In this week’s interview, correspondent Elizabeth Ralston talks with Bob Redmond and Anne Biklé about the complexities of the microbiome. They highlight how microscopic organisms are essential to the health of its host—whether that’s our soil or our own bodies. Biklé likens the gut to a garden, encouraging us to recontextualize ourselves as part of an ecosystem and exploring ways to keep that system healthy. They dive into discussions of cancer, mental health, inflammation, and the steps we can take to cultivate a healthy microbiome. Get an insider’s look and stay in the know about what’s going on in this moment at Town Hall Seattle.

The event was co-produced by Survivor Bee and co-sponsored by Big Dipper Waxworks, King County LOOP® Biosolids,  the Center for Microbiome Sciences and Therapeutics at the University of Washington, The Common Acre and Rainbow Natural Remedies.

Episode Transcript

Transcription by Megan Castillo.

Jini Palmer: Welcome to Town Hall Seattle’s podcast In the Moment where we talk with folks coming to our stages and give you a glimpse into their topic, personality and interests. I’m your host, Jini Palmer. 

Researchers are continuing to find out more about the link between our gut and brain, what’s in the soil and how this is directly related to bees and cancer. On Tuesday, February 4th a panel of experts are coming to our Forum stage to talk about our microbiome and the ways in which bacteria is essential to the health of our bodies, minds, and the environment. 

Our correspondent for this episode, Elizabeth Ralston, got her master of public health from the University of Michigan with an emphasis on health education. Elizabeth is the founder of the Seattle King County Cultural Accessibility Consortium, a grassroots effort to make the arts accessible for people with disabilities. The consortium is the first of its kind in the Seattle area to address inequities and accessing arts events, programs and spaces. Elizabeth sat down in our broadcast room at Town Hall to talk with moderator for this event Bob Redmond and panelist Anne Biklé. 

Bob Redmond found his ways to bees while living as writer in residence in a garden cottage surrounded by skyscrapers with 12 years experience tending honeybees, which at one time included 150 colonies. He has also been a leader in pollinator conservation, founder of the nonprofit, The Common Acre. Bob was also co-primary investigator on a four year USDA study led by WSU and instigated the Flight Path and Green Line projects with SeaTac Airport and Seattle City Light. Bob lives in South Seattle with his wife and son. 

Anne Biklé is a science writer and public speaker with over two decades of experience in field biology, natural history and environmental planning. Her work focuses on the connections between people, plants, food, health and the environment. Biklé is co-author of The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health. And now a conversation about bees, guts, soil and cancer.

Elizabeth Ralston: Thank you for joining us for this fascinating topic. When I was asked to lead this podcast, titled Bees, Guts, Soil and Cancer the public health geek in me went, Whoa. So exciting. So thank you for your time here. So the main question you will be exploring in your event is how are the health of soil, plants, bees and people connected? Well, where are we going to start? Where would you like to start?

Bob Redmound: Well this is Bob speaking I guess. Um, yes, you’re right. That is the focus of the event. How all these things connected and it’s a health focus. This is, it’s not a “Oh my God, the sky is falling” conversation. It’s about good things. And, one of my backgrounds is as a professional beekeeper and after 12 years, the conclusions I was drawing about bee health drove me into the soil. So many people are talking about colony collapse disorder and um, you know, pathogens. Those are part of it, but it really all comes down to not even flowers but soil. And, there’s a small group of us beekeepers who are trying to teach ourselves soil science. So that was one thing. The second thing was that about three years ago I was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer and it’s still active. And that’s a whole other story of what’s been going on, but completely related and similar path of, Oh, this thing is happening. Surgeries, radiation, all that stuff. But the more I dug in, and sometimes despite the care of my awesome doctors who aren’t trained in nutrition, I came to the same conclusions. It’s what is in the soil.

ER: Why don’t we start with this quote by Dr. Depolo. He says, “think of your gut as a garden.” You’re smiling Anne tell me more about that.

