 Hello everyone and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast, the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with researchers, policymakers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities, or in other words, their resource use and pollution emissions, and how to reduce them in a systemic, socially just and context-specific way. I'm your host, Aristide from Metabolism of Cities, and on today's episode we will talk about a topic that I have already declared my love about it in a previous episode, the one with Caroline Stil, and that topic is urban environmental history. As you will see, this topic not only is fascinating, well, according to me, but is also quite fundamental for planning future and current cities. More specifically, the history of urban pollution, the creation of technical and sanitary services and the role of sanitary engineers are crucial to be understood for urban transformations. To talk about this topic, I have emeritus professor Martin Melosi, who is an environmental historian whose research and writing have focused on urban sanitary infrastructure, including services for drinking water, wastewater and solid waste. He was a professor at the University of Houston, where he taught since 1984. He has written numerous books that I have read during my initial research until now. These ones include the Sanitary City, Affluent America, and also Coping with Abundance. And you'll see how these are super relevant for today's discussion. Just before we kick off this episode, I'd like to make a small request from you listeners and watchers, please help us spread the word around by these discussions, by leaving a comment on what you liked or learned today, and by sharing it with your friends and colleagues. That will help us a lot. With all that being said, hi, Martin, and welcome to this podcast. Hi, good to see you. Thanks a lot for taking the time. I want to start perhaps with some more of your personal trajectory. I read in your books that you started as a political historian, and then you turned into an environmental historian focusing on urban industrial societies. Could you perhaps explain what made this shift and why you shifted? Yeah, I actually trained in political history, but also in diplomatic history. So I was interested more broadly in the very traditional field. And when I was receiving my PhD at the University of Texas, I took a course on the American Gilded Age, the late 19th century. And one of the topics of the course was looking at cities and looking at the problems of cities at that time. And I found it very interesting. And ultimately, with the same professor, I wrote an article on waste. It seemed to me that it was the one topic that almost everyone came into contact with on a daily basis. So I was curious as to how it was dealt with in the cities. And so it became an essay. I won a national award for the paper, which caught my attention. I said, well, maybe there's something interesting. This is 1972, just to put it in time frame. So environmental history, as such, was a fairly vague area of study, very general, and mostly concentrating on rural America, conservation, so forth. And so to make a long story short, ultimately, when I took my first job, this was at Texas A&M University, I came to realize there are too many diplomatic historians and no urban historians. So I just took up the topic seriously, got a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and then that led to two books that dealt with urban pollution issues. And from then on, I just continued helping to encourage others to write about these subjects. My close friend Joel Tarr, who everybody in the field knows, Joel, was kind of a mentor to me early on. He was at another university, he became very good friends, and to this day, see each other quite often, but it was the common interest in the urban environment and trying to explain what that was all about. And it's pretty obvious that in those earlier years, what was really needed was a multidisciplinary approach. We just really couldn't stay within our lane. And that meant that most of us were studying geography, looking at sociology, looking at even landscape architecture, certainly going as far afield as possible. And in my case, because I was interested in urban services, as was Joel and a few others, we became very friendly with engineers and began to talk to people, not only academics teaching engineering, but in the field, people that were managing programs, and learning a great deal. So it was a cumulative experience, which I never gave up on. I began to take an interest in the late 70s and energy questions, and I always had my, say, ear to the ground, looking for topics that were important, and it was related in many ways. So I did a lot of writing on energy questions as well. But everything almost came down to the city, and it was how cities function, again, metabolism being kind of the larger concept that really drew my interest in our curiosity. And as we moved farther and farther in our own research, we began to gather disciples and friends who also, and find people, that were working in obscurity in these areas, and eventually kind of developing a strong wing within the environmental history community. And to this day, it's kind of interchangeable if you go to conferences. The kinds of presentations don't necessarily divide themselves easily along kind of rural urban lines or, you know, nature city lines, they tend to blur, which I think is important. And the bigger implication was, this is very much an international field. When I first went, I think my first meeting in Europe was in 1983 in Paris, and we had a conference on infrastructure. And almost to a person, the French colleagues, it was kind of a bi-national meeting. Everyone from France was an engineer, an economist, a geographer. Almost to a person, the Americans were historians. So we had to get kind of through the interdisciplinary differences and language and conceptual differences. And we found a lot of common ground. And some of those friends that I made in 84 are still dear friends now. I mean, they've been to my house, I've been to theirs. We communicate regularly. I think one of your speakers, Sabine Barrow, I've known Sabine since she was a graduate student. So it began to spread, and it wasn't one direction. It wasn't certainly the United States to Europe or any place else. Certainly, the French had, the Italians, Germans, had very important people that were doing this kind of work as well. The biggest difference was primarily that in the United States, it was kind of institutionalized into courses very early on the university level. But in terms of the scholarship, you can go into the scholarship of most nations and you can find someone important who's written about this. And in recent years, with me, it's been more so with China. I've been very active in China training people in environmental history and going there and lecturing and interacting. So it's been just amazingly interesting and exciting. And what we learned from each other is great. And of course, I was doing this before the internet. And so the gaps in communication from the late 70s until about the mid 90s were great. There were people I wouldn't see for three or four or five years. And now it's so easy every day to do as we are right now, we're doing. So it's changed the discourse, it's changed the scale of the discourse. And so I'm curious why you use this adjective of urban industrial societies rather than urban? Or is it particular to the US to have manufacturing so present in the cities? Or how come you use this adjective over another one? Well, I think that shows up more in my earlier work than it does more recent work. And I think a lot of that has to do with my own intellectual context. So when I was thinking about urban development, I was thinking about it very clearly in a US context. And thinking about when you're looking at the acceleration in population and scale of urban development, it links itself to the industrial revolution in the United States. So there was that. It was just simply marking a line that said here's where urban urbanization really becomes dominant. So in the United States, for example, the 1920 census is the first census that shows there's more people living in urban areas than rural. So we took that those kind of simple ideas, simple statistics. And I think we use them as a foundation in the same way that a lot of my early work had a strong political orientation to it. It still does because these issues are political. They're always political and decision making. But for example, in my most recent book on Fresh Kills Landfill in New York, what you'd see in there is a tremendous emphasis upon landscape studies and landscape architecture and geography. Those things have really influenced how I think about it. And as a result, the kind of urban industrial focus has shifted away. So that in many ways, the chronology of the work goes back further in time and goes much further forward in time as well. So I think this is all a learning process. And again, we were