Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 667: The Prairie Preacher and a Rant By Steve

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Ep. 667: The Prairie Preacher and a Rant By Steve · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: can't predict anything.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every
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  Speaker 2: hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: dot com. F I R S T L I T
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: E dot com. All right, everybody, we're joined today by
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: the Prairie Preacher. He's in from Tennessee. I was excited
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: about him coming on as a guest, but I'm not
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: anymore because he was just trying to explain to me
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: that Pennsylvania is the South.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: I told him parts of Pennsylvany.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: I told him that's not true, because I of my
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: own maxim if you can ice fish, it's not the South. Honestly,
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: sitting here, he tried to lay some bullshit ecological argument
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: on me and didn't even try to tackle the ice
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: fishing question.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: Lay a bullshit sociological reason on you. It's true, man,
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: parts of southern Pennsylvania are the South.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: Man. We'll get into this in a minute. I wish
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: we were talking about Ohio because I have such a
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: great Ohio story I want to tell, and I associate
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: it with Pennsylvania because I had driven out of there
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: into Ohio and then the story happened, So it doesn't
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: really fit.
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: You're always starting stories and never finished.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: But this is all on hold because there's all this stuff.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: Crims just got a root canal she's got, she's all
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: novacane up in this. Say something? Does it sound slurred?
• 1:49
  Speaker 4: Oh no, it's like in the front, I feel I
• 1:52
  Speaker 4: feel weird. I feel like a fat I have a
• 1:53
  Speaker 4: fat lip in the front, left side, right side.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: You don't look fat lipped. Okay, it's all on your head.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: So if Chris is normal, is normal? Quick? I gotta
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: get into some stuff. I got a h we got
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: we got like a bucket of just tear. Like really, people,
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: people really fed up.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: About last week's episode, which I'm going to try to
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: address for a while in a minute here why they're
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: right and wrong to be mad. But but back to
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: our the prayer Preacher Dwayne Askedes, doctor Dwayne Estes, Uh
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: he's poor on geography, but strong on.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: Strong on ecology.
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  Speaker 2: Dwayne Essa serves as the executive director at the Southeastern
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: Grasslands Institute, Full Professor of Biology, director of the A. P.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: S u Rbarium. Where is that? What is that apple?
• 2:57
  Speaker 5: That's like a plant museum?
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: But what is a P. S You?
• 3:00
  Speaker 5: Yeah, Austin p State University just outside Nashville.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, the herbarian Principal investigator for the Center of Excellence
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: for Field Biography Biology.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Sorry.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: In January twenty seventeen, he co founded the Southeastern Grasslands
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  Speaker 2: Institute with colleague THEO. Whitsell. And we're going to talk
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: about a lot of his work with grasslands. And I
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: got a boatload of questions for you. We got to
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: do something. But then we're going to talk about the questions.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: And just a key up on the questions. One of
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: my many questions is one already brought up. I'm going
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: to allow you to to retort about why Brody's a Southerner.
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: No, I'm in.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Northern Brody's I'd be like a Brody's a Southerner.
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: Needs to be divided into several different states.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: Okay, why Brody's a Southerner?
• 3:57
  Speaker 5: Upset?
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: Now, how Clay Clay should all in because he's gonna
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: be like just distraught that now, Brody's that.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Southerner.
• 4:05
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm liking this.
• 4:06
  Speaker 4: Now.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: I got another question about this, and I want to
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: get into this with you. Is like.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: When reading about the colonial American period, so late Colonial
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: American period, mid seventeen hundreds, that that these long hunters
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: would go into present day Kentucky and you see similar
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: things from southern Indiana where they're like I can't see
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: a tree, Like, how the hell is that true? Don't
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: answer me now, but just noodle on that. And then
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: when they talk about going into cane breaks that are
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: so big you can get lost in cane breaks? How
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: the hell is that true?
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  Speaker 1: So noodle on that?
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  Speaker 5: Got it?
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Noodle can Yeah, how that be true? How long does
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: he have he's got I don't know, five minutes, ten minutes. Uh?
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: You cool very much?
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  Speaker 6: All right, make sure you're on that, Mike, Dwayne when
• 5:12
  Speaker 6: you're talking.
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  Speaker 5: Got it?
• 5:13
  Speaker 6: Thank you?
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: He is just didn't hear him? He is cool with that.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: There's I got so many questions about this stuff, why
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: things are different? And then like, is there any possibility
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: of getting southeastern grasslands fixed back up again?
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  Speaker 5: Hmmm? Good question?
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: Noodle on that.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: Uh okay, So lots of consternation about an episode we
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: did last week where we do a State of the
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: Union with We did a State of the Union sort
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: of a State of the Conservation Union with Joel Peterson,
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: who is the president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: Conservation Partnership, and people just upset about how that conversation went.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: And I feel like, I want to, like, without Joel
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: in the room, not that I would have said anything
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: different with him in the room, I want to context you, Liza,
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: a couple of things and offer a few observations to
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: people who really feel like the way that the way
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: that we've discussed the incoming administrations actions around conservation issues
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: has been inadequate. But first, allow me to explain a
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: couple of things from my position one Joel Peterson. Joel
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: Peterson is the president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: Conservation Partnership, And for people that weren't listening carefully, the
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: Theatre Roosevelt Conservation Partnership is they are a d C
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: organization that works on federal policy. All right, This is
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: not like they're not like grassroots protests movements. They work
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: on federal policy, meaning engaging with lawmakers about federal policy.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: As I tried to explain, this administration is here for
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: four years. This administration might likely have a round two.
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: Depending on how things go, they might have a round
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: two where someone such as JdE Vance carries the MAGA
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: mantle into another four years. If you worked in federal policy,
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: ask yourself this. If you worked in federal conservation policy,
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: and you have a high likelihood the way things look
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: right now, I would say a high likelihood that you
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: will need to be engaging with this administration for the
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  Speaker 2: next eight years. Are you telling me that it's unfair
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: to say that you're trying to get the lay of
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  Speaker 2: the land, trying to look at who's coming in, trying
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: to look at how the decision making is going, and
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: trying to take a somewhat slow, gradual process to engaging
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: with the administration around conservation issues. Does that really strike you?
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  Speaker 2: Is that irrational that you're waiting a second and watching
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: and assessing how decisions are being made, what they care about,
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: what they don't care about, in order to engage in
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: a potentially eight year long dialogue about conservation now, Joel
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: Peterson laid out when we sat down to talk with
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: Joel Peterson. Prior to Joel Peterson coming on the episode,
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: Joel was already concerned. He's like, anything I say is
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: going to become outdated by the time you post the episode.
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: And before he came on, he wanted to clarify when
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: is it coming out? I need to choose my words
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: carefully about when it's coming out. I talked to Krinn
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: Krin said, will be able to put it out the
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: following Monday. We made a joke about how anything that
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: happens today is already going to be obsolete by the
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: time the episode releases on Monday. We release episodes on Monday.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: It's always driven me kind of crazy, but that's how
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: we do it. There's a bunch of reasons I'll explain
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: some other day about why we keep a certain cadence
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: and don't just drop instantly. Trust me, it makes sixty percent.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: That's sixty percent makes sense. So Joel Peterson comes on
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: already concerned. Then between Joel Peters Joel Peterson's appearance on
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: the show and the release of his episode, The The
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: Doge Boys, the Administration, however you want to put it,
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: axes thousands of Forest service positions and at SOMEHAE we
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: get a lot of emails from people again not listening carefully,
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: being like, well, how could you not bring that up? Well,
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: that's why that didn't come up. That hadn't happened yet.
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  Speaker 2: In fact, this is the first time I've sat in
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: front of a microphone since that did happen.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: But hold that thought for a minute.
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: And think about this before you get like, before you
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: start talking about who really has the back of public
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: lands people and who don't ask yourself this like like
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: Trump ran on the promise of having Elon Musk form
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: a group called Doge, and that Doge was going to
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: go in and look for federal efficiencies and reduce the
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: federal workforce. He ran on this.
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  Speaker 1: And won on this.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: People that are run around saying it's a coup, It's like,
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: that's an odd coup that you win in a that
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: you win a landslide election campaigning on the fact that
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: you're going to have a specific individual do a specific thing.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: If you win, then you win the specific individual does
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: this specific thing. And somehow people are mistaking what this
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: is really all about. This isn't me saying what I
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: think about it, But come on, like, like, don't just
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: start reading the news one day and not go read
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: the news from the other days and start thinking you
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: understand what's going on. Also, ask yourself this, and I'm
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: going to get around to what I think about this
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: in a minute, ask yourself this. Do you think Elon
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: Musk gives a shit about the environment? I mean, this
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: guy has already focused. This guy has already set sale
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: for Mars. He's interested in Mars, which is a lifeless planet.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: So if you think appealing to Doge on the fact
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: of conservation and land access and biodiversity, he's a interested
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: in the in the least biodiverse place you can possibly
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: think of, which is a place where life is inhospitable.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: That's where he'd like to go. He wears a colonized
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: Mars shirt. So you think that coming to Doge and
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: talking about access and biodiversity, they don't care. Like they
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: don't care. They don't care. As Trump pointed out Trump,
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: Don Junior is a hunter. Okay, Don Junior has at times,
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: like Don Junior has at times in the past, I'm
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: not sure about currently has it at times in the past,
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: supported different conservation groups, holds lifetime memberships with conservation groups.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: The guy likes wildlife. Okay, he's not driving this. So
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: for people to think that you might go that like that,
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: For someone in federal policy to take on like a
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: complaining tonality at this point right now might make Elon
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: Muskin doge reconsider cutting forest service jobs. It's like, get real,
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: that is not how you're gonna shape any kind of
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: action with and within this administration. You're so naive to
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: think that that that that's what you're gonna do. Here, Randall,
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: butt in at any time.
