April 4, 2024 • 54 mins
One of America’s most important ecosystems takes up more than half the state of Florida. It’s a river of grass, a cactus desert, and a saltwater bay all rolled into one. And there are alligators and crocodiles. And that’s just the beginning.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello friends, We will see you live in person somewhere
in the United States this year.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
That's right to May twenty ninth. We're going to be
in Medford, mass. On the thirtieth, we're going to be
in Washington, DC, and then on May thirty first, right
there in New York City. In August, we're going to
hit Chicago, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis on August seventh, eighth, and ninth,
and then we're going to wind out the year in
Durham and Atlanta on September fifth and seventh.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
You can get all the info and ticket links that
you need by going to linktree slash sysk Live or
going to our website Stuff youshould Know dot com and
clicking on the tour button.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
shouldn't So.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Do people still say that?
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
I mean I just did so. I guess somebody does.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I think of that every time I see one of those,
you know, pharma commercials are the worst.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Did they say Nizzo on that? A lot?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Well, sky Rizzy is Oh, yeah, I can't even remember
what it is.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I think it's for rheumatoid arthritis, like everything is for
rheumatoid arthritis.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
All I know is whenever I see those commercials, I
just die laughing and think, what a terrible name.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
So I know a lot of those jingles, and I
think sky Rizzies is nothing is everything?
Speaker 3 (01:41):
And then still Doug comes in at the end.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah he goes for shizzle with sky Rizzle. But yeah,
I've had that same thought too, and it is pretty funny.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
All right, So enjoyed the free ad.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, Novo Nordisk, whoever you might be h. Yeah, we're
not talking talking about pharmaceuticals today, although I'm sure there's
plenty of pharmaceuticals floating around where in the area we
are talking about today, Okay, exactly, it's probably screwing the
frogs up something fierce.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Yeah, because we're talking.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Today about the Everglades and I know at least one
person who has been recently, and I'm sure thought it
was amazing, but they're in a lot of trouble. It
turns out there's a we've been monkeying with the Everglades
in for a century or so, and it is starting
to be like that is enough. I'm sick of this.
(02:37):
You guys better restore me or else I'm gone.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Were you talking about me? Yeah, okay, I didn't know.
I thought you might have known someone else who recently went.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
You're the only human being I've ever met who's gone
to the Everglades.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
That's not true.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, Emily's Emily's parents moved down that way or at
least yeah, part time.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Oh cool.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
And we took a boat, an airboat tour of part
of the Everglades, a very tiny, tiny, tiny part obviously.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Hey, you sent Jerry and I a little video of
you on the airboat.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah, riding Toothless. It's my first airboat experience.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
What'd you think.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Well, they're super loud, so it's not like a relaxing
boat ride, not.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
For you, not for the wildlife, not for anybody.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Yeah. I wondered about all that.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
But I getting in the Everglades, and I had done
a previous probably one of the most amazing trips I
ever did was a three nighter in the Okefinocch Swamp.
So I've always been sort of entranced by swamp land.
And when I was down there, especially now that I'm older.
The okey pinoke thing was twenty something years ago. Sure,
(03:52):
I was like, you know, when you're older, you just
appreciate things a little more.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
I think like that, Oh definitely, when you're a kid,
you don't know what the heck's going on.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Yeah, so I just marveled at the mainly the bird life, honestly,
Like the alligators were fine, but the birds is what
really are what really knocked me out. And you know,
like this is how we learn stuff. As we see stuff,
we think, oh, well, think I got a job where
I can actually learn that for you know, as part
of my weekly pay right. And so here we are,
(04:22):
and so here we are, and it was amazing and
I'm super excited about it.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Well, what questions did you have that made you want
to research the Everglades more?
Speaker 2 (04:30):
I mean, just to know more about it. Our airboat
guy shout out to Kenny, like true interior Florida man.
But he knew a lot, it seemed like, and he
was giving us some pretty good information. I feel like
it wasn't just like driving us around. He was into it,
working for those tips, you know, sure, but just you know,
it was just a tip of the.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Mangrove, so to speak.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Very nice, thank you, and by the bye. Kenny is
such an interior Florida man. He once robbed a guest
with a snake. Has that, Yes, at least once? For sure?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
That's pretty smart.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Actually, I'd give up the cash register if the one
put a snake in my base.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Sure for sure. So okay. So for those of you
who don't know, and there's probably plenty of you who
don't know exactly where the Everglades are, although I would
wager that you've heard of them, but they essentially are
a well, I wanted to say, a wetlands, but there is.
It's a patchwork of diverse ecosystems that are extremely unique,
(05:32):
peculiar to the southern half of Florida. Essentially, if you
want to talk geography and natural history, they go from
just below Orlando all the way down to the Florida Keys.
That's technically the Everglades. And then there's one strip from
about Palm Beach down to Miami of high ground that
(05:55):
holds the Everglades in place, and that represents the one
border aside from the top or the Gulf of Mexico
or the Florida keys is that bounds the Everglades. Does
that make sense?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, totally, And it's a part of what makes the
Everglades so unique. And you mentioned different ecosystems. There's a
bunch of overlapping ecosystems that don't normally overlap necessarily elsewhere
in the world, which is always gonna you know, anytime
you have brackish or salty watery mixing in in places
(06:28):
with fresh water, it's just going to create a unique environment.
And the Everglades are that. It is seminole for well, actually,
the Seminole name for everglades is pahe oki and it
means grassy waters. And they have called them grassy waters
various people or river glades for a long long time
(06:50):
until finally, in eighteen twenty three the word everglades first
appeared on a map.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Yeah, and everglades itself is just one of those words
you've heard so long you kind of take for granted
it's its own thing, but it actually has an English
meaning too. A glade is a big grassy opening in
a wooded area, and ever is kind of like a
short for forever, so it's like this endless glade and
what they're talking about is that river of grass. There's
(07:17):
actually a couple of what are called sloughs slu sl
o u g h is how it's pronounced in America,
or how it's spelled in America. You pronounce it slough
and you punctuate it with an eagles cry. And the
slews are kind of what most people probably think about
(07:39):
when they're thinking of the Everglades. It's it's wet, marshy,
wetland that's pretty much flooded year round, with a specific
kind of grass called sawgrass that can grow anywhere. You
could take some sawgrass to the moon and it'll be like, great, thanks,
I'm gonna drive here. It'll grow in the water, it'll
grow on dry land, it'll grow in saltwater, it'll grow
(07:59):
on rush water. It'll grow under basically any condition. And
so it's this flooded grassland that are really just a
couple of specific ecosystems that make up the Everglades. Are
what most people think of when they think Everglades, but
it's far from the complete picture.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, And when we were driving over those grasses and well,
you couldn't tell because they look like little roads through
their little wet roads. I was like are these here
because you drive over them? And he said yes, And
he said and I think he saw my frownie face,
but he said, man, this stuff drives up and grows
(08:35):
right back up and you'd never know any anyone was here. Yeah,
at least in this part. So you know, I still
say it was fairly disturbing at least a noise.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Well, it's less impactful than the other mode of transport
they use in very swampy areas called swamp buggies, which
are just have these huge tires that you can't possibly
get stuck in. Those definitely are more disruptive to the
ecosystem than an airboat.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, And I was, I mean, every time he stopped
and turned that engine off, I would look down and
I was like, Kenny, brother, we're in three inches of water. Yeah,
And he said, it doesn't take much. Man, he just
goosed this thing and it'll get you going.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
And also every time he stopped it and then would
re crank that you know, it sounds like an airplane motor.
It kind of is. I guess I was. All I
could think of was please start.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Oh, yeah, for sure, because it's a little.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Like there's something about swamps when I was in the
Oke Pinoki. It's the same thing, and it's not just alligators.
But I think it's just not being able to see
into the water, you know, because that water looks like,
you know, brood iced tea. There's just something scary. Like
when I was a kid, I remember thinking there was
nothing scarier than because I'd seen a lot of movies
(09:54):
like set in swamps and stuff. I was like, there's
nothing scarier. If you go into a swamp, you're gonna die. Yeah,
and that's just not true.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
That was the clear lesson from swamp thing and swamp
thing too totally.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Olivia helped us with this, But it's also important that
we point out that there's Everglades National Park, and then
the Florida Everglades and Everglades National Park encompasses a lot
of areas that aren't what we think of as Everglades,
and the Everglades extend well beyond the boundaries of the
park itself as well.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, it sounds a lot more confusing than it is.
We'll line it all up into neat, little tidy packages
for everybody. How about that?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
How about this Everglade very large National park, smaller area
within and beyond.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
You did it. We can end the podcast right here,
essentially because you already mentioned alligators, birds, and iced tea
swamp water. So we're good.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Well, I think we should talk history because you dug
up some it looks like sort of the quintessential rundown
of how we got there?
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Right, my friend, Yes, I wrote.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
That that was good stuff.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I for some reason,
when I started to research a little more and more
of the natural history of the Everglades, they just got
more and more fascinated. So's so the Florida Florida is
a peninsula for those of you who don't know, and
it's on top of some very very solid bedrock part
of the continental plate that it's on, but a top
(11:26):
that is a layer of limestone bedrock, and it's formed
from old like corals and shells. Because for a very
long time what's now Florida was under a sea or
an ocean.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Right yeah, and potentially might be again one day.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Right. So over time there's like sea level changes and
rises because you know, the Earth likes to go through
glacial and interglacial periods, and the during the last period
where the ocean covered Florida. A new layer of really
poorous limestone was laid down a top of the limestone bedrock,
(12:05):
and that forms what's called the Biscayne Aquifer. And that
aquifer is a holding tank essentially for drinking water for
the nine million people who live on along the Atlantic
coast of Florida. And it's just super flat. I think
there's a difference in elevation chuck from the bottom of
Lake Okachobee, which is essentially the northern boundary now of
(12:28):
the Everglades, all the way down to the Florida Keys,
it just drops by like twelve to fifteen feet I
think in elevation all those hundreds of miles.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
And that is one thing I love about Florida, especially
when I was a kid too, is you know, it's
hot and stuff, but walking and jogging and riding bikes
and stuff, they don't have any of those hills. So
it's just much more palatable for a dude like me. Yeah,
it is very flats, the hills or the killers, you
(13:00):
know exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Yeah, everybody knows that for sure. It doesn't matter whether
you're walking, whether you're biking, whether you're rolling uphill. It sucks.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
The important part that you mentioned though, is that there's
there's not much elevation rise and change, but Florida does
slope just ever so slightly, I guess what southeast, and
so all the water in Florida wants to go southeast.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
It does, but it runs into that Atlantic Coastal Ridge,
which sounds tall, but at its tallest point it's like
twenty feet above sea level.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Yeah, that's a ridge, but Florida.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Is so flat that that actually contains the water in
the Everglades from going and spilling off into the Atlantic,
So it funnels it down toward that southern southwestern part
of Florida. And over time, as sea levels rose and
declined to rose in decline. When we went through glacial
periods the last time at the end of the Last
(13:57):
Ice Age, which is about twelve thousand years ago, sea
level started to kind of stabilize. And the current climate
that Florida has this subtropical monsoonal climate where there's a
dry season in a rainy season, and they're in the
rainy season, it really rains. There's hurricanes, that kind of stuff.
