Spirit in Action
Goin' Wild - Wild Foods and Fauna
Sam Thayer's 1st book was Forager's Harvest and his new book is Nature's Garden, invaluable info on getting to the heart of nature through our stomachs. Jim Backus has released 4 books this past year with stunning photography and simple, compelling prose, leading us to connect with the Earth and its animals. In December he released 2 Voyage Into Nature collections and New Pack on the Prairie, a children's story based on photographs of a wolf pack in North Dakota.
- Broadcast on:
- 20 Feb 2011
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat guitar music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - We're going to go wild today for Spirit in Action as we talk with two guests who will help us connect with vital parts of the natural world. In our second, we'll be visiting with Jim Bacchus, who has released four books this past year. Each book is filled with vibrant photography of the landscape and wild animals of the North American continent, including spirit bearers, grizzly bearers, wolves, eagles, and more. Before we talk to Jim Bacchus, we're going to visit with another advocate for the earth, Samuel Thayer. Sam joined us two years ago for Spirit in Action, and he has just released his second book. The first was Forger's Harvest, and the new book, Hot Off the Presses, is Nature's Garden, a guide to identifying, harvesting, and preparing edible wild plants. In fact, the book is so new that it won't be hitting the stores till the beginning of April, though you can get it from Sam right now via his site, forger'sharvest.com. Sam Thayer is at once a thoroughly knowledgeable and spiritually rooted expert forger. His books reflect the depth of his knowledge, providing an invaluable tool when venturing into the woods, or even in the city, seeking a meal provided by nature. Sam has a passion for dining with nature, and with communicating that zeal to others in the hope that they'll come to better know, value, and protect this planet on which we live. Samuel Thayer joins us today from his home in Birchwood, Wisconsin. Sam, welcome back to Spirit in Action. Happy to be here. There's a new member to your household. Congratulations on the birth of Mira Cagail. One of the first questions that occurred to me with the emergence of your new book was, I know that Mira Cagail is breastfed, but I was wondering if you've been able to sneak into her, her first taste of foraged food, as opposed to natural food, which is, of course, what she's getting right now. Have you slept or anything yet? Well, actually her first food, she's seven months now, so we gave her first food about a month ago, and her first food was a Wapato Hot Cereal. We gave that to her a few times. We gave her some apple sauce. Pretty much, she hasn't gotten anything other than stuff from our garden or stuff that we've harvested, but she hasn't eaten very much at all yet. She hasn't actually taken much interest until this week. People may not recognize the name Mira Cagail, and I think it's unique for a female. You wanna mention where it came from? Well, it's a name of a plant, and it's actually the Latin name, a plant sometimes called Sweet Gail, or the Lesson-Deering Bog Myrtle, but it's a plant that grows in the New World and the Old World around lakeshores and bogs. It's got a very sweet scent. Mira Cagail actually means sweet scented. I just always really liked the plant, and I always thought it was a nice-sounding name, man. So that's why we picked it out. It's a great name, and congratulations again. She's a wonderful young woman, and I'm sure she's gonna be great. Do you have plans to train her right from the beginning about foraging? I assume that as opposed to most of us, she's gonna grow up from her first steps, recognizing which foods are edible, and having a thorough dictionary by the time she goes to school. Well, you know, I don't have any plans to train her, but I will be foraging, so I know she'll be with me sometimes, so I'm sure she's just gonna absorb the knowledge through everyday life, which is the way I would rather have it be. Well, another thing to congratulate you on, Sam, is the release of your new book, "Nature's Garden," a guide to identifying, harvesting, and preparing edible wild plants, and it's your second book, first one being "The Foragers Harvest." This one is about 50% thicker. What's all that extra padding about? Well, you know, there's a lot of plants to write about, and there's a lot to say about each one. There's an entire library devoted to corn at the University of Illinois, and I like to tell people, well, there's that much to know, or more about every single plant in the world. So, there's a lot to say. When the sales of the first book were good, I knew that I would be able to pay for a larger book. I knew that it would be worth investing the time to cover more plants, and to just make a larger volume of text. And so, I did, because with the first book, there was not room for anything close to the number of plants I actually wanted to write about. A lot of people expect there to be one book about edible wild plants. It's interesting to me that there is that expectation, because people would not expect to pick up a book about being a doctor and just find one book. It's gonna cover everything, or people wouldn't expect one cookbook to cover all food that could be cooked, but people do have that expectation that there should be one edible wild plant book, and I should have everything I ever need, but you can only cover so many plants in a thorough and accurate, detailed fashion and fit them into one book. - And if anyone is thorough and accurate in their detail, I think it's Sam Thayer. I commend you on the excellent, clear wording pictures. The whole thing that you've got in Nature's Garden is really very comprehensible, even to someone who's pretty much beginner like me. Fortunately, I've benefited from some of your tutelage before, but your book is really so helpful in that respect. One of the reasons I have you on for spirit and action is because I know you're spiritually motivated, and I know that this is about what's good for the world, as well as for ourselves. It's about doing what I consider spirit work in the world. Would you care to talk about some of the health and personal benefits that one gets from being a forager, from going out there and collecting wild foods? How does an individual benefit? And then we'll talk, of course, about how the world benefits. - Well, you know, there's very real and very tangible individual health benefits to gathering your food. And I guess maybe the most important one is that people just get outside, get exercise and do things. I just