• 12:11
  Speaker 7: I I don't disagree with you. I mean I think, like,
• 12:18
  Speaker 7: do you want me to butt in.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Whenever you're writing. I'm just want you know you have
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: the right to butt in and Dwayne.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: Dwayne's probably sitting over there and wonder what the hell
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: we're talking about because you didn't listen to the thing
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: we're talking about.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: And you can comment on it too, or you can
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: just stick to what you want. This is something I
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: have to do.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: I'm not speaking for Dwayne at all. So here here's
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: the other part about this. Other agencies like to understand
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: these for services. I'm gonna read a letter from a
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: for service gun a minute, but let's back up. Other
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: agencies are being axed Okay, us A I D. Is
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: being dismantled, enrolled in under the State Department. Now ask
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: yourself this question to be honest when you answer this.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: Just promise me you're going to be honest with yourself.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: Did you know did you know that USAID was not
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: under the State Department? Like, answer that in all honesty.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: However, USAID is being dismantled to be put under the
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: State Department. The administration ran on the idea of dismantling
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: the Department of Education. They are closing doors, turning off
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: email addresses, and axing the place. The Justice Department is
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: making huge cuts, The FBI is making huge cuts. The
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: military is probably going to be making big cuts. They're
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: already outlining cuts they're going to make within the military.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: So point being, I don't applaud any of this. These
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: are areas that I'm not even an expert in, but
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: I see this going on. So to see that the
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: Forest Service, so the Bureau of Land Management, is going
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: to make a bunch of cuts. I can't look at this.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: I can look at that and say that really sucks.
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: And I personally think that really sucks. They're cutting things
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: that I care about. But I can't look at it
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: and see that the administration is targeting land management agencies
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: because they're dismantling non land management agencies.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: So in looking at the cuts to Forest Service and
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: the cuts.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: To BLM, which are our big land management agencies, look
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: at it in the context of a broader conversation about
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: what is happening right now writ large across the federal government. Meaning,
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: if you're going to understand these cuts and talk about
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: these cuts, look at them in the context. This is
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: not meant to be at this point in time. This
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: is not meant to be an assault on the Forest Service.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: It's meant to be an assault on the federal workforce,
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: of which the Forest Service is part. If I had
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: somehow like FIAT power as some kind of dictator to
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: come in and say, like what ones are okay and
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: what ones are not okay, believe me, I would probably
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: wind up saying I don't get USAID. A lot of
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: it seems kind of ridiculous. Go ahead, Forest Service, don't
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: touch it. In fact, take USAID's money and give it
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: to the Forest SERVI US That would be my perspective,
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: But that's not the position I'm in, and I don't
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: really know that pointing out aspects that people are pointing
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: out is going to reverse the situation. A lot of
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: other people wrote in about this national debt question, like
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: me having the audacity to talk about the impacts of
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: the national debt. Now, this is a kind of a
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: little bit situation where you can choose to play chess
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: or you can choose to play checkers around spending the
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: national debt. Like I'm going to keep this within a
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: within a conversation of National of Natural Resources Management, just
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: to give you some perspective. Every year this country, we
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: spend eight hundred billion dollars to pay interest, to pay
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: our interest on the national debt. Take a stab at
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: what the BLM's annual budget is, which I bet you
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: like I'm guessing most people don't know.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: I had to look it up. Take a guess, Randall.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: Oh, the national interest on the national debt is eight
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: hundred billion.
• 16:05
  Speaker 7: The BLM, I'd say thirty million. Way low, one hundred million.
• 16:16
  Speaker 5: Billion, way low, way low.
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: One hundred billion is low?
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: Oh no, way, Okay.
• 16:22
  Speaker 7: We're getting somewhere now five hundred million.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: Well, you know it's a problem you're creating for me
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: right now. Exactly is you know, like if you're saying
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: like like this bark was huge, guess how big he was,
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: and then you guess bigger?
• 16:33
  Speaker 6: Two hundred We've run it got problem, I mean countless
• 16:37
  Speaker 6: times over the last six years.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: And then I got to go, well, no, it was
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: one to eighty.
• 16:42
  Speaker 6: And then.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: But let's back up.
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: Eight hundred billion in interest, and then the big.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: This is not this is not paying down the debt.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: Servicing the debt is eight hundred billion dollars. The BLM's
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: annual budget is one point seven billionllion dollars. So in
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: any conversation about the long term, like way long term
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: health of natural resources in this country and where we're
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: spending our money, I'm just saying, I'm saying, and I'm
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: asking you to consider this. If we didn't have to
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: factor in in our budget, in our federal budget, if
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: we weren't factoring in eight hundred billion dollars in interest
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: payments that don't pay down the debt, I have to
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: think I have to think that there would be more
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: room than one point seven billion for the BLM. I
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: can't sit here and guarantee you that that's where it
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: would go, but I think that the health of the country,
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: and by meaning the health of the country, the parts
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: I like about this country, the natural resources, the public lands,
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: the wildlife, those things are going to continue to sacrifice
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: if we have to continue to do this. So if
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: I bring up, like even friends of mine get mad
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: if I bring up the idea of the national debt,
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: meaning like, oh, you would sell our prime, our our
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: main global our national treasures in order to pay down
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: the debt.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: I never said that. Ever.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: I'm pointing out that if you're gonna like a lot
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: of times we keep conservation conversations like very.
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: In a bubble.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: I have over the years and talking about conservation, I
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: have oftentimes looked at it in a bubble, certain things
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: in a bubble, and these in this conversation. As the
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: administration goes along, we will wind up, I promise you,
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: we will wind up with plenty of bubbles. So when
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: I said, when I sat there and said waiting for
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: the people, are like, oh, I can't believe you would
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: say you're gonna wait for the dust to settle or
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: whatever the hell I said. Let me rephrase what I said,
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: because you're right, I would be disappointed to hear someone
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: say that too. What I'm waiting for is parts of
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: this to bubble wise. But right now it's hard to
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: bubble it because I can't take like the Force Service cuts.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: Those can't be bubbilized because they're rolled into like a
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: wholesale reorganization of all of these federal agencies. So you're
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: not gonna be able to call your politician right now,
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: Like I'm telling you that, like it doesn't work. You're
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: not going to call your politician right now and say, hey, hey,
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: I understand like the thousands that the tens of thousands
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: of federal employees are getting caught across all of these
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: administrations or organizations. That's all fine. What I would like
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: you to do is put the Force Service people back.
• 19:35
  Speaker 5: Yeah, you can't.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: It ain't gonna happen.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: Like, what's like top of mind and most concerning for
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: us is not it doesn't translate to the entirety of
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: the federal government or like the people who voted for
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: the people who are running the federal government right like
• 19:52
  Speaker 3: they're not necessarily They're top concern is not conservation and
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: land access and things like that.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because they're not looking at they're not looking at
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: any bubbles. Yep, they're not looking at at this point,
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: no one is talking about any particulars. It will come.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: Like like starting already, it'll start to take some clarity,
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: but like right now, there's a little bit of like
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: waiting to see what happened. And with the Forest Service cuts, like, yeah,
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: I think it's I think it's like a catastrophic I'm
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: gonna read a letter where someone puts it really well,
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: But I'm inviting people to stop and like expand outside
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: of the way that we've historically framed conservation questions and
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: try to get a look at like where the national
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: mood is at right now with people in power, there
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: is this thing called the national debt, and know, like
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: the debt's not going anywhere, but they're going to make
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: a budget, and within this budget they're going to try
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: to find a way of how do you find the
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: money to facilitate the interest payments on the debt? And
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: how do you fund some tax cuts which they ran
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: on okay, and still balance the budget in some way
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: or another. All of these questions about what we're gonna
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: do on real specific conservation issues outside of like like
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: how we're gonna fight to keep mining interests out of
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: the headwaters of the Boundy waters, okay or sorry, on
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: the borders of the Boundy waters. How are you gonna
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: work on that? Where you gonna do about ambler Road,
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: What you're gonna do about anwar, What you're gonna do
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: about pebble mind, Like, all of these things are gonna
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: get specific with specific players doing specific things, and they're
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: like these little battles are gonna play out NonStop for
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: a bunch of years. But right now, on the employee thing,
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: it's part of such it's part of such a broader
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: conversation that gets really hard to explain how to be
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: like tactful at this moment. It's dizzying. It's dizzying. I
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: try to follow politics very closely. It's dizzying right now.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: And it's like it's intentionally dizzy. That's a point people
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: keep bringing up. It's like it's it's it's meant to
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: be almost it almost appears without any kind of broader
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: goal in mind.
• 22:06
  Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think that's I mean, I don't know
• 22:10
  Speaker 7: that people who want to shrink the federal government want
• 22:14
  Speaker 7: to shrink it in the way that it's being done right, correct.
