Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So we have an interview for today's show. John Perlin, author of the book A Forest Journey The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization, joined me for a chat. And when I found out about this book, this whole thing fascinated me. Like the second I got information about it, I was like, Yes, I would like to talk to the person who traces the close link between the successes and failures of human civilization with the way they use and live with the forest. Yeah. I am also fascinated. The conversation covers the history of the book, which is its own story, as well as science and history going all the way back to Gilgamesh. I love Gilgamesh. So I'm excited to hear this because conducted this interview. So we're going to jump right into it. John, I am so delighted and honestly excited to talk about you in this book and trees. But I want to talk first about your background because it's physics. Oh no, it's actually the first iteration of a forest Journey hit the eye of a physics professor, and two years later he won the Noball Prize, and he loved a Forest Journey so much he asked me to join the physics department. That's fascinating. So you started out more in environmentalism and history, ended up in physics, and now you are talking more about the thing that originally got you into that field. What actually got me into the field was I did the first breakthrough book. It was a history of solar energy called a Golden Thread twenty five hundred Years of Solar Architecture and Technology, which recently has morphed into a book call that it shines in the six thousand years story of solar energy. And while I was working on the solar history book, I discovered that every time people built their houses to catch the sunford heat was because they were running out of wood to houses. So I after I finished the Golden Thread book, I asked the question if a wood was such an important fuel, it was like the oil of almost every society until like or it was like the coal or the oil up till about the beginning of the nineteenth century. I asked myself, Oh, well, the trees must have played a pretty big role in the development of societies. And so that's how I plunged in without, you know, just making that assumption a little Did I know it would take me on a forty year like a trip, which which resulted in the new Patagonia book. Yeah, the life cycle of this book is really fascinating to me and quite unique, I think in the world of books. The first edition, as you said, came out in nineteen eighty nine. Now you have the third edition, which is significantly updated. But will you talk about that lengthy road and how Patagonia ended up publishing this new version of it. My whole life is based on certaindipity. Anything I've ever planned never works out as expected. So what happened was I was leading the symposium at the University of California, Santa Barbara on units Foot, the woman who in eighteen fifty six discovered that carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and she's really the mother of climate change science. And so I was doing the first symposium ever done at the university, and that was in two eighteen. And the local newspaper called the Santa Barbara Independent have a story on the symposium, and the Schnards, who own Patagonia, saw that I was in Santa Barbara, only twenty five miles away from their headquarters, and so suddenly they wrote to the editor of this Santa Barbara Independent and said, we've been trying to find John for like a decade because this is our favorite book and we would like to connect with them, and so about I would say, about a month or two later, I was signing a contract with Patagonia to do this a new book. And the fortunate part of it was a lot had happened, both in historical research and also in modern research on the importance of trees. Obviously, you've been researching this now for decades, and even when we do our show, I mean we've been doing it for ten years, and the things that have become available to us over that decade have shifted consistently and expanded a lot as we've gone just because of new technologies, more things being digitized. How much has your research changed and expanded as a consequence of going on through several decades worth of work. Well, for example, in nineteen eighty nine, there was no Internet, so the searching was a lot more in depth, and also being part of the University. They have an online all library of all the important journals, even the very esoteric arcade journals, which ended up helping me very much. But also the science of forestry had really changed over the years that my book came out back in nineteen ninety was the first study that was published in Science magazine that old growth was really greater, oh you might say, collector or absorber of carbon dioxide than say a young tree or a tree that was allowed to be harvested as a crop over sixty or seventy years. So that's one example of how forestry has changed. And in the last decade, all sorts of discoveries, for example, that trees create rainfall and they are responsible for at least forty percent of the world's precipitation. For example, the Amazon creates a river in the sky that satiates the thirst of people living all the way south than Planosiris, for example. And trees in the Congo, for example, provide the water for the Nile. And so all these plethora of new studies. What it did was allowed me to show that in times past the forests were necessary for the development of civilization, and today forests are even more important for our existential survival. Can you give us a quick science lesson and explain how forests are responsible for precipitation? Oh, exactly, Well, what forests do is they take you in a lot of water because if the water in the leaves that interacts with the sun to photosynthesize, where the tree gets all its nourishment, but it only maybe ten or even last percent of the water that goes up to the leaf is used for this reaction, so that the rest of the water is you might say, exhaled into the atmosphere, and that water becomes clouds, and the clouds as they go over areas becomes rain. Amazing. The way you trace this history is tied really to not just the development of like civilization, how we've used trees, but you really trace the way that trees have developed, starting right out of the gate with what you call the earliest modern tree. It's not what I call it, it's what every scientist calls it. Gotcha, will you tell our listeners about that and why it is important to note that moment historically where the first modern tree starts to exist, the first true tree. The reason why it's called the first true tree is because it has deep roots for one thing, and deep roots is where most of the sequestering of carbon occurs. In the roots, what they do is they change rainwater, which is basically diluted carbonic acid which means liquid carbon, into what's called carbonates, which basically we call limestone. And so when the carbon in the carbonic acid interacts with the root, the roots changed the rainwater into carbonic acid and then finally ends up in the sea where it ends up as limestone. And that's where the carbon dioxide is locked in right in rock, so it can't escape. So what this true tree did was it was the first plant that started to really take down the carbon dioxide which was in access for any kind of large life on the terrestrial planet. And also the leaves as a photosynthesize, they give off oxygen, so it created an oxygenated atmosphere where creatures like you and me can metabolize and survive. And so the first four legged creatures were attracted from the ocean. The first four legged creatures that could had lungs like a lungfish could escape where you had in the oceans at the time, huge voracious carnivorous fish, and so you could end up on land where it was a lot safer because you had you know, oxygen, the capability of breathing. A lungfish can survive out of water for multiple years, and they also have legs that can walk, and so they believe the first creatures that basically are the root of every like reptile, mammal, and bird began he is with this tree you find the first four legged creatures. They're called tetrapods. And as you know, we have two hands, right and two legs, so we're basically four limbed creature, right. And birds are the same way. You know, they have wings two and they also have two feet, and it goes you know, to amphibians, you know, it goes into reptiles, up the whole tree of what's called animals, right, And so it also provided a habitat for these new pioneers into the land because the tree coverage created basically food and form of belief and also made a sort of heaven for little insects things like that. And so the tree is called Archaeopterus. And in nineteen ninety in Nature magazine, which is the premiere scientific magazine in the world, announced the discovery of the first two tree Archaeopterus because it had both roots, it had a trunk, and this is really interesting. It had a trunk very