recently read about a study saying that TV watching increased people's chances of both heart, back, and cancer when all other variables like weight were taken out. I thought that was very interesting and probably tells us that we're not supposed to be watching TV. That's not what we were made to do. Gathering wild food is one of the things that we were made to do. But the nutrition in wild plants is absolutely astounding. A lot of them have not been analyzed for their nutritional content, but the ones that have been analyzed are really impressive. There's a new book coming out this summer that has really good charts to the nutritional composition of some of the real common wild greens by authors John Kailas. They don't recall the title off the top of my head. But I got to review that pre-publication and I was just really impressed with how densely packed with nutrients all these plants are. And, you know, for most of history, long-term human history, we've had just a great concentration of secondary compounds in our plant food, meaning things other than starch and sugar and protein, other than the simple building blocks and calories that our body needs. There is thousands and thousands of other chemicals in our food. That's what our bodies are. Custom to that's what they're designed for, that's what they've evolved with. They have this, this is our traditional diet. Because there were so many secondary compounds in our food, we actually instinctively or naturally seek foods with not very many. That's things like potato chips and donuts. We seek calorie-dense foods with small amounts of secondary compounds in them. When, in fact, that's not good for us. It's exactly like our craving for salt. We crave lots of salt because it used to be very, very hard to come by and it's vital to human metabolism and health. Well, now we've arranged things so we get too much salt and we get too few of these other secondary compounds we need. And we're only starting to discover things that people didn't hear about nutritionally 20 years ago, like iso-flavones and antioxidants and flavonoids. We're just kind of starting to scratch the surface of the huge variety of nutritional elements in plants, phytochemicals that are good for us. So I don't think we need to know exactly what's in there to know that a very diet of plants is really, really good for us. Also, not to downplay some of the other advantages, it's just fun. It's fun to collect wild food. It's an incredibly rewarding hobby. There's also a variety of food that you get to experience that you simply could not experience in any other way. You know, we get our food today from a really small number of plants. Most people, in their whole life, will eat 30 to 50 different plants, whereas you can go out in the woods in Wisconsin and find 400 or 500 different edible plants. So you can dramatically increase that diversity and you get to have delicious flavors that you really just can't get anywhere else. If you've had wild strawberries, you know that they're immensely better than cultivated strawberries, the same with blueberries. But there's an incredible variety of delicious wild plants that you just never would get to experience if you didn't participate in this hobby. You spoke of a few of the benefits that one gets personally by participating in foraging. How about how it benefits the world? I mean, I think you've trained an awful lot of people over the decades. You've helped them learn how to forage, to identify the plants, how to cook it, prepare it, all that kind of thing. You've done that. And so have you seen changes that happen in the way that they live that positively impact the world? Or just in general, how does foraging help us in the world? You know, that's a really interesting question, because there's two very diametrically opposed schools of thought about this. There's a very prevalent idea that foraging is bad for the environment. If people foraged or more people foraged, gathered wild food, there wouldn't be any nature left. And this is a totally ridiculous idea that is not supported by any evidence whatsoever, yet natural resource managers, people that run parks, people all over the place adamantly believe this, even though there's really no reason whatsoever to believe that it's true. I like to refer to what I call the weed phenomenon, which is when you take a plant and you put it in its proper habitat, a place where it is meant to grow, it grows almost inexderminably. So people know that if they have milkweed in a hay field, they can try and try to get rid of it, but it takes a lot of effort to keep it out of the field. It's the same with nettles in a ditch or sugar maple. In an area that grows maple forest, you have to expend a great amount of effort to get rid of sugar maple, if you wanted to. So there is an enormous productivity to the land, feral land, wild land in the kind of semi-cultivated land that we totally ignore as if it wasn't anything that was actually available to us, or if we touched it, we would be destroying it. And that's a strange thought when most of these lands are already managed. So we have national forests that are virtually every acre of them is managed for timber production. The plant communities are already determined by human economic needs. And yet people have the idea that if I went in there and dug up some wild leeks and maybe pick some butternuts, that that would be real bad for the ecosystem. It doesn't make any sense. In fact, we know that people harvesting and using wild food really had the only ecologically sustainable societies that the world has ever known. There are only examples of a way that humans can live in a relationship to nature that's sustainable on the long term. I do see that people come to my workshops, change their lives in terms of a physical sense of how they live and in terms of their philosophy. But those two changes are a little bit harder for me to to observe. But what I really do observe is there's a change in their knowledge and their concern for nature. A good example of that is a bitternut hickory. Now a bitternut hickory is the most widespread and common hickory in North America. It's the only hickory found in the northern half of Wisconsin. It is disappearing from northern Wisconsin due to a yet unidentified disease. We have hundreds of them on our property that are standing dead in several counties. Rusk County, Barron County, Taylor County, for example, the tree is virtually exterminated from the whole county. And this has happened over only a four-year period. Virtually nobody knows or cares that this is happening. If there were people that actually knew how to use this plant as food and actually did this, and there