What's the deal with controlled burns?

there's a Beasley brand storage thing. You're getting. You're getting some of that Beasley catch come in your way? Maybe what was that all about? I hope it's Beasley, it could also be Bisley. I don't know. You know, I got a listener mail from someone who went to get a Bond side tree in Boston after they were inspired after our episode, and the dude she's like, have you've been busy? Think? I was like, this week we've been like people want Bonds eye trees. The phone has been

off the hook. No way. Yeah, we could be getting some of that bonds ie scratch. We definitely should be. We're getting nothing. Japan should be giving us money. Man, what's their monetary unit again? Is it still the end? The Japanese yen? We we need many in coming our way. Yeah, soon many yet, and they're gonna try to flash some numbers that you know you'll be like, wow, that's a lot. Just remember it's about a hundred yend to one dollars. I'll just ten. I'll let you negotiate that one. I

think it's ten now, Yeah, I remember, uh. And the other night I turned on the television and Karate Kid was on that just moments before the Wonderful Bonds I seen. Yeah, I thought you took a picture of your television and I put it on Instagram, our instagram s, y s K podcast. Yeah, we're trying to take more pictures that what you do share ourselves. Yeah. Uh, but this isn't

about one. No, I've got one more shout out though. Um. There's a dude named Aaron Sits who remember when we had our horror fiction contest years back, and we said that anybody who was a part of it, if they ever published anything, we give him a shout out in perpetuity. In perpetuity, and Aaron Sites published something. He published a short story collection called The Andrew Jackson Stories, UM. And

he says that it was published by Lockjaw magazine. And he said they're about Andrew Jackson about as much as Richard Broad against trout fishing in America's about trout fishing. That means nothing to me. Well, it wasn't really about trout fishing. Um. But the the it's a slim little book. He sent it to us. I haven't read it yet, but he swears up and down that it's awesome. So we're gonna go ahead and take his word for it.

But congratulations Aaron Sites And if you want to go get your hands on Andrew Jackson's Stories, go look it up, go to the Lockjaw magazine side I would imagine. So that's done, and now we can talk about Controlled Burn. Yes, good band name, Control Burn, Yeah, depending on like maybe if it was like a soft rock group. Yeah, yeah, they're like a eighties wedding band, Controlled Burn. Good evening we were Controlled Burn. And this is by E. L

O right or Loggins and Messina. Yeah, I'm not dissing l O. By the way, I love No Llo was great. Did you see Kenny Loggins on documentary now Parter yeah, which episode is that? It was the two part one about them? What were the what? What did uh? What was their thing? Oh? They were a band? They were Um, oh that's right, that was the band. Yeah yeah, yeah, it was like the greatest band name ever. It was I want to say California Chrome, but that was that Racehorse.

I don't remember what they were called. Was it Controlled Burn? No? But that that was a good one. That two parter. Great show. I love that show. Uh, there's a new season coming out right, Uh they should Okay, so um again we're talking about Control Burning, not a band, an actual thing. Yeah. And this ties into our Wildfires episode yeah, which we did um years back. Yeah. Um, but Chuck, I always loved the opportunity to talk about Oh here we go and here's what now? Alright, so um, it

wasn't until about fourteen on one. The book by the way, if you're new to the show, Josh's long uh stated favorite book so long, and you've talked about it a lot, at least fifty sixty times. And I would have read it by now if you hadn't have talked about it so much. You don't even need to now you know the whole book so fourteen one. One of the premises of it is that they're like, our understanding of UM, Native America in North and Mezzo and South America prior

to Columbus coming over is like just totally wrong. There were way more people, they were way more advanced then UM. Anthropology and archaeology has long given them credit for the Internet. Pretty much they did, UM. But it wasn't until like the early two thousands that this idea of the noble savage who treaded lightly on the on the ecosystem, on

the environment started to crumble, right and UM. We started to realize that a lot of the features, what what the early explorers thought were natural features of North and South in Mesoamerica were um actually really well managed ecosystems, right um. And one of the ways that Native Americans used or managed ecosystems was through fire. But again there was this idea that Native Americans just had no idea