similar to a pine and had branches with leaves on them. And now what makes it even more fascinating. It's one of what we call transitional fossils that proves the veracity of Darwinism because the leaves were from an older type of plant called the fern, but the trunk was exactly like a gymnasperm. And so because on Earth at the time, on the planet there was one single continent called Gowando Land, a huge continent, the tree was able to proliferate throughout the terrestrial world land world. And today we find fossils of this tree in Oklahoma, in Pennsylvania, in Upstate New York, in Ireland, in Morocco, and in South Africa, and also all the way up Spisbergen, the big island off of Norway in the Arctic Circle. They're everywhere where. The fossils were everywhere because there was one big continent at the time, and so it had the capability of spreading up. It's what we're called heterospores, you know, their seeds, but they were they were they were a primitive form of seed throughout the world. Amazing. And so what this did was with all all these and also because it had deep roots, it was no longer dependent on being close to water, so it could you know, be in various landscapes. And so what the tree did was it initiated the takedown of carbon dioxide, but also added so much oxygen that we have evidence of the first forest fires because there was sufficient oxygen for ignition. Oh wow. In fact, I have a fossil collection because I actually like to go to the places where I write about and experienced them physically. And like I said, this is all in the new book, it was, and then the old edition. I went and spent two weeks digging Archaeopterus fossils in Pennsylvania. And I have, for example, charcoal that if you run your finger through it, it's mirrors on your finger, even those three hundred today seventy million years as if I got the charcoal from yesterday's campfire. Oh my goodness, that's amazing. So this this was the you might say, introduced, we use this term in science, introduced the tree idea that proliferated over the hundreds of millions of years, amazing. What it did was it made the climate possible for reasures to proliferate over the millions of years. So if not for Archaeopterus, we wouldn't be doing this interview. So that is obviously like a very key moment in terms of the history of trees on our planet developmentally for all species. But I also want to ask you what you see is the most important moment that trees were part of from a technological standpoint for humanity. Well, actually the mis named stone age was actually the wood age. And if not for wood fires, for example, none of our species could have traveled out of Africa because it gets cold, you know, when you go up north. And if not for wood fires, we would have you know, no hope Homo sapien ancestors in the majority of the world. So but and secondly, the would enable of the first the Homo sapiens and also the Neanderthals to actually more successfully use their stone tools, because if you've ever trying to break a rock holding a stone without a handle, you don't get very far right. So what and these are recent discoveries, is that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens used wood handles for all their implements, which also provided survival for us to live today. And so I hope I'm answering your question. And so then as we get to quote civilizations, this is where we see most of the deforestation. Actually, forests covered almost sixty percent of the habitable land on Earth ten thousand years ago. We've cut down at least thirty percent, and eighty percent of that thirty percent happened as civilization arose five thousand years ago. And so that's actually the book is the story two of how civilizations depended upon wood, but also that dependency on the wood required massive deforestation. And the first story of deforestation is in the epic of Gilgameshr. Yeah, I really really enjoyed that section because it makes very clear that the very thing that any person of power was doing, like trying to build so aggressively to expand their culture, destroyed the very resources that they needed to sustain that culture. And that happened over and over. There are many instances of that throughout the book. Are there any historical examples of civilizations or cultures where that is not the case, where they realized that there was that delicate balance that needed to be respected? There was a counter argument made at that time at the epoch of Gilgamesh. As you probably might have read at the end of the book, one of the partner of Gilgamesh who cut down the forests, and the partner who participated, as they were coming down on wooden rafts, he looks at Gilgamesh and he says, I think we've turned the Cedar forest into a waste land. And then he says, what will our gods think of us? So here you have the first environmental realization that perhaps we have done great harm. That's amazing. So this is a five thousand, four hundred years ago and as an example of the new material, the ultimate translation of Gilgamesh appeared in two thousand and one, which greatly aided the chapter on Gilgamesh. And remember Gilgamesh came from Eric and Rick was the first outpost of civilization in the world. And so it's a story that actually provides the platform for a forrest journey, because it's Gilgamesh's forrest journey that then I'd tell year after year after Gilgamesh. So Gilgamesh, see, he was really bummed out because he was two thirds god and one third human. So he was like mortal, and so he wanted to make a name for himself, and suddenly he came upon the only way was to cut down the cedar forest to build civilization. And so this is the whole you might say, bouquet of the book. So just like Archaeopterus shows the value of the tree, the Gilgamesh episode shows where we're going to go as the sort of the prelude to the rest of the book. Right, And just to add is that the gods lived in the forest because at that time, according to the writer, the forests were they heaven on earth. So why did they have to go? You know, it was only when gilgames cut down the abode of the gods that they had to seek life far away as possible from human beings, way up in the sky. Oh that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. How that shifts are our storytelling as well as our civilization. Well. Also what's interesting about the Gilgamesh story is that the guardian of the forest, and this is all from the new translation, he was placed by the gods to keep humans out. He had, according to the translator, a tusk. And the implication is that elephants once roamed you know, the Middle East in the lush forests, and once again in the last few years, and this is part of the new book. They've discovered in northern Syria plethora of ancient elephant bones. And actually also in new translations of the you might say, the platforms of the various Mesopotamian kings, they all brag about killing elephants in the Middle East. And can you imagine, I mean think of it. Do you think of the hills in Iran, for example, to be the equivalent of say the Pacific Northwest? No? And where have all the elephants gone? Right? Right? Because what happened? And that's another important part of a book is that the forest is the habitat for almost all living creatures. It makes you think about what could have been had people been more thoughtful about that? Correct and what's And also you asked, well, where there are conservation minded people? Well? In Genesis, for example, in the Hebrew Bible, the first demand of God to Adam is and I speak Hebrew soum as leishmarhad seem, which means protect, but a protect in a very militant way the trees m So it's right there. From the beginning. The message has existed. Well. Also, what's really interesting I've been going through is that in Ezekiel, for example, the death of a tyrant is described as them is falling like a huge cedar. And once again in the Bible there's the environmentalism where for example, in Isaiah, a Zaiah takes the life of an oak and he like rubs his brow and safety because he says that the great king a Sargan the Great has died, and so now I the oak can flourish with the Messiah coming. In Isaiah is like the desert gets transformed as a woodland, and Israel was again has plenty of water. And that's what we earlier discussed is the relationship between trees and precipitation. So that was recognized like maybe what three or four thousand years ago, that relationship, So we knew that from the stories in the Hebrew Bible, and yet no one learned. He also included the story in the book about Cicero, raising concern that Rome was destroying its forest lands. And there have been, like you said, all of these other warnings that have come along throughout history. How have those warnings of the need for conservation been perceived throughout history? You know, today it's a battleground for a lot of people, but I'm wondering how it was perceived in previous civilizations. Well, it's interesting. I appreciate you bringing up Cicero, because what Cicero was complaining about, he