- It's pretty mind blowing how many stars there are in the Milky Way galaxy.

On a clear night, just go outside and look up at the sky.

Well, what if I told you that right here on Earth there are more trees in the country of Canada than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

That's pretty mind blowing.

So what does that mean is the Earth warms and climate change causes bigger and larger wildfires, especially for us in New York, right across the border?

Well, on this episode we're "Rolling Thru", we're going to find out just how connected we are with forests, fire in the future.

Also coming up, I get escorted into some exclusive back rooms where I get to hold a dinosaur egg among other things.

And mother nature finally catches up with us by the time we reach the Hudson River Valley.

That's all in this episode, and more.

This is "Rolling Thru", a bicycle travel show.

(upbeat music) We've been pretty lucky this whole trip so far.

Blue skies, relatively warm mornings.

This morning in Albany, we're facing a cold drizzle and a long slow climb up to our first stop of the day.

I'll be the first to admit, climbing a long hill in the rain first thing in the morning it's not exactly fun.

It can feel like a bit of a struggle, but I can drop gears, pick up my cadence, or slow down if I need to catch my breath.

Greg's got the motor on his e-bike, so it's nice to have a little assist when the road ahead gets tough.

When you've got miles to go, why fault someone for taking a little help, especially if it gets you to the top.

That same idea carries into our first stop.

We're headed to meet Jammella Anderson.

During the height of the pandemic, they brought a small but national practice to Albany.

Everyone deserves to eat, but when things get tough, so can affording food.

So Jammella brought the Free Food Fridge program to Albany, and it's exactly what it sounds like.

Hungry, struggling, just take what you need.

We arrived to Honest Weight Food Co-op where I want to catch up with Jammella, help stock the fridge, and learn more.

- So our Free Food Fridges, they're located in four counties.

There are different versions of this program all over the country.

You know, it's like free libraries, all these like free pantries.

So it is in that like family of things.

Something I wanted to do was like something that was very actionable, and food is an actionable step.

We all need food.

We all want food.

It's a part of who we are, what we are.

It's a way to bring community together.

It's a way to form relationships.

It's a bond.

It's ancestral.

And so food is the thing that we all communicate through.

So this project is part of a larger system of feeding people in our community and it's also a way to build trust.

And what's great about the co-op is that everything is local.

It's done with good intention, and we're always learning and growing.

- So I want to help stock the Free Food Fridge outside here.

- Yeah.

- What are we getting for it?

- All right, so my favorite thing is, to say we want to get food that has its own housing, right?

- Yeah.

- So that's an orange, that's an apple, that's a banana.

So those are great people go put them in their bags.

But then also things like this.

So if you want to grab a few packages of tomatoes.

- Oh let's get some.

Corianders.

Someone can make a good sauce with this.

- Good sauce.

- Got to have some garlic.

- Garlic.

- Let's do some garlic.

(gentle bright music) - People have this misconception that folks who are in a lower income bracket don't know how to cook food.

They know how to cook food more than anybody else does.

And so what I love to do also is get food that is like a little bit more like niche.

So some herbs and greens and things that people might find in other places that they're don't typically find at a pantry.

(gentle bright music) Spring cheese is good.

We have a lot of kids that live in the neighborhood.

Some of our fridges have a lot of schools, and so we want kids to like be able to look in the fridge on their walks home and pick something out.

And so these individually wrapped things are really good.

(gentle bright music) - This is a good haul.

- So our fridge is at the edge of the parking lot, which is also like a gray area there.

It's to the left.

We try to be as intentional as possible when we put the fridges in different places.

We want them to be in well lit areas.

Especially if there's children so that there are eyes on everything that's happening.

- Yeah.

- So like if something happens, we have like that community care aspect happening at all times.

- It's very well-placed.

It's easy to get to.

It's accessible.

- We don't want people to feel like, you know, they have to be like it's anonymous, but like also like it's a good thing.

Like our community is taking care of us.

(gentle music) I grew up without having all the things that I need, and not seeing a full fridge is like really sad and you don't realize the impact it has on you.

And so when we have these, you know, it's in your face, it's a refrigerator, like it's a weird thing out on the street, but when you get to open that fridge and it's full, it like really does something for your brain and your heart.

Not only is it about filling the fridge, but it's thinking about how to reframe what abundance is.

I hope for the future for this is that it doesn't take something like this to solve an issue and that this like solvable problem of hunger, like we all can participate in feeding each other.

People always ask like, "Whose fridge is it?"

I'm like, "It's your fridge.

It's a community's fridge."

- [Pat] There's an old Italian proverb that I love, "La cucina piccola fa la casa grande."

It means a little kitchen makes a big home.