what they were doing with anything. So whenever archaeologists up until about two thousand, two thousand one or two, the late nineties maybe and it time they came across evidence of like a fire and it seemed like the Native Americans had said it they just assumed that either the Native Americans had said it to amuse themselves because they're big dummies, or because a campfire got out of control

because they're big dummies. But this is what they came up with their like, oh, well, they clearly wanted to set some fires for fun. They couldn't have possibly had any any point to it. But then more and more investigation has shown like, no, actually, not only did they know what they were doing. Like, if you step back and look at North America, the whole continent was a managed set of ecosystems, and one of the ways they

did it was through fire. The other thing that interested me too was depending on the the explorers and the Europeans and the settlers that came over to to North America. Um, some of them came and that was not anything new to them. It turns out that using fire to manage ecosystems is almost universal. Basically, yeah, I mean so of the reasons they might have done it. Of course, these days, one of the main reasons we do it is to

prevent forest fires from spreading, which we'll get to. But back then, uh, they would use it to improve the foraging conditions for free ranging cattle. Uh, increased visibility, access. There were all kinds of great reasons to burn things in a controlled way. Yeah. Supposedly the early explorers didn't really think about it, but the historians went back and looked at it. That the explorers who used to say, like, you can't you can't get through the forests in North America.

We're talking about swamp land like lands that wouldn't burn. Ye, but you could drive like a car through a forest in like Ohio or something like that. Although there's swamps in Ohio, a non swampy part of Ohio because of the use of fire. The swamps in Ohio, Yeah, there were. They filled them in and built to ledo over it. So, uh, you were talking about the um when Europeans came upon

the scene. Um, it's really interesting. I read this article called the Historical Foundations of Prescribed Burning for Wildlife colon a Southeastern Perspective Beautiful by A. Sydney Johnson and Philippe Hale, and it was I think it was an academic paper or something, but it started dawn on me when they were talking about the founding of America. Why we ended up like we ended up. Um, it just kind of

all came together for me. I love reading stuff like that that connects dots that weren't connected before, and this was a simple dot I should have connected before. But basically, in the northeast of the United States, it was largely settled by people from the southern lowlands of England, people that lived in cities and people that had not for the most part, lived on farms and didn't have a lot of experience with agriculture, and certainly not with prescribed burning,

which is another name for a controlled burn. Uh. And then in the south, particularly the southeast, we were more populated by people from rural areas of the UK and Scotland and Ireland and western England. They had a lot of experience with farming. And then I started to think, oh, wait a minute, that all just makes total sense. That's why the Northeast became industrialized. Why the South we're a bunch of yokels. They were agrarian, and uh, it just sort of it was very obvious thing, but it just

sort of like coalesced in my mind. Yeah. I knew that part already, the industrialization aspects of it. But one of the things that coalest for me was wondering how much of the Civil War was driven by by rivalries that go back to England and Scotland and Ireland rather than you know, the just the context of North America in the US. Absolutely, because I think for the most part, once people came over here, they did things like they did them were there, which makes sense. Like Scarlett O'Hara's

father had Irish brogue. Remember, No, Yeah, her dad he had. I'm pretty sure he didn't. I'm losing my mind. R. Well, it's been a while since i've seen that movie. H I'm pretty sure I believe it. But it makes sense. And like you said, maybe the attitudes came along with that. Maybe that carried over into how people felt about each

other pre Civil War. Yeah, I'll bet it. But the point of all this is that up north there was fire suppression that was the key driver, right, Like they would they would try to keep fires from breaking out under any circumstances. Yeah, and don't get confused, because a suppressing fire is a controlled burn. Fire. Suppression is putting out fires. So maybe we should just say up north,

they didn't think that starting fires on purpose was smart. Yeah, they were like and down south they said no, no, no, this is We've been doing it in England for years. They were like fire, Yeah, fire is a good way

to manage things. Yeah, and that's how the sation was divided, at least at first, and then the Civil War happened, and interestingly, UM the Yankees came down and said, hey, this old plantation, UM will make a really great hunting preserve, and I'm going to buy it now that I own this enormous tract of land in the South, I'm a Yankee and we don't believe in fire, so I'm gonna make sure no fire ever breaks out here, even though

