School of humans.
Deep in Peru's cloud forests, a stream of fog weaves past tree trunks, mist blankets the undergrowth, filtering the sunlight above and supplying moisture to the plants below. The result is one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. They are up to three thousand species of orchids here, more than anywhere else in the world. The forest has a way of seducing people, and in two thousand and
two the Sirens Lord James Michael Kovac to Peru. An orchid enthusiast, Kovak flew there in search of the Holy Grail, in search of flowers nobody could see anywhere else, And one day, as he walked past a roadside flower vendor, his heartly jumped out of his chest. It was a Lady Slipper, a pinkish purple orchid with giant petals unfurling like the wings of a butterfly. Kovak was mesmerized. He began haggling with the shopkeeper, but they refused to budge.
The owners knew they had something special, so Kovak paid the asking price three dollars and sixty cents. A week later, Kovak had printed his boarding pass home, he slipped the orchid into a cardboard tube and boarded a flight to the United States. When he landed in Miami, customs officers failed to stop him, so Kovak made his way to Sarasota to the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, home to one of the most diverse orchid collections in the world. Kovak
brought the specimen in and watched the reactions. According to journalist Craig Pittman's book The Scent of Scandal, the flower sparked a simultaneous wave of eye widening and mouth opening. Nobody bothered to ask if he had acquired it legally. Shortly after, Selby published a scientific description of the new orchid, They named it Fragmipedium kovakii. Then phone lines at the US Fish and Wildlife Service started to buzz. It was Peru.
An American botanical garden, they claimed, was saying it quote discovered an orchid that had been clearly smuggled out of Peru. Soon, armed agents were knocking on Kovac's door. They confiscated his papers and more than three hundred plants. Indictments streamed in the gardens were fined for violating the endangered species Act,
the garden's orchid expert placed under house arrest. As part of the punishment, the garden had to buy a full page ad in a trade magazine apologizing a subtle message to other institutions that they should learn from Selby's mistakes. That was the dirty secret. In botany, this type of low key smuggling was par for the course. In fact, when activists tried to change the name of fragment pedium kovakia, arguing it was wrong to name the plant after a
person who poached it, scientific authorities shrugged and did nothing. This, they said, was too high a standard. If botany reclassified every plant name for smugglers, poachers, and thieves, the entire field would suffer quote major nomenclature instability. In Layman's terms, it would throw the entire scientific field into turmoil. On this podcast, we've explored the crimes of obsessed hobbyists, of organized gangs, and even corrupt governments. But what about the
elephant in the room. What about when the places entrusted to conserve plant life are committing the crimes. In this last episode, when the worlds of policy and piracy collide, I'm summer rain Oaks from school of Humans and iHeart podcasts, This is bad Seeds. In the early two thousands, the Selby scandal would divide orchid collectors. Some complain that this was government overreach. Others wailed that it was about time rich Western institutions had been taking credit for quote unquote
discovering plants that natives knew about for ages. But the fight went far beyond claims of who got there first. For many, the problem was the profit motive. Kovac told investigators he planned to artificially propagate the smuggled flower and mass and those are his words. He didn't express any intention to share future profits with the people in Peru who had actually discovered and were actively protecting the plant.
In Botany, this kind of behavior, smuggling a plant and then getting rich off its mass production, conjures a painful past, especially in South America.
You start to hear them call Henry Wickham the Pirate of the Amazon and the destroyer of worlds.
That's Joe Jackson. He's a writer.
I'm the author of At the End of the World.
And he's an expert on one of South America's most reviled villains, an Englishman by the name of Henry Wickham.
He was born in eighteen forty six, had a comfortable middle class upbringing until his father died in one of the cholera epidemics in eighteen fifty five or eighteen fifty six. And you know, back then you didn't have pensions, and his mother had three kids. He had a dream in drastic descent in class, and he had a spirit of adventure, and he had a talent for art. And at that time, if you were an adventurous boy in the British Empire, you went out to the wild places and you explored,
and you wrote a book about your travels. And Henry thought he was ready made for that. The explorers were the astronauts of that generation, and Henry wanted to do that.
So Henry, desperate for both money and adventure, set out into the world, spending his twenties exploring places like Belize and Nicaragua, hoping the jungles would give him material for books and maybe even change his family's fortunes.
