I'm Justine Paradise and I'm Felix Poon and this is Outside In, a show about the

natural world and how we use it. Today we're opening up some listener mail and

answering your questions as part of our regular segment, the Outside In box.

Do you write a lot of letters Felix? I've started to do that more recently. You

know, I used to have a pen pal when I was a kid. You did? Yeah, it all started

from like, I think me and my family went to Disney World and we got some postcards.

My parents were like, yeah, you just write a message and you send it to a friend.

I was like, oh, interesting, fine, I'll do that. I sent it to a friend back at

home and then my brother did the same thing. I think my sister did the same thing,

which picked friends. None of their friends wrote them back, but mine did.

And then we just kept writing letters back and forth.

Did you live in the same town? No, we were probably about two hours away from

each other on opposite ends of the state of Massachusetts and this started. I

want to say I was like an elementary school and it went on through middle school,

went on through high school. Do I know how it ended? Oh, I really do. This is like a cliffhater.

It ended with the advance of email. We did you switch to email or did you just

stop communicating? We were like, oh, there's this new email thing. Let's give it a try.

And she was like, okay, and then I think we each wrote one email to each other and

then we just stopped responding and that's it. So this is like email supposed to make

communication easier, but it's an example of it actually ending communication. Yeah,

yeah, it's like so easy. It's like, oh, I can get to that. No problem. Okay to that

with some time. At some point, but then it just never happened. Oh, we actually got

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