everybody's been using UM fire techniques for generations. Yeah. And interestingly, to the fire techniques that the founders in the South used where the same kind that the Native Americans in the area used, so like they're on the same page, thousands of miles apart, and basically came and kind of started doing the same thing or kept doing the same thing that Native Americans were doing. And what makes that even more interesting is that UM It's using fire is

not universal to ecosystems like you. There's different techniques or not using it at all, depending on the type of ecosystem you're dealing with. Well, yeah, because in the in the UH Southern Lowlands, apparently the forests were like fire sensitive hardwoods and spruce tree. So it's sort of depended on what kind of forest you had, right, I guess there's weren't as flammable, right, or inflammable, which is a

word I think we should just get rid of entirely. Inflammable. Yeah, it means the same thing, is flammable, but it sounds like it means the opposite. It's just a stupid word. Really, Yeah, inflammable, I've never heard of it. Well, that's great, that's all the more reason to get rid of it. That's crazy. Inflammable means flammable. What's the point, man? What a dumb language. So um, the point of the whole thing is that fire is a natural feature of a living, thriving ecosystem.

It's it's something humans terrified of, but on the on the environmental level, on the ecological level, it's a necessary component to keep any or most ecosystems healthy. Right, And some groups of people understood this. The people who ended up running the show after the Civil War did not believe this, and it actually has had a very large impact throughout the twentieth century in the United States, which

were just now overcoming. We can actually thank one guy for changing the attitude toward fires and using them for um wildfire management. And we'll talk about him right after this. All right, So you tease the name drop it did right before the break uh in Well, there was there was this one particular northern landowner that came down south and brought up a bunch of plantations. Name was Henry

Bedell and he hated fire. Uh. Fire had burned his favorite horse maybe you never know, Um, so he hated fire. He was appalled at the idea of burning land. And uh, but other people, you know, like we're saying, in the South, so now it's a good thing. So in uh they commissioned the U. S. Bureau of Biological Survey, which was precursor to the Fish and Wildlife Service, and uh it was headed up at the time by guy named Herbert L. Stoddard,

who was the name that you teased. And Stoddard actually the thing that kicked it off the most was that these guys who um, who bought these huge plantations and turn thement and preserves, they like to hunt quail, and um, they right, and they noticed that the Bob white quail population was declining every year and they had no idea why. So they brought Stoddard it in and Stoddard became a Bob White quail expert. Well he already was. Oh, he

was already that's why they brought him in. Yeah, he was the He wrote a book about it, and um, this guy was awesome. He he helped found the literally helped found a profession of wild life management. Right, the whole field is like basically this guy. Yep, he wrote like some legendary books that are still used today. Uh. He was like literally the first critic of industrialized agriculture. He's just this sort of champion and a Georgian, a

transplant to Georgia. Yeah, yeah, I think he things from Chicago, but did a lot of work here for sure. Yeah. So he Um, he starts looking into the quail situation down here and he's like, well, you need to burn him. There's your problem. You guys have a woody undergrowth problem. And I looked into this and Bob white quail requires

some of the most complex habitats you've ever heard of. Right, So they thrive in areas where you've got what's called woody cover, which are dense shrubbery that's like mostly woody. That they can use is what's called umkovie headquarters. It's like little escaped patches, and they need them all over the place. But in addition to this, they also need food sources, so they need like crops of a certain variety, and then they also need some grassy areas. And they

need all this stuff in certain proportions. And if you have the proportions right, which apparently they did, the quail populations thrive. But if you have too much of one thing, then the coil populations diminished. And that one thing that had that had grown up was the woody undergrowth. And the reason the woody undergrowth was allowed to grow up was because the Yankees came in and stopped using fire.

