White Pine discusses both the story of the white pine and its environment and the history of the relationship between humans and nature.
White Pine – The Natural and Human History of a Foundational American Tree Written by John Pastor – https://drurylanebooks.com/book/9781642831412
Cook County MN Extension Master Gardeners – https://co.cook.mn.us/government/departments/extension_services/master_gardener_program.php?fbclid=IwAR1_vhlWmHi51XobKbYJLmld8R2YyPhtN-9pbucTT0qOelDWxTs8l2mezcQ
MN Extension Master Gardeners – https://extension.umn.edu/master-gardener/become-master-gardener?fbclid=IwAR2vFTw1UarK5GNqfJkJ_i3VDQ1VDa6jexQxGvvhJC_DZq4V15Xtl41VcEs
Island Press – https://islandpress.org/
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Janet Welcome to our December book club and we’re going to talk tonight about white pine the natural and human history of a foundation American Tree I I selected this book to to lead it was at um Sugarloaf they were selling it at Sugarloaf and I worked there this summer
And I was interested in reading it and in the meanwhile John Pastor the author of the book saw that we were having book club and has offered to participate so I would like to introduce the author of our book John Pastor okay we’ll turn it over to you and uh
Nice to have you here I’m Hillary I’m one of the master naturalists of the NorthShore chapter we’re a new chapter and uh just sign in as you come in and where you’re from and John we’re going to turn this over to you and when you finish we’ll take questions and answers from
People okay so I’d like to keep this somewhat informal and focus more on your questions um I think Kel Kelsey and a few others sent around a few questions that I suggested would be good for discussion kind of general ones um uh what was surprising or what was in the book that
Was surprising to you you uh I enjoy hearing people tell me oh I didn’t know that about White Pine and so anything like that um What Might Have Been confusing that could lead to um uh that you would like to ask me about for clarification and I have to warn you um
I’m retired now but I was a professor at uh in biology department at the University of Minnesota duth and I do have a 10 to give long lectures so um I’ll try to keep my answers brief and to the point and then one final thing whenever I’ve given talks about uh this
Book I always ask people during the course of the talk to think about a particular white pine or white pine stand that has some meaning to them uh either you know in Minnesota obviously The Boundary Waters is one place but there are many beautiful white pine
Stands in the up the uh Sylvania tract in the ader deex in Maine in Pennsylvania throughout the range of white pine or any particular white pine tree that U for some reason has particular meaning to you and uh you know we could share that with each other
Too and those often make for really nice stories um so how did I come to write this book well as a professor my um research for the last 40 years that I’ve lived in northern Minnesota has been largely on the Northwoods with some research up in the Arctic as well but
The the Northwoods this Forest of um Spruce and fur and white pine and Red Pine and Jack Pine as well mixed in with sugar maple and uh the two Birches Yellow Birch and paper birch and uh Red Oak northern red oak as well as a bunch of other species Mountain Ash and so
Forth that stretches from Minnesota clear Eastward uh on either side of the Great Lakes all the way past Maine actually into New Brunswick and maybe a little bit of Newland the the western edge of Newland and it’s a remarkable biome uh there’s lots of very interesting research questions because each tree
Species does something different with the nutrients and water it requires and so if uh there’s a change in species for whatever reason you could immediately pick it up at the ecosystem level and so it’s a very good uh ecosystem in order to study the links between uh species and their natural
History and life cycles and whole ecosystem properties like productivity and nutrient cycling and so forth and my research has been largely on that and it also includes uh moose and beaver and what species they browse and how they change in the composition of the forest uh the effects of climate change on the
Northwoods um and some work on pet lands that we have in the Northwoods as well which have a similar uh kind of composition of species that do each one is very unique and does something very different um and so a number of years ago I had written a collection of essays
Uh called what should a clever moov eat but it was a collection of essays on the species of the North Woods and and how they come together and form this kind of ecosystem biome and it was published by uh Island press which is a nonprofit publisher actually that has a long history of
Publishing books on the environment and on natural history and I really love working with the people at Island press they’re just wonderful people the editors are great and uh they’re just fun to work with and one thing I learned was that um in producing a book like this it’s not just
You write a bunch of stuff and put a St you send them off to the publisher and they put a big staple through it and bind it and send it to the bookstores it’s much more involved than that um but at the end of when that book was
Published and I I think Jory Lane carries that book as well um the uh my editor at Island press said so what would you like to write for your next book and I gave her a couple of ideas and one of them was about White Pine and she said well why didn’t you
