Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 52 - Evergreen: The Trees That Shaped America (w/ Dr. Trent Preszler)
116 Plays13 minutes ago
Today we'll discuss the INCREDIBLE story that Evergreens have played throughout human history! We have a very special episode with Scientist, Author, and Professor, Dr. Trent Preszler, who takes us through the fascinating story of the Evergreen tree, published in his new book “Evergreen”. From its role in oxygenating Earth's early atmosphere during the Devonian period , to contributing to the fall of the Roman Empire, to becoming a beloved symbol of holiday tradition, you will be stunned by how vitally important Evergreen trees have been in almost every chapter of human histpory.
BUY THE BOOK HERE: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1643756702?ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cso_cp_apan_dp_0H06W9HBFCZZNMMCDVJJ_2&bestFormat=true
To watch the YOUTUBE VIDEO of this episode and the irreverent & somewhat unpredictable AFTERSHOW, subscribe to our Patreon: (http://patreon.com/user?u=91688467)
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:16
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Well, your favorite band of misfits is back. This is Woodworking is Bullshit, your favorite show about creativity, design, philosophy.
00:00:19
Erik-green
Woo!
00:00:28
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
It's all about why we do what we do and not how we do what we do. I'm your host, Paul Jasper of Copper Pig Woodworking, and across the way, I got my boy Eric, fine furniture maker and content creator.
00:00:41
Erik-green
Them golden pipes of Boston still flowing easily, baby. That sounded beautiful.
00:00:44
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
yeah
00:00:46
Dr. Trent Preszler
Thank you.
00:00:46
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And today with us on the show, this is a special show. This is not our typical by any means. Today on the show, we have a friend of ours who wrote his second book. I think a lot of you will know him.
00:01:02
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
ah He has a PhD in horticultural biology. He's been ceo of a vineyard for many years. He is, here's the giveaway, a canoe builder, perhaps
00:01:14
Erik-green
The handsome and handsomest man this side of a canoe.
00:01:17
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
a canoe builder who sold what is perhaps the most expensive canoe in the history of the world. ah And also now with his new, most recent reinvention, professor of practice in the Dyson School of Applied Economics at Cornell, and one of two Emmy winners on today's show.
00:01:39
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Please welcome Dr. Trent Presler.
00:01:41
Dr. Trent Preszler
Thanks for having me. Wow, that was quite an introduction.
00:01:45
Erik-green
Yeah, you see how that works, right?
00:01:45
Dr. Trent Preszler
I...
00:01:47
Erik-green
is like He's like PhD in blah, blah, blah, something about vacuums and horticulture.
00:01:47
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:01:52
Erik-green
And he like and also like Eric's still fucking here.
00:01:55
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:01:55
Erik-green
You know? Like that's...
00:01:56
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I didn't say that. Fine furniture.
00:01:58
Dr. Trent Preszler
He's like, erics Eric's got nice tattoos.
00:02:01
Erik-green
ah
00:02:02
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I didn't say that.
00:02:03
Erik-green
Well, you know, Trent, Paul and I were, I mean, you two were literally some of my oldest friends on, on Instagram, on the interwebs. Like we, we started talking, what was it?
00:02:13
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Hmm.
00:02:13
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:02:14
Erik-green
2018 where we were, we were in a group pod together, started hanging in, in some of the earliest friends from the internet that I met in real life.
00:02:15
Dr. Trent Preszler
I think so. Yeah.
00:02:23
Erik-green
I think it was right after the era of like, don't meet strangers online. And then we all were just like, fuck it. We'll just like hang out, you know, go party together.
00:02:32
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Oh, I saw Trent right after COVID, after we got our first COVID vaccinations.
00:02:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
That's right.
00:02:38
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
That April, I took an East Coast road trip and Trent, you were tren you were ah one of my earliest stops ever.
00:02:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:02:43
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:02:45
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. Well, we met back in the glory days when Instagram was still Instagram.
00:02:50
Erik-green
Yeah, when it was decent.
00:02:52
Dr. Trent Preszler
When it wasn't a pay-for-play advertising platform for content creators.
00:02:53
Erik-green
and
00:02:57
Dr. Trent Preszler
But that's not at the topic of our conversation today.
00:03:00
Erik-green
No, it's not.
00:03:01
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:03:01
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
No. So Trent, you you have this new book and it's called Evergreen and i've I've read it just so the audience knows. I come in fully loaded. i know exactly this book is, it was an on it unexpected let's Let's say I didn't expect to learn as much as I did.
00:03:01
Erik-green
It's not.
00:03:20
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
i thought I knew about Trace and I thought I knew a lot about Trace and it turns out I don't.
00:03:21
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:03:26
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And it was phenomenal. Like I just kept texting Trent as I read this thing. Every few days I would text him a few like incredulous text messages like that really happened. What are you like seriously?
00:03:37
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
have What? And Trent would be like, you just hold on to your little britches because it gets better. So today, what what I'd like to do is, is, you know, kind of pick Trent's brain and go through chronologically, because I think the book follows in chronologically about the history of the evergreen tree. And there are so many things. And I i know this for a fact.
00:04:01
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
You as a listening audience, there is so much you don't know about the evergreen tree throughout history. It will blow your freaking mind. So let's let's get into it.
00:04:11
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
So Trent, just to begin with, why why did you even think about writing this book in the first place?
00:04:12
Dr. Trent Preszler
Awesome.
00:04:16
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:04:18
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Like what what precipitated this?
00:04:20
Dr. Trent Preszler
Well, there's two things. So first of all, I like writing the type of book that I enjoy reading. And my favorite books are the single subject deep dive narrative nonfiction books.
00:04:31
Dr. Trent Preszler
You've probably heard of like Salt and Cod.
00:04:33
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:04:35
Dr. Trent Preszler
And there's a book called Mauve and just books where they take something that's been right under your nose your whole life and they go so deep that your mind is blown. And by the end, you're like, wow, I didn't know there were 87,000 trivia facts about hot dogs.
00:04:45
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:04:50
Dr. Trent Preszler
But now I do, right? um So that's the first part of the answer to your question. The second part is that it all started during COVID, which I think a lot of things did in this country. And so the first COVID, the real bad COVID, the shutdown Christmas COVID, I've been at home for a long time alone, you know, sort of rewatching every single thing that had ever been produced on television.
00:05:12
Dr. Trent Preszler
And I decided... kind of on a whim that the thing that would cheer me up is to go get a Christmas tree. So I left the house, I put on my mask, my N95 mask. God, it's such a window into a certain time, right?
00:05:24
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Right, right.
00:05:25
Dr. Trent Preszler
Like right after I finished like washing my Wheaties box with rubber gloves,
00:05:29
Erik-green
ah
00:05:30
Dr. Trent Preszler
I mean, like, you remember the shit we did?
00:05:30
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
yeah
00:05:33
Erik-green
Wow.
00:05:33
Dr. Trent Preszler
It's... God. So I'm like, I'm going to get a tree. So I go... I lived on Long Island at the time, and I go to this tree farm not far from my house, probably a couple miles down the road, and I pull in.
00:05:45
Dr. Trent Preszler
The place is a mob scene. I mean, thousands of people, and we're... It was the era where they still had like the X's on the ground. So you stayed six feet away from people.
00:05:54
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Way sit.
00:05:55
Dr. Trent Preszler
Right. But I go in and there's thousands of people and they have reindeer and an ice skating rink and and like a Mariah Carey soundtrack and those jump jungle gyms for children.
00:06:06
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah People dressed as the Grinch like the whole thing is a madhouse. But as I pull in, there are there's a row of cars pulling out and they have trees on their roof, which you would expect at a tree farm. But the trees were spray painted fluorescent colors.
00:06:21
Dr. Trent Preszler
There was a pink tree and a purple tree and a blue tree and a yellow tree and a red tree. And I was like... Wait a minute. I've never seen this before. and I don't just mean like a little spray paint flocked, but like a fire engine color, but like a tree. Okay.
00:06:37
Dr. Trent Preszler
So I go in and I tracked down some like tired employee, probably some 22 year old kid who's like home on Christmas break working. And I said, what is up with the colorful trees?
00:06:49
Dr. Trent Preszler
And he said, well, a couple things. So first of all, he's like, there are bestsellers. It's Long Island. And, you know, and then he goes like this. He's like, people like fake things, you know, like, you know.
00:06:58
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
yeah
00:07:00
Dr. Trent Preszler
and I was like, OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, really, why? Like what possessed you is, you know, so in my mind, I'm immediately thinking evergreens are no longer green. The basic tree is not enough for some reason. We had to turn it into this gaudy commercial product.
00:07:16
Dr. Trent Preszler
And he said, well, we first got green paint to start painting our trees green because we couldn't keep them alive. With these droughts we've been having and heat waves and climate change, by the time Christmas comes around, our trees have blotches.
00:07:32
Dr. Trent Preszler
There's like yellow and rust colored blotches.
00:07:34
Erik-green
And heaven forbid a tree actually have some inconsistencies in it.
00:07:37
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Look like a tree.
00:07:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
right?
00:07:38
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah. Yeah.
00:07:38
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:07:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
And look like a tree.
00:07:40
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:07:40
Dr. Trent Preszler
you know and It's just like you go into grocery store and you don't buy the bruised apple, right?
00:07:43
Erik-green
Sure.
00:07:44
Dr. Trent Preszler
And so Americans apparently don't like Christmas trees unless they're perfect. So he said, we we started painting them green to counter the effects of climate. And then we were like, well, let's get the paint in different colors. And we started trying that out. And now they're our best sellers.
00:07:59
Dr. Trent Preszler
And in that moment, this is the long answer your to to your question. I said to myself, I have to write a book about this.
00:08:07
Erik-green
About orange Christmas trees?
00:08:07
Dr. Trent Preszler
I said,
00:08:08
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
All right.
00:08:09
Dr. Trent Preszler
I said, this is outrageous. Like Christmas trees are the most sacred tradition for many people.
00:08:11
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:08:16
Dr. Trent Preszler
I grew up with them in my family.
00:08:17
Erik-green
Mm-hmm.
