Hal Flanders Interview, Part 1 of 2

DT: Let's begin. My name is David Todd and I'm here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. We're in Alpine, Texas, at the home of Hal and Mary Flanders. It is April 4, 2001, and we have the good chance to be talking to Mr. Flanders about his work in many different regards on behalf of the environment from recycling work to being a guide to introduce people to the flora and fauna of this area to political work against radioactive waste being disposed in this area. And on many other issues that I probably haven't mentioned here. I wanted to take this chance to thank you for spending the time with us. 0:02:06 - 2153HF: It's good to get a chance to blow off steam. DT: Well, good. I'd like to at least get us started by maybe asking you how you first might have gotten exposed to the outdoors and interested in conservation. Is there is anything you could point to there?0:02:26 - 2153

HF: Well, it was pretty much self-taught experience in the first place. But when I was three years old, I was climbing Lookout Mountain, where Bill Cody's grave is in Colorado. And I was ahead of my father, of course, and I hollered at him, hey dad, look what I got. And he came chugging up the hill with a full pack, got up there, promptly drew his pistol and shot. And ruined what I found. It was a rattler. I can see why he did it, but I thought it was too bad, and I never did like that idea. So I found nature early, just being curious.

The important thing, I think, was that as I developed, not a whole lot brought me into contact with nature excepting frequent camping out. We used to do a lot 0:03:39 - 2153of that and continued that into our married life with our own children. So it was pretty much self-taught.

And finally realizing that I was only partially informed about anything, I started trying to find ways to organize this. And in my birding activity, fell in love with hawks, raptors.

And I had a buddy in New Jersey called Len Soucy, who runs the Raptor Trust in New Jersey. It's a wholly, privately owned thing. People finance it to a pretty good extent. But he's kept it up all these years as an animal hospital for birds, and I just got a report from him the other day. This year's produced three thousand, one hundred and eighty-four, if I recall correctly, birds people brought to him to fix. And about fifteen 0:04:45 - 2153hundred of them were raptors, hawks. And then I got to know him, why, we were pretty set up on the Kittatinny Ridge banding hawks in a blind and trapping them and all of that goes with that. The recording, sending the information to Washington, learning about the decline of the population of the birds and so forth.DT: What year was this that you began banding?0:05:13 - 2153

HF: It would have to be about 1953. DT: So this was before Rachel Carson had come out with her Silent Spring?0:05:23 - 2153

HF: Yes. Yeah. It's one of the bibles, you knew that didn't you? That and the Sand County Almanac. Okay, well, when we got to fooling around with the hawks and banding them and sending them on their way, that was thrilling and a lot of fun.

But then-1972, I retired from organized business and was glad of it. First thing we did is to buy a trailer and we pulled nineteen thousand pounds all around on the road, all over Canada, United States, Mexico, everywhere, looking for the hot spots for birding, the hot spots for scenery. Every-all this constant contact with nature in one form or another in this biome, in that biome and another, in a different life zone-asks questions. Why, why does all of this go on? And I've been doing nothing but thinking about that since then 0:06:38 - 2153and having a lot of fun doing that.

Ever so often I discover something. I remember one occasion in Mexico, which I'll tell you about later, we found new spiders and brought them into American Museum of Natural History and were credited with two new spiders. You'd think there wasn't anything new anymore, but there is. Lots. Only thing is, they were out at night. At night there's a great deal of life going on. So, as we traveled looking for a place to settle down, where is the place, almost settled in Mexico but it was 0:07:20 - 2153starting to get politically unstable. So after touring for years and camping all the time, usually in the best places you could get in, like Cerocahui in southeastern Mexico. That's the best birding spot in the west for migration. Oh boy, those were fun days.