Put that in what should a clever moose eat book and I said because because every time I thought thought about writing an essay about white pine there was so much and and white pine is so important as a key species in the North Woods that I realized that one essay
Wasn’t going to do it and it really needs a book and so I’d like to start working with you on ideas on how that book could be organized and originally and so what I wanted to do was combine both um the natural history and also some the history of how we’ve interacted
With white pine but the primary focus originally was going to be on natural history of White Pine and its life cycle so I was going to start from the seedling stage and just follow it up through maturity into Old growth and even after the tree dies the dead still
Plays a role in the forest and so one of the scientific ideas that I’ve been um I don’t know playing around with is that the life cycle of an organism ex doesn’t end when the organism dies it extends further into what happens with its carcass because that for trees that’s
Still a great Storehouse of carbon and nutrients and it provides structure in the forest it still provides habitat for a lot of species well when I started thinking about it that way that seemed a logical way to do it but then if you think of
About it it was hard to work the history of how we’ve interacted with white pine in with that because when we started interacting with white pine as European settlers but even before that with the uh Native Americans they were interacting with white pines that were mature in Old growth so I would actually
Have to start if the uh uh the life cycle they weren’t interacting with this the the seedlings at that point and so the whole thing was sort of backwards and so then I decided Well I will just use the chronology of what we’ve discovered about White Pine and
Why and follow the chronology of how we’ve interacted with white pine and how that how through that we learned more and more about the natural history and the ecology and the biology of White Pine and how that changed how we saw White Pine and interacted with it in the
Future and that’s basically the structure of the book The The Narrative line is the history of how different cultures of the Northwoods have interacted with white pine and as I was writing the book it it occurred to me very quickly that the different cultures that have interacted with white pine and
I don’t just mean Native American and white European I also mean like the Paul bunan culture is a different culture of the Northwoods than the Wilderness culture is or the forest management culture is and and so forth and so on and the cultures the culture that we’re
Now entering of how climate change is going to affect how we think about our relationship with the land so we’re entering a new culture of how we interact with the world around us and one of the key scientific ideas in the book as you probably realize is
That white pine is what ecologists are coming to call a foundation species and these are large plants that form the foundation of an ecosystem because they control because they’re so large and relatively common that they control the entry of energy into an ecosystem by sunlight and photosynthesis they control
The movement of water through the ecosystem by uptake from the roots and the evaporation of water from their crowns from their leaves and needles high in the the canopy and they control the cycling of nutrients by uptake from the soil and converting those nutrients into uh leaves and wood and then when
The leaves including needles fall to the ground they all decompose differently and so a foundation species really controls a lot of what’s happening in the in the Eos the flow of energy and material through an ecosystem it also because of it the at large sizes of the individuals controls um uh the structure
Of an ecosystem it it controls to the habitat for many many animals and it occurred to me that we could expand that into a social context because these large Foundation species really are the core of the cultures how cultures interact with the landscape so if you think of other plant
Species that might be Foundation species Douglas fur for example is a foundation species of the Pacific Northwest it’s an important part of the indigenous cultures and also the white European settlement cultures in the Pacific Northwest um Saro Cactus would be a foundation species of the Sonoran Desert both um Native and non-native cultures
And even in the uh the Prairie big blue stem uh if you read Willa and people like that who was written about the Prairies uh they talk about the big blue stem and the Sea of Grass and how you know moving through the the the big blue
Stem as they their covered wagons went northward it was like the covered wagon was a ship a sailing on this Sea of Grass most much of which was big blue stem so it one of the things I I thought about in writing this book is how do all
The how did all these different cultures see White Pine and why did each succeeding culture see White Pine differently than the preceding one and it it’s not as if each succeeding culture from Native Americans to the uh American Revolution to the White Pine logging to thorough in the beginning of
Wilderness to gford pincho and scientific management of white P it’s not that they replaced the particular culture they sort of added on to it and out of that comes the the conflicts we have in how we interact with the landscape around us and particularly these big trees do we do we Harvest
Them uh do we eradicate them do we Harvest them and use them to create um beautiful woodwork like you know the bookshelves behind me the desk I’m sitting at uh the furniture and so forth if you read the first page of my book you know that my father was a carpenter