00:08:18
Dr. Trent Preszler
it it And I just I didn't realize how how far we had gone down the commercialist path with evergreens. And that started the journey to write this book.
00:08:28
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
What an event to start you like ah basically incredularity and outrage basically is what right.
00:08:30
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:08:35
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. Oh, yeah, completely.
00:08:36
Erik-green
ah So this book is this book is a long-range tweet?
00:08:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
Like a big...
00:08:40
Erik-green
Is that what I'm hearing?
00:08:41
Dr. Trent Preszler
220 pages of rage tweet.
00:08:42
Erik-green
Hmm. Hmm.
00:08:42
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. it's two hundred and twenty pages of rage tweet Yeah. ha ah
00:08:49
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
all right. So, so Trent, so what surprised me and ah is your book starts like in the dinosaur, like described, I mean, after, after the prologue, you know, you, you kind of like the, the very first time timeline piece, and I wasn't expecting this was looking at the the what is the Denisovian period?
00:09:01
Dr. Trent Preszler
yeah o
00:09:13
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:09:16
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
What was it?
00:09:17
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah It was 385 million years ago in the Devonian period.
00:09:22
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Devonian period.
00:09:23
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yes.
00:09:23
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yes.
00:09:24
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. So I started out after the prologue and kind of getting people in. I shared a couple sentimental memories of cutting down trees with my dad as a kid. Then I made a decision early on with my editor that the book had to be chronological.
00:09:36
Dr. Trent Preszler
It was the only way we could logically organize all these ideas.
00:09:38
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Makes sense. It makes so much sense.
00:09:39
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:09:40
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah.
00:09:41
Dr. Trent Preszler
because the research is very dense. And um'm I was weaving together a really complicated narrative. So I said, so that originally i kind of started out with the you know the pilgrims coming to America.
00:09:53
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:09:53
Dr. Trent Preszler
And then I made some offhand comment in a meeting with my editor about the original Christmas trees. And she was like, wait, what? There were prehistoric Christmas trees? No, no, no. Now the book needs to start then.
00:10:04
Dr. Trent Preszler
So we dropped the reader 385 million years ago
00:10:04
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:10:08
Dr. Trent Preszler
Archaeopterus. It was the original Christmas tree. It was the proto-gymna-sperm, or they the precursor to all of our modern trees. And it's found in the fossil record with the dinosaurs.
00:10:19
Dr. Trent Preszler
um And it looked kind of like a top-heavy Christmas tree, where like the upper fronds were Christmas-y-like, like big fern-like fronds. And it was massive. These things would grow ah root systems that were like 80 feet deep.
00:10:31
Dr. Trent Preszler
And they dominated the Earth's surface in a time when there really wasn't much else except, you know, dinosaurs, much plant life. But here's the funny thing. They all died all at the same time in these, you know, volcanic eruptions or asteroids that hit or whatever it was.
00:10:47
Dr. Trent Preszler
And when they died, they collapsed into these oxygen deprived swamps.
00:10:51
Erik-green
Mm-hmm.
00:10:52
Dr. Trent Preszler
which then over millions of years compressed and compressed and compressed and became coal. So even when we power modern civilization with burning coal, we are burning fossilized Christmas trees.
00:11:07
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I can't. That was the very first moment already. Like the very first part of the book that I was like, so let me get this straight. We have a, we have a climate problem now with too much carbon, right?
00:11:22
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:11:22
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And that carbon is us unleashing what was squirreled away 300 million years in the form of and the very first evergreen tree.
00:11:26
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yes.
00:11:32
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yes, correct.
00:11:32
Erik-green
Mm-hmm.
00:11:33
Dr. Trent Preszler
We're basically, yeah, we're digging up and reversing what happened in the Devonian now, but yes.
00:11:33
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
What a prof... Sorry, go ahead.
00:11:40
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
What a profound irony is that?
00:11:43
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm. I know.
00:11:44
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Like, Trent, again, that was the first and i was like, oh shit.
00:11:44
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:11:49
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
This book, like that kind of set the tone for me.
00:11:49
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:11:52
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Like this book is going to flip, is really gonna flip everything I think I know about, about, yes.
00:11:53
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:12:00
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm. Turn it on its head. Right.
00:12:04
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
So the next part, Trent, that really I found surprising was like, if if we can fast forward now to, let's say, um you know, ancient Greek in Rome.
00:12:15
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:12:15
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Okay.
00:12:15
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm. Sure.
00:12:17
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
You blew my mind yet again. when When you made the case ah quite correctly and and had never occurred to me that like we see we see the the Parthenon, we see all these like ruins of of amazing old buildings and you you you make the case that they were all supported by wood and now the wood's all gone.
00:12:33
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mhm.
00:12:41
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And I was like, what?
00:12:42
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mhm.
00:12:43
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Holy shit, that like like that never occurred to me that they would have these huge elaborate wooden structures.
00:12:44
Dr. Trent Preszler
Aha.
00:12:47
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:12:50
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Can you tell us more about what you you've found?
00:12:52
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah, sure. You go down the list, the Parthenon, the Acropolis, the Colosseum. You walk around at today, modern Greece, modern Italy, and Rome, you look at ruins and you see marble, you see stone. And every single person that goes to to Greece and Italy thinks that ancient buildings were made out of stone.
00:13:12
Dr. Trent Preszler
In fact, the the primary material used in their construction was wood. And like the Parthenon had a huge timber beam cross beam span roof, right? It all rots. It all rotted away. So the only thing we see left is the rock and the stone.
00:13:28
Dr. Trent Preszler
But in fact, they were made with wood and even the great pyramids of Giza. ah The pyramids are made of stone, but there were um millions and millions of pines cut to make the sleds and the levers and the pulleys to be able to make those. So, yeah.
00:13:46
Dr. Trent Preszler
Wood, kind of as it decomposes, it becomes it becomes historically like this ghost material where we don't see its presence, but in fact, it underpinned everything. and The Roman Empire, you know there are all these speculations, and a lot of people know a lot more about it than I do. I'm not a Greek or a Roman scholar, but...
00:14:07
Dr. Trent Preszler
It didn't necessarily end because of political strife. Rome collapsed because they ran out of trees. you know they They cut down every pine and the whole spine of the Apennine Mountains. And then Caesar had to march his legions through North Africa and Europe trying to find more trees.
00:14:24
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah You know, they had to make armaments and and shields and swords. And how do you do that? Well, you smelt metal. How do you smelt metal? With fire. And what do you burn? Wood. And they just they kept running out of wood. So they had to conquer new nations to get more wood.
00:14:41
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I don't even know what to say. Like did none of the Eric, did you know that?
00:14:47
Erik-green
I didn't know that. um it's it's a It's a wild statement, just like Rome fell because they cut down all the trees, period. That's a really interesting statement.
00:14:55
Dr. Trent Preszler
Uh-huh.
00:14:57
Erik-green
And that like the history nerd in me, the the the kid with ah ah you know a religious history degree, wants to sit here for the next 45 minutes to talk about that. because that's a really interesting fact and how the the socio-political ramifications.
00:15:10
Erik-green
But um it's not surprising to me. Like the world runs on resource collection, right? Like that's how we build empires.
00:15:17
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah.
00:15:18
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah.
00:15:18
Erik-green
And so it's not surprising to me if you're building your greatest monuments and they were all mostly, to your point, made of wood and and kind of faced with marble, if you will, or maybe a mix of of stone and wood and you run out of those resources, of course your empire is going to collapse.
00:15:20
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:15:35
Erik-green
That's not surprising.
00:15:35
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah, right. Well, empire building.
00:15:37
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
it
00:15:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
Sorry, go ahead, Paul, because I think this is a great segue.
00:15:39
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
No, no, you, Well, Trent, just just to to to kind of sum up on that, it's like ah ancient Roman Greece were built like these invisible empires based on wood, and we don't really think about that today.
00:15:53
Dr. Trent Preszler
hmm. Mm hmm.
00:15:55
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
ah That was literally the first time anyone had ever brought to my attention the importance of wood in these ancient empires.
00:16:03
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:16:04
Erik-green
Well, that also feels a lot like we've had this conversation on the pod before about like the, the what's, what's the word we use?
00:16:05
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm
00:16:11
Erik-green
what Like the bias of like everything used to be more ornate, right? And that's a bias of the things that get into museums because wealthy people commission them.
00:16:16
Dr. Trent Preszler
hmm. Mm
00:16:19
Erik-green
So they're more ornate. And the things that the common person usually held in their possession were functional and made of wood.
00:16:21
Dr. Trent Preszler
hmm.
00:16:25
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:16:27
Erik-green
And then those decompose over time. So it's not, not surprising that like you walk around Rome or, or, Greece or wherever and you see everything's made of stone you go like well yeah the ancient world was just made of stone that makes total sense.
00:16:30
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
that's true
00:16:31
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm hmm.
00:16:40
Dr. Trent Preszler
and You know, your point about the difference between class and wealth, too. There's a story I remember when I was a PhD student in horticulture about tomatoes. And in ancient times, people thought tomatoes were poisonous, the rich ruling class, because they were eating them off of lead plates.
00:16:53
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:16:58
Dr. Trent Preszler
and But like ah but people sort of basically people sort of lower down in the economic ladder were using wooden plates and they loved tomatoes.
00:16:58
Erik-green
Oh.
00:17:07
Dr. Trent Preszler
So you know tomato sauce, red sauce, you know pasta sauce in Italy it became kind of a peasant food because peasants could eat but tomatoes off of wooden plates.
00:17:08
Erik-green
Interesting.
00:17:09
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
The acidic.
00:17:17
Dr. Trent Preszler
And the rich people were like, we can't eat tomatoes, they kill us. But it's because they were using lead plates, not the tomatoes.
00:17:22
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Oh my God.
00:17:23
Erik-green
That's wild. That's so interesting.
00:17:24
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I know.
00:17:26
Dr. Trent Preszler
So yeah.
00:17:26
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
right So for the next. ah Yeah, it's it's going to it's good the whole episode is going to be like this. It is like revelation after revelation.
00:17:33
Erik-green
Yeah, just fact after fact where we're like, holy shit, how did we not realize that?