• 22:18
  Speaker 7: I think lost in all this is that these are
• 22:20
  Speaker 7: just completely arbitrary decisions and that they've had to you know,
• 22:24
  Speaker 7: I saw it the other day that they'd cut security
• 22:28
  Speaker 7: people at nuclear facilities and then they realized they didn't
• 22:31
  Speaker 7: have anymore, and so they're trying to get in touch
• 22:33
  Speaker 7: with those people to bring them back. And the same
• 22:36
  Speaker 7: for bird flu. I saw just the other day of
• 22:38
  Speaker 7: the USDA cut all the people working on the bird
• 22:41
  Speaker 7: flu outbreak that's driving up the price of eggs, and
• 22:43
  Speaker 7: now they need to figure out how to get in
• 22:45
  Speaker 7: touch with those people to bring them back. So I think,
• 22:49
  Speaker 7: regardless of like where you stand, I think like we
• 22:52
  Speaker 7: can acknowledge that this is a very arbitrary and destructive
• 22:58
  Speaker 7: way of doing it.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: It is, yeah, it is.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: It's emerging that, and it's like, and parts of this
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: are hitting at things I care about deeply, But I'm
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: not succumbing to the temptation to look at it as
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: being an assault on the things I care about deeply
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: rather than an assault on like a kind of hamhanded
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: assault on the idea of the federal role in American lives.
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: When I'm scrolling through the news and it cuts here,
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: cuts there, cuts there, cuts in the Forest Service or wherever.
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: I've had to force myself not to like focus just
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: on that one thing, right because it's kind of unfair.
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: It's like unfair to think about it that.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's thousands and thousands and thousands of people and
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: any person. I have a neighbor who is a school teacher.
• 23:47
  Speaker 5: He's like, he could.
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: Go on for a long time about what the Department
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: of Education dismantling means for him. Meanwhile, I look at
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: the Department of Education thing and I'm like, Eh, wells
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: it all mess with the four Service? BLM, I'm cool.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: Do you know what I'm saying.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: It's it's like.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: It's a very hard like for the conservation space right now,
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: for the conservation movement right now, for the environmental movement
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: right now.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: It's like a.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: This is going to require a radical reorientation of how
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: we talk about things. They're using a playbook on the
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: federal workforce that was used on that was used on Twitter,
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: like breaking Twitter.
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: Move fast and break things.
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: Yes, breaking Twitter is like okay, I mean broken, and
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: they already broken.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: It will always be broken. But they did break it.
• 24:45
  Speaker 7: It became a wildly less, wildly less effective company and
• 24:49
  Speaker 7: lost a bunch of advertising and kind of sure took
• 24:51
  Speaker 7: a dump.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, so I'm saying, like breaking the government, taking the
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: same approach to break the government, Like, I hope it
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: goes better than it did when he broke Twitter. Yeah,
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: to return to my main point, to somehow pin it
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: on a person, to somehow suggests that an individual that
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: works in federal policy and is needing to figure out
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: who am I talking to, what are we talking about,
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: where are some areas we can succeed in the next
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: four years or eight years, rather than saying, you know what,
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: I don't like the way this is looking, I'm going home.
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: They have to work with who they have to work with, right,
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: they don't have a choice. Yes, they've got to do
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: what they can do.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: Imagine if he says, you know what, Okay, I'm not
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: going to talk to anybody about federal conservation policy for
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: the next four years. That'll stick them, That'll show them.
• 25:47
  Speaker 7: And I think too, there's like a when you think
• 25:50
  Speaker 7: about how a group like TIERCP works, there are other
• 25:53
  Speaker 7: groups out there that are going to be throwing bombs
• 25:57
  Speaker 7: at the administration. There are other groups out there that
• 25:59
  Speaker 7: are going to be like rallying the troops and and
• 26:05
  Speaker 7: taking shots. Right, But like, if you're in d C
• 26:09
  Speaker 7: and you're serious about trying to make change or trying
• 26:12
  Speaker 7: to protect what we like, you know, you got to
• 26:15
  Speaker 7: go to work every day.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: There's different groups with different.
• 26:19
  Speaker 7: Roles and the and you're not gonna the biggest the
• 26:23
  Speaker 7: biggest advantage that you can have in d C is
• 26:26
  Speaker 7: that someone takes your calls or that someone has a
• 26:29
  Speaker 7: meeting with you.
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: Correctly if I'm wrong, But t RCP has like a
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: very good working relationship with politicians on both sides of
• 26:37
  Speaker 3: the aisle, right, like right.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: That's their program, y, yeah, that is what that is
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: what they are.
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's how they get shipped done.
• 26:47
  Speaker 7: Yeah, and and and I mean that's that's how the how,
• 26:51
  Speaker 7: that's how it works, you know, whether you like it
• 26:53
  Speaker 7: or not, Like it's I mean, I think it's incredible
• 26:56
  Speaker 7: that we have a group like that who's using the power,
• 27:00
  Speaker 7: you know, like they're using the system in place, because
• 27:04
  Speaker 7: that's where the rubber hits the road in DC, and
• 27:06
  Speaker 7: it's it's somebody going to take your so you can't.
• 27:09
  Speaker 7: You have to be the adult in the room sometimes
• 27:11
  Speaker 7: and and not throw bombs.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: And not name call so yeah, And I like I've
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: even like as a board member at TRCP, you know
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: I have, I don't like, I have a voice in
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: the room. And the part about having a board is
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: you try to assemble a board with a bunch of
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: disparate voices. So sure I have, you know, I have
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: perspective on things where I talk to someone privately about
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: what I think. When when Utah was trying to figure
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: out a way to declare that public lands were effectively unconstitutional,
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: I'm on the phone with TRCP, knowing the other people
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: around the phone with TRSP, and I'm giving my take
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: on it. Then they're in the role of taking these
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: different takes, shaping them, asking who they can speak with,
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: and then make it some progress. But if you're just
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: gonna throw Molotov cocktails for them, I'm not talking about me, Yeah,
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: for them, if they're gonna throw Molotov cocktails and then
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: one day call up and be like, but seriously, uh
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: the farm bill? Yeah, I mean, like, you know, how
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: are we gonna keep the CRP programs alive?
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: Like that still has to happen.
• 28:23
  Speaker 7: Oh yeah, And and you need a seat at the table,
• 28:27
  Speaker 7: you're like, and it's very easy to lose your seat
• 28:29
  Speaker 7: at the table if you if you come out and
• 28:32
  Speaker 7: start throwing punches.
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, if you want to be like like, ask yourself,
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: like someone else said, oh pretty rich that Steve said,
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: get involved in the conservation movement after saying blah blah
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: blah whatever he said, uh to everyone else, I'll say this,
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: if you want to get involved in the conservation movement
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: and you want to do it in a way where you.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: Have a voice.
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: At the you have a voice in a seat at
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: the highest level of table, right the top table. You
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: want to voice there, get on board with an organization
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: like TRCP. That doesn't mean that people going out and
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: protesting that their state capital isn't effective. It's a way
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: to show forces. If that's where you're at. TRCP is
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: not your group. If you like, if you are willing
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: to be like patient and somewhat intellectual and strategic and
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: play in Washington.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: D C. That's different.
• 29:24
  Speaker 7: It's just different, and there's room for both and you
• 29:28
  Speaker 7: can support both at the same time, right, Like, I mean,
• 29:31
  Speaker 7: there's certainly it's effective to go and let your elected
• 29:36
  Speaker 7: officials know where you stand and strongly worded calls to
• 29:40
  Speaker 7: your reflected officials do work, but that there's also another
• 29:47
  Speaker 7: model that's having like high stakes meetings with people who
• 29:50
  Speaker 7: have the power, and you're not going to get very
• 29:54
  Speaker 7: far with them by calling them up and leaving a
• 29:56
  Speaker 7: strongly worded voicemail.
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: I'm gonna try to give a little bit to explain
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: myself a little bit with with the with the parallel
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: thing that occurred to me one time, Like picture that
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: you picture. You're a kid growing up in America and
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: movies come out, and you just in the movies come out,
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: and you become aware of movies. You see movies, and
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: then there's books that are in the bookstore, there's books
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: in the library, and they just are there because they're there.
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: And the movies that get made get made because they
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: get made. That that's how I grew up. I don't know,
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: just like movies came out and you went so me
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: never gave any thought to what happened. Right then, as
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: my career went along and I got into my thirties,
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: and I started going and having meetings with people that
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: make TV shows and people that make books and people
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: that make movies, and I understood, like why they do
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: what they do, how they do what they do, how
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: it's finance how the whole bigger project works. All of
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: a sudden, you go, all of a sudden, it's like,
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: you know, I never use like the whole like stupid
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: red pill thing.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: You get red pilled. You're like, oh shit, that's how
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: all this works. Do you know what I mean? And
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: then you're like, oh, I get it now.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: That's why the books that are out are out, and
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: that's why this that that's how this whole thing functions,
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: and all of a sudden you understand the world in
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: a different way. I over time, being someone involved in
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: wildlife conservation have had I've.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: Like undergone a sort of evolution. What's the opposite evolution?
• 31:23
  Speaker 5: The evolution?
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: Do you know where opposite evolution? Okay, some might say, oh,
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: he went through a de evolution.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: I don't know. To me, it feels yeah, devolved.