Anne Biklé: Wow. I don’t even know him. And he’s my kind of guy is what I can say about that. Part of what we’re learning about microbiomes wherever they may be, because one thing that’s very true about this whole new field of science is that this universe of microscopic organisms, it’s not just bacteria and fungi, it goes beyond that. But these communities of trillions of organisms are actually very fundamental to the health and wellbeing of humanity. And Bob had talked about the, alluded to the soil previously. And this idea of the gut being a garden is very apt because even if you’re not a gardener, even if you’ve never grown a plant in your life, when you hear the word garden, it implies several things. I think it implies stewardship, it implies cultivation. It implies something positive and good about this place when we talk about a garden. And so to think about the gut as this alive thing, you know, it has an ecosystem. The gut has an ecosystem just like the soil. And so when you start to sort of look at these parallel universes, if you will, the, the gut and soil, then you start asking things like, what is the diet of the soil and what is the diet of this inner ecosystem and what do those diets have to do with the functioning of these microbiomes? And what does the functioning of these microbiomes have to do with the health of their garden or their person? And you’ll often hear in microbiome science, people will say the host and the host is, you know, all of us here have our own microbiomes and hopefully they’re doing something positive in us right now. But we are their host. And, the host of the soil microbiome is the soil itself. And I would add to that what farmers and gardeners are doing to that soil. Right. Cause we can get up and we can walk around and so forth, but the soil is stuck in place like the plant. So there’s, I’m very excited to hear that someone’s already talking about the two G words, gardens and guts.

ER: Yes. And when you talk about global warming and the rising incidents of autoimmune diseases and cancer, I mean, this is all so relevant, but let’s back up a bit. And you have the hidden half of nature. You talk about, how you transformed the lousy soil in your garden into, healthy soil by feeding lots of organic matter, including coffee grounds and that supported the plant growing into a thriving garden. And then that garden took half a decade to create right? And I really loved your description about the transformation of this garden to accommodate plants. But first, of course, the microbiome, the micro-organisms, then the plant will grow. Then the tiny animals that come from that and then over time grow to attract bugs and worms. Then birds, then larger birds and predators and raccoons and eagles. I really loved your description of how when you transform that garden into something that attracted a living ecosystem. Can you say more about your journey with that because it’s so applicable?

AB: Yeah, I think people are awfully self-centered and it’s very hard for us to see ourselves as part of a system or as part of something larger. But indeed, when you start to look at microbiomes or a garden or you could even be out in the Amazon, you know, jungle in some other kind of ecosystem, what you see is that life is sort of nested within life. And that was pretty easy to see in the garden. Well, I mean, it helps that I have a background in biology and I have a very bad case of plant lust. And so I’m prone to thinking about these things, let’s say. Okay. But what really makes you sort of wake up and notice is when you start with something, that we started with, which was a completely barren lot. And by that I mean when we started the garden, I wanted a blank slate. I didn’t want to —well, first of all, we really, there really wasn’t anything there. There was some dead trees. There was this like, you know, old growth, lawn, I’m doing air quotes here, “lawn”. And I thought, let’s just, we’re gonna scrape all of this off, all of this existing vegetation and we’re going to get it down to a blank slate. It was sort of like taking you how when people talk about remodeling house and they say, we’re gonna take it down to the studs. We took everything outside of our house back to the studs. Okay. And that wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t really hopeful. Like when you take the house back to this studs and you can start to see the potential. And in our case it led to dead. It was dead dirt. It was — it sent me into an utter panic attack because, and embarrassment to here’s this biologist and her geologist husband and I’m like, Oh my God, we didn’t look at our soil before we like scraped all this vegetation off. How stupid is that? I said, well we need to stop blaming ourselves. We need to start doing things right now. And I had done enough gardening to know organic matter. You better go find a lot of organic matter as quickly as possible, as close to home as possible and cheap cause we have no money. Cause I spent it on all the plants and the scraping of everything off of the lot. There was no money to be buying organic matter. So I started collecting things and bringing them home. Everything from the neighbor’s fallen leaves to, you know, I’d hear an arborist truck in the neighborhood and go track them down and say I need your wood chips right now. Come over here, dump them in my driveway. And so I began mixing up these mulches and layering them on top of the soil. It had been my intent to dig all of this mulch in. And what I know now is that that was a really happy accident that I did not in fact get some rototiller or some piece of equipment or use my own hands to start digging this stuff in because all that would have done would be to further scramble what little bit of life was clinging on to whatever tiny, tiny pieces of organic matter were still not, you know, decomposed. So I layered it on top and I let the organisms in the life come to the food, so to speak. And that is what kicked off, Elizabeth, this whole thing that you just sort of read out of the book is that Dave and I realized later, it’s like, wow, we just sort of saw the whole way in which life on earth unfolded over millions and millions, billions of years, four and a half billion in fact. How that all unfolded in, just, you know, maybe a half, a decade to a decade. And I’m not saying it was precise and accurate. What I’m saying is that in general, we started with soil and the microbes in the soil and that drew in one thing after another. And that’s what I mean about life nested in life is that life sort of represents, you know, somebody is somebody else’s lunch. And so that’s what all life is doing. They are looking around for lunch, for places to rest and sleep, and for places to raise their young. And so that was what we had sorta started once we got the soil back up on its feet.