Well, about 1970-I guess in the winter of '72, I was in the Cerocahuis, and we were visiting our friends that-who ran the museum there and he came up one night where we were in the campground and said say, I just got a bunch of students in from Evergreen College in Washington. And there was about thirty of them. They're here-tomorrow they're going to go out and do some experimenting, but tonight they don't have anything to do, 0:08:29 - 2153have you anything you could show them for entertainment? How about the Galapagos Islands? Ooh, yeah. I had led a trip there and got a lot of photographing done. And so I packed up and brought this stuff up there and showed it and those thirty kids were pretty interesting and live wire, wanted to find out if it was possible to make a living and still be a field biologist. Not a biologist in a lab, but in the field. Well, that suited me fine and we got along well. It was about three years later that I was settling down with Len Soucy again, up in Cornell, at a conference for raptors research, and a kid came down and 0:09:28 - 2153sat kind of in front of me in tailor fashion on the floor and he grinned at me and says, you remember me? I said yeah, you're the man that was following the Cotamundis around the Cerocahuis. Yeah, he says, there's ten of us here now. None of us were interested in birds at that time, but we are now. Ranger Hunt has gathered us and we came back here in a school bus to attend this conference. Oh? Where did you sleep? 0:09:58 - 2153Under the bus. Okay. There's a-this-here now and-finally I thought-exciting in her stimulus for grabbing at knowledge, said to us, you-you come through Alpine, Texas, don't you when you're going back south for the winter? Yeah, I do. Well, we-we got a raptor research conference coming up there in 1975, and we don't know much about this, but we sure would like you to help us if you could. So I stopped there the next time we went by on the way south and here they all were sleeping on the floor in an-in an abandoned school and grabbing food as they could and so forth, but really into birds and research. So I helped him with this, and with that, helped build a kitchen and some study carrels and stuff of that sort. They were sleeping on the floor in the gymnasium. 0:11:18 - 2153They're a great wild group. And doing interesting research.

And about that time I met another fellow who turned out to be very important in my life. He was from Montana and his favorite place in the world was Big Bend National Park. Before he moved down there, he'd come down and he photographed everything around the place. I met him-I was doing still photography at the time and he was doing movies and we sort of teamed up and followed these kids around doing their research in Mexico, bat falcons, the Logol Andrina cave, so big a cave that you can put the Empire State Building right down inside 0:12:00 - 2153and not touch a wall. That's a real cave. We were after the birds that nested in there at night, swifts and so forth. We were both photographing. Went into Palenque and found out that there was a lot there to photograph.

The two of us developed a team and we roamed widely all over the Chihuahuan Desert. Not the Sonoran, the Ch-Chihuahuan. It's the least known desert of them all. And found a lot of interesting stuff to photograph 0:12:42 - 2153and to learn about. And finally we argued a lot and arguments usually centered around what would best show-what would best tell people who can't see this beauty there-it's-it's important that they come to realize that it is beauty or they'll never take care of it. And it's getting worse every year. We can see it even as closely aligned as we were with our trips.

So, we ought to make a movie and we ought to make it pretty so that people will come to appreciate the beauty, and if they appreciate the beauty, maybe they'll take care of it. And then we ought to have a part of this trilogy, what man is doing in the desert. So we made the first one, Land of Lost Borders. Second one, Where Rainbows Wait for Rain, that concentrated on the water, or the lack of it, and the third, 0:13:55 - 2153Desert Semaphore. Signals, you're getting signals, are you looking? And when we got all done, took a year each to make the films and Burgess Meredith, we got to narrate it. I asked the old man if he knew how big the desert was and he said he thought he did, so forth. Wonderful narration for the background that we'd provided for him. And we were pleased with it when we saw the result so we went down and showed it to the superintendent at the park. And he-well, first we'll get rid of that film that Washington made for us, and we'd like to use your film to introduce the people to the desert when they come in and need to see a show. Okay. Same result with the second one. When we got the third one done, we showed him that. I-I don't know, we-we better not show that one. It was pretty to the point. We needed changes. And government folks are limited with respect to the changes they're able to make. Well, we finally finished those 0:15:22 - 2153films and went to make others and so forth, but Harry had long said, I won't live to be fifty. Nobody-no male in my whole family has ever lived to be fifty years old. And at about forty-eight, heart attack. Bing. Gone. But he left some heritage in those films. I wish he'd lived to be a million because he could have been making them all that time. All these explorations, mine, related items in different biomes, in different life zones sometimes. What's the difference?