operating in an intellectual world that hadn't taken on a lot of these questions. Or we weren't aware of them. Geographers have been doing similar kind of work for years and years. But it took a while till I started reading the work and started recognizing the different vantage point that was necessary. And history is like any discipline is influenced by its times. We look at history as a field today when we talk about history and social history. The term social and cultural as definers is a very different set of definitions than you would see back prior to the 1960s, for example. And so you become part of the trends. Gender, race, class issues, very, very important in almost every phase of historical studies internationally, is something that had been largely compartmentalized or ignored years before. And so sometimes what happens, I found, is that some of my works were accused of not doing enough with gender, race and class because I was focusing on technology and focusing on politics. And so, you know, in some ways, I tried to adjust my own work to meet current interests. But at the same time, asserting that if we avoid looking at materiality, material things and infrastructure, if we don't understand cities as something more than the people that populate them, then you don't understand cities. And so it's not simply giving up on a trend that people like Joltar and I borrowed and used because of our contact with engineers, but it's because of the wealth of information that you'd find in other disciplines like geography that help us to explain that we really need to think about space as much as we think about a population or about culture and then how they interact. And that's been the biggest challenge, I think, for any of us today. As I'm doing my work now, I have a new essay book I'm working on that will deal with consumption and waste. And it's very different in the way I approach it, much more social history, much more gender class than I ever did before, to reflect kind of a broadening understanding of these questions. So I guess the reason I like it and why I've stayed in environmental history is because it's very dynamic and it's very cosmic, it's very broad. And like I said, the opportunity to talk with people of all different types, it's been a challenge for me in terms of language. You know, I speak a little French, a little Italian, a little Danish, understand a little German, but nothing very well. But there's a whole set of challenges that occur when you cross international lines, for example, and cultural lines. And having to, when I'm in China speaking about environmental justice, for example, that resonates very differently with the Chinese. Then I'm talking about infrastructural changes, which we can share and we can understand how a sewer works and how a landfill operates and that kind of thing. So I guess it's because of the challenges that I like it and because I stay with it and because it's important to understand the urban-centered nature of our modern society. Yeah, I'm wondering, I think as you say, that there are still, let's say, common elements within most of urban transformations and then their context, of course, dictates how you read them or how you express them. Perhaps we could, I think there are many, many similarities in most of cities going from, you know, a primary economy to a secondary economy and then a tertiary economy. In terms of settlements, in terms of services, in terms of many different things. Could you perhaps just help us walk through these couple of transformations, perhaps in the US context, in broad strokes, how US cities really fundamentally changed over the, well, I don't know when, what is your time period when you discuss about these changes? Is it the mid-19th century? Is it the early 19th century until when? I think for the United States and the United States, as similar as urban development can be internationally, it is very different and very dependent upon, you know, national and regional histories as well. You can't divorce those, you can't look at Argentina during the Peronist period and understand what in fact Peron and others had on urban development in Argentina and then turn to the United States and see, you know, similar patterns or in China or Switzerland or Italy or anywhere else. But I think in the United States, when, if we're talking about, and what I was interested in was the delivery of primary services, that is services that, and I call them sanitary services, to link water, wastewater and solid waste, which normally hadn't been linked together historically. Because solid waste seems to be an outlier because the infrastructure is different. But when I looked at that in the United States, and that's what I try to do essentially in the sanitary city that we published in 2000, was to look at those three services, look at how people dealt with those problems prior to a citywide system, and then how those, those change. Now the book ends in 2000 so there's a lot of things to go on since that time are, you know, important. I've been pressed to revise that book and just don't have the energy. But if we're looking at the, especially at water and wastewater, in the United States when you go from essentially a system where individuals are responsible for their own water to where the city is providing some centralized form. You're talking about the 1830s that across the map of most size cities. There's some form of a centralized water system. The first in the United States was in 1800 in Philadelphia, but it took about 30 years before that idea of having a citywide distribution network became popular so that becomes a mid 19th century issue and, and again to get away from my older model of industrial non industrial. It's not dependent upon industrialization is dependent upon urban growth that could be for number of causes. wastewater a little later. And there are reasons why but you talk about 1020 years later. And the biggest difference I argue is that essentially water was was a income generating resource cities can make money distributing water. They couldn't make money with, with sewage is something they had to provide, but people were not going to pay for the same way they would want water. And then it's always you're talking about a centralized kind of a system. That's harder to pinpoint, because you get different stages of different technologies that that are influential and really in the United States the, the most universal technology was landfills, sanitary landfills. And that's not true anywhere else in the world really. And that comes really after World War two. So there are different stages of these but water wastewater systems were were mid 19th century. And the one of the one of the important points and that's why I've used path dependency as an economic theory that actually economists brought from historians, and then historians part of the back from economists but the basic notion is that once you commit to a infrastructure or technology, it's very difficult to get off that path. That's a simple definition. So, if you're putting water mains on the ground, you made a concrete or wood or no matter what they are, where you're putting wastewater system underground pumping stations, etc. It's very hard to move away from that pattern, because they follow growth. So what you do with the water system is you expand the system to meet the new territory. Now you might have several of these systems that just essentialize one but essentially the manner of distributing the water is the same. So, for modern cities, the difficulty is moving away from the path. And the same speed wise for example example is if you look at material differences. I talked to local engineers here about this years and years ago, and I said, Well, you know, are you making any changes and how you distribute water. And I said, I would think that a modular approach, which is dependent on a centralized kind of hard infrastructure system would be good. And the young guys there, the young guys said, Yeah, we're thinking about that. The old engineers were insulted, because all they knew were putting in concrete pipes into the ground. So, even though there were there changes that were, they came about because of new materials, because of changes environmental perspectives and ecological perspectives. It's been a long time and certainly in storage. It's a good example because there's, you know, ecological engineering as a field is a very small field. But what the major the thrust of of modern engineering is to try to match the natural environment with the built environment that humans have created. There's ways to purify waste that we're not polluting and could essentially mesh nicely with the natural world with an actual flow so forth and so on, then let's try to do that. So the ideas, new innovations in terms of ideas and concepts are always out there, always kind of ahead of the process himself. It's very, very difficult to move from that technology is like a gigantic, you know, battleship in the ocean. How long it takes us to move it. Some cultures have been successful, either