00:17:34
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah. it Yes. Yes.
00:17:37
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:17:37
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
That's pretty much how the book read for me.
00:17:37
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:17:39
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Eric, I'm going to put you on the spot for the next one. ah What when you went to school, what were you told about the pilgrims coming to America?
00:17:49
Erik-green
like Like elementary school? Yeah, the same story that everybody else heard, you know, the pilgrims came on the Mayflower and then we or they kind of set up villages around the Northeast.
00:18:01
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah. Okay.
00:18:02
Erik-green
You know, Jamestown happened. I don't think we learned about Jamestown early, early on. But there are still some remnants of those ah early settlers because it was only a few hundred years ago.
00:18:15
Erik-green
And some of those wooden structures are still around. But largely it was the white man came to America and made friends with the natives and and everybody lived happily ever after.
00:18:18
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Okay. Okay.
00:18:23
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Right, right, right.
00:18:23
Erik-green
Right.
00:18:24
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:18:24
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And we, and we, yeah, we like handshake and Thanksgiving and all that bullshit now.
00:18:27
Erik-green
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We share a bird, you know, share a drink and trade corn.
00:18:29
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah. So why did they come and why did they come in the first place? Remind me.
00:18:34
Erik-green
ah Jesus. ah Let's see. Because, you know, they were looking for a land of opportunity. They were looking for often fleeing religious persecution. um
00:18:45
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Religion. Hmm.
00:18:45
Erik-green
A lot of, a lot of um I think, later on learned that there was also a lot of opportunism in the way of like, if I'm a criminal in England, I'm not in the new world.
00:18:46
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Hmm.
00:18:59
Erik-green
So let me hop a boat and get over there.
00:18:59
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Okay.
00:19:01
Erik-green
But like still fleeing persecution, if you will.
00:19:01
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Okay. Persecution, right?
00:19:03
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:19:04
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Okay.
00:19:04
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:19:04
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
ah And I'm with you, Eric. That is what I thought I knew. Trent, lay it on us.
00:19:13
Dr. Trent Preszler
So it's a common myth that the pilgrims were religious separatists. In fact, they were just timber merchants. And they were sent as emissaries of the crown to cut down trees.
00:19:22
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:19:22
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
What?
00:19:23
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:19:23
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Like, no, just one fucking second.
00:19:23
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:19:25
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
What? Like... when No one in my entire life, Trent, has ever said that.
00:19:33
Dr. Trent Preszler
yeah well it's a thing
00:19:34
Erik-green
Because wood is a poor man's material.
00:19:34
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
What the fuck?
00:19:37
Erik-green
nobody Everybody wanted to talk about gold.
00:19:37
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
No, but what the fuck?
00:19:39
Erik-green
Everybody wanted to talk about silver.
00:19:40
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
No, nobody.
00:19:41
Erik-green
Everybody wanted to talk about land.
00:19:41
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
put
00:19:42
Erik-green
Nobody talks about wood as a valuable resource. We still don't.
00:19:45
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah, but Eric, it was all about like, oh, they fled religious persecution. ro ro And it's like not even, and no, it's not even true.
00:19:49
Erik-green
Sure, there was some of that.
00:19:49
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:19:51
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
If you if you dig deep, Trent,
00:19:52
Erik-green
I mean, i'm sure I'm sure there was at least a handful of people who were like, I'm going to get murdered for being a Protestant. Let me go to this place where probably I won't.
00:19:58
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Well, that no, apparently they already escaped religious persecution 10 years before they came over.
00:19:59
Erik-green
But...
00:20:02
Erik-green
i I'm sure that the the half a percent of people who actually did that, you know, those are the people that we paint the story around.
00:20:04
Dr. Trent Preszler
Ha ha ha ha.
00:20:09
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Well, Trent, keep going.
00:20:11
Dr. Trent Preszler
Well, okay, so by the 15th century, ah almost every single tree had been cut down across the English countryside. And ah we go around England today, we see sheep's meadows, and we think, oh, it's a lovely prairie grass country.
00:20:20
Erik-green
Sure.
00:20:26
Dr. Trent Preszler
The entire island was covered in trees, right?
00:20:26
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Hmm. Hmm.
00:20:30
Dr. Trent Preszler
But they cut every single thing down.
00:20:30
Erik-green
Mm-hmm.
00:20:32
Dr. Trent Preszler
And then they they ran into a very serious problem because the Royal Navy needed masts. for their ships, for their battleships. They were blockaded from cutting trees in the Alps and in the Baltics.
00:20:44
Dr. Trent Preszler
And so they were very desperate. And they heard through early exploration that the coasts of North America were just covered in old growth, Eastern white pines.
00:20:56
Dr. Trent Preszler
So they ah commissioned several ships, including the famed Mayflower, to to to head on over with the express mission of cutting down trees to ship them back to England.
00:21:11
Dr. Trent Preszler
um Yeah.
00:21:12
Erik-green
How, i like, real question, just on a functional level. How does one cut down massive virgin growth trees, put them on a ship, and carry them across a fucking ocean?
00:21:22
Dr. Trent Preszler
Well, that it's a it's very difficult, but they enslaved almost 2 million Native Americans to get the job done.
00:21:22
Erik-green
Like, how does how does that happen?
00:21:30
Dr. Trent Preszler
For about a 200-year period, um Native Americans formed the backbone of the timber ah labor force in the Northeast. So the whole Thanksgiving mythology is also completely fabricated.
00:21:40
Erik-green
Sure, sure.
00:21:41
Dr. Trent Preszler
They were, in fact, ah murdering them and enslaving them by the million. And um but how do you cut them down? And I detail that in great length in my book because it defies all logic. I can't even believe that they did it, but they were just using axes and oxen's.
00:21:58
Dr. Trent Preszler
And if the tree didn't wasn't growing within 20 miles of a waterway, they had to leave it because it was just too far to drag it to the waterway.
00:22:05
Erik-green
Sure.
00:22:06
Dr. Trent Preszler
Now, here's where the real tension happened and why the American Revolution started with a pine tree riot and not with the Boston Tea Party.
00:22:12
Erik-green
ah
00:22:14
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yes!
00:22:14
Dr. Trent Preszler
Ha!
00:22:15
Erik-green
That's I would full stop. This is going to be my favorite sentence of the podcast. Go ahead.
00:22:18
Dr. Trent Preszler
Okay.
00:22:19
Erik-green
ah
00:22:19
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Let's go!
00:22:20
Dr. Trent Preszler
So the king said, i hereby declare that we own all the pines that are over 24 inches wide in the new world. So all the colonists were like, all right, well, fuck you. we're going to cut We're going to cut down all the trees that are 23 inches wide.
00:22:35
Erik-green
Amazing.
00:22:36
Dr. Trent Preszler
And so if you look today in many pre-colonial homes in New England, they have the wide pine plank flooring.
00:22:41
Erik-green
Mm-hmm.
00:22:42
Dr. Trent Preszler
If you measure them, many of those planks are 23 inches wide.
00:22:46
Erik-green
Fucking amazing. I love pettiness.
00:22:47
Dr. Trent Preszler
Right. Right. So they were like a big F you to the king. And then the king and the the monarchy was like, well, no, now we've declared that we own all the pines. You have to stop cutting everything. Now, the problem here was that the colonists were making big money off of of timber stores, not mass trees. So they were cutting smaller pines, ah milling them into planks for construction and home building and a million other purposes, especially firewood.
00:23:13
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah But there were only these monarch trees, the old growths that were good for ships mass, and they didn't want to cut those because they couldn't. They made no money on it. It was terribly hard work and whatever. So ah the king sent his royal surveyor of the woods over to kind of ride around on a horse around New England and say, we own all these trees. And he stopped for a beer.
00:23:33
Dr. Trent Preszler
in the Weyer Tavern in the Pine Tree Tavern in Weyer, New Hampshire. And he was just having a lovely bowl of porridge or whatever the hell they ate back then.
00:23:44
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Gruel. gruel
00:23:45
Dr. Trent Preszler
Gruel. And this angry lumberjack named Ebenezer Mudgett Barged in with all his angry lumberjack posse and they lifted this king's representative up by his feet and they lashed him with pine boughs and then they put him on the back of a horse and slapped the horse in the ass and it rode out of town. And this became legend. This was the beginning of the American Revolutionary War and it inspired the Boston Tea Party, which didn't happen until a year later.
00:24:12
Erik-green
Fucking copycats.
00:24:13
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:24:14
Erik-green
You know, Boston's always out here trying to claim the goddamn glory.
00:24:17
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:24:18
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Go Patriots. um So, yeah, Trent, again, another piece of of history that was completely fabricated, i think, to all of us growing up.
00:24:19
Erik-green
ah
00:24:31
Dr. Trent Preszler
Hmm.
00:24:31
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Or or or not not not not completely, I should say, it was erroneous. It just was not the complete story.
00:24:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
Hmm.
00:24:39
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And you have absolutely completed ah the picture here. I was stunned. to to read, is especially that the idea that the the pilgrims were timber merchants.
00:24:49
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Like I, I, I, that is, I will never, you've permanently changed obviously how I i see this.
00:24:50
Dr. Trent Preszler
Hmm.
00:24:53
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:24:56
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
the The next part I wanted to ask you about is this idea of, almost like a myth of a virgin wilderness. Like it was not a virgin wilderness in the Northeast.
00:25:05
Dr. Trent Preszler
hmm.
00:25:07
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
they were already ah There was already ah ah you know a large native population who I think were doing an amazing job as stewards of the forest.
00:25:07
Dr. Trent Preszler
Right.
00:25:13
Dr. Trent Preszler
hmm.
00:25:16
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:18
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
can Can you talk a little bit about that?
00:25:20
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah, absolutely. So for, we estimate up to 10,000 years, Native Americans were managing the forests all across North America, but especially intensively in the Northeast. And so these were not...