ER: Yes. And when you restore soil fertility you are going to combat chronic diseases and promote a healthy immune system. Right? So what are some examples of how microbes can really promote healthy immune systems?

AB: Yeah. Wow. See, that’s the question right there. Because we used to think that human health was predicated on the absence of microbes. That has consumed us since the days of Anthony van Laywin. Who was a Dutch guy who invented the microscope several hundred years ago. He didn’t know anything about microorganisms or pathogens, but in the centuries after him, we began to learn, wow, some of humanity’s most dread diseases. Let’s talk about the Corona virus that is emerging now in China and maybe coming around the world, that is pretty much how we have thought about the entire microbial world for all of human history. Everything is out there, a lurking Corona virus. I don’t want to downplay that because there is a duality to the microbial world and pathogens and especially disease causing pathogens are a reality. But they are a very, very small part of the microbial world. And so now what we know through not only plant microbiome research, but now emerging out of human microbiome research is that Oh, it’s the presence of microbes as well that is very influential on human health. And so this has caused a lot of people ranging from, you know, moms to researchers in labs to granting agencies to scientists all over the place, scrambling to do several things. You know, sort of in a, this is like a very big picture thing. What are they scrambling to do? Okay, how does the human microbiome work? How do we stop wrecking it? Where we’ve impaired it, how do we bring it back to life and how do we move forward with practices in medicine? And I would contend, I don’t think medical folks are so much thinking about this, although I wish they would think more about it, is how do we also make sure that we’re growing our food and treating our farmland and our animals in agriculture in ways that is producing healthy food. Because the quality of the food that we bring into our bodies, it’s not just our taste buds who like that, you know, heirloom tomato, um, fruits and vegetables are chock full of phytochemicals. So these are naturally occurring chemicals in plants and we know that growing practices affect their density. That is how much of what are the levels of lycopene, for example, in a tomato because the lycopene in a tomato that comes into the human gut represents food. It’s a portion of the food that the human microbiome is consuming. And so you want your microbiome to have in general a diverse diet. Plenty of different kinds of whole plant foods to ferment down, down in the gut. And this is where, this is no disrespect to any vegans or vegetarians out there, and I’ll probably get hate mail on this later, who knows? But all of this faux meat, the whole problem with that is that whether it’s a whole soybean or a whole pea plant that’s been pulled into some factory somewhere, it’s phytochemicals, its whole nutritional profile gets scrambled. And what we know about the human microbiome was that when we start scrambling our diet, simplifying it and taking away the fermentable carbohydrates, the human microbiome does not do so well. Part of what our health hinges on with the human microbiome are all of these molecules and compounds that they produce from the foods we eat and these compounds, they’re called metabolites. Also these compounds in metabolites. They are like our onboard medicine chest in many, many ways, but they can also be harmful to us. And so we want to always be feeding our microbiome. These things are going to fill up that medicine chest and we don’t want to eat a lot of the foods that are gonna allow them to turn our diet into things that harm us. So this whole thing about you are what you eat. We need to modify that to this. You are what your microbiome eats, right?

ER: Yes. And that brings me back to the question about the bees, right? Because we have to start with the bees. The bees are a critical factor in all of this. So I want to go back to Bob, what you were saying about being a beekeeper and your experience with bees, but, so I’ve read in an article that honeybees rely on the gut microbial community for a variety of functions, food processing, regulation of immune system, defense against pathogens, and the use of pesticides as you’re talking about food, growing food, apparently the swabs, the gut of the bee, which makes bees more susceptible to environmental stressers. And you brought up the colony collapse disorder. So can you say more about the importance of bees and bee health to all of what Ann has been saying.