That's right, and that interesting. So it was all because these rich guys, um, these rich industrialists who wanted to hunt quail were like, war's all the quail, and they hired the government to come look into it. And this government guy came in and was like, oh, here's the problem. You guys need to set this on fire. But the thing is is no one listened to him. Well, no, he had he had a few people that um I mean they hired him for his expertise, so he had

a few people that got on board. But he fought for many many years. UM. Like the history of control burning, it wasn't until post World War two is when it started to catch on a little bit, and then in the fifties and sixties it became more commonplace. But it wasn't until ninety one that the U. S. Forest Service had their very first symposium on UH on prescribed burns,

and that's what really turned the tide. But this was the nineteen twenties, and it took all the way till the nineteen seventies for it to become like completely accepted that's the right way to do things. And in the meantime we had a lot of unnecessary wildfires well. And one of the reasons too was apparently all the forestry um workers in the South were from the North UH and so they had these bad experiences in England and elsewhere with like devastating fires that kill people in wiped

out villages. And apparently they also had this German influence, like a protectionist influence from Germans in forestry school that was taught to them that way, so they were they

were doing it all wrong. Well, one of the other explanations I saw for why the forestry services like, no, you can't burn down here is because um one I guess one of the spoils of winning the Civil War was the North came down and just clear cut the south of its pine and they figured, well, the pine forests have been so devastated for what for timber uh huh, that we can't let any fire happen or else. No, no, this pine is never gonna recover, so we really can't

do any burning now. And yeah, so eventually everybody started listening to Stoddard and um. Now we use fire um pretty much everywhere in the United States. And there's a couple of reasons to set fires on purpose. And the coolest one is that if you set fires on purpose, you actually prevent wildfires down the down the line. Yeah. And and you know we're not talking about like completely

burning down every tree in the forest. Yeah, they're mainly burning uh that that you know, the stuff that will catch everything on fire, like the the understory, the underbrush, the dead leaves, dead branches, stuff on the ground, right, and if you if you burn that on purpose, you burn out the fuel for again a future out of control wildfire. One of the other things you do is you open up the canopy, right, So you're burning out some trees, but for the most part, the older, more

established trees can survive. And since that canopies opened up, more sunlight can come through. And when more sunlight can come through, you have smaller trees that can start to grow, so there's more reproduction. Actually, yeah, and and if you're listening thinking, well, this all sounds great, but uh, doesn't that release a ton of carbon emissions in the air when you're burning things? And if you're burning thousands and tens of thousands of acres a year on purpose, aren't

you just adding to the problem? No, I was being KOI, But the answer is no. Well it depends, so it's a little bit of both. I thought this was a little strange for the way that this was parceled out. So on the one hand, in this article it says, nope, Actually they've done studies and the the large established trees that can survive a controlled burn actually lock in more carbon um in the long run than uh, So the control burn releases less than say, a wildfire that's burning

out a control that burns those trees and unlocks that carbon. Right. And then later on in the last like section of this article, the authors like, Yeah, that really just depends on what kind of forest you're talking about. In some forests, it doesn't make a difference at all. And and yes, and in that case it's bad for the for the environment. I don't know about that last part. I'm the same.

I just think it was weird. Well, I think it's cool though, Like what you just said, the the large trees capture that carbon, and if you burn off the small stuff underneath what you said earlier, it's gonna open up that canopy and let those big trees grow bigger. And uh, that's gonna you know, that's gonna be good in the long run, short long term gain for a

short term carbon emission output. Right. So and then also in addition to opening up that canopy allowing more sunlight so reproduction can happen, there's actually they found, um some species of trees that depend on fire to reproduce. In chief among them is the giant sequoia in Yosemite. And I think the sixties, Yeah, the sixties. Um, they were like, the sequoias aren't reproducing. What's going on? And somebody, a guy in aimed um. Dr Richard Hartsfeldt said, I think

it has to do with fire. We stopped doing fire, and we want to do fire, so let's do some fire. And they're like, shut up. Hearts felt you can't even talk right. And he's like, I'm gonna go burn some stuff and prove you guys wrong. So he started doing some tests. He did, he'd do fire tests, and um, he found that when fire was applied to a sequoia forest, the sequoia cones opened up and their seeds could germanate. Yeah,

and the big daddies are very fire resistant. So they were like, I'm a little hot underneath in the undercarriage, but it feels nice. But it feels pretty good, and I'm gonna stand strong. But what I'm gonna do, like you said, is I'm gonna open my cones. Uh. And the other thing it does is, you know, when you drop seeds, if you have a woody understory and understories another word for that under brush under what'd you call it? Uh? Under cover under coverage? What do you cover for a