So maybe a little fridge on the neighborhood corner can make a big community.

Now I'm excited to coast back down toward the city center.

And it's not just because gravity's on my side, but because it's finally drying up.

So I get to enjoy the hill that much more.

- Hey.

- [Pat] Oh, these are some nice streets.

I'm also excited and have kind of buried the lead here, but I've been invited to a pretty interesting place.

One that not people get access to.

It holds the secrets of New York State going back millions of years.

Cryptic I know.

But the folks at the New York State Museum are happy to educate so science doesn't stay buried.

This is Dr.

Robert Feranec.

He's director of Research and Collections and curator of place to scene vertebrate paleontology.

Don't worry, I also had to look that up.

He studies and helps to piece together huge ice age animals.

- This room is one of our chemistry labs that we're putting together a mastodon that was discovered last fall, and piecing it together before it gets put back into the official collections range.

- And what can these mastodon remains tell us?

- I'm trying to find out when animals colonized the state of New York and how we went from 25,000 years ago when a huge glacier covered almost the entire state to the ecosystems of today.

So I'm trying to understand how animals colonize the state, the timing of that colonization.

How climate change affects colonization of those particular animals.

And one of the species that I look at is mastodons.

Mastodons are the most abundant large ice age animal that we have in the state.

And I can get carbon dates to understand when they colonize.

So this is a piece of a jaw that we have from this mastodon that was discovered in Orange County, New York.

And it was found high in the ground.

It was only 14 inches below the surface.

So we think it went through, let's say 13,000 years at least of freeze-thaw cycles.

And that has broken the bones, the bone pieces.

What I'm trying to do now is we need to get all the dirt out of the middle of the jaw and put and glue back all of these pieces back together so that it lasts for a really long time.

- So it's a literal elephant-sized puzzle.

- Yes.

This room that we're in is the biology collections room.

It has about 3 million objects.

We have in mammals, birds, ice age animals, insects, botany, and fungus in this room.

And we have specimens in this room that date back to the 1825, even before we were a state museum.

- [Pat] Among the prized fines back here, they have the remains from a whale, a mammoth tooth, a prehistoric giant beaver, some actual woolly mammoth fur, and... - This is 70, 80 million-year-old dinosaur egg.

So you can hold it.

So that has been re-crystallized into a rock.

So every piece has been reformed from what it was into something else, but they found it, and it's looks like what it was when it was around.

- I have to say I did not think I would be holding a dinosaur egg today, and I'm extremely excited about it.

- So we used to have mountain lions in the state.

The museum has four skulls of mountain lion.

This is one of them.

We learn from those specimens and give us information about what we are today and where we're going to be.

When we think about climate change and other ecological changes and human impacts, we need to have an understanding of these animals that probably should be here but aren't here anymore for whatever reason.

Either their habitat isn't here anymore, like mastodons, or they were hunted out of the state like mountain lions and wolves.

Having those specimens allows us to do the science.

It is the three dimensional record of the history of the state of New York.

- [Pat] And after all those painstaking hours of putting the puzzle back together, this can be the reward.

That's a big mastodon.

- Yes.

So this is like for me, our flagship specimen for the state museum.

It was found in 1866 just north of here in Cohoes, New York.

We know he was 32 years old when he died.

We think he was in a couple battles in his life with other mastodons.

He got a tusk to the chin and then we think he got a tusk to the temple on the left side.

- [Pat] Poor guy - Which killed him.

But we can utilize these specimens again with the specimens upstairs to understand about ecosystems.

So if we use the ice age as a model, we're going to see these animals migrating with their habitat as the Earth warms.

So if you care about particular animals and you want to preserve those animals, you need to make sure that as the Earth warms and global warming is occurring, that you have habitat available for them where they will need to be, not necessarily where they are here today.

So we can use the ice age as a model to understand the things that are going on today with global climate change.

(gentle bright music) - Now it's time to pack up, head out of Albany, and start the trek south towards New York City.

But that's a long way.

So fuel is essential, which is why we've got one more pit stop.

Now a few episodes ago, I had a beast of a farm fresh burger powered me for miles all afternoon.

So a burger felt right, but this time I wanted a twist.

We stop in a Wizard Burger to get something outstanding, juicy, umami.

And if you didn't tell me, I wouldn't have guessed it was all vegan.

See here the pickle.

These folks live up to their name.

They're wizards here.

Wizards.

Because of every American who usually eats a burger at a backyard barbecue swapped just one for something like this.

Once a year the US would cut about 1.1 million metric tons of carbon emissions.

That's like taking 260,000 cars off the road for a whole year.

And to me, that's enough to make it worth it, especially when it's served up in a spot this cool.

