Show Notes
This episode is a conversation with Adam Haritan from the youtube channel Learn Your Land, which covres a diverse variety of topics related to the ecology of Eastern North American Forests - Fungi, Plants, Insects, & more. In this episode we talk about how fire suppression has caused an explosion in tick populations, along with a multitude of other factors. We also discuss medicinal mushrooms of Eastern North America, surviving stands of American Chestnuts, the importance of geology, and how Paw Paw trees might be neurotoxic. We also talk about how humans having a connection to (and knowledge of) the land that they live on is a matter of existential health, almost more so than anything else.
Adam's been producing the Learn Your Land youtube channel for ten years and has an extensive library of videos about a diversity of topics, and unlike me, he doesn't curse like a madman so his videos are appropriate for all ages. Please check the youtube (especially the tick episode!) and go down a wormhole. Also check out www.learnyourland.com for more info on what he does, a link to his onlince courses, and a list of the videos he's done.
All episodes of the Crime Pays But Botany Doesnt podcast are available Ad-Free on the Patreon at : https://www.patreon.com/CrimePaysButBotanyDoesnt
More from Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
2 hours of rants - recorded from a filthy motel room in Miami, Florida during an intermittend layover - about the route from Santa Cruz dela Sierra, Bolivia West into the dry Inter-Andean Valleys and up to the Altiplano, and the many plants encountered along the way : Onoseris acerifolia, Deuterocohnia meziana, Neoraimondia herzogiana, Schinus mollis, Puya glomerata, Schinopsis lorentzii, Cereus hankeanus, Harrisia tetracantha, Blossfeldia liliputana, Puya humilis, Trichocereus tunariensis, Trichocereus bridgesii, Zanthoxylum coco, Koeberlinia holacantha, and more.
Originally recorded June of 2026 in Los Angeles California.
In this episode we talk with Chuck Delwiche about the early evolution of land plants, photosynthetic bacteria, what Earth may have looked like 4 billion years ago, what some of the first land plants look like, why bioluminescent dinoflagellates (Pyrocystis) "light up", and the species of algae responsible for the reflecting pool disaster that nearly have the president an aneurysm over the summer.
Laiken Jordahl is the national public lands advocate for the center for biological diversity. In this episode he tells us about the destruction of Big bend National Park for a pointless and unnecessary border wall and what efforts have been made to stop it.
Rants about Taos, Garden Design in the sba to j aisle, how to tell if a plant has massive tuberous roots, Peteria scoparia, a new species of Paronychia leucochthonicola, Texas Madrone in Denver, US intervention in Latin America, and more.