Bob White coil. That's what the Bob White coils call it amongst themselves. All right. So imagine a seed dropping from a pine cone from a hundred feet up and the ground is covered in leaves and sticks and things. That seed might fall on a pile of leaves six inches deep and just sit there, just sit there and be like I'm unfulfilled. A ka. It never makes contact with the soil where it needs to be to establish roots, right, or even if it did, the sunlight is being blocked

out by that understory. And fire solves all those problems. It does. Because fire pops that pine cone open, the seeds come out. Uh, they are in the newly burned ground, which has a lot of carbon fertilizer now in the form of ashes and um, lots of sunlight coming through because the understoy has been burned away. So fire is the greatest thing ever. Pretty amazing. Um. But again we said before, it depends on the ecosystem, right. So, especially

out in California, they got kind of burned happy. They're like, oh, wait, fire can actually suppress wildfires. We have tons of wildfires out here. We need to burn all the time. And they started burning and burning and burning in southern California and it had zero impact on, um, diminishing wildfires, and they couldn't figure out why. And they finally said, well, maybe we should study the ecosystem we're setting on fire

and see what's what. And they found that they really shouldn't be burning the the southern California ecosystem to prevent wildfires. So that actually makes it worse in this case. Yeah, in southern California, they have what's called chaparral, and it's the uh I mean, if you've ever been to southern California, you know that. Um it looks lovely now in the neighborhoods because people planted stuff everywhere, but the hillsides are kind of gross. They're brown in there, forny and they're shrubby.

It's like all tumbleweeds. Yeah, it's just it's not uh, it's just just sort of gross in those canyons. And that's just my opinion. Yes, well that's chaparral, right, yeah, okay, and uh that chaparral. Uh, well, if you leave everything to itself there, apparently it's super fire resistant, so every like if you left it naturally, it would only catch flame every hundred years or so, right, But they were setting fire to this every few years um in order

to try to prevent wildfires. And what they were ultimately doing was burning the chaparral, which was naturally flame resistant, right, And in favor of the chaparral. What was since it took a long time to grow back, the stuff that was beating the chaparral out that could grow faster, was actually very flammable. So they were promoting the growth of wildfire fuel in southern California by burning these the chaparral.

Too much good stuff, it is, it's really interesting, all right. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about a little bit about climate change and how that factors in, and then how you can do your un control burn all right. By the way, I was kidding, no one should try this ever ever. Ever, we should have probably not broken for a minute or so before you said that. I don't think anyone just paused and said, oh my gosh, I'm gonna run out because we didn't

teach him yet. Oh that's a good point. You should never start a fire. Yeah, don start fires. Okay, I got that out of the way. Uh, climate change is having an impact on these wildfires. Um. From between nineteen seventy nine, there's a season of fire, wildfire season, we talked about it in our episode, when it's just more likely to happen. In between nineteen the global fire season increased by almost nineteen Yeah, which means like the fire season grew longer around the world by that much, which

is bad. And at the rate of eight hundred and sixty four million acres worldwide of wildfire that burned every year, which is an amazing number. Um. Apparently that emits more than half the amount of carbon that fossil fuels put out in the atmosphere. Yeah, so that's awful. That's a tremendous amount, right. Yeah. And it's a feedback loop. It is because um it the it contributes c O two

to the atmosphere, which promotes the greenhouse effect. Right. The greenhouse effect creates drought conditions, It heats things up, it lowers humidity. Um. And it becomes a vicious cycle, right because when you have drought conditions, you have more dead trees that provide more fuel for more wildfires, and more wildfires put more c O two into the air, which promotes the greenhouse effect and it gets worse and worse

and worse. More wind to problem. Yeah. I was reading about the Fort McMurray wildfire um up in Canada, and apparently they just had some freak weather, the Fred McMurray wildfire. Yeah, he was like, I got no Fred Mury to um he uh? When not? He the city for McMurray, like a little outside town there. They think the fire started somewhere out there. They're not sure what did it yet, but they had some freak weather where it was like ninety one degrees. They still have like frozen lakes up

there right now. But the temperature was like one degrees, humidity was at like and winds right about forty five miles an hour. So it was just ripe for a wildfire. And now it's up to like about four hundred fifty hectares, which is exactly a ton of acres. I think, Yeah, man, alright, so how do you start a controlled burn? How do you do this carefully? Well, first of all, you want to work for for a service or fishing game or Yeah, the the author of this article says, go to local authorities.

