All right, then, welcome to our first group talk of the day. Please welcome with me Alex on Rook intro and what's new in Rook. Thank you. Well, first of all, technology works as we want. So, I'm Alex Hennar, I'm a DevOps Engineer at Cloudical, I'm one of the Rook maintainers and, well, certified Kubernetes administrator. So, before I'm just jumping into the topics, quick point that you see on the rough outline on what I'm going to talk about. First part, Kubernetes and storage. Just a quick point on how is it looking in Kubernetes, what's the situation? What is Rook? Did you, well, get kind of a bit of an overview on what is Rook even? Architecture, and then we're going to dive into the new features, also in the roadmap for the future, and just as a last point to throw in, we are looking to graduate the project soon. So, I'm going to talk about that in a bit as well. So, Kubernetes and storage. In Kubernetes, if you want storage, you're well basically bound to use external storage, meaning, well, taking on-premise with bare metal as an example, you need to have some sort of storage already existing. Not to name any names, but, well, there's bigger appliances for storage you might have. Well, if you're just on-premise, that might be already enough for you. But in general, with the storage there, it's not too portable, meaning that if you go from on-premise and you're on the multi-cloud, hybrid cloud kind of trip, well, your appliance in the data center might not be sufficient for, well, your AWS or whatever cloud scenario. So, well, as we have it, if your appliance is in the basement and not in the AWS cloud or GCP wherever, well, you need to have access to the services. That's not so much of a challenge if you're just on-premise, but, well, it's in general just like it's not too portable unless you are in the same environment all the time. For if you're more or less in a cloud environment, the problem that arises is, well, you're kind of locked in because if you're with AWS, well, you can use their EBS and their, well, their file system and, well, S3 and so on. At least S3 is a bit more open, if you will, so, so that's not too much of a problem, but normal, well, classic storage like block and file system storage is kind of a burden to have. Well, switching from environments. Even though as we have in Kubernetes storage classes and such, which kind of are, well, a bit of an abstraction there, well, it's still a bit of a challenge because if you have a bug on, well, on, let's say, your local appliance storage and you move it to AWS and you don't have the bug there, well, there's certain scenarios where it's simply a bit more important to have the same storage from your on-premise or whatever to full production, so, now.  So if you just put some appliance in and, well, it runs, then, well, you might not need to manage it too much, but still, at least it feels a bit weird to just put in some appliance and, yeah, it runs, it runs, and it runs till it doesn't run. Yeah, well, so kind of the question there, who's managing the storage? So that's where we come to what is Rook? Rook is, well, a storage operator. The part of the operator part, I'm going to go into that concept a bit further later on, the part of operator is simply as it kind of implies. Well, I'm, for example, an operator to, well, operate, well, some crane or something. It's kind of the same, if you think, for Rook there, it's, well, operating things like SAV, edge affairs and other storage systems, storage software, back ends, providers, how you want to name it. And the point with Rook there is that it, well, do you have Kubernetes? Well, fine. Put Rook on it, you have SAV, for example, or edge affairs, or it's generally not just about SAV, there is general point of those, well, complex storage systems making them easy to run in your Kubernetes cluster. So, well, in containers in the end. And the part of, well, where the Rook part with the operations is coming in is, it's trying to have it as abstract as possible, but with also a good amount of customizability for the users, where Rook takes care of deploying, managing, installation, configuration, this 100 steps, and, well, in the end, you create one or two more objects to talk about the Kubernetes part there, and, bam, SAV cluster in your Kubernetes cluster ready to be used by the applications. Well, if you want to bring that to production, there's a bit more to think about, like, what's kind of distance on, but, well, kind of, if you think about more on a lower level. Still, remains that Rook will take care as good as possible about those points for storage software. But, well, let's kind of step a bit back there. Rook, it's open source, a package point serial license. We are a project of the CNCF. We currently, that's also, later on, we are looking to graduate the project as other projects like Kubernetes, as well, have already done graduating from CNCF, so we're trying to do that as well. As we had with the operator part to make it easily possible in Kubernetes, we can introduce so-called custom resource definitions. There's basically, well, a possibility for users, especially more, well, administrators of the cluster, to extend to Kubernetes API. So, well, for Rook, looking at CEF there, we would, for example, have a CEF cluster object for, well, other purposes, like, well, MySQL, for example, you might want to have like a MySQL database or something object, which, especially looking at, well, user experience for the developers, if they need a database, well, go ahead and create your MySQL database object and some operator in the end will take care of creating all the things needed for the database. It's the same concept there for Rook. The admin, hopefully not just all the users on the cluster, creates a CEF cluster object, and based on the specifications in that object, Rook will take care of, well, for example, for CEF to create OSDs from the disks in the servers, will discover them and, well, create the command structures and all needed to, for example, then tell CEF volume to use those in those disks based on these specifications. Yeah. I already mentioned that it's not just about CEF. It's also about other storage, which, well, is, yeah, well, complicated to run. CEF. Cockroach should be Atrofest, Cassandra, NFS, YugobarDB. Kind of shout out to the YugobarDB people. They just joined with, like, version 1.1. Great people. And, yeah, the idea is to grow that even further. So it's not just as, like, CEF or something. The idea is that, in a broader sense, well, I have my own premise, for example, I create my CEF cluster using a root CEF operator. And, well, I need a, well, YugobarDB. And I create it and just, for example, tell it to use as normal Kubernetes flow to claim, persistent volume claims is a key word there, the storage, for example, from the CEF cluster. Because why not? So, yeah. Going to the architecture. There's, in itself, three layers. You have the operator layer. It's, well, managing the CEF. It's configuring it. But the main point to mention is not on the data path. So there's no, well, my one operator part right now is down. So, oh no, everything's holding. I always stop. And that's not going to happen. For storage provisioning, thankfully, through the CSI, the container storage interface, it's, well, it's amazing as it's not just, well, for, there was something previously. Don't remember, like, don't, well, it's not too important. It's flex volume. Point is with CSI, it's more like a common solution for general storage. It has container storage interface as a name, but it's general interface to more or less be able to say, hey, give me 50 gigs of storage. And then on a note to say, hey, please mount the storage, for example. And that's great. Previously we had written our own flex volume driver. And, well, it's a pain to maintain such a driver. So, but it's also for, it's not just for the SAP part. It's also for HFS, for example, as they're also providing block storage and file system storage. Rook takes care of setting up the CSI driver as good as it can, like there's definitely some points where, well, the admin needs to step in to create storage classes to maybe, well, have certain changes, certain security levels specified in a storage class or something. But main point is that Rook will normally get you for some of SAP HFS class in a state where you just need to create a storage class. So, yeah. So, as previously said, for the operator, the operator is not on the data path. So, no need to worry about operator crashing or anything or being incompatible. It's just SAP or HFS or Cassandra and so on. There's, well, yeah. Yeah. I mentioned previously, like Rook SAP operator and there's even Rook HFS operator and so on. The point there is that it's separate operator. It is not like, yeah, I want to use SAP. But because I install Rook, I have the Rook SAP operator, the HFS and so on operator. That's not like it. That's the reason why it's split like that. If you want SAP, well, go for the SAP operator. If you want, let's say, Cassandra is an example used to Cassandra operator. So you have the freedom there to kind of say what you need and what you want. So, yeah, well, as said, we have the Rook operators that do the management, configuration, upgrades and stuff of the software. From, as previously said, with like the operators, it's basically the same. The operator is simply, well, automating certain actions which normally you would need to do. Or, well, maybe even another automation tool, like, well, Ansible or something. So, yeah. Coming back to the custom object. If you create a SAP cluster and say, hey, I want to use, for example, well, my STB drive or something, or maybe my, well, you add a new disk in that definition and say, well, use my STC disk as well. The Rook operator will take care based on that. And, well, we'll see, OK, to stay changed and act on that. We'll trigger all the things needed, all the preparation jobs, for example, for the OSDs. And you will hopefully in a few, well, let it be a minute. Sometimes LVM and so on takes a bit of time, at least for SAP, as a volume part there. But, yeah. So in the end, operator watching over everything, seeing OSD changed. I need to do something. And even kind of like health checking to a certain point where it's like, oh, we can't upgrade now because the status of the SAP cluster right now says we have data, well, OSDs down or something like that, too many or so. There's parts where the operator kind of tries to also throw in a good amount of knowledge from a people that run SAP cluster or even, well, more or less also the developer of SAP. Well, for example, there's like a, what is it called? SAP, SAP to stop, I think, and SAP to remove command and such. And there's parts where Rook also tries to, where we're more and more also moving there to use the SAP native parts to, well, have the cluster operator save as possibly. So, from the Rook part, operator part again, which is simply is the Kubernetes API. There's not too much magic involved. It's just normal power of Kubernetes. Nothing, well, too special there to say. As I said, it's managing upgrades and such. It's trying to do them as already for, like, SAP and so on is, well, stateful if you want. So, coming back to your customer service definitions. So, we have those customer service definitions and in those, the admin specifies what they want. They can specify one device after another. They can even, if they're, well, in AWS environment or well, in the cloud environment in general, they can even specify that storage should be taken from, like, the cloud provider and such through, again, like, standard Kubernetes methods, persistent volume claims and such and, well, just a normal way of kind of doing it. And the object is basically in the end, as Kubernetes wants it, it's the state as it's desired. So, there's not, the Rook operator will try as long as possible to use the disk even if it doesn't