was more than a few of them, I will guarantee you that people would know. And people would care. You know, when hunters hunt a particular animal, that animal becomes rare. People hear about it. I mean, people hear in just incredible uproar from deer hunters because the population is down 30%. But when an entire tree species, which is probably ecologically as important as deer, at least in certain areas, completely disappears. Alarmingly, over four years, it becomes exterminated over thousands of square miles. It hasn't been written about in any newspaper or magazine covering this region even once that I know of. So we need people participating in nature so they can observe it. So we know what's going on. If people don't know something, they don't care about it. Anybody who collects a plant, they know that plant on a very deep personal level. And they automatically, instinctively, intuitively, they are concerned for that plant's welfare. If we have people just sitting in offices, thinking abstract thoughts about how beautiful and important nature is, it doesn't matter. It's not going to help nature at all. We need people that participate in nature, touch it, they experience it, they eat it. Those are the people who will actually raise a finger to do something and raise their voice to talk about what's going on. You have a rather extensive discussion about 17 pages about Chris McCandless, whose wilderness adventure and his death were featured in the book and movie "Into the Wild." That's a lot more than you gave to any other single topic in the 74 pages of intro in your "Nature's Garden" book. Why the big spotlight on Chris McCandless and his death? Well, that's kind of a funny question, an interesting question. For years, since the book came out, people would tell me about the book and that I needed to read it and this kid poisoned himself with some plant and it killed him. And I just kind of ignored it. And it just came to a crescendo when the movie came out. People just kept asking me and asking me what I thought about it, what I thought about it, I don't know, I've ignored this book for so long. So I thought, I better get the book and read it and see what this is about. When I looked into this, what I found was utterly astounding that there's no evidence that this poisoning ever occurred. No one in the media, well, I shouldn't say no one, but the larger media never even brought that up or seemed to care because there were people that pointed that out, that there was no evidence that had ever happened. But it didn't seem to bother anyone. So I first looked into it just because I was prodded to do so by lots of students or people that have read my book. I was really taken by how this story of Chris McAnilis dying, it's an embodiment of what I call the poisonous plant fable. It's a story that our culture likes to tell. It's a parable with a lesson. And the lesson is what our society gives you is better than you think. And here's what happens when you dare to step outside of it. You eat a poisonous plant and you die. And this is actually such an incredibly rare event that people who want to tell that story, they make it up again and again and again. I'll give another example that I think many of the listeners have heard and believe. And this is that you will give him died because he ate some edible wild plant and it killed him. There's all kinds of variations of the story. One is that he died of liver cancer or stomach cancer because of all that nasty wild food he ate. And then the other one is that he just plain old poisoned himself. And none of those are correlated in any way with the truth. He died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm that was probably related to Marfan syndrome, which is a congenital condition that is believed that he had. There's no reason whatsoever to believe that his death had anything to do with edible wild plants. And yet that story spontaneously generated and was repeated. It's still found in print media. It's still found. I heard on the Bob and Tom show a few years ago. So it's pretty amazing that people love this story so much that they will fabricate it out of thin air. And that's exactly what John Crackhauer did. There is no evidence whatsoever that Chris McAnnel has died in any way from a wild plant that he ate. One should be immediately suspicious that John Crackhauer has presented three separate explanations for Chris' death. All of them rely on him eating a wild plant that killed him. It's just that the plant changed. He's proposed that three different plants killed him in three different ways. And there's no evidence that any of those is true. It's clear that he just wants Chris to have died from a plant. And why he wants that? That's the interesting question. I think that's the most interesting question that comes out of at least that part of the book. Why does John Crackhauer desperately want us to believe that Chris McAnnel has died from eating a plant? So I went into it in 17 pages to explain very thoroughly why the evidence... It's not only that there's no evidence Chris died this way. There's conclusive evidence that he didn't, that he couldn't have, and that no such explanation is necessary. There's a very simple explanation for his death, which is that he starved to death. And there's abundant evidence pointing to that. So you could say that John Crackhauer's explanation is the opposite of the truth. He didn't die because he tried to eat a wild plant. He died because he didn't eat enough of them to sustain himself. So it's a fascinating look at our culture and how our culture perceived edible wild plants. And I thought it was really appropriate because virtually every single person who's interested in edible wild plants knows that story and has been affected by it. Very few of them know the truth. Well, if they want to find the truth, the way they should do it is they should get Sam Thayer's book, Nature's Garden, a guide to identifying harvesting and preparing edible wild plants. Sam Thayer is my guest today here for Spirit in Action, which is a Northern Spirit radio production. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeat, and these programs can always be heard again via my website, northernspiritradio.org, and when you do visit, please post us a comment. We love to hear what's going on, and your guidance will be helpful for future listeners. Again, we're speaking with Sam Thayer. Sam, one of the things you mentioned in your book is back in 2008, you and your wife, Melissa, engaged in a month-long experiment in eating only wild foods. Please lay out for our listeners some of what you did, what you experienced, what did you learn from this, what did you get out of doing this month-long, month-plus-long in your case? There's two big lessons that sort of come to mind. It's not the first time I've done this nor the last time, but really two lessons come out of that experience or those experiences. And one is that we're really spoiled when it comes to food and our culture. We're spoiled in that we have like an infinite variety of foods to choose from at our disposal at any time of year. These malady doesn't matter, locality doesn't matter, we just get what we want. We also have no problem stuffing ourselves with these very low secondary plant compound foods and high calorie foods, aka the potato chip and slice of bread. We take things for granted, like that a stick of butter has the amount of calories of, I don't know, three or four pounds of broccoli. So these dense source of calories are really easy for us to get. But for most of our ancestors, even until very recent history, that was not the case. People used to eat bulkier diets that were not as dense in calories because the dense sources of calories were expensive. They were expensive either in labor or in money. So that was one of the lessons which is kind of a fun lesson. It almost becomes a game. It's the opposite game. The game is trying to get enough calories into each meal that you're not hungry before the next meal, rather than the opposite of what most people think of trying to lower their calories. The other thing that really struck both Melissa and I was how good we felt on this diet of no junk food. I mean, of course, the thing we had the junk food was maple syrup. And sometimes I use it as junk food, but it was nothing compared to diets that most Americans generally have. I mean, everything is nutritionally dense. You just feel good. You're not eating generally high sugar foods or high starch foods. It's really easily assimilated, so you're not having these blood sugar swings. And it just feels really good to eat really good food. Even though we had to devote more of our day towards food preparation, it wasn't like that's all we had time for. We probably two to four hours a day devoted to collecting, gathering, preparing food depending on the day and all that. But we had just fantastic meals. I felt like we ate really, really well during that experience. And it was a lot of fun. It forced me to learn a lot about different ways of combining foods to, you know, whenever you kind of push your limits, you'll learn new things because it forces you into places that you wouldn't normally go. So many people are having food allergies these days. I think you've mentioned in the book, Sam, that you have to stay away or that you don't digest well wheat and milk products. And of course, that means that when you were on your wild food diet, that made you feel better. How widespread is this in our society? Do you know anything about that? I mean, if we switched largely to wild foods, would food allergy problems go down? Well, you know, there's a lot of debate about virtually any aspect of health and nutrition. And I don't know the statistics of the number of people that are intolerant or somewhat intolerant of dairy products or wheat. But it's certainly something that I think everybody hears a lot about. And I grew up on a diet of almost exclusively wheat and dairy products. I mean, that was probably 85% of my calories growing up. I was fed very little else. And I think that probably is directly related to why my body doesn't tolerate them now. And I do believe, and I can't cite good, strong scientific evidence for this, but I think it will probably come out in my lifetime. I do believe that the monotony of our diets contributes greatly to such dietary intolerances. And I don't think people would even need to switch primarily to wild food. I think people just need to vary their diet, eat a greater variety of things. And I know I've come back to this point a number of times, but we instinctively look for these calorie-dense foods with very few secondary compounds. And when we find them, we're fighting our instincts, not eat them. That's what we want. So every culture has had to find these foods, their, quote, bread and butter. You know, for the Ojibwa in this area was wild rice. Was this starchy staple that was easily digestible? And for a lot of tribes in California, it was acorns, which were oil and starch primarily. So we kind of have to fight an inherent tendency to focus on these foods that are really easy to digest because we don't need to eat 80% of them. We need them for 50% of our diet, not 80%. And that in that difference between the 50 and the 80, I think is the variety that if we all ate, we would be much healthier. Or if we ate in general, if people ate that much more, they would be far healthier than they are now. I want to turn my attention to spirituality. First of all, I want to note to that for a lot of people, if they think back on their childhood and they want to reach for that moment of awe at creation, they've experienced it and the healingness of it out in nature. So that is not a strange idea for most people. Yet, most of the time, for most people in the U.S. to engage in reverence for the creator, we go into a room and we put four walls around us instead of being out in nature. Of course, you know that Quaker meeting for worship, we sit in an hour of silence, listening for the voice of the Spirit. I was wondering if you wanted to be a prophetic voice within Quakerism to say if we're really going to find the voice of the Spirit, the best place to do it would be out in creation. So maybe we should be foraging or maybe we should just be doing our worship out of doors, amongst the trees. So did you want to become a prophetic voice of that sort? Or where do you end up connecting with God the best? Well, you know, I don't think that there's anything wrong. I really enjoy the experience of Quaker worship, whether it's indoors or outdoors. I've only done it outdoors a few times with a group. But that's only the once a week meeting for worship should be only a small part of a person's spiritual life. So it's really kind of the rest of it that counts. And I'm not real keen on saying how anyone should or shouldn't do that one week experience or once a week experience, but gathering food, and I really mean this, it is the best opportunity in all of life in the whole world. It is the absolutely best way to mix economy and worship. Economy being the mundane physical things necessary to go about life with the spiritual aspect, the worship. And one of the phrases that I live by is that if it doesn't work, don't use it. What I mean by that is when you have a spiritual idea, you need to put it to test in real life. And if there's conflict