And cabinet maker and just made beautiful furniture that we grew up with or do we preserve them as Wilderness and what do we how do we manage them to provide not just Timber but also at the same time provide habitat and Watershed protection and so forth and so each of
These cultures gets layered on top of or Creed on top of the other and they’re often contradict you know pure Wilderness is contradictory to Timber management and that was a big argument that gford pincho the founder of the forest service had with John M they knew each other personally they went camping together
And but it was a big argument about what to do particularly with big trees and uh forests composed of big trees and um when you have a lot of these resources big trees or desert or Prairie the conflicts really don’t matter there’s plenty for everybody um but it’s when these things
Become less and less common and even to the point of being rare or the the original Prairie or White Pine Forest or Douglas fur forest or Sonoran Desert the the patches of the original untouched stuff become smaller and smaller and more and more rare then these different
Cultures that are accreted on top of one another then they start to con conflict because of the different ways they see these Foundation species so that’s basically a a summary of the ideas in the book um working with a publisher particularly um Island press it’s interesting so I uh met with my editor
At the uh uh professional meeting that I go to and they’re often book sellers there and so she saidwell what’s going to be the structure of the book and I explained to her and then she said all right send me an outline and a brief synopsis and so forth and I’ll take it
Up with my fellow editors and we discuss it and send it back to you and so working with Island press is actually going back and forth a lot before the con the uh contract is signed um to try and refine the proposal and how the book
Is going to be structured and so forth um so that when I start writing the book and particularly um what they don’t want to happen is if I start writing the book and I finish it and then I send it off to them they say well wait wait a second
This is not what we expected and then you run into a lot of problems and so there was about a year of us going back and forth and refining things and saying well what about this what about that are you going to include this are you not
Going to include this um how are you going to work this in um what if we move the chapters around a little bit you know or what if we save that idea for a later chapter and so forth and it was a really interesting intellectual discussion that that went on for a whole
Year before uh fin finally they said okay we’re you know a lot of details need to still be worked out but they’ll be worked out in the writing and editing so we’re we’re satisfied we’re on the same track so all right here’s the contract start writing so that’s how it that’s how it
Went and some people might be really frustrated with that approach they get gung-ho and W to oh I just want to start writing and you know I’m so inspired and jazzed up I really really like that approach um in the end the book ended up being quite a bit different uh in
Structure than what I had originally thought it should be or would be and I think it’s much better this way than what I originally did if I if I just wrote the book that I was originally thinking of writing um I don’t think it would have been this good a book as this
So I’m I’m very proud of this book um I think I think that’s kind of all I have to say for introduction about what I think the book is about and how it came to be and uh what it’s like to work with a publisher um not all Publishers work this way some
Publishers I had written a previous more technical book on ecology and that publisher was just all right here’s the contract go ahead and write it and it turns out in the end we didn’t have we didn’t argue anything that what I gave them is they were very happy with and
The book is still in print but it was much less satisfying just to go away and then okay you know you got two years to write this book and then in two years I send it to them and they say okay we’ll send it to a copy
Editor and you know they’ll correct the grammar here and there and okay fine it’s done and it just wasn’t as even though I’m very proud of that book and and the book has gotten a lot of good reviews in the scientific literature um the process of working with that
Publisher who’s a very well-known publisher was not um not as satisfying as working with the people at Island press so uh I would encourage you if you enjoyed this book to go to the island press website if you’re not familiar with Island press and see what other books that they’ve published they are
Now getting into um other things like the urban environment and what they call the built environment which is the the buildings that we build and the environment that those buildings create and what that environment does to us but they’ve still kept their original line of books on
Natural History that’s still the core of uh uh natural history and Ecology of what they published but they added these other lines and expanded and uh they are just an incredible publisher uh very very high quality literary uh books so I think it’s just if you just Google
Island press it’ll come up and you know spin through their catalog and stuff the books are in paperback they don’t publish in hard cover because it’s too expensive and the the prices run about $30 a piece so the price for my book is about about average I would say and it’s