00:25:34
Dr. Trent Preszler
um Virgin landscapes bestowed upon the pilgrims by a benevolent god, necessarily, they were managed. And so there were fires, controlled burns, which they used to kind of keep the dry tindling at bay and the understory, but also to clear out portions of the forest, which would give, you know, the grass would sprout for the deer to and the elk and the moose to eat. And then they would hunt those animals. So it was all part of almost like a large scale gardening with the forests of the Northeast. And it was ah but there were also, of course, the the the grand monarch old growths that kind of peppered that landscape. But it was a managed landscape and where the European settlers kind of um took a hard left
00:26:23
Dr. Trent Preszler
was that they viewed all these trees as such a commercial commodity, as such a resource, a valuable resource. In fact, they minted America's first currency, the pine tree shilling, to pay for timber. And um they viewed them as being so valuable that they ah kind of...
00:26:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
I know... Oh, yeah. Oh, Eric.
00:26:39
Erik-green
Yeah, you're just going to breeze right over that? Like, I didn't want to interrupt you, but you're just, yeah.
00:26:41
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Eric, Eric, I know.
00:26:42
Dr. Trent Preszler
Oh.
00:26:43
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
go Dude,
00:26:43
Erik-green
Oh, yeah, the classic pine tree shilling.
00:26:45
Erik-green
We all remember that, Jam. Like, what?
00:26:46
Dr. Trent Preszler
but
00:26:48
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
when I got to that part of the book, I Googled it and I just sat there awestruck. was like, I've never even heard of this.
00:26:52
Erik-green
Tell me more about this. I don't want to interrupt your story. You can finish it if you want, but, like, I need to hear about this.
00:26:55
Dr. Trent Preszler
oh Oh, no, no, no No, America's first currency was a silver coin minted by the colonists because the crown got so mad that we were cutting down pines that they stopped sending gold and silver. So we couldn't pay for our goods. So we had all these this growing population and we were...
00:27:13
Dr. Trent Preszler
trapping furs and cutting down wood. So the colonists basically raided some Spanish colonial ships, took all the silver and minted their own coins and stamped the emblem of a pine tree on them.
00:27:24
Dr. Trent Preszler
And that was America's, our first dollar, our first currency was a pine tree shilling.
00:27:24
Erik-green
No shit.
00:27:29
Erik-green
That's it. So, so it's called that because it had a pine tree stamped on it as a fuck you to the government who is mad about that.
00:27:32
Dr. Trent Preszler
h Exactly.
00:27:35
Erik-green
That's amazing.
00:27:35
Dr. Trent Preszler
Exactly.
00:27:35
Erik-green
God, I love wood Sorry. Carry on.
00:27:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
know.
00:27:40
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And I love the truth. i the
00:27:42
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:27:43
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
yes, like Trent, preach it. You know, it's like all these things you're rewriting the the incorrect history that we were taught in in in school.
00:27:50
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:27:52
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
That's amazing.
00:27:52
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:27:53
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah.
00:27:53
Dr. Trent Preszler
Well, wait, there's more.
00:27:53
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
So sorry. Continue where you were at.
00:27:55
Erik-green
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:27:56
Dr. Trent Preszler
oh Well, now I lost my train of thought, but basically...
00:27:59
Erik-green
Sorry, I do that a lot on this pod, buddy.
00:28:02
Dr. Trent Preszler
The end. No, ah it's been fun.
00:28:03
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Okay.
00:28:05
Dr. Trent Preszler
No. ah um Anyway, ah basically, the the settlers viewed the forest as a resource to be extracted, right? And they had no concept or notion. And we still to this day do not grasp that forests need to be managed.
00:28:21
Erik-green
Sure.
00:28:22
Dr. Trent Preszler
Like you can't just build suburbia for 300 million people right up against timberlands and then act surprised and shocked when forest fires happen.
00:28:34
Erik-green
a
00:28:34
Dr. Trent Preszler
Like, so, and and we'll get into this later with how I take Smokey the bear to the mat as well um in the book.
00:28:41
Erik-green
oh
00:28:42
Dr. Trent Preszler
That's a little bit.
00:28:43
Erik-green
Big, big 80s kid takedown right there.
00:28:43
Dr. Trent Preszler
at
00:28:45
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Trent, do it.
00:28:46
Erik-green
Okay.
00:28:46
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Do it now. Take them down. Let's go.
00:28:48
Erik-green
Yeah, all the rabbit holes.
00:28:48
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Ding, ding, ding. Go right now.
00:28:48
Dr. Trent Preszler
Okay.
00:28:49
Erik-green
Let's ride.
00:28:49
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
No, jump the shark Let's go
00:28:50
Dr. Trent Preszler
Okay. Okay, so s Smokey the Bear, which, by the way, he's half clothed, not half naked, right? So his his natural right his his natural state was naked, and then they put clothes on him, because I guess, God forbid, we have like a naked bear.
00:28:58
Erik-green
Okay.
00:29:05
Dr. Trent Preszler
But anyway... um So for there was this phrase by Roosevelt that careless matches aid the axis, the axis.
00:29:16
Dr. Trent Preszler
And there was this belief that forest fires were going to be our downfall and that the Japanese were threatening to drop bombs in our in our conifer forest, which are highly flammable because ah evergreens contain turpentine, which is one of the world's most flammable substances.
00:29:28
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:29:33
Dr. Trent Preszler
And so ah he appointed Gifford Pinchot as the inaugural director of the U.S. Forest Service, who was a eugenicist and a white supremacist. And he believed very firmly that fire was an enemy, the enemy number one for America.
00:29:49
Dr. Trent Preszler
So after World War II, we invented, we being the US government, invented Smokey the Bear. And you you all know, like, you know, Smokey the Bear, don't, you know, only you can prevent forest fires, right?
00:29:57
Erik-green
Only you can help prevent forest fires.
00:29:58
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Only you can prevent forest fires.
00:30:01
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:30:01
Dr. Trent Preszler
And for about 70 years, our fire suppression policy was 100% effective.
00:30:02
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah.
00:30:07
Dr. Trent Preszler
So for 70 years in this country, we suppressed all fire.
00:30:08
Erik-green
Wild.
00:30:12
Dr. Trent Preszler
We didn't have any instances of fire.
00:30:15
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:30:15
Dr. Trent Preszler
This was in response to several... 70 years before, this was in response to several extremely deadly fires like the Hinkley Fire in Minnesota that killed hundreds of people. And there were many more like it. And so people were just sort of thinking, we've got to stop these fires.
00:30:31
Dr. Trent Preszler
The original fires in the eighteen hundreds and started mostly because of these giant slash piles of logging debris left near the railroad tracks.
00:30:39
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Mm-hmm.
00:30:39
Dr. Trent Preszler
Now we fast forward. After 80 years of fire suppression in this country, our forests just became wild, ah unhinged tinderboxes.
00:30:48
Erik-green
Mm-hmm.
00:30:49
Dr. Trent Preszler
So for the better part of a century, we haven't thinned out the undergrowth, we haven't burnt any of the sort of small kindling, and that's been compounded with climate effects where we're seeing millions and millions of trees dying from, let's say, the pine bark beetle, which is surviving mild winters in great numbers. And so the entire West is um a tinderbox. And you would think we would learn from this, but we haven't.
00:31:15
Dr. Trent Preszler
And so we continuously see every year bigger and bigger infernos that are the direct result of Smokey the Bear's fire suppression policy.
00:31:24
Erik-green
this is This is such an interesting like ethical question. right like we can We can wade into these ethical waters a little bit. I'm curious about it. Because on the one hand, um you can, or or or I can, I should speak from the first perspective,
00:31:43
Erik-green
I can see the logical conclusion that they came to of like, we've seen forest fires rage and hundreds of people die.
00:31:51
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:31:52
Erik-green
And so fire equals bad. That's an emotional response.
00:31:54
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:31:55
Erik-green
That's a primitive response. I get that. Now our logical brains, and I want to be clear, I agree with you a hundred percent, like forest management includes fire.
00:32:01
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:32:03
Erik-green
And if you don't burn the underbrush, something will, and bad shit happens.
00:32:07
Dr. Trent Preszler
yeah
00:32:08
Erik-green
But there's an ethical, interesting ethical dilemma of like, If you know that this particular square mileage of fire is going to burn at some point, it's a ticking time bomb. And there are people who live near in and around that forest.
00:32:25
Erik-green
Like how, how do you square that with telling those people just like, ah, that's the way of nature, you know, like, what are you going to do?
00:32:32
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:32:33
Erik-green
It's going to burn eventually anyway. So it might as well be now and it might as well be you.
00:32:37
Dr. Trent Preszler
Right. Yeah, no, it's a tough nut to crack.
00:32:39
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:32:39
Dr. Trent Preszler
um I should mention as a precursor to the answer to that, that ah the US s government also systematically removed tens of millions of indigenous people from their lands because they continued to practice controlled burning against federal law.
00:32:51
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:32:55
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:32:55
Dr. Trent Preszler
um And then that included the establishment of several hundred religious schools funded by the U.S. government, which were specifically for indigenous children, which they separated from their parents.
00:33:07
Dr. Trent Preszler
A big portion of that was to kind of strip out fire from the indigenous culture and from the American landscape.
00:33:15
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:33:15
Dr. Trent Preszler
They couldn't suppress it just ah physically. They also had to suppress it culturally with the people who were still practicing it.
00:33:22
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:33:22
Dr. Trent Preszler
um So it's a difficult subject. And how do you tell somebody that just bought their $3 million dollars house in Malibu that, hey, I have a crystal ball and Malibu is going to burn to the ground?
00:33:34
Erik-green
It's going to happen eventually.
00:33:35
Dr. Trent Preszler
right And it did this year. right I even have data from just this year.
00:33:37
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:33:40
Dr. Trent Preszler
This year's fire in Los Angeles was the most expensive natural disaster in human history.
00:33:45
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:33:46
Dr. Trent Preszler
These are really tough questions.
00:33:48
Erik-green
Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to like put you like I'm not asking you for the ethical answer. Like, it's just it's it's an interesting ethical dilemma.
00:33:52
Dr. Trent Preszler
Oh, no.
00:33:55
Erik-green
Like even even if you take the kind of capitalist approach out of it, like let's say they are native lands and and, you know, they haven't been managed over time because they're complying with US s policy.