there between the spiritual idea and your real life, it has to be resolved. I mean, I guess that's kind of the feeling. That's what peace is in my mind. Inner peace is a resolution between the physical and the spiritual. And gathering wild foods is a perfect place for the interface of those two things. It's daily, so it provides a constant reminder of the beauty of this gift of life that you're receiving and that you receive whether you realize it or not. It's satisfying an endless need. And it brings you again and again to some of the deepest questions about life. And I don't mean to negate anything but any other spiritual experiences, but for most of human history, gathering and hunting really were the bread and butter of our spiritual lives. I think that our spiritual beliefs don't mean very much until they're reflected in our daily lives. And this is just a way that we can put our spiritual beliefs to test in our daily lives and refine them through our daily lives. So I think it's not just a good way to experience the divine. I think it's maybe the best way and I think that there's something lacking. This might offend some people, but unlike some Quakers, I'm not always afraid to offend people. I think there's something lacking when we don't have that direct experience of nature, that interaction with nature, because this is a very, very new thing in human life to not have that interaction. I think we are built, we are designed, we are meant to have that connection. And when we don't, I don't think that our spirituality functions quite as fully as it should or could. So, I mean, yeah, the interplay of faith and economy is what we do when we're gathering wild food. And I think it keeps both of them real and honest. The book is Nature's Garden, a guide to identifying harvesting and preparing edible wild plants by Samuel Thayer. You can go to his website for jurorsharvest.com. This will be out in the bookstores on April 1st. But in the meantime, if you contact Sam, I'm sure it'll help you out. I've got my advanced copy here. It's a wonderful guide, and it's a great value to the earth and to you individually to engage in foraging. Thanks again, Sam, so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you so much, Mark. I'm glad to be here. That was Sam Thayer of foragersharvest.com. And I'm your host for Spirit in Action. Mark helps me. This is a Northern Spirit radio production coming to you from the Great Midwest. My home radio station is W-H-Y-S-L-P-O-Claire. And you can always listen to the full archives of the shows via iTunes or my website, northernspiritradio.org. As I said earlier, we're going wild today. First up was Sam Thayer, a proponent of wild foods. And next up is Jim Bacchus, who captures the wild world in pictures. He's produced four books this past year, the latest out in December, with amazing photography and a wonderful glimpse of the earth beyond the confines of human habitations. You can see many examples of Jim Bacchus' photography on magoophoto.com. Jim does a great job of connecting us to the majesty of creation through his pictures and books, taking us to a place where we can fill reverence for and hopefully a willingness to be proper stewards of the earth. Jim Bacchus is in the studio with us here today. Jim, thanks for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thanks for inviting me. It's a privilege to be here. What got you into this because I don't think this is the job that you started out intending to do in life? No, late in life, I decided to become a nature photographer, so I started taking hundreds of pictures of the wildlife and realized after I got into it that not everybody has a wall to put a picture of a grizzly bear on. Because of that, I thought, "Well, why don't I do a book on it?" Then they'll be able to buy a number of photographs, learn also the history of the area and the ecosystem. My fourth book, somebody said, "Hey, have you ever thought of a children's book?" And so the fourth book in this series is a children's book using a wolf pack in North Dakota. Well, let's step through the books sequentially, Jim, and talk about what they're about. I'll try and describe some of it. Mostly, it's photography. There's text in a couple of them, in particular, that's important. But mostly, I think you're taking us there with the pictures because not everyone can do the same trip you can. So let's start with the spirit bears in your first book called "The Spirit Bears of the Great Rainforest of British Columbia." Tell us about the region and what our spirit bears. The area that we're talking about is the temperate rainforest, which is the coastal rainforest in British Columbia. It starts about 250 to 300 miles north of Vancouver and goes up into Alaska. And it's along the coast. It's the temperate rainforest, which means it gets about 120 inches of rain a year because of that. It's got massive vegetation. Along here are a number of fjords that go into the inland. Pretty uninhabited. In about a 400-mile area, there's two Indian villages. And otherwise, there's nothing between Balabella, British Columbia, and Prince Rupert. In this area, there's a spirit bear, or Komori bear, which is a black bear with a recessive gene that turns white. And they're born white, one out of every ten black bears in the area is born white. The spirit bear part is the name the first nation people gave them. And there's two to three hundred left in the world, and they're all in British Columbia in this temperate rainforest area. In 2001, PBS did a series on this bear. And I became interested and said, "Someday in my life I want to see this bear." Well, that time arrived after a lot of education on the area. In 2008, I went up there for the first time. And I think that you're pretty well addicted now. I think that all of your vacations are scoped out for the foreseeable future, aren't they? Yeah, it turned into a once-of-a-lifetime trip. I've been up there three times in the last year. Once you see this bear in its environment, it's almost like seeing God walking on earth. Now, this area is a sanctuary, right? This is not just to be overrun. You can't hunt in there. What are the limitations? You comment in one of the books that visitors are discouraged from going there, but somehow you manage to do it. There's a certain number of guides in some of the areas that are allowed to go in there. And they really control that so it doesn't get overrun and the bears don't become endangered because of that. The spirit bears are protected. The grizzly bears, they can hunt up there. But because it's such a remote area and so hard to get to, they're not hunted a lot. And the government is trying to restrict the hunting there