About the length of most books that they publish few hundred pages okay are we ready for some questions then John you ready for hearing some thoughts from people who read the book and have some questions or things that spoke to them absolutely the descrition as you’re thinking I have one that’s
Prepared so we can toss it out there uh somebody that’s not able to attend tonight uh asked the question uh how how he thinks White Pines will Faire specifically in Cook County with climate change it’s a good question we don’t know um we can speculate I don’t think White Pine is
Going to go extinct um but its range might shrink back from the West it you know I don’t think beiji is going de White Pine if if climate warming continues as it’s warming B midi is only about 30 or 50 miles from the Prairie um I don’t think White Pine is going to
Survive there unless we slow down climate change um I think in Cook County it’s cold enough that a little bit of warming might make white pine actually grow better it’s almost a little too cold in Cook County for the best growth of White Pine and so I think White Pine will always be
Around in Cook County and other places but what’s going to happen is the so of the range of white pine might shrink from the south and from the west and move more Northeast into more into Canada and Northern main Northern main is more spuce fur area and so forth
Maybe it’ll even get over into um New Finland but what is going to happen is that other species that white pine is associated with are also going to migrate and they’re going to migrate at their own rate and in their own directions um because they all have different um tolerances to temperature
And moisture and so forth and so white pine is going to become in many places associated with different species than it is now maybe in some place the same White Pine sugar maple sugar maple will probably be more of a component important component in Cook County than
It is now um uh northern red oak maybe so you might have a White Pine Forest that you see now in uh Northern Wisconsin like around waaw some place like that where it’s um more associated with more Hardwoods and less with Spruce and fur I think Spruce and fur are going
To move pretty much out of the state uh completely almost completely um you might have some Spruce and fur remaining right along Lake Superior like right right up to the U the ridge toop and that’s it so I think it’s going to become associated with other species and what
Those species are uh will be different in different places it’ll be different here in Pennsylvania in New York Maine so forth um up and that means that white pine is GNA play somewhat different roles in the ecosystem in which it’s founded because these other species also play their own
Role and I think it’s going to be interesting to see how the forest um reassemble itself and reorganizes itself as species start migrating in response to climate change um if under really extreme climate change scenarios the Prairie actually could come east almost to Lake Superior I don’t think
That’s going to happen but it’s I can say for sure it’s not going to happen but that would be a really extreme scenario um particularly for Cook County I I don’t think it’s G the Prairie is going to get to Cook County it might get to Southern St Louis County where I am
Now but not to Cook County so wonderful I’m gonna toss it over to Heather and to Betsy next after Heather yes thank you uh we really enjoyed the book um I I loved the uh way you put this into a larger historical perspective I mean starting from the very beginning of
Uh White Pine spreading U after the last ice age um which I think just gives the book A really wide range also thinking to the Future mean you can think ter the shortterm future of a few hundred years or you know the much much longer future
Um so I really enjoyed that I had one technical question which which confused me which is uh this white pine rust that you talk about uh that affects both some current plants and the White Pines was brought over from Germany in Germany there weren’t any white pines there must
Be something else that also takes that rule that the white pine takes up it’s wondering what that was and how that interacts with that particular white P bu that’s a really good question and I don’t know the answer to that I I tried to look through the literature to see
Well why weren’t the German Foresters concerned about this and in Germany you have more um spuce and fur and the pine in Europe is largely the Scots pine uh Pine is sylvestris um in the Estonia it’s called the r Pine and that Pine there are two main
Branches to the Pine genus one branch is the white pinees of which are eastern white pine is like the type species and the other Branch are the yellow Pines are the hard Pines and Red Pine and Jack Pine which the uh the blister rust does not affect our uh yellow Pines so the
Blister rust does not affect the yellow Pines for reasons that I don’t think anybody really knows it just affects the White Pines but there aren’t too many members of the white pine branch in Europe so um there’s a few in Switzerland you know when you get up
Into the Alpine areas and in Italy there’s a few members of the white B the blister us may have been confined to a very small area in Europe and there might have been enough White Pine members of the white pine Branch to keep it from going extinct along with the uh
The currents that serve as the alternate host but when it got to America it was like oh my God this is Paradise to me because I got all these white bines all over the place and they’re planting them they’re making food for me you know and
