Author Interview: John Perlin 'A Forest Journey'

Holly is joined by John Perlin, author of "A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization,” to talk about the ways that human development and survival depends on the health of the planet’s forests. 

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:21):
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.

(00:43):
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

(01:07):
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

(01:29):
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

(01:50):
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

(02:12):
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

(02:32):
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

(02:54):
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

(03:17):
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

(03:37):
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

(03:58):
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

(04:20):
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

(04:41):
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

(05:05):
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

(05:27):
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

(05:48):
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

(06:08):
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

(06:30):
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

(06:52):
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

(07:14):
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

(07:35):
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

(07:58):
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

(08:20):
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

(08:40):
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

(09:03):
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

(09:27):
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

(09:50):
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

(10:11):
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

(10:35):
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

(10:58):
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

(11:22):
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,

(11:47):
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

(12:09):
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

(12:33):
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

(12:55):
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

(13:15):
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

(13:39):
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,

(13:59):
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

(14:22):
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

(14:47):
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

(15:12):
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

(15:38):
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

(16:01):
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,

(16:28):
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.

(16:51):
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

(17:14):
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

(17:37):
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

(17:58):
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

(18:19):
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

(18:40):
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

(19:02):
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

(19:25):
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

(19:50):
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

(20:14):
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

(20:34):
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

(21:00):
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

(21:20):
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?

(21:44):
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

(22:08):
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

(22:30):
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,

(22:54):
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,

(23:19):
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.

(23:44):
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,

(24:08):
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

(24:32):
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

(24:54):
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,

(25:20):
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

(25:44):
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

(26:05):
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

(26:25):
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,

(26:47):
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

(27:10):
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

(27:31):
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

(27:52):
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,

(28:12):
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

(28:36):
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

(28:56):
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?

(29:21):
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

(29:44):
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

(30:05):
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

(30:26):
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

(30:46):
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

(31:08):
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

(31:33):
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

(31:54):
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

(32:16):
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

(32:37):
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

(32:57):
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

(33:22):
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

(33:43):
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

(34:07):
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

(34:27):
without charcoal, which provides a hot and steady fuel, we
could have never extracted of that metal from the stone.

(34:48):
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

(35:13):
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,

(35:35):
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

(35:59):
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,

(36:20):
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

(36:43):
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

(37:06):
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

(37:30):
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,

(37:52):
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

(38:14):
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

(38:36):
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

(38:58):
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

(39:21):
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

(39:43):
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

(40:04):
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

(40:25):
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

(40:47):
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

(41:07):
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.

(41:28):
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

(41:51):
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

(42:11):
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

(42:32):
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,

(42:53):
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

(43:15):
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,

(43:36):
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

(43:58):
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

(44:18):
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

(44:40):
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

(45:02):
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

(45:26):
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

(45:49):
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

(46:12):
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

(46:33):
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
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(46:58):
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