that's in the works right now. Let's get into again the motivation for why you did this. I mean, it's a beautiful experience where you like to get out in the woods. You are fly fishermen originally. Why photograph the bears? I mean, is this like going to Mecca, is this church for you? Yeah, once I saw them, it's more than church. It's an experience that you'll never forget. You see this bear and you feel like going up and hugging them, but you can't naturally because these are wild animals. And if you leave them alone, they'll leave you alone. You know, you don't have to feel threatened around them, but you respect them and respect their territory. You said you can't go up and hug them, but you've mentioned to me getting very close to these bears. Yeah, I've been within three feet of some of the bears. I've been three feet from a 1200 pound grizzly bear. But he came up to us. We didn't go to him. You don't run around and chase them. And you might sit there for a half a day before they become comfortable with you and will come into your space. Now remember in that half a day, you might get an inch of rain. So you're setting up your photography equipment and you have to protect it from the elements. And I've been up there in springtime and May photographing grizzly bears. And I've done the spirit bears all in the fall in October and end of September. And they're in the rivers eating salmon at that time of the year. So they're more worried about getting in that 30% of their body weight that they need before they go into their winter sleep. They primarily eat the grasses and that kind of thing up there, don't they? I mean, are they big meat eaters? No, a bear is primarily a vegetarian, but they'll eat old carcasses and they'll down a deer that's injured. And they take the weak and lame and old. And then they eat pine nuts in the spring when they're eating the sedge grass that's high in protein. They'll eat 60 pounds of grass a day, a bear will. Then when fall comes, they have to pack on the weights so they'll eat salmon that's high in protein and fat content. And of course, humans are pretty, some of us at least, are pretty high in fat content. There's really no danger to us. I mean, you said the grizzly bear, you're a few feet away from him. I mean, I know that there's some people who thought they could get along with bears and then they end up dying because of it. No, a grizzly bear or a black bear is only going to be a danger if he feels threatened. If he's got cubs and he feels like they're in trouble or if he's hungry. So as long as there's food around, you don't have to worry about them attacking you. Now there's mean animals just like there are in humans. A friend of mine that's a bear biologist calls them cannibal bears and they're bad and they'll kill anything that moves. But we have the same problem with humans. Well, the bears are just one of the animals that you photograph, although clearly you've got a particular spiritual connection with them. The series that you came out with just in December, just a month ago, is your voyage into nature series. You started with the Kutzmatin grizzly bear sanctuary. Got some amazing pictures here of bears and of other animals too. Where's the Kutzmatin and how often you've been going there? I went to the Kutzmatin grizzly bear sanctuary, which is the only grizzly bear sanctuary in North America. And it's 175 square miles of land in British Columbia that's just south of Alaska. It's northeast, a Prince Rupert of about 30 miles and it's in a fjord and the Kutzmatin river runs into it. And in there there's 40 to 60 grizzly bears living in the 175 square miles of land. And they're all protected there. There's no island of any grizzly bears. And in there I've got grizzly bears and eagles in that book. It's a great trip. We go into the valley at Hightide and we move through the area in an 18-foot zodiac, which is a rubber boat with a 50-horse motor on it. And there's usually six photographers and we'll move through that area and photograph the grizzly bears as they're eating and playing in the grasses. So you've got some amazing pictures in that book, particularly mostly of grizzly bears. Your next book in the series is Voyage into Nature with photos and reflections. I want to mention a few of these. And this includes my personal favorite picture. My personal favorite is one with Eagle. I don't know how you got them to pose for that. Did you have to say smile or something? It's just an incredible, incredible picture. What kind of eagle is that? And why did you pick the quotation underneath it, which is from Abraham Lincoln? Well, that's a golden eagle drying its wings. And that eagles about three and a half to four feet high. And he's drying his wings. And I just thought the quotation that Abraham Lincoln said fit the photograph. It's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. And that book includes a number of different sayings that I thought would fit the area in the photograph. There's stuff in there by Chief Seattle, by Isaac Walton, things that I just found that I didn't have any author. Eleanor Roosevelt, Buddha, you know, all kinds of spiritual sayings. John Mirror, the Blackfeet Indian, the First Nation people in British Columbia. Ralph Waldo Emerson, different sayings by different people. In the photographs from all over the North America, from Lake Superior, from North Dakota to British Columbia in Wisconsin. As the title of the book makes clear, this is about voyage and in nature. Weren't you afraid that if you show all these beautiful pictures of all these wonderful natural spots, like the Kootz-Mateen Sanctuary, aren't you afraid that what that's going to lead to is all these people overrunning it and turning it into, like our state parks? I mean, I think love of nature is a very important thing. But what we tend to do is then drive our RVs in there and turn it into a parking lot. Number one, that won't happen in the Kootz-Mateen or in British Columbia there because of the area that it's in and how you get there. And in the government also, like the Kootz-Mateen, there's only two people that are licensed to go in there. And you can't go in there without one of them and it's an expensive trip. Because I was fortunate enough to get up there, I wanted to show it to other people. But there's also, if you look at these photographs, these animals are talking to us and they're telling us to help and protect that area by not over logging it and doing things that we shouldn't be doing to the ecosystem to interrupt it. And if we take everything that we want out of something, it destroys the area. And the creator didn't put it there for us to destroy it. He put it there so we can look