He wasn't by science. He was driven by ambition. I mean, he kind of wanted to come back up in the world from what he had lost.
He was ambitious, sometimes to his detriment. Henry was a thoughtless explorer. Consider the time he brought his wife Violet to the islands near Papua New Guinea.
There were still cannibal tribes and some of the islands around there, and Henry was pretty impulsive, and some of the natives had stolen a couple of his canoes, and Henry got rene, and he took some of his workers and he went paddling after them and left Violet on that island for I don't know, like ten twelve days like that, by herself, and she knew there were cannibals around.
Turns out that leaving your wife alone on an island inhabited by cannibals not a great recipe for a happy marriage. Violet ended up being okay, but their union not so much. Henry's absent mindedness aside, his travels helped him become something of an expert on rubber, and this was the eighteen seventies. Rubber was big. Railroads, telegraph companies, bicycle manufacturers, hose and gasket makers. All of them were starving for the stretchy stuff.
Rubber was a central component. Everything was steam driven, so he had giant turbines. You had these giant pistons, you had looms, steam powered looms, and you had the British Empire's navy. And with all of these moving parts, you needed oil. But you also needed rubber to cushion the blow.
Problem was there was only one place to get rubber, the Amazon Basin. About ninety percent of the world's latex came out of Brazil, and that demand, derived from the poetry heavy at Braziliensis, was fueling a boom of wealth. Entrepreneurs flooded Brazil, laying thousands of miles of railroad track and erecting resplendent buildings sculpted from the finest European marble. The British wanted in on it.
They needed to find some way of getting rubber from the forests of Brazil to the British empires of.
Possession, and that's when they set eyes on Henry Wickham.
And the director of Q Garden guy by the name of William Booker wrote to the council and said, find me that guy. He knows something about rubber. So Henry did not go to the Amazon thinking he was going to be a secret agent for Q, but in a way he became a secret agent for Q because Booker Rhodehiman said, would you agree to be our agent and bring as much rubber back as you possibly could?
I agreed. In eighteen seventy six, he paddled down the Amazon River and moored his boat near the town of Boeien by a grove of potter trees. There, Henry enlisted a group of locals to help them collect more than seventy thousand rubber seeds, wrapping them in banana leaves. When it came time to leave the country, Brazilian officials asked Henry if he had any seeds on him. He lied and said he had some, but that they were academic specimens.
Said I've got some rubber seeds, and he paid the tear of you know, about ten or twelve seeds. I forget the exact number, but it was very low.
It was an undercount of say sixty nine nine ninety.
He saund off and he brought as seeds to Hugh Gardens, and twelve percent of them survived.
British scientists grew the seeds and sent the surviving specimens to the British Empire's colonies.
They eventually transferred them to vast plantations around Singapore and malays and that became the British Rubber Empire.
The British Empire's rubber plantations, all grown from Henry's seeds, would utterly destroy the trade in Brazil, and it.
Broke the back of Brazil's rubber empire in one year, which is pretty dramatic.
In the eighteen seventies, the South American country controlled the world's rubber production. By the nineteen twenties it had all slipped away. The dramatic boom and bust killed Brazil's economic momentum with effects that are still felt today. In Britain, Henry would be knighted, but Brazilians would give him a much different title.
He was the devil incarnate. They hated him down in Brazil. They thought he had raped the nation.
He'd be called the princip those ladros, the prince of thieves. Today, botanists have another name for him, biopirate. Henry Wickham's theft of those seeds would sap in calculable economic potential from Brazil while enriching the leaders of British industry. But what did his actions do for him?
The British Empire kind of padded him on the back and paid him the equivalent of about seven hundred dollars and said go on your way, buddy. And he felt cheated pretty much for the rest of his life. And what he did for the rest of his life was basically try to find discover this next great wonder plant. And he never really did. He never found anything that was as quote miraculous as the rubber tree. I don't know.
It was kind of like some mythological character that kind of wanders the world trying to replicate his early success.
If you search the annals of botany, if you look at the names of great plant explorers, you discover more and more people like Henry Wickham, people who today we'd call poachers, traffickers and thieves, or as experts now call them, biopirates. It's something of a theme. In twenty fourteen, the journalist Sam Knight, writing for The Guardian, put it this way quote one big problem with plant crime is that it is so difficult to distinguish from the act of botany itself.