because they came late to the game, or they can put resources to that or population size, you get a country like China, for example, one of the fascinating things I've discovered this is all kind of my personal reflection is that it's a society that has some of the most incredible innovations in these areas, and some of the most arcane systems. So it works on both ends. Some places are just, you know, terribly polluted and, you know, the great wall, when I visited there, it was amazing but you realize that large portions of that wall have been torn down. It was torn down to make ovens on small little, or houses or something in poor neighborhoods and so whatever function that had was diminished because they got other uses. It's very hard to think about citywide changes in these kinds of areas, largely because of the just the sheer inflexibility of those systems. In the 19th century, what good engineers wanted to do was to create permanence. And this term was used over and over again. We wanted to create a permanent solution to these problems, because it'll make cities healthier. It'll make cities, the water flow, so forth and so on. But sometimes it didn't take into account that those sources of water, we're not going to be the same. We're not going to be plentiful enough. Yeah, you know, so that changed the game. So what was seen as permanent then is now seen as inflexible. As our viewpoints change about what is for the good of society. If we think that way, sometimes I wonder if we do that enough in the United States. Ideas can kind of change some government actions, political actions, private sector actions, a little easier. In waste disposal, you're always getting all these new ideas. Most recently we think about zero waste as a concept. Zero waste largely implies that you're thinking about the front end of production as much as the backing. You're not so worried about disposing of the waste as you are the creation of the waste. And so the idea is that you want to make production and the use of materials effective to such a point that you do not have much waste at the back end of the pipeline. And so zero waste, you know, nobody believes that in terms of a lit in a literal sense, but it is a different concept. And there are some places that have tried to do this that is to work with the private sector to create packaging or utilize certain materials that are sparse or not easily available. That will not become instantly become a waste problem on the back end. That's a great idea. And I was writing about it back in the 70s and 80s and argue that the problem was that this was this required a cultural change of massive proportions whereas the changing of a disposal option landfill to incinerator has a cultural component there's no doubt about it. But it also has the intent of government behind it and politics and politics. Which is separate from government, you know, and plays plays a very, very central role. It's kind of the key point in the transition. So in the areas like waste disposal, where you're not bound by the kind of infrastructure to do another other process, there's some possibilities for change. But in the United States where you've depended on landfill for so long, that is using large areas of private public land for waste. It is a big deal to try to move to another to an alternative. And in areas like water. The delivery system is a difficult problem in itself that is to make sure that it functions properly Houston, for example, gigantic city of over 700 square miles has a massive infrastructure problem because of leaks in its pipes. And just the time it takes to fix one small part of the town is monumental my part of the city now is, is, you know, just torn up with new pipes going in, everybody's grumbling but the reality is we'll have a better system. So that's that's one set of issues that water managers have to cope with the other of course is supply. How do you ensure this supply is safe. And so that has a there's a very strong, you know, technical component there in a scientific component. And that's a different question than the pipes in the ground. A different question in terms of the supply and how, how, how much quantity, how much is available, how much of it is polluted and needs to be either either un polluted or moved on to someplace else. So there's a whole number of parts that to the system itself. And that makes these issues harder so the first difficult spot I think is the is a material question of the delivery but then beyond that, it's all these other things. And one big problem that most cities face in the States is if we're talking about, you know, outward growth on a scale that's not typical in Europe, maybe more typical in Brazil, maybe so in China. When you're talking about scale and delivery, you're talking about an economic component in terms of costs. Who are you going to charge how much you're going to charge to suburbanites versus dinner city people, shouldn't you people pay for the infrastructure that's moving out to the suburbs. And in all parts of the world. These are questions. And again, the biggest difficulty and this to me was the most difficult thing about studying urban history is that it is, it is such a diverse subject and cities are such diverse entities. To talk about a city in a town or even distinguish them by, by size and population isn't enough. A city like Phoenix, Arizona, and a very hot and aired part of the country versus Houston in a very hot and human part of the country can't deal with these problems in the same way. So you can't just simply create in terms of policy regulation, it's really hard to create national policies for all aspects of these questions that that will work or can even even be applied logically versus what the local community wants to do. And then that's all layered with the politics of each of these, each of these sections. It's, it's extraordinarily, extraordinarily difficult. And I think cities in particular. It's what makes them harder to deal with in terms of any kind of transformation. Sometimes it's kind of organic. You look at a place like Mexico City, and Mexico City reminds in some ways, Houston is certainly not as dense as Mexico City, but made up of all the neighborhoods in Mexico City all these different neighborhoods have their own history have their own time when they were important have their own identity and trying to, to decide on a policy that effectively helps all the people in those areas is just, it's maddening you go to Mexico City, you just you just ask yourself how does this work. How does it on a daily basis, how do they, they do, I give I'll give the Mexicans a lot of credit, but on a certain level it does function but it's impossible to kind of take that model and then shift it to Paris, or you know shifted to London or, or Beijing. And I know in Houston because of our, you know, severe flooding issues, you know we've gone to the Netherlands to ask for kind of help, but even then you're talking about a scale difference that has to do with the countries of development as well so. So, it's, it's, it's maddening it's what makes the study interesting. But, you know, I try, in my own case, try to keep myself from generalizing too much because I, to me I think that's where I find history to be extraordinarily valuable. Every year's years, it's a cliche. I've said to every student historians make complex what appears to be simple. And that's what we do, and that's what we need to do. When I first got to Houston, I was on a, I don't know if I go on but I was on a water resources board for the, for the county. I was on this board and it was unusual because you had engineers and public health officials and me. And, you know, they all looked out, you know, what's this story and you're doing on this mini and the proposal they gave us to deal with was, this was back in the early 80s. How do we anticipate the future water needs for the city. It was always a question. And so already back then, there was some type of questioning in that sense. Well, it was, it was looking forward because they saw the population just it was at that particular time, there had been a recession in Houston because of the oil industry. But it was very, very clear that the Houston was going to continue to be dynamic in its growth. And the question was, you know, were the water supplies available, sufficient or not. So anyhow, we were taking up that question and the engineers said something and the public health officials said something else. And then I said, I said, Well, have you looked into the use of bottled water in Houston, they looked at me like I was crazy. They said, Why would you even bring that up. And I said, Well, I said, I think it's important for us to understand how people consume water and by what source. And I said, I understand the bottle water is very small. But if we're seeing supplies of bottled water increasing, what that's telling me is that we are replacing our traditional uses of potable water from the tap from other sources. And if that trend is getting greater than what kind of water uses. Are we looking at are we looking