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: No, No, because I don't want to seem my I
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: my picture of how things happen.
• 31:43
  Speaker 5: Mmmm, there we go, rand.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: Point. I'm trying to make point. I'm trying to make here.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: My understanding of how things happen and why the world
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: looks like it does in wildlife conservation has changed as
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: much as my understanding of why what shows get made
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: and what books come out in print. It's like it's
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: changed with education. It has changed. I have come to
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: see more of the value of like back room high
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: level conversations. There are other people who've come up with
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: a very different opinion. If you really want to get
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: into this, you could go read about what happened with
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: Why did the Sixties fizzle? You could dig into Joan Didion.
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: You can start watching things about the efficacy and evolution
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: of Vietnam protesters. I don't know, there's different ways to
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: engage in policy discussions.
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: The civil rights movement was disruptive and very effective. Other
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: movements have been disruptive and they faltered and haven't worked.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: What else? Oh my for service?
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: Let I personally personally, Yeah, I'm gonna say a couple
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: more personal things here. I've always had a thing where
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: I have a I've tried to keep a brand promise
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: where we stay out of issues that we stay out
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: of issues that aren't directly relevant to hunters and anglers. Okay,
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: so at times this is where I'm in a little
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: bit of a bind. At times I have expressed appreciation
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: for some things half some number of things that the
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: current administration ran on and is doing I have expressed
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: appreciation for because it's just true.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: It's just true. I appreciate a bunch of the things.
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: I would have to violate my pact with the audience
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: to start talking about the things I appreciate.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: There's a thing called a nypothesis. Randall knows what it is.
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: I do.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: An apothesis is when you bring something up by saying
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: you're not going to bring it up. So my example
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: will be your fighting with your wife. Your wife says, well,
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: I'm not even going to bring up what you did
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: on Friday. That's an apothesis. She's bringing it up by
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: not bringing it up. So I'm gonna do an apothesis
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: when I'm talking about this administration. I'm not going to
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: bring up that I think that the country should have borders. Okay,
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: I'm not going to bring that up. I'm not going
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: to bring up that I don't think people should have
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: their livelihoods and careers destroyed because they fail to get
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: on board with whatever.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: New sloganism emerges in a given day. Like, I'm not
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: going to bring that up.
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: Okay, I'm not going to bring up things I think
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: about with human biology and distinctions between males and females.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: Not going to bring it up.
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: But when I've talked about things the administration is done,
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: I'm talking about some things I'm not going to bring
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: up that I think are pretty good. Do I then
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: think that what they're they're threatening to do, what it
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: seems like they're going to do to American wildlife and
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: American wild places and public lands? Do I think that
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: that's accessible? No, I don't. But I can hold two
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: things in my hands at the same time that, like,
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: there's things I like about the administration, there's also seems
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: to be like some things that they're going to be
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: doing and are doing that are going to be catastrophic
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: for public.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: Lands and wildlife.
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: And it's part of my personal thing to sort out
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: these two issues and find out where I'm going to
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: land on it. But I can't sit here and tell
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: you that every single thing Donald Trump does pisses me off,
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: because that's not true. Like it doesn't. Some of the
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: stuff is absolutely going to But I'm not gonna look
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: at it like that. I'm gonna look at it like
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: I'm going to find the areas and weigh in on
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: the areas that I think they're screwing up, and it's
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: starting to look like there's going to be quite a
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: pile of them.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: Any else? Uh? No, letter? Where do I begin the letter?
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: Put my spectacles on.
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: My name is blank, and I am a Forest Service
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: mule packer. As I write to you February fourteenth, I
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: am still an employee of the US Forest Service. Today
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: I lost many co workers that I call friends to
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: the new administration's recent cutbacks on federal employees.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: For valid and invalid reasons. The new administration has decided
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: to pick on the US Forest Service. I'm going to
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: step in and editorialize here. I'm outside of the letter
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: for a minute. People don't want to hear this, But
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: I don't think the word choice is right. I don't
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: think they've decided to pick on a lot of people.
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: It'd be like if I went into a class. If
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: I was a bully and went into a class and
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: beat up all the kids in the class, they would.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: Say he was picking on Bobby. Right? Is that a
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: good announce Yeah? Yeah.
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: Throughout my career, I'm back to the letter. Throughout my
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: career and the Recreation and Range departments, I have witnessed
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: decrease in budgets every year, forcing us to do more
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: with less. Last year, all seasonal non fire field workers
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: were fired. That was last year under Biden. They left
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: US field going permanence. They left US field going permanent
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: employees feeling overwhelmed, to say the least, for the upcoming
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: field season. But today the new administration fired over thirty
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: employees on the Beaverhead Deer Lodge National Forest. All but
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: one of the wilderness rangers were let go on the
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: Crassle Ranger District of the frank Church River of No
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: Return Wilderness, and all the trail crews of the Spotted
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: Bear Ranger District and the Bob Marshall Wilderness were let go.
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: This is the Ranger district no longer has any trail
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: crew to maintain the anacon of Pintler Willderness either a
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: dear friend was days away from graduating from probationary status.
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: He was fired from the NRCS in Alaska along with
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: her entire tribal relations team. Out of all the wasteful
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: spending and government, for this administration to pick on the
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: hardest working, lowest paid, and most dedicated workers makes me ill.
• 38:29
  Speaker 2: This may be an honest, uneducated attempt to cut wasteful
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: spending in government. Now this is this is like why
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: this particular letter resonated with me because of this line.
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: This may be an honest, uneducated attempt to cut wasteful
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: spending in government. He says, in my off season, I
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: work for different outfitters guiding elk hunts in multiple states.
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: We rely on these trail systems, do our job and
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: earn a modest living doing what we love. These layoffs
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: are taking away access to our public lands. Over one
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: hundred and twenty years of blood and sweat by the
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: American working class maintaining these trail systems will be lost.
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: Those that making that make a living in these areas
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: will suffer, but most importantly, the American people will lose
• 39:12
  Speaker 2: their access to the last place they can escape the
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: modernities we call progress in this world. And he ends
• 39:23
  Speaker 2: with a plea, use your voice to let the American
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: public know what these government cutbacks are costing us.
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: A lot all across the board.
• 39:37
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think, like.
• 39:41
  Speaker 7: Just on the subject of people who are working in
• 39:44
  Speaker 7: these jobs, like beyond the end and and there's lots
• 39:49
  Speaker 7: of people wondering how they're going to pay their mortgage
• 39:52
  Speaker 7: this month, or how they're going to pay their rent,
• 39:54
  Speaker 7: and beyond that, like immediate in individual tragedy, like there's
• 40:01
  Speaker 7: a larger I think tragedy, and like there's probably some
• 40:05
  Speaker 7: talented young kids right now in college who are studying.
• 40:09
  Speaker 7: They're trying to figure out what they're going to study
• 40:11
  Speaker 7: and what career they're going to pursue. And if I
• 40:14
  Speaker 7: was graduating from college right now, I probably wouldn't be
• 40:16
  Speaker 7: thinking about trying to go work for the Forest Service,
• 40:20
  Speaker 7: you know, or try and try to go work for
• 40:21
  Speaker 7: the National Park Service. And those jobs require a ton
• 40:25
  Speaker 7: of sacrifice year after year after year to get your
• 40:29
  Speaker 7: foot in the door, and then the pay is not
• 40:32
  Speaker 7: great and then you're probably transferring around to you know,
• 40:36
  Speaker 7: if you're in the Park Service, bouncing from park to park.
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: Or wherever you are.
• 40:39
  Speaker 7: Like I think we're going to see generational consequences from
• 40:44
  Speaker 7: the past few weeks just on the types of people
• 40:48
  Speaker 7: we can attract to those jobs. And that, for me,
• 40:50
  Speaker 7: I think is like a pretty profound Like even if
• 40:55
  Speaker 7: they hired all these people back next week, Like there's
• 40:58
  Speaker 7: a chink in the armor that it is hard to
• 41:02
  Speaker 7: polish out at this point, and it's just like, yeah,
• 41:06
  Speaker 7: I don't know. I mean when I was when I
• 41:08
  Speaker 7: was finishing college, I tried really hard to get my
• 41:11
  Speaker 7: foot in the door at a public land management agency
• 41:15
  Speaker 7: and couldn't do it. I did, you know, And I'm
• 41:19
  Speaker 7: lucky that. I'm lucky that things went the way they did.
• 41:22
  Speaker 7: But yeah, it's just like, these people love the resource,
• 41:27
  Speaker 7: and I never go out on our public lands and
• 41:30
  Speaker 7: think I wish there were fewer I wish there are
• 41:33
  Speaker 7: fewer guys working on roads, you know, I wish there
• 41:36
  Speaker 7: were fewer interpretive rangers telling people what's great about this
• 41:40
  Speaker 7: landscape or telling people about these animals we're looking at.
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: Like I just yeah that.
• 41:48
  Speaker 7: Obviously I'm having a hard time like putting my finger
• 41:51
  Speaker 7: on it. But it's really hard to not sort of
• 41:54
  Speaker 7: have your thoughts spiral when you think about the compounding
• 41:58
  Speaker 7: consequences of this stuff that's being done by twenty year
• 42:03
  Speaker 7: old kids that don't know anything about the government.
