most important sources for that article and for so much research is the the tree itself as an archive. And so this is really cool because at University of Arizona, we have actually a really incredible laboratory that relies on trees to tell us stories and, and not just about the recent past, but the very long ago past. And I have taught this awesome undergraduate student for the last couple of years who actually works at what we call the tree ring lab. That's not its official name. She'll explain all that but that's, you know what we call it because it's beloved here in the University of Arizona and to the Tucson community in general. And I think globally, it's a pretty well-recognized lab. And so we're going to hear from her now about dendrochronology, about the lab, and thinking about forest as archive. Take a listen.

GV: 40:48

My name is Gabby Vanover. I am a senior undergraduate at the University of Arizona. I'm studying history. That's my major. But I'm doing two minors, education and natural resources, which is actually how I got interested in environmental history and ended up taking your class. And we developed our connection through that class. But now I'm primarily a student curatorial assistant for the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research.

MB: 41:22

That is amazing. Yes. So we... Gabby and I kind of share a brain.

GV: 41:28

Just a little bit. A couple brain cells back and forth.

MB: 41:32

That's exactly right. We have a lot of similar interests, which is very fun. Great. So just take us through the tree ring lab. What is it? How long has it been around? What in the world does the... And there's an official name. We... I think all of us who know of it colloquially, easy for me to say, call it the Tree Ring Lab, but I think there's some more fancy name to it. But can you just tell us a little bit about it and its history.

GV: 41:58

Sure. I mean, ironically enough, the formal name is the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research.

MB: There you go.

GV: 42:07

Yeah. The study of dendrochronology was founded in 1937, almost by accident. It was founded by an astronomer named Andrew Ellicott Douglas. He was working at the University of Arizona, and he was looking to understand the changing climate in relation to solar activity, primarily. And he thought that by using trees, by looking at their annual growth rings, that he could find some answers to his questions about solar variability. And in doing so, he invented this study of using tree rings to build timelines, which is what we call dendrochronology.

MB: 42:57

Amazing. So Emily and I are... One of the things that we've talked about in this episode is the importance of multi-generational ecosystems and especially forests. And we've also- perhaps cornily - connected that to our love of intergenerational scholarship, of thinking about elder scholars, sort of middle career scholars, but then also our amazing students. So I've had one of my high school students on the podcast. She's now a lawyer, but I taught her when she was in high school. We've had graduate students on the podcast and now we've got you as an undergraduate. And it's so fun because we learn from our students all the time. I actually didn't know what you just told me about how dendrochronology came to be. And in the 1930s, it's so fascinating to me that it was at that particular moment. So, okay - what do you do in the lab and what happens at the lab?

GV: 43:55

So there's a lot of things that are ongoing at the lab. Something that you just mentioned was how intergenerational the study of history can be. At the Tree Ring Lab, it's not only intergenerational, but it's also very interdisciplinary. We have researchers from across the nation and across the globe who come to this lab to study climatology, ecology, archaeology. There's so many different fields that tree ring science can be applied to. As a history major, I'm primarily interested in the historical research that goes on. So my main job working there is with the curation team at the Tree Ring Lab. At the Tree Ring Lab, our primary goal in curation is to protect and preserve our collection. So we have an archival space that functions just like a library, but for 3D objects. So instead of going and checking out books to do research, you would go in and look at the different types of wood samples that we have.

MB: 45:34

That is so cool. So the lab itself is a working laboratory for, like you're saying, many different fields, but it's also kind of a museum itself. It holds historical collections of specimens that have been used and collected over time which is so cool. What's your favorite thing about working there what gets you excited to go to go to work every day?

GV: 46:04

Oh my goodness in a broader aspect I have to say that my time working at the Tree Ring Lab really helped me to hone my passion for history because I used to I used to get the question of, oh, you study history, so what time period, what era do you like to study? And I think to myself, I kind of like a lot of it. I don't know if I could tell you anything specific. I don't know if I'm knowledgeable enough to say I'm really interested in one period or the other. But my time here is really... diverted that way of thinking where it's not so much about the time period of the history that I'm doing, but more so about the field in general. And so I found that studying environmental history has been such a big passion of mine now for a couple years. And I'm definitely keeping on that track for sure.