BR: Sure. Um, there’s a lot of big questions that you’re asking. And I also recognize that it’s hard for people, our culture, the dominant culture who is so steeped in, and especially these days, in data and evidence. We’re approaching things in a certain way. And, well what’s the science behind that? Prove to me that this is, you know, carcinogenic or prove to me that this is hurting the bees. And I also want to step back, and one thing you said Anne reminded me that, yeah this is our history since van Laywin, and there’s a tradition of Western culture that has certain approaches and diagnostic procedures and stuff. But there’s other approaches, like the Native American cultures or even the witch cultures and plant medicine a completely different approaches. Right now we are taking a really long way around to correct some of, kind of the willful illiteracy that we have embraced around relationships between ourselves and the natural world. But we are educating ourselves and trying to reestablish or establish proper relationships between us and the ecology. It just, it’s been really difficult. So I don’t want to lose sight, I don’t want to make things too complicated when we say, Oh, bees, like what are the 15 reasons why bees are doing bad and what, how am I supposed to understand the complicated nature of the bee microbiome and what does that mean? It really does get simple though when you say that the bees eat nectar and pollen from flowers and also gather propolis, which is also very important to be health. But, and then water is the fourth thing that they gather. So they’re not only collecting four things and each of those is super important in maintaining the hive as an organism of itself when we’re talking honeybees here for a moment. But those things pollinate, especially in our industrial agriculture system. The bulk of what we eat that requires pollination. So, if we feed them sugar water and if we put them on trucks and cart them around the country and say, Oh, well you’re going to eat almonds for three weeks, now you’re going to eat blueberry nectar, now you’re going to eat apple nectar. It’s a terrible diet. It’s terrible. And pollen substitute that’s made from soybeans, they’re getting, gosh, imagine if we fed our kids peanut butter and jelly every day for weeks and weeks. And then we gave them, you know, delly turkey and then, you know, Snickers bars as candy and Capri Sun. Oh gosh, we actually do that. Really bad for their diet. So, yeah, long story short, what the bees eat helps them fight disease and also stimulates their immune system.They have the same thing and fights all these factors. Anyway, there’s some demystifying that I want to do and kind of bring things back to, care for not just honeybees, but all the pollinators and flowers. And, it’s not as simple as it’ll take care of itself, but it is simple that if we plant and tend soil in our yards and kind of bring everything as local as possible, we’re going to grow these invisible gardens and have really awesome relationships with these creatures. Cause there’s nothing like watching all this amazing bounty in your own yard.

ER: Yeah, you brought up such an excellent point, the care piece, like taking care of our environment and our ecosystem and ourselves and the complexity of that because we’re all so interrelated and interconnected with each other, right? This is becoming more and more fragmented. And so the work that you’re trying to do is to put the pieces back together so that we can continue to nurture ourselves. Which brings me back to something that you Anne said, we talk a lot about diet and about how you are, what you eat and you said that a third of all cancers are thought to be linked to diet, including breast cancer, in post-menopausal women, colon cancer and prostate cancer. And you brought this up, so that diet-cancer connection really resonated strongly with you. And if you can tell me a little bit more about your personal journey in this regard and how and what we can all learn from this.