I'm like, you can do this if you're not a local authority, Yeah, but I guess you could. Like He also mentions the landowner in the pine bearings of NuGen that does his own control burns. Surely you have to get you got permitted and if you're doing it yourself, right, Well, yeah, he's saying go to local authorities. But I was surprised that, Yeah, you can do it if you're not a local authority. Yeah.

I didn't know that either. In fact, I'm still not quite convinced at the very least you want to collaborate closely with local authorities if you're not one, that's right, Okay, uh so yeah, I mean this beginning stuff is you know, get your permits, find out what the best time a year, and all that stuff. What you need to do is just leave it to the people who do it best.

But this is what they're gonna do. Um. But the first thing that you want to do after you've gotten all your equipment and all that good stuff is look at the weather and pick out a good time to do it. Yeah. You want it kind of damp, Sure, you want the humidity above, low winds. Yeah, basically everything the opposite of the weather like it was in Fort

McMurray on May one. Yeah, less than eighty degrees ideally. Um. And then once you've got everything all set up and you've got a great day picked out, um, you're going to start a tiny little test fire in a corner. First, you want to wake up and have a complete breakfast. Then you can go start your test fire. UM. Test fire basically just look at it and say, how are

you gonna behave today? Yeah? Um, Well, even before you set the test fire, you've got you want to plan out your area that you want to burn, and in the area, you want to identify natural fire breaks. These are things like roads, bodies of water, that kind of stuff, things that the fire is not going to spread across, right ideally, And then you want to create even more

fire breaks around it where there aren't natural ones. You want to plow and dig and cut and um basically create an area to where the fire can't spread outside of the place you want to contain it into. I wonder if dropping an atom bomb on a wildfire woodwork operation plash here. Sure, I don't think so. Probably, I think that would make everything a lot worse. So, once you've got all your fire breaks, both natural and the

ones that you've just made yourself with your hands. You want to start your first fire, called the backfire, and the backfire is down wind. It's against that fire break, so you know it's only gonna be going in one direction. Um, it's against the wind, so it's not gonna be super fast, and you're gonna be able to control it. Like you're kind of starting off nice and easy. Yeah, just don't cut yourself out of the gate. Yeah, just take it

nice and easy, like you said. Then after you got the backfire going, you create flank fires, one on each side, right and um, they are not necessarily going against the wind, so they're gonna burn a little bit faster. Yeah, they're right angles to the wind. Um. And one of the neat things about fire when you're creating a control burn is the places you're burning first actually create fire breaks

themselves as they burn the fuel. Have you ever seen the gods must be crazy too, didn't see the second one. There's like a bush fire and um, I can't remember. The main guy's name is awesome. Um. He saves his like companions by um setting fire to the grass around them so that the brush fire has nothing to burn when it gets to them, so he creates a firebreak basically by burning the area around him before the fire gets there, so he controlled it himself. Was that good

the sequel? Sure? Yeah, yeah, both of them are really good. And I remember that when it came out, it was like kind of one of the first, uh foreign sort of indie movies that made a big dust up. I feel like, you know, they got a lot of attention. It's good to be crazy. Holds up, does it not? To check it out again? Uh? So where were we? We've got our flank fires, we've got our back fires, were creating larger fire breaks. And then you want to ignite the big daddy, the head fire. The head fire,

it goes in the direction of the wind. It's it's up wind, so it blows very quickly downward and spreads quick. But because you said it last, there's less fuel for it to burn. It's gonna finish out the fire for you pretty quick, but it's not gonna go beyond the areas that have already been burned because you just created those fire breaks by burning them on the backfire and the flank fires. So after that happens, your fire should be done and you can go home, just forget about it.