MB: 47:09

Yeah, I love that. I was like you. I went from high school into undergrad just loving history and kind of liking it all. And I actually really loved the Civil War, which is so funny because it's so far from anything I do now, but I, that's what got me interested in it. Abraham Lincoln was like, you know, my passion forever. I had really good high school history teachers. So they just made me love it. And my parents loved history. So when I got to undergrad at Colorado College, my advisor, who's Anne Hyde, who is a fairly well-known historian of the U S West, but also an environmental historian introduces me to environmental history. And I was like, wait, what? You mean I can study history and the environment, the two things I love the most? That is so cool.

GV: 47:52

I couldn't believe that that was a thing when I realized it. Yeah, I know. That's so great.

MB: 47:59

Yeah. And also thinking about the different kinds of aspects of the past that are ripe for the studying, right? So when we think about the past, so much of what we think about as traditional history is important. I never say that the old school political history is not important because I think it is. And I also find great lessons in it and it's all super fascinating. But I think for a long time, we only focused on legal history and on formal political history and certainly on military history. And I think one thing about environmental history is that it shows us all of the things that go into comprising the past. And that is super powerful. And then you layer on race and class and gender and all of the intersectional social organizational stuff. And wow, it just becomes... it just becomes so dynamic and complex and so fascinating. So in that regard, as an undergraduate history major, you are an advanced, so you're now a senior almost to graduate....have you done your capstone project yet?

GV: 49:11

I have.

MB: 49:12

Yes, that's right. What was it on?

GV: 49:15

So my capstone was on the tourism industry and how it develops and as a result of industrialization. I focus specifically on Bisbee, Arizona and the mining industry that happened there. And because it was such a lucrative industry, the town was booming when the mining was, when the mines were running. But once they ran out of all that material, it almost became a ghost town until tourism stepped in. And now the only thing that's really available to Bisbee to keep it flourishing is the tourism industry. It's really difficult to get other things up and running because no one could really afford to live there. There's no incentive anymore. And that's not happening just in Bisbee, it's happening in Butte, Montana, places in Colorado, Nevada. I mean, everywhere that there's major industrialization that has now died off.

MB: 50:27

Yeah, that's so fascinating. And yeah, I'm not going to go on a tangent for sake of time, but that's really cool. And so what we do at the University of Arizona, and I think in most history programs, is undergraduates create a capstone project that requires them to do historical research. And I think most folks, many of our listeners probably, when they think about how does historical scholarship, how does it get made? How do historians study it? They go look at sources. And so, of course, thinking about... traditional sources, books and newspaper articles and all of those kinds of archival things that we find in special collections across the country and across the world, of course, are the raw components of the historical discipline and of the ways in which historians do their work. Having said that, increasingly, especially environmental historians are thinking about ways to look at the morethanhuman as important sources. And we talked a little bit about this in the soil episode in this podcast about soil as an archive and all the things you can tell by just looking at just a soil sample in any given location. I think trees are another kind of source that are super unique and super cool to think about. So can you just talk a little bit about how trees can be used as historical sources? Can we consider forests as archives?

GV: 51:51

So I'm going to say first off, trees are one of the most important historical sources when it comes to environmental history. And we can absolutely use our forests as archives. One of the main points that makes dendrochronology so special is the practice of cross dating, which is taking different patterns that you see in tree rings and matching them up between different trees to extend your timeline. And it doesn't necessarily have to come from a living tree that you sample or a dead tree. These samples can come from trees that have been buried in soil for hundreds of years. They can come from building materials used to make buildings and ships. But the process of doing so is we have a single calendar year, your 365 days. That year can be assigned to a single ring, and that ring width fluctuates based on what happened that year. So in the environmental record, if you have a really dry year, you're going to have a narrower ring than if you have a year that's really great, really easy for the tree to grow. It's not competing or fighting for the resources it needs. So we can take those patterns that we see if there's one dry year or three dry years and match that up to a different tree that has that same pattern, then we can extend our timeline from just maybe, 150 years. Now we have 300 years. And then we take a building that, uh, was built, you know, a hundred years ago and we can put that in the bottom of the timeline. And now we have records going into the past.

MB: 53:49

Yeah. That's awesome. I love it. I think it's great. I guess it's probably safe to say that you would argue that it's really important to listen to trees as we think about constructing, reconstructing and interpreting the past.

GV: 54:06

Definitely. Trees are the living record of our environment. And most, I think most importantly, they're an unbiased source of this record. It doesn't matter what doesn't matter what's going on in that year. The tree is going to record that event. Yeah. So nothing gets lost.

