OURTDOOR STORY -- SCOOTER CHEATHAM: How one man 
went from eating possum to developing an encyclopedia 
of useful wild plants ... out on Passport to Texas Outdoor 
Stories.
 
Passport to Texas Outdoor stories from TPWD

When Scooter Cheatham convinced his anthropology 
professor to let him and a friend conduct an experiment -- 
instead of writing a research paper -- he had no idea it 
would lead to his lifelong passion.

:58 -- What we proposed was that we go down to my 
grandmother's ranch on the Guadalupe river near Concrete, 
Texas, and take with us replicas of some of these early cultures 
we'd been studying. We had mostly stone tools, deerskin 
clothing -- we did the whole thing. Uh, basically we got down 
there, and uh for about a week we didn't have much to eat. I 
think we had a possum and an armadillo -- and I didn't eat all of 
the possum, it was too greasy for me. But in that timeframe, we 
had an awful lot of time to spend in that setting. And so we 
began talking a lot about how civilization came to be. Asking 
ourselves a lot of "what if" questions, like: what if we went back 
and there was no back -- it was all gone, and you had to start 
over -- how would you do it? And you start looking around and 
the great diversity, the thing that supplies us all of our organic 
needs is rooted in the plant kingdom. It just became very 
obvious to me that this was very important. And I was sure that 
some group of scientists had already done studies all over the 
world and that there was a body of information about this. So, I 
came back to Austin expecting to find that and to tap into it -- it 
didn't exist.

So, he created it -- a 12 volume encyclopedia of Useful Wild 
Plants of Texas and beyond. Volume three is at the 
printers now.

That's our show ... For Texas Parks and Wildlife ... I'm 
Cecilia Nasti. 








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Maximum Script time:		 0:27.0 Suggested show time: 85.0 = 1:25