We've spent what feels like a good while in Albany, and I'll miss it.

It's a forward thinking city that could really help move the state along.

But now, I'm looking forward to some country views again.

(uplifting music) This trail runs right along the edge of the Taconic Mountains, some of the oldest in North America.

At one point, they even rivaled the Himalayas.

So I'm thankful for the millions of years of erosion that turned them into the rolling ridges I get to coast along today.

But coasting can be easy to take for granted, because the mechanism of erosion isn't just a thing of the past.

Well, we had the sunshine while it lasted and that was a nice long stretch.

Many days in a row no rain.

But you always got to pay the toll.

And here it is.

So we're about to gear up in our rain suits.

♪ Sun bright light ♪ ♪ And then we're finish in the sun ♪ - Good luck.

Well, it's not so bad.

Yeah, it's raining a little bit hard.

We wear all dry, you're good.

Oh, it's getting harder.

Spoke to you soon.

It's my bad, it's my fault.

Jinx myself.

(upbeat music) ♪ I am a cartoon ♪ - And just when I thought it might go on forever.

For a limited time only, the sun.

As nice as it is to dry off, I can't help but think about the cosmic tie into our next stop.

Remember that fact from the beginning of the episode?

It turns out it's the perfect time to have drying on the mind.

(upbeat music) As a cyclist, I'm getting pretty tired of wildfire smoke, and it seems like the season's getting longer and more frequent every year, which is why I feel like I need to know about it.

So I'm here at the FASNY Firefighting Museum to speak with some really smart educators about the future of wildfires in New York State.

I did not know we would be starting the interview with a celebrity.

- Yeah, so Molly just recently won but favorite local celebrity by Chronogram Magazine, which is a local arts magazine here in the Hudson Valley.

- [Pat] And she beat out like real celebs.

- Several A-listers including Paul Rudd, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Walton Goggins.

So she's quite the thing.

- [Pat] And just like any celeb or star, Molly is on her own schedule.

- I volunteer up at the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, and they have a very fire-dependent ecosystem.

So I'm actually part of the burn team up there.

And what we do are called prescribed burns.

So we intentionally set fires for ecological benefits.

The burning is what is reducing these fuel loads.

So if we're doing burns, we're reducing the intensity of wildfires so they don't have those jackpots of fuel like they do out in California.

New York State has some like really incredible fire people.

The New York State DEC Forest Rangers are so highly trained and skilled, and we do deploy crews throughout the country.

New York State works on, it's like a mutual aid system.

So that's something local volunteer fire companies really rely on in this area where, you know, if there's a fire in Hudson, our friends from Stockport, the neighboring town couldn't come help.

- And it's a good practice to help other parts of the country because if it has a lot of fuel, it's still going to affect us 'cause all that smoke can come over here, right?

- So that's something we do nationally is New York State has this great resource and these great firefighters.

So we send people out west, we're sending resources, we're helping to educate people and helping to educate people here in New York State about wildfires.

And it's not that wildfires don't happen in New York 'cause they do.

Most of the fires that happen here in New York State wildfire wise are people cause, they're human cause.

And that's something with our education here at the museum.

I hit hard with our fire safety programming.

We get visitors from all over the country, all over the world.

And wildfire is, it's on everybody's mind, right?

We get those, the smoke coming in here, even if we don't have a fire going, we have the smoke.

So we are planning on the future of the museum.

- [Pat] As the museum looks ahead to educating on the future of wildfires, there's a standout fact Kathy wants New Yorkers to take home.

- About 90% of the firefighters here in New York State are volunteer.

They leave their job at the grocery store, they leave their job at the school, and they go and fight a fire.

It's an incredible testament to New York State.

The city of Hudson is a city and it's all 100% volunteer firefighters.

- That's pretty wild.

Truly, no pun intended.

Stresses on our planet are nothing new.

And humans have weathered a lot.

We're pretty resilient.

But as the effects of climate change worsen, those stresses will too.

The World Bank's Groundswell report estimates that globally by 2050 over 200 million people could be forced to move within their own countries because of climate change.

Driven by things like water shortages, storms, and rising seas, to put that into perspective, that's like if two-thirds of the US population had to relocate across the country for shelter.

Imagine the chaos, and regular people are right at the center of it.

So it's important to understand it, whether it's increasing wildfires or just needing to get out of dodge.

If you had to move because of the climate, what does that actually look like at scale as it starts to play out?

That's what I want to find out at my next stop.

I'm meeting a journalist in Hudson New York's Public Square.

His name is Brian PJ Cronin, an environmental reporter for the Highlands Current.

So he can help break down what this looks like on the ground.