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: And the impact like the like the real world impact
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: to hunters and anglers and all kinds of outdoor recreation people.
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: Like it's gonna take a while to see what actually happens,
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: you know, with like trail access and boat ramps and
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: like who knows, Like, we don't know necessarily what we're
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: gonna be facing when the fall rolls around for hunting season.
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: No, you don't. And to return to my analogy about
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: the bully coming in and beating.
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: Up everybody in the class, like the like it's kind
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: of great analogy, but not trying to quit the same thing.
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: But you might look and be like, well, yeah, I
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: mean a lot of those kids had it coming, but
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: little Billy, well, he's the nicest kid in the world.
• 42:52
  Speaker 2: And so yeah, like, I don't think you're gonna find like,
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: you're not gonna look at the Forest Service and the
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: Rocky Mountain West and and and and Musk aren't gonna
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: be like and look at all the embarrassing look at
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: all the embarrassing, crazy expenditures they were making.
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: It's not gonna happen.
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but here's where here's where a thing I do
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: predict happening as this goes on.
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: And again, this is all new news, but I could
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: picture this.
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: Do you remember when Dwayne I'm sorry, where I'm almost done?
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: He could cause that a bad moment. Do you want
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: to come back? Do you remember when when Trump floated
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: the idea, and I talked about this the other day,
• 43:36
  Speaker 2: Like I was the ere day. I was explaining, if
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: I get really mad at my kids about iPads and phones,
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: I'll say something like I'm about ready to take all
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: those iPads.
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: Out and run them over with my truck. I use
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: that one.
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: Now they know I'm not gonna run the iPads over
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: the truck, but they also know he's gonna do something.
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: He's fed up.
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: I was saying, how I was just joking around, saying
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: how when Trump said I got half of mine to
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: the out gaza and make a big resort, he was
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: kind of saying, I'm gonna put all the iPads in
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: the driveway and run them over my truck. Meaning people
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: are like, he's not gonna do that, but he's pissed.
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: He's gonna do something. Well, who's the guy who's the
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: libertarian from Kentucky?
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: Oh, Paul right away?
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: He uh now that Twitter's not Twitter, it's called the
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: X When you tweet, what are you doing xing?
• 44:26
  Speaker 3: He They still say, tweeted just a horrible businesses. Yeah,
• 44:31
  Speaker 3: he tweets this thing.
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: He's running the government, ran Paul tweets. I thought we
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: voted for America first. Right, Yeah, Now, just to capture
• 44:40
  Speaker 2: that sentiment, here's a thing that I do picture happening.
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: Much of this conversation about the right and the left
• 44:48
  Speaker 2: in this country has been framed over the previous years
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: as a as a rural people, interior people battling for
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: the soul of the country against the coastal elites.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: Remember this, mm hmm.
• 45:03
  Speaker 2: Okay, as doge, if they do take a wrecking ball
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: to the interests of rural people, to the people that
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: were supporting Trump, he won overwhelmingly in this state. When
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: you run for office in this state, you have to
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: I'm talking about Montana. If you're running for office in Montana,
• 45:28
  Speaker 2: I don't care what you're doing, you have to pay
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: lip service at least to being pro public lands. You
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: have to say public lands in public hands. You have
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: to do it else you can't win. You have to
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: do it, just like you can't say at the federal level,
• 45:43
  Speaker 2: I'm going to cut social Security.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: You lose. If here you say I want to sell
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: off public lands, you lose.
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: Now, So that's true of Montana, Montana. I've met Trump
• 45:54
  Speaker 2: the first time, won Montana by fourteen points. Right, they
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: don't even need a campaign here gonna win. But what
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: happens when what happens when you start seeing in the
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: erosion of these things that the people and not in
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: this state care a lot about, which is their public
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: lands of public land access. You risk alienating your own
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: support network.
• 46:17
  Speaker 3: You risk the pendulum swinging the other way.
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and people in a couple.
• 46:20
  Speaker 3: Of years when the midterms come.
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: Up, and just like rand Paul, was it, Rand Paul,
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah said I thought we were voting for America. First,
• 46:30
  Speaker 2: someone might say I thought I was voting for guys
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: like me. This isn't serving my interest.
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: No, excuse yourself, Randall, I'm really sorry.
• 46:42
  Speaker 6: Keeping that in that was incredible.
• 46:44
  Speaker 3: I was wondering where you can't tell where it's coming from.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: Excuse me?
• 46:50
  Speaker 7: That was only supposed to be fin was elsewhere at
• 46:52
  Speaker 7: the moment.
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: Can I start interviewing Dwayne? But what's up?
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: We should re enter do him because everyone probably forgot
• 47:01
  Speaker 3: who he is.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: It's terrible joining us today.
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: Doctor Dwayne asked us who I have heard about from
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: a ton of people and has been uh and Krim
• 47:17
  Speaker 2: was very eager to have him on The Prairie Preacher,
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: co founder and executive dress director of Southeastern Grasslands Institute.
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: I first have to say everything I just said is
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: me talking, not Dwayne talking.
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: But I would like to invite if Dwayne, if you have.
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: Any comments about anything about what we just said, because
• 47:38
  Speaker 2: you're sort of now like like you're sort of affiliated
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: with the conversation.
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: You could either sit it out or you could give
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: you some of your thoughts. You'd say whatever hell you want.
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: I don't care.
• 47:46
  Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, let's talk about it. Well, number just wade
• 47:49
  Speaker 5: in number one, there's a there's a double meaning to apothesis.
• 47:53
  Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, it's the it's the broad portion of
• 47:57
  Speaker 5: a pine cone scale. Just just f wi from a
• 48:00
  Speaker 5: little bit botanical. Yeah, like you had a pine cone, right,
• 48:04
  Speaker 5: You've got the little the prickle there. It's that broad
• 48:06
  Speaker 5: triangular face that you see. That's the apopthesis.
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: Ship. Yeah, I love that, you.
• 48:13
  Speaker 5: Know, drop knowledge next week show. No, uh, you know,
• 48:22
  Speaker 5: I find it fascinating, man, because we're all in this
• 48:25
  Speaker 5: limbo right now, and as a founder and executive director
• 48:30
  Speaker 5: of a conservation organization, we're like everybody else, you know.
• 48:34
  Speaker 5: I talked to a good friend of mine who is
• 48:36
  Speaker 5: a former senator, and he said he reminded me he said,
• 48:39
  Speaker 5: you know this, Uh, I hear you. He says, not
• 48:42
  Speaker 5: about you, it's you know, there's worldwide ramifications of what's happening.
• 48:47
  Speaker 5: And I think that helped to frame it in a
• 48:49
  Speaker 5: context that made me kind of just sit back and
• 48:53
  Speaker 5: try to chill and get through it and just say,
• 48:56
  Speaker 5: you know, it's going to take a little while for
• 48:57
  Speaker 5: us to kind of figure out what the road ahead
• 49:00
  Speaker 5: looks like. You know, we're trying to go through planning
• 49:04
  Speaker 5: right now and to think about what are our options.
• 49:06
  Speaker 5: You know, it could be that we get by unscathed.
• 49:09
  Speaker 5: It could be that our organization fails in four weeks
• 49:13
  Speaker 5: because of what we're currently faced with. So yeah, it's scary, man.
• 49:17
  Speaker 5: People's livelihoods at stake. Good people, good hardworking people doing
• 49:21
  Speaker 5: habitat restoration work, you know, planting seeds, plant and prairies,
• 49:27
  Speaker 5: doing prescribed fire, people with babies and kids and elderly parents,
• 49:34
  Speaker 5: farmers that we work with, seed producers, they're all they're
• 49:38
  Speaker 5: all uncertain right now, and they're you know, a little
• 49:41
  Speaker 5: bit scared about what's coming. So to me, I found
• 49:43
  Speaker 5: the fascination conversation be very fascinating.
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: I just was enjoying it, really. I wouldn't call it
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: a conversation.
• 49:50
  Speaker 5: Is more like a monologue.
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: But it's okay, monologue version verging on rant, But that's okay.
• 49:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, wasn't rant because a rant you're pushing a thing.
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: I was pushing a question mark.
• 50:05
  Speaker 3: Your face wasn't red and there wasn't like a blood
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: vessel sticking out of your forehead.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: Thank you? Yeah. Uh, let's let's set the stage for Grasslands. Yeah.
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: Can we can we tackle this first? Explain how Brody's
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: a song again?
• 50:23
  Speaker 6: Right?
• 50:23
  Speaker 5: Okay, So Brody and anybody, well, anybody in southern Ohio,
• 50:29
  Speaker 5: southern Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey. Imagine that you're in the
• 50:32
  Speaker 5: South man, Yeah, you're in the South. I'll draw you
• 50:35
  Speaker 5: the South. I'm gonna tell you that.
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: I'm familiar with two ways of drawing this line. I'm
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: familiar with the Mason Dixon line.
• 50:41
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: And I'm familiar with my thing about where it's a
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: line of where you ice fish or not.
• 50:47
  Speaker 5: Yeah, and the Mason Dixon line and got nothing to
• 50:49
  Speaker 5: do with what I'm about to show you. So I
• 50:53
  Speaker 5: do like I do like geography. By the way, By
• 50:55
  Speaker 5: the way, you gotta put the Chesapeake Bay in there,
• 50:57
  Speaker 5: you know, you got to put the New Jersey in.