(14:18):
That started around the end of the Last Ice Age, right,
and so over that last twelve thousand years, that big
old Lake Okeechobee that forms the northern boundary of the
Everglades would periodically flood, and it would send a ton
of water down toward the bottom of Florida, the southern
southwestern tip. Simultaneously, all of that sea level rise and
(14:39):
decline deposited things like shells and mud and all sorts
of stuff, and that formed a natural dam, a barrier
that keeps a lot of the water from flowing out
of the southwestern part of Florida. And it forms the Everglades,
which is essentially an extremely slow moving body of water.
(14:59):
That is, it moves so slowly that the water has
time to percolate downward through the soil into the aquifer,
become purified and be held. So during times of the
wet season, it's a big repository for storm water. During
the dry season, it's a source of drinking water for
the people who live in Florida.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
And some say that a drop of water, some meaning you,
and I imagine you got this from somewhere.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Right, I didn't make that reputable.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
That a drop of water takes about a year or
to go from Lake Okachobee to the Florida Bay, which
you know all of this talk sounds like Florida is
a very scary place. It sounds like it's held together
by you know, reedy roots and duct tape.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
It essentially is, for sure, But it's so flat that
you're really not in any danger. And it's also very shallow.
I think that Florida Bay that extends between the Florida
Keys and the southernmost tip of the Florida Mainland, that's
like five feet an average of five feet deep.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Could you walk to the Florida Keys?
Speaker 1 (16:02):
I believe so. Yeah, because from what I saw, the
average the average depth is three water. Yes, that it
is five feet.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
We should, It's pretty cool. I never thought about that,
but yeah, you could from what I from what I
can tell.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
If it can be done, it has been done.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
I'm sure you'd think so for sure.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
I mean, I imagine Jimmy Buffett walked Traverse that many times.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Probably in his life. Uh.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
Is that good? On natural history? Should we take a break?
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I think so? Did? Do we cover everything? I don't remember?
Speaker 3 (16:31):
I think so. I think that spells it up very nicely.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
All Right, So we're gonna take a break, and we're
gonna come back and talk about what Livia calls America's
greatest swamp. All right, so we covered natural history, we
(17:10):
should talk about the people of Florida. Southern Florida was
it was really as far as you know, settling the
America's it was one of the last pieces of the
Americas to be settled by human beings.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
But there's still.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Like I think twelve hundred BCE is where the indigenous
population started out there, so still nothing to sneeze at.
H And you know, you still see that that indigenous uh,
I guess representation sort of everywhere. It's just it feels
thick just from the names and just kind of everywhere
(17:49):
you go. It's it's it's a it's as parent almost
as if you were I feel like out west of
the unit in the United States, like you get a
little bit of that in Georgia and the Carolinas, but
it just feels heavier in Florida.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
For sure. Yeah, there's a lot of Native American words
that are used as place names still for sure. Is
that what you're mean?
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yeah, I mean more than that, but it feels like
a clunky way to say what I probably didn't even
get across.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Well, the thing about the Everglades is it's how's people for,
like you said, a very long time, thousands of years.
And I think what blew my mind is the Everglades
is we know them today, whereas I guess we would
have known them if we came upon them in eighteen
fifty or something like that. They were only like three thousand,
thirty two hundred years old from what I saw. I
(18:40):
saw some places five thousand, but I think the National
Park Service said they're only about three thousand years old.
So people and the Everglades kind of came around that
area around the same time, and they've been inhabited in
some way, shape or form ever since. Because as Europeans
pushed further and further west and further and further south,
(19:03):
the Everglade you couldn't do anything with them. When Florida
first was settled by European people of European ancestry, they
were like, this is just a completely valueless expanse of swamp.
We can't do anything with this.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
You go live there, yeah, for sure, and you know
in a sec we'll get to like, you know, kind
of what the United States started doing once they acquired
Florida from Spain in eighteen nineteen with the Adams Was
it onus treaty? That's probably not pronouncing it right.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
I'm not sure. I didn't see that one.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Well, that was the treaty where the United States got Florida.
But as far as original inhabitants, we're talking about the Tequesta,
the Yaga, and I don't know. I tried to find
the pronunciation for the Ais tribe.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Do you know what that is?
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah? It was Ais. It was an abbreviation.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
That's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
I thighs.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Maybe maybe I tried to find as it's hard to
dig up pronunciation sometimes for some of this stuff. But
they lived on the East coast, and then you had
the Caloosa in the Southwest, and then you know, they're
all over the Everglades. They're living there and they're in
they're raised huts. What were those called chickie huts?
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Yeah, and those were seminole, I believe a seminole invention,
which is just like a platform like the one you
stayed on in the Okefinoki swamp.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Well keeps even better, right, but it has.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Like sides and a roof and stuff like that. Yeah,
So it's a house. It's a platform house that was
designed to be to be lived in in the Everglades.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yeah, in the Everglades. You mentioned Seminole. They were formed
from a lot of displaced Creek Indians, some other indigenous groups,
and then there were some Africans who were, you know,
fleeing the slave trade, and a lot of these people
ended up just sort of hiding in the Everglades because
it is a great place to hide.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Yeah, and so still there there's Seminole tribe. The Seminole
tribe has a reservation in Big Cyprus, one of their
reservations in Florida, and the Mikosuk tribe apparently is made
up of like former Creek members that rather than be
moved westward to Oklahoma during Indian removal, they said nope,
I'm staying down here, and they ended up forming basically
(21:21):
their own tribe over time that's still around today.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
I kind of like the idea of we're going to
be in the middle of the Everglades, come and find.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Us, That's exactly what they did.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yeah, they were like, well we'll go brave this. You. Yeah,
you come after us if you want to see what
happens malaria boy.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
And then I'm there going don't go in there.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
You die if you go into a swamp exact, you
don't know what's under that water.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
It's the lesson of swamp thing and.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Where they're like, uh, you know what's under this water? Food?
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Yeah, bedrock.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
So you mentioned the land being valueless.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
That was literally what the first state legislature said that
it is quote holy valueless and said, we got to
figure out how to get this water out of here
and make this into land we can use.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, there's like some people are actually adapting to living there.
Can you believe that we will obtain this thing? And
so they did very quickly. They started digging canals and
ditches to drain water from Lake Okeachobee, which again has
traditionally flooded its banks and sent water into the Everglades.
(22:30):
That's where the Everglades gets most of its water. It
has over time, and then it takes so long to
slash out that it stays generally wet throughout the year.
If you dig canals to divert water to other places,
like say an existing river or the Atlantic Ocean, you're
not going to have those banks flood anymore, and the
(22:50):
people that live along those banks are not gonna die
being covered in a mud slide or a flood, or
your crops aren't going to be ruined. And so that
was like the first attempt to really kind of the Everglades.
It was by cutting off its water supply from the north,
from Lake Okechobee.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yeah, And that happened up through the first couple of
decades at least of the twentieth century, until in the
nineteen twenties some people, not too many, but some people
started standing up and saying, you know what, we're wrecking
an ecosystem here. Yeah, it's kind of heartening. I guess
(23:26):
to think that this was happening all the way back
in the nineteen twenties. But in nineteen twenty eight there
was a land developer named Ernest f Co, a land
developer who actually developed a campaign to protect part of
that area as a national park, which eventually bore fruit
in nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Can you believe it? He was a unicorn?
Speaker 2 (23:48):
I know.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Another champion of the Everglades who came along about twenty
or so years later was a journalist named Marjorie Stoneman Douglas,
whose name sadly has become synonymous with a school shooting
as well. And I didn't know anything about her, but
she was this amazing champion of civil rights, of women's rights,
of protecting the environment. And we're talking in the forties,
(24:12):
you know, and she was a really good writer, and
she wrote a book called The Everglades River of Grass,
which is a great title or whatever, but it was
apparently a very popular book that changed people's attitudes towards
the Everglades. It wasn't like, this isn't something to be
tamed for industry and real estate. This is something to
be preserved and protected. And because she helped kind of
(24:36):
point out just how unique the Everglades was as an ecosystem,
it became protected not because it's incredibly beautiful. It's actually not.
In some ways, it's not ugly, but it's featureless. And
in a lot of places it was protected because of
the life that it housed.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Yeah, you know, I get that it's not you know,
the Rocky Mountain National Park and like all the amazing
things you get out west, but I was blown away
by the way it looked. And I know that swamp
just has a connotation, as you know, like when we
first you know, when the US first got ahold of it.
They were like, this is this place is gross. Let's
(25:19):
get all this water out of here. Youw But like
I was knocked out and I the same thing happened
in the oke Finocchi. I just think it's an amazing,
like visually amazing place as well.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
That's awesome. Well you would have been a great early
proponent of protecting the Everglades totally.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Just don't. I don't want to walk around in there, right,
because you'll die.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
I wanted to exist over there.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
And again I talked about the birding, but apparently there
was a conservative governor named spesciod Holland who was like, well, hey,
you know, there's tons of birds here. We could probably
bring in some money as a tourism hot spot with
the Everglades.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah, those nerds are loaded. They usually I don't have
kids or anything else to do, really well paying job.
Bring them in.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Oh God, bless the murders.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
So the park started out at four hundred something thousand
acres and eventually just started ballooning very quickly. I think
it's about one and a half million acres now, about
twenty three hundred square miles. It's big, a god gigantic,
amount of kilometers and it's it is, it's giant, and
(26:29):
you're like, wow, twenty three hundred square miles. It's a huge,
staggering size. But compared to the actual historical natural boundaries,
and I'm talking like the taking anything anyone's ever said,
this is the Everglades into account, naturally speaking, it's about
an eighth of what the actual Everglades are meant to be.
(26:51):
There's supposed to be something like eighteen thousand square miles,
or about twice the size of New Jersey.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
So like basically the entire lower half of Florida.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Yeah, up up, well into central Florida.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
So it might even be closer to the bottom two thirds.
I don't know, but it's it's a significant, huge amount
of land. And the idea that the park is just
protecting it, that it's like an eighth of its size,
it's misleading in one way because there's actually a patchwork
(27:27):
of Native American reservations that are protected and state parks
and areas that also enjoy.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
Some wildlife refuges.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, so it's actually bigger than just the National Park.