AB: Yeah, I think whenever somebody is facing a health challenge, you’re either the kind of person who shuts down and doesn’t ask any questions or you’re a person like me. And in my case when I was diagnosed with cancer, it was, it was actually not a diet related cancer, but ironically enough it was a cancer associated with a virus. And so here is a sort of a thread, you know, a thread that I tugged on hard about the microbiome because I wanted to find out more about the human microbiome. What does that have to do with my health? And then hearing what you just said, Elizabeth, there’s a number of cancers that are linked to diet. And so this is a modifiable factor: what we eat. And so when it comes to diet in the soil or for a human being, you really, this is just sort of really common sense. Let’s think about this. So long ago when we were hunter gatherers, and even in the years after that we never had any pharmaceutical companies. We never had any agrichemical companies. All we had was our microbiome and what we ate. So that was the doctor. And now obviously like diet isn’t going to do something if you fall down out there in the Savannah and you sprained your ankle, right? That’s an acute thing and that, I’m not talking about that. But what we know about the diet cancer connection is that at least half of the battle with these diet related cancers is that you want to prevent the onset of any weirdnesses, any, you know, cell abnormalities. Anything that is the beginning of a cancer because this whole thing “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. That is why people say that. Because if we can prevent the onset of things, then you’re never going to deal with the being down here at the very downstream, you know, end of the cancer and doing, whether it’s surgeries or radiation or chemotherapy or whatever it is. Let’s not, let’s not get to that point. Let’s, let’s, let’s cut this off at the pass. And so the reason diet is so important, and this is Bob also said something. You had mentioned plant medicines, and do you know this, that you know, some of the very earliest doctors we know this from England, the Chelsea Physic Garden. It is the oldest, medicinal garden that we know about, although I would probably contend that they’re in the Western world—I should caveat that. And doctors at this time, this would be back in probably 1500-1600’s. They didn’t go inside a classroom and open up books solely. They were sent out to the garden to learn about the plants because plants are their own, this has to do with, just the plant lifestyle, right? They’re stuck in place. They can’t get up and run around and get away from predators. Aha. But what can they do? They can create chemicals. The genome of a plant is something I’m not sure that you know the human brain will ever totally understand because that genome is what is interacting with the microbiome and it’s spinning out all of these different chemicals, some of which if you were a doctor way back when you would need to know, you know this plant has this property. They didn’t know what the chemicals or the phytochemicals were at that time, but they knew this plant for this thing, this plant for this thing.. That was the medicine. And so because we also eat plants, we are voluntarily bringing some of this stuff into our bodies, you know, every day and so far I’m not aware of anybody who has died from over consumption of fruits and vegetables and I would say fruits and vegetables, you know, known to be, let’s say you know, free of pesticide residues and things like that. So far no one has died from over consumption of fruits and vegetables. What they are bringing into their body though is this whole pharmacopoeia of phytochemicals and, and what we know about plant foods is that all of these phytochemicals, they tend to work in combination with one another. That’s why, if you’re eating, just again back to Bob’s point about simplifying the diet. Oh, I’m so healthy. I eat carrots every single day, every single meal. No, that’s not what we want because the beta carotene in that carrot, it can interact with say the lycopene in a tomato or an anthocyanin in your blackberries that you had for breakfast. So it’s all about bringing in sort of an abundance and I don’t mean exclusively, but an abundance of plant foods in diverse combinations and that is doing things at the cellular level. It is triggering genes with anticancer activity.

ER: Yes. But the other stuff is causing inflammation. Which is the key word here “inflammation” and what foods cause inflammation?

AB: It’s the simplified carbohydrates. 

ER: Yeah. Bingo. 

AB: Okay, good. Whew. Those, are causing inflammation. And there’s all of these things that are not in food that we add to food. And I will just put that under the umbrella of additives. That could be preservatives, that could be stabilizers, that could be artificial this or that. We don’t really know. We don’t really know what those are doing. You know, there’s that category. It’s called grass, generally regarded as safe. I believe that’s the, the FDA lingo on that. So there’s all these grass products out there, you know, or ingredients to products.

BR: We should not be spraying everything with glyphosate with Roundup a carcinogen. They say, Oh, well if you apply it properly, it won’t harm humans. But then meanwhile you’ve got all these pollinators out there sprayed by a glyphosate and ingesting it really messes with them and their health. So anyway, random note. But I also wanted to say something about, things that cause inflammation and sort of disrupt, um, sugar! And, as a beekeeper, I have a complicated relationship and as a sugar lover, such a sweet tooth, but so do all of us humans. We’re wired that way and evolution isn’t quick enough to catch up with industrialization. And so we’ve figured out all these ways to create sugars. And a lot of it when — not 500 years ago, the way we got the sweet was to get it from bees and that practices as beekeeping rather than just hunting honey is only 4 – 4,500 years old. So it’s taken a while for and, industrial beekeeping is really only, like 150 years old. So it’s taken all this time to figure out how do we maximize getting sweet products. And then, it must be said, coincidental with slavery, we created mass plantations of sugarcane and figured out how to make a lot of sugar for really cheap. But all that is baked into our diets and our cultures. And now we eat ungodly amounts of sugar and we’re not, we can’t handle it. Our bodies can’t handle it. And how we use to use sugar kind of strategically, Oh God, to run from the tiger, you know we’re going to get sugar to now, Oh I’m just going to sit on on the couch and watch TV and eat a lot of sugar is not a good match for that, for that particular food.