• 51:00
  Speaker 5: There's your Long Island right there, that's the that's the
• 51:02
  Speaker 5: northern extent of the South right there. Yeah, no ship man, absolutely,
• 51:07
  Speaker 5: need they talk. No seriously, man, we could even make
• 51:11
  Speaker 5: a case for southern Nova Scotia and Cape Cod I'm
• 51:14
  Speaker 5: telling you, all right, So then what we do is
• 51:16
  Speaker 5: we draw that line coming across the southern two thirds
• 51:19
  Speaker 5: of Pennsylvania.
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: Okay, not no, no, no, he's a Yankee.
• 51:23
  Speaker 5: Yeah, ere, he's out. You're in those glaciated plains, yes,
• 51:29
  Speaker 5: very close.
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 51:31
  Speaker 5: Now, now what you're going to just bring it down
• 51:32
  Speaker 5: the trader. Yeah, you're gonna pull in the edge of Appalachia,
• 51:36
  Speaker 5: country of Ohio. You do, bring in Cincinnati, Yeah, southern
• 51:40
  Speaker 5: third of Indiana, southern Illinois, cut right across south of
• 51:44
  Speaker 5: the Columbia a US map a shirt now.
• 51:48
  Speaker 7: Yeah, so you're drawing a map of basically what right there,
• 51:52
  Speaker 7: what wasn't covered by.
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: The middle of Texas.
• 51:54
  Speaker 6: You want to hold that up for the camera.
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: I can't believe you just did that without having a reference.
• 51:59
  Speaker 5: Man, I've been studying since I was wearing a diaper. Bro. Yeah,
• 52:05
  Speaker 5: that's the South right there, The SGI focal region.
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: I'm still Yankee, twenty four states.
• 52:11
  Speaker 5: It all gets down to biogeography, Steve.
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: So you're you're you're a Johnny reb now there around yep, Yeah,
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: just south of the south of the Hills there. Yeah.
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: Look weat explain that to me. What's going on within
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: that map?
• 52:27
  Speaker 5: Yeah, so pretty much when you look at this region
• 52:30
  Speaker 5: and you know, again this is not the cultural South, right,
• 52:33
  Speaker 5: this is that kind.
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: Of stuff we're talking to, Collegy.
• 52:36
  Speaker 5: Yeah, if you're talking about plants and animals, you know,
• 52:39
  Speaker 5: there is a high level of endemism here. So lots
• 52:42
  Speaker 5: of species that occur within this region that that don't
• 52:45
  Speaker 5: occur anywhere else on earth. And so there's lots of
• 52:47
  Speaker 5: these clusters of endemic species, and they all are really clustered,
• 52:51
  Speaker 5: like in the southern Appalachians or in the what we
• 52:53
  Speaker 5: call the Interior Plateau or parts of Florida East Texas,
• 52:58
  Speaker 5: and many of those species are really narrowly distributed, you know.
• 53:02
  Speaker 5: But then you also have wide ranging species. That's the
• 53:05
  Speaker 5: ones we look at, like look at post oak trees
• 53:07
  Speaker 5: for example. Post oaks grow all the way out to
• 53:10
  Speaker 5: the cross timbers of Texas. They grow up into southern Illinois,
• 53:13
  Speaker 5: they go all the way up to Long Island or
• 53:14
  Speaker 5: so they don't go any farther north. So what you
• 53:17
  Speaker 5: have then is this perpetual pattern of species that reach
• 53:21
  Speaker 5: their northern range limits and their western range limits because
• 53:24
  Speaker 5: of climatic barriers. So here you get into the boreal northeast,
• 53:28
  Speaker 5: you get into the true you know, the tall grass
• 53:31
  Speaker 5: prairie of the Midwest and the Great Plains, and then
• 53:34
  Speaker 5: the arid basically Chiwalla desert margin right here in South Texas.
• 53:38
  Speaker 5: So that means then everything in this region is kind
• 53:42
  Speaker 5: of temperate. It's got seasonality, with exception of South Florida,
• 53:46
  Speaker 5: which is subtropical, it's mostly you know, people think of
• 53:50
  Speaker 5: it as a deciduous forest region. That drives me bonkers.
• 53:54
  Speaker 5: You don't like that term, No, I don't. Actually, it's
• 53:56
  Speaker 5: a huge misnomber and it's not based in science or his.
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: Can you tell what it means and why you don't
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: like it?
• 54:02
  Speaker 5: Yeah, because what it does is it extrapolates you know,
• 54:06
  Speaker 5: all parts of the East as being you know, people think, well,
• 54:10
  Speaker 5: it all used to be forest, right. There's this what
• 54:12
  Speaker 5: we call the myth of the.
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: Squirrel that tell you the squirrel.
• 54:16
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: I was raised on this good Okay, what the squirrel
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: could go from blank to blank and never touch the ground.
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: Squirrel could go from Kentucky to Michigan, from Florida to
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: New Jersey, that's right, whatever and never touched the ground.
• 54:32
  Speaker 5: Yeah. I heard it as my sixth grade teacher, Tommy John's,
• 54:36
  Speaker 5: who also paddled me thirteen times for talking too much.
• 54:40
  Speaker 7: Does he invent the surgery?
• 54:41
  Speaker 5: He told me?
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: No, I don't know Tommy john surgery.
• 54:44
  Speaker 6: No, this is.
• 54:47
  Speaker 5: I call it. I call it Tommy John's in the
• 54:48
  Speaker 5: fabled squirrel.
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: You know, we still got whooped when I was a kid.
• 54:52
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm forty six. Huh yeah, I got I got
• 54:55
  Speaker 5: thirteen of them in nineteen ninety.
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, mister Bricken, Yeah, man, he called me down, whooped
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: me one time.
• 55:01
  Speaker 5: But he told me, he said, look, a squirrel could
• 55:02
  Speaker 5: travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without
• 55:05
  Speaker 5: ever touching the ground.
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: That's what I heard it. I was screwing the whole
• 55:08
  Speaker 2: thing up. That's my dad would like to tell me.
• 55:10
  Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know it really no, I don't buy
• 55:13
  Speaker 5: it at all. And it has its origins. The origin
• 55:16
  Speaker 5: is kind of complex. I wrote to the pretty well
• 55:19
  Speaker 5: known author Stephen J. Pine and said, you know, do
• 55:22
  Speaker 5: you know where that originated? And we both have been
• 55:25
  Speaker 5: sort of scratching our heads over the true origins. That
• 55:28
  Speaker 5: myth are a little bit hard to put to nail down.
• 55:32
  Speaker 5: But what's easily provable is that it's not true. All
• 55:38
  Speaker 5: you got to do is go back into the annals
• 55:40
  Speaker 5: of American history the days of Boone and in his contemporaries,
• 55:44
  Speaker 5: or you can look at multiple lines of scientific evidence
• 55:47
  Speaker 5: at many different places across that and say, oh, there
• 55:50
  Speaker 5: were vast prairies there, there were cane breaks there, non
• 55:54
  Speaker 5: forested eco systems. So for us to take this mantra
• 55:58
  Speaker 5: that it was all forested has had a deleterious effect
• 56:02
  Speaker 5: for biodiversity and conservation. Think about it. We've invested billions
• 56:07
  Speaker 5: of dollars in the eastern United States into forests. When
• 56:10
  Speaker 5: we go by land for protection we create public new
• 56:13
  Speaker 5: state parks or new national parks. It's all the mountainous
• 56:17
  Speaker 5: forested or big swampy bottom lands that get all the attention. Yep.
• 56:21
  Speaker 5: Nobody thinks about the open spaces when you do prioritization
• 56:27
  Speaker 5: for you know, conservation action, all the places that get
• 56:33
  Speaker 5: the conservation focus. And I'm talking about terrestrial week systems,
• 56:35
  Speaker 5: not streams and rivers at this point. But you know,
• 56:38
  Speaker 5: it's big river floodplains, it's big swampy intact forests, it's
• 56:42
  Speaker 5: big mountain systems that are still forested. Nobody gives a
• 56:46
  Speaker 5: shit about pasture lands and crop fields, but those are
• 56:50
  Speaker 5: the areas that used to be grassland, and they no
• 56:54
  Speaker 5: longer are in most places.
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: Is it safe to say that those went first because
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: you could grill a corn, a crop of corn on
• 57:04
  Speaker 2: them without needing to girdle all.
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: The trees, and so it just everything got gobbled up.
• 57:07
  Speaker 5: Yeah. Absolutely, And we were beginning to sort of lay
• 57:11
  Speaker 5: a fact trail of evidentiary information that proves that exact point.
• 57:16
  Speaker 5: You know, you got people in the eighteen seventies who
• 57:19
  Speaker 5: are writing back about conditions and say the eighteen forties
• 57:22
  Speaker 5: in Tennessee and say, you know, the earliest waves of settlers,
• 57:25
  Speaker 5: for example, who went from Middle Tennessee into West Tennessee
• 57:28
  Speaker 5: when that land was purchased by Andrew Jackson from the
• 57:31
  Speaker 5: Chickasaw Nation. They settled in the already open lands first,
• 57:36
  Speaker 5: because quote it opened, you know, a crop of corn
• 57:41
  Speaker 5: and cotton very quickly, and so you can look again
• 57:44
  Speaker 5: and again in places throughout the East, and what we
• 57:48
  Speaker 5: have begun to advance is what we call this push
• 57:52
  Speaker 5: pull hypothesis. You know, it's the same thing that was
• 57:55
  Speaker 5: driving Boon to Daniel Boone to want to kind of
• 57:58
  Speaker 5: move around, and he didn't like the pressure of a
• 58:02
  Speaker 5: neighbor being ten miles away from it, So he was
• 58:05
  Speaker 5: being sort of pushed by this ever increasing population density factor.