But at the same time, it's still a shadow of
its former South and there are two things that cause
the Everglades to become a shadow of its former self.
One is real estate development. So Florida's amazingly beautiful and sunny.
There's yeah, there's a rainy season, but it's still worth
(27:57):
hanging around during to make it through to the dry
because it's so nice. And then number two agriculture, because
the Okachobe traditionally like overflowed its banks to the south.
It deposited tons of like nutrient rich silt. Yeah, so
just to the south of Lake Okachobe with some of
the most fertile land in the United States, and they're like,
(28:19):
this is wasted. We need to damn this thing. We
need to build levies and dykes and everything to keep
this thing from overflowing and plant there. And that's what
they did. So the Everglades were drained for real estate
in this patchwork way and then cut off again, like
I said, from its source of new water, Lake Okachobe.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
And one of the main projects that kind of got
that going in more recent history was in nineteen forty eight.
The Hurricane George came through in nineteen forty seven, aka
the Fort Lauderdale Hurricane, did a lot of damage, and
then Congress said, all right, we got to do something
about this for real, so they authorized the Central and
(29:00):
Southern Florida Project for Flood Control and Other Purposes, otherwise
known as the Sea and Sea ampor sand SF CNSF.
And that's what basically got it going in nineteen forty eight,
Like you were talking about, when you know, just more
and more canals, more levees, creating more farmland and urban areas,
(29:23):
just swelling outward.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, because if you weren't on board with the idea
of real estate development or agriculture and you wanted to
protect the Everglades, every once in a while, an enormous
hurricane would come through and kill a couple thousand people,
it'd be like, we got to do something about that. Yeah,
So it would bring everybody else into the fold. And
that's how that happened. So over time, these projects became
(29:45):
so successful that still today, the canals and the ditches
and all of that stuff that diverts water away from
the Everglades outward so that we can live and farm
in Florida carries about one point seven billion gallons of
water a day to the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf
(30:06):
of Mexico.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
That's incredible still today.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
So, yes, the Everglades is essentially you would hope it's
in this holding pattern, it's not. It's been cut off
from its natural source of fresh water coming from the
north and Lake Okechobee, and it's slowly dying. Essentially, it's
still huge, but it's still being carved up. Agriculture is
still being carried out, it's still being drained, and it's
it's in a little bit of trouble. So we'll talk
(30:29):
about that, but I say we take a break and
then come back and talk about some of the stars
of the Everglades.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
You know who else agrees with you on these points?
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Who?
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Kenny? All right, we'll be right back, all.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Right, Chuck. So, the National Park Service carves the Everglades
up into nine habitats because I think we said at
the outset, the Everglades is actually this amazing patchwork of
different kinds of ecosystems, nine to be exact. And the
reason that there are so many different ecosystems is because again,
(31:33):
Florida is so flat, the Everglades are so shallow that
just in a rise of a few inches can create
a completely different ecosystem. Than one that's a few inches
shorter than it, because it can be dry, and so
then there can be hardwood trees and then all sorts
of different life comes in flocks to these little islands
(31:55):
that form over time as the tree roots capture dirt
and the round rises slowly but surely over time. Those
are called hardwood hammocks, and they're just one of the
ecosystems found in the Everglades.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Yeah, and people should understand every time we say the
word dry, that's heavily quoted, right, dry meaning you know,
it can sustain birds walking around on it and like
a tree to grow.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Yeah, and it'll get flooded periodically, but it's not constantly.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Yeah, wet, And imagine if you jump up and down
and stand in place, you'll sink a little bit.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
You will be very sorry.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
You've also got the pine rocklands. These are just beautiful areas.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
These are.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Areas of forest and it has and it's very unique.
It's only found in South Florida and the Bahamas and
mostly in Florida. But it's got this pine canopy. You know,
Florida's got these beautiful pine trees. I know people often
think of like, you know, just coastal Florida with palm
trees and things like that and sand. But you know,
you get interior, get into interior Florida a little bit,
(32:58):
you've got these beautiful pine forests, and that forest canopy
means that stuff grows there that doesn't grow anywhere else
on planet Earth.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Right. And one of the things that's really important to
the pine rocklands is they can sustain fire, and so
fire periodically comes along these days. The National Park Rangers
set fire on purpose for prescribed burns to mimic natural fires,
and that keeps those hardwoods from coming in and establishing
(33:29):
dominance and turning those places into a hardwood hammock. So
it stays of pine rockland, which is cool. It's its
own thing, and it's probably always going to be its
own thing as long as everything stays exactly the same.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Freshwater sloughs they are the Shark River slough that goes
to the Gulf of Mexico and the Tailor Slew that
goes into Florida Bay. They're basically two giant marshy sawgrass rivers.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Moving very slow.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Yeah, And that's again, that's what people think of typically
when they think of.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Everglades, right, yeah, the rafting not so good.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
There's Marl prairies, and Marl is like the opposite of Pete.
It needs aerobic conditions to form. Did you just Pete
because it has to do with Scotch now.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Just because we talk about Pete later, and I think
Pete is just sort of amazing.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
I do too.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Plus also it makes Scotch pretty great.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
Yeah. Sure, and that's part of it.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
But the maral is made up of a bunch of
different weird stuff like algae and microbes and calcium carbonate,
and it's a very specific kind of mud or dirt
basically that feeds a lot of very diverse wildlife.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah. Absolutely, So those are the Marl prairies.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Yes, Yeah. What about the cypress trees. They kind of
have their own system allotted to them. But they seem
to grow in various places too.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
I mean they can grow in water like the standing water.
They do really well in the wet areas. They're beautiful.
They also grow in dry areas that don't have great soil,
so they're pretty hardy species.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Okay, And I think I would be the jerk of
the year if I took mangrove forests.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
You know. I love my mangroves.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
I asked Kenny. I was like, are those mangroves? He said, no,
but there are some. So what I was seeing was
I'm not sure what I was seeing or exactly which
area I was in now that I'm looking at them all,
I mean it.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Was it's.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
It's north west of Fort Myers is where I was,
and we were driving around through the marshy section. But
there was a very large lake there that I think
he said was the second largest lake.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
I don't no, I'm not familiar with that area, but
it sounds like you're talking about Cape Coral area.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Maybe I tried to find that lake on the map,
but I couldn't. I couldn't find anything today.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Does Kenny exist? Is anything real?
Speaker 3 (36:13):
He does? I took his selfie and he jumped in
the back of it. He photo bombed us.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
But anyway, mangrove forests, there are mangroves there. They're in
the coastal channels around the southern tip of Florida in
that brackish water. So I wouldn't have seen him where
we were. And you know, listen to our Mangroves episode
to learn all the great things they.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Do, Yeah, for sure, and they are really great trees.
The Everglades apparently has the largest contiguous mangrove ecosystem in
the entire Western hemisphere, and I read that some of
them are like four stories tall. Chuck, can you imnagine
seeing a four story tall mangrove tree?
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Man, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
And you know, I did say, listen to that episode,
but we should say at the very least that one
of the big things because this will come up later,
that mangroves do is protect against high water and storms.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Yes, exactly. And so there's areas that get such high
waters and get such high winds during hurricanes that the
mangroves are like nuts to this, I'm moving elsewhere. And
those areas where they move away from or where they
just can't exist are called coastal lowlands. And these are
the antithesis of what people think of when they think
(37:24):
of the Everglades, because it's essentially a scrub desert. Yeah,
in that nuts, there's scrub desert ecosystems in the Everglades.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, It's it's incredible, like all the ecosystems are so varied,
it's really amazing.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Yeah. So it's populated by low growing, salt tolerant plants
that can handle being blown around in one hundred and
eighty one hundred and ninety mile an hour winds like succulents.
And then there's Florida Bay and this is again the
very very shallow coastal area that's bounded at the south
(37:59):
by the Key, at the north by the Florida Mainland,
and there's amazing fishing there and it's most people would
think like, that's not the Everglades, but it's technically included
in Everglades in particular Everglades National Park.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Absolutely, we got to talk about some animals here. We're
not going to go into too much detail, but we
got to talk about alligators and crocodiles because, as you know,
if you've listened to the show, that's the only place
on planet Earth that has both, which is pretty remarkable. Yeah,
it is a lot more alligators and crocodiles. Of course,
I think about two hundred thousand gators compared to two
(38:35):
thousand crocs.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Yes, but the crocs numbered two hundred back in nineteen
seventy five. That's pretty good comeback, yeah, because they were
never gone. Same with the panthers, there's a they're still
in a very precariously low population density of about two hundred. Yeah,
but that's up from twenty to thirty in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
It's crazy.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
So this is like these are the year or the
dividends that protection yielded, Like the Florida panthers should not
exist any longer were it not for people like E. F.
Co and Marjorie Stone in Douglas, like they would just
be long gone. And now they're starting to slowly come back.
And those things are beautiful.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Yeah, they are gorgeous, big kitty cats.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yeah, six to seven feet long.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
Yeah, you don't saw a wild cow?
Speaker 1 (39:27):
What?
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Yeah, Kenny said, they're not wild cows, But what.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Do you call them, like a feral cows?
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Maybe he did say wild cows, but wild just meaning
they're not anyone's cows.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
There's a word for that. I just can't think of it.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Unowned cows, no possess they were least cows.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
I think, so, yeah, that's pretty neat. Though then I
don't understand how those things survive because they're just an
alligator could take them down so easy.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
This cow was fifty feet from an alligator.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
It's so weird. I don't understand nature sometimes, even though
I love it.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
You've got your you've got your water mammals. Everyone loves
to see a manatee or an otter or a dolphin.
The manatee. There was a I feel like a push
to save the manatee started in like the nineties or
maybe even earlier.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Something like that, because they were in trouble and they've
kind of come back too.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
I think they went from endanger to threatened in twenty seventeen.
But just a few years ago they had what's called
an unusual mortality event, which looks like it is because
of a loss of sea grass and water quality.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Yeah, that's a huge one. So Lake Okachobee, as we'll
see as a toxic dump of farm runoff in nutrients,
and because it's diverted that water's diverted now to the
eastern coast and the western coast, they're very frequently algae
die offs or algae that lead to fish kills and
(41:01):
die offs, including the sea grass. So it's a huge,
huge problem. Not only is it not providing the Everglades
with water right now, that's actually kind of good because
if it were, the Everglades would be even more poison
than they are. So instead, the coastal areas are getting poisoned,
and that's where the manatees live. And when the sea
grass goes away, the mandes go away. So now they've
(41:21):
taken up programs of like feeding the manades expired heads
of cabbage and lettuce and stuff from grocery stores around
the state, and it seems to be sustaining them. But
the key here is to is to figure out how
to treat Lake Okachobe. That's the key. If you can
treat Lake Okachobe, you can start moving water from Lake
Okachobe down into the Everglades. You're taking an enormous first
(41:45):
step toward restoration, and you're also saving coastal areas that
are now just completely trashed by algae blooms and agricultural runoff.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
Do it turn the water on?