Why, that why, why, why stuff got to be pretty 0:16:15 - 2153exhausting, but it did enable me to be able to run the rivers down here in the Rio Grande with people who wanted to know-they-they-they wanted a river trip. That's what started it. And they'd ask the Far Flung Adventures people, can you get somebody to go along to tell us what it is we're seeing? And so we hooked up and did some of that. And it helped the people I think, and me, both. DT: Let's resume, you were telling us about being a guide on some of the raft trips on the Rio Grande.0:17:01 - 2153

HF: Yeah, we had some interesting ones. It's really fascinating to be in a riparian area adjoined by a desert because you've got the water, and as long as you're near that water, you've got the cane and the other things that lie on both sides of the river and make it look green and lush, creatures, yellow-breasted chats screaming at you every foot of the way and you're trying to find them and see them. It's not easy to do. And you beach, 0:17:37 - 2153you walk back in. You don't have to walk very far, a very short distance until all of a sudden you are in the desert and there's a line that's very narrow that divides the riparian area and the desert itself. And that was fascinating. So, everything down there is fascinating. There is more life in a desert than there is in any of the other biomes. But it's at night. Well that's practical. It's hot during the day. So you expect to find things at night that you don't see in the daytime. If you're not going to spend all your time sleeping. And it's fun to do, over a campfire and all that.

You can engage people and 0:18:30 - 2153ask them the questions about what do you like about this and so forth and so on. And are you surprised? And as they come to answer and their-their eyebrows are up. They're-they're surprised all right. Well, what are you going to do about it? And talk about that for a while. It's a-it's a recurring theme that goes on and on and on as you acquaint people with what's going on and how absolutely remarkable it is. Nothing a few billion years can't bring about. They realize that the world does not-the sunrise does not-sun-sunrise or sunset on us. There's more. A lot more. And everything I've noticed in 0:19:23 - 2153the news that talks about nature and there's some very good programs on TV about nature, PBS and so forth, but I don't see how people can see that stuff and not be taken by it and ask some pretty important questions about just what's what and who's who. We are not the only creatures on the planet. I-I'm sure I'd get argued with, but I'm pretty much of the opinion that we're not even the-the most remarkable creatures on the planet. Each in his own way, so many of the others outstrip us. We're-if it weren't for 0:20:07 - 2153our minds, we'd be in big trouble. The trouble is that our minds are moving in all sorts of wrong directions. Our revered leader W and his gang busy making money all the time, are-are ruining us. We don't take the steps necessary to give the creatures the place in the sun that they deserve. We could learn so much from them.DT: Can you give us examples of the sort of things that are quite remarkable that animals do that we might learn from?0:20:55 - 2153

HF: Well, I think so. Some of the things we should learn not to do stand out. I've got a can up on the shelf here behind me. It's a beer can, little bent. I found it out in the middle of the desert. Somebody had tossed it out there. And in it is the skeleton of what's left of the spiny lizard which found the can after it was thrown out there, perhaps with a little moisture still left in it, stuck his head in, but the spines all point backwards. And when he tried to get his head out, he couldn't do it. So he's still there. And some of those spiny lizards and some of the whiptails are amazing. We got a bunch of whiptails out here that there's no known male in-in that species at all. They're all female. 0:22:01 - 2153Somehow they found the trick to manage to fertilize their sperm, or their reproductive agency, and it goes in and produces another clone. We are very excited about cloning now. If you get so good that you can do something like that, to perpetuate your species, that's-that's remarkable. I don't know that we want to get into that. We already have too many people. This has been a striking example shown to people who scratch their heads. You can't throw it away. There's no such thing as throwing it away anymore. It needs to go somewhere, to be taken care of.DT: Well, speaking of that, maybe you can talk about your efforts to get a good recycling program started here in Alpine?0:23:04 - 2153