For decades, biopiracy was not the exception, but the rule. Q Gardens paid Henry Wickham seven hundred pounds to steal, mislabel and smuggle those rubber seeds out of Brazil. The British East India Company asked the Scotsman Robert Fortune to sneak into forbidden China and steal the country's tea making secrets. The list goes on and on. In a way, the study of botany was just an extension of empire, or, in other words, exploitation, and most of these early day
biopirates felt little remorse. They had no problems stealing from or talking down to native populations. In the words of one nineteenth century botanist.
The Spanish Americas have accomplished nothing in the development of the knowledge of their rome, floras and vegetable products.
The Anglo Saxon blood must originate and direct all exploitation and development.
This, of course, couldn't have been further from the truth. Take San Shona officionalis a leafy green shrub with starburst blooms that grows across the Andean forest. For centuries, Peruvians and Bolivians had used Saintchona bark to stop fever. They were onto something. The plant contains quinine, an anti malarial. Centuries after that discovery, a British alpaca farmer named Charles Ledger caught wind of the bark's medicinal properties in the
eighteen sixties. He traveled through Peru and Bolivia and with the help of his servant, a native named Manuel Incra Mammani, he stole seeds, smuggled them to Europe and sold them to the Dutch. The production and study of quinine soon exploded. It would save millions of lives. And that is where the ethics of biopiracy gets sort of Harry.
It's a real gray area in a lot of ways. There's always two sides of this biopiracy thing. I mean, it's a sovereign nation, seems like it should have a right to the things that are found within its borders. But then what the British Empire used when they were taking the Tinjona tree for quini, and they said, well, look, this is for the greater good of mankind. And that's something that still is going.
On regardless of where you land on the issue of quinine. This long history of biopiracy left many nations, especially those in South America and Africa, feeling cheated, and it wouldn't be addressed by the international stage until the early nineteen nineties.
In Rio de Chenaier you had a the nineteen ninety two Earth Summit, the first summit that basically came up with international regulations against biopiracy.
That year, an international treaty was signed, the rules for which are pretty simple. If a country is home to a genetic resource, for instance, a rare or unique plant like rubber, then that country is entitled to benefit financially from any profits when the plant is sold elsewhere. It's essentially a thank you for keeping and protecting the plant over the past few centuries. The same goes for a
traditional knowledge. If a pharmaceutical company learns about a plant's medicinal benefits thanks to indigenous knowledge, then locals deserve some financial compensation when the profits roll in. In other words, it's about giving credit where credit is due. Despite these efforts, biopiracy remains what Jackson calls a rancrous issue, especially as corporations get bigger and bigger.
You still have that kind of sovereign rights versus the greater good, that kind of pushing pool that is part of the argument, that's part of the exchange. People don't really believe in empire right now, Government empires aren't so big, but I mean private are a big deal.
In the US, corporations can patent a plant, new breeds can be protected by intellectual property law, and this has gotten some folks in trouble. In nineteen ninety five, the US Patent Office granted scientists a patent for turmeric, also known as kurkuma longa, because it could be used for wound healing. Of course, over in India, locals had known
this for centuries, if not thousands of years. A couple years later, a Texas company tried to patent basmati rice, a decision that, to put it lightly, made a lot of farmers in India very angry. And the treaty itself, even though it's prevented a lot of exploitation and theft, has its downsides because as it's gotten harder to export and study some plants, they've only gotten rarer and more endangered.
By the time I wrote a book and talked to some dis botanists and then demoloed it would go down to the Amazon and study these things. Is said. You go down there and you're the villain. You don't know whether or not you're going to be called a biopirate. Even after you've jumped through all the hoops and paint all of the fees at the airport, they might decide that you're trying to steal from them, and they'll sequester you for a long time.
All of you or specimens will die.