MB: 54:31

I'm going to just end it there because that is awesome. Thank you so much for being here.

GV: Yeah, of course.

EW: 54:39

What a great view from a brilliant student. Yeah. Planting new things and even plants, right? Grow their own food in really cool ways. But thinking about the plants themselves as reconstituting the landscape, I think is super empowering and super interesting. And the soil supports how the supporters are able to do that. But I'm also curious if there's other ways that plants have tracked change or helped us understand how change has happened.

MB: 56:00

Yeah. You know me because of the obsession with cows that that questions takes me immediately to grass. If one, if one is to understand cows, one must understand grass. And one must also understand what we call range management, right? So the ways in which, especially in the United States, and I imagine in lots of places, government agencies tend to, at least the public domain, at least land held in common through the government. And in the United States, that tends to be the Bureau of Land Management. It also tends to be the United States Forest Service. Sometimes the National Park Service. But at any rate, these land management agencies and specifically, of course, the Forest Service and the United States Department of Agriculture, they do a lot to "improve the range." And by that, they they have traditionally meant trying to make it more cow friendly and or maybe more sheep friendly. But in general, they're trying to figure out ways to make the grasses on the range more robust and more useful for cattle. And in the USDA down here in the Sonoran Desert, specifically the Santa Rita Experimental Range, it's really cool (and we'll put this on our website)...they have a whole...archive of change over time on the range. So you can see the ways in which these land managers and these range scientists have proceeded with trying out new kinds of management strategies, specifically planting grasses. And sometimes they're trying to plant native grasses that they know will grow here well, that they know native species tend to like to eat, that in fact, even cattle prefer in many ways. And then in the 1920s and 1930s, they start to plant all all these other kinds of grasses. And so there's this literal experimental range where they're trying to figure out how to do this. And what they find, it's very fascinating, is Lehmann Lovegrass, and Buffelgrass are these two species that are going to do two things. They're going to grow really well and provide forage, mostly for domesticated livestock. And two, they're also going to help with soil conservation, which in the droughty 1930s is really important, right? When there's no rain and there's wind. So thinking about the ways in which arid spaces need particular kinds of grasses, particular kinds of plants in them is really powerful. But the USDA, the Forest Service decides they're going to plant these non native grasses. And so they do. And it's terrific. And it works. And hooray. And by the 1970s, everyone's going, "oh, my God, all we have is Lehmann Lovegrass and Buffelgrass. All the native plants are gone." And in fact, Buffelgrass doesn't really become as obvious as being really widespread until like even the early 1990s, which is so fascinating. And all of a sudden folks are going, oh, but wait a second. These plants are fire adapted. These plants are plants that can withstand lots of fire activity. And the Sonoran Desert itself has not evolved as a fire ecosystem. So not only is it [Buffelgrass] crowding out native grasses, which are more nutritious for native plants, animals, but it's also, and also for some livestock, but it's also like taking over and it's not necessarily a positive thing. And I just think that that shift in range management is important to consider when we talk about plants and science. I think sometimes we think, you know, nothing changes, including the scientific approaches to Western range management never changes. That's not true. Scientists are profoundly and ecological sciences in particular are profoundly adaptable and they are changing all the time and they're changing as a result of what the plants have done on their own accord, right? Like we just, we think we've got the best of intentions. We think it's going to be all good. And then the plants go, uh, joke's on you. And so I think that just those two examples are really good examples of the ways in which plants have agency all in themselves. And they are a story all into themselves about how they actually force shifts in how ecological scientists and range managers think about what they're doing for and to the range itself. And I think they're just really cool stories. Also in this archive, just a last tangent, and we'll link this also, there's this great letter from one of the officials, I can't remember the name of him, but he says that basically, here's what we've learned about cholla, which for the listeners, cholla is a nasty cactus. They're gorgeous, they're cool, they're important, yada yada, they're nasty if you get in them. Chinle got into them many times, and then you've got the tweezers, and sometimes a vet visit, and it's a mess. Because their needles are sharp as hell and they kind of, they seem to jump off the plant. They're terrible.... anyway. And you can just brush up against them and you've got like a thousand of them in your arm. And so of course the range managers are trying to control the cholla because cattle can't eat cholla. And so this hysterical memo is, here's what we've learned about cholla. Cholla can't be controlled. And he lists all the things they've done that doesn't work. This doesn't work, and this doesn't work, and this doesn't. And we recommend that you figure out a natural way to do something about the cholla. It's hysterical. And so you watch this constant pushback on the part of plants to almost flummox the efforts of these range managers and how the range managers themselves have to be really deeply enmeshed and connected and observant of the plants and their behaviors. It's really kind of cool.