at gray water are we looking at other things. And have we thought about conservation as an option. Well, they, at first they kind of dismissed it. And then, then they said, Okay, you write the report on conservation of water in Houston. So I wrote that report. But I think here's a case where the thinking outside of the box came from a different disciplinary point of view. It was not the only one and it was not necessarily the best one, but it was helpful. And I also, I also was involved in the establishment of the recycling program in the city. And I made some initial presentations about recycling and I said, you know, look, we can't look at a proposed system. As we look at what happened during the war years. I said during the war years are the best examples we have a recycling in the United States until that time. The whole, the whole context is different. And I said the other thing is that if you begin to look at our city. The presumption is that it's middle class city dwellers that are going to want recycling. Well, that wasn't the reality. The reality was it was crossing racial in class lines. And I said, you're dealing with a problem that does not so much require education, as it does execution in a lot of different sectors in the community. So again, you know, my contribution was a small one, but it was nonetheless to use history as an as a way of exploring certain kinds of questions, how things change over time. So, you know, I've always been a great promoter of history in urban studies because I think it provides an interesting context. Yeah, you've covered already some topics such as even political ecology resilience, many different layers that we can take some more time. And I think what is also very fascinating is the, the perceptions and why we develop certain services and when. And there is a lot of these, when we talk about transitions, what triggers them and why, you know, why we started this water, waterworks, this wastewater works and all of that. And I think there is a public health slash environment preoccupations that are either the cusp or at least have instigated some of these technologies and infrastructures. Can you perhaps help us a bit with with this. I think if you do go back to the to the mid 19th century and you look at you know what, what stimulated interest in developing these systems and some of them were not public health related some of them were clearly business related. And that is, as industry industry began to grow, their need for water, their weed, their need for kind of for concern systems began to increase so the cities wanted to promote themselves as an economically vital place. They had to have services in place that could could help develop the economy. And we can't forget that because that's very, very important. Public health dimension was also extremely important. Sorry, that was the city services themselves that marketed their selves to the inhabitant and future investors or. Oftentimes you don't have an internal governmental sector that deals with these issues in particular this is a period. And again, we have to kind of backtrack a bit where engineering departments or public health public works departments were just getting formed that the cities recognize that they had to have special knowledge in these particular topical areas. And what stimulated their development when I'm suggesting are a number of things. And one of them was that there was there was this need to be concerned about how growth would affect cities and certainly you're talking about a private sector that would would demand those services. Now, what happens early on in water and I'll get back to our other point in a second is that the almost all of the first systems in the cities were private. The city, the city governments, local government municipal government is just beginning to emerge as a separate identity from legislators and a lot of places this is true in New York City, even you think New York would always have autonomy and didn't did relied on the legislature. New Orleans relied on the legislature in Baton Rouge for its public health activities so forth. So the cities were just finding their own authority during this period. And therefore, if they wanted to improve water service. The first step was that to to get the private sector to do it. That is given the opportunity to give a franchise. If somebody 99 year franchise you know and say okay, you need to do X, Y and Z. In order to provide the service and and we'll sustain this contract as long as you do that. But at a certain point, and this is in the United States, more so than almost anywhere else because it's very different. You go to France you have a private system in Paris, you know forever. But in the United States what happens is that as the local governments became more, more autonomous, and we're getting more power away from the legislature and part of that came not only because the legislature to let them do it, but because of the taxing Paul power and get a dead making power. And this is what Joltar told me years and years ago, follow the money. And that is understand that when the cities were able to incur debt and tax. Therefore, they could take over services. And so what happens is what I write about is that it wasn't because all private sector systems failed. It was partly that way because oftentimes these companies were in it for the profit. They didn't want to invest in long term infrastructure. They wanted to, you know, get what they could as they could, and keep themselves going. But in some cases they did okay. They provided the service. But as the city became more powerful. It said, we can take over control. And water was the first public service that cities went after. And they went after it for a very simple reason. And that's because they can make money. They could charge something for water. And when they began to meter water later on, they could do it in a very specific way before it was kind of a lot or monthly charge or whatever you. But when cities realized they could do that, they start spreading the word to the private sector and failed that they were not doing the job and we have to, and this has a lot to do with the prevailing politics of the United States at that time and in the cities. So cities began to gain that gain that authority. Now, all on the way public health was certainly involved in the demand for water and for good sewage, because we had to, you know, had somebody had to say, we have to make sure this isn't going to make things worse. But water can really help. And the fear fact that cities develop water systems and sewage system, even if they were inferior in any way, affected the mortality rates of the cities in amazing ways you can really see a great correlation between better public health procedures and and health conditions. But but and so they're great, great and stimulating interest. And also, in the early stages, sanitarians were actually involved in managing with the water systems. Now, I don't want to make this too complex, but what what happens in a lot of places. Can we just take a moment to explain what sanitarians are I love this word and what there's the hygienist movement sanitarians can you perhaps provide some one definitions there. It became a generic term for all people that dealt with health matters but at that time, you have a distinction between a medical doctor and a public health official who could be professionally trained or not. There were a lot of people that were sanitarians that were interested in the sanitation of the city but not necessarily trained in a college as public health officials. Engineering as a field until that time did not incorporate a field that dealt with public health per se. And so in this period, we see the emergence of a specific field called sanitary engineering. It's not it's not a euphemism you know for garbage but it's an actual term an actual study that you would have and to be a sanitary engineer meant that you studied public health and said engineering. These are very important people. But a sanitarian did not necessarily have to be an engineer or a doctor. Maybe someone that that had an interest in maybe some practical experience, as we're still talking about an era in American history where degreed people of any professional field were few and far between, and we're bringing over a lot of people from Europe who were one of the most famous sanitary engineers, any Rudolph herring German, a lot of German engineers that came to the United States. Several of them that were at these international reputations, and then little by little Americans developed. So you have, but the, but the sanitarian was a could be a reformer could be anyone that was concerned about the public health. Unfortunately, this is something that spins off into a lot of different areas that the nature of public health in this period. And this is what is the core of my sanitary city but the nature of our understanding of public health was extraordinary So we did not believe in bacteria causing disease. We believed in miasmos we believe that smells, or discolorations, or