• 58:12
  Speaker 5: What we like to say, though, is look at the
• 58:14
  Speaker 5: pool sure, right, why was Boone being attracted to the
• 58:17
  Speaker 5: Kentucky Bluegrass or the Nashville base in the Cumberland River Valley.
• 58:22
  Speaker 5: He certainly wouldn't going to hunt in a big, vast,
• 58:24
  Speaker 5: extensive forest. He was going to hunt the meadow lands,
• 58:28
  Speaker 5: the cane break margins, the savannahs. That's what people were
• 58:33
  Speaker 5: attracted by. Like these early land surveyors and land speculators,
• 58:37
  Speaker 5: they wanted good land that was going to open up
• 58:41
  Speaker 5: settlement opportunities for incoming westward migrating settlers and colonists. So
• 58:47
  Speaker 5: that's what was pulling America's migration patterns in the sixteen
• 58:52
  Speaker 5: hundreds and seventeen hundreds. It was the availability of open space.
• 58:56
  Speaker 5: That story has never been told in American history, but we're.
• 58:59
  Speaker 2: Telling speaking of history, you know the I don't know
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: if you know Randall's specialty.
• 59:05
  Speaker 5: M tell me about it, Randal.
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: Well he doesn't.
• 59:08
  Speaker 7: Yeah, I was waiting to hear you.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: Randall has been formally trained to your thing about where
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: did that squirrel thing come from? He's been formally trained
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: to find that kind of stuff. Wow, he's a pH
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: d in history.
• 59:25
  Speaker 5: That's what we need, man, we need we need to
• 59:27
  Speaker 5: figure it out.
• 59:28
  Speaker 7: The first time I ever heard that.
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: He's busy right now.
• 59:30
  Speaker 5: We need more PhDs.
• 59:33
  Speaker 2: But if you put Randall on that, he'd probably coming
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: after a couple of weeks. He'd come tell you where
• 59:37
  Speaker 2: that first appeared.
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: Well, I don't know about that.
• 59:41
  Speaker 7: I mean that stuffs so hard to pin down.
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: But yeah, like never mind, Well, well it's a great compliment.
• 59:50
  Speaker 7: I really I feel like I'm sitting up straighter in
• 59:54
  Speaker 7: my chair now. But uh yeah, I think you're probably
• 59:57
  Speaker 7: doing the Stephen Pine as well, the as much as
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 7: can be done on that.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: What Uh I wish I had.
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 2: I wish I had compiled more specific examples, but places
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 2: random This will jogging memory, places where I don't. I
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 2: don't necessarily from Boonez descriptions, but places where guys seven
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: around seventeen seventy whatever are describing could be north of
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 2: the Ohio and some places, mostly south of the Ohio River,
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 2: are saying that like not.
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: A tree in sight. Yeah, I mean, where in the
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: world is that happening?
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 7: I thought that was when you're reading all those accounts.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 7: I mean they're describing savannahs and.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: The barons.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 7: The Barons is this region that they talk about all
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 7: the time. And in my mind, having grown up in
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 7: Ohio and driven interstates, you know, up and down to
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 7: the you know, to the south and throughout sort of Tennessee, Kentucky,
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 7: how this I picture? It's trees on the hills and
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 7: farms in the bottom. And you read these descriptions from
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 7: that time period of all this open country, and for me,
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 7: it was just like I didn't have a visual reference
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 7: in my imagination for what that looks like.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 5: I kind of think about the land as I told
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 5: a friend this recently, and she kind of looked at
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 5: me like she didn't believe me. I said, imagine if
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 5: you were to go into like the eighty one Corridor,
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 5: which takes you from Pennsylvania down, you know, into Tennessee.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 5: The Great Valley as it's called, you know, it's the
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 5: bottom of the valley is relatively open today. I think
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 5: the vast majority of Americans would look at that valley
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 5: and say, oh, at some point in our past, it's
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 5: been cleared, you know, it's been deforested.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: I would think it was open anthroporogenically.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly, you know. And I would maintain that many
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 5: sections of eastern United States are relatively about the same
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 5: in terms of the approximate closure of the landscape versus
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 5: openness as it was to pre settlement times. So that
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 5: you know, those open cattle pastures you see down in
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 5: there in western Virginia today, or cornfields or valley bottom
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 5: hay meadows, those were probably mostly always open. Sure, there
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 5: are blocks that were deforested, yes, but the relative balance
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 5: of land open to closed, I think is relatively the same.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 5: It's just what happened to the land. The forests went
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 5: through the mountain sides, some of them were cleared and
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 5: logged and grew back up into secondary and tertiary forests.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 5: Those valley lands, though, those were part of that pull
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 5: factor that attracted for people moving out of Chesapeake Bay
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 5: and stuff and Tidewater, Virginia. And when they moved into that,
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 5: they moved in state forever. Right. They converted those meadow
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 5: lands and those savannahs into the first cornfields and crop
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 5: lands and plantations. And when those got exhaust then sometimes
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 5: they let them go back and go follow into pasture lands,
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 5: or they went into pasture lands from the beginning. And
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 5: many of our grasslands too, especially the savannah types, they've
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 5: always had trees. And that's one of the big hallmarks
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 5: of what we call southern grasslands is not all of
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 5: them had trees. There are certainly many examples that were
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 5: essentially treeless that we can point to, and we can
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 5: talk about where they were and why. But eighty percent
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 5: at least of southern grasslands had somewhere between probably ten
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 5: and fifty percent tree cover. And so many of our
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 5: friends said, well, hell, why don't you just call that
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 5: a forest and be done with it. Well, because you
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 5: could call it an open forest, you can call it
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 5: a woodland. We don't really give a shit what you
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 5: call it. The fact of the matter is we need
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 5: to understand what its structure needs to be, right, what
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 5: does it need to be to be healthy and flourishing
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 5: for both native plants and native wildlife. It needs to
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 5: be something other than what it is today. We have
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 5: deviated from the natural condition so profoundly that people in
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 5: the East are just unaware of that deviation.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 7: Good, well, this is a non sequitur.
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 5: I don't even know what that means.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 7: It's not going to fall what you just said. I
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 7: wasn't sure what we were walking into today. And I
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 7: love profanity, but you've said the word shit a few times,
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 7: which is not something that I expected from the prairie preacher.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 7: Now I'm understanding that they heard.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 5: It from you guys the gospel.
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: Oh please, I mean I thought he was a preacher, yeah,
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: from the prairie. No, I mean I read that.
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 7: I was like, I wonder sort of where the preacher
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 7: comes from. And now I'm getting you know, you've got
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 7: your own gospel here of of what the East used
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 7: to look like. But yeah, I don't know, that's just
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 7: my thought. I don't really have a question.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: Thank you. Back to you, how much of your work
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: is about.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 2: Where do you split your work and your worldview from
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: trying to capture what things looked like? I'll add a
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 2: little bit on that because random I have experiences as
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 2: well as in some of our research about market hunting
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 2: that we've been doing lately, where we're sort of taking
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 2: the first far west meaning Appalachia, Kentucky, Tennessee south the
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 2: Ohio River and looking at the source material that explains
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: what that looked like, who was there, what it looked like,
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 2: what are the first experiences that Euro Americans had there.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 2: The source material for that versus the source material for
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: the Rocky Mountains. The source material for the Rocky Mountains
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 2: is just relatively vast. I mean, you can't in a lifetime,
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: you can't get through all the first hand accounts of
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 2: what a quote unquote untouched West looked like, like the
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 2: what it looked like in the Native America state. You
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 2: can't read it all. If you're trying to find accounts
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 2: of what this what we're talking about looked like in
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 2: an untouched state, it's like it's.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: Like a paucity of material.
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 2: The people that weren't talking and describing weren't describing that.
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 2: So like, how much of your focus is understanding what
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 2: that was because it's so mysterious what it looked like,
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 2: how it functioned, what it did and how much of
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: your work is about, well, what do we do now?
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 2: Like knowing that, what do we do now?
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 5: Yeah? Yeah, I would say we're equally split, cause it
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 5: took us, you know, for our first eight years. We've
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 5: we've been around since twenty seventeen. You know, we really
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 5: kind of grew first out of this desire to know
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 5: what it was and document and substantiate how we know
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 5: what it was, right getting back to that original source material,
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 5: educate the public and the masses to the extent we
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 5: could about you know, what it looked like, giving someone
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 5: a visual reference for you know, ecosystems that are nearly extinct.
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 5: So we really were heavily research based and sort of
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 5: into the documentation up until now, and we still are.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 5: That's one big branch of what we do as an organization.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 5: And then the other thing that we've grown into really
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 5: in the past three to four years is the restoration.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 5: It's like, what do we do about it? You know?