HF: Well I guess that's what I am talking about, isn't it? Recycling. Germany has a very strict code on all that. If you build something and you have to crate it to send it to the buyer, you're responsible for that crate until they send it back and you do something with it. You recycle it. Well, we're not that advanced yet. We begrudge having to spend any money on anything after we've got the money. Money is not the whole answer by any means. So to try and find ways which to convince people that there is the possibility for reducing waste came about at an opportune time. Alpine here had a-a landfill but what's bad about landfills is they keep filling up, then you have to go buy a new one. 0:24:09 - 2153And at that time, they were beginning to get worried about putting sheeting under the landfills in order to prevent leakage into the water. By the way, I should tell you something about the water system in Alpine. Usually bolsons or aquifers are-Willy, lie down-he's my dog, he's smarter than me. Most aquifers are built in sandstone or limestone, porous rock that can build up and hold a whole bunch of water, acres and acres of it. Not in Alpine. This is a volcanic area. We're only about eighteen miles from the epicenter of the earthquake we had here a few years ago. And our aquifer contains 0:25:13 - 2153nothing but impervious rock, volcanic dry light, stuff of that sort. It breaks brittle and shards, and so forth. So they got these bunch of little bitty rocks and the water is held in the interstices between the rock, not inside it. So, when the earthquake got here and that situation for water, that's what we are depending on. Anybody know that the earthquake will happen next week, or when. When-when, not if. Jars that enough so that it drains. This couldn't happen in other places. There are only about, less than ten of these in the world that they know of. So we're worried about that-that kind of thing constantly. 0:26:10 - 2153Nature has made this an area that's desert-like, dry, the variety. But organisms fill this org-or this-or this-this place too; only it-it makes sense to not be out in the daytime. You don't live in the daytime. I think I showed you an example of the scat of horned lizard? Which is, oh, maybe an inch long and a quarter of an inch in diameter and on the end of this dark scat made up largely of ant shells, is a little bit of white that's fastened to the bottom. It's nothing but uric acid crystals. Don't give up any moisture if you're in the desert. That's an adaptation don't we wish we could come up with. There's 0:27:12 - 2153all sorts of things that are examples for us in the desert about how to live in the desert. Well, that kind of experience throughout nature and everything I talked about with people in all these years, sets the stage for coming into a city like Alpine and we're not doing anything but making more stuff to throw in the landfill. But the regulations are getting tougher and tougher, so finally we get permission to build a landfill and we don't have to 0:27:53 - 2153have a layer under it because there's a thousand feet of rock underneath. It's not going to leak through, but it's a limited kind of-twenty tons a day is all we're permitted by law to put in the landfill that we have now. Thirteen of it comes from Alpine. Alpine is growing. One day we're going to pass the twenty-ton limit. So then what if we didn't put so much in the landfill? All right, that takes recycling. Well, then, let's recycle. And more-more out of stubbornness than anything else, a group of us got together and had a little to bother about but try to wrestle with the City Council. And grudgingly we got them finally to help us a little bit, and then a little bit more, and then a little bit more.DT: What year was this?0:29:01 - 2153

HF: 1990. I started it in 1990, in June. And we developed, oddly and strangely. We were breaking glass in fifty-five gallon drums by poking them with two and a half inch diameter pipe. All that did is to bend the fifty-five gallon drum out of shape. We broke the glass but that was a poor way to do it. So we invented a way where you have a lid top on a fifty-five gallon drum. A hole cut through it that you can drop the bottles through, and a rotary lawn mower principle with a heavy, heavy object turning around. And put a chute to put it in. So you turn this thing on, the shaft is revolving and this big heavy thing going around bang, bang, bang, crushing the glass very nicely. And it cost thirty dollars to build. We used, reused, what's the popular manufacturer? Kenmore. We used a Kenmore motor, the shaft in a Kenmore, and put it together and broke glass. We did this 0:30:28 - 2153big time. We found out right away where we had erred in starting out to encourage people to take stuff to the grocery stores that had the barrels outside. The principle is, you go in and you buy something in a bottle, or glass, take it home, use is up, bring it back to the store, drop it in the barrel, go back some more, nice natural route. And it started working and we got more and more that we had to-but how do you get rid of it? In a little remote rural town, you got a hell of a problem trying to move material. So we finally found somebody who would buy our glass and we put fifty thousand pounds on 0:31:18 - 2153one truck, which is all the law would allow. And took it from here to Waco, four hundred and seventy miles. Well, at two dollars a mile, that's nine hundred and forty dollars. And when we got the fifty thousand pounds there and ready to sell it, they gave us a thousand dollars. And volunteers in about three months had piled up that tonnage for which they got sixty dollars. If you have to ship it, no good. So then we realized what we should be trying to do is to develop an area where we could get stuff recycled and sell it to profit. But as long as you have to ship it, you can't do that. So we'll never make money and I've tried to assure the city government that they're foolish to look for anything out of that. The way it's going to come, the way it'll come, is right down here in the corner. These blocks.DT: Tell us about the blocks.0:32:28 - 2153