The ability to patent plants in the US has also made it a huge target of foreign biopirates. It's twenty eleven and a field manager working at DuPont Pioneer is peering across a cornfield when he notices an Asian man crouched over a row of maize sifting through the dirt. Now this isn't just any old cornfield. This is a grower field, a place where agricultural companies test news strains of veggies, ones that could be more resistant to disease
and famine. In other words, exactly the kind of plants a foreign nation might want to steal and replicate. The manager drives over to the visitor and confronts him. The man named Mo looks startled. He explains he worked for a university, but he doesn't go into any more detail. Instead, he quickly gets in his car and speeds away, the field manager notifies the FBI. Turns out the FBI is
already on Moe's tail. Mo Hi Loong has been sneaking through the cornfields of Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa with a crew of accomplices, stealing ears of corn, rooting up seedlings. The FBI discovers that Moe works for a Chinese agricultural company, and he's been targeting cornfields owned by American corporation. His goal to unlock the trade secrets buried in the DNA of various new GMO corn. If he can steal the seeds, his employer can reverse engineer the plant to skip years
of expensive biotech research required to create new strains. Mo and his accomplices would later be caught trying to ship two hundred and fifty pounds of stolen corn seed to China, hiding hundreds of small samples in envelopes of microwave popcorn. The trade secrets hidden in those seeds were worth at
least thirty million dollars. After police caught up with him, Mo would be sentenced to three years in prison, a pretty light sentence for a biopirate all things considered, because remember that story about Charles Ledger, the guy who's sticky fingers helped launch the world quinine biz. You may recall he had help from a native, a guy named Manuel Kramamani.
While in Europe, Ledger was celebrated as a hero, but in gram Amani Back home, locals soon learned what he had done, and he'd be arrested, beaten, tortured, and then killed. The difference between a smuggler and a saint, between a backstabber and a lifesaver, may merely depend on whether you live in the nation that was pilfered or the one that profited. But where there are people willing to kill for a plant, there are others who are willing to
die for one. Their story when we return Leningrad nineteen forty three, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union with a plan. First they would surround Leningrad, Then they'd cut off the city's supply routes, and then finally they'd starved the population into submission. The goal, according to a high level memo, was to quote wipe Leningrad from the face of the earth. For months, Germans dropped bombs onto Leningrad's hospitals and homes.
The Luftwaffa zeroed in on the food depots and markets. Meanwhile, Axis troops looted the cities famously ornate palaces, transforming them into smoldering heaps of ash. Leningrad became a tomb. Michael Wahlzer, a political theorist, claims quote more civilians died in the Siege of Leningrad than in the modernists infernos of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki taken together. But the Red Army punched back. Snipers lurked in the rubble, hid in the bell towers,
and burrowed under bodies. A chorus of anti aircraft weapons boomed day and night. Millions of ordinary people who did not or could not evacuate, stretched their bread rations by substituting flour with sawdust, and in the center of town, a team of botanists made a decision that would change the course of world history forever. In nineteen forty three, Leningrad housed one of the world's largest seed banks. Established two decades earlier, the institute was at the forefront of
a new type of botany. Not as a haven for biopirates or greedy monarchs, but a new botany for the good of the world. In Leningrad, scientists used a vast collection of seeds to study plant immunity, pathology, and cultivation. It was a library designed to preserve and protect the plant world's genetic story, a repository and intensive care unit for some of the planet's rarest and most endangered species.
As the neighborhood around the institute crumbled, dozens of botanists working inside risked their lives to keep those seeds safe. But bombs and mortar fire were the least of the botanist's worries. Their greatest enemy was their own hunger. To preserve the seeds, the botanists had to keep the collections warm. With electricity destroyed and the brutal Russian winter barreling in, the scientists scoured the charred rubble of their beloved city,
burning any scraps to keep the collection alive. Then the ice swept in. With the cold came mass starvation. Up to one hundred thousand people began dying every month. Even the rats began to show the rib cages inside the seed bank. The botanists, grappling with their own hunger, faced an unrelenting temptation. They had access to rice, wheat, peas, oats, corn, the work courses of agriculture, and yet each scientist, despite growing increasingly hungry, refused to tap into the collection to
save themselves. One by one, the botanists starved. According to The Washington Post, the first was Alexander Stutkin, a peanut expert. He collapsed at his desk. Then it was the institute's rice specialist, and then another and another. Eating the seeds could have saved their lives, but each scientist had made a choice. They refused to grow or eat the seeds because doing so would have destroyed the future they had worked toward. The Siege of Leningrad lasted eight hundred and
seventy two days. Over that time, at least nine botanists starved to death, but the seeds survived. Years later, those same seeds would be crossbread to produce crops used around the world today. You and I have definitely eaten food descended from those Leningrad seeds. In a world of biopirates, these botanists were something different. What journalist Boyce Rensburger called the first martyrs for biodiversity, and that's where we want to end this podcast by focusing not on the thieves,
the crooks, and the corruption. We want to end by shining a light on the people making huge sacrifices right now to save us. In the nineteen forties, the Leningrad Seed Bank was a novelty, but today there are approximately seventeen hundred seed banks across the globe.
