Savanna

The way you grow them is the same.

you cut it to about uh one meter high once or twice a year and it re-sprouts and that tender re-sprouting growth is the part you eat and it has um like a with a with a basswood for example you might get two weeks of edible leaves on a regular tree but if you cut it down and let it re-sprout you can get months of tender growth so the coppicing the cutting makes it um have a longer season of tender growth but also makes it so that you can reach the leaves without endangering your life so it's a very low maintenance way to grow vegetables you only have to plant it once and they're pretty easy to take care of and pruning is really minimal and all that so I think whether it's baobab in the African Savannah or You know, Moringa in Cuba or Linden's here in Massachusetts is pretty much the same kind of management, which made it a fun book to write.

This is a universal pattern.

People have discovered the same thing over and over again all around the world.

I'm Jenna.

And I'm Mark.

Jenna, where are we right now? We're on the Savannah yard.

In the middle of the African Savannah habitat.

Our guest today is Murder of the Ostrich.

Good girl.

And one of the coolest things is that we can share space with all of the animals out here.

So we come out here multiple times a day and get to be around them.

right uh no that's uh that's a great point and the point of that is that we talk Like humans, storytelling, you're totally right, we're wired for story.

Going back to the Savannas, Don Hewitt, who created 60 Minutes, the most profitable, longest-running show in TV history.

He said the whole show was based on the one sentence, tell me a story.

And telling you a story is speaking like a human.

that would be, it'd be, I see

a little less terrifying than on the African Savannah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Upon an easy slope it lies at large, And scarcely overlaps the long curved crest Which swells out two leagues from the river marge.

A trackless wilderness rolls north and west— Savannas, savage woods, enormous mountains, Bleak uplands, black ravines with torrent fountains— And eastward rolls the shipless sea's unrest.

The city is not ruinous, although Great ruins of an unremembered past, With others of a few short years ago More sad, are found within its precincts vast.

The street-lamps always burn, but scarce a casement In house or palace front from room to basement Doth glow or gleam athwart the murk air cast.

It's just magnificent.

So we're in front of the African Savannah at the moment.

We've got the giraffes behind us and we've got a very special guest.

Wren is a zookeeper here.

And I, I see this, like, to me, the roots of this are evolution.

Like think of our ancestors living on the African Savannah without much food.

And if you got kicked out of the tribe, you just died and you didn't pass on your genes.

And so we are the ancestors of generation after generation, after generation of people who were attuned to subtle social cues about how to fit in because the ancestors, people who didn't do that, didn't pass on their genes.