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Well, that's what they're doing there. So are we onto
conservation and climate change? Well?
Speaker 2 (42:03):
I want to shout out our bird friends real quick, because,
like I said, early on, the alligators were neat, although
we did see baby gaiters, very very cute, all piling
on one another trying to I guess get out of
the water. There's like ten of them. They were just
climbing all over each other.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
They don't get either.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Like five feet from us is very cute, But the
birds is what really knocked me out. And Emily and
I have gotten much more into I wouldn't even say birding,
but just appreciating birds enthusiasm. Like we got a bunch
of feeders now and cameras and we're looking them up more.
And she puts out her phone and then the Cornell
app you know, listens and records. So we've gotten more
(42:42):
into it. We don't actually go out with the binoculars yet.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
I have a magazine you got me a subscription to
that I hadn't heard of before that I love that.
I think you'll like too. It's called Birds and Blooms.
Oh yeah, and essentially it's almost ad free. I don't
know how they publish. I guess just sudden subscribe. And
it's all about birds and how great birds are and
oh check out this plant and this plant beautiful. It's
almost like just appreciating this stuff for ap preaching it.
(43:07):
It's not just shoving conservation down your throat. It's not
there's agenda. There's no agenda, aside from appreciating birds and plants,
it's a really great magazine.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Oh, my friend, I appreciate that that is going to
be coming Emily's way, and I will tell her that
you and you me are to think sure, but anyway.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
It'll probably never get back to me if you don't.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
The birds down there were just amazing cranes and herons,
and the really the showstopper was that pink what's it
called the rosette spoon bill. We came upon a big
mess of them, and I was just like, you got it,
Like it was in the swamp road ahead of us.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
How tall I knew it he was.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
I knew what he was going to do, and he
cut the engine and we watched them and stuff. But
then you know, he drives and they fly away, and
all I could think of was sorry.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Sorry for disturbing you. Yeah, how tall are they?
Speaker 2 (44:04):
They were about the same size as like a hair
in her crane, it seemed like. But just the spoon
bills are cool looking, and then when they take off
and fly, they're just this like flamingo pink.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
That's really cool, man. Yeah, lots of butterflies down there, too,
which I'm a big fan of as well.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Yeah, and hopefully we're going to be doing If you're saying,
how can you not talk about orchids, I think we're
going to do maybe a shorty.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
Just on orchids.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yes, So, as I was saying, there's some steps that
need to be taken to restore the Everglades, and there's
been a huge push to restoring the Everglades for decades now.
Unesco put it on his World Heritage List in nineteen
seventy nine, and even long before that, people will be like,
(44:50):
we've got to stop screwing with this stuff. We have
messed it up so bad with the system of canals
and ditches and dykes and levees and dams. We've got
to just undo some of this. And there was a
huge push to to actually do that, and in two thousand,
back when Congress was capable of being bipartisan, they passed
the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan SERP, and SERP essentially said
(45:14):
we're going to undo as much of that C and
SF project work as possible and just let the Everglades
be what the Everglades are. And had anyone been on
the ball and funding come through early, it would be
done by now. It was projected to cost eight billion
dollars in twenty years, and that is not at all
(45:37):
how it worked out at all. They're actually just now
starting a lot of the projects, and by a lot
of the projects, I mean a tiny fraction of what's
needed to be done.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Yeah, and you know, Kenny said the same thing that
you know, there's still real estate encroaching and developers encroaching,
so it seems like a one step forward.
Speaker 3 (45:59):
To steps back situation.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah, that they're still draining more wetlands to expand you know,
living space and grocery stores and everything else that people
use further and further into it. So it's fairly discouraging.
I know that was at one point a deal to
buy back a bunch of land from US Sugar, but
(46:23):
thanks to the two thousand and eight financial crisis that
went belly up, right.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
Didn't that just anger you? So this would have been
a huge, huge step because this was prime agricultural land
that was below Lake Okeachobean. If they could basically flood
that again, it would it would restore water back to
the Everglades. Would have been huge and US Sugar who
up until you said it, I've been pronouncing in my head.
US Sugar. They were on board, and a lot of
(46:51):
people were critical that Florida was going to spend one
point seven five billion dollars to buy like one hundred
and eighty thousand acres from US Sugar because it was
a struggling company to begin with, and YadA, YadA, YadA.
But all of those political obstacles and it was basically
a done deal. And then the financial crisis happened and
(47:14):
all those stupid banks that screwed up the entire global
economy also prevented the Everglades Restoration Room taking that enormous
step forward because Floor is like, oh, we don't have
any money all of a sudden, and we really need
every penny we can get.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Yeah, that's a real thumb in the eye.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Yeah, well, we promised a little bit more talk of
Pete and I'm glad Lyvia found this because I'm just
I think both it was pretty knocked out by Pete.
Maybe we should do a Pete cast one day. Yeah,
but there's a lot of that Pete rich soil underneath
the marshes there. And you talked earlier about what was
(47:53):
it that was the opposite of pete.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Marl.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Yeah, Marl was the opposite of pete. Pete forms from
organic materials that don't have oxygen. They're shielded from oxygen
so they don't break down. And that's why you can
find like amazing discoveries and peat bogs. The wetland dries up, though,
and that stuff can all of a sudden burn that's
going to release a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere,
(48:18):
and it's you know, all of a sudden, the peat
is threatened as well.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
Yeah. So yeah, there's a lot of problems with climate
change that climate change is going to bring to the Everglades,
and one of them is that restoration. The restoration plan
that was adopted in two thousand did not plan for
climate change. So they're having to figure out how to
implement these these things now, the projects now, without going
(48:43):
back to the drawing board and starting over and losing
tons of ground and time, but also without spending billions
of dollars on things that aren't going to work because
the Everglades are going to change with the climate. So
that's currently where they're what they're trying to figure out.
Oh yeah, yeah, and I recommend two different articles that
(49:05):
have two really different views of what's going on for
a really really sunny view that I almost found suspicious,
as if as if some AI wrote it, knew what
I was researching, and wrote it and served it up
to me just in time for me to report on
it to you guys. I don't think that's a thing yet,
but it made me think like that's coming in the future. Yeah.
(49:28):
I think it's called like a bypass surgery for the Everglades.
It's on fizz org and it's pretty good. It's very interesting,
but again it's got a really sunny outlook for the
opposite outlook. There is a up first public radio interview
with Jenny Stilettovich, who's a public radio reporter who reports
on the Everglades and has forever, and that's called how
(49:50):
to Save the Everglades. Would strongly recommend listening or reading
to that as well as that fizz org article, and
I'll give you a pretty clear perspective on what's going on.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Phyzorg sounds like Snoop Dogg named that what a perfect
way to end.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Very nice well. Chuck made another Snoop Dogg reference to
circle things up again, and of course that has just
triggered listener mail.
Speaker 3 (50:12):
Whether we like it or not, we're gonna shout out.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
I don't know if you did you see that flood
of emails come in from those high school kids.
Speaker 3 (50:23):
No, okay, you will.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
It was sort of right in the last hour before
we recorded, we got like ten or twelve emails all
at the same time from a high school class. So
I was like, somebody had an assignment, nice, and I'm
going to read one of them and shout out the rest.
This was called subject line. My teacher forced me to
do this. I'm not gonna say which student Ms Tiak
(50:46):
wrote this one, but I bet you could probably figure
it out. Hey, guys, really enjoy listening to your podcast.
I've been listening for the past month or so. So
far I've learned a lot from it. One of my
favorite topics was the origin of math symbols, since I'm
a big math person. I'm an ap English language student
at Wasco High School. My teacher is a huge fan
of both of you guys, and it's been making us
(51:08):
listen to a podcast episode every week.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
So we gained general knowledge for our argument essay in
the ape exam. She is now forcing us to send
a listener mail for a grade.
Speaker 3 (51:20):
If you happen to see this, can I get a
thank you to Ms Tiak?
Speaker 1 (51:25):
How do you spell it?
Speaker 3 (51:26):
T y A c K.
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Great name?
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Unless the ta is silent, then it's just yak or
unless the why silent? In this tech? Sure, what if
the A silent then it'd be tyke. What if the
c K is silent, it'd be tia?
Speaker 1 (51:43):
Very nice?
Speaker 3 (51:44):
Anything else?
Speaker 1 (51:45):
I think we've covered the big ones.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
I would actually like to thank you for giving our
class more knowledge in order to hopefully use it in
the exam. Again, thank you keep educating the world in
an entertaining way. Actually, that was a nice email, so
I'm gonna go ahead and say that was from a
Neil Neil and big shout out to Jessica, Damien, Elijah, Abel, Dalen, Marianna, Yeah,
(52:08):
an Angel.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
Great lineup of names or in hell, I'm not sure,
and it's a great lineup of people too, I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
And hey, this just in We don't normally do this,
but we got a bunch of more emails from kids
from this class, and you can't just read a third
of the kids' names and be done with it.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
You know, Chuck, what day is it? What's going on?
Speaker 2 (52:29):
I mean, this is much later, but like, you got
to read all these kids' names, so we're gonna do
that right now. This must be many classes, there's no
way all these kids are one class. But in addition
to the ones we read, can we also shout out
from that ap class? Ian and Brie and Megan and
Eileen and Jocelyn and Marisol and Amanda and Alexis and
(52:51):
Charisma and Celeste and Nicholas and Cecilia and Garelli and
alex and Inez.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
You think I'm done?
Speaker 2 (53:01):
Yeah, nope, halfway there, my friend. Wow, because we also
have to thank Paulina and Arturo and Jacqueline and Antonio
and Lauren and Brittany I see you, Brittany and Victoria
and Isack what a name Isick? And then finally Juliette, Jasmine, Ava,
Sebastian and of course dearest Kiardon all wrote in and
(53:24):
there was one student that was.
Speaker 3 (53:26):
Like, don't read my name, hooper humperdink.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
So we're not going to, but uh just wanted to
give everyone in the class a shout out.
Speaker 1 (53:33):
That's awesome. Sounds like a great bunch.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
Chuck, Yeah, so uh, Miss Tiack give everyone a great
grade and a big shout out to the ap English
class at Wasco High.