00:33:59
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:34:06
Erik-green
then it's like, ah okay, so now you're fucking over all of the natives that are living on this land.
00:34:07
Dr. Trent Preszler
h
00:34:11
Erik-green
And and how do we, I don't, um this is a question that I am not smart enough to know the answer to.
00:34:11
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:34:17
Erik-green
It's just an interesting ethical dilemma when you're talking about a subject this broad.
00:34:19
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. It is hard. And you know it it's not helped by the fact that in the last couple of years, there have been well over 5,000 Forest Service employees that were furloughed or laid off as part of the government deficiency programs.
00:34:30
Erik-green
Hmm. Hmm.
00:34:35
Dr. Trent Preszler
So we don't... you know Honestly, if you drive around Colorado, which I did a couple of weeks ago, there's just entire mountainsides of dead trees, just like millions of acres of dead trees.
00:34:42
Erik-green
ah huh
00:34:44
Dr. Trent Preszler
And we have no logging infrastructure to take care of any of it.
00:34:49
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:34:50
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah But... Paul.
00:34:52
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Well, yeah, sorry. To to be continued, i don't know what the answer to any of this is either.
00:34:55
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:34:56
Erik-green
Yeah. Yeah.
00:34:58
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
i don't think any of us do. I mean, maybe there's some people who have some ideas about a solution, but obviously a solution is complex.
00:34:59
Dr. Trent Preszler
No, no, yeah.
00:35:02
Erik-green
Well, can can I can I ask one more question? and And if this comes up later on in the discussion in the book, we can put it aside until then.
00:35:13
Erik-green
But I'm wondering about I think it's the Sequoia ah that that requires fire in order to reproduce.
00:35:16
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Mm-hmm.
00:35:21
Erik-green
Do you touch on that at all?
00:35:21
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. I do. Yeah. In fact, most.
00:35:24
Erik-green
Okay, all right.
00:35:24
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah Yeah. It's a theme in the book that almost all evergreens. There's over 100 species that actually require fire.
00:35:30
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:35:30
Dr. Trent Preszler
Fire. Once the sap, the resin heats up above 138 degrees, it melts and the cones burst and the seeds come out. So they are built to burn.
00:35:38
Erik-green
Hmm. Yep.
00:35:40
Dr. Trent Preszler
They need to burn. They have to burn. And, you know, even the conical shape of a Christmas tree is in part designed so that snow kind of falls off and to capture light from the side and the northern climates.
00:35:50
Dr. Trent Preszler
But it also it helps with burning.
00:35:51
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Thank you.
00:35:54
Dr. Trent Preszler
So they have more branches at the bottom by the ground because fire can wick up from the ground. Like that's why they're shaped the way they are.
00:36:01
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:36:03
Dr. Trent Preszler
So they need to burn. We need them to burn.
00:36:06
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Fascinating. Literally fascinating.
00:36:08
Erik-green
Mm-hmm.
00:36:08
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I didn't know that either, Trent, about about seeds being released above a certain temperature.
00:36:09
Erik-green
the
00:36:13
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I was completely ignorant to that too. So all of this fire discussion started with our point about the Native American the native american populations controlling the forest and being good stewards until...
00:36:26
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:36:27
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
The European colonists came and basically just took what they wanted and dysregulated everything.
00:36:31
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:36:34
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And that brings us down to the, like, continuing on from there, that brings us to um the time of slavery. And the thought of cotton plantations, and I think all of us are familiar with cotton plantations.
00:36:43
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yep.
00:36:48
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
But Trent, again, open my eyes to the fact that slaves were used to cut vast swaths of forest before there was the the land for a plantation.
00:37:00
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Can you tell us more about that?
00:37:01
Dr. Trent Preszler
Sure. Yeah. So if you were a white landowner and you just, you know, you had this land, ah you couldn't just plant cotton. First, you had to cut the trees down because the entire deep south was heavily wooded. um And timber extraction, especially evergreens and the longleaf pine,
00:37:18
Dr. Trent Preszler
really supercharged slavery in the antebellum South. And so there was a practice of the day called log it and flog it, and they would bring their workforce in, cut down the pines, all the trees, not just pines, oaks and everything else, cypress, process it for shingles, lumber, everything else, ship it out, and then they could turn a profit a second time either by selling the land or planting cotton on the land.
00:37:41
Dr. Trent Preszler
And timber extraction was for a large chunk of American history in the deep south, more valuable on a per acre basis than cotton growing. ah Yeah. And it's part of, there is a a motif in the book really of how draw parallels of human suffering and human exploitation in every region of our country. And it followed the exploitation of the evergreen.
00:38:09
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
It did, yes.
00:38:10
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:38:10
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Northeast, down to the south, start going west across the middle of and then all the way to the west coast.
00:38:12
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yep.
00:38:14
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:38:17
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yes.
00:38:17
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And it's like exploitation of the resource was hand in hand with exploitation, just like you said, of the humans used to cut it.
00:38:25
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. Yeah.
00:38:26
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I just couldn't believe it.
00:38:27
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:38:27
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I never really imagined, I never for a minute thought about slavery having anything to do with wood and like cutting down of trees.
00:38:33
Dr. Trent Preszler
Oh, yeah. There was a huge timber cutting enterprise. And even before the African slave trade, for hundreds of years, there was a a Spanish colonial slave trade in the Deep South. And they were shipping barrels like rum barrels and oak staves and shingles to Caribbean nations, who by and large didn't have their own ah lumber mills.
00:38:56
Dr. Trent Preszler
They would fell entire logs and ship them to be processed back in the mainland US and then ship the parts and pieces back. Massive business, huge industry.
00:39:05
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Unbelievable.
00:39:09
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
So two two more things, Trent, about the the whole the whole slave piece in the southern United States, which is you opened my eyes to how dangerous it was for them to be cutting these trees down.
00:39:11
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:39:20
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:39:22
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And this whole idea of... um it actually, it's sort of like a dichotomy. It's like they were slaves, but yet they could be away from the slave owners for a time while they were in the forest.
00:39:33
Dr. Trent Preszler
Sure.
00:39:34
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
So could you elaborate on that?
00:39:35
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yes. Yeah, so there's some really beautiful writings by Frederick Douglass and others about that period of the logging camp culture in the Deep South.
00:39:46
Erik-green
can you Can you give me a time window here?
00:39:46
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yes.
00:39:48
Erik-green
Like, what years are we talking about?
00:39:49
Dr. Trent Preszler
So this...
00:39:50
Erik-green
I know you mentioned Frederick Douglass, so it's late 1800s of some kind.
00:39:52
Dr. Trent Preszler
So he wrote about it yeah he wrote about it later, but there were, I would say, pre-Civil War, so early eighteen hundreds um There's more documentation of it then, let's say.
00:39:58
Erik-green
Okay. Okay.
00:40:05
Erik-green
Okay.
00:40:05
Dr. Trent Preszler
I know it was going on for hundreds of years before that, but what Paul is referring to is that If there is no good version of slavery, but being a timber cutter allowed you just a little degree of freedom, a slight modicum of the ability to live in the woods.
00:40:23
Erik-green
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:40:28
Dr. Trent Preszler
And these woods were dangerous. They were filled with poisonous cottonmouth snakes, alligators, biting flies, and the white landowners really didn't want to go there.
00:40:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
They didn't patrol. their workforce like they did on a cotton plantation. You were it was brutal.
00:40:42
Erik-green
of
00:40:44
Dr. Trent Preszler
You were being brutalized constantly. And so timber cutting and to fuel the firewood need demand for steamboats on the Mississippi. um Timber cutting was I'm not going to say slightly more desirable, but it was a less terrible outcome.
00:41:02
Erik-green
Yeah, it's ah it's ah it's a lesser of evils.
00:41:04
Dr. Trent Preszler
Lesser of evils. Yeah. And so there were these clandestine networks and cabins in the woods and trails um where people could kind of meet informally in the woods. And it just gave it like ah a tiny dose of humanity in a grossly inhumane era.
00:41:22
Erik-green
this This could be entirely unrelated and entirely off base, but I've i've heard tale of um communities of um enslaved folks or formerly enslaved folks in the swamplands and woods in the South.
00:41:37
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:41:38
Erik-green
and like is Is this where that stemmed out of?
00:41:39
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. Yes, absolutely.
00:41:42
Erik-green
like it's it's It's a logging community and then they just like find places to hide and build communities?
00:41:43
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:41:48
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. and not just
00:41:50
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Right?
00:41:51
Dr. Trent Preszler
yeah And not just logging, but also turpentine extraction from the pines.
00:41:54
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:41:55
Dr. Trent Preszler
And we needed lots of turpentine. it was a burning fuel, a burning fluid. When whale oil became really expensive, the discovery of turpentine kind of saved the whales from extinction.
00:42:02
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:42:07
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:42:07
Dr. Trent Preszler
But it also led to the eradication of 99.99% of all pinus trees on the continent ah from North Carolina all the way to the Piney Woods of Texas.
00:42:20
Dr. Trent Preszler
And that was all fueled by enslaved laborers as well.
00:42:24
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
God, yeah, so Trent, that was a tough, I remember that being a tough chapter. it like It was kind of a gut punch, honestly, but I'd rather know the truth than to not know it at all.
00:42:29
Dr. Trent Preszler
It was, yeah.
00:42:34
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
So that was that was a phenomenal chapter you wrote, really hit hard.
00:42:34
Dr. Trent Preszler
Sure, yeah.
00:42:37
Dr. Trent Preszler
Thank you.
00:42:39
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
um That was then not that not that um far after you talked about the queer history in lumberjack camps.
00:42:39
Dr. Trent Preszler
Thank you.
00:42:51
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yes.
00:42:51
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Again, no no no preparation for that topic.
00:42:55
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah,
00:42:56
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I had no idea. i was so fucking ignorant. like like This book was like a testament to my personal ignorance, honestly, is how it felt. could you Can you fucking take us through that?
00:43:09
Dr. Trent Preszler
yeah absolutely. Eric, here's the, here's the sentence that I'll, the soundbite sentence, but the,
00:43:13
Erik-green
Okay.