HF: The blocks are blocks of paper called papercrete or fibercrete and in the west here, there has been some experimenting with that. What you do is get paper and a little lime and a little dirt. And none of these are extremely expensive, especially if you're recycling paper. So we started out getting law books sent to us, cut the back and the end pieces off, take the paper, sometimes five pounds of paper in one book. And pack it up to throw into a mixer where this is turned into a slurry of paper, very wet paper. And when you pour it out into simple little molds, four sided molds, pour them full, let them dry. It's was better insulative value than concrete block. There's better fire retardant-not-not better fire retardant, but it's good fire retardant properties. And it's about one quarter the weight among the group messing with this kind of thing, the statement is commonly heard, well, a woman can build a house like this. She can. If you've lifted concrete 0:34:01 - 2153block up to the next story a few times, you'll-you'll know what-what, that again is trying to learn from nature. What has nature done-every creature has to have some sanctuary and you can think of every sanctuary in the world and there's an insect in there somewhere. The desert is full of them because they're all out at night. You can see them then. You can't see the daytime. And people want to go out in the daytime okay, show me something. Well, come on, meet the desert on its own terms. And so that's what we're trying to do is get paper, make building blocks out of it, in the same town that the paper is collected in. No shipping. So we're working on that now and we've got a fellow in town, Tom Curry, who is making these cinder-not cinder, but paper blocks. And that's going to work right in with straw bale development and tire houses and so forth. Using stuff that's no longer useful, using it one more time constructively. That's what man has always done. Teepees, caves-original settlers in Mexico. Adobe-adobe is 0:35:40 - 2153dirt and maybe some straw and water and that's it. You use what you have and you really don't need Italian marble to live in. So we're trying that as an example of the possible movement in the direction for recycling, especially in little towns. It's this travel that-shipping that kills you. So if you're saving all of that expense, it's perfectly practical. Will that go well? Well, if it's a rough exterior as is the case with adobe, plaster over it with some more that slurry, let her dry. Paint it if you must, but don't paint it red. This is a desert. Well, it's that kind of thing and that sort of thinking that has been 0:36:49 - 2153going on for a long time and slowly learn how to-to work the system so to speak. And small town governments are no more giving than large town governments.

Now with W, we're going to find out all about how important it is to make money. Money is not the answer. It's learning to cope with nature on nature-nature's terms. You're not going to cope with her any other way. So, that was an upshot of the efforts towards recycling. But it's exceedingly rewarding to go over to the-I only live two blocks from the-the recycling yard and I'm over there frequently, and finding automobiles driving into the compound, little old ladies in tennis shoes getting out, coming around and picking up the 0:37:53 - 2153back of trunk, and taking out glass bottles, flashlight batteries, cooking oil, automobile oil, but no more than five gallons at a time and you have to swear that there won't be any antifreeze in it, refrigerators. But if going to take refrigerators over, don't forget to empty the freon. Bottle it up and send it back to New Hampshire and recycle it. All metal now does pretty well. About sixty-seven percent of all of the aluminum in the United States is 0:38:36 - 2153being recycled, in about the same tonnage as steel. Well, Mesabi Iron Range just ran out of Minnesota. We got to go find another big place and destroy it completely in order to get the metal we need, or are we going to use the recycle? We're going to be forced into complying with nature, like it or not. So let's get about it. I don't have much respect for government. It advances too slowly, if it advances at all. There are better things we know to do. It's time we got at it. DT: Speaking of your efforts to minimize waste through recycling...0:39:25 - 2153HF: Yeah.DT: I know you've been active in trying to dissuade the powers to be using West Texas to dump the hazardous, radioactive waste. Can you tell us a little bit about your efforts there?0:39:41 - 2153