Speaker 1 (53:44):
Yeah, huge shout out. And if you want to be
like Miss txx class and get in touch with us
for whatever reason we want to hear from you, you
can send it via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 3 (54:01):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello friends, We will see you live in person somewhere
in the United States this year.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
That's right to May twenty ninth. We're going to be
in Medford, mass. On the thirtieth, we're going to be
in Washington, DC, and then on May thirty first, right
there in New York City. In August, we're going to
hit Chicago, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis on August seventh, eighth, and ninth,
and then we're going to wind out the year in
Durham and Atlanta on September fifth and seventh.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
You can get all the info and ticket links that
you need by going to linktree slash sysk Live or
going to our website Stuff youshould Know dot com and
clicking on the tour button.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
shouldn't So.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Do people still say that?
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
I mean I just did so. I guess somebody does.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I think of that every time I see one of those,
you know, pharma commercials are the worst.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Did they say Nizzo on that? A lot?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Well, sky Rizzy is Oh, yeah, I can't even remember
what it is.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I think it's for rheumatoid arthritis, like everything is for
rheumatoid arthritis.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
All I know is whenever I see those commercials, I
just die laughing and think, what a terrible name.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
So I know a lot of those jingles, and I
think sky Rizzies is nothing is everything?
Speaker 3 (01:41):
And then still Doug comes in at the end.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah he goes for shizzle with sky Rizzle. But yeah,
I've had that same thought too, and it is pretty funny.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
All right, So enjoyed the free ad.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, Novo Nordisk, whoever you might be h. Yeah, we're
not talking talking about pharmaceuticals today, although I'm sure there's
plenty of pharmaceuticals floating around where in the area we
are talking about today, Okay, exactly, it's probably screwing the
frogs up something fierce.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Yeah, because we're talking.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Today about the Everglades and I know at least one
person who has been recently, and I'm sure thought it
was amazing, but they're in a lot of trouble. It
turns out there's a we've been monkeying with the Everglades
in for a century or so, and it is starting
to be like that is enough. I'm sick of this.
(02:37):
You guys better restore me or else I'm gone.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Were you talking about me? Yeah, okay, I didn't know.
I thought you might have known someone else who recently went.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
You're the only human being I've ever met who's gone
to the Everglades.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
That's not true.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, Emily's Emily's parents moved down that way or at
least yeah, part time.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Oh cool.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
And we took a boat, an airboat tour of part
of the Everglades, a very tiny, tiny, tiny part obviously.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Hey, you sent Jerry and I a little video of
you on the airboat.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah, riding Toothless. It's my first airboat experience.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
What'd you think.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Well, they're super loud, so it's not like a relaxing
boat ride, not.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
For you, not for the wildlife, not for anybody.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Yeah. I wondered about all that.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
But I getting in the Everglades, and I had done
a previous probably one of the most amazing trips I
ever did was a three nighter in the Okefinocch Swamp.
So I've always been sort of entranced by swamp land.
And when I was down there, especially now that I'm older.
The okey pinoke thing was twenty something years ago. Sure,
(03:52):
I was like, you know, when you're older, you just
appreciate things a little more.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
I think like that, Oh definitely, when you're a kid,
you don't know what the heck's going on.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Yeah, so I just marveled at the mainly the bird life, honestly,
Like the alligators were fine, but the birds is what
really are what really knocked me out. And you know,
like this is how we learn stuff. As we see stuff,
we think, oh, well, think I got a job where
I can actually learn that for you know, as part
of my weekly pay right. And so here we are,
(04:22):
and so here we are, and it was amazing and
I'm super excited about it.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Well, what questions did you have that made you want
to research the Everglades more?
Speaker 2 (04:30):
I mean, just to know more about it. Our airboat
guy shout out to Kenny, like true interior Florida man.
But he knew a lot, it seemed like, and he
was giving us some pretty good information. I feel like
it wasn't just like driving us around. He was into it,
working for those tips, you know, sure, but just you know,
it was just a tip of the.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Mangrove, so to speak.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Very nice, thank you, and by the bye. Kenny is
such an interior Florida man. He once robbed a guest
with a snake. Has that, Yes, at least once? For sure?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
That's pretty smart.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Actually, I'd give up the cash register if the one
put a snake in my base.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Sure for sure. So okay. So for those of you
who don't know, and there's probably plenty of you who
don't know exactly where the Everglades are, although I would
wager that you've heard of them, but they essentially are
a well, I wanted to say, a wetlands, but there is.
It's a patchwork of diverse ecosystems that are extremely unique,
(05:32):
peculiar to the southern half of Florida. Essentially, if you
want to talk geography and natural history, they go from
just below Orlando all the way down to the Florida Keys.
That's technically the Everglades. And then there's one strip from
about Palm Beach down to Miami of high ground that
(05:55):
holds the Everglades in place, and that represents the one
border aside from the top or the Gulf of Mexico
or the Florida keys is that bounds the Everglades. Does
that make sense?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, totally, And it's a part of what makes the
Everglades so unique. And you mentioned different ecosystems. There's a
bunch of overlapping ecosystems that don't normally overlap necessarily elsewhere
in the world, which is always gonna you know, anytime
you have brackish or salty watery mixing in in places
(06:28):
with fresh water, it's just going to create a unique environment.
And the Everglades are that. It is seminole for well, actually,
the Seminole name for everglades is pahe oki and it
means grassy waters. And they have called them grassy waters
various people or river glades for a long long time
(06:50):
until finally, in eighteen twenty three the word everglades first
appeared on a map.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Yeah, and everglades itself is just one of those words
you've heard so long you kind of take for granted
it's its own thing, but it actually has an English
meaning too. A glade is a big grassy opening in
a wooded area, and ever is kind of like a
short for forever, so it's like this endless glade and
what they're talking about is that river of grass. There's
(07:17):
actually a couple of what are called sloughs slu sl
o u g h is how it's pronounced in America,
or how it's spelled in America. You pronounce it slough
and you punctuate it with an eagles cry. And the
slews are kind of what most people probably think about
(07:39):
when they're thinking of the Everglades. It's it's wet, marshy,
wetland that's pretty much flooded year round, with a specific
kind of grass called sawgrass that can grow anywhere. You
could take some sawgrass to the moon and it'll be like, great, thanks,
I'm gonna drive here. It'll grow in the water, it'll
grow on dry land, it'll grow in saltwater, it'll grow
(07:59):
on rush water. It'll grow under basically any condition. And
so it's this flooded grassland that are really just a
couple of specific ecosystems that make up the Everglades. Are
what most people think of when they think Everglades, but
it's far from the complete picture.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, And when we were driving over those grasses and well,
you couldn't tell because they look like little roads through
their little wet roads. I was like are these here
because you drive over them? And he said yes, And
he said and I think he saw my frownie face,
but he said, man, this stuff drives up and grows
(08:35):
right back up and you'd never know any anyone was here. Yeah,
at least in this part. So you know, I still
say it was fairly disturbing at least a noise.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Well, it's less impactful than the other mode of transport
they use in very swampy areas called swamp buggies, which
are just have these huge tires that you can't possibly
get stuck in. Those definitely are more disruptive to the
ecosystem than an airboat.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, And I was, I mean, every time he stopped
and turned that engine off, I would look down and
I was like, Kenny, brother, we're in three inches of water. Yeah,
And he said, it doesn't take much. Man, he just
goosed this thing and it'll get you going.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
And also every time he stopped it and then would
re crank that you know, it sounds like an airplane motor.
It kind of is. I guess I was. All I
could think of was please start.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Oh, yeah, for sure, because it's a little.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Like there's something about swamps when I was in the
Oke Pinoki. It's the same thing, and it's not just alligators.
But I think it's just not being able to see
into the water, you know, because that water looks like,
you know, brood iced tea. There's just something scary. Like
when I was a kid, I remember thinking there was
nothing scarier than because I'd seen a lot of movies
(09:54):
like set in swamps and stuff. I was like, there's
nothing scarier. If you go into a swamp, you're gonna die. Yeah,
and that's just not true.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
That was the clear lesson from swamp thing and swamp
thing too totally.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Olivia helped us with this, But it's also important that
we point out that there's Everglades National Park, and then
the Florida Everglades and Everglades National Park encompasses a lot
of areas that aren't what we think of as Everglades,
and the Everglades extend well beyond the boundaries of the
park itself as well.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, it sounds a lot more confusing than it is.
We'll line it all up into neat, little tidy packages
for everybody. How about that?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
How about this Everglade very large National park, smaller area
within and beyond.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
You did it. We can end the podcast right here,
essentially because you already mentioned alligators, birds, and iced tea
swamp water. So we're good.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Well, I think we should talk history because you dug
up some it looks like sort of the quintessential rundown
of how we got there?
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Right, my friend, Yes, I wrote.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
That that was good stuff.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I for some reason,
when I started to research a little more and more
of the natural history of the Everglades, they just got
more and more fascinated. So's so the Florida Florida is
a peninsula for those of you who don't know, and
it's on top of some very very solid bedrock part
of the continental plate that it's on, but a top
(11:26):
that is a layer of limestone bedrock, and it's formed
from old like corals and shells. Because for a very
long time what's now Florida was under a sea or
an ocean.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Right yeah, and potentially might be again one day.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Right. So over time there's like sea level changes and
rises because you know, the Earth likes to go through
glacial and interglacial periods, and the during the last period
where the ocean covered Florida. A new layer of really
poorous limestone was laid down a top of the limestone bedrock,
(12:05):
and that forms what's called the Biscayne Aquifer. And that
aquifer is a holding tank essentially for drinking water for
the nine million people who live on along the Atlantic
coast of Florida. And it's just super flat. I think
there's a difference in elevation chuck from the bottom of
Lake Okachobee, which is essentially the northern boundary now of
(12:28):
the Everglades, all the way down to the Florida Keys,
it just drops by like twelve to fifteen feet I
think in elevation all those hundreds of miles.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
And that is one thing I love about Florida, especially
when I was a kid too, is you know, it's
hot and stuff, but walking and jogging and riding bikes
and stuff, they don't have any of those hills. So
it's just much more palatable for a dude like me. Yeah,
it is very flats, the hills or the killers, you
(13:00):
know exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Yeah, everybody knows that for sure. It doesn't matter whether
you're walking, whether you're biking, whether you're rolling uphill. It sucks.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
The important part that you mentioned though, is that there's
there's not much elevation rise and change, but Florida does
slope just ever so slightly, I guess what southeast, and
so all the water in Florida wants to go southeast.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
It does, but it runs into that Atlantic Coastal Ridge,
which sounds tall, but at its tallest point it's like
twenty feet above sea level.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Yeah, that's a ridge, but Florida.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Is so flat that that actually contains the water in
the Everglades from going and spilling off into the Atlantic,
So it funnels it down toward that southern southwestern part
of Florida. And over time, as sea levels rose and
declined to rose in decline. When we went through glacial
periods the last time at the end of the Last
(13:57):
Ice Age, which is about twelve thousand years ago, sea
level started to kind of stabilize. And the current climate
that Florida has this subtropical monsoonal climate where there's a
dry season in a rainy season, and they're in the
rainy season, it really rains. There's hurricanes, that kind of stuff.