was complaining about the vineyards taking over the forests. And that's happened in the happening in California where both in the north the reds are giving way to the vineyards and in where I live, the oaks have been decimated for vineyards. And so Cicero, thousands of years ago, was on a rampage, you might say, like he says, he says, much better to have oaks than to have wine. And yet oh, so many people I know, see, nobody puts things together. And that's what I hope my book does, is nobody puts together the fact that they're drinking wine and that caused the destruction of the trees. And so maybe we can change our activity a bit to have the trees flourished. But until we learn these of various dependencies you might say, or threats, like so people, you know, horror, horror, I want to drink my wine, right, But nobody puts it together. By purchasing wine, you're actually supporting the decimation of the woodlands. Yeah, there's so many instances of cause and effect that I don't think most of us even think about that are super important. I want to talk about some of the additional really fascinating stories that you tell in this book, because there was one that I read that was completely captivating. You talked about in Greek Asia minor after the Homeric Age. There's a section in the book about it about farmers suing a which made me like do a triple take and reread the paragraph over and over. Can you tell us that story? Oh, I'd love to. So what happened was by deforesting the river banks, the siltation created a very like you know, windy river and also like destroyed the ports that it fit into. Because once the protection of the soil by the routes is removed, than just all the earth comes down and silts up at the work comes out in the ocean, which we call the delta, and so the ports no longer were ports because of the creation of deltas. And so what the farmers did, because they lost land because of you know, erosion, they would charge a ferry boat ride to compensate for that loss of agland. H. I think that answers your question right now. Yeah, that this is the compensated by suing the river and forcing the people who needed to go across to pay for the damage of the river had done and deforestation had created. There are a lot of examples in your book, obviously of just casual overusage of wood resources that I had never thought about. The one that jumped out to me was just something that we think about often in very romantic terms, is the baths of Rome, but heating those baths ate up a lot of wood. Will you talk about some other instances of resource overuse in history that we might not automatically think about. Well, I'd like to talk about the baths of Rome, because that's one of the ways I got into writing about a Forest Journey, because the Baths of Rome, because of the fuel shortages that created, because to keep the Romans loved their baths to be you know, steaming hot, like like not like like like sixty degrees, not seventy degrees, not eighty degrees, you know, about one hundred rights. And they actually had sweat rooms two to heat, right, and so all these trunks. They burned trunk after trunk of wood, and this is one of the entrees as I began my research from my solar experiences, because the Romans were the first people to discover their glass traps solar heat. As to what they did is they designed their baths so they all faced the winter sun. So during the colder part of the year in rome U, the sun's beams would come into the bath and be captured because the wavelengths were our different, our difference when the sun goes in and when it's turned into heat. And so this was a solar plan that all the leading Roman architects actually wrote about that we still have access to. And so the question is where did the trees come from? And this will blow you out to a good portion of the trees came from North Africa, which was considered the great woodland of the Roman Empire. And as a parallel to oil, you know, being transported by oil tankers, the Romans had five hundred boats ships that were in constant travel between the forests of North Africa and the baths of rome Because if the Romans didn't have hot baths, there would be immediate rebellion and to keep the population. It's sort of like California where if you don't have your hot tub, you know, your natural draft for your hot tub, you know, you'll uh, you you'll you'll start to uh, you know, get really pissed. Right, Um, do you have a nominee for most careless civilization when it came to forests? Is it us? Well, I don't know if you're familiar. Are you familiar with the walrus and the carpenter and Alice in wonder Land? Yes? Okay, well with the walters and the carpenter there was a um and you're and you're familiar with Tweedlede and tweedledumb right of course? Okay, well, um, Tweedledee asked Alice, after you know that, they told her the walters and the carpenter poem right, who did she think was worse, the walrus or the carpenter, And so Alice jumped to us, I think the walrus because he ate um more oysters. But then Tweedledum jumped on her and said, but the carpenter tried to eat as many as he could. And so I think the same thing, as with civilizations, is depending on the ability to access timber you had more consumption, and so the difference was in olden times it was economically not feasible to collect wood more than fifteen miles from a river. Right, But when were you developed, for example, the railroad you could go in and just you know, just wherever you built the track, you can you could like go take it out. In fact, I don't know if you noticed in the book, there's an incredible picture of a railroad train with all the flat cars. It's carrying these huge logs. Did you see that? Yeah, you know, I mean they were just huge. I mean, I don't think we could in California we could dream of trees being that large. In fact, there are several I think, very striking pictures of you know, the girth of those trees and also the um to show how little respect people had is. There's one image and this is all new and then it never was shown before in the other editions. Uh is a dance floor creed and from the stump of a giant sequoia. Yeah, where where forty people are dancing astonishing? Yeah, So it's it's it's the old like tweetled the tweetled you know, now a story of Loris and Carpenter is I think all societies and that includes uh, you know we people. Some people worship you know, the noble savage or the indigenous as they call it. But they were as destructive. But they only had the capability, for example in North America, because they didn't they didn't even have like draft animals, right, So you realized that they were constricted in damaging the forest by a their sparse population size. And also they did not have metal tools. I don't know if you know that, right. The reason for that is because they came over from Asia before metallurgy developed, oh that, and so they didn't have in their tool kit, right, they had handles, right, they had handles for stone tools, which I elaborated came from the stone age, but from the metal age, which I also show is not the correct name. It's the charcoal age because without charcoal, there was no way you could remove the metal from the rock. Because we only have like five percent of the world, we have a metal that's called native metal that you know, is pure and the other comes as or and so that had to be extracted by heat. And so the metal age is another misnomer because it's actually the charcoal age. Because without charcoal, which provides a hot and steady fuel, we could have never extracted of that metal from the stone. The book is so beautiful. Congratulations on this update. It's gorgeous. But I as my parting question, I would love to ask you what you feel like is the most important lesson we can take from learning about the history of trees as we move into the future, stay out of the forest. So many people will be chagrined at the thought of that advice, I think, well, yeah, I mean, we can't drink a petroleum right, right, and we it's scientifically proved that not only do the trees provide water locally, but also they act like relays. So like I said earlier, they take water and take it, say a thousand miles away. For example, the forests in Siberia provide China with rain. So if we remove all the forests, no water, right, and water is I think much more important than you know and other resource, because without water we could only subsist for three days, right, And so basically I hope people see the folly that other civilizations like oh Um went through to say hey, uh, you know, a big slam in the face and say wake up, wake up, you know, um, let's not repeat. And I also hope they see that the forests are so valuable. For example, there's a portion that talks about human health and forests. Yes, where the major illnesses that people in um the world have suffered were created by removing the trees which served as a barrier or you might say, a social distancing. And once we open the forest, we open humanity to these terrible diseases like lime disease