EW: 1:01:37

I love that example. And I feel like the word experiment in the experimental station so deeply captures all of those dynamics, right? And that we often fall into these tropes of like humans know what they're doing or scientists have all the answers. And that's a brilliant example of how, you know, they're really just trying to understand all of the complexity of these amazing beings that are shaping the world around us. And I think the fire relationship is one that we're witnessing more and more because of climate change in more dramatic ways, even though fire has been in many ecosystems of the Mountain West for a really long time. But the intensity and the occurrence and its creep into, because of non-native grasses, its creep into ecosystems like the Sonoran Desert, like the Sagebrush Steppe around where I live, has brought fire in more regularly, which has had effects that are more dramatic on some of the native plants that were there. But there's some ecosystems, and here we can talk a little bit about ponderosa pine, which is perhaps my favorite tree of all time, that are fire adapted, right? And ponderosas can be very stately trees. They can grow up to 500 years and be over 200 feet tall. Sometimes you and I hugging couldn't reach around them, right? They have a very wide diameter and they smell like butterscotch and their bark is shaped like puzzle pieces. So they have all these really unique features. And some of those are adapted to resist fire, right? Or to be adapted to it. So their pine cones, their seeds don't open up until fire has come through the landscape because fire unlocks those seeds because the fire is also cleared out the saplings underneath so that that ponderosa will have time to become a sapling and to grow up and seed in that space. And so fire can create history on the landscape in really interesting ways.

MB: 1:03:45

Yeah, that's so great. I think we both love Dr. Pyne, who's a professor at Arizona State University, who's written, I don't even know how many books. I mean, so many books. Dozens. Dozens of books about fire, about the history of fire, which is so great. It's such a wonderful example of how to center the morethanhuman in thinking about change over time and in thinking about how ecosystems and environments in general change and transition. He's really brilliant and his writing is accessible. The books are huge, but they're really fun to read. So listeners should check them out if they want to. And I was thinking about the fact that what we're talking about is again disrupting some of the narratives, right? Some of the binary narratives that are so prevalent in our Western culture. We are specifically in this podcast thinking a lot about human versus nature, nature versus culture, that kind of thing. But I think we're also... starting to think about the ways in which the concept of wilderness could maybe stand to be rethought at this particular historical moment. It was important in the 1960s when it's first conceptualized. I think it served important purposes when the Wilderness Act is passed in 1965. But I think at this point, it's pretty obvious that you can't have islands of ecosystems that are, quote unquote, untouched by humans. And we know that humans can't control the morethanhuman. And so you plant Buffelgrass and it's going to move into Pusch Ridge Wilderness, right? Which is a wilderness area near Mount Lemmon, near the Santa Catalina Mountains mountain range. And it's full of Buffelgrass, which is this quote-unquote non-native, right? It's from Middle East and Africa. This grass, it's crowded out native grasses. We've had several significant fires in recent years that are going to really harm theSsaguaro because the Saguaro are not fire adapted and they just literally can't withstand really hot fires and Buffelgrass burns really hot. So this designated wilderness. It has a particular kind of designation that reads in a particular way to citizens of this community and to folks who want to explore quote unquote "pristine" environments. But I think we would do well....and I'm not 100% sure about this, and my students keep calling me out on it, but I'm not sure that it does a lot of good to only think about somewhere as denigrated if it's not pristine. If in fact my backyard is not full of wondrous wild but also full of some domesticated stuff. And some stuff that maybe was here originally, but maybe not here originally. So I just think it's kind of interesting to play with some of these concepts because I think we're in a moment where it's maybe an us and a them and a black and a white. And there's all these binaries that we're really talking a lot about in our current political culture that I think if we could find some nuance it might make those conversations more helpful. And certainly in my opinion, more interesting.

EW: 1:07:03

Oh, absolutely. And history tells us that change has always been on the landscape, right? And change has had different agents and it's had different results. And I feel like that that can never be read as neutral. The native grasses that got replaced by the Buffelgrass lost in that endeavor. But maybe they'll come back in 100 years.