(14:18):
That started around the end of the Last Ice Age, right,
and so over that last twelve thousand years, that big
old Lake Okeechobee that forms the northern boundary of the
Everglades would periodically flood, and it would send a ton
of water down toward the bottom of Florida, the southern
southwestern tip. Simultaneously, all of that sea level rise and
(14:39):
decline deposited things like shells and mud and all sorts
of stuff, and that formed a natural dam, a barrier
that keeps a lot of the water from flowing out
of the southwestern part of Florida. And it forms the Everglades,
which is essentially an extremely slow moving body of water.
(14:59):
That is, it moves so slowly that the water has
time to percolate downward through the soil into the aquifer,
become purified and be held. So during times of the
wet season, it's a big repository for storm water. During
the dry season, it's a source of drinking water for
the people who live in Florida.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
And some say that a drop of water, some meaning you,
and I imagine you got this from somewhere.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Right, I didn't make that reputable.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
That a drop of water takes about a year or
to go from Lake Okachobee to the Florida Bay, which
you know all of this talk sounds like Florida is
a very scary place. It sounds like it's held together
by you know, reedy roots and duct tape.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
It essentially is, for sure, But it's so flat that
you're really not in any danger. And it's also very shallow.
I think that Florida Bay that extends between the Florida
Keys and the southernmost tip of the Florida Mainland, that's
like five feet an average of five feet deep.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Could you walk to the Florida Keys?
Speaker 1 (16:02):
I believe so. Yeah, because from what I saw, the
average the average depth is three water. Yes, that it
is five feet.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
We should, It's pretty cool. I never thought about that,
but yeah, you could from what I from what I
can tell.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
If it can be done, it has been done.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
I'm sure you'd think so for sure.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
I mean, I imagine Jimmy Buffett walked Traverse that many times.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Probably in his life. Uh.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
Is that good? On natural history? Should we take a break?
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I think so? Did? Do we cover everything? I don't remember?
Speaker 3 (16:31):
I think so. I think that spells it up very nicely.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
All Right, So we're gonna take a break, and we're
gonna come back and talk about what Livia calls America's
greatest swamp. All right, so we covered natural history, we
(17:10):
should talk about the people of Florida. Southern Florida was
it was really as far as you know, settling the
America's it was one of the last pieces of the
Americas to be settled by human beings.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
But there's still.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Like I think twelve hundred BCE is where the indigenous
population started out there, so still nothing to sneeze at.
H And you know, you still see that that indigenous uh,
I guess representation sort of everywhere. It's just it feels
thick just from the names and just kind of everywhere
(17:49):
you go. It's it's it's a it's as parent almost
as if you were I feel like out west of
the unit in the United States, like you get a
little bit of that in Georgia and the Carolinas, but
it just feels heavier in Florida.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
For sure. Yeah, there's a lot of Native American words
that are used as place names still for sure. Is
that what you're mean?
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yeah, I mean more than that, but it feels like
a clunky way to say what I probably didn't even
get across.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Well, the thing about the Everglades is it's how's people for,
like you said, a very long time, thousands of years.
And I think what blew my mind is the Everglades
is we know them today, whereas I guess we would
have known them if we came upon them in eighteen
fifty or something like that. They were only like three thousand,
thirty two hundred years old from what I saw. I
(18:40):
saw some places five thousand, but I think the National
Park Service said they're only about three thousand years old.
So people and the Everglades kind of came around that
area around the same time, and they've been inhabited in
some way, shape or form ever since. Because as Europeans
pushed further and further west and further and further south,
(19:03):
the Everglade you couldn't do anything with them. When Florida
first was settled by European people of European ancestry, they
were like, this is just a completely valueless expanse of swamp.
We can't do anything with this.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
You go live there, yeah, for sure, and you know
in a sec we'll get to like, you know, kind
of what the United States started doing once they acquired
Florida from Spain in eighteen nineteen with the Adams Was
it onus treaty? That's probably not pronouncing it right.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
I'm not sure. I didn't see that one.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Well, that was the treaty where the United States got Florida.
But as far as original inhabitants, we're talking about the Tequesta,
the Yaga, and I don't know. I tried to find
the pronunciation for the Ais tribe.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Do you know what that is?
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah? It was Ais. It was an abbreviation.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
That's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
I thighs.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Maybe maybe I tried to find as it's hard to
dig up pronunciation sometimes for some of this stuff. But
they lived on the East coast, and then you had
the Caloosa in the Southwest, and then you know, they're
all over the Everglades. They're living there and they're in
they're raised huts. What were those called chickie huts?
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Yeah, and those were seminole, I believe a seminole invention,
which is just like a platform like the one you
stayed on in the Okefinoki swamp.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Well keeps even better, right, but it has.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Like sides and a roof and stuff like that. Yeah,
So it's a house. It's a platform house that was
designed to be to be lived in in the Everglades.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yeah, in the Everglades. You mentioned Seminole. They were formed
from a lot of displaced Creek Indians, some other indigenous groups,
and then there were some Africans who were, you know,
fleeing the slave trade, and a lot of these people
ended up just sort of hiding in the Everglades because
it is a great place to hide.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Yeah, and so still there there's Seminole tribe. The Seminole
tribe has a reservation in Big Cyprus, one of their
reservations in Florida, and the Mikosuk tribe apparently is made
up of like former Creek members that rather than be
moved westward to Oklahoma during Indian removal, they said nope,
I'm staying down here, and they ended up forming basically
(21:21):
their own tribe over time that's still around today.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
I kind of like the idea of we're going to
be in the middle of the Everglades, come and find.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Us, That's exactly what they did.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yeah, they were like, well we'll go brave this. You. Yeah,
you come after us if you want to see what
happens malaria boy.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
And then I'm there going don't go in there.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
You die if you go into a swamp exact, you
don't know what's under that water.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
It's the lesson of swamp thing and.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Where they're like, uh, you know what's under this water? Food?
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Yeah, bedrock.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
So you mentioned the land being valueless.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
That was literally what the first state legislature said that
it is quote holy valueless and said, we got to
figure out how to get this water out of here
and make this into land we can use.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, there's like some people are actually adapting to living there.
Can you believe that we will obtain this thing? And
so they did very quickly. They started digging canals and
ditches to drain water from Lake Okeachobee, which again has
traditionally flooded its banks and sent water into the Everglades.
(22:30):
That's where the Everglades gets most of its water. It
has over time, and then it takes so long to
slash out that it stays generally wet throughout the year.
If you dig canals to divert water to other places,
like say an existing river or the Atlantic Ocean, you're
not going to have those banks flood anymore, and the
(22:50):
people that live along those banks are not gonna die
being covered in a mud slide or a flood, or
your crops aren't going to be ruined. And so that
was like the first attempt to really kind of the Everglades.
It was by cutting off its water supply from the north,
from Lake Okechobee.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yeah, And that happened up through the first couple of
decades at least of the twentieth century, until in the
nineteen twenties some people, not too many, but some people
started standing up and saying, you know what, we're wrecking
an ecosystem here. Yeah, it's kind of heartening. I guess
(23:26):
to think that this was happening all the way back
in the nineteen twenties. But in nineteen twenty eight there
was a land developer named Ernest f Co, a land
developer who actually developed a campaign to protect part of
that area as a national park, which eventually bore fruit
in nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Can you believe it? He was a unicorn?
Speaker 2 (23:48):
I know.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Another champion of the Everglades who came along about twenty
or so years later was a journalist named Marjorie Stoneman Douglas,
whose name sadly has become synonymous with a school shooting
as well. And I didn't know anything about her, but
she was this amazing champion of civil rights, of women's rights,
of protecting the environment. And we're talking in the forties,
(24:12):
you know, and she was a really good writer, and
she wrote a book called The Everglades River of Grass,
which is a great title or whatever, but it was
apparently a very popular book that changed people's attitudes towards
the Everglades. It wasn't like, this isn't something to be
tamed for industry and real estate. This is something to
be preserved and protected. And because she helped kind of
(24:36):
point out just how unique the Everglades was as an ecosystem,
it became protected not because it's incredibly beautiful. It's actually not.
In some ways, it's not ugly, but it's featureless. And
in a lot of places it was protected because of
the life that it housed.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Yeah, you know, I get that it's not you know,
the Rocky Mountain National Park and like all the amazing
things you get out west, but I was blown away
by the way it looked. And I know that swamp
just has a connotation, as you know, like when we
first you know, when the US first got ahold of it.
They were like, this is this place is gross. Let's
(25:19):
get all this water out of here. Youw But like
I was knocked out and I the same thing happened
in the oke Finocchi. I just think it's an amazing,
like visually amazing place as well.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
That's awesome. Well you would have been a great early
proponent of protecting the Everglades totally.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Just don't. I don't want to walk around in there, right,
because you'll die.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
I wanted to exist over there.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
And again I talked about the birding, but apparently there
was a conservative governor named spesciod Holland who was like, well, hey,
you know, there's tons of birds here. We could probably
bring in some money as a tourism hot spot with
the Everglades.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah, those nerds are loaded. They usually I don't have
kids or anything else to do, really well paying job.
Bring them in.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Oh God, bless the murders.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
So the park started out at four hundred something thousand
acres and eventually just started ballooning very quickly. I think
it's about one and a half million acres now, about
twenty three hundred square miles. It's big, a god gigantic,
amount of kilometers and it's it is, it's giant, and
(26:29):
you're like, wow, twenty three hundred square miles. It's a huge,
staggering size. But compared to the actual historical natural boundaries,
and I'm talking like the taking anything anyone's ever said,
this is the Everglades into account, naturally speaking, it's about
an eighth of what the actual Everglades are meant to be.
(26:51):
There's supposed to be something like eighteen thousand square miles,
or about twice the size of New Jersey.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
So like basically the entire lower half of Florida.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Yeah, up up, well into central Florida.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
So it might even be closer to the bottom two thirds.
I don't know, but it's it's a significant, huge amount
of land. And the idea that the park is just
protecting it, that it's like an eighth of its size,
it's misleading in one way because there's actually a patchwork
(27:27):
of Native American reservations that are protected and state parks
and areas that also enjoy.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
Some wildlife refuges.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, so it's actually bigger than just the National Park.