at it and leave with memories, leave it better than when we entered it. So does this mean that you're one of those eco nut tree huggers like me? One of those people who think that they have value in and of themselves, not just for us, but the bears are there with or without us. It's not because they serve our needs that we have to preserve them. They've got their own value? Yeah, they're speaking to us. And if you look at them, through my photographs, you'll see that, hey, maybe I shouldn't be hunting these. If we needed to eat, that's a different story. But to hang it on the wall, let's enjoy it. And especially in an area like the Tempered Forest where that's the last one in our world. Because humans, over running an area, we have to control the wildlife then. And I'm not against hunting, but let's do it in areas that aren't going to hurt the ecosystem. For Spirit and Action today, we're visiting with Jim Bacchus. He's just released three more books to add to his fourth one. It was released earlier last year. Voyage into Nature is the name of the series. And his website is MagooPhoto.com. You go to MagooPhoto.com, you'll see some of these pictures that I'm referring to in the books. And you can also find out how to get the books. The fourth book that you came up with, Jim, is a children's book, and you collaborated on this one. Tell us about the children's book. The children's book, I got an interest in it. Somebody kept telling me, hey, why didn't you try to put these pictures into a children's book? Because little kids will be interested in it. Well, when I started thinking about this, I'm not the best writer in the world. So I found a lady from New Holstein, Wisconsin, that was a great writer, a children's writer. So I co-authored with her. I did the photographs with the help of my wife and my three-year-old granddaughter. Looking at photographs, we decided to do it on a wolf that separated from the pack and started their own pack. And it's about the wolf mother talking to the three cubs and the father that's also involved in their life. And it's an educational book as well as an entertaining book for young kids anywhere from three years old if you read it to them up to 103. It's a great book on a wolf pack in North Dakota. So did you drop the story for the wolves and then tell them to act? How did this come about? How do you put together the story that comes with this book? I started with the photographs, then thought up, you know, how can I put this into story form? And I came up with an idea and then gave it to Jean and she put it into a story to bring it into the book. We now have it where people that have read it are using it as a bedtime story for their kids and it talks about what wolves go through in their life. Now you said this is from North Dakota. I'm imagining that there's farmers or ranchers out there who aren't really very excited about having wolves around. And the pictures include a cougar, a bobcat that are part of that. When human civilization meets the people who used to live here, the animals that used to live here, there's often a clash. How do you think about that clash of perhaps perceived needs? Well, the wolves or the animals, the cougars are usually the loser. By loser, I mean, we turn them into an extinct species by killing them. We finally learn to start living with the creatures that God put on this earth. Because of that, the animals are learning to live with us too. Like I said, I'm not against hunting, but let's control it and do it in an orderly way. The wolf can have as many as there were 200 years ago because there's 100 times more people living in their area. But there's still a lot of beautiful wild land out there. Most of this was done in western North Dakota, where there's Theodore Roosevelt Park and the Badlands. It's just a beautiful area to go to and see nature and its best. A couple times in your books, you quote, and you draw from lessons of the First Nations people. They tend to call them that more in Canada than down here in the US. A lot of people are used to thinking of a certain, I don't know, religious, cultural assumption about places of animals and people and how we're supposed to relate from First Nations. Where do you draw your ideas from? Where do you're philosophical? You're talking about animals talking to us. That can get you put in insane asylum, right? Well, yeah, and a lot of people think I probably should be there. The First Nations people are, that's what they use in Canada. You're right. In the United States, we say Native Americans. They've got a feeling towards nature that maybe that we should look at and use some of their ideas. Because if they're hungry, they'll kill something, but that's the only time they're going to do it. And their believers in the spiritual world, like the White Bear, they believe the raven is their creator. And when we went from the Ice Age, which was all white to green, the raven flew over and said, "Hey, I need something to remember the White Era that we just went through." So we made this spirit bear. And he put it on an island in British Columbia and said that they're going to live there in peace all their life, and nobody's going to ever live there, except the animals of this world. And that's what's happened. You can believe in the raven making it or whoever does, but somebody did a good job. Because of that, when you go see something like this, you just believe in these stories and take an interest in what they're saying. And maybe we should be listening to people like that more than we do with the people that are trying to destroy everything in this world. This does not sound very much like dominion of nature, which some people get out of reading what we call Genesis. How does that fit for you? Where you come from religiously, spiritually. To say that we're the top animal in the food chain is what you're really saying there. Yeah, we're not going to sit here and die of hunger. But for us just to kill because we want to kill, that's what's wrong. To kill and use it is a different story. But when you see the, for instance, the grizzly bears that are being poached for their gallbladder, and all they do is take the gallbladder out of a beautiful animal because it's an aphrodisiac to the Chinese. And then sell that for huge money to the Chinese. There's something wrong with that. The area in Russia that's being poached the most, they find up to a thousand grizzly bears in the spring that have been killed for their gallbladder. Now, is this right? Not according to what I think. And I don't care what you believe in, you got to believe that animals should be treated with some respect. And if you look at my photographs, you'll see why I believe