So I think that I don’t think in Europe the blister Rust ever got nearly as much to be as much of a problem the lack of species in the white pine branch of the uh the pine genus I does that kind of answer your question yeah very good question you
Want to be a graduate student and answer that question question Betsy you’re up if you want to unmute yeah um John thank you it was so interesting to read your book and and learn about um the succession um I live in lived in Southwest Minneapolis before
I moved to Grand marray and um just outside my door was like a 7 25-year-old White Pine you know obviously planted a little close to my home on you know my postage stamp house um on the corner but um I you know just really um protect it
And had a fodness for that Pine and would sit under it and listen to the wind blow through it and I’ve just always I think um felt uh an affection for for White Pines especially um it was so interesting to read through and here how um really the the voice
Of um of what was going to happen with um all of our white pines and and lumber and things like that came through the forest service um I mean it doesn’t feel like there was a lot of other voices other than governmental I mean that really drove um the decisions made
That affected everything um you know so like when I walk into the forest here it’s nothing like you know what it was 200 years ago which I think in reading this book kind of blew my mind that I I’ll never really other than being in the Boundary Waters know what it was
Like um so yeah it was very interesting to read just what’s happened over time and you know that Forest ecology is kind of a new science you know kind of blows my mind too so um the last thing I’ll say and then um let you comment is um I
Appreciate it at the end of or near the end of your book um the example of the monomon in northeastern Minnesota who um you know have a sustainable practice going um that’s also you know um allows them to sell their Timber but at a I think a much more um sustainable way
Thank you yeah well the monomon can do this because they never destroyed the forest to begin with it’s awfully hard to take a forest that’s been converted because of mistakes we made to Aspen you know and try to restore it to the original White Pine uh Forest that you see in the
Boundary Waters so when you have it you you can make money quite a bit of money off it the other example of that is John RI and actually up in Cook County Howard headstrom was doing a magnificent job uh harvesting White Pine largely off of forest service land but really the role
Of the these Sawmills like Howards was to actually help the forest service if people think of well The Sawmill has a contract and the contract allows them to go in and cut the Timber and then make it into Lumber and sell it but really there’s a closer when it works well there’s a
Closer relationship between the Sawmill and the surrounding National Forest where the Sawmill owner and the loggers actually Implement what the forest service Foresters want to do to bring the forest into some desired future condition and so they are actually when it works well they’re actually working well to implement for for service
Policy and they aren’t just Timber Barons robbing the forest anymore and uh Howard was a really good example John Riya the whole Riya family out at Grand Rapids they have their own forest that’s about 25,000 Acres it’s called The Wolf Lake Track and they manage it themselves
And they work with the surrounding chipo National Forest actually in kind of a more research mode to try and Implement some of these new ideas in forestry but they don’t get much of their Timber from the surrounding chimo National Forest so these are two different business models
Of how Sawmills work with the forest service and they both work well but in in different ways um and the monomon of course you know we forced them onto their reservation and said okay you live here you know we don’t want that Timber anymore and everything and look what they’ve done
With it they’ve created uh not first place they preserved their culture around the White Pine and that kind of forest and they’ve created jobs and um for the people and uh beautifully managed and they don’t like uh Jack riyer John riyer does they don’t just manage for white pine they manage also
For all these species associated with white pine like sugar maple and so forth um so they’re they all they both take or all three people take a real ecosystem management approach to things um Howard might disagree with me he doesn’t like the term ecosystem management but uh that’s what he’s
Doing yeah but the for hold on second let me get a book just a whole um these are the two books and if you recall there’s um two chapters on these these books one is by uh gford pincho who was the founder of the forest service and this little book here is
Called the White Pine and this is a a first edition it’s actually kind of rare and uh I was able to get it on online but here’s the the title page it’s probably backwards uh but this was the first book written about management of White Pine and it’s um there’s a little bit
About the science but the book is full of tables like this called volume tables and the point of this book was that Foresters can take it out you see it’s a very small book it would fit in their pockets that the early Foresters from the forest service could
Take this out in the woods with them and it would help them restore and manage White Pine and and calculate the amount of board feet in uh a stand of Timber of different productivities and stuff so pincho wrote this to restore White Pine to its former glory in order to provide