alike, oh ebol, like malaria. And actually, in twenty eighteen, I got a hold of a article in the leading a journal on Frontiers and Microbiology which was titled bats, deforestation and coronaviruses. Oh wow, and all the coronaviruses. There's two or three various coronaviruses. And the proven origins of these other coronaviruses have always been the opening of the forest. And so you know, you know, right now in Congress, because they want to find an enemy, no one's looking at the possible relationship of deforestation and the COVID decimation of the world. Well, hopefully they will all read and learn if that's what you know, I mean, that's that's the help. So you're still so you asked why did I do the book? Well, I thought I had a whole novel look at the world, which I think you agree upon. Yeah, And so hopefully this will wake up people to say, you know, we've got to stay out of the forest. And actually perhaps we value people not doing work at all and getting paid for it because they would otherwise need to cut down the wood, you know, for lumber, for vineyards, et cetera, et cetera. Right, so if we could develop a different um philosophy where um basically having our hands psycho just uh, maybe dancing or something like that, you know, a set of the chainsaw. That sounds like a lot more fun to me. Yeah, and to understand m For example, the best example of what happens when you cut down the forest in China, for example, under Mousey Tung, the bust storms that created the pollution in Beasing was all a consequence of urging the peasants to cut down the trees for fuel to make iron. You know, it was the great leap forward. And the great leap forward was actually a great like oh oh somersault backwards. Right, we did we did a multipart coverage of the great leap forward, so our listeners will be very familiar with that. Yeah, oh, so much food for thought. I thank you so much, John for spending this time with me. I feel so lucky to get to learn from you. Okay, well, thank you so much for having me. Many many thanks to John for spending this time with me and talking about just a handful of the historical events that he covers in the book. This whole thing definitely made me think about how closely entwined the success and health of our forests are with the success and health of the people here on Earth, and that happening often in ways that we don't consider. So I'm grateful to have this opportunity. John has also written several books on solar history, including A Golden Thread Twenty five hundred Years of Solar Architecture and Technology and Let It Shine, The six thousand year Story of Solar Energy. This new and heavily expanded edition of A Forest Journey is available now wherever books are sold. For listener mail, I have an email from our listener Rachel, who wrote a really interesting email about the Alma Petty Gatlin trial, and she writes, good afternoon, Holly and Tracy slash Tracy and Holly. I just finished your latest podcast on Alma Petty Gatlin and the violations of her most vocal accuser as a man of the cloth. This triggered a memory from while I was an attorney serving in the Army. An Army judge advocate, I was stationed at a base in Virginia working as a command advisor and litigator, and while it was not my usual assignment, a colleague in my office was going on vacation and asked me to cover a legal brief for the semi annual regional Chaplain week long training block. I know, you know, but just as a note, chaplains are the military version of counselors, and while they have an ordained religion and may host religious services, they are generally available, regardless of faith, as therapeutic and spiritual help to many military families and individuals. The day of the presentation, I followed the PowerPoint slides brief defining privilege and walking through military, state and federal regulations. Then we got to what religious type privilege did not cover. I gave the example that a chaplain who was a witness to a car accident would not be bound by privilege to testify to what they heard and visually observed as a bystander slash witness. I was not ready for the spectacle that ensued. Nearly every chaplain had some vocal objection or what if. Some stated that by being a first responder to the accident, they'd rush over to pray with the people involved in the car accident, thus invoking privilege. Others said that because God put them at that scene, it was a call from a higher power to have them intervene and help, therefore preventing them from serving as witness in a court of law. As I was trying to allay these initial concerns, the Catholic priests chimed in and say they wouldn't speak ever, period, And this spiraled into a cacophony of chaplain's declaring over one another their willingness to go to hypothetical jail before ever, potentially violating any privilege regardless of what any secular judge would order against them. Despite my efforts, the presentation devolved into a religious kind of green eggs and ham a discourse in a car in a bar. We went more than thirty minutes over my scheduled time at lunch, no less, and no one in the audience seemed to mind. Given the passion that I experienced that day. It was bizarre, indeed, to hear about a man so flippantly betraying that privilege. His religious leaders of his time must have been rocked at his violation and its subsequent publicity. Anyway, I hope you get a kick out of this story. I love your podcast. I've been listening since fall of twenty thirteen, when I started law school and needed something to listen to that was lighthearted but still informative. I love how the podcast has developed since then. This funny to have a topic intersect a strange experience from the career. I started on with stuff you missed in History class a decade ago, and then included is my tithe to the stuff you missed in History class? Hosts attached to the email, I don't have pets in my own right now, so I'm sending the one I rescued with my stepdad for my mom after our Alaskan malamute Lucy, like the mischievous redhead, passed away. Meet Casper the friendly Ghost for his white face and calm attitude. He's a husky. We rescued from the shelter in twenty fifteen. He has always perfectly quaffed, looks resigned when I take too many picks, and obsessed with his snowman squeaky toy. Mister Snowman came in a package with tennis balls my mom bought me for Christmas, not realizing it was a dog toy. Casper is iffy on tennis balls, but it was love at first sight with mister Snowman. Mister Snowman has since endured multiple surgeries, with Casper worriedly tending his bedside when my mom restages him now with sock grafts and stands watch outside the washing machine at mister Snowman's bathtime. He is too cute thanks to mercy. I have such a soft spot for huskies and malamutes anyway, so this is all extra extra fabulous. But this whole thing is really really interesting to me discussing, you know, current takes on confessional privilege and when men of clergy, which it sounds like would never ever betray it. As we said at the time, you know, this was operating in a state where there was no such laws, so there wasn't the same level of guidance involving never ever ever. Yeah, and we mentioned that he wrestled with it and felt like it was his service, like it was his duty to report it. It's very you know, there two points of view on it, and I know not everyone agrees on it, So it's an interesting one. And I'm fascinated at the thought of having a bunch of clergy discuss no. No, not even because this could be considered divine intervention that put me at that scene. I had never thought about anything from that perspective, So that's really interesting. Rachel, thank you. This was eye opening. Yeah. There have also been states that have been discussing various laws to sort of carve out like mandated reporter type roles, so if you if someone confesses something that suggests there's going to be like harm done to a minor, and various states looking to pass laws involving that, which I saw articles about literally the day before that episode of the podcast came out, you know, weeks after we had actually recorded it, and similarly incredibly heated opinions on the subject from the people involved. Yeah. Yeah, it's you know, it's one of those things that I think will always I don't want to invoke Star Wars, but it has such a good moment where in the Attack of the Clones when Anakin and Padmey are discussing how legislation works, and he's like, really smart, really smart people should make the decisions about how laws work. And she's like, that's that's how it works. But not everybody agrees, right, I'm like, yes, so simple. This explains so many problems that we all deal with all the time, but just very simply in a Star Wars movie. I'm I'm interested to see how that debate goes on in the meantime. If you would like to email us, you can do so at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you would like to subscribe, you can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is the production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So