HF: Well, I'm satisfied that when Teller and Oppenheimer got together and came up with a bomb that worked, they were exulting about it one day in Einstein's presence. They told him all about what they'd done and how the-problems they'd solved and so forth. After they quit talking he sat there and scratched his head, Einstein did, a little while and he looked at them, he says, what are you going to do with the waste? Oh. 0:40:18 - 2153That's why I say that one of the most common words in the world of science is oops. And that's what we don't do. We-we do things, which are remarkable, completely remarkable but we don't think of all the things that could happen. And we should explore, okay, we can do that, next question. Should we? I think we gave the wrong answer to that question, we should not have. We don't know enough about it yet to do it well. So, when I hear that little Sierra Blanca up the road a piece is picked out for a target, they're going to put atomic waste that's been gathering for a long time now and-not only from Texas but also from Vermont and from New Hampshire-Maine, Maine 0:41:13 - 2153and Vermont. We're in a compact. That's a little community of about three hundred people, most of them Hispanic. Now we're going to go out there and dig up a great big hole and put all this stuff in there. Well, sure, that ought to be all right. What if it isn't? What do you do to that place, what do you do to those people? They can't defend themselves. No way. So we got excited about it down here because this is not that far from Sierra Blanca as a practical reason, but also as a simple justice. It's-it's wrong to target areas that are not able to defend themselves. So Gary Oliver and Susan Curry and I 0:42:08 - 2153went back to Vermont thinking to let them know what they're doing to us. And the first day back, I was shocked. They had set up a Senate hearing and one of the Senators that ran the hearing in the courthouse at, oh I forget, but the capital, had a hearing and we were, the three of us, allowed to put our point of view across. And when we got all done talking, they turned the meeting on to comment for the public and no less than fifteen 0:42:54 - 2153people in the audience sputtered around, no way to inter-communicate to each other, got up and apologized to the state of Texas for what they were going to do, send all that stuff from the Vermont Yankee down here to put by those defenseless people. And that shocked me. That could never have happened in Texas. We don't apologize for the way we do. That's the way granddaddy did it, that's the way I'm going to do it. It's my property; I can do whatever I want with it. I heard the man that ran for Governor make that statement when he was asked about why he was selling water out of Comanche 0:43:46 - 2153Springs. That's arrogant. So I thought we ought to shape up and we went on then to march varying degrees in about ninety three-mile trip down to Brattleboro, to hold a rally. The-the people up there had gotten together to march, which was abolition. You know, that's enough already, stop, don't do anymore. First find out what the heck you got to do in order to be safe. Well, we did our best to join them in good spirits, and they joined us all the way along the line, every little town we'd come to, some people would meet us a 0:44:40 - 2153mile or so out of town, and walk all the way with us to the end of the town, talking about what we were doing and so forth, but that was one of the highlights I think. Gary and I kidded a lot, he pushed me up a lot of hills. But this again was a done deal, it's just formalities and it would be signed, signed off on. But when it came right down to push and shove, in Austin they had a hearing and finally decided, no, we better not do that. So usually I find myself fighting for a battle I lose. This time we won. (misc.)DT: I understand that you are a self-educated person yourself about the environment and conservation. I was wondering if you could comment on how awareness is slowly evolving among society at large?0:45:57 - 2153

HF: Well, much as been made of what all we have learned and I have come to feel that much should be made of what we haven't learned yet. The-you remember Rachel Carson, she tapped us on the shoulder pretty good, and should have. There are people today doing the same thing and the more I learn about what we do, the more I'm chagrined at some of the actions we do take. Much of it, almost all of it now, it seems like, comes out of corporations abusing their power and running things to suit them. And we just elected a president who's bound and determined to make money the big issue of living. I don't see the sense in making money if you're not going to sustain yourself. 0:47:09 - 2153Sustainability seems to be a new word. They don't understand what it means. But, ever so often, nature taps us on the shoulder again. We better listen. Slowly we're getting into worse and worse shape with our concentration on money and pride, aggression. I don't see a good future unless we learn-learn to shift our-our attitudes. We've got the greatest tea-na-teachers in the world in nature, watching how she copes with problems. She's been practicing it for billions of years and she has some pretty good 0:48:07 - 2153answers. We're unfortunately not developing as fast in education, in science, as we should. Even there, we aren't just excluding all interest in our egos, we're fighting with each other about who invented what first and so forth. We're not going to make it, the prospect is not good. If I had to guess at our hope of survival, I'd have to hedge by saying, I don't think our hope of survival is very good at all unless we have a major change in attitude towards sustainability. Much of what we do is anything but sustainable.

Here the water situation is so terrible on the Rio Grande, it's dirty, there's 0:49:16 - 2153something like two and a half million people in El Paso, Juarez, Elephant Butte Dam controls a lot of water for agriculture. Everybody slices up their share of the water and it turns out that there's none left for the wild animals at all. Haven't got time for that.

Well, everything in nature is built to counterbalance-balance, counterbalance, balance, and if you're going to do-get into an escalation war, which we've done with pesticides and so forth, you escalate with a bug that will kill, with a drug that will kill some bug. And the bug, a lot of them get killed, but some don't. And they develop ways around 0:50:05 - 2153that. Pretty soon you've got this bug. Now that-yesterday's solution is no longer a solution. You're escalating. You do something to harm nature, nature does something that takes care of that. You really think we're going to es-out escalate nature? I don't think so. So I'd say the human animal, unless he changes an awful lot and decides that sustainability is what's important, not your size of your fortune, and the bigger the fortune, the less that you get in danger from doing things that are illegal. That's not right.DT: You mentioned pesticides as being one example of where people inevitably lose out, and the war is escalating attacks and I was wondering if you might comment on a little bit about some of the newer ways that scientists are trying to protect plants and us through genetically engineered organisms. Do you have any thoughts about the wisdom of that?0:51:26 - 2153

HF: I don't have as many thoughts as I have misgivings. The food we eat developed over eons. And until we started messing with that sort of thing, we were a pretty healthy lot. As a young man eighty years ago, I didn't have any friends in school that had allergies or that were suffering from this, that and the other, cancer, all that was unheard of. Now grade school kids know about that stuff because there's so much of it around. Isn't that telling us anything? It seems to me we are involved in trying to, again, out escalate nature and it's not working. Some remarkable work as been done, it's true. But again, the old question that Einstein proposed, you know, what are you going to do with the waste? You come up with something that gets escalated above and so forth. Then 0:52:50 - 2153something else is going to come up.

You're fighting a war with nature instead of trying to benefit from her. And in the long run, I don't think that's going to work. A lot of innocent bystanders in the way of organisms and insects and-I'm appalled at how little attention we pay to pollinators. Where do we think the food comes from? But we just-kill the bugs.