New York City's like a stones throw from here.

You know, we're in our final leg of our tour.

So I'm interested in this idea that, you know, you have 10 million people, the city's only getting hotter.

Many of them are bound to leave, and they'll probably want to be able to be within reach of the city.

What happens to towns like this?

- So with climate migration, the idea is, well, we'll go someplace where it'll be more comfortable, we'll be safe.

We'll go to a climate haven.

Of course, that's a misleading term because climate change is going to affect every place.

And what do we do?

The people who already live here, how do we make sure they don't get displaced?

You know how they say the future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

Now one of the bad things about climate change is that it's a threat multiplier.

It exasperates inequalities, it makes everything worse.

But if there's a good thing about climate change and there aren't many, one good thing is that it's also an opportunity multiplier.

So if anytime you tackle a problem 'cause of climate change, it also makes life better for everyone.

Affordability is a big thing.

Now in Beacon, one thing we've done, the city build workforce housing.

So if you work for the city, if you're a municipal employee, if you're a cop, if you're a firefighter, if you're a teacher, it's below market rate.

Then if you grow your population base and you get a bigger tax base, then you start to attack the affordability from a whole other angle.

So Hudson's got a free bus on Tuesdays and Fridays.

It does a loop around town, it goes to the Price Chopper on the outskirts of town.

So you can go and do everything.

You get everything you need.

So that's something you can do makes things a lot more affordable.

- [Pat] And in small towns like Hudson and Brian's home base of Beacon, maybe that foundation is already there.

- When I talk to people in Beacon and go, "What is it about Beacon?"

The thing they bring up, which I never would've thought of, and Hudson has the same thing.

It's main street, which here is Warren Street.

If you have a main street that's a mile long, you can walk to it.

If you've got all the social services you need, if you've got a hardware store, if you've got a library, if you've got schools, if you've got a grocery store, a dry cleaner, you know, you're walking up and down the street every day, you see people every day.

And then the next day you see them again and makes it a lot easier to form connections.

That makes them stronger and more resilient community, which also ties into climate change 'cause we know one of the best ways you can get prepared for climate change, no matter where you are, it's not about having buckets full of meals ready to eat.

It's not about safe full of guns.

It's not about barrels of rainwater, it's about knowing what your neighbors names are.

You live in an apartment building, it's knowing who everybody in your building is, who has medical issues, who are the elderly people, who you can check in on.

Because when things hit the fan, when there are these disasters, if you already know everybody, you've already got a group text or whatever, you can all come together and help each other.

That could literally be the difference between life and death.

- [Pat] Some of what Brian talks about can sound scary.

I get it.

But there's still hope here.

- The good thing about doing something in your town is you make a change, and then you see that change every day.

You see the way people's lives.

All of a sudden, you know, the world is fungible.

You can make changes, you can push back, you can make a real in your community.

And I mean that's the best part of my job.

And I'm sure one of the best things that you're finding out on this trip is how many people in this state are working on climate change every single day?

It's a lot.

I mean, even just the city, the state government, it's like thousands of people who get up and they go to work every day and their job is, "How do we make New York safer for climate change?"

- [Pat] Yeah.

- And when you realize like how many people are helping and are super jazzed about this.

- There's so many people I've talked to.

Where they're not even worrying about red tape, they're just doing things.

- Yeah.

- And it's all building community.

And that's the core of like what I've really discovered.

It's just helping out.

- Yeah.

I always think of that there's that old cartoon where there's a scientist on stage and, you know, he's got the big board, and it's like, "Benefits of fighting climate change."

- Yeah.

- Cleaner air, cleaner water, cleaner food, healthier communities.

And the guy in the back goes, "What if climate change is a hoax and we make a better world for nothing?"

- Yeah.

- It's the same thing.

If you make a stronger community, it's better even when there isn't a disaster.

- [Pat] And when it's helpful, keep doing what you're doing.

That's good.

- [Brian] Yeah.

- [Pat] Well, today's mileage has been our lowest so far.

It's a good reminder.

Take it slow and be good to yourself so you can keep showing up for others.

Looking back at the ground we covered today, I think that's really the theme, mutual aid.

In the face of this climate future, it's important maybe more than ever to be able to look to your neighbor as they can look to you and know you're both fed, safe, and still part of the community.

And sure our pace isn't breaking any records on this journey, but I think we're living up to that old proverb.

If you want to go fast, go alone.

If you want to go far, go together.

On the next episode of "Rolling Thru", it's a day of sheep, trees, and boats.

(gentle upbeat music) - Careless match a cigarette, and poof... Fire.

So the next time you're in the forest, be extra careful, okay?

- If you knew it was me, would you have listened?