we have an interview for today's show. John Perlin, author of the book A Forest Journey The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization, joined me for a chat. And when I found out about this book, this whole thing fascinated me. Like the second I got information about it, I was like, Yes, I would like to talk to the person who traces the close link between the successes and failures of human civilization with the way they use and live with the forest. Yeah. I am also fascinated. The conversation covers the history of the book, which is its own story, as well as science and history going all the way back to Gilgamesh. I love Gilgamesh. So I'm excited to hear this because conducted this interview. So we're going to jump right into it. John, I am so delighted and honestly excited to talk about you in this book and trees. But I want to talk first about your background because it's physics. Oh no, it's actually the first iteration of a forest Journey hit the eye of a physics professor, and two years later he won the Noball Prize, and he loved a Forest Journey so much he asked me to join the physics department. That's fascinating. So you started out more in environmentalism and history, ended up in physics, and now you are talking more about the thing that originally got you into that field. What actually got me into the field was I did the first breakthrough book. It was a history of solar energy called a Golden Thread twenty five hundred Years of Solar Architecture and Technology, which recently has morphed into a book call that it shines in the six thousand years story of solar energy. And while I was working on the solar history book, I discovered that every time people built their houses to catch the sunford heat was because they were running out of wood to houses. So I after I finished the Golden Thread book, I asked the question if a wood was such an important fuel, it was like the oil of almost every society until like or it was like the coal or the oil up till about the beginning of the nineteenth century. I asked myself, Oh, well, the trees must have played a pretty big role in the development of societies. And so that's how I plunged in without, you know, just making that assumption a little Did I know it would take me on a forty year like a trip, which which resulted in the new Patagonia book. Yeah, the life cycle of this book is really fascinating to me and quite unique, I think in the world of books. The first edition, as you said, came out in nineteen eighty nine. Now you have the third edition, which is significantly updated. But will you talk about that lengthy road and how Patagonia ended up publishing this new version of it. My whole life is based on certaindipity. Anything I've ever planned never works out as expected. So what happened was I was leading the symposium at the University of California, Santa Barbara on units Foot, the woman who in eighteen fifty six discovered that carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and she's really the mother of climate change science. And so I was doing the first symposium ever done at the university, and that was in two eighteen. And the local newspaper called the Santa Barbara Independent have a story on the symposium, and the Schnards, who own Patagonia, saw that I was in Santa Barbara, only twenty five miles away from their headquarters, and so suddenly they wrote to the editor of this Santa Barbara Independent and said, we've been trying to find John for like a decade because this is our favorite book and we would like to connect with them, and so about I would say, about a month or two later, I was signing a contract with Patagonia to do this a new book. And the fortunate part of it was a lot had happened, both in historical research and also in modern research on the importance of trees. Obviously, you've been researching this now for decades, and even when we do our show, I mean we've been doing it for ten years, and the things that have become available to us over that decade have shifted consistently and expanded a lot as we've gone just because of new technologies, more things being digitized. How much has your research changed and expanded as a consequence of going on through several decades worth of work. Well, for example, in nineteen eighty nine, there was no Internet, so the searching was a lot more in depth, and also being part of the University. They have an online all library of all the important journals, even the very esoteric arcade journals, which ended up helping me very much. But also the science of forestry had really changed over the years that my book came out back in nineteen ninety was the first study that was published in Science magazine that old growth was really greater, oh you might say, collector or absorber of carbon dioxide than say a young tree or a tree that was allowed to be harvested as a crop over sixty or seventy years. So that's one example of how forestry has changed. And in the last decade, all sorts of discoveries, for example, that trees create rainfall and they are responsible for at least forty percent of the world's precipitation. For example, the Amazon creates a river in the sky that satiates the thirst of people living all the way south than Planosiris, for example. And trees in the Congo, for example, provide the water for the Nile. And so all these plethora of new studies. What it did was allowed me to show that in times past the forests were necessary for the development of civilization, and today forests are even more important for our existential survival. Can you give us a quick science lesson and explain how forests are responsible for precipitation? Oh, exactly, Well, what forests do is they take you in a lot of water because if the water in the leaves that interacts with the sun to photosynthesize, where the tree gets all its nourishment, but it only maybe ten or even last percent of the water that goes up to the leaf is used for this reaction, so that the rest of the water is you might say, exhaled into the atmosphere, and that water becomes clouds, and the clouds as they go over areas becomes rain. Amazing. The way you trace this history is tied really to not just the development of like civilization, how we've used trees, but you really trace the way that trees have developed, starting right out of the gate with what you call the earliest modern tree. It's not what I call it, it's what every scientist calls it. Gotcha, will you tell our listeners about that and why it is important to note that moment historically where the first modern tree starts to exist, the first true tree. The reason why it's called the first true tree is because it has deep roots for one thing, and deep roots is where most of the sequestering of carbon occurs. In the roots, what they do is they change rainwater, which is basically diluted carbonic acid which means liquid carbon, into what's called carbonates, which basically we call limestone. And so when the carbon in the carbonic acid interacts with the root, the roots changed the rainwater into carbonic acid and then finally ends up in the sea where it ends up as limestone. And that's where the carbon dioxide is locked in right in rock, so it can't escape. So what this true tree did was it was the first plant that started to really take down the carbon dioxide which was in access for any kind of large life on the terrestrial planet. And also the leaves as a photosynthesize, they give off oxygen, so it created an oxygenated atmosphere where creatures like you and me can metabolize and survive. And so the first four legged creatures were attracted from the ocean. The first four legged creatures that could had lungs like a lungfish could escape where you had in the oceans at the time, huge voracious carnivorous fish, and so you could end up on land where it was a lot safer because you had you know, oxygen, the capability of breathing. A lungfish can survive out of water for multiple years, and they also have legs that can walk, and so they believe the first creatures that basically are the root of every like reptile, mammal, and bird began he is with this tree you find the first four legged creatures. They're called tetrapods. And as you know, we have two hands, right and two legs, so we're basically four limbed creature, right. And birds are the same way. You know, they have wings two and they also have two feet, and it goes you know, to amphibians, you know, it goes into reptiles, up the whole tree of what's called animals, right, And so it also provided a habitat for these new pioneers into the land because the tree coverage created basically food and form of belief and also made a sort of heaven for little insects things like that. And so the tree is called Archaeopterus. And in nineteen ninety in Nature magazine, which is the premiere scientific magazine in the world, announced the discovery of the first two tree Archaeopterus because it had both roots, it had a trunk, and this is really interesting. It had a trunk very similar to a pine and had branches with leaves on them. And now what makes it even more fascinating. It's one of what we call transitional fossils that proves the veracity of Darwinism because the leaves were from an older type of plant called the fern, but the trunk was exactly like a gymnasperm. And so because on Earth at the time, on the planet there was one single continent called Gowando Land, a huge continent, the tree was able to proliferate throughout the terrestrial world land world. And today we find fossils of this tree in Oklahoma, in Pennsylvania, in Upstate New York, in Ireland, in Morocco, and in South Africa, and also all the way up Spisbergen, the big island off of Norway in the Arctic Circle. They're everywhere where. The fossils were everywhere because there was one big continent at the time, and so it had the capability of spreading up. It's what we're called heterospores, you know, their seeds, but they were they were they were a primitive form of seed throughout the world. Amazing. And so what this did was with all all these and also because it had deep roots, it was no longer dependent on being close to water, so it could you know, be in various landscapes. And so what the tree did was it initiated the takedown of carbon dioxide, but also added so much oxygen that we have evidence of the first forest fires because there was sufficient oxygen for ignition. Oh wow. In fact, I have a fossil collection because I actually like to go to the places where I write about and experienced them physically. And like I said, this is all in the new book, it was, and then the old edition. I went and spent two weeks digging Archaeopterus fossils in Pennsylvania. And I have, for example, charcoal that if you run your finger through it, it's mirrors on your finger, even those three hundred today seventy million years as if I got the charcoal from yesterday's campfire. Oh my goodness, that's amazing. So this this was the you might say, introduced, we use this term in science, introduced the tree idea that proliferated over the hundreds of millions of years, amazing. What it did was it made the climate possible for reasures to proliferate over the millions of years. So if not for Archaeopterus, we wouldn't be doing this interview. So that is obviously like a very key moment in terms of the history of trees on our planet developmentally for all species. But I also want to ask you what you see is the most important moment that trees were part of from a technological standpoint for humanity. Well, actually the mis named stone age was actually the wood age. And if not for wood fires, for example, none of our species could have traveled out of Africa because it gets cold, you know, when you go up north. And if not for wood fires, we would have you know, no hope Homo sapien ancestors in the majority of the world. So but and secondly, the would enable of the first the Homo sapiens and also the Neanderthals to actually more successfully use their stone tools, because if you've ever trying to break a rock holding a stone without a handle, you don't get very far right. So what and these are recent discoveries, is that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens used wood handles for all their implements, which also provided survival for us to live today. And so I hope I'm answering your question. And so then as we get to quote civilizations, this is where we see most of the deforestation. Actually, forests covered almost sixty percent of the habitable land on Earth ten thousand years ago. We've cut down at least thirty percent, and eighty percent of that thirty percent happened as civilization arose five thousand years ago. And so that's actually the book is the story two of how civilizations depended upon wood, but also that dependency on the wood required massive deforestation. And the first story of deforestation is in the epic of Gilgameshr. Yeah, I really really enjoyed that section because it makes very clear that the very thing that any person of power was doing, like trying to build so aggressively to expand their culture, destroyed the very resources that they needed to sustain that culture. And that happened over and over. There are many instances of that throughout the book. Are there any historical examples of civilizations or cultures where that is not the case, where they realized that there was that delicate balance that needed to be respected? There was a counter argument made at that time at the epoch of Gilgamesh. As you probably might have read at the end of the book, one of the partner of Gilgamesh who cut down the forests, and the partner who participated, as they were coming down on wooden rafts, he looks at Gilgamesh and he says, I think we've turned the Cedar forest into a waste land. And then he says, what will our gods think of us? So here you have the first environmental realization that perhaps we have done great harm. That's amazing. So this is a five thousand, four hundred years ago and as an example of the new material, the ultimate translation of Gilgamesh appeared in two thousand and one, which greatly aided the chapter on Gilgamesh. And remember Gilgamesh came from Eric and Rick was the first outpost of civilization in the world. And so it's a story that actually provides the platform for a forrest journey, because it's Gilgamesh's forrest journey that then I'd tell year after year after Gilgamesh. So Gilgamesh, see, he was really bummed out because he was two thirds god and one third human. So he was like mortal, and so he wanted to make a name for himself, and suddenly he came upon the only way was to cut down the cedar forest to build civilization. And so this is the whole you might say, bouquet of the book. So just like Archaeopterus shows the value of the tree, the Gilgamesh episode shows where we're going to go as the sort of the prelude to the rest of the book. Right, And just to add is that the gods lived in the forest because at that time, according to the writer, the forests were they heaven on earth. So why did they have to go? You know, it was only when gilgames cut down the abode of the gods that they had to seek life far away as possible from human beings, way up in the sky. Oh that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. How that shifts are our storytelling as well as our civilization. Well. Also what's interesting about the Gilgamesh story is that the guardian of the forest, and this is all from the new translation, he was placed by the gods to keep humans out. He had, according to the translator, a tusk. And the implication is that elephants once roamed you know, the Middle East in the lush forests, and once again in the last few years, and this is part of the new book. They've discovered in northern Syria plethora of ancient elephant bones. And actually also in new translations of the you might say, the platforms of the various Mesopotamian kings, they all brag about killing elephants in the Middle East. And can you imagine, I mean think of it. Do you think of the hills in Iran, for example, to be the equivalent of say the Pacific Northwest? No? And where have all the elephants gone? Right? Right? Because what happened? And that's another important part of a book is that the forest is the habitat for almost all living creatures. It makes you think about what could have been had people been more thoughtful about that? Correct and what's And also you asked, well, where there are conservation minded people? Well? In Genesis, for example, in the Hebrew Bible, the first demand of God to Adam is and I speak Hebrew soum as leishmarhad seem, which means protect, but a protect in a very militant way the trees m So it's right there. From the beginning. The message has existed. Well. Also, what's really interesting I've been going through is that in Ezekiel, for example, the death of a tyrant is described as them is falling like a huge cedar. And once again in the Bible there's the environmentalism where for example, in Isaiah, a Zaiah takes the life of an oak and he like rubs his brow and safety because he says that the great king a Sargan the Great has died, and so now I the oak can flourish with the Messiah coming. In Isaiah is like the desert gets transformed as a woodland, and Israel was again has plenty of water. And that's what we earlier discussed is the relationship between trees and precipitation. So that was recognized like maybe what three or four thousand years ago, that relationship, So we knew that from the stories in the Hebrew Bible, and yet no one learned. He also included the story in the book about Cicero, raising concern that Rome was destroying its forest lands. And there have been, like you said, all of these other warnings that have come along throughout history. How have those warnings of the need for conservation been perceived throughout history? You know, today it's a battleground for a lot of people, but I'm wondering how it was perceived in previous civilizations. Well, it's interesting. I appreciate you bringing up Cicero, because what Cicero was complaining about, he was complaining about the vineyards taking over the forests. And that's happened in the happening in California where both in the north the reds are giving way to the vineyards and in where I live, the oaks have been decimated for vineyards. And so Cicero, thousands of years ago, was on a rampage, you might say, like he says, he says, much better to have oaks than to have wine. And yet oh, so many people I know, see, nobody puts things together. And that's what I hope my book does, is nobody puts together the fact that they're drinking wine and that caused the destruction of the trees. And so maybe we can change our activity a bit to have the trees flourished. But until we learn these of various dependencies you might say, or threats, like so people, you know, horror, horror, I want to drink my wine, right, But nobody puts it together. By purchasing wine, you're actually supporting the decimation of the woodlands. Yeah, there's so many instances of cause and effect that I don't think most of us even think about that are super important. I want to talk about some of the additional really fascinating stories that you tell in this book, because there was one that I read that was completely captivating. You talked about in Greek Asia minor after the Homeric Age. There's a section in the book about it about farmers suing a which made me like do a triple take and reread the paragraph over and over. Can you tell us that story? Oh, I'd love to. So what happened was by deforesting the river banks, the siltation created a very like you know, windy river and also like destroyed the ports that it fit into. Because once the protection of the soil by the routes is removed, than just all the earth comes down and silts up at the work comes out in the ocean, which we call the delta, and so the ports no longer were ports because of the creation of deltas. And so what the farmers did, because they lost land because of you know, erosion, they would charge a ferry boat ride to compensate for that loss of agland. H. I think that answers your question right now. Yeah, that this is the compensated by suing the river and forcing the people who needed to go across to pay for the damage of the river had done and deforestation had created. There are a lot of examples in your book, obviously of just casual overusage of wood resources that I had never thought about. The one that jumped out to me was just something that we think about often in very romantic terms, is the baths of Rome, but heating those baths ate up a lot of wood. Will you talk about some other instances of resource overuse in history that we might not automatically think about. Well, I'd like to talk about the baths of Rome, because that's one of the ways I got into writing about a Forest Journey, because the Baths of Rome, because of the fuel shortages that created, because to keep the Romans loved their baths to be you know, steaming hot, like like not like like like sixty degrees, not seventy degrees, not eighty degrees, you know, about one hundred rights. And they actually had sweat rooms two to heat, right, and so all these trunks. They burned trunk after trunk of wood, and this is one of the entrees as I began my research from my solar experiences, because the Romans were the first people to discover their glass traps solar heat. As to what they did is they designed their baths so they all faced the winter sun. So during the colder part of the year in rome U, the sun's beams would come into the bath and be captured because the wavelengths were our different, our difference when the sun goes in and when it's turned into heat. And so this was a solar plan that all the leading Roman architects actually wrote about that we still have access to. And so the question is where did the trees come from? And this will blow you out to a good portion of the trees came from North Africa, which was considered the great woodland of the Roman Empire. And as a parallel to oil, you know, being transported by oil tankers, the Romans had five hundred boats ships that were in constant travel between the forests of North Africa and the baths of rome Because if the Romans didn't have hot baths, there would be immediate rebellion and to keep the population. It's sort of like California where if you don't have your hot tub, you know, your natural draft for your hot tub, you know, you'll uh, you you'll you'll start to uh, you know, get really pissed. Right, Um, do you have a nominee for most careless civilization when it came to forests? Is it us? Well, I don't know if you're familiar. Are you familiar with the walrus and the carpenter and Alice in wonder Land? Yes? Okay, well with the walters and the carpenter there was a um and you're and you're familiar with Tweedlede and tweedledumb right of course? Okay, well, um, Tweedledee asked Alice, after you know that, they told her the walters and the carpenter poem right, who did she think was worse, the walrus or the carpenter, And so Alice jumped to us, I think the walrus because he ate um more oysters. But then Tweedledum jumped on her and said, but the carpenter tried to eat as many as he could. And so I think the same thing, as with civilizations, is depending on the ability to access timber you had more consumption, and so the difference was in olden times it was economically not feasible to collect wood more than fifteen miles from a river. Right, But when were you developed, for example, the railroad you could go in and just you know, just wherever you built the track, you can you could like go take it out. In fact, I don't know if you noticed in the book, there's an incredible picture of a railroad train with all the flat cars. It's carrying these huge logs. Did you see that? Yeah, you know, I mean they were just huge. I mean, I don't think we could in California we could dream of trees being that large. In fact, there are several I think, very striking pictures of you know, the girth of those trees and also the um to show how little respect people had is. There's one image and this is all new and then it never was shown before in the other editions. Uh is a dance floor creed and from the stump of a giant sequoia. Yeah, where where forty people are dancing astonishing? Yeah, So it's it's it's the old like tweetled the tweetled you know, now a story of Loris and Carpenter is I think all societies and that includes uh, you know we people. Some people worship you know, the noble savage or the indigenous as they call it. But they were as destructive. But they only had the capability, for example in North America, because they didn't they didn't even have like draft animals, right, So you realized that they were constricted in damaging the forest by a their sparse population size. And also they did not have metal tools. I don't know if you know that, right. The reason for that is because they came over from Asia before metallurgy developed, oh that, and so they didn't have in their tool kit, right, they had handles, right, they had handles for stone tools, which I elaborated came from the stone age, but from the metal age, which I also show is not the correct name. It's the charcoal age because without charcoal, there was no way you could remove the metal from the rock. Because we only have like five percent of the world, we have a metal that's called native metal that you know, is pure and the other comes as or and so that had to be extracted by heat. And so the metal age is another misnomer because it's actually the charcoal age. Because without charcoal, which provides a hot and steady fuel, we could have never extracted of that metal from the stone. The book is so beautiful. Congratulations on this update. It's gorgeous. But I as my parting question, I would love to ask you what you feel like is the most important lesson we can take from learning about the history of trees as we move into the future, stay out of the forest. So many people will be chagrined at the thought of that advice, I think, well, yeah, I mean, we can't drink a petroleum right, right, and we it's scientifically proved that not only do the trees provide water locally, but also they act like relays. So like I said earlier, they take water and take it, say a thousand miles away. For example, the forests in Siberia provide China with rain. So if we remove all the forests, no water, right, and water is I think much more important than you know and other resource, because without water we could only subsist for three days, right, And so basically I hope people see the folly that other civilizations like oh Um went through to say hey, uh, you know, a big slam in the face and say wake up, wake up, you know, um, let's not repeat. And I also hope they see that the forests are so valuable. For example, there's a portion that talks about human health and forests. Yes, where the major illnesses that people in um the world have suffered were created by removing the trees which served as a barrier or you might say, a social distancing. And once we open the forest, we open humanity to these terrible diseases like lime disease alike, oh ebol, like malaria. And actually, in twenty eighteen, I got a hold of a article in the leading a journal on Frontiers and Microbiology which was titled bats, deforestation and coronaviruses. Oh wow, and all the coronaviruses. There's two or three various coronaviruses. And the proven origins of these other coronaviruses have always been the opening of the forest. And so you know, you know, right now in Congress, because they want to find an enemy, no one's looking at the possible relationship of deforestation and the COVID decimation of the world. Well, hopefully they will all read and learn if that's what you know, I mean, that's that's the help. So you're still so you asked why did I do the book? Well, I thought I had a whole novel look at the world, which I think you agree upon. Yeah, And so hopefully this will wake up people to say, you know, we've got to stay out of the forest. And actually perhaps we value people not doing work at all and getting paid for it because they would otherwise need to cut down the wood, you know, for lumber, for vineyards, et cetera, et cetera. Right, so if we could develop a different um philosophy where um basically having our hands psycho just uh, maybe dancing or something like that, you know, a set of the chainsaw. That sounds like a lot more fun to me. Yeah, and to understand m For example, the best example of what happens when you cut down the forest in China, for example, under Mousey Tung, the bust storms that created the pollution in Beasing was all a consequence of urging the peasants to cut down the trees for fuel to make iron. You know, it was the great leap forward. And the great leap forward was actually a great like oh oh somersault backwards. Right, we did we did a multipart coverage of the great leap forward, so our listeners will be very familiar with that. Yeah, oh, so much food for thought. I thank you so much, John for spending this time with me. I feel so lucky to get to learn from you. Okay, well, thank you so much for having me. Many many thanks to John for spending this time with me and talking about just a handful of the historical events that he covers in the book. This whole thing definitely made me think about how closely entwined the success and health of our forests are with the success and health of the people here on Earth, and that happening often in ways that we don't consider. So I'm grateful to have this opportunity. John has also written several books on solar history, including A Golden Thread Twenty five hundred Years of Solar Architecture and Technology and Let It Shine, The six thousand year Story of Solar Energy. This new and heavily expanded edition of A Forest Journey is available now wherever books are sold. For listener mail, I have an email from our listener Rachel, who wrote a really interesting email about the Alma Petty Gatlin trial, and she writes, good afternoon, Holly and Tracy slash Tracy and Holly. I just finished your latest podcast on Alma Petty Gatlin and the violations of her most vocal accuser as a man of the cloth. This triggered a memory from while I was an attorney serving in the Army. An Army judge advocate, I was stationed at a base in Virginia working as a command advisor and litigator, and while it was not my usual assignment, a colleague in my office was going on vacation and asked me to cover a legal brief for the semi annual regional Chaplain week long training block. I know, you know, but just as a note, chaplains are the military version of counselors, and while they have an ordained religion and may host religious services, they are generally available, regardless of faith, as therapeutic and spiritual help to many military families and individuals. The day of the presentation, I followed the PowerPoint slides brief defining privilege and walking through military, state and federal regulations. Then we got to what religious type privilege did not cover. I gave the example that a chaplain who was a witness to a car accident would not be bound by privilege to testify to what they heard and visually observed as a bystander slash witness. I was not ready for the spectacle that ensued. Nearly every chaplain had some vocal objection or what if. Some stated that by being a first responder to the accident, they'd rush over to pray with the people involved in the car accident, thus invoking privilege. Others said that because God put them at that scene, it was a call from a higher power to have them intervene and help, therefore preventing them from serving as witness in a court of law. As I was trying to allay these initial concerns, the Catholic priests chimed in and say they wouldn't speak ever, period, And this spiraled into a cacophony of chaplain's declaring over one another their willingness to go to hypothetical jail before ever, potentially violating any privilege regardless of what any secular judge would order against them. Despite my efforts, the presentation devolved into a religious kind of green eggs and ham a discourse in a car in a bar. We went more than thirty minutes over my scheduled time at lunch, no less, and no one in the audience seemed to mind. Given the passion that I experienced that day. It was bizarre, indeed, to hear about a man so flippantly betraying that privilege. His religious leaders of his time must have been rocked at his violation and its subsequent publicity. Anyway, I hope you get a kick out of this story. I love your podcast. I've been listening since fall of twenty thirteen, when I started law school and needed something to listen to that was lighthearted but still informative. I love how the podcast has developed since then. This funny to have a topic intersect a strange experience from the career. I started on with stuff you missed in History class a decade ago, and then included is my tithe to the stuff you missed in History class? Hosts attached to the email, I don't have pets in my own right now, so I'm sending the one I rescued with my stepdad for my mom after our Alaskan malamute Lucy, like the mischievous redhead, passed away. Meet Casper the friendly Ghost for his white face and calm attitude. He's a husky. We rescued from the shelter in twenty fifteen. He has always perfectly quaffed, looks resigned when I take too many picks, and obsessed with his snowman squeaky toy. Mister Snowman came in a package with tennis balls my mom bought me for Christmas, not realizing it was a dog toy. Casper is iffy on tennis balls, but it was love at first sight with mister Snowman. Mister Snowman has since endured multiple surgeries, with Casper worriedly tending his bedside when my mom restages him now with sock grafts and stands watch outside the washing machine at mister Snowman's bathtime. He is too cute thanks to mercy. I have such a soft spot for huskies and malamutes anyway, so this is all extra extra fabulous. But this whole thing is really really interesting to me discussing, you know, current takes on confessional privilege and when men of clergy, which it sounds like would never ever betray it. As we said at the time, you know, this was operating in a state where there was no such laws, so there wasn't the same level of guidance involving never ever ever. Yeah, and we mentioned that he wrestled with it and felt like it was his service, like it was his duty to report it. It's very you know, there two points of view on it, and I know not everyone agrees on it, So it's an interesting one. And I'm fascinated at the thought of having a bunch of clergy discuss no. No, not even because this could be considered divine intervention that put me at that scene. I had never thought about anything from that perspective, So that's really interesting. Rachel, thank you. This was eye opening. Yeah. There have also been states that have been discussing various laws to sort of carve out like mandated reporter type roles, so if you if someone confesses something that suggests there's going to be like harm done to a minor, and various states looking to pass laws involving that, which I saw articles about literally the day before that episode of the podcast came out, you know, weeks after we had actually recorded it, and similarly incredibly heated opinions on the subject from the people involved. Yeah. Yeah, it's you know, it's one of those things that I think will always I don't want to invoke Star Wars, but it has such a good moment where in the Attack of the Clones when Anakin and Padmey are discussing how legislation works, and he's like, really smart, really smart people should make the decisions about how laws work. And she's like, that's that's how it works. But not everybody agrees, right, I'm like, yes, so simple. This explains so many problems that we all deal with all the time, but just very simply in a Star Wars movie. I'm I'm interested to see how that debate goes on in the meantime. If you would like to email us, you can do so at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you would like to subscribe, you can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is the production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.