But at the same time, it's still a shadow of
its former South and there are two things that cause
the Everglades to become a shadow of its former self.
One is real estate development. So Florida's amazingly beautiful and sunny.
There's yeah, there's a rainy season, but it's still worth
(27:57):
hanging around during to make it through to the dry
because it's so nice. And then number two agriculture, because
the Okachobe traditionally like overflowed its banks to the south.
It deposited tons of like nutrient rich silt. Yeah, so
just to the south of Lake Okachobe with some of
the most fertile land in the United States, and they're like,
(28:19):
this is wasted. We need to damn this thing. We
need to build levies and dykes and everything to keep
this thing from overflowing and plant there. And that's what
they did. So the Everglades were drained for real estate
in this patchwork way and then cut off again, like
I said, from its source of new water, Lake Okachobe.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
And one of the main projects that kind of got
that going in more recent history was in nineteen forty eight.
The Hurricane George came through in nineteen forty seven, aka
the Fort Lauderdale Hurricane, did a lot of damage, and
then Congress said, all right, we got to do something
about this for real, so they authorized the Central and
(29:00):
Southern Florida Project for Flood Control and Other Purposes, otherwise
known as the Sea and Sea ampor sand SF CNSF.
And that's what basically got it going in nineteen forty eight,
Like you were talking about, when you know, just more
and more canals, more levees, creating more farmland and urban areas,
(29:23):
just swelling outward.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, because if you weren't on board with the idea
of real estate development or agriculture and you wanted to
protect the Everglades, every once in a while, an enormous
hurricane would come through and kill a couple thousand people,
it'd be like, we got to do something about that. Yeah,
So it would bring everybody else into the fold. And
that's how that happened. So over time, these projects became
(29:45):
so successful that still today, the canals and the ditches
and all of that stuff that diverts water away from
the Everglades outward so that we can live and farm
in Florida carries about one point seven billion gallons of
water a day to the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf
(30:06):
of Mexico.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
That's incredible still today.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
So, yes, the Everglades is essentially you would hope it's
in this holding pattern, it's not. It's been cut off
from its natural source of fresh water coming from the
north and Lake Okechobee, and it's slowly dying. Essentially, it's
still huge, but it's still being carved up. Agriculture is
still being carried out, it's still being drained, and it's
it's in a little bit of trouble. So we'll talk
(30:29):
about that, but I say we take a break and
then come back and talk about some of the stars
of the Everglades.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
You know who else agrees with you on these points?
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Who?
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Kenny? All right, we'll be right back, all.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Right, Chuck. So, the National Park Service carves the Everglades
up into nine habitats because I think we said at
the outset, the Everglades is actually this amazing patchwork of
different kinds of ecosystems, nine to be exact. And the
reason that there are so many different ecosystems is because again,
(31:33):
Florida is so flat, the Everglades are so shallow that
just in a rise of a few inches can create
a completely different ecosystem. Than one that's a few inches
shorter than it, because it can be dry, and so
then there can be hardwood trees and then all sorts
of different life comes in flocks to these little islands
(31:55):
that form over time as the tree roots capture dirt
and the round rises slowly but surely over time. Those
are called hardwood hammocks, and they're just one of the
ecosystems found in the Everglades.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Yeah, and people should understand every time we say the
word dry, that's heavily quoted, right, dry meaning you know,
it can sustain birds walking around on it and like
a tree to grow.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Yeah, and it'll get flooded periodically, but it's not constantly.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Yeah, wet, And imagine if you jump up and down
and stand in place, you'll sink a little bit.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
You will be very sorry.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
You've also got the pine rocklands. These are just beautiful areas.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
These are.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Areas of forest and it has and it's very unique.
It's only found in South Florida and the Bahamas and
mostly in Florida. But it's got this pine canopy. You know,
Florida's got these beautiful pine trees. I know people often
think of like, you know, just coastal Florida with palm
trees and things like that and sand. But you know,
you get interior, get into interior Florida a little bit,
(32:58):
you've got these beautiful pine forests, and that forest canopy
means that stuff grows there that doesn't grow anywhere else
on planet Earth.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Right. And one of the things that's really important to
the pine rocklands is they can sustain fire, and so
fire periodically comes along these days. The National Park Rangers
set fire on purpose for prescribed burns to mimic natural fires,
and that keeps those hardwoods from coming in and establishing
(33:29):
dominance and turning those places into a hardwood hammock. So
it stays of pine rockland, which is cool. It's its
own thing, and it's probably always going to be its
own thing as long as everything stays exactly the same.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Freshwater sloughs they are the Shark River slough that goes
to the Gulf of Mexico and the Tailor Slew that
goes into Florida Bay. They're basically two giant marshy sawgrass rivers.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Moving very slow.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Yeah, And that's again, that's what people think of typically
when they think of.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Everglades, right, yeah, the rafting not so good.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
There's Marl prairies, and Marl is like the opposite of Pete.
It needs aerobic conditions to form. Did you just Pete
because it has to do with Scotch now.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Just because we talk about Pete later, and I think
Pete is just sort of amazing.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
I do too.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Plus also it makes Scotch pretty great.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
Yeah. Sure, and that's part of it.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
But the maral is made up of a bunch of
different weird stuff like algae and microbes and calcium carbonate,
and it's a very specific kind of mud or dirt
basically that feeds a lot of very diverse wildlife.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah. Absolutely, So those are the Marl prairies.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Yes, Yeah. What about the cypress trees. They kind of
have their own system allotted to them. But they seem
to grow in various places too.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
I mean they can grow in water like the standing water.
They do really well in the wet areas. They're beautiful.
They also grow in dry areas that don't have great soil,
so they're pretty hardy species.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Okay, And I think I would be the jerk of
the year if I took mangrove forests.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
You know. I love my mangroves.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
I asked Kenny. I was like, are those mangroves? He said, no,
but there are some. So what I was seeing was
I'm not sure what I was seeing or exactly which
area I was in now that I'm looking at them all,
I mean it.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Was it's.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
It's north west of Fort Myers is where I was,
and we were driving around through the marshy section. But
there was a very large lake there that I think
he said was the second largest lake.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
I don't no, I'm not familiar with that area, but
it sounds like you're talking about Cape Coral area.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Maybe I tried to find that lake on the map,
but I couldn't. I couldn't find anything today.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Does Kenny exist? Is anything real?
Speaker 3 (36:13):
He does? I took his selfie and he jumped in
the back of it. He photo bombed us.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
But anyway, mangrove forests, there are mangroves there. They're in
the coastal channels around the southern tip of Florida in
that brackish water. So I wouldn't have seen him where
we were. And you know, listen to our Mangroves episode
to learn all the great things they.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Do, Yeah, for sure, and they are really great trees.
The Everglades apparently has the largest contiguous mangrove ecosystem in
the entire Western hemisphere, and I read that some of
them are like four stories tall. Chuck, can you imnagine
seeing a four story tall mangrove tree?
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Man, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
And you know, I did say, listen to that episode,
but we should say at the very least that one
of the big things because this will come up later,
that mangroves do is protect against high water and storms.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Yes, exactly. And so there's areas that get such high
waters and get such high winds during hurricanes that the
mangroves are like nuts to this, I'm moving elsewhere. And
those areas where they move away from or where they
just can't exist are called coastal lowlands. And these are
the antithesis of what people think of when they think
(37:24):
of the Everglades, because it's essentially a scrub desert. Yeah,
in that nuts, there's scrub desert ecosystems in the Everglades.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, It's it's incredible, like all the ecosystems are so varied,
it's really amazing.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Yeah. So it's populated by low growing, salt tolerant plants
that can handle being blown around in one hundred and
eighty one hundred and ninety mile an hour winds like succulents.
And then there's Florida Bay and this is again the
very very shallow coastal area that's bounded at the south
(37:59):
by the Key, at the north by the Florida Mainland,
and there's amazing fishing there and it's most people would
think like, that's not the Everglades, but it's technically included
in Everglades in particular Everglades National Park.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Absolutely, we got to talk about some animals here. We're
not going to go into too much detail, but we
got to talk about alligators and crocodiles because, as you know,
if you've listened to the show, that's the only place
on planet Earth that has both, which is pretty remarkable. Yeah,
it is a lot more alligators and crocodiles. Of course,
I think about two hundred thousand gators compared to two
(38:35):
thousand crocs.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Yes, but the crocs numbered two hundred back in nineteen
seventy five. That's pretty good comeback, yeah, because they were
never gone. Same with the panthers, there's a they're still
in a very precariously low population density of about two hundred. Yeah,
but that's up from twenty to thirty in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
It's crazy.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
So this is like these are the year or the
dividends that protection yielded, Like the Florida panthers should not
exist any longer were it not for people like E. F.
Co and Marjorie Stone in Douglas, like they would just
be long gone. And now they're starting to slowly come back.
And those things are beautiful.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Yeah, they are gorgeous, big kitty cats.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yeah, six to seven feet long.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
Yeah, you don't saw a wild cow?
Speaker 1 (39:27):
What?
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Yeah, Kenny said, they're not wild cows, But what.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Do you call them, like a feral cows?
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Maybe he did say wild cows, but wild just meaning
they're not anyone's cows.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
There's a word for that. I just can't think of it.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Unowned cows, no possess they were least cows.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
I think, so, yeah, that's pretty neat. Though then I
don't understand how those things survive because they're just an
alligator could take them down so easy.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
This cow was fifty feet from an alligator.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
It's so weird. I don't understand nature sometimes, even though
I love it.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
You've got your you've got your water mammals. Everyone loves
to see a manatee or an otter or a dolphin.
The manatee. There was a I feel like a push
to save the manatee started in like the nineties or
maybe even earlier.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Something like that, because they were in trouble and they've
kind of come back too.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
I think they went from endanger to threatened in twenty seventeen.
But just a few years ago they had what's called
an unusual mortality event, which looks like it is because
of a loss of sea grass and water quality.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Yeah, that's a huge one. So Lake Okachobee, as we'll
see as a toxic dump of farm runoff in nutrients,
and because it's diverted that water's diverted now to the
eastern coast and the western coast, they're very frequently algae
die offs or algae that lead to fish kills and
(41:01):
die offs, including the sea grass. So it's a huge,
huge problem. Not only is it not providing the Everglades
with water right now, that's actually kind of good because
if it were, the Everglades would be even more poison
than they are. So instead, the coastal areas are getting poisoned,
and that's where the manatees live. And when the sea
grass goes away, the mandes go away. So now they've
(41:21):
taken up programs of like feeding the manades expired heads
of cabbage and lettuce and stuff from grocery stores around
the state, and it seems to be sustaining them. But
the key here is to is to figure out how
to treat Lake Okachobe. That's the key. If you can
treat Lake Okachobe, you can start moving water from Lake
Okachobe down into the Everglades. You're taking an enormous first
(41:45):
step toward restoration, and you're also saving coastal areas that
are now just completely trashed by algae blooms and agricultural runoff.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
Do it turn the water on?