A sustainable supply of white pine Timber before pincho uh did this nobody was thinking about sustainability it’s like well why bother there’s plenty of Timber we just keep going west and we get to the Prairie and we go over to Prairie and there’s even bigger trees
Out out west who cares but why would you want to sustain this stuff but pincho realized no we there’s an end to this and so he wrote this book and this is the first book written about for any tree species in North America and then a u there’s another
Chapter about this book also called The White Pine and this was written by a Forester and a botanist um and this is more of a it’s all s stuff in it about man looks like he froze FW it back into theic uh pulling together and this book
Is the model of the way the forest service the forest service now has books called the manual they’ll take every tree species in North America that has a commercial purpose or um commercial value and even many that do not and they write a com a a long chapter and it’s
Put into a two volume syix manual it’s called Uh about that tree and it combines both the biology of the tree and how to manage the tree this book is the model that everybody goes back to for how to write those chapters so these two books set the stage for how to think
More scientifically and more sustainability about uh the management of these tree species um in North America and they are the foundation of Forestry in North America and also Forest ecology in North America so how we think about the forest as a collection of trees and individual species that’s more than just a a
Warehouse of lumber that’s out there but that interact with each other and with other organisms so that’s that’s the foundation of U forestry in America is white pine other questions from people I have a little question about the currents and gooseberries on my little three acres uh where I’m planting white
Pines is it worth trying to manage the current and the Gooseberry bushes or is it or uh we’re I’m close to the lake uh on the hillside going up from the lake to toward the ridge um yeah um where did Gooseberry um one of my uncles who was in cccc
Spent a lot of years pulling up gooseberries he he thought it was make workor um and research on gooseberries and the blister us has shown that um it’s not as bad lethal as it once was it was at one time thought to be a death certificate for white pine but the
Places where it is a problem apparently is places um where there’s considerable amount of fog so if you were in the fog belt above Lake Superior which is about you know couple hundred feet up from the lake where there’s often a fog layer there that is particularly conducive for
The spread of blister rust so I would say if you have a gooseberries on your property you need to manage them or get rid of them but what I would suggest you do is contact your local DNR County Forester and get their advice because it’s you’re talking about
Something that’s very specific to your site and they would have to look at your site and look at how many gooseberries do you have out there are you in the fog belt and so forth but there are also coming uh online now some blister us resistance strains of white pine so you
Might be able to find actually your local County Forester could suggest a source of a rust resistant Pine and you might want to try planting those so without walking around in your land I can’t say for sure but I think U you you probably need to exercise a bit of caution there and
Research he would you like to go hi I don’t want to hog the questions here um but I had regarding this management um I was a little Blown Away by the implication of uh some of the CCC work that you had that in some sense it was you know more beneficial to the
Workers than it was to the restoring of the Pine Forest all all things taken together with the blister us being included and a lot of the places missing the the the fungal Foundation to to make the forest Thrive um so it would it be a fair assessment
That that a lot of that work wasn’t actually super helpful for the forest itself in the end no I think it was very help helpful but the CCC had um had two purposes um and the the original purpose was to get young men out of the city during the Depression because these
Young men were out of work and you know a lot of young men in their late teens and early 20s out of work is not it’s a recipe for disaster and um Franklin Roosevelt actually loved the outdoors in the woods as much as his cousin Theodore did and
He had this idea that getting out in the woods would just be good for these young men um it would prevent the buildup of crime rings in the cities and so gangs and so forth um it’s something we should consider today and he was friends with gford pincho just like Teddy Rosevelt
Was and pincho was all for that idea of you know get out in the fresh air and do some good and you know build something and uh so it was as much of a social experiment to start with as it was a forest um restoration project but
Then it they sort of merged together and pencho was the one who convinced Roosevelt that they should expand it not just for outof work young men in the cities but also out of work young men in rural towns small towns in the country and get people out get young men out in the
Woods and many of these young men came in and they were um illiterate they just or barely literate and the CCC taught them how to read and had to write and every CCC camp had a library uh many of them that I’ve seen really nice library with fireplaces and