My name's Eleanor Braman, and I work at the Millennium Seed Bank at the roeb Botanic Gardens Queue.
The Millennium Seed Bank program is the largest conservation resource in the world. If there's any place to find hope in the future, it's here.
Since two thousand, we've worked with ninety seven different countries and territories to help conserve their native flora. It sounds deceptively simple. You just say, well, you just go out and you collect some seeds, and then we dry them and freeze them.
Of course, it's a little more involved than that. The Millennium Seed Bank is the kind of place that would make a Doomsday prepper drool.
The vaulte underground is actually within half a meter thick reinforced concrete, so we're near an international air The idea was it could withstand a plane going down. We've also got radiation detection which would cut off a supply to the vault if radiation was detected, and we have a flood protection mechanism, and we have backup generators, and we have some solar power.
And protected in these underground vaults are seeds. Lots and lots of seeds.
So we've currently got six walking cold rooms that are active, four of those are full, and we've got space for formal We've currently got forty thousand species held in our vault.
Forty thousand species, or at the moment, around fifteen percent of the world's plants, all being saved for the future and emergencies.
We are a real bank in that sense. We save things, we hold it for a rainy day, but you can withdraw seeds at any time.
And Millennium is not alone. Many countries have their own networks of seed banks. In the United States, there's a National Plant Germplasm System full of cryo preserved seeds in Fort Collins, Colorado. Cherokee Nation has its own seed vault, and at the Smithsonian scientists are currently banking the genetics of two hundred plus orchids native to the US, more than half of which are endangered.
Goes back to the fundamental that all lives dependent on plants. The majority of our ecosystems are made up of wild plants, and these are the things that are providing us with the oxygen that we breathe, and preventing floods and providing all these amazing services within the landscape. We tend to focus on things that are threatened in the wild, things that are rare so they're likely to become threatened, and
also useful plants, And that's in the broadest sense. You know, it could be useful for food, for medicine, for fiber, for cultural reasons, whatever it is.
Focusing on plants that are threatened carries a certain feel good message, but it's not like you could bring a species back from the dead, like back from extinction, right wrong. In the nineteen nineties, there was only one cylindrocline lorentzi alive in the wild. The small tree native to the island nation of Mauritius, was saved from oblivion when scientists
successfully extracted and grew sells from dead cylindricline seeds. More recently, researchers in Israel were able to nurture a date palm called Phoenix dactylifera from two thousand year old seeds. That tree now bears the same fruit that biblical figures may have eaten. And impressively, in twenty twelve, scientists discovered a seed of a flowering Siberian plant which had been buried an ice age squirrel thirty two thousand years ago, and
they successfully revived it. And you know, that spells hope for the plants plagued with poaching or overexploitation, because it's here in places like this that solutions are emerging.
We're involved in a project in South Africa because the illegal trade in succulent plants there is kind of at a crisis point. They seized something like seven hundred thousand individual plants at the borders to date, and some of those plants can be tens to hundreds of years old, so you know the impact that that's having on these
populations is pushing them towards extinction. So our partners in South Africa have recently developed a nursery for growing on succulent plants and for training their staff in how to propagate them and how to restore them to the wild, and we've got a really interesting program that's just starting to see if you can use stable isotopes within the plants as a signature for where they came from. So then could you say whether something's been illegally collected or
was from a reputable nursery. So can we help to stop this illegal trade In.
That way, maybe in the not too distant future, buying plants will be more secure and transparent. You'll be walking through the store and be assured that the plant you're buying didn't come from a bad seed.
So we're going to walk just a little bit further down this hiking trail we.
Wanted to end here in Tennessee.
So as we get out here and take a walk, you'll see gravel right at the surface, so very little soil, very rocky, harsh environment for plants to grow in.