00:43:15
Dr. Trent Preszler
The vast majority of the timber cutting labor force in the 19th century were gay men. So that's the clip.
00:43:21
Erik-green
That's the clip. That's the Instagram clip right there. Yeah.
00:43:24
Dr. Trent Preszler
but So I'm going to paint the picture here for you from, let's say, Gold Rush, San Francisco, 1849, up through the beginning of World War One. So roughly 60, 70 years.
00:43:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
um That was a period of time of of enormous timber extraction, especially in the Sequoia and Redwood Groves in California and in the Sierra Nevada. And it was also at that time the most dangerous profession on earth and still is.
00:43:52
Dr. Trent Preszler
But especially in that era, if you were a logger and you worked a 10-year career in the foot in the woods, you stood a 50-50 chance of dying. And the death always usually came by being crushed, to smushed by a falling tree.
00:44:05
Erik-green
Sure.
00:44:05
Dr. Trent Preszler
It's not very imaginative, but these were like Kind of like wartime battlefield type injuries, like gruesome, horrible things. And so there were two things happening simultaneously. The timber barons desperately needed ah a transient, dispensable, invisible labor force where no one would really care if they were killed in great number.
00:44:26
Dr. Trent Preszler
On the other hand, in that period of American history, the word homosexuality did not exist in the English language until like the 1930s. And it was illegal in every sense of the word to even have a hint or a whiff of what they called lewd and lascivious behavior, which was defined by the infamous Comstock Act.
00:44:45
Dr. Trent Preszler
If you were suspected of any sort of homosexual behavior, you could be tens of thousands of men were forcibly castrated and sterilized. Oregon was the worst.
00:44:55
Dr. Trent Preszler
they They sterilized, I forget the exact number, but tens of thousands of suspected homosexuals. You could be put in jail.
00:45:01
Erik-green
Hmm. Jesus.
00:45:02
Dr. Trent Preszler
You could be put in a mental institution. And most significantly, you were forbidden by law from holding employment.
00:45:09
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:45:09
Dr. Trent Preszler
So your choices were this. You either could live a life of fear and shame and secrecy and just fake your way through to try to have a job and a life or go on the road and try to find something.
00:45:23
Dr. Trent Preszler
And so there was this roving bands of hundreds of thousands of down on their luck, sad, destitute, desperate men who traveled from the deep south to the great woods of the North States, ah Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and eventually found their way to California during the gold rush.
00:45:42
Dr. Trent Preszler
And the timber companies employed them, and they set up these massive timber camps in the redwood groves. to cut down trees and they died in shocking numbers, but no one really knew that they were gone because they were already kind of invisible members of society.
00:45:59
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:46:00
Dr. Trent Preszler
um Look, as a gay man, I didn't even know this story until I started researching this book and I was like, I was digging through these photo archives at Stanford Library about the redwood logging frenzy of the late 1800s. And noticed, like, I found all these photos of men holding hands. And there were these cowboy stag dances. And kind of just, I was like, wait, like...
00:46:23
Dr. Trent Preszler
What's going on? But of course, the masculine ideal of a lumberjack is rooted like in our Paul Bunyan mythology and that it's sort of, um you know, they wore the fedora hat and the handlebar mustache and the and the suspenders. And like the photos of these timber cutters circulated around the world and they were heroic.
00:46:42
Dr. Trent Preszler
They were iconic that these butch dudes out in the woods were cutting down these trees that were 30 feet wide.
00:46:44
Erik-green
hmm
00:46:49
Dr. Trent Preszler
um But there's also ah sort of a there's a fatal twist here, but also I think sometimes a bit of a humorous twist because it's now been fetishized, at least in gay culture. I don't know what you dress up as for Halloween, Eric.
00:47:05
Dr. Trent Preszler
But have you?
00:47:07
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
00:47:09
Dr. Trent Preszler
Look, have you ever dressed as a lumberjack?
00:47:12
Erik-green
Um, I think I, I, did I did. This is a thought that I had like two mornings ago. i opened my closet and I had to go out, uh, not to the shop, but just go out in the world.
00:47:24
Erik-green
And the literal question that ran through my head was, do I wear a work flannel or a formal flannel? And that's my closet. So I feel like I cosplay as a lumberjack most days by accident.
00:47:33
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:47:37
Dr. Trent Preszler
I love that. Well, I always think it must be this Halloween must be the scariest night of the year for trees because they're like there's there's all these gay men running around dressed as lumberjacks and like, oh, my God, they're going to take to the forest and cut us down.
00:47:38
Erik-green
ah
00:47:50
Dr. Trent Preszler
And this is it. But sure enough, everyone wakes up on November 1st and the birds are chirping and the sun sunrises on a landscape where the hell anyway.
00:48:00
Erik-green
So so is so this is a time period that predates even the term homosexual. So I imagine it also predates the term bear.
00:48:07
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yes.
00:48:11
Dr. Trent Preszler
It's...
00:48:11
Erik-green
ah
00:48:13
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yes. And twink. Twink didn't exist. And certainly there were no twunks of that era, but...
00:48:20
Erik-green
Wait, i don't I don't know what a twonk is. What is that?
00:48:22
Dr. Trent Preszler
Oh, like a twunk is like a muscular twink. Like a hunky...
00:48:26
Erik-green
Wow, man, I'm learning so much on this show tonight.
00:48:26
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Oh,
00:48:27
Dr. Trent Preszler
Like a hunky twink. ha
00:48:30
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
i just learned what a twink was about a month ago. ah gay friends Gay friends of mine, their son is gay and they're like, he's a twink.
00:48:33
Dr. Trent Preszler
but
00:48:33
Erik-green
ah
00:48:38
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And I was like, what's a twink?
00:48:39
Erik-green
ah
00:48:40
Dr. Trent Preszler
Well, then there's otters and there's a whole thing, but, um, yeah, yeah.
00:48:43
Erik-green
Oh, this is for the after show. this is the after show we're going in now.
00:48:45
Dr. Trent Preszler
That's another thing.
00:48:47
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah.
00:48:48
Dr. Trent Preszler
Anyway, the, uh, If I could wrap a bow on the whole gay thing for you, for your listeners.
00:48:52
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah.
00:48:52
Erik-green
Yeah, yeah, please.
00:48:54
Dr. Trent Preszler
um You know, I built canoes. I've been a woodworker for a while. I've myself been challenged about this hyper-masculine ideal of being a woodworker.
00:49:05
Dr. Trent Preszler
And I can't tell you how many times people on Instagram, because, you know, I have a certain number of followers and just random strangers say things.
00:49:12
Erik-green
h
00:49:13
Dr. Trent Preszler
You know, and people be like, I can't believe you're a woodworker and gay. and it reminds me of like, there's this very famous, I know, right?
00:49:19
Erik-green
What?
00:49:21
Dr. Trent Preszler
Struck your shoulders. Like, are we not allowed to be?
00:49:24
Erik-green
Yeah, like, well okay.
00:49:24
Dr. Trent Preszler
is it just, is it just,
00:49:25
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
What the f- Yeah, what the fuck?
00:49:25
Erik-green
I don't understand how those two things are mutually exclusive.
00:49:28
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:49:28
Dr. Trent Preszler
Right. But people put these notions on you of how they think you should live or exist in this world when you're not fitting the typical straight white male you know thing.
00:49:34
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:49:38
Erik-green
Mm-hmm.
00:49:39
Dr. Trent Preszler
Right.
00:49:39
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:49:39
Dr. Trent Preszler
And this is sort of a just a thing that I face on a daily basis where it's like, oh, that's funny.
00:49:43
Erik-green
Sure.
00:49:44
Dr. Trent Preszler
You're not a hairdresser.
00:49:45
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:49:45
Dr. Trent Preszler
like And it's just like, OK, fuck you. Right. But.
00:49:48
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:49:49
Dr. Trent Preszler
but So the interesting thing is that this carried through into the 1930s in the Dust Bowl. So after you know about the Dust Bowl, terrible dust storms, all the topsoil in the Midwest blew away.
00:49:58
Erik-green
Sure. Sure. Yeah.
00:50:01
Dr. Trent Preszler
As part of the new as part of the deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt started the Civilian Conservation Corps.
00:50:01
Erik-green
Mm-hmm.
00:50:09
Dr. Trent Preszler
One of their charters was he set up hundreds of camps around the U.S. of men to plant trees around the Midwest. And it was the last gasp of the queer heavy kind of timber camp culture before the U.S.
00:50:24
Dr. Trent Preszler
government shut it all down. But they had a newspaper even called Happy Days, which you can look up on the Internet.
00:50:30
Erik-green
Really?
00:50:31
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah, the Civilian Conservation Corps was staffed primarily by queer and down low closeted men. um who needed work. And there was no other place in society where they could work safely, except in these remote parts of the of the country where they were kind of safe from prying eyes.
00:50:43
Erik-green
Hmm.
00:50:50
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah And in writing this, I felt like what I didn't realize i was lacking, and what I think most LGBT people don't realize they're lacking, is any kind of consistent notion of ourselves in the historical record.
00:51:03
Dr. Trent Preszler
Like, you know You're growing up and you're like, well, I didn't know I could be a woodworker because you're certainly never told, ah like, oh, there's a guy, he's a woodworker and he's gay, or a Supreme Court justice, or a president, or you name it, right?
00:51:12
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:51:16
Dr. Trent Preszler
So um I do feel like the book offers an unexpected and important... addition to scholarship in the field of just queer awareness and queer study and queer life in America. And in fact, it's central to the economic prosperity and development of a young nation that desperately needed timber resources.
00:51:38
Erik-green
Yeah. Like I've got goosebumps right now.
00:51:39
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Oh my... Yeah, Eric, right?
00:51:40
Erik-green
Um, it's well, the, okay.
00:51:40
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Is that like...
00:51:43
Erik-green
So as you were closing out that, that argument, um, The thing that popped into my mind, and I hope this doesn't come off as like glib in any way, because I don't mean it to.
00:51:55
Erik-green
But like we we we started the conversation about the pilgrims and the the farce or the fallacy or or whatever the tale that we were taught as young people of like this is a group of people who were fleeing persecution and coming to a place in the woods where they could kind of hide from society and
00:51:55
Dr. Trent Preszler
Oh yeah.
00:52:10
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:52:16
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:52:17
Erik-green
build their own communities where they were safe and could live out their lives in multiple times and in multiple communities.
00:52:21
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:52:24
Erik-green
You've painted that picture. It just has happened from the American community to smaller groups that were running away into the woods, that were running away into the swamplands, that were running away into these sometimes government sanctioned enterprises because they were fleeing the persecution that was bestowed upon them by the American government.
00:52:46
Erik-green
It's just it's I don't know.
00:52:47
Dr. Trent Preszler
Uh huh.
00:52:48
Erik-green
I don't, you know?
00:52:48
Dr. Trent Preszler
Oh, yeah. Oh, it's, it's distressing and ah but forests, especially evergreen forests have always been a place of refuge.
00:52:51
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
i see
00:52:58
Dr. Trent Preszler
And even the Latin word forest, F-O-R-I-S, it was ah an English term for ah an outdoor area set aside for hunting.
00:53:09
Dr. Trent Preszler
And it was kind of meant to be a prescribed area where you would go for a certain type of activity. where it wasn't just wild, but it was like a forest was defined and bounded.
00:53:20
Dr. Trent Preszler
And I think you're right. That's an interesting through line through American history that we've retreated. Persecuted groups have retreated into the woods for safety.
00:53:27
Erik-green
Mm. Mm.
00:53:29
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:53:30
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Eric, very, very good. Wow.
00:53:32
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
00:53:32
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Really awesome. Awesome observation. i didn't put that together. But once you started saying it, i was like, oh, my God, that's exactly what happened.
00:53:37
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:53:40
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
um Trent, yeah you know now we've gone through, you know, all the way, you know, slavery.
00:53:40
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:53:45
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And then we, you know, and what I'm going to save us forever. what I want to go to are kind of like are the last two or three really big picture questions that come out of the book. I'm going to save more of the details for people to read.
00:53:59
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Like, for example, the railways and what that took in terms of wooden rail ties and the whole Western United States and Sequoias and the Redwoods.
00:54:00
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:54:03
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
00:54:08
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm.
00:54:09
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
There's and in the most interesting chapters on those. that But in the interest of time, I wanted to kind of take what I've learned from the book and and zoom out like to 10,000 feet and ask you some really more big picture philosophical questions. And the first one, I'll call the, tragedy of the commons.
00:54:34
Dr. Trent Preszler
hmm.
00:54:35
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And so this idea that when you have something in common in a society, Is it inevitable that that common resource is always like inevitably target of destruction and greed?
00:54:51
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yes, and it's ah it's an economic principle that's been documented throughout history. And there's actually a whole chapter in the book called The Tragedy the Commons, and I trace it from the Greeks and the Romans to the English to today.
00:55:05
Dr. Trent Preszler
We tend to use resources until they're gone. And there is no other stopping point, logically. You would think we'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's pump the brakes.
00:55:15
Dr. Trent Preszler
But usually, until it's absolutely necessary that we pump the brakes because we run out, we just keep going. And that happened with trees where finally we got to the West Coast. We cut down all the Sitka spruces for airplanes in World War I. We cut down all the Douglas firs for plywood for armaments in World War II, including the boat that JFK was on when he was shot.
00:55:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
And then we turned around, we faced back to the East and we're like, well, it's all gone. Now what? Holy shit. um You know, and it goes that way with like fishing resources you see now with the the seas open fishing areas just being plundered.
00:55:53
Dr. Trent Preszler
And it's a human, it's a, it's a human trait that this is what we do.
00:55:57
Erik-green
yeah we're gluttons man we can't help ourselves
00:55:59
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. Yeah.
00:56:01
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
It seems like greed has no end to it in humans.
00:56:05
Dr. Trent Preszler
Well, yeah.
00:56:05
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
um All right.
00:56:07
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. hu
00:56:10
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Again, that's a principle i had never ah i had never been I had never come across really.
00:56:12
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:56:15
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I mean, I guess I knew it in the back of my brain because I'd seen it my whole life. But you really crystallized it and like put a finger on it for me in your book. um The next question I have is about the worse is better revolution, right?
00:56:29
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
You you talk about how how timber framing using these huge beams and nice mortise and tenon joinery has given way to tubifers and balloon framing, as it's called.
00:56:30
Dr. Trent Preszler
Oh yeah.
00:56:41
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And that was, um you know, that that just took over, right?
00:56:47
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:56:47
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
The worse worse is better. And I'm wondering, does that ideology, I was thinking about other examples of that. Is that sort of a precursor to fast fashion or cheap disposable furniture with particle board today?
00:57:00
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:57:04
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Like, are these all incarnations of the same drive?
00:57:09
Dr. Trent Preszler
I think so. And you you hit on a great point. So when I did my book talk at Harvard Bookstore last week with Kevin O'Connor from This Old House, we talked about the worse is better phenomenon. And it's fascinating because timber framing homes are beautiful, but they require specialized labor. You have to cut all the joinery. It takes forever. They're gorgeous, but so impractical. And that led the huge growth in population in the U.S. We couldn't keep up. We couldn't build enough houses. so So that led to dimensional lumber and two by fours. And that was all rooted in evergreen timber. And it allowed it enabled the economic expansion of this country in sort of it allowed everything to be scaled, basically. Right. um
00:57:50
Dr. Trent Preszler
And then more to the point, your your question about fast fashion. Right. um How do I get to that issue? ah Because it's tied a lot in with plastics as well. But it was part of a period of time in American history, especially let's say post-World War II to the present, or even just until the year 2000, where we saw this huge proliferation of wood and paper products. So now there's like you go to CVS and there is a a wipe for everything. There is a cup for everything. There is you name it. And this this gigantic sucking sound of the demand of American consumer demand for wood and pulp paper products.
00:58:31
Dr. Trent Preszler
became so staggering that we needed to invent new ways to use forest resources and to market them. I'm not sure if this literally chronicles the rise of fast fashion, but um when we invented, let's say, MDF, medium density fiberboard, and it became the staple of everything, including like that cabinet that book bookshelf behind Eric right now, like that's not solid wood, right?
00:59:00
Dr. Trent Preszler
That's probably a timber coated.
00:59:02
Erik-green
Yeah, i mean, the the large majority of it is ah she good.
00:59:04
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
00:59:05
Erik-green
Yeah.
00:59:06
Dr. Trent Preszler
Right. And these are wood products that are infused with plastics and resins and all kinds of chemicals that make them basically a commercial product and no longer a natural product.
00:59:11
Erik-green
Mm-hmm.
00:59:17
Dr. Trent Preszler
Right. Uh, similar thing happened in fashion though. I'm not an expert in that field, but, um, uh, One of the inspirations for me writing this book was another book I read called Unraveled by Maxine Badat. And she's a good friend of mine. And she followed the story of a pair of Levi's jeans from a store in Manhattan to the cotton farm in Texas to the cotton mill in China and the factory in Bangladesh where someone has paid one penny a day or per garment right to make this pair of jeans or this shirt.
00:59:48
Dr. Trent Preszler
And she said, how have we arrived at a point where we're so disconnected from nature and so disconnected from the land and the things that we grow and the things we make from them that this is kind of just the acceptable part of our supply chain? And I see great parallels in timber and paper.
01:00:03
Dr. Trent Preszler
And it's made its way to the Christmas tree itself. So I've racked my brain. Yeah, I know.
01:00:10
Erik-green
Nice full circle. Well done. Well done.
01:00:12
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
01:00:13
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah, yeah.
01:00:15
Erik-green
Okay.
01:00:15
Dr. Trent Preszler
Okay, Christmas tree. If I may go there.
01:00:19
Erik-green
Please.
01:00:19
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah.
01:00:19
Dr. Trent Preszler
Do I have your permission, Paul?
01:00:21
Erik-green
Absolutely.
01:00:21
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yo, go.
01:00:22
Erik-green
Take it. I'm here for the ride, buddy.
01:00:23
Dr. Trent Preszler
Listen, um ha the Christmas tree, I've racked my brain. I can't think of anything else in American culture that occupies the space of being both mass production, commercial building product, industrial material and sacred quasi religious symbol.
01:00:47
Dr. Trent Preszler
I can't, there is nothing else. I mean, I was thinking, well, maybe the Thanksgiving turkey or maybe the Easter bunny, but like, you know, nothing compares. So evergreens from the time when pagans dragged them inside and worshiped them as part of fertility rituals to the time when like the Catholic church refused to put up a Christmas tree until 1982, because they thought it was like a a little Protestant pagan ritual.
01:01:12
Erik-green
That's cute little Protestants with their ideas.
01:01:13
Dr. Trent Preszler
Um, Those, yeah, aren't they so cute? and you know And now here we are today where ah even the Christmas tree itself, just a basic tree, is not enough.
01:01:26
Dr. Trent Preszler
So lumber, timber, timber framing wasn't enough. It wasn't fast enough. So we switched to dimensional lumber. Dimensional lumber wasn't enough. So then we switched so then we invented MDF so we could build furniture and cabinets, right? That wasn't enough. So we we went into veneers.
01:01:42
Dr. Trent Preszler
So we could put of a sheath of wood on top of a plasticized product. At every step, every decade, basically, since World War II, we've come out with some new abomination on the original.
01:01:56
Dr. Trent Preszler
And in building and construction and timber and craft, it's led us to the place where you can buy a piece of furniture at Ikea that's presumably wood. It looks like wood, but it's actually 95% plastic. And it's disposable and lasts about seven years before people get rid of it.
01:02:12
Dr. Trent Preszler
And the same thing happened with Christmas trees. So the real Christmas tree business peaked in the 80s. And when there were about in 1985, there were 22,000 mom and pop Christmas tree farms in America. Today, there are only 3000 left.
01:02:27
Dr. Trent Preszler
And the yeah, the entire national stockpile of Christmas trees could could fit roughly in the five boroughs of New York City. Meanwhile, the imports of plastic Christmas trees from China have boomed and increased to about a four, approaching a $4 billion dollar industry.
01:02:44
Dr. Trent Preszler
And got to give them credit, the plastics industry, they they successfully marketed and pigeonholed the decision to buy a real Christmas tree as being the environmentally bankrupt and morally deficient decision.
01:03:01
Erik-green
I was going to ask your opinion on that or if there's any stats about it.
01:03:03
Dr. Trent Preszler
Oh, there are. I mean, I'd spend the last 30 pages of the book just you will know my opinion about Christmas trees by the end by the book.
01:03:08
Erik-green
Okay. Okay. All right. Go buy the book, friends. Go do the thing.
01:03:12
Dr. Trent Preszler
But I just eviscerate the plastics industry because they bastardized the most pure and wholesome thing we've ever had, the most renewable resource that exists on this planet. Evergreens.
01:03:23
Dr. Trent Preszler
And they made them somehow be like a bad decision. No, instead replace them with this plastic f flexibility that will take a thousand years to decompose and we will eventually throw it away anyway.
01:03:35
Dr. Trent Preszler
So the average lifespan of a fake Christmas tree is seven years. It's the same as Ikea furniture.
01:03:41
Erik-green
You know, what's really funny is, and you don't have to speak on it because I want people to go buy the book. Like I'm going to get the book and and I will read it, but there was 0% chance I was going to finish a 200 page book before this podcast because But but I did just see a tick tock like literally last week about some guy who is comparing the carbon footprint of a plastic tree to a real tree. And basically what his argument was like, if you keep the plastic tree for six to seven years as the standard ah you know lifespan is, then the carbon footprint is kind of a wash.
01:04:21
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
01:04:21
Erik-green
And I was like, even if that, this is just my like my internal gut reaction.
01:04:25
Erik-green
It was like, even if that is true, let's take that at face value. I have no way to to know if that's true or not.
01:04:31
Dr. Trent Preszler
Mm
01:04:31
Erik-green
To your point, Trent, then you have one tree that's going to take a thousand years to decompose, maybe more.
01:04:38
Dr. Trent Preszler
hmm.
01:04:39
Erik-green
And another tree that's going to be gone in like it's five to 10, you know, like it's going to go back and put nutrients back in the soil, presuming, of course, that like it gets tossed in the woods somewhere and you don't live in a city like me where you throw it in the park.
01:04:44
Dr. Trent Preszler
yeah
01:04:48
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Hmm. Hmm.
01:04:51
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah.
01:04:53
Erik-green
And I don't know what the city does with it after.
01:04:55
Dr. Trent Preszler
ah
01:04:55
Erik-green
But, you know, like it was just an interesting way to frame the argument of like, ah, it all comes out in the wash.
01:04:56
Dr. Trent Preszler
Well,
01:05:01
Dr. Trent Preszler
right. I've seen that. I think I maybe have seen that video and it's based on flawed logic and it actually is totally inaccurate.
01:05:05
Erik-green
Mm.
01:05:07
Erik-green
Mm.
01:05:08
Dr. Trent Preszler
I wish they would take it off the internet. What they don't talk about is two things. The first you mentioned, which is that the plastic tree takes a thousand years to decompose. And microplastics are, and I think, eventually going to kill us all.
01:05:19
Erik-green
Mm.
01:05:21
Dr. Trent Preszler
I don't know. they're finding They're finding microplastics in our blood and our semen and our breast milk.
01:05:25
Erik-green
Yep.
01:05:26
Dr. Trent Preszler
Babies are born today and their first stool has microplastics in it.
01:05:30
Erik-green
Jesus.
01:05:30
Dr. Trent Preszler
So I don't know. I'm not an expert. In 50 years, I wonder if that's going to be like asbestos and lead.
01:05:36
Erik-green
Yeah. Yeah.
01:05:37
Dr. Trent Preszler
But do we need more plastic things in this world that go in the landfill? I don't think we do. But the second flawed part about that argument is that let's say you do keep your fake Christmas tree for 10 years. That means that there are 10 years of real trees not being grown and cut and bought.
01:05:54
Dr. Trent Preszler
And that has led to the bankruptcy of about 90% of America's Christmas tree farms, which are preserving open space and land. They're giving families jobs. They're providing um habitat for wildlife.
01:06:08
Dr. Trent Preszler
And they're removing carbon from the atmosphere. And they're a functional part of a functioning ecosystem in an agrarian landscape. that fake plastic trees from China are not.
01:06:21
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Oh, wow.
01:06:21
Erik-green
And that's what the Radiohead song's about, I think, actually.
01:06:27
Dr. Trent Preszler
I think I've depressed Paul.
01:06:27
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
So, yeah, as the, ah ah oh man, as the owner of a plastic Christmas tree, who was, who was inadvertently led to that just decision many years ago by flawed logic.
01:06:28
Erik-green
i That sigh let out a lot of emotion.
01:06:35
Erik-green
ah
01:06:43
Erik-green
is it Is it currently up in your house, buddy?
01:06:46
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yes, it is.
01:06:46
Erik-green
Okay, we're going to have to change that, I think.
01:06:48
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Well, I don't know. like at this point, do you just throw it away to throw it away? or do you just use it as long as you can? and and then like i
01:06:56
Erik-green
This feels like moral relativism now. I don't know.
01:06:58
Dr. Trent Preszler
I don't know.
01:06:58
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
like i don't even know what the fuck to do with it, to be honest.
01:06:58
Erik-green
wenna
01:07:00
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
I'm like totally confused. But Trent...
01:07:02
Dr. Trent Preszler
Just don't burn it.
01:07:04
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
this This leads me to this leads to my last question.
01:07:04
Erik-green
but
01:07:08
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
It's like, this book is so great. It's so fabulous because I found myself learning. I found there were there were light chapters.
01:07:19
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
There were hard v some very tough chapters. But like I said, I would rather know the truth than a bunch of mythology or or or whitewashed history.
01:07:27
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah. Yeah.
01:07:31
Dr. Trent Preszler
Thank you.
01:07:31
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
And now... I wanted that and i and I sat with those chapters and it was just fascinating book. what What are your parting words about what we can do?
01:07:48
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
How can we move forward with a positive mind frame?
01:07:49
Erik-green
Hmm.
01:07:52
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
What can we do to make things better as end users?
01:07:57
Dr. Trent Preszler
Uh-huh. Plant a tree. Plant dozens of trees. ah They don't have to be big. They can be tiny twigs. They can be, you know, if you don't own a house or the backyard, there are tree planting programs you can partner with. ah Yeah, go ahead.
01:08:13
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Do those work? Do those work? Tell tell me about them.
01:08:15
Dr. Trent Preszler
Oh, yeah.
01:08:16
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
i've I've donated two of them before.
01:08:18
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah, so there are organizations you can donate to that do plant trees. But I think ah sort of a, I don't know, for me, it's more fun and interesting model is like what they're doing at the Detroit Arboretum. You can go there and they give you a tree and they and they'll plant it with you.
01:08:33
Dr. Trent Preszler
Like they have
01:08:34
Erik-green
Oh, that's awesome.
01:08:34
Dr. Trent Preszler
Yeah, they have giant sequoias. They have cloned at the lookup Detroit Arboretum. They have cloned sequoias from 3000 year old monarch, old gross in California, growing in Detroit.
01:08:45
Dr. Trent Preszler
And you go there and you pay a little fee and give somebody a gift and you can plant one of these giant sequoias. And it's a beautiful thing. So I do end the book on a note of hope and optimism about tree planting and the heroic efforts, especially among indigenous populations and people who are collecting seeds from these endangered evergreen species.
01:09:05
Dr. Trent Preszler
sprouting them into little saplings and planting them by the millions across this country. And I do think that if you're looking for something that we can do, we could buy a real tree to support a local business, we could plant trees, and we can maintain some kind of optimism about the circularity of our purchasing decisions. And just understand, you know look, I live in this ecosystem too.
01:09:29
Dr. Trent Preszler
I'm drinking out of a paper cup right now. I'm sitting on a chair that's probably made with plasticized MDF plywood. We're all part of this. there is no There's no moral, there's no escaping.
01:09:39
Erik-green
Yeah, there's no escaping it. Yeah, yeah.
01:09:41
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Yeah. Yeah.
01:09:41
Dr. Trent Preszler
right like I'm part of it too.
01:09:44
Dr. Trent Preszler
and um ah But if I may also bring it back to my very first story about going to the Christmas tree farm and seeing the spray painted trees.
01:09:54
Erik-green
Hmm.
01:09:54
Dr. Trent Preszler
Part of why I found that also so devastating was that as soon as you paint them, they're no longer biodegradable because the paint they used was latex.
01:10:01
Erik-green
Hmm.
01:10:02
Dr. Trent Preszler
And it was like, you know, if we if we can just endeavor to find and use things that are natural, that are in their natural state, then they will do, and evergreen will do the most evergreen thing of all for us, and it will return to the earth.
01:10:20
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Oh,
01:10:20
Erik-green
Goddamn.
01:10:21
Erik-green
You know, I was going to ask a question.
01:10:22
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
ah
01:10:22
Erik-green
Fuck it. That's the end of the podcast. That's it.
01:10:25
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Trent, this thank you so much for talking with us. This was illuminating, fascinating.
01:10:29
Erik-green
Yeah. Thank you, buddy.
01:10:31
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
You are so brilliantly well-spoken. Thank you.
01:10:34
Dr. Trent Preszler
Thank you. It's my pleasure. It's great seeing you both again.
01:10:37
Erik-green
And go buy the goddamn book, people. Support this man so he can write another great book in the future.
01:10:43
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Oh, he's going to do that.
01:10:44
Erik-green
Oh, I know. It's in the bones. Yeah.
01:10:46
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
All right, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this special episode with Trent. a good friend of ours, ah both mine and Eric, for many years. In fact, a lot of our circle is really good friends with you, Trent.
01:10:57
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Thank you for being such a great ah community member and a wonderful author and now teacher influencing not only our minds through your writing, but also the minds of the college students who attend your classes.
01:11:11
Dr. Trent Preszler
A pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys.
01:11:14
Woodworking is Bullsh*t
Bye, everyone.
01:11:15
Erik-green
Bye.