exist or, well, there's magnetism simply to hopefully prevent that but just from a, just from a Kubernetes standpoint, if the object says, hey, use this disk, it would technically, well, try it forever because the user wants to decide state to use this disk, so, now. So, moving on to the new features. You got a, you got a DBA joint in 1.1. We're already at Rook release 1.2, but, well, yay, new storage back end. Same goes here. We are a perfect example right now for the CRD party, customer sources. We can define our own objects or even, well, own APIs and the people that create those CRDs can basically put in whatever they want and even have, which is pretty powerful about Kubernetes, have validation and such in place. EdgeFS, EdgeFS has been able, thanks to G1, I think I'm butchering the name. Mustafa has implemented multi-homed network. That's a big challenge a bit still in Kubernetes. I can tell you, at least just from general concept there for the, well, for the, for projects such as MULTUS, if anyone has maybe heard about MULTUS yet. The idea is simple to have, again, Kubernetes native customer resources and such to be, to easily be able to have multiple interfaces from the node, but even virtual, well, overlay networks and such per application, per pod running in your Kubernetes cluster. Well, he didn't just design it. He even implemented it. That's great. That's cool to see. Just kind of quick look here for, again, part. We just specify a new part of configuration. In this case, I think there's even not just support for MULTUS, but I can't get the name right now. But one of the other projects that's allowing custom networking stuff in Kubernetes and easily configure those networks to be used for these, for this EdgeFS cluster in this case. For Seth, I think a lot of, a lot of people, including me, well, having kind of desperate for this feature. Partitions. Finally, at least to kind of bring up what my case is. Maybe who knows Hatsnop hosting provider? Anyone, maybe? Well, they have cheap servers and you, but you have two disks most of the time, and those disks are most of them, like four terabytes, eight terabytes or something back. And if I have my OS on one of them, I basically lose the whole disk because previously I couldn't use a partition, which, well, I would, one hundred gigs maybe for the OS and the rest for Seth, because why not? And finally, I think the, yeah, since, well, with the upcoming, I'm not sure if it's already out, the 14.28 release though, that is available as a feature to use. Yeah, it's great to see, it's awesome. So, big thanks for everyone that's contributing, helping, being on the slack, just, well, also thanks for being here. Yeah, so for the roadmap, well, we just try to further stabilize the customer service definitions, try not to, well, change them too much as we are on a stable level for a second edge, as for example, right now. We, well, we try to use, we have, well, we have our own code that does like the watching on the custom objects and such. Well, it's, well, there's a bunch of other projects out there as well, which kind of offer a more, well, more commonly used approach to doing that, like the operator SDK from right at chorus, I think there's two projects slash companies. So, the idea is to, well, move away from our own stuff and get something which, well, everybody uses. Yeah. As we had it with UGA-byDB joining for 1.1, we hope to get more storage providers on board with RUG for SAF. I talked about the multi-hom network stuff for HFS. Well, it's soon also coming to SAF in, I think, let me, in where you heard it. It's planned for around 1.3 thanks to Sebastian Hahn again. Yeah. Let me go back around and slide here. And for SAF parts, the manager part, who knows about the SAF manager? Who knows about the SAF manager dashboard? Well, the idea there is, there's a cool dashboard where everybody is working on to, in general, have better integration with such orchestration tools, like, well, the deep-sea stuff and so on, like the existing, well, RUG also exists, but also for RUG side to even also better integrate it with that. That's one of the ideas, Daniel, is that you can specify everything you want in the SAF cluster object. But if you want, you can also just log into the dashboard, see which disks are available in each node and then just click, click and say, oh, well, make the most of these or something. And, well, we want to get there. We're not quite there, but it's getting better and better. For HFS, they simply want to feature, well, to support new features that they have implemented in the project themselves. And one of the bigger parts here definitely is the CNCF project graduation, but precisely, there's more to come. So we saw that, project graduation. I'm not gonna bore you too much with dates or anything, the point being we joined the CNCF project as a sandbox project in like 2018 or something and, well, we further improved and so forth and, woo, point being, we tried to graduate in 2020. So hopefully around, well, March. And, well, besides looking from the past to now, well, a lot of numbers have increased so that should probably mean something good, right? It's growing to summarize that slide. Rook is growing further and further. We have done also, which is for a good amount of companies, also very important, there was a security audit about Rook, well, an independent security audit. Was performed by the Trail of Bits guys. They even did the Kubernetes security audit by being, there were some vulnerabilities. We fixed them or we're just one or two small, like, well, not two critical things which are still being fixed. Point is we got the security audit. It looks good. We didn't have too many critical things in general, just like the coin fracture stuff. We need to improve a bit on the CI part and such and, well. So should you run Rook already? Who's running Rook in development or so testing around playing with it? Okay. Who is running it in production? Oh, well. At least a few ends. I'm happy about that. If you want, like, I would really encourage you to get in touch with me maybe now or you can also just send Jared once a message on Slack or on Twitter and, well, kind of talk to him that we get a bit more, what he's called, not customer testimonials but testimonials about people using the project and, well, using, well, using it simply. Yeah. And, well, for people that might not be able to say, hey, yeah, we're using it, it can also be confidential. So, well. Well, I'm working for a classical justice point. If you want to work on Rook, like to program Go or something, feel free to reach out to us or to me. But now, getting back to Rook. If you want to get involved, feel free to jump on our Slack. Rook.io is also a great place in regards to the documentation and such. Twitter, we even have a mailing list. We have community meetings, so feel free to join. And, yeah. You got the photo? Thank you. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them now. I'll try to repeat them as we will. Some audio issues. Yeah. So, the question is that there is an issue about extending persistent volumes slash persistent volume claims with Seth Caesar, right? Yes. Yes. That is solved. Well, it's solved. It must have to be that guy. But it's back-pointed as far as I know to 1.2. Something 1.22. Yeah, it is in 1.2 as far as I know, but not released yet, or it is already in the latest patch release. Point being, Seth CSI, which brought this feature, which is the, for them, the 2.00 release, has brought this feature finally. Probably worth checking out github.com slash Seth minus CSI. I hope they've updated their feature table below. Yeah. So, the question is, is it possible to use multiple, well, Rook storage operators, for example, Rook Seth and Rook HFS in the same cluster? Well, technically speaking, yeah, sure, that's not a problem. They're self-independent. Well, if you use the same disk for both, there is a chance that, you know, one might take a disk first before the other or something, but, well, it's, you have two people fighting over the same disk, for example. Then it's not a clash of the operators because they don't know about each other, but just a clash of the disk on the servers. Yeah, if you separate, like, what nodes they use, then it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Yeah, it's like the same with, if you use Seth and the Cassandra one, you don't need to use the Seth one. In the end, it's just normal piston volume clamp storage, and if you separate, and so it's, yeah. Yeah? How is it evolving? So the question is, let me try to summarize it. How far Rook operators will go in regards to second-day operations, right? Well, one of the main parts, at least it's already covered by the operators, for example, for Seth, that's, well, the most common I know there, is the health checking of the monitors. Because, well, you don't want to lose your quorum. Well, bad things will happen then. In regards to backups of volumes and such, that's not a thing Rook is looking too much into. Simply due to the fact there's already a big ecosystem around it, like, let me, where do we have it? From Stash Project, the Stash operator, well, it's even an operator which has CRDs as well. There is Haptio, or well, it was previously, I think it's VMware or something now, with their Arc project. I hope they didn't rename it as well. Yeah, Valero, yeah, the new name. And there's a few more projects, some even more on the Seth layer, for Seth for example, like Becky too, I think. It's second-hand operations, but it's something just due to the diversity there. Do you want it in communities? Fancy with customers, those definitions are more outside. Just back up everything, for example, well, and at least one phrase that's kind of stuck with me from some people that do a bit more in regards to Seth is, if you want to back up Seth Cluster, put in our Seth Cluster besides it, and it's like, well, yeah. Yeah? Howdy integration? So you mean if you want to add a new storage backend, basically? So the question is what you need to do, basically, to add a new storage provider? Well, we're trying to improve that even further now. The main idea is that we have a lot of, well, framework-like structures to call it like that. Not yet at a, I would say, full-blown framework for that, but there's basically certain structures already available where you design your customer service definition, and, well, to put it like that, you can copy and paste certain parts of the codes, which, for example, just do the easy part of watching and notifying your own functions then to, well, on ads, like a new object has been created, you react to it and such. There's a good amount of functions already available. It can be still improved, like I said. It's more like we're moving more and more to be a framework in that regard, yeah. Okay, any other? So the question is, if one Rook-Saf installation can support multiple clusters, to a certain extent, yes, you would have, let's assume the following. You have one cluster with the Rook-Saf on it, and you have, let's say, three other clusters, three other Kubernetes clusters. You would use Rook-Saf just as normal in the first cluster to get Saf running, and in the other three clusters, you could also use Rook there to, with the, I forgot the name, external cluster integration, where you would take the access key and such from this cluster, give it to each cluster, and then the Rook-Saf operator can also set up to certain things like CFCs and such. Though one important thing there to mention is, the Rook-Saf cluster, you need to run it with host network true as of right now, because the other nodes and such need to be able to access the OSDs and the months and like, well, everything in the end, so that's one of the kind of restrictions as we have right now, yeah. If you don't have any questions anymore, well, I got a few stickers still with me, so feel free to grab them. So, yeah. See you.


Hello, everyone, I am Chantelle Mertz, like she said, and I will be talking to you a little bit today about salinity and how plants respond to it. So first of all, first of all, where does the salinity come from, especially out here out west, a lot of our salinity is often a result of brine spills. So brine is a byproduct of the oil and gas industry, specifically for when we use hydraulic fracking, we use water that we pump down into the oil and gas deposits to break it up to get that oil and gas to the surface. And so when we do that, we actually hit marine shale deposits so thousands of years ago. North Dakota used to be more of a marine oceanic environment and so because of that, the deposits are very highly salinized with sodium and chloride. So when this water comes back up with the oil and gas, it's extremely salinized it can have ECs which is the electrical conductivity which is how salty the water is greater than 200 desiccements per meter. And so this water is usually stored in storage tanks next to the pumps, or it can also be in pipelines. But occasionally these things spill and so when this happens this can have detrimental effects to both the soil that's there, as well as any organisms that might be living there as well. So we know that salinity is not a new problem but it is a growing problem for example like Tom alluded to, out of the 45 million acres in North Dakota that we have around 6 million of them are salinized, just with natural agricultural salinity so this is a result of salts that come up with the groundwater, as that water evaporates it leaves the salts, and this causes a lot of agricultural salinity that we have. And so it's not a new problem but it is a growing problem so how do we deal with these brine spills and this agricultural salinity that's beginning to be such a big problem. Well the first part of that is understanding how it affects plants. So I know this kind of seems a little bit complicated and we're going to get into the plant physiology of things. It's my hair. We're going to get into the plant physiology of things but I'm going to try to make it as simple as possible. So there's two main effects that salinity or saline sodic soils like Tom was talking about have on the plants. The first is ion toxicity. So normally with any kind of nutrient you can have a deficiency which means you're not going to get enough growth of that plant because you don't have the nutrient to perform those functions. If you have a sufficient amount of that nutrient you can probably get the best yield possible you're going to be able to hit that sufficiency range but you can have too much of a good thing, or as we say you need to have everything in moderation. So with salinity comes sodium and chloride or other salts such as magnesium or calcium sulfates that become too much for the plant. So this is called ion toxicity. Basically it just builds up in the leaves and the plant is no longer able to function. It's a little bit more common that you like to think of as osmotic stress. This is just a fancy way of saying that the plant can't get enough water or it's drought stressed. And so, you can't really see the colors on there but there is the equation for photosynthesis and as you can see we need carbon dioxide and water to be able to make sugars to perform the functions that we need to and grow as a plant. And so if we don't have enough water, we can't make those sugars which means we can't grow as a plant. And so, osmotic stress is usually seen more rapidly because just like if we didn't have enough water, we would start to feel sick pretty quickly plants have a rapid response as well if they can't get enough water. And so this causes that decrease shoot growth because they can't make those sugars that they need to build up the plant material. Now ion toxicity isn't seen quite as much just because in a normal agricultural salinity situation you don't have that concentrated like sodium and chloride as you do in a brine spill so you don't see ion toxicity quite as much. But in brine spill situations you really see it because we have so much sodium and so much chloride concentrated in those soils. And so this is a little bit of a slower onset that onset than osmotic stress. And this kind of all those ions start to build up in the older leaves because those were the ones that are around the longest and so those ions build up in those mature leaves and they start to senesce which means that they're kind of starting to decompose or become necrotic and necrotic. So those are kind of the two main things that happen to plants, when they're exposed to salinity we also have a couple secondary effects. One of them is we can get like, we can get other nutrient deficiencies because if we can't bring water into the plant. That means we also can't bring the nutrients that the water brings into the plant as well. And we can't transfer those nutrients from the shoots to the roots and back again. So we have a lot of nutrient deficiencies such as calcium or magnesium and then we can also get something called reactive octan species. So basically if you think about it, if the sun's beating down on you, normally in photosynthesis you have electrons that are going to receive this energy and go where they need to go to be able to make their sugars. Well if the sun's beating down on them, and they can't perform photosynthesis because they don't have enough water, those electrons are going to take that energy and they're going to start to ping around like a pinball machine kind of thing. And what they do is it actually destroys their membranes. And so they can't keep all their organs and all everything that's supposed to be in certain places in certain places anymore. And so it starts to really damage these plants. And that's what ends up leading to death and the stunting that you will see in salinity. So those are kind of the main effects. So where does that lead us? I want to show you guys exactly what happens to a plant when it's under that osmotic stress. So here's a good diagram that shows typically our water moves from high water potential which means it moves from places with low salts to places with high or to low water potential with high salts. And so as you can see here, this is a soil that's at negative 0.3 bar. So you really need to know what that means. Basically the soil's at field capacity. We have a pretty good amount of water in that soil. So what the plant does is it's able to form kind of a straw through capillary action, using some adhesion cohesion.  And so the plant under normal conditions when there's no salt in the soil, the water moves from high to low. It moves from negative to even more negative. So under normal conditions, plants are able to uptake that water. And because of that, their cells are pretty happy. If you think of a tire, you have that inner tube inside a tire, you want that tube to be inflated, right? To have a pretty good tire that rolls around. If you have a plant cell that has enough water in it, it's turgor pressure is what it's called. It's going to be good. And it's going to be able to stand up straight. It's not wilting. It's going to be a healthy plant. So what happens if you have salinity? So now we have our sodium and our chloride in our plant, or in our soil. And so what this does is that sodium, that chloride, just like Dr. Sutter was talking about before, can become hydrated with water. They're almost stealing that water, and they're causing the soil water potential to become more negative. So as you can see, we're at now at negative 12 bar, which is getting kind of close to permanent wilting point. And because the leaf can only go to negative 15 bar, this is stopping that soil from having as much when it sucks through that straw. So now that plant can't get all that water into itself. And so what does that happen for our plant cells? Our plant cells start to lose water because the soil has more ions and is more saline than the cell itself. So the water wants to move to where those salts are. So this causes our plant cells to desiccate or dehydrate. And when this happens, our plant starts to wilt because it no longer has that trigger pressure that's keeping it healthy, letting it stand up. All right, so now that you guys know how salinity affects the plants, this can get us starting to thinking about the different kinds of plants that we use in remediation and reclamation and things like that. So we like to classify plants in two different ways. The first being glycophytes. So glycophytes are most of our agricultural crops, our wheat, our soybeans, our corn that we've domesticated for thousands of years. These crops are not very salinity tolerant. They don't have a lot of stress tolerance in general. They can only tolerate ECs, which is our electrical conductivities of around up to 10 deciements per meter. And even at 10 deciements per meter they're not doing too hot at that point. So, because we've been domesticating these crops for years, we've been making sure that we've been going for high yield, ripening at the same times, things like that. And so because of that we often lost those stress tolerances that they normally would have. And then the halifites. So halifites are defined as plants that can fulfill their life cycle, even under really saline conditions. So this is not a very broad group of species only about 1200 species. That's about 0.5% of all angiosperms so angiosperms, just a fancy way of saying plants that produce seeds. So it's not very broad, but what they can do is they can tolerate that salt and so these are plants that grew up in pretty extreme environments so this is your deserts this is your coastal areas with a lot of salt your marshes things like that. And so these plants used to have to be defined as plants that could tolerate seawater which is 58 deciements per meter, but now they kind of lowered it and said plants that can tolerate at least 20 deciements per meter of the water of the solution can be considered as plants. So here's a chart up here and I know it's not very big, but I just want you to look at the curve. So on the y axis, we have basically biomass. And then we have increasing salinity on the x axis and so as you can see we have Durham, we have bread wheat, we have barley, and they as soon as we get any kind of salinity in there we increase our salts, their biomass goes straight down, they're like I said they are just glycophytes that don't have a lot of stress tolerance. However, if you look at that blue line right there that is salt bush salt bush is a halophite and as you can see, it even increased in biomass a little bit when we had some increasing salts so it's able to tolerate those salts and in turn keep growing even when we have really high salinities and fulfill its life cycle. So here are the ways that different plants glycophytes and halophytes included can tolerate these different kinds of salts. Well I like to classify them by four different mechanisms. So we have exclusion. We have storage, we have utilization, and we have secretion. So the first one I will start with is exclusion. So almost all plants can exclude ions from coming inside to a point. They can exclude ions by opening and closing their stomata to different points and they have special things in their roots and transporters that they can use but that's all a little complicated. So the best way to explain it is even if there's salts in the soil, there's different plants that can stop those soils from or stop those salts from coming into their roots. Examples of this include mangroves which can exclude up to 90% of salts from coming in. For example, the barley that we grow here in North Dakota, a cousin of barley is sea barley. Sea barley can do the same thing and exclude salts from coming into the plant. The next thing that plants can do to make sure that the sodium and the chloride doesn't come into their system to prevent that ion toxicity is they try to retain the sodium in their roots. We want to retain something in our roots. Because if it gets to the leaves, if that sodium or that chloride starts to accumulate in the plant and get to the leaves, we cannot perform photosynthesis. Our membranes are going to start to get broken up by those reactive oxygen species, and we're just going to have a lot of problems. So what the plant does is it tries to make sure that it retains that sodium and that chloride in its roots. And then the last thing a couple of plants can do is let's say the concentration of salts in the soil is so high, we can no longer prevent it from coming in the plant. We can no longer stop it from going past the roots, and it's starting to go into the xylem well there's certain plants that can grab that sodium grab that chloride and shove it back down to the roots. And so this is called ion retrieval it's still pretty new. But there are plants that are able to do that to make sure that it doesn't hit those leaves where we're performing photosynthesis. All right, the next one storage now this has a lot to do with what we just talked about. So here's an example of a plant cell you have your cell wall that gives the plant structure, you have your cell membrane that's what regulates what water and ions go into it, you have the chondria that's where respiration occurs, your nucleus is where your DNA is your chloroplast that's the most important that's where photosynthesis occurs. And so what plants do just like I said they store that sodium in the roots, well they're actually storing it inside the vacuole which is the storage mechanism, organelle of the plant cells. And so you will be storing that sodium or that chloride in the vacuoles in the plant cells in the roots first. And so, basically plants are storing sodium and chloride as much as possible in their membranes to prevent it from getting into this cytoplasm, where all the organelles are hanging out. We want to keep that salt is far away from the chloroplast where photosynthesis is occurring as possible. Different membranes and different plants have the ability to store these membranes to a point. So, for example, broadleaf plants are more leaky, they can only hold so much sodium and chloride before those salts will start to leak into the cell, versus grasses have a lot greater ability to keep that sodium and chloride inside just because of what their membranes are made out of. So the next one is called utilization. This is when plants can actually use sodium or use chloride for different functions within their plant cells, so that it doesn't become toxic or so that it can prevent that osmotic stress from hurting them. So the main way that I can explain this is that sodium can be used as a substitute for potassium. So I don't know about you guys but if I'm thirsty or if I just ran a lot maybe I'm going to drink a Gatorade because a Gatorade has electrolytes in it. Well the principle electrolyte that humans use is sodium. We use sodium to regulate our water in our body if we need to sweat it out we do, but plants don't use sodium like that. Plants actually use potassium to regulate their water. And so, that being said, sodium and potassium are actually very similar in their size when they're hydrated meaning when they have water near them. And they also are both monovalent cations which means they each have a plus one charge. And so, if there's a function that a plant might need potassium for such as that osmotic regulation, they might be able to use sodium instead because they're so alike. And so an example of plants that can do that is castor bean. So what they do is once castor bean has mature roots. It says okay, I'm going to take this sodium. I'm going to take this chloride. I'm going to put it in the vacuole so it can't hurt my other organs, and then I'm going to use that sodium and chloride that's in the vacuole to make the cell of that plant more negative, so that I can get even more water into the plant. Because what they're trying to do is out compete the soil. So if they're able to keep the plant and get the plant more negative, they can suck water up that straw. And so this is a way that plants can utilize sodium instead of using potassium. Another thing is C4 species versus C3 species. C4 species examples are like corn and sedan grass, things like that. And so C4 species actually needs sodium to function. They cannot, they need it as an essential micronutrient and without it they can't perform their life cycle. So for example, the plant like this is wild proso millet. It actually needs it to make chlorophyll to do photosynthesis, and it needs it to make certain enzymes for C4 photosynthesis. And then the last one is sodium can actually act as a beneficial nutrient, so it's not needed for their life cycle and most things do not need sodium, but if we can find some way for them to utilize it, some of them can do a lot better. So examples of plants that can use sodium, and it actually increases their photosynthetic capability, which means they can grow more is beets. So beets, turnips, marigolds, things like that actually need sodium. It helps them grow better, and it helps them use less potassium, which in the end helps them do a little bit better because they need less of that nutrient that they usually need so much of. So here is an example of a paper and I know it's a little bit hard to see but basically they did a study where they gave plants enough potassium, as well as they added sodium. And there was plants that even though they had enough potassium, when they got sodium they did better. And so that was like sugar beet Swiss chart red beet and turnips so it's pretty interesting to see how some of these plants can utilize some of these ions we think are so bad. So this is my favorite one so excretion is the last method that plants can use to either get rid of those ions that might become toxic. And so, just like we have an epidermis our skin or top layer of our skin plants also have that it's the epidermal or epidermal layer of their cells so right on top of the leaf. So what happens is plants have two different organelles that can help excrete salt from the plant so that it doesn't accumulate so much that they get that it gets toxic to them. And so the first one of those is assault gland assault gland is like a multi cells structure, and what it works like is like a pump to take all of that salt that might be accumulating in the plant and shoot it out to the outside so that it doesn't accumulate inside their leaves because like I said, we want to keep doing photosynthesis and so examples of plants that can do this are gray and white mangroves, as well as inland salt grass which is people out West here is probably pretty familiar with. The second structure I like a lot it's a called assault bladder. This one's a little bit different it's only one cell. And what it is it's kind of like a stock and on that stock is a balloon. And so in that balloon there's a vacuum and they shove all of the sodium and chloride and other ions that they don't want in their system. And it keeps getting bigger and bigger until it bursts and when it bursts it shoots all of that sodium and chloride outside of the plant. And so examples of things that do this are quinoa and lambs quarters. Now there's still a lot of science being done with these kinds of things. And they don't always develop these glands or these bladders and only certain kinds of plants have them, but it is pretty interesting to see how plants can protect themselves like this. And then here's an example they use an electron microscope so this is what they look like in real life. Here's an example of assault plan, as well as assault bladder. And this is a picture of a mangrove where you can actually see the salt crystals on the outside of the leaf because the plant was able to expel them. This is what's going to protect them in the end from that high salinity soil. All right so now that we know where salinity comes from how the plants are not like how the plants do with salinity and ways that they can combat it how does this come into my research. Now that we know that we have saline plants or that we have plants that we know that we need plants that can tolerate salinity first. And so we need something that can tolerate that ion toxicity can tolerate that osmotic stress and still live in that environment. Well this caused me and Dr. de Sutter to look through a couple different plant species which I will talk about later in the presentation. However, we know that when we get a plant like this that can tolerate salinity can tolerate the ionic stress and the ion toxicity and the osmotic stress. Then we know that it will be able to form roots that go down into the soil. If it's able to form roots that's going to allow us to infiltrate with precipitation hopefully leech salts down, as well as have roots that are there using up the water to make sure that more salts don't come up with the water table so that's like the first step in remediation. The first step is finding a plant that might be able to utilize or store those salts above ground so that we can remove whatever biomass that is to take the salt out of the soil and get it out of that area to try to remediate it. And then should we find a plant that can do both of these things or at least one of them, then hopefully we can do a field trial and do remediation. So here is the first step and this is the research that I've done so far. So I have done a girl chamber experiment utilizing five different plants, more alternative species that are Halifites so examples of these Halifites are Oratch Swiss Charred common lambs quarters which is a weed, as well as a weed, as well as curns out which is intermediate wheat grass it's actually a perennial. And then I also tested iron corn which is an ancient grain, because we thought if we were testing. We know that weeds relatively tolerant if we could go back to weeds roots perhaps it would still have those those stress tolerance genes that maybe got bred out. And then I also tested black turtle beans as well as hard red spring because we know hard red spring we is tolerant and black turtle beans are relatively susceptible to salinity. And so what we did, it was we grew them in containers with half soil half sand. Once they emerged, we had eight different increasing sodium chloride treatments to mimic a brine spill. And then we also had a control with no salts. So we let them grow for 30 days. And then after that we took the above ground dry mass and we weighed it. And then we also took the EC or the electrical conductivity of the soil to see how salty it was. And so here's an example of my eight different sodium chloride treatments as well as my control. And the EC one to one here which is half water half soil we had almost ECs of up to four, but most of the time we do things in saturated pace which is a conversion of 2.2. So we got up to around eight desicciments per meter in our soil. And so that's relatively anything greater than four saline usually. And then I typically went a lot higher than most normal salt tolerance experiments. Here are the photos from that experiment. Here are the black turtle beans as you can see most of the black turtle beans are either dead or dying, unless they were part of the control, or the very beginning salt treatment so they were not very high. However, lamb's quarter over here was growing pretty good. It was putting on a decent amount of biomass and it was actually starting to pollinate within that 30 day period. So here's an example of what we found. We compared all of the crops to each other. And so this might look a little confusing but what we did is we assumed that the control treatment with no salt had 100% biomass those plants didn't have any stresses so we assume their biomass was at 100% so we could compare them all to each other because they all grow at different rates. And so what we found is that lambs quarter over there it's not connected to any other rectangles but itself, meaning that lambs quarter was significantly different from all of these other ones that we tested. And so this comes into play here where it's a little bit better to see. So as you can see here we have the broad leaves, specifically lambs quarter Swiss chart or after all Halifites and tested against black turtle beans. So black turtle beans all of these started at 100% biomass and then went down black turtle beans. As soon as it saw any kind of salt, it decreased in biomass we knew that it was susceptible and it did exactly what we thought. Swiss chart and Orach, they did pretty good they either stayed about the same with increasing salinity levels, or they actually increased in biomass, a little bit which means they grew. However, the best one the one on top there is common lambs quarters, common lambs quarters did not care at all that it was in salt it kept growing it didn't have any decreases in biomass. Now this wasn't it didn't have a statistically significant linear relationship but it did have a biological significance which is really important and so that's why we are going to go with lambs quarter in the future which I will talk about later. So here is the results of our grasses so we have I'm corn and hard red spring we as well as Kernza I'm corn and hard red spring we did about the same. The point where they had 50% biomass which means they were at about 50% of what they could have been if they were in the control. They were at 50% EC of 1.9. And as Kernza did a lot better and the point when it was at 50% biomass was 2.7. And so, we know it decreased with increasing salts but the fact that Kernza is a perennial means that we could possibly skip that germination and early vegetative stage that might be more sensitive, because we don't have to keep replanting it year after year. And so that had us looking into Kernza for future experiments as well. So the advantages of these two plants that we kind of saw were pretty salt tolerant. So Kernza for one is perennial we don't we can get past those sensitive stages, as well as it can be harvested for grain or forage. It's actively being bred in both Minnesota as well as Kansas by the Land Institute, and it currently has about one third the yield of wheat. So it's a good resource for landowners if you want to start to possibly remediate that soil. Then we also have lambs quarters now lambs quarters might seem a little bit daunting because it is a weed. However, common lambs quarters is a little bit easier to control than Kosha, or water hemp that are more difficult weeds. So I mean lambs quarter does have some resistance to photo system to inhibitors as well as ALS inhibitors. But in general, we can control it a lot better than we can Kosha so it's a better option. It can be used as a forge for livestock, as well as it has a pretty wide emergence window meaning that we can plant it at different times we don't have to worry about getting in or if we haven't had a rain yet for any kind of oil and gas industry things because it has a really wide emergence window. It also produces a lot of seeds so should we be able to find that it is a really good fighter and mediator we potentially have the capabilities to get that out there to people who want to try it, and it also has heteromorphic seed production now what does this mean. Heteromorphic seed productions means that when it's under stress it can produce brown seeds that are non dormant that are really stress tolerant, because it realizes that it's going to die and it want to make sure that it has progeny to continue on versus if it's in ideal conditions and it's not under salt stress, it can produce black seeds that are dormant because it doesn't want any competition. So we have a lot of benefits of lamb's quarter and curns up that we are looking into to possibly use for remediation. So what does this mean for moving forward, moving forward, we want to do a greenhouse experiment where instead of just doing the early vegetative stage we're going to go from germination to maturity. And we're going to use a lot higher salts because we do want to find what the salinity tolerance of lamb's quarter is because it never did decrease in biomass. We want to test their capability as a fighter mediator so can they take up that salt can they utilize that salt in any way that we can potentially remove that biomass from that area to get the salt out of that system. And then we'd also like to do field trials in the future, possibly this summer in Carrington we're going to utilize some natural salinity gradients, where we will test curns in a multi year experiment since it is a perennial and see how it goes after year with salinity, as well as possibly testing lamb's quarter and calcium acetate which Dr said or talked about earlier, because not only does it have. Not only can it help the soil when under saline conditions but it also has been known to possibly help with that drought stress or that osmotic stress. So, these are my references, and thank you all take any questions. So lamb's quarter does have some natural resistance to glyphosate it's not like resistance it's just tolerant it's naturally a little bit tolerant to glyphosate so you can have a little bit of trouble if you want to just use roundup. There's a little bit of tolerance to liberty, which is glue fosnate but it still does pretty good on it, and that photosystem to resistance and that ALS resistance is not so much widely seen as North Dakota as it is in other states so right now it's still relatively low, but it's definitely something we want to watch and we can prevent that kind of stuff resistance from spreading just by mowing it down just like you would kosher to prevent seed production so it could be a nuisance but for now it's not and it's a better. A better idea looking forward than kosher potentially would be just because we don't have to worry about that quite as much.


Well, with all this beautiful weather lately, perfect time to get out on the lake and enjoy a day of fishing. On this week's segment of fishing tips, Ray and Mandy talk about using crankbaits. Tonight we like to talk a little bit about using crankbaits for fishing. Crankbaits are a very, very effective tool for catching everything. As we had mentioned in the earlier show, you can use little tiny ones for panfish. You can use bigger ones for bigger fish. So you can use a crankbait from everything in Minnesota from a panfish to a muskie. And they're not cheap anymore. I can remember when they were a buck and a half, but they're getting a lot more expensive, but they are still very, very effective. And if you're not sure of what kind of crankbait to select, we're gonna give you a few tips on how to select a crankbait for the kind of fishing you're gonna do. So let's talk about casting them. When you're casting cranks, you've got a couple of different options and some things that you should know about. You can have a square bill crankbait and this is really good if you're going to be around wood or rocks or things like that because this little crankbait will smash into it and then it'll bounce off the corner and so it won't get hung up in it. See the opposite end is where it's got a rounded tip here. So when this hits something, it slides off the side of any kind of structure. These around wood, rocks, things like that are more likely to get hung up than you do with a square bill. This particular product is called a walley diver. This is something I would love to use in the river systems. I've used this up in Canada, caught many big walleyes with this and you can get these in a variety of sizes all the way down to about like that and even the little crankbaits have caught big walleyes for me. And when you're trolling with these, it takes a little while and a little practice to figure out how deep they're going and when you buy a product, it should have on the box how much depth it's rated for and not only to look at the bill but to get an idea of the depth of what it says on here. So if you're fishing in 12 feet of water, you don't want a crankbait that's going to go down 25 feet because you're just strictly being the weeds the whole time. So you can actually get crankbaits that you control right over the top of weed lines and they will not dive down deep or you can get crankbaits that go very deep all the way down to 25 feet of water and it's a great way to catch bass and walleyes in Northern Pike. I'm Ray Gildo with the Niswa Guides League. And I'm Mandy Eric, The Bass and Biologist. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Welcome to Sportsman Tech Talk, my name is Jim Isaac and today we're going to go over how to create a customized combo page. So what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to go to your home page here, you're going to want to go to combo options, which is your menu, you'll go to add combo, you can either do a dual or you can do a layout, it has a bunch of different layout options here. We can start today, we'll just do a three-way, tap on the button, you can add your nav chart, you could add your, let's see, we'll do a radar, we will do some gauges here, and you can set this up however you want, obviously there's going to be, each person is going to have different functions that they like to have up on the screen at one time, so you can pretty much customize it to your needs, but yeah, it's as easy as that and that'll be saved to your screen if you want to change it. All you need to do is go to options, edit combo, we're just going to change the layout, we'll do a dual screen here, and then you can set it up how you want to fit your needs and that's really it for how to set up a combo page, if you have any questions just leave them in the comments below.


Thank you all for coming. This is the second of our interview series at the festival. We also had a keynote speaker come in to introduce this symposium element of the festival that's kind of threading through with all the performances. So we're very happy you're here and we hope that you continue to follow this pathway with dialogues between the artists and activists. We have next weekend two more. No, we have three more next weekend. Julie Liechtenberg, Trini Mayeda will be speaking about the first generation experience in America in the U.S. And Ruben Dario Salazar will be interviewed from Cuba about puppetry in Cuba, the arts in Cuba. And Eric Bass and Roberto Salarón will be speaking about their international collaboration of a work they've been doing in El Salvador. So all many exciting themes continued next weekend. Please come back again. Please purchase your festival t-shirt, if you haven't seen them yet, arch-designed by Yana Zeller with an image from Magali's show, so if you haven't seen that, that's going to be performed tonight at 7 o'clock. If it's raining, it will be raining and the venue will be 118 Elliott Street. There we are. So shift in venue. If you haven't seen that, please, please come. It's a free performance. Absolutely stunning. So without further ado, I'd love to introduce this interview and we're actually going to let it be led in graciously by Scott Ainsley with a little art burst for you. Thank you so much. This is a song, a true story song that I wrote after hearing a report on National Public Radio of the search for a woman named Gracia Cruz who was lost on June 23rd in 2007 in the Sonoran Desert. The facts in the song are all straight out of her story. It was amazing. For those of you who don't, used to be the arts editor of the Brattleboro Reformer. Now I'm the executive director of The Latches and I'm very pleased and proud and honored to have been asked by Sanglass to facilitate these conversations. I'm here today with Shura Wallin, a founder of Green Valley Samaritans out of Arizona and Alejandro Benitez Cuellar, director of Mexico's Factor Teatro. And we'll find out a little bit more about them and what they do very shortly. The general theme today is U.S.-Mexico relations. And I just want to frame this with a couple of thoughts that came to me as I was preparing. For those of us who live 2,000 miles away from the U.S.-Mexico border, the issues along that border are a comfortable abstraction, I think, grounded in statistics and numbers and data and sound bites and stereotypes and devoid of the humanity and the reality around it. Although I did find it interesting that a million dollars of products are traded legally across the border every minute. It is a very, very powerful locus. When we think of Mexico at all, many of us here, it's because some candidate with appalling hair said something inflammatory or we hear that somebody wants to build a bigger and better wall. And however much we know it in our hearts, the stereotypes that we've received often still form our judgments. I'm as guilty of anyone of profound ignorance about Mexico. I made one brief foray into Tijuana when I was younger for a night of music and revelry, which I will never forget. But that hardly makes me an expert in preparing for this conversation. I'm willing to learn. In preparing for this conversation, I spent more time thinking about and looking into Mexico than I ever have before in my life, Mea Culpa. I think if we think about Mexico at all, we don't think about our shared humanity, our common ties through faith and family, community and culture, and enter sand glass and all of us here to begin to work on this. I'd like to conclude with something I found. It's a quote from the great cellist Pablo Casals, who said, the love of one's country is a splendid thing, but why should love stop at the border? And I think with that, we'll turn it over to our guests. And I think perhaps we could start by finding a little bit more about what you do. And sure, why don't you tell us a few words or less? A few words? Then we'll dig deeper. Okay. I'll give you, I'm not a person of few words, but I'll try. I'll give you a brief summary. I lived in Berkeley, California for 28 years. During my time there, 14 years was spent with the homeless. I co-founded and coordinated a food program for the homeless. And in 2000, June of 2000, my husband and I moved from Berkeley to Green Valley, Arizona, which is basically halfway between Tucson and Nogales. And it was shortly before we left that I began hearing from some of my Latino friends this, we don't want them to come. And I thought, what is this all about? Never read anything in the papers about what was happening on the Arizona desert, the Texas desert, whatever. So I kind of tucked that away and I thought, well, they're probably afraid for their jobs. You know, afraid that they're going to lose their jobs. And we moved in June of 2000 and my husband was still working in the Bay Area. And so I was in Green Valley by myself for the first summer. And about a month after we were down there, I read in the paper about this group called Humane Borders. And Humane Borders is a group that puts recycled Coca-Cola containers out on the desert with a picture of the Big Dipper, a 30-foot pole and a blue flag for migrants who come across who are thirsty. And it is not uncommon for us to find bullet holes in those water tanks. It's not uncommon for us to find these spigots turned on and all of the water has run out. And I thought, well, this is something I could do. And I got involved with Humane Borders and used to do these water runs. And then another group in Tucson was started called Tucson Samaritans, got involved with them as well. And then along came another group called No More Deaths. And I'm thinking, wouldn't it be nice if I could get a group started in Green Valley? Green Valley is extremely conservative and it is a retirement community. And so one day in January of 2005, Randy Mayer, who's a minister at the UCC Church, the Good Shepherd in Salarito, which is adjacent to Green Valley, had a one-day symposium on immigration. And a friend of mine from Tucson had brought down two or three articles and items that had been found on the desert and things that had been left behind and a sign-up sheet. And so at the end of the day she said, you're not going to believe this. There are a number of people here who would like to get involved. And that's what started us. Our first search, and I will tell you what we do, our first search was February 5th, 2005. The first thing that we do is to search for people. We take backpacks of food and water, medical supplies, some socks.  We have food, water, and assistance. That's the number one thing. The second thing that we do is we put water out, gallons of water, with GPS coordinate on the bottle, Green Valley Samaritans, and the date that we've dropped the water in strategic areas. Areas where we know we feel that people are coming. There is a retired geology professor from the University of Arizona who has mapped all of the trails that migrants have used. So we know we can follow the clues that are out there, things that have been left behind, how fresh they are, and so on and so forth. And also we get word of which way people are coming from a variety of sources. And the reason for the GPS coordinate is that if we find a bottle, say, hypothetically, five miles from that way point, that gives us an idea that maybe people are changing directions. And we can target that area in hopes of finding people who are in desperate need. A brief story about one of our water bottles recently.  And obviously left behind to die was extremely hot. She found one of our water bottles, and the water bottle is what saved her life. A Border Patrol agent found her and carried her to safety. So with everything, if that bottle saved one person's life, we have done what we have set out to do. Another thing that we do, in addition to putting the water bottles out, we used to do, and we don't do this as frequently as we did in the past, we would do what is called basura. The items left behind by people are often referred to as trash. I don't see them in that way. But nonetheless, we feel an obligation to help clean up the desert. And so we will scout different areas, and when we find what is called a layup spot, which is a place where people have been waiting for a ride, when a ride arrives, they cannot take anything with them other than what fits in their pockets. So everything is left behind. And so we will pick up items. We sort through everything for identification, things that can be reused. We take home, we wash, we recycle. I take a lot of the things to Mexico because I work in Mexico every week with migrants who have been returned. And the other things we discard, and we hope that this is helping to maintain the geography of the desert and keep it in pristine condition as best we can. We also have groups that go to Operation Streamline, which is the court proceedings that take place every day of the week. Up to 70 migrants are processed in court. They are taken into court at 9.30 in the morning. They are handcuffed to a chain around their waist with chains running down their legs and shackled. And they sit in court until 1.30 in the afternoon when they go before the judge. They've been able to see a lawyer perhaps for half an hour, and then they are sentenced or whatever the judge determines. Basically, those are the things that we do. Thank you. Wow. Honor, would you tell us about what you do? Yeah. First, I want to apologize because my English is not real good, but I will try to make myself clear. I'm an actor, a puppeteer, also a drummer, and I've been doing puppetry for the last 20 years. And for the last 10 years, I became really involved with a toy theater or paper theater, and I have my own company that is called Factor Teatro. And I started doing paper theater, which is my main job now, because I first went to the Great Small Works International Authority Theater Festival in New York 10 years ago, and I was just amazed by the marvelous world that was opening in front of my eyes. And because they organized this museum and they had these multiple techniques doing toy theater, so I decided that I wanted to do that. But also, I saw the results of a workshop that they did with these young people from very poor high schools in Queens and in Brooklyn. And I saw that this is a marvelous tool for education. So I said that maybe this can work in Mexico, and I was a theater teacher on a high school in Mexico, and I said, okay, let's try it now. And it was marvelous. It was just pure magic for either students and the teachers. And since then, I have been trying to give this technique to Mexico because also, as you know, we are in a huge economical and social crisis now there. And I think paper is just at the reach of anybody's hand. And also, it doesn't have this strong wall between the artist and the audience. No, it is not like that because it brings the child inside everyone. So it's magic. And after each show, people approach and say, how do you do this and how do you do that? Okay, it's just as simple as this. You can do it at home and you can share it with your family because this is how this technique was born. And since then, now I organize an international paper theater festival in Mexico City since 2012. And it has been great. Now there are at least 10 or 11 professional paper theater companies in Mexico City, so I'm very happy. That's pretty much it. Thank you. To continue with you, Alejandro, I think a little bit.  Thank you very much. If you haven't, please do so at 3 o'clock at the latches. It's really enchanting. It's not specifically political about the issues. And it's not as sort of upfront activist as sure as work. But tell me the ways in which the things that are going on in Mexico today are reflected and examined and celebrated in your work. And what is the activist side of what you do? Of course, I mean, right now we just went back in time and we have the same government that were in the power for 75 years. I mean, we never had during the 20th century a military dictatorship. It was worst because it was disguised as a democratic government. So they say, okay, you can vote, but your vote doesn't care, you know? And in the year 2000, we were so happy because that was the first time in 75 years that we had this change in the government. I mean, it was the right-wing party, but I mean, it was a change. And the thing is that the political and social system in Mexico is rotten from the very roots. It was made to protect the powerful people and it was made to be, you know, you can just, you have money, you can do anything you want in Mexico as clear as that.  That's it. And I think, as John said, with facto teatro, we don't have a political agenda per se, but what we do is to try to remind people that there is beauty in the world because now they are killing journalists. They are killing teachers. They are killing students. They are killing almost anyone that dares to raise their voice.  You know, it's a worst time for Mexico in the modern era. It's just scary. And one of the best ways that I found that I can do something is to bring art to the people, to remind them that, I mean, I think that each human being is a creator, has the capacity. Thank you very much of creating something. And people just forget that in Mexico. People just want to have more material things. And the young generation now is convinced, I mean, not everybody, of course, but mostly the most poor ones and the most uneducated people, they just want to have as much material things and money they can have. It doesn't matter if that turns out that they get killed. You know, because they can sell drugs, they can steal, they can kidnap. It doesn't matter because with that, you can make much more money than working for a whole year in just one, you know? And I think it's very, very, very sad because now the younger generation doesn't have any value besides what the television or what the media, it's telling them. Because they want, I mean, the US influence in Mexico is strong. I mean, we grew up listening to music in English. We grew up going to the movies and seeing all these movies in English. And I mean, I am not saying that it's bad because I love rock and roll. I love jazz. I love jeans. You know, those good things and all the culture and everything, but what's going on in Mexico is that everybody wants to be, I want to say it, to be gringo. But we are not gringos, you know? And it's very hard to change this kind of thinking, this way of thinking, sorry. I don't know. Do you see part of what you do as countering that to restore some of their natural, where they're from, their culture to them? And also, you know, because talking about stereotypes, we also have a lot of stereotypes about the US and Mexico, of course. I mean, in Mexico, I made a show with this theater company. It wasn't puppets, it was theater, with the Hand to Mouth Theater from Portland, Oregon. And we made this collaboration between La Divina Comedia, which was a company that I was working with, and Hand to Mouth Theater, about how both countries see each other. And we were working and we were just realizing that we were very ignorant about each other because we only had the information we received from the TV or from the movies or from music, and it was just crazy because we had this part where everybody was saying just one archetype that we have and one of my Mexican colleagues say, okay, I think in the US everybody... it's on a horse with his cowboy hat and just shooting, no? And they're very drunk. And one of the colleagues from Portland, she said, okay, in Mexico everybody lives under a palm tree and they are just scratching their bellies all day and everything just... you know? It was ridiculous. It was just ridiculous. And we learned so much about each other, just working for about one year. We were going back and forth to Portland and to Mexico City. And also, we are very far away from the northern border of the country. Mexico City is, I think, far away from the border. And also, we don't know much about it and we are just realizing in this past two or three years that the situation for migrantes in Mexico is much, much worse in Mexico than in the US because there is this huge crime organization, I mean, Narx, and now we are learning that there is this body part selling, I mean organs. They are killing children. They are killing people just because about migrantes. Nobody gives nothing about them, so we can sell. We can sell them. We can sell their livers. We can sell their hearts. It's just horrible. And now we are realizing that it makes...  And there's a... I know there's this statistic that says that at least 90% of women, children, men, every age gets robbed, raped, mutilated, or killed in their way to the US in Mexico. And the government is very involved in this because you don't understand how this huge organization is working to self the bless of the Mexican government and the local government in every state where you know the train that brings people from all the way, it's called la bestia, the beast. And now it's a very scary word because we know that if you go on the beast, something terrible will happen to you. Would you talk to us a little bit about what you know about who you're serving and helping, who are these people and what circumstances bring them to the United States? What we're seeing now are predominantly Central Americans. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and people from Chiapas, which is in Mexico, but by and large they're indigenous people. Many of them do not speak Spanish, they only speak their dialect. They are coming because they are starving to death for one thing. And secondly, they're coming because of all of the violence. And they're trying to get their children out. I cannot tell you the number of children that I have seen who have come by themselves. And not long ago there was a young boy sitting by himself at the Commodore, which is a dining room in Nogales, Sonora, which is run, started by the Sisters of the Eucharist, and the Jesuits have taken over and it's called the Kino Border Initiative. And every morning after migrants have been deported, they go to immigration in Nogales.  They take that to the Commodore and it allows them to eat there for two meals a day for three days. It used to be that they allowed them to eat for 14 days and then through time they realize that most people are not staying for 14 days. They're going to be moving on, so they've cut it down to three. If there are extenuating circumstances, the person can come probably as long as they need to come. But this 14-year-old boy was sitting by himself and I went over and sat down next to him, put my arm around him, and asked him where he was from. He was from Honduras. And I said, did you come with friends or family? And he said, no. And I said, where are you going? And he said he was going to Oxnard, California. Someone had told him, given him the name Oxnard because that's an agricultural area. And I said, do you have family or friends in the United States? And he said, no. He was going to cross by himself. He had come on the train. Now fortunately, he wasn't pushed off the train. The trains are controlled by the gangs. Salva Maratrucha from El Salvador is one of the big gangs. And my understanding is that they formed when they were in prison in Los Angeles. And they went back and they are absolutely ruthless. And it's not only are they involved, but the police along the way, wherever the train stops, the police are there extorting money, whatever the people have, extorting money from them. And they have nothing to begin with. And they have less than nothing when they get back on the train if they're lucky. Okay. And so with that, we're seeing a lot of young people come. Again, mostly indigenous. And that doesn't mean that we don't see people from Mexico. We see a lot of people who have been returned, who have been in the United States for years and years and years. Some of them don't even speak Spanish. And another very, very distressing thing here is that we're beginning to see older people. And by that I mean people in their early 70s who are getting ready to cross the desert again because they have no family in Mexico or Central America. Their family is in the United States. The United States is what they know. Now, to cross that desert, it takes roughly a week to walk from Nogales to Tucson. That's if you are going in a straight line. Now, how much food and how much water can you carry with you to get you through that trip? Not to mention the number of people who are praying on not only the gangs, but people who are praying on the migrants as they cross. The coyotes, the guides are part and parcel of this. They really do not care. That's just the bottom line. You, if someone dies in the desert, it's not uncommon for the coyote to get in touch with the family and say, I have your son and I need another $3,000 by tomorrow or your son is dead. You as the family member have no idea that your son or your daughter or your loved one has died. No idea. So those are the kinds of things that we see pretty much on a daily basis and the desperation is palpable and we are as involved in that desperation as Mexico is. We run hand in hand. You know exactly what you are saying about the coyotes and they don't care. It's what happened with the authorities and the government. They just don't care because narcotraffic and I mean corruption is a way of life in Mexico and I think the people with power and I am saying economical or political power, they just see everybody else like merchandise as expendable, is that a word? Expendable. Expendable. Thank you. As expendable merchandise. They don't see the other as a human being. I think that's the main problem because the level of dehumanization, if that's a word, that now it's going on in Mexico, it's just horrible. They just don't care. That point of view is just spreading all over the society because it doesn't matter. I mean everybody is trying to survive. Of course there are a lot of good things in Mexico. There is a lot of good people in Mexico but the feeling that we have now is that it's getting less and less and less. So that's what's going on. We feel that this crisis now is really serious for everybody. It doesn't matter if you have money or you are middle class or you are very poor. It doesn't matter. It just touched everybody there. So I think that's the key. But I also think that, I think you're absolutely right, I think also that the vast majority of people still do not understand what is pushing people to leave their homes and to come here. They just don't get it. And I hear in my own community, well they are only, they are coming to take our jobs. They are coming to do this. They are coming. They are coming here to steal flat, I've heard this, flat screen TVs.  That's the only reason that they're coming. You can't trust them at all.  And nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, you have a faction of people, not unlike in our own society, we have a faction of people who are up to no good. But the vast majority of people are not like that. The vast majority of people aren't. And it's very difficult to get people to understand this. And I say to people who make these outrageous statements, I will say, you come with me. You come with me to Mexico. You come with me to the Commodore. You look into the faces of these folks who are suffering so terribly. And then you tell me, then you make that statement that you just made after we leave there. You tell me. Because nothing could be further from the truth. And also, I think it's a worldwide situation because it's the same case in Europe with the migration from Africa or Asia. I mean, also in Mexico, we have migrantes from Central America. And it's the same case.  It's the same because, I mean, we wonder why they want to go to Mexico because it's terrible, but imagine how's the situation in their countries, no? But also, there's the issue of racism, which is palpable. And case in point, our government issues warnings to us, the State Department, don't go to Mexico. Don't go into Mexico. Mexico is very dangerous. But we have no compunctions about deporting women, babies, children, young boys and girls who are ripe for the picking and others in the middle of the night to Nogales as one case in point. And they have had their cell phones thrown away. They have no way to get in touch with their families. They don't know where they are. They have very little to eat. They have no place to sleep. And Nogales is rife with cartel members. Across the street from where I work at the Commodore, Barb and Scott have been there. Across the street, up on the hill, stand the Sicarios, the assassins, who are working for the cartels. They're watching us with binoculars. The young boy that I told you about was ripe for the picking. All he has to do is walk out of that Commodore by himself. Somebody calls ahead to a guy that's standing around the corner. The guy goes up to him and says, hey, have you ever been to Nogales before? No. Do you know where you are? No. Well, come with me. Come on, let me show you. That's it. And once you are in, once you've been taken, there is absolutely nothing you can do except to give up your life. That's it. And that's what most people don't understand. They do not understand. You talk a little bit about the backlash and the threats and the, you know, response to what you do from both sides of the border and... Okay. Well, interestingly enough, I don't really have threats from Mexico. However, we have minute men in our community. Less so now than maybe five or six years ago because there were three minute men, a minute woman from Seattle who, Sean Afford, was her name and her sidekick, Jason Bush, who was being investigated for serial killing. They got in touch with one of the minute men, one of the high mucky mucks in our community. And decided between them that they would come down to basically where we're living a little bit further out on the desert. And they were going to rob drug dealers of not the drugs, but of their money to use that money for purposes of whatever they wanted to use it for to beef up their organization. And they were targeting young man and his family who live in a place called Arivaca, which is 23 miles back Kitty Wampus off I-19, which is the freeway that runs from Tucson to Mexico. Okay. And they had all of this planned and there was a fellow who was working in Arivaca at the feed store who was involved with this tool. Alberto Gaxiola was his name. And at 5.30 in the morning, Shauna Ford and Jason Bush burst into the home of this young man, Raul Flores. His wife was in the bedroom. She was armed. Raul was not armed. Their nine-year-old daughter was in the room with Raul. Their older daughter was at her grandmother's in the town close to where I live. And at any rate, they broke in, fully armed, and they were going to rob him of money. And the daughter, Brisiana, was her name.  And with that, they shot her in the head. And they shot and killed Raul. And the mother who had the gun shot Jason in the leg.  They fled, and they didn't stop for help until they got pretty close, I think, to the California border, and they had to stop. And by then, word had gotten out that this had happened. And so they were captured, and both of them were sentenced to death. So they're on death row in Arizona. I don't know what happened to the other individual who was involved in this. But at any rate, once that happened, the Minutemen, who used to have, they would drive jeeps, and they had Minutemen Civil Defense Corps across the front windshield. They kind of backed off for a while. But recently, they've started up again, and what they're doing is they're sitting close to the border. They're fully armed. And many of my friends and myself believe that they've probably taken out a lot of migrants and disposed of them. I mean, who could ever find somebody on the desert, really and truly? And I have no compunctions about saying that. I don't have that as a fact.  So, you know, they're nuts. As quite frankly, as I see it, they think they're protecting the country. They're not. When you hear someone like Donald Trump say what he said and politicians talk about the wall, you know, what's your reaction, both maybe viscerally and then, you know, academically or intellectually as well? What's your reaction to that? It's mostly my heart. I just... The statements that he makes are so totally unfounded. And I know that there are a faction of people in the United States and elsewhere who believe what he's saying, you know, that they're only coming for this. Most of them are rapists. Most of them are murderers. That just speaks volumes about what he doesn't know and what he doesn't understand. He just doesn't understand this. And I... You know, I really... I can't say that I stepped back when I heard him say that because I really basically wasn't surprised. I don't think... What I love about so much of this is, well, I don't love it, but what I... it's just preposterous to me. Are the groups of congresspeople who will go to the border and feel... and they go to the Arizona border and they feel like they've really seen the border. They've really seen what is going on when, in fact, they haven't seen anything. And this wall that is... encompasses the border is 15 feet tall, okay? There's a film of two young women climbing that wall and they timed them. And one woman climbed young women. One woman climbed it in 15 seconds and another did it in 17 seconds. And what the coyotes will do to get people over the wall sometimes is that they will have people climb and there obviously is a way of doing this. The wall, in part, is built with Vietnam landing mats, which are steel, of course, and there's about this much space between them. So there's enough space to be able to fashion your feet to go up and to hang on. And what the coyotes will do is that they will put a rope over the top so that when someone gets to the top they will lower themselves down. And I've only heard of one fatal accident and the rope broke and some person died on that. So I think that he, like so many people, again, just simply does not understand he sees this in a very myopic way and cannot see the humanity, which is very, very unfortunate. And here is someone who has everything imaginable and wants more. And that, to me, is the crux of the situation, not only here and in Mexico, but around the world. There are too few with too much and too many with nothing. And those who have nothing, for the most part, only want to be able to support their families, to educate their children, and not unlike what any of us in this room would want. One more question and then we'll turn it over to you guys for some questions. It's for Alejandro. When we talked a couple days ago, you talked about your work bringing and reintroducing beauty. But there was also an element of empowerment. And if you could talk about that when you introduced people to your work and introduced maybe some young people to the art, can you talk about the empowerment that comes with what you do? Of course. I mean, I think ignorance is one of the most powerful impediments to progress.  That's it. And as Shura here said, it wasn't a surprise because we don't expect anything more of these kind of people because we have a lot of... not a lot, but we have a small group in Mexico who has all the power. I mean, we have Carlos Slim who actually owns the country. If you... I mean, we are always saying if you have a cell phone or if you go on that airplane, I don't know, you are always working for Slim. Some percentage of your money always goes to Slim. And I think people is getting used to it. I mean, people is always thinking that's the way it is. We know how... Last night we were talking about this situation with Armando and Antonio and Barbara, my colleagues at Facto Teatro. And Armando said something very, very true.  They will leave you alone. And I think one of the most powerful tools we have is to also bring art and more knowledge to people. Not only art. I mean, people is too busy just trying to survive that there is no space for amusement for half, five minutes just to relax and say, okay, let me read. I don't care if it's a book, a magazine, anything. I just want to sit down and watch TV. I want to disconnect myself because I deserve at least a moment of disconnection of this tragic life. I mean, I'm trying to expose something. But I think now with that way, there's a lot of people in Mexico trying to give, again, people the chance to enjoy art and to tell them this is not only for leader, I mean for intellectual, intellectual people. It's also for you because on TV they're always saying to you, art is boring, art is for domes. Art is not good for you. You have to see these sparking lights and you have to try to look like this or to look like that and you have to wear these clothes. You know, it's so much pressure, so much pressure. And outside the big cities, people is just starving. They don't care. And also, I mean, I've been touring in the U.S. since the year 1996. And when I go to cities like Chicago or New York where there's this huge Mexican population, it's very, I mean, we don't have Mexicans in the audience because they are working. You know, and they are, when we talk to them, they say, oh, I would love to go, but I can't. Either I'm working or I'm too tired to go or it's too expensive. So it's very desperate and it's the same case in Mexico. And now the government is really trying to kill the cultural institutions and the theater groups and the music groups that have something to say and they are doing a really good job, which is very sad. So it's hard to survive as an artist, but I think we have to keep doing it, because it's not that we are, in fact, a theater, have a political flag saying we are this or we are that. No, what we are trying to say is that it doesn't matter what are your beliefs or your political tendencies. Art is for everybody and it's for you also and you can do it and you can enjoy it and please come. I don't know. I think we'll turn it over to questions, so please feel free to fire away. So it's high profile as both of you are. You did mention how your life was threatened by these, but in other ways, have your life been threatened? There were personal questions? Not because I'm an artist, but because I'm a citizen.  They can kidnap you or they can kill you or they can beat you. It doesn't matter because they are the law. And the thing is that there is no division between crime and police or government. It's the same thing, because you cannot understand the way Mexico is now without the bless and the participation of every level of society. I mean, also as the people, we are part of the problem because it always is like Armando also said last night. I mean, we are always complaining about the government and the politicians, but what about us? Who buys the drugs? Who pays the police just to get free? Who is the other part of the corruption? And this victimization of the people is used by the powerful people to say, you are good and there's evil. We are going to fight evil. Okay, let's go fight it, but at the same time, they are asking money for everything. I mean, it's just, it's very complex because really corruption is a way of living and it's really hard to break this structure. It's almost impossible at this point. I'm cautious. I mean, I'm always watching in the United States and where I live, specifically where I live, I'm always looking at the cars that go by and things like that. When I'm in Mexico, now I would not go to Mexico by myself at night. I go to Mexico at night for a demonstration about a young man who was shot and killed by the Border Patrol, but there are a lot of us who go, so I don't have any compunctions about doing that. During the day when I'm there, I know so many people and I treat everybody with as much kindness as I can to tell you the truth. If somebody wants a pair of socks, I give them a pair of socks and I'm always, you know, I'm friendly to people and I know that a lot of the people are not particularly savory characters, but I can't make that judgment about what put that person in the position that he or she happens to be at any given time and as my mother used to say, you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar any day, so I'm willing to do what I have to do and I don't, a lot of people ask me that, aren't you afraid to go, aren't you afraid to go? And I'm not. I have no fear about going at all, so... But you said earlier that, you know, you fear what's happening in your community more than you do in Mexico. Well, yes, yeah, largely because of the Minutemen and what they're up to, although again, they're positioning themselves on the border. I'm 35 miles north of the border, and they're out in the boondocks, in a sense. I mean, they're not sitting right along the wall that is adjacent to Nogales as an example. I mean, they're going out in areas where they feel that people are crossing and people, for the most part, are not crossing right under the noses of border patrol. Sometimes that happens, but for the most part, they're not. They're going very circuitous routes, so, yeah, I don't have a fear there. Anyone else? I'm sorry, try to continue. A few years ago, I spent a day photographing the King Anne home ranch. Yes. And two things. One thing struck me and one thing I could not wrap my arms around. The thing that struck me was that night, the number of people that crossed in that one small area. So I'd like you to talk a little bit about how many people crossed the border. Okay. And the thing that I couldn't really understand or wrap my arms around was the relationship between the men and the border patrol. So I'll speak a little bit about that. Okay. I think the number of people who are crossing would be very hard for me to give you an exact number. I can't. But I do know from the people that I see at the Commodore on the days that I'm there, sometimes it's up to a hundred people. Sometimes it's more. And many of the people who are there have been in the United States for years, as I had said before. And so their family is here. They want to get back. You know, it's difficult. I can't really answer exactly how. I mean, I would never know exactly how many. It's thousands of people crossing. That night, the men stretched out for, I think it was about five miles. Yes. You know, in a site. Mm-hmm. And they saw over 200, over 200 people crossing. I think in that five-mile area. And I think the Kingdom of Orange is actually a ways from the border. It is. I remember. It is. You're right about that. So it was just amazing to think about the numbers and the density of the way it would filter across. And in one body. 200 people, 200 living people in one body. Yeah. It was just a phenomenal thing. Yeah. It is thousands. And they go into very, very desolate areas.  And because they don't know. And if they're with a group and they have a coyote, the coyote says, when you cross the border, it's five miles to Tucson. And they have no reason to not. They want to believe that. Obviously, like any of us, it's really, it's only five miles, I think I can make it. But in fact, it isn't like that. And if you fall ill during your journey, that's tough luck. No one for the most part is going to stay with you. And there was a story. This happened. This is just such one of these. Everything is tragic actually in this situation. But a 14-year-old girl named Joselein, who was traveling with a group with her 10-year-old brother.  And they got to a point. I mean, Joselein, they were up in the mountains, out of this town, not very far. We need to wrap up. Okay, that's okay. I can talk more about this after. Okay, I'm sorry. No, it's okay. You have to. My crew is doing that. I want to thank both of you, of course, and all of you for being here. And please come to more festival offerings. And very quickly, you haven't gotten enough. I'm sure it's doing an entire lecture tomorrow at Landmark... No, tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. At Landmark College at 7 o'clock. There's also... Sorry? Eight. Seven o'clock. It's eight. Oh, it's eight. It's eight. It's seven o'clock in our program. Oh, okay. We will double check on that. We will be there, not to worry. And there's also a performance, a free performance in the Landmark lawn before the talk at 7.30. No, at 6.30. Okay. At 6.30 in our program, but we will check on that. And Alejandro and his whole company with Native Paper has one more show at 3 o'clock today. So please also come and see that. Thank you so much. Please let this conversation continue. I know there's so much more to be said about it. So continue the dialogue. I will have a number of items that I found on the desert that I would like for people to see and to pick up and to just imagine the journey.