David linsecom, manager of the Natural Heritage Program for the State of Tennessee, is showing our producer Gabby around the state's Cedar Glades to witness a little miracle.
Today we are here at Couchville Cedar Glades State Natural Area in Davidson County, Tennessee. Today we're going to look for the Tennessee purple cone flower Echinasia Tennessee ensus. It is a globally rare species and a state rare species.
The Tennessee cone flower Echinasia Tennessee ensus is a gorgeous bloom. It kind of resembles a spinley purple daisy. It attracts important pollinators like bees and butterflies. It's also rare. It only exists right here in Tennessee.
The plants that occur here many of them her nowhere else in the world, including our Tennessee purple cone flower. It's surprising when you walk this hiking trail, the cone flowers scattered throughout, and it's so common here that probably
no one thoroughly thinks about it being globally rare. In about a fifteen miles of range here, and there's only five wild populations, and that's in the entire world, and it's all right here, primarily in Davidson County, Wilson County, and Rutherford County in Tennessee.
The coneflower thrives in this unique environment where shallow soil is layered atop limestone croppings, but back in the day its survival was at risk. In the nineteen seventies. It became just the second plant to be added to the US Endangered Species list. But when state and federal entities realized it was at risk of disappearing, they jumped into action to conservative.
So it's the two pronged approach of protecting the habitat and then working with conservation horticulture to collect seas, propagate plants, and re establish colonies that has really proven to be successful for this species.
Workers acquired land to tech the environment. They enlisted botanic gardens to propagate the cone flower. They sent specimens to seed banks for preservation. Up until twenty eleven, the government was spending around thirty thousand dollars a year to keep the flower on life support and it worked. All of that effort helped revive a plant staring down extinction. Similar efforts have worked with other plants you've heard about in
this podcast. The Saint Helena ebony is bouncing back. The cacti that you heard about in episode one, the ones found in a man's apartment in Italy. They're back home in Chile. Io For the cone flower, botanical gardens and seed banks saved the day. They propagated the plants, providing an alternate source for obsessed buyers, known as Echinasia rocky top, helping reduce collection pressures on wild populations. Seeds became widely available across the country, feeding the demands of gardeners and
what the cedar glades protected. The government was able to reintroduce the flower into the wild. In twenty eleven, the Tennessee cone flower was removed from the Endangered Species list.
The Tennessee cone flower was a big deal because it was one of the first plant species ever listed on the Endangered Species Act and it took thirty two years to reach that recovery state. It's quite an achievement for myself. That was one of the first species I was really actively in working with and you know, reaching recovery. I mean, that's what our job is, to get these species off the list, and so being able to actually do that
and accomplish it was very rewarding. It really took a small army of folks to make it happen.
It really does take an army. And now you're a part of it, because the first step is awareness. But if you're still wondering where do I go from here? How do I help stop this? I have a few ideas. First, know where your plants come from, especially if you're like buying wood or something like that. If the person or place you're buying from can't tell you anything about the plant source, then get it somewhere else. If you're dealing with foreign or endangered species, always ask for a FIDO
sanitary certificate. If they don't have one, look elsewhere. And please don't buy non commercial plants from places that do not have nursery certificates. Many can be illegal or poached. Now if you must, always ask the seller to show their nursery certificate, permit or FHIDO Sanitary certificate if need be.
Support your local botanical garden, not only are they wonderful places to visit, where your money goes straight to the conservation and protection of species, and you could give to groups like the Environmental Investigation Agency, the International Union for the concert of Nature or Cactus and Succulent Plants Specialist Group. The work they do matters, and please, if you're in the US and witness the poaching or trafficking of plants, or have any evidence of any other wildlife crime, report
it to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Their tip line is one eight four four three nine seven, eight four seven seven. Again that is one eight four four three ninety seven eight four seven seven. I'm Summer rain Oaks. That's it for Bad Seeds. Thank you for listening and for building a future for some good to grow. Bad Seeds is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. I'm your Host Summer rain Oaks. Lucas Riley is our writer, Gabby Watts is our producer, and Amelia Brock is our
senior producer. Fact Checking is by Savannah Hugely and Zoe Farrell. Original music is by Claire Campbell, sound design and scores by Jesse Niswanger. Development was by Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer. Special thanks to a voice actor Christopher Goldie. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzer.