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Transcript57 lines
- [00:00]
Chuck Marohn
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Abby Newsham
This is Abby and you are listening to Upzoned. Hey everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzone show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the Strong town's conversation. And we upzone it, we talk about it in depth. I'm Abby Newsham, reporting live from my childhood home in Wildwood, Missouri.
- [00:37]
Chuck Marohn
It's so delightful.
- [00:39]
Abby Newsham
Very delightful. And I'm joined by Chuck, once again, founder of Strong Towns. Hey, Chuck.
- [00:45]
Chuck Marohn
Hey. It's so nice to chat to you. And your childhood home does look idyllic. I know you said you're in a room full of windows. I mean, no, you know what? It looks like it. It looks like a beautiful place to have grown up.
- [00:59]
Abby Newsham
So I'm happy for you that you're.
- [01:02]
Chuck Marohn
Able to visit and have this nice time.
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Abby Newsham
Yeah, totally. I'm actually in town because my youngest sister, she's engaged and his family is throwing her an engagement party. So nice. I, of course, couldn't miss it. So excited to be here.
- [01:19]
Chuck Marohn
Now. That's sweet. And I've seen some photos of you and your sister and she looks. She looks as kind and delightful as you. So I hope that everything works out very well.
- [01:28]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, yeah. I'm one of four all kind and delightful, so. Yeah, just kidding. Well, no, they are kind and delightful. Okay, so we're going to talk about trees today, and I don't know that we've covered this topic in the past, Chuck, so I'm curious about what your thoughts are here. So this is an article that's from national observer by Hannah Hett. And. And it is entitled Can Urban Forests Survive the Housing Boom? So this is kind of talking about Canada mostly, but I think it applies a lot more broadly. And Canada has specifically identified a need for an additional 3.5 million housing units by 2030. And this article digs into this big question of how cities can solve for the housing crisis without sacrificing their urban forests. A Vancouver project shows how tough these trade offs can be. Designing around mature trees and adding density while also trying to maintain all of the natural lands and elements that are in their cities by reducing sprawl. So across Canada, a lot of different cities are grappling with this issue of how they can grow smarter and. And balance density with the need for green space and rethinking ultimately how we use urban land. And that creates a lot of clashes around what you do with the urban tree canopy and how you preserve it both in public space and in private space. So, I mean, this is something that I think, personally, I think cities have a lot more power around this issue. When looking at the public realm and how you preserve trees within it, I can definitely see a lot of challenges with how you actually manage tree preservation on private property. I know some cities have done that. To me, that's kind of how I split this issue and how you actually would address that. But it's definitely very important. Is this something that you have kind of come across in your work, Chuck, or you've heard other cities in your travels talking about?
- [03:40]
Chuck Marohn
This is always a thing that comes up. Let me try to take an empathetic view first time around, because I don't think I'm very empathetic on this issue in the way that I see people who identify strongly with it. So here's. Here's the empathetic take. I run into a lot where people are trying to do something, build. Build a house, do a development, build an apartment, at a shop, at a business. And people show up and they are kind of emotionally centering on the trees that are there. I understand from an emotional standpoint what a tree is. We have a tree in our front yard. We call it Steve. It has to have been there a hundred years. I mean, it's a huge, massive tree. We talk about it like it's a living person. It was there before us. Hopefully it will be there after us. It has its own cycle. Steve tends to drop the leaves, its leaves, later in the year than other trees. So it has this kind of unique feedback with my family where we go out and rake and then all Steve is dropping his trees now, like, now that it's cold and now that it's nasty out, you know? And so you have this thing, and I get, like, the emotional attachment that the trees are. To have a good urban tree takes time and energy and commitment. And it shouldn't be something that we just dispatch with lightly. And it does often seem like we dispatch with these things very lightly, like on a whim. Just this past summer, the city, my city, was redoing a street. They ripped up the entire thing and they rebuilt it, including replacing the sewer and the water. I watched them do this. And the very first thing they did is they wrapped a ribbon around all the trees. And these were mature, I mean, decades old trees, big canopy, tree cover. They tore them down, and it was horrible. It was unnecessary. It was not needed. It was, to me, like, wasteful. They did it. And as far as I can tell, and I had a few conversations with people, they did it. And, like, the best Excuse was we didn't think they would survive. To me, that's like super lame because try to save them and if they don't survive, then replace them. But I think it was really the idea that it was just easier to work and quicker to work if you got rid of the trees. And then what they did is they planted new trees in here, but the new trees were, you know, six foot tall and they're going to take decades to grow. You just, in a sense, eliminated decades of effort for what? Just kind of sheer laziness, really. I get that offense. Like, I get why that bothers people. It bothers me. And I get why people are motivated about that. Does that make sense?
- [06:43]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, I mean, that. That totally bothers me too. Especially where, you know, we see articles like this and we know that urban tree canopy is a concern and an issue. And it's very disheartening when you see public street projects happening. And they either don't put in trees, take out trees. They're not. Some. Some places they don't even replace them. So I think it's really important that I guess urban forestry is not outsourced to the private sector via like, landscape standards and maybe even some preservation standards. While that's all, I think well and good to have landscaping on private property, a lot of the times the public realm is not preserved for urban forestry. And to me, that that's a huge issue.
- [07:36]
Chuck Marohn
It's not adequate compensation for a bad public realm. Can I give the next step of where I feel like I'm starting to diverge from the people who obsess over this? And then we'll go full way. Like, here's where I think we've got this completely wrong. So there's a certain contingent of advocate or of. Yeah, I think advocates may be the right word that equates this with the stormwater and the drainage issue. Where you have trees, you have transpiration. Trees will actually suck up water and then transpire it. So you need to run. Less water runs into the stormwater system. Less water ends up in the rivers or in lakes or in other places where they kind of aggregate up to pollution. You know, when you've got urban runoff from urban areas, you're picking up all the trash and the garbage and, you know, the petroleum products and all that and sending that out to streams. The more trees you have, the less runoff you're going to have. And I think that is, like, very, very true. I mean, I'm not even going to. That is true. Right? Like, that is a Scientific fact. Like, we can see that on the ground. I think where the nuance comes in and I think where it gets difficult is when you start to look at what kind of investment you're making. When you put stormwater systems in. Stormwater in a street section, managing drainage is often the most expensive thing that goes into a street. So we look at like, oh, the pavement is really expensive. Yes, pavement's really expensive. Oh, the sewer pipe and the water pipe. Those are really expensive. Absolutely, they are. But the thing that is like 2x all of that are these big, huge stormwater pipes, these big catch basins, these big. The area that you're draining, the amount of water that you're pulling through there. Now, an urban tree advocate would say, well, sure, Chuck, that's right. And if we lower that amount, we can reduce that cost. And I guess that's where I'm gonna push back. I think it's actually the opposite. When we put that cost in the ground, that requires us then to actually build sufficient tax base to justify that cost. What I see, I mean, almost as the default is that we put stormwater systems in without really recognizing and understanding how much of a cost commitment it is. And we put these in in suburban areas. We put these in on, you know, the Arby's lot out on the edge of town, and the target have like, these stormwater systems that drain in and drain. They're massively expensive. They don't make sense at that scale. We actually need to make one of two decisions. And this is, I mean, ultimately kind of the strong downs insight. We either need to build great urban places which are going to have. It's going to have the expense of having stormwater runoff, but then also have the tax base to sustain that, which means a lot more building and a lot less, in a sense, sacrificing building for greens. You know, just literal green space. Or we need to build things at extremely low densities where we can have not expensive stormwater system, but just natural watershed ecosystems that process water that way and are not kind of overloaded by human, you know, human endeavors. I think if you look to me like the personification of everything we do wrong with stormwater is right up the street from where I'm at. The school district did an addition onto one of the elementary schools, and they bought up four houses, and they did that in order to tear them down and put in a drainage pond. And so they doubled the amount of surface runoff because they built a big parking lot, and. And then they drain that all into a pond. Adjacent to the property. And I'm like, you've done. You've done like four crimes in a row there. But we look at it as, like a net positive good. And then they lined it with, you know, baby trees under the theory that, like, this will eventually be good for the environment. And I think that we are mixing what is good environmental policy for natural environment, which. With what is good urban design policy for urban environments. I think we're casual about mixing those in a way that I think it's like the stroud outcome of each. We get bad environment and we get bad urban areas.
- [12:35]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, it really doesn't seem like we have a consistent approach to even, like, philosophically how we think about trees, because trees are so often. And landscaping in general is so often kind of thought of as a nature band aid where you just throw some trees on it, throw some landscaping on something, and now it's okay. Where I think trees really should be thought of as a part of infrastructure and really thoughtfully planned into infrastructure, because to your point, they do have really significant stormwater benefits, doesn't mean that you. If you have a dense urban area that you just put trees in and there's no stormwater infrastructure, but they're a part of the puzzle. And they also provide, you know, heat management, and they contribute. They contribute to property values as well. So when you're thinking about building infrastructure having a return on investment, I think trees should be thought of as part of infrastructure and they actually contribute to that return on investment piece that is so important.
- [13:43]
Chuck Marohn
I see so many cities that go out and buy construction equipment. Like, they'll buy a big backhoe and then it sits at idle for 80% of the time. Or they'll go out and buy an end dump, like a dump truck, and they'll let that, you know, they'll use it occasionally, but it doesn't get full utilization. And it's always bothered me because I look at it and I'm like, if you were a construction company and you bought that piece of equipment, you would have to keep it utilized, like, 85% of the time in order to pay for it. But because we're the government, we like, we do that. And it just sits there. These same governments. And this has always been my recommendation, if you're going to go buy a big piece of equipment, go buy a tree mover. Like, literally, like, invest in that. And really, I had one city that I worked with that I thought was very smart and sophisticated. They owned a bunch of land that was green space kind of land. But it was denuded of trees and it was like a field. They went out and planted saplings like little trees and then let them grow. And then once they reached a certain point, they, they had a tree mover and they had a crew and they would go out and they would move trees and they would plant them in the boulevards and they would plant them in places. And that was like what they use this equipment for a tree mover compared to like a backhoe or an end dump or like any of the other equipment we got, is very low cost. Right. But it is a specialized piece of equipment. I think that if cities were very serious about this, they would do exactly what you're saying. They would really focus on this as infrastructure. When you were building a street, part of designing that street would be what are the tree mix that works here. You would have a diversity of trees. So if you get Dutch elm disease come through, it doesn't wipe out all your trees. That maybe gets one out of every four and then you can replace that with other things. So you've got a diversity of species. You actually have people who know what they're doing, who are putting these things in and caring for them. This is something that we could do at the city level, at scale. And here's the cool thing about urban trees within the streetscape. They actually pay for themselves in the sense that every tree raises property values by thousands of dollars. If you have a tree lined street, that street is wealthier and more valuable than a street denuded of trees, all other things being equal. And it's not even close, it is a vast disparity. If you're building wealth on a street, you have to have street trees. Like it just is. That's the simplest way you do it.
- [16:21]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, exactly. I should have brought my colleague Robert Whitman on this call actually, because he has conducted. He's like our tree guy. He's the person who produced this great trees for the Kansas City region document that a lot of people reference. And he just spends all his time studying trees over time. And he's conducted studies on property values and the impact of street trees and different, different markets in the same market and in all different contexts. And it's really fascinating to see the association between the value that is created from having a really robust tree canopy. And I like that you mentioned like the tree relocation ideas, because I remember seeing like in Japan where the city, they actually go out and move trees when they need to. And I think that's something that could actually preserve trees, not just in the public realm, but even on private property. Because this, this article is obviously talking about the need to, to, to develop more dense housing and the challenges that come about when you're trying to build more on a piece of land that may have pre existing trees and the concerns that people have over that. And so if, if the city had those tools available, I would, at no expense to a developer, perhaps, I'm sure a developer would happily allow them to take out the tree if they needed them to and plan it somewhere else so that way it wouldn't have to just be taken down.
- [17:57]
Chuck Marohn
I didn't really understand this until I read this in a book about the, the construction of Disneyland. So Disneyland, if you go, you know, the park itself is, you know, great urban design, right? And there's these mature trees all over the place. And when I first went there, I was a young kid, but the park had been around for decades at that point. And my assumption as an, you know, as an engineer, as a young person or whatever was that these trees were planted less mature and then they grew up to be this level of maturity. I read this book about the, the creation of Disneyland. And what was fascinating was how much money and how much time and effort they put in. I mean, they had a full time crew that just moved trees. And what they did is they went around Orange county, they went around the area and they saw like, okay, that's a beautiful tree, like, we really want that one. And they would go talk to the property owner and they'd be like, hey, could we buy this tree out of your yard? And it was not like a sapling or a little tree. It's like a mature tree. And then the trick is to like excavate it and move it delicately into place, put it in place, get it compacted, but not too compacted, have it. There's a whole science to doing this. There's a story in the book where Walt Disney came out. And you know, Walt is Walt Disney. He's like, something's wrong with this tree. And every time he would walk by it, he'd be like, something's off here. And everyone like, working for him is like, what? I don't get it. Like, this looks fine to me. And he would just, something's wrong. And then he stood there and he's like, it's like a foot off to the side. It should be like over here a little bit. And he's like, it's just like a foot or a foot and a half off. And he explained the problem is like everybody Saw it then, and they actually went and moved the tree a foot and a half just to put it in the right spot. I actually think that attention to detail might seem obsessive to us. Like, that's crazy. Like, that's only. You would only do that in a theme park. But the reality is, is that if you are doing good urban design, you actually have people who have that attention to detail who are saying, yep, the developer's going to come in and rip down two trees on this lot. I tell you what, one of those trees is like a prime specimen that could be moved. We have a spot that. That would go where it would be really fantastic. Let's get our tree moving crew out there. Let's take that tree out. Let's move it, let's preserve it, let's put it in place. I think that that is something that would make people not just joyous. Like, I think. I think people would broadly support that kind of effort if we were doing that. And I think it would create a lot of value. Because the reason you move these mature trees and the reason they did that is because they needed the place to, like, look a certain way. On day one, it wasn't like, well, 20 years from now, this won't look crappy. You know, we want it to look good on day one. This is something that we undervalue and I think casually, like, you know, throw away when we're building places. I'm agreeing. Right?
- [21:08]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's. I mean, it goes back to how cities, how we as a society think about trees and value trees. I think a lot of times it's easy to look at trees and great street trees as kind of a luxury rather than being an investment and a worthwhile investment that actually is healthy for property tax base. Healthy in a lot of other ways, you know, beyond just the economics of them. And that's something that gets overlooked a lot. Just the. The entire value of street trees. And I think the attention to detail is something that. I mean, yes, it's critically important. If we took civic design and urban design really seriously in cities, then yes to all of that. But we haven't even gotten past the hump of actually valuing trees as a healthy part of our society, at least in most places.
- [22:09]
Chuck Marohn
Well, let me give the answer to the question literally, can urban forests survive the housing boom? And I think, for the most part, the answer is and should be, no, they will not. And let me answer that with this contrast. I think the contrast of the idea of an urban forest is Just to me, wrong. And let me point to New York City. New York City has Central Park. Are we calling Central park an urban forest? I feel like that's a stretch, right? Like a forest has a forest ecosystem. Does Central park have wildlife? Sure. Does Central park have. You know, but does it have its own ecosystem? I'm not arguing that it doesn't, but that is very different than a forest. Central park is a planned park. I mean, Olmsted designed it. It is a planned place. If you walk around New York, New York has great neighborhood parks. They are urban spaces. They are designed to be adjacent to urban spaces. They accentuate and provide green space within that urban space. But I would hardly call any of them a forest. They really are not a forest. And I don't think they even pretend to be a forest. Okay, if you're saying, can great. Can great parks that have trees within urban areas survive the housing boom, the answer to that should be absolutely, yes. Like, absolutely. It would be ridiculous to go and take out Central park and make that housing because New York has a housing shortage. It would be ridiculous to take all these beautiful neighborhood parks they have and tear those down and like, put housing in there just so you have housing. You would devalue everything about New York. You would devalue everything about the experience of being in New York.
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Abby Newsham
You would.
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Chuck Marohn
You would actually make New York unlivable in some ways if you did that. And so that's not a good trade off. Right? But if you're saying, I've got an empty lot over here that's got sewer, water, stormwater drainage, it's between two houses, we're gonna clear the trees, put up a five unit thing or a 10 unit thing, and we're gonna plant some mature trees in there that will be part of the streetscape. If you're calling that an urban forest and losing an urban forest, I think you've lost the plot. I think you don't understand what a city is about and what a city should do. And so that's where I. If this article is asking, and it kind of is, as you get into it, can patches of trees in developed urban areas survive the housing boom? The answer to that should be no. It has to be no. There's this old story, and I don't think it's apocryphal, but it's a story about kings and their castles. The idea was a king would have grass out in front of their castle or have a big courtyard with grass. And that was such a luxury thing because most people if they had space, had to plant food in it so they could survive. Only the king was so rich that the king could have all this luxurious grass out in front and get no, in a sense, valuable use out of it. They could grow. The king could grow weeds and not have to grow food because the king was so rich. When I look at an urban lot where you have sewer, water, roadway, sidewalk, street lighting, storm sewer, drainage systems, and you're like, you know what we're going to do with this lot? We're going to have a big stormwater pond here. Do you know what we're going to do with this lot? We're going to have a patchwork of trees. Not enough trees to have an ecosystem. Not enough trees to have like a bear or even a deer live in it, or even like a raccoon live in it, but just enough to where, like, I can walk by and, like, is a little bit of woods. To me, you're like the king just wasting land. Like you've. You said, we're so rich, we don't have to care about any of this stuff. We're so affluent. Let's just waste $100,000 worth of land on nothing now as compensation. Yeah, the streetscape should be beautiful. And if you go around New York City, not only do they have great parks, but I think New York City is probably the city in North America with the most trees per foot of street. I mean, almost all the streets are tree lined. The tree canopy is thick. These are gorgeous places. Yes, do that. Like, absolutely do. Great urban design. But to leave, like random patches of trees here and there and call that a forest. I think you are bastardizing both the term urban and forest in the same conversation.
- [26:51]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, totally. And I'm. Even as you're talking about this, I'm on Google Maps. I was looking at New York. Now I'm looking at my own neighborhood where I live. And something that becomes really obvious when you just look at aerial imagery of a lot of neighborhoods is that all of the trees are on private lots. There's just very little trees within public streetscapes. And so, yeah, I think that's. That's the concern, right, is that if you were to redevelop some of these sites, the trees wouldn't survive. And we don't have trees in public space to compensate for that. But if you did have trees, you know, a thick array of street trees within the public realm, that wouldn't be so much of an issue. So to me, that's. That's one of the Biggest issues is that all of the big, mature, beautiful trees are in people's backyards rather than along the street tree or the streetscape.
- [27:49]
Chuck Marohn
Yep. And you will have people who are listening to this who say, I hear this all the time, oh, you can't grow trees in urban areas. I don't know who the idiots are who believe that, but all you have.
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Abby Newsham
To do is travel.
- [28:04]
Chuck Marohn
Yeah, just travel. Travel a little bit. Go to, like, a real city where there's, like, tons of people, tons of traffic. Go to Paris, one of the densest cities in the world. And there are street trees all over the place.
- [28:18]
Abby Newsham
Well, and Czech. You don't even have to travel. Just go on Google.
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Chuck Marohn
Yeah. Oh, I know. Yeah.
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Abby Newsham
You don't even. You can just go on Google these days. You don't even need to. You can go to Paris right now on Google and see trees.
- [28:32]
Chuck Marohn
Paris density is not the densest in the world, but compared to American standards, these are. These are incredibly dense places. And they have lots and lots of tree canopy within the streetscape. This is not a hard thing to do. And if you're planting trees and they're dying, then you need a different tree. Right. Like that. That is not like, oh, trees are impossible. Here I'm looking out my own door in the office. Like, I'm looking out the windows to my rather rundown, kind of pathetic, kind of neglected neighborhood. And even we have planted street trees throughout most of the city, throughout most of this neighborhood. This is not some, like, crazy kind of thing. So, yeah, the other thing I think that we should say is that street trees, if all you can do today is go out and plant seedlings at 20 bucks a piece, go out and plant seedlings. It would be way better to do that and get things started and have half of them die and then replace them next year and then have half of those die. And now you're replacing a quarter of what you did the first year. But start to get that growing. Those are investments that will actually pay off. And if that was the only thing you could afford to do right now, go do that.
- [29:49]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. One of my favorite things that the city. My city of Kansas City is doing right now is the free tree program, where people can just request trees be planted in the. In the public realm, but in front of their house. And so they're actually taking steps to revive the canopy throughout Kansas City. And I think that's, like, a great idea because so many trees over the years that were. That were street trees, and a lot of streets used to have them they had just been neglected over the years and had to be taken out or died. And so replenishing that, I think, is incredibly important.
- [30:27]
Chuck Marohn
I don't think it's a stretch to say, and I'm not a politician, and I don't think like a politician, so someone who is political may disagree with me, but I feel like the easiest campaign to run for a local office would be to say, we're going to plant X number of trees in this city. Like, if you did this in Brainerd, and you said, hey, in our city, we're going to plant a thousand trees in my term, that would be something where I would be like, yep, I'm voting for that person. Like, that person, like, gets it. And I actually think that if your platform was three things, and the first thing was we're just going to plant a hell of a lot of trees, I actually feel like you're going to win 95% of elections just on that. That platform right there. For local.
- [31:15]
Abby Newsham
People love trees. People love trees. People love parks.
- [31:19]
Chuck Marohn
Yes. Yes. And trees are something you can actually do cheaply. You can actually deliver on this. It will actually be noticeable, and it will actually make a big difference.
- [31:29]
Abby Newsham
Yeah. And do that while also building lots of housing.
- [31:33]
Chuck Marohn
Build lots of housing. But don't call this stuff urban forests. I mean, I'm trying to think of, like, an analog, because to me, those are. Okay, I live in San Francisco.
- [31:44]
Abby Newsham
It's interesting because, Chuck, it's kind of become an industry term because you bring that up, and I'm like, yeah, it's technically not a forest, but urban forest is, like, the term that people use.
- [31:57]
Chuck Marohn
People ask me, where's Brainerd? Where do you live? And I say, if you look at, like, one of those land cover maps, you actually see the Great Plains of the Dakotas come into Minnesota, Right? Like, it crosses over. Minnesota is, like, on the edge of the Great Plains. And then you can see the kind of karst land that is in Iowa come up. You know, where you're at the Missouri, you get a lot of the clay, a lot of the kind of rolling fields. You get that all through Iowa, and you get that into southern Minnesota. But then you get this Canadian forest, this thick, thick tree cover that comes down from Canada into Minnesota, where those three kind of meet. I live about an hour, maybe 45 minutes into that tree cover of the Canadian forest. These are, like, real forests. I mean, when I say real forests, these are places where you could be dropped into and, like, walk a mile, and you're not Going to hit a road. When you get that deep into the forest, it actually changes the ecosystem of the place. There are a lot of animals that live on the edge of forest, like a deer will do on the edge of forest. But a deer won't necessarily do deep forest. A bear will do deep forest, but a bear will not do edge of forest. Right. There's a little bit of, like, nuance there in where, like, habitats work. Well, when you say forest, you're actually describing a unique kind of habitat that, you know, is different than an. I mean, it's different than a suburban area. It's different than an urban area. When you say urban forest, I realize that has become like a term now that I was going to say something demeaning to a certain class of professionals. I think it is a. I think it is a bad term that describes something that is largely unhelpful and that is the preservation of tiny chunks of really trees that are not valuable in an ecosystem standpoint and also not valuable in an urban design standpoint. So build your great ecosystems. We need them. We need deep forest. We need, need inner forest. We've built too many roads in this country. We've segmented too many wild areas. We actually need to get that back. We need to deal with that. Like, that is a real, real issue. But not in our urban spaces. In our urban spaces, we actually need to build great cities. Like, let's build good urban spaces. Yes.
- [34:37]
Abby Newsham
And trees being a part of the overall civic design infrastructure of our cities. And yeah, I think just being more thoughtful about what, how we use trees, how we apply trees as infrastructure is very important.
- [34:56]
Chuck Marohn
I'm with you.
- [34:58]
Abby Newsham
Okay. So I know that you have to go soon, so I'm going to shift into the down zone before we finish today, so. Down zone, part of the show where we can share anything that we have been up to lately. And Chuck, I'll. I'll give it to you.
- [35:17]
Chuck Marohn
So I feel like you and I have not talked for a while. I know I've been. I was out for book tour stuff, so I don't know how far back we go. I don't remember the last time I shared. I've. When I travel, I get through a lot of audiobooks and quite a few written, you know, reading on my Kindle as well. The two that, like, stick out for me recently, I did go through the new Bob Woodward book, which is called War. And it is about basically the Biden administration's first couple years, the war in Afghanistan, the withdrawal, and then the interface between Kind of the old Trump administration and the new Biden administration and how kind of the back and forth in Bob Woodward style he tends to write these books about, you know, parts of president's terms. I've read them since the George W. Bush administration and I actually appreciate Woodward. He, you know, he is a reporter in an old school kind of way and I think really does his best to write gripping narratives as authentic to, you know, what happened as he can. He does tend to, and I think the criticism of him is he has certain sources that he uses that are maybe not always reliable. In other words, people feed him stories that are one sided and he doesn't get the other side of the story because those people aren't talking to him. But I do think he genuinely does his best to kind of represent the narrative as it's unfolding and the narrative as he sees it. I find them really interesting and helpful perspective on presidencies from a historical standpoint. So I thought that was a really good book. I've also been kind of deep into it. I'm finishing up this book now called the Song of the Cell. An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human. I started it this summer and then I went away from it and now I've come back to it and it's just this kind of. I think it's. It would be too pithy to say it's an exploration of anatomy because I think it goes beyond anatomy to really look at our new understandings of different parts of the human body, their interfaces, their interactions with each other. The chapter I listened to last night was all about the pancreas, which is not like a sexy exciting topic, but it was fascinating the way people figured out what the pancreas actually did. The whole idea of insulin connecting that to diabetes. I mean, a lot of dogs lost their lives trying to figure this out, which was kind of sad. But you know, you understand how people figured this out before kind of modern scientific techniques. There's a. The human body continues to be this like endless exploration of understanding. And we learn more and more all the time. I think the only folly that I see is that we think if we uncover this, we will then know the answer. And what seems to happen is that everything we uncover does reveal like a truth that allows us to ask like a multiplication more of questions that we didn't even know we should ask before.
- [38:32]
Abby Newsham
And that's kind of just makes everything more complex.
- [38:36]
Chuck Marohn
Yes. I mean it's like, okay, I think of it like an astronomical terms, like, okay, everything orbits around the Earth. And like now, oh, we figured out like that's not true. Well then that asks like begets like another question and then we figure out the answer, that question and that creates 10 more questions. And then we figure out the answer to like those 10 questions and it creates a thousand more questions. And I feel like with the human anatomy you would think that a system that we're literally is us, that you can, you know, cut up a person or dissect or look at this or look at that, that we could actually figure out fairly easily is still so mysterious to us in so many ways. Despite like mind boggling levels of knowledge. Now it's, it's really wild, you know.
- [39:21]
Abby Newsham
How we talk about things being complex and adaptive versus like mechanical and really humans are kind of complex, right? And adaptive. Even though we, we think of our bodies as being kind of mechanical. Like the heart does this, the brain does this. It's a lot more complex than that. We're not like a clock.
- [39:43]
Chuck Marohn
Oh, it's a fractal ecosystem. I mean, it's fascinating to think that, you know, inside your body in a sense are all of these independent organisms, I mean, bacteria and other things that are like codependent on you that like live in a sense in a colony within. Within you, having their own ecosystem. And you know, you recognize that like we are that on the earth. Are we part of some like greater being that we don't recognize? You know, it's really. There's a lot of like fractalness to this whole thing that can get really mind boggling once you think about it.
- [40:20]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, it's totally fascinating. That sounds like a great book.
- [40:26]
Chuck Marohn
I would. I think it's. Yeah, I put it down because I needed to think about it for a while and then I got into other things and now that I've come back to it, I'm really glad that I did. It's ending rather beautifully.
- [40:39]
Abby Newsham
I feel like you may have brought this book up at one point in the past because it sounds familiar and I wasn't sure if I had heard it from you or maybe somewhere else. So. Yeah, sounds like a good one.
- [40:53]
Chuck Marohn
I like the idea of the song because I feel like the song, the metaphor of a song and he really doesn't use that in the book. I mean, maybe he will at the end, end here. But the Song of the Cell to me expresses this thing that. I mean music, a song is many different layers working together in this like complexity. And I do think that that is a really good metaphor for, you know, what, what he's trying to express in this book. So it's very good.
- [41:24]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think for me, the. The main thing I want to share, and I shared it with norm last week, but I didn't get to talk to you about it. Is that I am currently converting my basement into an art studio. So I'm, like, building a real studio in my basement, which is a lot of fun. It's like, I have the dehumidifier, and the lighting is getting changed, and so it's actually, like, a space that I can use and store things and spend time in. And my cat is very happy to be able to spend time with me in this basement space. So that's been a lot of fun. And I just found out today that two of my paintings got accepted into an art show. So I'm gonna do my first art show ever. Yeah, I'm pumped.
- [42:21]
Chuck Marohn
That's exciting.
- [42:22]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, it's fun to find a hobby that you're really into and get to do stuff like this. I'm really excited.
- [42:33]
Chuck Marohn
You are very gifted, and I'm glad to see that not only are you pursuing that gift, but that other people are able to recognize it and experience it too. It is beautiful to be able to share a gift like that and have it appreciated by others. So I'm happy for you.
- [42:49]
Abby Newsham
Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun. Thank you. I'm very excited. Well, Chuck, I'll let you go. You have a nice rest of your Friday, and I will talk to you next week.
- [43:00]
Chuck Marohn
I'm very excited. I can't wait. Thanks, Abby.
- [43:03]
Abby Newsham
All right, talk to you later. Thanks, everyone, for listening to another episode of up sound. Thanks, Chuck.
- [43:08]
Chuck Marohn
Bye. Bye. Get down tonight get out.