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Well, that's what they're doing there. So are we onto
conservation and climate change? Well?
Speaker 2 (42:03):
I want to shout out our bird friends real quick, because,
like I said, early on, the alligators were neat, although
we did see baby gaiters, very very cute, all piling
on one another trying to I guess get out of
the water. There's like ten of them. They were just
climbing all over each other.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
They don't get either.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Like five feet from us is very cute, But the
birds is what really knocked me out. And Emily and
I have gotten much more into I wouldn't even say birding,
but just appreciating birds enthusiasm. Like we got a bunch
of feeders now and cameras and we're looking them up more.
And she puts out her phone and then the Cornell
app you know, listens and records. So we've gotten more
(42:42):
into it. We don't actually go out with the binoculars yet.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
I have a magazine you got me a subscription to
that I hadn't heard of before that I love that.
I think you'll like too. It's called Birds and Blooms.
Oh yeah, and essentially it's almost ad free. I don't
know how they publish. I guess just sudden subscribe. And
it's all about birds and how great birds are and
oh check out this plant and this plant beautiful. It's
almost like just appreciating this stuff for ap preaching it.
(43:07):
It's not just shoving conservation down your throat. It's not
there's agenda. There's no agenda, aside from appreciating birds and plants,
it's a really great magazine.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Oh, my friend, I appreciate that that is going to
be coming Emily's way, and I will tell her that
you and you me are to think sure, but anyway.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
It'll probably never get back to me if you don't.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
The birds down there were just amazing cranes and herons,
and the really the showstopper was that pink what's it
called the rosette spoon bill. We came upon a big
mess of them, and I was just like, you got it,
Like it was in the swamp road ahead of us.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
How tall I knew it he was.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
I knew what he was going to do, and he
cut the engine and we watched them and stuff. But
then you know, he drives and they fly away, and
all I could think of was sorry.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Sorry for disturbing you. Yeah, how tall are they?
Speaker 2 (44:04):
They were about the same size as like a hair
in her crane, it seemed like. But just the spoon
bills are cool looking, and then when they take off
and fly, they're just this like flamingo pink.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
That's really cool, man. Yeah, lots of butterflies down there, too,
which I'm a big fan of as well.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Yeah, and hopefully we're going to be doing If you're saying,
how can you not talk about orchids, I think we're
going to do maybe a shorty.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
Just on orchids.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yes, So, as I was saying, there's some steps that
need to be taken to restore the Everglades, and there's
been a huge push to restoring the Everglades for decades now.
Unesco put it on his World Heritage List in nineteen
seventy nine, and even long before that, people will be like,
(44:50):
we've got to stop screwing with this stuff. We have
messed it up so bad with the system of canals
and ditches and dykes and levees and dams. We've got
to just undo some of this. And there was a
huge push to to actually do that, and in two thousand,
back when Congress was capable of being bipartisan, they passed
the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan SERP, and SERP essentially said
(45:14):
we're going to undo as much of that C and
SF project work as possible and just let the Everglades
be what the Everglades are. And had anyone been on
the ball and funding come through early, it would be
done by now. It was projected to cost eight billion
dollars in twenty years, and that is not at all
(45:37):
how it worked out at all. They're actually just now
starting a lot of the projects, and by a lot
of the projects, I mean a tiny fraction of what's
needed to be done.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Yeah, and you know, Kenny said the same thing that
you know, there's still real estate encroaching and developers encroaching,
so it seems like a one step forward.
Speaker 3 (45:59):
To steps back situation.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah, that they're still draining more wetlands to expand you know,
living space and grocery stores and everything else that people
use further and further into it. So it's fairly discouraging.
I know that was at one point a deal to
buy back a bunch of land from US Sugar, but
(46:23):
thanks to the two thousand and eight financial crisis that
went belly up, right.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
Didn't that just anger you? So this would have been
a huge, huge step because this was prime agricultural land
that was below Lake Okeachobean. If they could basically flood
that again, it would it would restore water back to
the Everglades. Would have been huge and US Sugar who
up until you said it, I've been pronouncing in my head.
US Sugar. They were on board, and a lot of
(46:51):
people were critical that Florida was going to spend one
point seven five billion dollars to buy like one hundred
and eighty thousand acres from US Sugar because it was
a struggling company to begin with, and YadA, YadA, YadA.
But all of those political obstacles and it was basically
a done deal. And then the financial crisis happened and
(47:14):
all those stupid banks that screwed up the entire global
economy also prevented the Everglades Restoration Room taking that enormous
step forward because Floor is like, oh, we don't have
any money all of a sudden, and we really need
every penny we can get.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Yeah, that's a real thumb in the eye.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Yeah, well, we promised a little bit more talk of
Pete and I'm glad Lyvia found this because I'm just
I think both it was pretty knocked out by Pete.
Maybe we should do a Pete cast one day. Yeah,
but there's a lot of that Pete rich soil underneath
the marshes there. And you talked earlier about what was
(47:53):
it that was the opposite of pete.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Marl.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Yeah, Marl was the opposite of pete. Pete forms from
organic materials that don't have oxygen. They're shielded from oxygen
so they don't break down. And that's why you can
find like amazing discoveries and peat bogs. The wetland dries up, though,
and that stuff can all of a sudden burn that's
going to release a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere,
(48:18):
and it's you know, all of a sudden, the peat
is threatened as well.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
Yeah. So yeah, there's a lot of problems with climate
change that climate change is going to bring to the Everglades,
and one of them is that restoration. The restoration plan
that was adopted in two thousand did not plan for
climate change. So they're having to figure out how to
implement these these things now, the projects now, without going
(48:43):
back to the drawing board and starting over and losing
tons of ground and time, but also without spending billions
of dollars on things that aren't going to work because
the Everglades are going to change with the climate. So
that's currently where they're what they're trying to figure out.
Oh yeah, yeah, and I recommend two different articles that
(49:05):
have two really different views of what's going on for
a really really sunny view that I almost found suspicious,
as if as if some AI wrote it, knew what
I was researching, and wrote it and served it up
to me just in time for me to report on
it to you guys. I don't think that's a thing yet,
but it made me think like that's coming in the future. Yeah.
(49:28):
I think it's called like a bypass surgery for the Everglades.
It's on fizz org and it's pretty good. It's very interesting,
but again it's got a really sunny outlook for the
opposite outlook. There is a up first public radio interview
with Jenny Stilettovich, who's a public radio reporter who reports
on the Everglades and has forever, and that's called how
(49:50):
to Save the Everglades. Would strongly recommend listening or reading
to that as well as that fizz org article, and
I'll give you a pretty clear perspective on what's going on.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Phyzorg sounds like Snoop Dogg named that what a perfect
way to end.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Very nice well. Chuck made another Snoop Dogg reference to
circle things up again, and of course that has just
triggered listener mail.
Speaker 3 (50:12):
Whether we like it or not, we're gonna shout out.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
I don't know if you did you see that flood
of emails come in from those high school kids.
Speaker 3 (50:23):
No, okay, you will.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
It was sort of right in the last hour before
we recorded, we got like ten or twelve emails all
at the same time from a high school class. So
I was like, somebody had an assignment, nice, and I'm
going to read one of them and shout out the rest.
This was called subject line. My teacher forced me to
do this. I'm not gonna say which student Ms Tiak
(50:46):
wrote this one, but I bet you could probably figure
it out. Hey, guys, really enjoy listening to your podcast.
I've been listening for the past month or so. So
far I've learned a lot from it. One of my
favorite topics was the origin of math symbols, since I'm
a big math person. I'm an ap English language student
at Wasco High School. My teacher is a huge fan
of both of you guys, and it's been making us
(51:08):
listen to a podcast episode every week.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
So we gained general knowledge for our argument essay in
the ape exam. She is now forcing us to send
a listener mail for a grade.
Speaker 3 (51:20):
If you happen to see this, can I get a
thank you to Ms Tiak?
Speaker 1 (51:25):
How do you spell it?
Speaker 3 (51:26):
T y A c K.
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Great name?
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Unless the ta is silent, then it's just yak or
unless the why silent? In this tech? Sure, what if
the A silent then it'd be tyke. What if the
c K is silent, it'd be tia?
Speaker 1 (51:43):
Very nice?
Speaker 3 (51:44):
Anything else?
Speaker 1 (51:45):
I think we've covered the big ones.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
I would actually like to thank you for giving our
class more knowledge in order to hopefully use it in
the exam. Again, thank you keep educating the world in
an entertaining way. Actually, that was a nice email, so
I'm gonna go ahead and say that was from a
Neil Neil and big shout out to Jessica, Damien, Elijah, Abel, Dalen, Marianna, Yeah,
(52:08):
an Angel.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
Great lineup of names or in hell, I'm not sure,
and it's a great lineup of people too, I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
And hey, this just in We don't normally do this,
but we got a bunch of more emails from kids
from this class, and you can't just read a third
of the kids' names and be done with it.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
You know, Chuck, what day is it? What's going on?
Speaker 2 (52:29):
I mean, this is much later, but like, you got
to read all these kids' names, so we're gonna do
that right now. This must be many classes, there's no
way all these kids are one class. But in addition
to the ones we read, can we also shout out
from that ap class? Ian and Brie and Megan and
Eileen and Jocelyn and Marisol and Amanda and Alexis and
(52:51):
Charisma and Celeste and Nicholas and Cecilia and Garelli and
alex and Inez.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
You think I'm done?
Speaker 2 (53:01):
Yeah, nope, halfway there, my friend. Wow, because we also
have to thank Paulina and Arturo and Jacqueline and Antonio
and Lauren and Brittany I see you, Brittany and Victoria
and Isack what a name Isick? And then finally Juliette, Jasmine, Ava,
Sebastian and of course dearest Kiardon all wrote in and
(53:24):
there was one student that was.
Speaker 3 (53:26):
Like, don't read my name, hooper humperdink.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
So we're not going to, but uh just wanted to
give everyone in the class a shout out.
Speaker 1 (53:33):
That's awesome. Sounds like a great bunch.
Speaker 2 (53:35):
Chuck, Yeah, so uh, Miss Tiack give everyone a great
grade and a big shout out to the ap English
class at Wasco High.
Speaker 1 (53:44):
Yeah, huge shout out. And if you want to be
like Miss txx class and get in touch with us
for whatever reason we want to hear from you, you
can send it via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 3 (54:01):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
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