any kind of sense, essential things created illness. So it was, it was referred to as non contagionist. They didn't believe these things were that you can contract them from others. You drank bad water, you sniffed bad sewage, whatever. So, the intention of the public health people was very, very good. I know this gets kind of complicated but, but what they were, what they were advocating in terms of improving health were based on very primitive ideas. And I've said this often that the modern water system was based on the theory of miasmos, not based on the idea of the bacteria causing disease was not even postulated until the 1880s, and not widely accepted until the 20th century. So we have Louis Pasteur and Coke from Germany, who said, there's a correlation here, you know, and we think that it's caused by some little small thing, you know, in the water. So, to kind of recap, when you're looking at the mid 90th century which you have our business people and political leaders, wanting to have these systems in place, and to improve the overall condition of their city. The sanitarians amongst them, some engineers and public health people, promoting cleanliness, but based on very, very weak evidence, and evidence was largely wrong. So, these early systems are promoted and designed to create good health. This is what happened in Philadelphia in 1800 and 18 what, there had been two bigger outbreaks of yellow fever before. The city said we got to do something about this, we got to bring pure water to the city. And these ideas were coming largely from from England, coming from the, the, the sanitary community in England. And that's what stimulated it but again, various forces, building it with the wrong information, but nonetheless with the best of intentions that I did see some serious improvement. But I want to get to one final punchline, but as we move in closer to the 20th century medicine itself is changing. And so with bacteriology especially the authority becomes the physician, the physician becomes the final authority on health, not the sanitarians, not the public health officials. And so what doctors will say, and in many cases, physicians train doctors are not involved, very deeply in public health departments, or in these movements for pure water. Yes, there are some, but they're not leading it. What's what they're saying is public health people don't understand what creates disease. And so it's the way we can deal with health issues is on an individual basis with individual people. And public health loses a great deal of stature in at this time. And many of these services that were promoted by public health people now end up in engineering departments. So the public health public works department, the engineering department, not the public health department becomes more responsible for these, because they'll say it's a technical issue, putting in a pipeline as a technical issue. And all of a sudden then public health gets discredited. And it takes a long, long time before the stature of public health thinking is widely accepted. And this is what's curious we get to the president about about coven. I think there's a great story to be written on how public health in some ways is resurrected as a field, partly through the advent of the epidemic, because you're having to rely on a lot of functions of public health people can do in the larger community to deal with this epidemic issues and this puts aside the debate over the science and some people that deniers and things but but in some ways public health officials will gain some stature and that's happened periodically over time. But the change in medicine itself, the change in our understanding of the environment, the promotion of business activity, all these things have to be looked at as as a reason to to see these things come into place. And, and some of the problems to are the lack of materials and technologies to deal with these problems. One thing I, I learned when I was working on that book. I took out a bunch of maps of water works plants. And I looked at an overview that some somebody had drawn. I just want to look at them see what what are the components. If you look at the earliest water supply system. They're very simple. You have a source to be a river pond underground water. You have a pipeline to a plant. Distribution network in Philadelphia they took water from the skull kill river that was right next to the city piped it by steam engines and later by gravity pumps up on top of a hill into big tanks and then they had to flow by natural into the houses and businesses. That's it. If you look at a water, a water plant in 1910. It doesn't look the same. It has a treatment facility. It might have a filtration system has all these other components. I looked at that and I said what does that tell me that tells me that our understanding of health understanding of keeping water pure change because we need these other elements in that before was hopefully we'll just find a pure source of water. In the case of Philadelphia, the, the, the wells were just polluted. And so they said, here's fresh water. There's a lot of it. We'll just use it. Of course, it eventually gets polluted to or New York goes all the way upstate to a state New York to get us water or California goes, you know, way into the central part of California, get its water. All these are going to be built on the premise that we need to find this pure source. But later on, it's, we can make that source pure. We can make we can take water that's contaminated and make it fresh. Anyhow, that's, I hope I didn't jumble it all together, but it's No, I'm wondering because, well, there is this role that we often forgot about actors, because we always think it's just technologies that are invented and we just apply them of course, there's agency there but there's also this bi directional relationship between infrastructure and urban growth. A city would not grow if these services were not there as well. And so I'm curious how was that as well during the same moment where you said that the city became an economic power that kind of saw these services as a way to grow its future, let's say money or future capital and how this go hand in hand. Well, there is a convergence at the time varies somewhat, depending on individual circumstances. But if you take 1830 as the point where most major American cities are developing a public system. This is in the early stages of the industrial revolution, the United States, and a lot of factors that cause it. But growth is taking place. Because of a number of reasons one, as we're talking about mid 19th century agriculture is becoming more recognized in the United States and centralized. And so people are leaving the farm to go to the city to get jobs. And so we're already seeing if you're looking at American urban development in terms of rates of growth rates of growth were really great in the mid to late 19th century. People are coming into the cities as for jobs where opportunities seem to be that wasn't simply dependent upon the rise of the industrial sector. That's going to that's going to be more powerful as we start moving into the late 19th century. And again, another great indicator is, where's the labor coming from, well, the labor's coming from, at that point, Southern Eastern Europe, Italians, Greeks, you know, people from the southern part are being brought in in droves to feed the increased develop economic development in the city. So most of the, you know, most of the immigrants are being brought in our, there's some are coming over because of chain migration they have family here, and they follow them over. And in the late 19th century, the whole, like if you look in Italy, that the earliest immigrants from Italy, came to the United States for the northern part of Italy. These are artisans and people that had some skills, and for whatever reason, decided they can make a living here better than they could in Italy. But as we get later than 19th century, most of the population is coming from the rural South, from Sicily and come from South, and they're attracting people to work in the factories. So if captains, you have companies going diddly and saying, there's great opportunity here, we can pay for your passage, come on over. And so the demographic shifts among Italians but also shifts in terms of the kind of people that are being brought over and scale. That's an indicator that the United States was very labor poor compared to other industrialized places. So once the technology was imported from Europe, or developed here, and they saw they could mass produce things, then people are going to come the other element to and this again indicates a mid 19th century identity is the advent of the steam engine. The steam engine made possible moving of industry from running water in like along in Massachusetts, for example, along their industrial rivers to the cities. So you have the convergence of energy technology, labor, a thriving agricultural economy in the United States. That's one of the leading agricultural powers in the world in the 19th century. It's amazing. So