that because they're all talking to you through the photographs. I've been in areas that'll make a believer out of you. You alluded, Jim, to one of the quotations you included that's been attributed to Chief Seattle. I want to read that. Get your commentary on it. Is this the way that you think? I mean, there may be things in the book that are not 100% yours, but you're including diversity. I'm wondering about this one. If all the beasts were gone, we would die from loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beast soon happens to us. The Earth does not belong to us. We belong to the Earth. All things are connected, like the blood which unites a family. Whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the children of the Earth. And, you know, there's parts of that, like whatever happens to the beast soon happens to us. That's not a good prognostication for what's going to be coming for humanity. Well, I believe in exactly what he said, and that was done about 150 years ago. If we killed all the animals up in this world, what would we have left? The Earth itself, as we know, would disappear. And we have to watch what we're doing to this Earth. I always said that we don't have to worry about the atom bomb destroying us. We have to worry about garbage. If we pollute enough stuff, we won't have to worry about anything else. Because we'll kill ourselves with the pollution. Do you see the effects of that kind of thing happening in these remote areas, like the quitsmantine? And that, do you see the pollution? Because either on the daily show or on the Colbert Report, they had a captain on who's reporting this garbage cesspool out in the Pacific Ocean twice the size of Texas. So is this affecting places like Quitsmantine or the prairies of western North Dakota? Yeah, what you're doing is you're seeing the salmon run on the Pacific Ocean slowly going down. And when that happens, we're going to be in trouble because the salmon feed that whole ecosystem all the way through the trees that are growing even because the bears will drag a salmon into the woods and it decays and actually ends up into the ground and fertilizes the trees. And they've scientists have found proof of this by checking the tops of the trees. And the salmon kill is from different things in the ocean that we're doing to it. Through pollution, through the salmon farms, which when I started looking at salmon farms, I thought of somebody in a leave a dig in a hole in the ground and fell into the water and put fish in it and raising them. Well, that isn't what they do. I've looked into this and you see them in the areas now in the ocean where they'll actually fence an area off and fill it with fish. Because those fish can't swim, they end up with diseases that are hurt in the area. And that will hurt an area around it miles and miles away from the fish farm. And it's because of the sea lice and everything else that happens because these fish are contained. Salmon farms are one of the bad things that's happening up there. When I first started looking into this, I said, "How can a salmon farm be detrimental to the environment?" But it is. In Norway, warned British Columbia about it before they allowed it to happen and said, "Hey, we stopped it over here because they literally destroyed some of the fjords in Norway, by having fish farms in these fjords, and it destroyed them. We're nothing that grows in the fjord anymore." You sound a little bit like an ecologist, someone who's actually studied these bio relationships. But that's not been your profession for these many years, is it? I own a rep business, a sales business, where I sell automotive machine shop equipment. And I've done that, but because that business has been successful, it allowed me to turn a hobby of mine, which was photography, into a disease, which it's a good disease because I see a lot of beautiful country. I hope that other people will enjoy what I see through my photography, or they can go there. You know, anybody's welcome to get ahold of me on my website. Email me and discuss anything they want with me. And it's easy to get ahold of me and just go to MagooPhoto.com. And there's a connection there for my email address. And there's approximately 800 to 1,000 photos on there all the time from areas from Bam, Mexico, to the northwest territory in Ontario, to Alaska, and everywhere in between. Lake Superior, and I'm working on my fifth book right now. It's all done except for proofreading, and then it'll go to the print. And that's 140 pages on the temperate rainforest in British Columbia, all the way from the ecology of it to the animals that are up there, to the recreation areas that are available up there in the history of the area. Like I said, it's just about done. And then I've already got my sixth book in the planning stages, and I'm talking to the refuge down in Nacita, and the whooping cranes are being brought back from extinction or close to it. I think that that's an area that is overlooked by everybody in the state of Wisconsin alone. There's 43,000 acres of some of the most beautiful land in the world down there. There's this wildlife down there that people just dream about. It's full of cranes, there's sandhill cranes, and whooping cranes, and waterfall, and there's two packs of timber wolf down there, and white-tailed deer, and parks, and eagles, you know, it's a beautiful country. And just so people don't miss the point, on the website, MagooPhoto.com, you'll find a lot of these pictures that are in the book, or they're not in the book, I mean, there's so many more. The four books that you can buy right now, they're listed out there on the website, go out there and check them out, MagooPhoto.com, and Contact Jim. Again, my guest has been Jim Bacchus here today for Spirit and Action, and you can always find links to my guests, including Jim Bacchus, via my website, NortonSpiritRadio.org. Thanks so much for joining me today for Spirit and Action Jim. Thank you, I really appreciate the time I spent with you, and I hope that everybody takes a look at my website, and if you get a chance, get a hold of me, and I'll be more than happy to talk to you about anything I've done. That was a little walk on the wild side today for Spirit and Action. That was Jim Bacchus capturing the wild animals and world through his photography, and in the four books he's produced to date, available via MagooPhoto.com. And earlier in the program we spoke with wild foods and foraging author, Sam Thayer of ForagersHarvest.com. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit and Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, NorthernSpiritRadio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.