I got personally involved in 1979 when the question came up about, where 0:53:32 - 2153the heck do the monarch butterflies go when they leave in the fall? In 1974, science found that they go down in the volcanic belt west of Mexico City. And they wouldn't tell anybody where, but Paul Spitzer, who is a ornithologist, a-one of the people that Roger Tory Peterson helped a lot. He wanted to know if they go down there in such masses as they're said to do. All of a sudden now, here's a food supply. A big, huge, inexhaustible food supply. What takes advantage of that? Something in nature will. So what? Well, we know who, everybody said, it won't be birds that eat them, because we have big blue 0:54:38 - 2153jay experiments up in Cornell. And a blue jay eats a monarch butterfly and throws up because the monarch butterfly eats milkweed plant and there are cardiac glycosides in that, and it-it infects their body enough so that if you eat it, you're going to throw up. So rule out boards-birds. Well what else would it be? We went down there to find out in 1979 and had to find the place on our own. We got maps out and looked at the description of the areas and so forth. We found them. And we set out on a metric system grid, posts on a random area and smeared pie-peanut butter on all of them. If anything that's in the way of rodents around is sure going to eat the peanut butter. Well we were 0:55:46 - 2153there for about three weeks and never saw a tooth mark in anything. It isn't' that. There were millions and millions of butterflies and a lot of them dead on the ground, one of which had a number on a tag on the wing. I picked it up and sent it back to [Frederick] Urquhart in Toronto and he wrote back and told me that butterfly was tagged near Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania. And it had made the trip all the way down. Others were there by the 0:56:23 - 2153millions and they-they're still there, still viable. We-we studied them for about three weeks and found out that they were going to, being all together, start mating in about February. And this goes on until it's safe to head north again where they can get into bad weather. The butterflies then eat milkweed plant. They use them to lay-lay eggs on. They eat whatever's-pollinate all sorts of things, but they lay eggs only on the milkweed plants as they go north. And some of them make it back up there, not all the way, but along the way they planted a whole lot of eggs. They, in turn, develop and go 0:57:23 - 2153north, build up that big population again. And for three, four, five, I don't know how many differing, I suppose, generations, they don't think about migration at all The fifth generation on, what does it know about what the experience is, where is the place that they should go, so forth. I don't know. I've never had anybody explain it. But the fifth generation, if-if that's the one, comes out and starts exercising. Never a thought about mating. This group is going to go, mating comes on the way back. It's some kind of a system. And we found it as remarkable as it could be that that whole thing was taking 0:58:14 - 2153place under our noses. The Indians have known about them for years. But now industry's come down there. Logging, cutting down the trees, and the big Oya [fir] mills are where the butterflies are. And you have to build terrible roads through the places to try to get at their ten thousand foot altitude and it's rough country. And they're going commercial. And so what's happening? We found the answer to our question. Birds do take advantage of all that easy living. They come in early in the morning. The birds eyes 0:58:59 - 2153are very sensitive to motion, any motion, bing, leave, don't question, don't think about it, beat it. Something's wrong. That ought to be the way they go. But these butterflies are dormant. Their wings are locked back, absolutely motionless. The degrees are down around thirty-five, thirty-seven degrees. Thirty-two they can handle, thirty-one they can't. They have to be high, near water, so forth. We studied them for quite a while. And finally saw some birds come in early in the morning before their wings started moving, no motion, everything is absolutely still, so the bird is not alarmed and it'll come 0:59:46 - 2153in, here's these butterflies. They hop along a branch, bite one on the wing. Get another, bite it on the wing, bite another. Oh, this one's all right. Peel off the abdomen, let the rest float down. Finally we located where they were going, when they were doing that, up above, by this spiraling down of the wings. And we found about seven species and subspecies of birds that were coming in there early in the morning, sampling, and not being disturbed by any motion, nothing else happening. Just-then as the butterflies start to opening up their wings and moving, leave, too much motion. So birds do do it. Why 1:00:40 - 2153do birds flo-throw up in the states? Because there are a hundred and five different species of cardiac glycosides plants in the milkweed. Some are more, some are less. Sample, find one that's less that you think you can handle. Leave the others alone. We found what we wanted, but we also discovered logging trucks starting to come around on rickety, terrible roads, shifting loads, dangerous. But they were starting to clear out lumber. And just recently there's-you read about outrage, and that's what outrages me, 1:01:36 - 2153is people realizing that this is probably the most remarkable migration in the world of all the migraters there are. I don't know of any that match that poor little butterfly flying two, three thousand miles. I found one that went at least two thousand, probably more. Why don't we learn something from that? But no, we got to make money. Sustainability, not good. Prognosis poor. Wake up. [End of Reel #2153]