MB: 1:07:27

Yes, right. And now managers are trying really hard to figure out how to get rid of some Lehmann lovegrass and plant some native grasses. That's what's so fascinating, right? We also did that with fire. So in our fire suppression efforts, especially the USDA, right, starting in the 40s, this is really interesting, starting in the 40s, there weren't enough firefighters around to really fight wildfires because they were enlisted and off to fight World War II. And so the Forest Service sort of went, oh my God, we're gonna have these really devastating forest fires. We better do something to try to teach or encourage citizens to make sure they don't get started to begin with. And then maybe even know a little bit about how to "prevent" them and then also how to fight them. And so they started a fire suppression effort that eventually morphs into fire science that suggests that wildfires in general are to be avoided. And we know, as you just said, that with the Ponderosa Pine, and we can see it in Yellowstone, that there are these, I think, lodgepole pines, [EW: right], in Yellowstone that are fire adapted. They actually need fire to do what they do. And there's these landscapes that need rejuvenated by fires. Indigenous peoples knew that for a very long time and they started what we would today call prescribed burns of specific places in order to continue their regeneration and their richness and unfortunately we did the binary there too so for you know half a century or more there was this "don't let anything burn" kind of mentality and the best icon of that of course is Smokey the Bear. And we're gonna run out of time here because we don't want to we don't want to kill you with an hour and a half podcast but let me just say this. If you want one of the best stories in American history, go check out the Smithsonian exhibit, the digital exhibit sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute on Smokey the freaking Bear. I mean, this guy is, it's hysterical as, caricature, as a living symbol, as beloved. There was an actual bear that gets rescued. The idea for Smokey the Bear starts in the 1940s. But there's an actual living bear, an American black bear, who gets rescued from a wildfire in New Mexico. And he becomes the living symbol of why forest fires are bad because poor Smokey, and you can think about Bambi, right? Bambi's kind of coming out in that same 1940s to 1950s time period. So the consciousness of the American people in all these pop cultural ways are being led to think that fire is really bad for cute little animals. And that's just fascinating. And so this black bear gets rescued in New Mexico and then he gets sent to the National Zoo in Washington DC, where he originally is named, um, I can't think of what it was. [EW: Hotfoot Teddy. Hotfoot Teddy.] YES! That's what it was. And then, of course, it's like, oh, that's a little weird. Let's do Smokey. And so Smokey lives in the zoo and he swims in the pond in his little lake in his exhibit. And people adore this guy. And so, I mean, he's the symbol until 1975. 25 freaking years. Then he dies in 1976. And there's this outpouring of national grief. I think it was the Washington Post that put the obituary on the front page. So it's fascinating to me. You were talking about charismatic macroflora. I think that sometimes when we think about plants and think about saving them, we do so in such a way that we have to elevate fauna as what we're protecting plants for. Again, just thinking about plants themselves as deserving beings, as our relations, is something that maybe we could start moving into that we haven't yet.

EW: 1:11:06

Oh, I love that. And in all those disturbances, there's growth, right? And there's strength in that. They nourish us. My parents got married in 1972 and my dad gave my mom an inflatable Smokey the Bear. I mean, that's how sort of deeply that symbolism and I don't think there's been a more successful PR campaign in U.S. history. And it's fascinating because it's an ecological story, but you're right - like it wasn't, ponderosa, the happy pine, that needed to be saved. The plants have been kind of written out of the story and we would do well to bring that relationship back in, I think.

MB: 1:11:47

Yeah, for sure. Well, I don't know. Somehow we started with a cottonwood tree and then we ended up with an inflatable Smokey the Bear. I mean, if this isn't a perfect example of More Than: A Podcast, I don't know what is. We've had fun and we hope that you will join us for our next episode.

And that's it for this episode of More Than: a Podcast. We hope you've loved what you've learned and we hope it's made you think a little bit differently about nature and about history. We hope you've learned more about the world around you and the histories and stories that make up those places and those more than human beings who are so important to our historical past. We want to thank our guests and our amazing producer, Ruxandra Guidi. We'd also like to give credit to Jason Shaw, who composed our music, Back to the Woods. We'd also like to cite our sound effects from the BBC, and we'll give more specific citation information on our website. There, you can also find sources that we've used and links to other interesting stories to continue your learning. So go check out morethanapodcast.earth. If you'd like to, please leave a review about this podcast and be sure to tune in next time for the next episode of More Than a Podcast.

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