AB: There’s the dietary aspect, but there’s also what we know is that because you want, because of the communication between gut microbiota and the immune system that the gut microbiota in a way and especially as they change and develop from birth through about age five, they’re constantly — that early, early microbiome is constantly interacting with the human immune system. And we know most of the immune system is engaged with the gut and so if you have insufficient scrambled, perturbed human microbiome, then what you have is an immune system that is firing way too much. And an immune system that fires way too much is an immune system that is constantly on inflammation mode. So that was the other thing. Sugar causes it, but also not having the properly functioning microbiome from birth onward because these immune cells, their whole job is “got to keep the person healthy, healthy gotta keep the person healthy”. And so the only thing the immune system can really do, it’s only a big, big hammer and it’s big, big tool is inflammation. And the other thing I meant about our immune system is if in doubt fire away, cause you never know. In the olden days, you know it was pathogens that were getting us. So there was a good chance there was a pathogen involved, there wasn’t a good chance that sugar was involved or that an insufficient microbiome was involved. So that’s probably why the immune system, you know, I ask no questions, I just embark on inflammation.

ER: I think this has been a great conversation and I think that it seems like your approach is to explain things in a way that the lay person can understand. Because so much of this is technical information about complex sugars and how the soil composition affects plant and all that. Anne, you do such a great job in your book of explaining some of these issues. You also mentioned something called the built environment and I really loved that concept and what this meant is the way the cities are laid out, influences the choices and opportunities that underlie a person’s health and well-being. And this is kind of, I feel like this is kind of a good summary of what we’ve been talking about. In that, how we live our lives, in a city or in a town or whatever influences the way that we live. And, I also have my accessibility hat on as well. Because I’m working on accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts and the built environment is such an important way of how people with disabilities and how everyone else can really access their environment in a way that makes them thrive and is healthy and genuine for them. So I really appreciate you bringing that up. Did you have anything else you would like to say about the built environment and how this applies to your work?

AB: You know we have this big brain sitting on top of our shoulders and that, that makes us unique among animals, and it’s also why the built environment I think is so important to think about for people. We know that more and more people are moving to urban and urbanized areas. And so the fabric of the built environment and I’m not sure I’ve seen this yet, but what, you know, but I think architects, landscape architects, planners and so on, all those in, you know, quote “in charge of the built environment”, should steep themselves in is, about how human beings perceive the environment around them. And when you think about how, you know, 99% of our evolution was about moving through natural environments. It was about, looking for food, you know, staying away from the predators and not falling into the water. But it was also about pausing maybe, and looking up to take note of a particularly beautiful color of light or a flower that had opened or the million shades of green that might surround a person or the million shades of tans and browns in that kind of an ecosystem. And so when we build built environments that don’t tap into or support how our brains and our bodies really work and what makes them healthy, we’re just doing ourselves a disservice. And I would also contend that probably if you dug deep enough, I mean there’s actually some research on this in the human microbiome and that is that, when a person is happy, when they are in a good mood that that is also good for their microbiome because we’re making, our bodies make compounds and molecules too. And our microbiome is affected by those. So that might be dopamine or it might be serotonin or these, any number of other neurotransmitters that get triggered when we’re out in a high quality, stimulating, safe, healthy environment. So I think, it sort of comes full circle that way.

ER: Yes. You just summed it up so beautifully and I want to invite you Anne over to my house to help me with my garden and you, Bob, to my house to help me start a beekeeping business. Thank you so much.

BR: Thank you, Elizabeth.

AB: Yeah. Thank you very much. It’s been great.

JP: Bob and Anne will be in conversation with Alyssa Arnheim, health and ecology caretaker, William DePaulo, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the university of Washington and Jenifer Walke, PhD, assistant professor of biology at Eastern Washington University. They will be at Town Hall on February 4th at 7:30 PM. There’s still tickets available for this event, so if you’re interested in hearing what is sure to be an enlightening conversation, click on the event link in the episode description and get yourself a seat. Thank you for listening to episode 52 of In the Moment. Our theme music comes from the Seattle based band, Hibou, and Seattle’s own Barsuk Records. To support Town Hall, become a member or see our calendar of events. Check out our website at townhallseattle.org next week, our chief correspondent Steve Scher will be talking with Dan Esty about big ideas for a sustainable future. Until then, thanks for joining us right here In The Moment.