After you set that head fire, just getting your truck and go home. No, there's a little bit more. You gotta stay there with my friend until afterward. And then they call it mop up duty when you obviously put out all the flame is completely with water, cut down any little trees that are on fire, and just extinguish everything and leave it a big, smoldering, nasty mess that

is actually going to be good for the environment. And you gotta tell everybody who drives by and shouts at you for setting a fire that you're doing this because it's better off in the long run. Say, the end justifies the means pretty neat. Yeah. Another tip, don't wear rubber clothing when you're part of a fire setting crew because it can melt and stick to your skin. I wonder this is something I didn't look into. I wonder if the surely they're they're they're just wildfire fighting teams

that are doing this. Right, it's the same people, right, I would guess. I would guess I would hope, because the thing is is like, yes, you can, you can be told how to set a fire. I think that's probably the easy part, like figuring out how to adjust when it starts to get out of control or doesn't do what you think it's gonna do, or the weather conditions change, or if it jumps that firebreak that you think is big enough, Right, that's when I think you

need somebody who's like experienced it's gonna be. There should be the same people doing this who know what they're doing. I'm sure it is. And if that's what you do, we want to hear from you, so shout out to us. Well, yeah, I think we heard from some fire jumpers in the last episode we did from the wildfire one, and that was a good one to go back and listen to that.

Everybody do it now. If you want to learn more about controlled burns, you can take those words in the search part house to works dot com since they said search parts time for listener, ma'am, I'm gonna call this mind blown, not my mind listeners, pind Hey, guys, I was listening to the Landfills episode and the most important issue you brought up the song Powerhouse by the Raymond Scott Quintet. Josh had hummed a snippet and Chuck said

it was Leoney Tunes. That was a moment of cognitive dissonance that rivaled almost anything I've suffered in my forty one years, because Josh was actually humming a bit of love Villa or Levia Strangiato by Rush, not some dumb fifties ban I know that song. So this scot my attention powerhouses from the thirties, and it was like an orchestral right on the fifties band. This guy out of his mind? Well maybe so. I couldn't believe you were singing a part of one of my favorite songs by

one of my favorite bands and crediting someone else. As I watched the Raymond Scott video, though, the universe refocused, like when the candle holder resolves into faces, or the Canadian flag is irreversibly changed into two angry guys pressing their foreheads together case closed. Have you ever seen that the Canadian flag? No, and I've seen when that says like Jesus loves you or something like that. I never knew that the Canadian flag, if you look at a

certain way, looks like two guys. Uh. I went and looked into sort of what about the man on the moon? You ever seen that? I don't know, But well then you haven't. Okay, you would know. Yeah, it's it's kind of like, yeah, I guess I can see that. It's like the arrow and the FedEx logo, like once you see it, you can't unsee it unless you really want to, and then you can't. Okay, I don't see what this

guy is talking about with the Canadian flag. Well, you have to type in Canadian flag faces and then someone will have It's a bit of a stretch. If you ask me, have you ever seen any Sister Wendy stuff. No, Um, she is a nun who um it just understands art and art history like no one else on the planet.

And she had like a PBS show for a little while, and she just she would just point out things in art that you just never think to look for, like in the negative space, like the sometimes but also more like um, like the shadows surrounding a family and being it makes him look isolate and you're like, oh, yeah, I didn't really put my finger on that or whatever. She's just got this really great knack for explaining art and really interesting way. And I think it's online for free. Alrighty,

sorry about that. Now that's all right, So where are we Canadian Flag too angry. Guys, thanks for broadening my understanding of one of the first Rush songs I learned to play on drums and then I found this on song facts dot com and it sounds credible. Apparently this was an issue, and Rush did not give credit to

Scott for using Powerhouse. By the time Raymond Scott's publisher notified the band's management of the infringement, the statute of limitations had expired of the challenge, but rusha's management, out of deference to Mr or Mrs Scott uh and being the class act that they are, offered a one time penance payment, feeling it was the ethical thing to do all involved. We're happy with the resolution and Rush has

no further financial obligations under the story. I know under the settlement they were required not required to uh accord Raymond Scott partial songwriting credit on the Beast. So apparently Powerhouse and rushes Labilla strangeata or similar and they nicked it from there. Huh. Never knew I didn't either, Uh. And that is uh. From Ken Wrinker in Colorado Springs. Thanks a lot, Ken, and he says best to Jerry in the game. Jerry says thanks. I think yeah, uh, Ken,

that was awesome. I take back that you're out of your mind. You're interesting instead, how about that? Uh. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweek to us as by Eska Podcast. You can join us on Instagram as by Eska podcast too. You can join us on Facebook dot com h slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you

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