Bookcases like this behind me and stuff and these young men would spend their evenings in the library reading about natural history and that’s what it was stuck with as well as American history and they became literate because of the uh the CCC but they also developed all
Almost all of them a real love for nature and to my uncles were in the ccc’s and they loved to hunt and and fish that’s what they grew up doing but they also learned about conservation and the CCC ended right before World War II and in fact the
Ccc’s were some of the first men sent over into the army out into the battlefields because the CCC was a military structure and when they came back um the CCC had been dismantled but they kept that idea of just and you talk to people like my uncles this you mention the
Ccc’s and their eyes light up you know I just remember my uncles’s like oh best time in my life best time in my life and they came back and they said well how do I keep doing this and many of them were the founders of local chapters of Ducks
Unlimited and trout unlimited and pheasant unlimited and so forth so they really started the public um hunter fisherman conservationist kind of uh ethic uh which is related to but not the same as like the Sierra Club in the more Wilderness oriented environmental organizations but they started the Ducks
Unlimited mainly what I remember my uncles doing was you know spending their weekends when they weren’t hunting and fishing doing stream restoration or you know Marsh restoration for the Ducks and so so that they could go and you know catch fish and Hunt but they
Were they loved the time doing it so the CCC it it was a s to me it was a success in every way both from a conservation and restoration standpoint a social standpoint the one thing that the CCC fell down upon and it was just a common
Part of our culture that they did not um have many black men in the C they actively discriminated against black people and that was a failing but that was a failing society-wide at that time the ccc’s were no different than anybody else in fact if they had tried to be a little
More active in integrating uh I think there would have been an outcry against them and it doesn’t excuse what they did but in the the social environment of that time it just wasn’t possible to do what they were trying to do as well as integrate the black and white people of North America
Together the there were Indians in the Native Americans in the ccc’s who were more more accepted than black people in the ccc’s so that was the one part of their social experiment that um didn’t work thanks um some people who haven’t had a chance yet to ask a question we’ve
Got about 10 minutes left burning questions that other people might have about white pines that you have white stories what would you like to share voices we haven’t heard one of the parts I really enjoyed about the book which is isn’t surprising since this is a naturalist book club was
The chapter an Theo and how he he actually was like one of the first naturalist and the first actually by observation and the and then the other painters Drew attention to what happened to the forest and that was really interesting to me and I enjoyed that part of
It yeah I’ve never been a big fan of Walden I I don’t think I’ve ever finished Walden I’ve picked it up a number of times and I’ve tried to read it and I just can’t get through it um but his book on um the the Woods is just wonderful and it the books
I like the best well he’s written a number of essays that I cite in that chapter that have been compiled into various um other books natural history essays of thorough and books like that but his journals and if you could get a hold of many of the the is um volumes of throw’s
Journals they were were edited by English majors and so they took out all the natural history and just let in the bad poetry and philosophy and all that kind of stuff but if you could get a hold of the complete journals of thoro um the ones I have in the Shelf
Back there were published like in 1905 or something like that and princeon University press is coming out with a new uh Edition and just read through it and it’s full of these Natural History observations and ideas about things that he wanted to investigate and so forth um
Those are really fun to read really fun to read so if you’re a little bit turned off by the uh preaching of Walden like I was um try some of the other writings of throw it’s he’s a he was a remarkable naturalist absolutely remarkable I have a comment not a question I was
Very surprised by the part of your book in which you talked about the shipping industry um you know uh that the white pines were harvested as masts for the shipping industry in Europe um I was stunned by the size of the trees that they were cutting down and the number of
Them you at one point I think mentioned uh ships were specially built for carrying these masts and they were huge yeah and then and then you went on to say that one of the one of those ships sank leaving the British army without mass for its ships which
Hampered their part in the the naval part of the Revolutionary War could you say more about that yeah well it sank but also the colonists once we went to war um they blockaded sending White Pine to Britain they didn’t want to send White Pine to the British
Navy and but they still sold White Pine kind of through a a black market a PIV Privateer kind of thing John Paul Jones was you know brought White Pine over to France so the friendships had American mass and the British Navy thought when the Revolutionary War started they actually thought oh this