one of the leading producers of iron in the world. At that time, but something you don't think about. So as industrialized is like Italy, Northern Italy becomes, for example, or England, or parts of Germany. The United States had a lot of this, the raw materials that could inspire growth and a lot of that is starting to come together in the mid 19th century, and it's going to accelerate them into the late 19th century. So again, my earlier work was the problem I earlier works I didn't account for these other elements that were also important agricultural growth, shifting from world or this kind. And I just, you know, I just didn't do it, but so it's not just simply an industrial push. But, and so what's and the other thing that's important is in terms of urbanization is you're developing regional centers of urban development, we got to get away from looking at New York and Chicago, and San Francisco, and look at Omaha, or Pittsburgh, or some of the smaller cities in the, in the, the old rest belt now, or in the upper Midwest, who were growing Omaha was growing dynamic ways, because of agriculture, because of me packing. And, you know, the cattle were being driven up from Texas and in the south, up to these cities in the Midwest and that was making them watch Chicago is a good example. And it's been, it's, you know, this is, it's part of the problem with the study of history. As such, because urban historians in the United States, early on we're looking at New York City, looking at Boston, looking at these, and I still study New York City so what can I say but they're not the pattern. They're not the pattern from for this country. In the same way that Paris is hardly the pattern for France. I mean, even more so, since you have nothing even closely resembling this or London for the UK. So there's that distortion that we get by just simply looking at those cities. And it happens other parts of the world is, you know, Rio, you know, or Buenos Aires or you name it, Mexico City. I don't know if that answers your question or. Yeah, I think that, well, I mean, it's a series of part of patterns of regime shifts kind of helps us to trace back. Also, as you said, how come we have some permanent elements in our economic structures in our physical structures and, and kind of. Yeah, I remember Sabina had a conference already 10 years ago or something like that and she said like we, we build infrastructures, or at least water infrastructures as if everybody should open the tap at full capacity at the same time. And well, that seems obvious for some people, but for me it was very striking. And, you know, once you have the shape of the infrastructure or the shape of your city, then you're, as you said, there is a path dependency or a lock in effect. And how do you maneuver around it? How do you. Well, make some aspects decentralized modular or something else. So I think over there it's, I'm quite curious. You said that there are some permanent elements of course there are some heavy investments in some services in some others we can be more nimble. But how do we take what we have learned from the past, the infrastructures that we have from the past and then transpose them into today's challenges because of course. Yeah, this brings not only for future city but also for our existing cities that are have this legacy, this economic legacy, this service legacy, this infrastructure legacy. How, how do we move in this complex world. Yeah, well, I think what you have to do versus identify as many variables as you can, because I think that's important than to say, then what value, you know, do you give to them. What we're not the obvious things, for example, or when we're talking about developing these initial infrastructures, there's a couple things that are are typical about them in most places one is who do they service. And oftentimes, the central part of the city's got the best service or everything radiated out from there and then the related question of that is equity. The important parts of the city were denied service denied the development because of who live there. And, you know, it's kind of it's kind of a it's odd because if you look at the city of Houston in the 19th century, its first water system was all focused on on developing in the down. What was then the downtown, the downtown we have days not the same place. But that downtown coincidentally also was the area where you had the highest concentration of African American people and and other people of color. That was more coincidental that intention, because the goal was to get it to the place that was central to the city's economy, not to service the poor community. So those are in terms of you have to understand the intention of that infrastructure from the beginning and look you need to look at it for each of the cities. Where is it? Where is it located. Who is it serving in Houston. The major push for surface water came after World War two. We're the largest city in the United States using exclusively groundwater until 1945 you can believe that. The only reason we got surface water is because the oil industry and the industries on the ship channel wanted water. And so they went upstate beyond us brought the water down to them the two major pipelines went to the ship channel to service that economy. It didn't go to the poor neighborhoods in Houston or those in Pasadena or anything close. You have to kind of look at the physical patterns first. I think that's really important. And I think that we presume certain things that are not necessarily true in terms of, you know, how widespread is it. What, you know, what is the quality of what we have service. And then the historic question is, where is it now. Where is this, you know, where is the center of the city. Where is the, you know, where is the water supply going. It doesn't need to go. This is true for business as it is for poor people. That is the industries and cities, the need for water. In many places change the kind of industrial capacity that was necessary in Buffalo, New York or in an industrial town in Germany or something. They migrate they change the nature of industry changes the demand for water changes. There's that demand side that is that has to be looked at, along with the historic patterns of where water is accessible. And then of course, the one that they do pay attention to is supply. Where, you know, where does it come from. And, you know, how is that access, you know, for a long time New York City. It was, it was important they moved, they moved up, upstate, brought the water down in a big tank in the middle of Central Park, and distributed from there and they still have some of the best purist water available but they also had to tap the Catskill Mountains and tap other places. So I think the groundwork is really important. The historic groundwork is really important in order to make future policy decisions. And in all of those there, there's a questions of the reality of the infrastructure, the materiality of it. There's the question of equity. Absolutely in terms of who gets it and why. And I think that's extraordinarily important and using like other cities grappled with the fact that a lot of the water stopped at the city boundary, or that the wastewater facility stopped at the boundary. And it's taken a long time to understand that what happens outside that line is important to what happens inside that line. And of course we're faced with gigantic problems because of the flooding issues. There's a, what, what is water and distribution water mean in a society that has too much of it coming in at different times, but I think that that that that foundation is really kind of important. And of course, the available technology to do what you might want to do with it. This is very important in sewage treatment, because the anaerobic technologies that use a lot of natural sources they developed a lot of those things in Houston actually over the years, different ways to accomplish the goal of filtration or the cleaning of the water. And I'm fascinated by the fact that the inputs, the pollution inputs are different. I made a big deal in my book and the modern section of the book, talking about about runoff, and that all the systems in Houston were designed, you know, to have water flow to essentialize treatment facility, really huge treatment facility. So that's ground. That's great. But what about runoff? Runoff doesn't follow a natural path into the pipes of the city and into the treatments. It flows where it wants to go and it ends up going into water you don't want to go into. And the most toxic, some of the most toxic pollutants that we have now are from runoff from people fertilizing their lawns, more of an American problem than elsewhere in the world, but a problem nonetheless. Roads are tremendous contributor to pollution. Everybody's got has those. And so the waters running on the roads, the roads are often used as sewer lines in Houston. That's, you know, we measure how much water we can get in the roads as a part of our wastewater infrastructure. But it's going to flow every different direction any terrain changes. So it's certainly why the ecologists, the environmentalists, the geographers, all of these experts have to help understand way things actually flow, how things move and how things change. And I think cities sometimes do that some better than others, but oftentimes tend to restrict expertise to very few. Urban planners are not necessarily trained in all these areas. They certainly don't know the history. And I think one thing that that cities can kind of learn to do is to diversify the expertise that they have for solving problems. And again, there's a lot of complicating factors. There's a lot of multi jurisdictional issues that again go down to politics. In Houston, we have, you know, city government, county government, special districts, the state, the federal government, all of them have an input. All of them have a say, all of them have money. And who, where you get that money from oftentimes dictates what you're going to do with it. There's a federal grant that says this money is going to be used to expand this highway. That's where the money is supposed to go. If the state has a, you know, budget for X service, that's where it's going to go so that it's even though even the planning stage is requires often regional approaches that are very, very hard to do because of the different sort of things. And I think there's a lot of meetings of the, of the flight control district in Houston, not a lot, but several. And kind of listen to what they talk about. And they try to do really good work there really have a lot of admiration for what they're doing. But you understand the impossibility and the tasks they have. And so, you know, it's all well and good for we as academics to sit down and say, here, this is what you need to do. So there is the expertise input on the one hand, there is the kind of the financial component and the political component as well, and then the execution of the plan. We have some stuff going on in Houston, in terms of flood control. A tremendous amount of money put into certain approaches that now have been dismissed is not the best way to go. So it, it was, it was easier in the early stages, because the options were not as great. The political leverage was a problem. Economics is always an issue money is. And, and I think that you know the one thing that we all know is that you know what do we give our priorities to. It's the shiny ornament in front of us, you know, the thing that's, you know, obviously, a lot of money that was intended to be used for the purposes was diverted because of the epidemic. Nobody's denying that that's important. Nobody's denying that that was essential. Nobody's denying that that should have been, but there's some people that argued, it shouldn't have been the primary objective. And I don't have an agree with that, but that's true. But let's, let's even say that we all agree that that was the first priority in terms of how we expend money. Well, what, what do we do, what do we do with these other issues that are important that fall farther and farther down the line, you know, and I'm sure you've heard this too and it's just, it always amazes me know that there's been a small minority states that have been really not so small that have been resistant to sending money to Ukraine for help. That should be, you know, that's why we should be using at home. Well, you know, not even get into what that means in terms of discussion, but, you know, we did this with, I remember during the era of candy wanting to get someone on the moon. I said, why are we spending all this money to get somebody on the moon and we should be spending it in the poor neighborhoods. And they're, you know, they're behind all of this there's, there's a legitimate question of priorities, I understand I may not have the same priorities as you. But, but I can fully appreciate that there are a variety of, of, of alternatives. And that's a killer. That's so difficult to overcome. And I've really, when I really felt sorry for well intentioned political leaders. I mean, there's some that are not well intentioned. We have plenty of those here. Everything is done with a political motive involved and, you know, that's it. But a well intentioned political leader who really wants to make a right decision has to cut across so many barriers in order to get there. I admit with the city councilman years ago. And once in a while I get it, I get asked to lunch by a politician I usually figured that they're looking for a job and hope you can help them find it where they want something very specific they never just how are you. So I went to lunch with this with the city council and he said, you know, we're thinking about privatizing our landfills in Houston, because most of them had been city or county owned he said, What do you think about that as a solution that this was an era when there was they were outsourcing everything in the city, you know, and, and trying to win away things from the budget. And I said, Well, I said, I, that can be good. But I said, Have you thought about the landfill as a resource? They go, What do you mean? Well, do you know anything about mining landfills? He goes, No. I said, Maybe you should look into it. I said, because people have made some money by mining the landfills for certain materials, or the conversion of the landfill and the usable land. And I said, not for high rise apartments, but for parks and other things I said it has value, whether you believe it has enough value to continue to own it versus the outsources is the question you should be asking. And he, he hadn't thought about those things, because he knew nothing about that topical area. So, anyhow, I didn't want to get off the point I think it's germane because the information flow is the wild card, you know, for any of these changes. Yeah, and also it's you get a parallel paralysis by analysis after a while because, you know, today we are with the possibility of the task of of doing anything. We have just too many challenges. And you're afraid that as soon as you do something, there's going to be a trade off a bad trade off coming out. So how would you either yourself do it, or you would, you know, give an advice to a fellow planner, historian, a geographer that is parachuted in a city department, and is supposed to deal with, you know, depletion of resources at the one hand, then, you know, acidification of oceans, climate change and all of these elements that are short to long term. And at the same time you have something that also is that has a vast history and you're supposed to deal with it right now. Yeah. And there are politics as well. How do you help a fellow colleague to stay sane and at the same time give a good insight into all of this? Well, yeah, that's that's the big question. I think the for we as academics, I think a certain degree of humility would be well in order. I think you get people that say, Well, I'm just speaking to my peers is nothing that I really can do. And others will say, Well, they just read my book. I ran a public history program at the University of Houston for 33 years and the objective of public history and some of the spread outside the country but the idea is, is to be able to cross that border between the academic and the public in a lot of different ways. And, and, you know, we train our teacher or students that way but what we always talk about is, is how do we do that? How do we bridge that gap? How do we communicate? And, and what we try to teach them to do is not to rely on what they think are the obvious means of communication. Things have changed a great deal because of social media. And there's a lot you can do. There's a lot of bad things that happen but there's a lot of good things you can do. Communicating some ideas via that route. But what you can't do is assume that even though if you create knowledge or information and I feel like I, you know, I've written a ton of things. But what I would not do is take my book and hand it to an engineer and say, read this. Or in, now it's happened and I've been really fortunate that some, that part of my audiences have been non-academic people. And they've actually read it in contact me and I'm really happy about that. But that's not in a format that is potentially usable for them. And so the other thing I'm, and I've done, I'm not saying I'm, I know all the answers to these things, but there are times that I've written things that do not go in an academic journal that do not go into a place that only a few of my colleagues are going to read that I want to share it more broadly. I've written children's pieces, the same reason. So my grandkids will, you know, know what the heck I do and read about. It's learning to communicate on other people's terms. It's, you don't even have to share their ideas that not important that I have the same idea as somebody else. But I had, I did find in my experiences working with the engineers, and I had the luxury of time because we, we got to meet each other on a regular basis for a long time. I would kind of pass along, you know, some of the observations I had had. And, and they, they would like to listen to them their contingencies, the kind of array of variables that were taking into consideration that maybe you wouldn't otherwise in terms of your own training. And if you can communicate some of those things in a way that it's not, we would say, you know, to dummy it down or to make it so simplistic doesn't mean anything. But I found when I talked to engineers, they sincerely believe that I respected them, because the way I made my presentations or interacted with them was not let me tell you how to do this but it was really a very much of a conversation. There's a lot of different ways to communicate that that if you want to participate directly on city boards have a friend of mine and Tempe who's very active and alternative energy stuff and he sits on one of the city committees. I think it's, it's an honorable thing to do and it's, it's very, very useful. Not everybody's going to do that. But it is trying to figure out the means of communication that make a difference. And if it's somebody you know personally, maybe it's a little easier to do that but if you're trying to reach a larger community that that can be done. People do listen and we get called on a lot to be interviewed on on radio TV newspapers and things. For some reason, some people, you know, value our opinion but that's not enough you really do have to work on the communication skills. And I think that's the most, most important element and in our program we try to is, is teach students how to do that. What are the different ways in which we can communicate and make information available. And of course what you don't do is say, history has got all the answers and you're wasting your time as an economist that's, you know, it's not the way that it sounds very simple. It sounds very, very Pat, but in reality, it's, it's always most of the problem that an academic has. I love writing theoretical pieces and I love writing stuff that's read with my peers. I love for them to say nice things about my work, but I don't. I'm not satisfied ending there. I don't. And I just don't think that that's my ambition. And that's why I just I finished a book in 2002 on on on fresh kills landfill in New York. It's an 800 page book. You can believe that dealing with the what was the biggest landfill in all the world. And the focus of the book is not simply on it. It's on kind of the politics that New York went through to try to find a way to deal with its waste given a certain circumstance. But also to look at the, the, the land skill of the landscape transformation, because it began as a salt marsh where Lenape Indians lived. And for the longest time people kind of didn't even acknowledge that there were human beings there. They were there. And then transitioned into into a landfill and eventually in it became a deposit area for after 911. It was important in that story and then now it's turned to a city park. So, to me, the purpose was to look at the way landfills change. Okay, so the question is, I wrote the book in a new pages. A few people are going to read the book. Not everybody. I think my wife did one of the first things she's read of mine in the years. And, but I'm working on a documentary with a filmmaker, and we're not doing a straightforward documentary it's not going to be. I just tell the story of the landfill but it is a series of episodes kind of dealing with the whole process of understanding space, understanding what it means to be utilized in a certain way and it's been great. So much working with a filmmaker, I can get it an audience with ideas that I either didn't transmit in the book or are buried in the 800 pages. And so, especially in my age now in retirement seems to me that I'm having to try to find different ways of accessing audiences, because I think that that's important. So, it's a long answer to your question. No, no. Well, I asked for it. So, do you have perhaps to conclude this discussion? Do you have any documentaries or films or books that might help us to, well, to bridge all of these complicated facets of urban growth infrastructures but also what you stress very much issues of equity and environmental justice. Yeah, there's, there's the greeners and I the French director woman is wonderful that movie years ago, kind of dealing with that whole process and I can't. I can't give you the great citation with the winners and I is the name of the film is that's the English translation it's, I think it's still subtitled in French it's a wonderful, wonderful. It's a personal story of the interaction between materiality and people and I like that very much. There's, we used, we've been looking at a lot of stuff that Werner Hart Herzog did, and the director Guzman was a Peruvian director, just on looking at the way in which they take kind of large ideas and personalize them. In Herzog I got a movie about Petroglyphs that looked at some of the caves in France. I taught courses on suburbanization using film and asking someone just to look at the film itself without contextualizing its heart, but I used all kinds of all kinds of films that depicted life in suburbia. And they were some very critical and some of them that were not. And these are, these are mostly popular motion pictures. I teach film I taught film, and I always tell people to have to be leery of documentaries because they're also the result of someone's point of view, and they're edited and managed in a way. You know, anything Ken Burns does has his imprint on it in terms of what he believes and interested in. But there's been a lot of movies I looked at suburbanization that were so Australian films that were great. There's a wonderful movie that Australians made called The Castle and it's kind of a comedy about a family that built as a house on the edge of an airport runway. And they think it's the greatest thing in the world. They have power lines in the backyard and a waste dump behind them, and the airplanes going by. And all they can think of is this is our home. This is where we live. And they kind of fight to keep it. The whole story is about somebody who wants to buy it. You know, it doesn't hit you over the head with some of the issues, but it tells you the values that people keep, you know, about where they live sometimes. And I think the stories are really important, rather than, you know, pointing my finger at you. There's a lot of documentary stuff that kind of shows the tough part of life too. But these films were like these were very useful in class to get a sense of a place and just point to certain kinds of questions. In terms of the cleaners and I think what's really great about that was just making you stop and think about how people deal with material possessions. There's some people in it that are essentially homeless that are picking up waste, and that's what they eat all this food and everything. This guy is perfectly happy to do this, not that you want to emulate his life, but you can understand that what we take for granted, what we throw away, what we don't think is important. That to me, it's just had a very powerful effect on me. And, and like I said, in some cases, I've tried to use film that doesn't really come to mind that these are going to have a certain point of view but taking this part of a larger group of films they kind of give you that that pressure. And of course on atomic energy, first time I ever use film and I use like 13 films dealing with atomic energy and some were pretty graphic documentaries and some were lighter fare. But I, but again the difficulty there was yeah, I had to kind of prepare my students for what they're looking at people and we live in a visual age, but people are not aware of how film was made or, or what someone's trying to do with it or. What the point of view is or what the limited screen size says and like with documentaries. One of the points I made is you need to be skeptical of it as much as you can a fiction film, because you can edit these things anywhere you like. So, I'm not giving you a lot of a lot of films per se, but in my life I found that there's so many different kinds of sources that are worth relying on understanding, you know, that that helped me in a way, going to places where I write is always important to me. I'm writing about something I like to go there and see it and feel it in a way that's kind of a cliche but it to me it always it always works and just gives me the background I need so people can write to me if they want some films I'll be happy to share what I know. Yeah, I'll put them in the description of the video. Well, thanks so much, Martin. I mean, also meeting the person behind the books is always a fantastic pleasure. Thanks a lot for taking all this time and well, helping me and tackling a bit some of these aspects. It's not all clear yet, but it's getting. I made it worse. Like I said, we try to make complex what appears to be simple. So I've done that I've accomplished my goal as a historian. Well, thanks again and thanks everyone for watching and listening until the end and we'll see you again in in two weeks for another discussion. Bye bye. Take care.