Piece of cake this war will be over by Christmas we’ll be home by Christmas every stinking war that starts someone says we’ll be home by Christmas right well they so they didn’t lay in a big supply of white P mass and these masks had to be replaced on ships every three
To five years because after a while they crack and they they fatigue and we’re out well they went through their own uh supply of the big Mass very quickly and um and then they started splicing smaller trees together which worked okay but in a storm they would the mask would
Break and then you’re left without sales but the interesting thing is that when Washington had corn Wallace bottled up at Yorktown in Virginia the British Navy was on its way to rescue corn Wallace and bring the British army out what remained of it and so they could
Fight another day but they were coming they ran into a big storm and their Mass all broke and they never made it to rescue corn Wallace but the French navy went around that storm with American white pine mass and blockaded Yorktown from the sea so corn Wallace was
Surrounded and that’s why he surrendered and I I learned that from a book on the uh the Naval History of the United States during the Revolutionary War and this particular author said um that the role of white pine in the American Revolution was really very little appreciated so I I hope that
Chapter in my book um spark some discussion but it it that was the chapter where I think I learned the most that I didn’t realize and I just kept reading and reading and reading about this I thought wow how come they didn’t teach us this and history books and
Stuff but it’s it’s it’s in there it’s in books on the Naval History of America and uh it’s it’s really fascinating that’s the chapter where I learned the most too uh all the other chapters I had you know a bit a basis already I was able to learn more about
Each topic but that one was a complete surprise to me yeah a lot of people say they that’s their favorite chapter which is kind of funny because when I started writing the book I didn’t think well okay yeah I’ll sort of mention the role of White Pines in the revolution but
It’s it’s much more important than I had realized when I first started writing the book well if there’s still time I’ve got a question about White Pines in the future um and wondering if you have any thoughts or recommendations on compatible uh Shrubbery and plants that might be typical in the future White
Pine Force along the NorthShore and elsewhere what have you found when you’ve explored some of the best and oldest stands of I know it can be a dark understory but at in you know diverse forest with white pines what what do you find would be compatible are you are you
Talking about shrubs itself or other so for other tree species I would say northern red oak and sugar maple would be the best ones to plant for the under story um mountain ash often grows underneath White Pine and then along on the forest floor things like bunchberry um gold thread um twinflower bana
Borealis things like that will often grow and if the white pine canopy is intact you know you walk into a White Pine Forest or Forest dominated by white pine it’s cool in there it creates its own microclimate and that’s not going to completely reverse the effects of global
Warming but it will create a microclimate so that those species will probably hang on um hopefully long enough and the white pine stays there that when we get our act together and we get the climate to start cooling again they’ll still be there and be the nucleus of um repopulating the
Surrounding Forest the idea that The Nature Conservancy chapter in Minnesota has called Conifer strongholds and we have to preserve these conifers in cold spots and they will be the nuclei for restoring the forest surrounding them well we are at about 7:30 exactly I could we take one last
Question of anyone who hasn’t spoken yet and if there is none then we’ll thank you profusely but um is there one last question from someone who’s just been quietly waiting to like lunge at the last opportunity Branch out I should say at the last opportunity oh that’s a good
One branch out I like that well I didn’t want to needle anybody but you know I’m done now any last questions well going once twice okay well let me let me thank you for this really has been wonderful you’ve had great questions thank you for buying the
Book authors like it when you buy books particularly if you bought it from a local book seller um and uh it’s been great you you probably get the idea that I could talk about this stuff all night so I I could stay here forever talking
About this stuff I love it um and I hope you do too we live in a beautiful beautiful part of the world I’ve work worked in Scandinavia in China um I’ve been through much of the world up in the Arctic the Antarctic this still is the place where
I come back to this is to me the most beautiful part of the world that I’ve ever lived in or worked in um Northern Scandinavia is a good second but this is home so I I hope you like it I hope you now know that white pine is a good
Has an important role in making it our home and uh we should do everything we can to try and keep it here and healthy we’re so grateful for your time John and for everybody that took time tonight to come together and ask questions and just be together as we
Talk about books just a reminder about the one we have coming up next which is going to be the naturals book group focused on on Trails exploration that’s to be on January 9th and if you maybe have a book that you’d want to host in the future let me know
Always happy to chat with you about ideas for things we could do together thank you so much everyone stay cozy it’s chilly out there