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 5: So we have these remnant grasslands where we have these
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 5: areas that a private landowner wants to restore or the
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 5: National Park Service wants to restore. We've been rapidly building
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 5: our team up until the big freeze I have to say,
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 5: we've been rapidly building our team up and we were
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 5: just poised to really begin to do some real impactful
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 5: on the ground habitat restoration work. Those are the two
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 5: equal halves of our organization, and yeah, I'm excited by
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 5: you know. One is I listened to the audible version
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 5: of the Long Hunter.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: Book that you use there is.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 5: I love it, man, you know, I love the complementary.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 5: Is that a word between You're in Clay's southern accent? Yeah?
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 5: I thought that played off real well.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but like one of these guys is obviously, uh,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 2: you know, a man of the people.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 5: But I love the book. And you know what I
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 5: found is that you found You talk about the paucity
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 5: of those records, You found some of them. You found
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 5: some of the few. You know, like you mentioned the
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 5: Casper Mansker and the Bloods. I always forget if it's
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 5: Isaac or Anthony, you know, the brother two?
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, and I can't remember which one was with
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 8: Mansker when they encounter the lick and what is modern
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 8: day Summer County s and you know the first time
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 8: they came, as you alluded to in your book, they
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 8: were on horseback and they shot a deer.
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 5: It was in the middle of this giant herd of bison, right,
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 5: and they couldn't get off their horses for fear of
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 5: being trampled to death. But as long as they stayed
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 5: on their horses, they were good. You know. There were hundreds,
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 5: possibly you know, a few thousand buffalo into that particular
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 5: lick that they were in, and you found that reference
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 5: to that. There's a couple more to that exact same
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 5: same place though. That has always stuck with me, For example,
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 5: when they came back the following year, and I think
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 5: you may have references too. All those bison had been
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 5: exterminated French. Yeah, the French hunters like Timothy de Munbrin
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 5: and his his you know, cronies were all kind of
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 5: hunting around in that area. So you know, you've stumbled
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 5: upon like one of the very few references to what
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 5: I would say is a reference that alludes to the
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 5: savannahs around the Nashville area. Some regions have really well
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 5: documented grasslands, like the black Belt Prairie region of Mississippi
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 5: and Alabama. It goes all the way back to like
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 5: seventeen oh one, you know, when that was French territory.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 5: You had French generals and stuff like, they were based
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 5: in New Orleans, they and their armies were crisscrossing northern Mississippi.
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 5: Those are all recorded in the French archives, and I've
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 5: got a colleague, doctor John Barone, who's published and pulled
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 5: that stuff out. But part of the challenge of the
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 5: South and the East in general is that many of
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 5: these areas were settled so rapidly and hectically chaotically that
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 5: the original landscape. We always say they were gone before
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 5: the camera was invented. They were gone before people who
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 5: could write about them visited. In some cases they were
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 5: transformed before they could be recorded, and oftentimes they were
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 5: gone before the first artist came through. So the record
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 5: has to be sort of pieced back together, like Humpty Dumpty.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 5: And that's one of the things that we're actively doing,
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 5: is piecing back where they were, what they looked like.
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 5: One of our great friends, and you gotta have them
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 5: on your show. He's amazing. He's the best oil painter
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 5: you'll ever meet.
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: And careful knockcuse, my wife's taken over now, man.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 5: But he goes back and he tours like when William
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 5: Bartram was an explorer in the South in the seventeen seventies.
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 5: He goes back to where William Bartram was in Montgomery, Alabama,
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 5: and he uses Bartram's words and his ability to look
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 5: at the modern landscape to put back the scene that
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 5: Bartram would have seen. And it's a vast prairie that
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 5: looks like the Flynn Hills of East Kansas.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 3: You were talking about bison, Do you guys suspect that
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 3: they played a role in maintaining these these grasslands?
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Now, bison in the East, as
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 5: you guys, I'm sure no, is very complicated. You know,
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 5: I've read Ted Bulow's book. I love It's one of
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 5: my favorite of all times.
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: This whole thing is a great story.
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 5: I got them a backpack. But you know, there's some
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 5: new evidence emerging on bison in the East. There's some
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 5: archaeology and paleontology work that's been done. You know, we
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 5: thought that bison had kind of re emerged in the
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 5: South in like the middle fifteen hundreds early fifteen hundreds,
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 5: after the depopulation of Native Americans from some of the
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 5: different pandemic diseases that they came back in from the
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 5: Great Plains I think that the supporting evidence suggests that
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 5: is true. Right, But if you had asked, most people, Okay,
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 5: so bison came back into the South, because you know,
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 5: they were definitely here in the South in ice age
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 5: times we had multiple species of bison. But most people
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 5: kind of considered that in states like North Carolina, Georgia,
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 5: you know, Tennessee, that bison had essentially been gone for
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 5: you know, since fifteen thousand years ago, up until about
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 5: the year fifteen fifty or so. And so then you
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 5: get into saying, well, well, wait a minute, does that
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 5: mean there were no big animals grazing southern grasslands three
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 5: thousand years ago, five thousand, nine thousand years ago. That
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 5: was kind of the I think the consensus.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 2: But this this wedgend, if you have wedging, well, I
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 2: just want some of the things people have looked at
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: and describing that That that I've read about is like
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 2: that the the Spanish and the French would come through
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: places in the early sixteen hundreds and they'd describe everything
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 2: right down to possums, no mention of buffalo.
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you go to the.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: Effigy mounds, like the mound builders, the Mississippian cultures on
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 2: the Ohio Mississippi River. They carve and have things every snake, turtle, deer, bear.
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: They don't have buffalo effigies.
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 2: And I think that that like that kind when we're
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 2: talking about evidence, like that kind of evidence, it's almost
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 2: like a omission. I'm try like omission equals absence. I'm
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 2: familiar with that kind of evidence, like, well, if they
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 2: were there, they would have talked about them, so they
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 2: must not have been there.
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 5: I've encountered a lot of that logic, right, Yeah, And
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 5: I think that's that's generally it seems like there's wide
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 5: agreement that there generally were few to know bison in
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 5: the East and Southeast before the early fifteen hundreds. You know,
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 5: when you get to the French explorers of the sixteen
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 5: eighties through you know, the seventeen twenties, ample, ample discussion
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 5: of bison just just it's it's everywhere, you know, when
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 5: you get to the seventeen sixties and seventies seventies, everybody
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 5: who goes out is talking about bison in every valley
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 5: in West Virginia and every big you know whatever. Isn't
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 5: that crazy, It's crazy, you know? But and so many
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 5: place names too. But here's the challenge. Uh we we
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 5: thought they essentially had disappeared at the end of the
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 5: ice Age. But I think his name is doctor Gary Moore.
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 5: He's an archaeologist from East Carolina State University. Was doing
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 5: some work at a archaeological site in the Piedmont of
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 5: South Carolina and using a technique where they looked at
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 5: these spear points, these stone projectile tools. Right, they were
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 5: able to go into you know, you guys have seen
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 5: those flint nappers, right and you're sitting there making it,
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 5: making a projectile. Yeah, there you go. Well, those those
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 5: stone tools have little microfractures in them that through capitalar
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 5: re action, you know, draws in blood and other types
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 5: of material when you when you kill an animal. And
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 5: what doctor Moore's work has shown is that they can
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 5: actually extract not the DNA, but they can extract the
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 5: protein residues of animals that were killed with these stone tools.
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 5: Is well, I know I've heard mixed opinions on it too,
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 5: but but if it's true, let's just say if it is,
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 5: and you know, it's gone through peer review, publication and
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 5: that kind of stuff. But what his work shows is
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 5: that there's a continuous record of bison in South Carolina
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 5: from the Late Ice Age, so probably fifteen thousand years ago,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 5: all the way up until seven thousand years ago. So
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 5: that's a totally different story. If you got bison in
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 5: South Carolina at seven thousand years ago, you probably had
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 5: them in Tennessee, Kentucky. You may have had them even farther,
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 5: you know, to the west and south. So then that
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 5: means that the window without bison is actually much narrower
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 5: than we suspected gotch So it's that kind of that
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 5: kind of emerging evidence which adds to and somewhat you know,
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 5: clouds the whole picture of southeastern grassland ecosystems.
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 2: Can you speak to the impact of Native American burning
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 2: like this? This was I can't remember what year it was,
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 2: but this became a very fashionable.
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: Idea that.
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 2: Open country, that all this open lands was a result
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 2: of slash and burn agriculture, or there are accounts, I
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 2: believe there's French accounts where they were using fire and
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 2: game drives. Yeah, I mean they would encircle big areas,
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 2: get some hunters staked up, and just burn the place
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 2: to push out deer. And so for a while it
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 2: seemed like everybody was really hip on this idea that
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 2: all that open country was that was anthropogenic and not natural,
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 2: you know, like not whatever the hell the opposite anthropogenic is.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 5: Yeah. I think I'm reading the book Forgotten Fires right now,
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 5: right and they talk about you know, it's written by
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 5: an anthropologists, so it relies heavily on that perspective and
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 5: sort of the science of anthropology. There's no question when
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 5: you go back into the earliest seventeen hundreds and sixteen
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 5: hundreds and maybe slightly beyond that, there are just ample
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 5: documentary evidences and observations of Native Americans burning the landscape
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 5: for you know, setting large, you know, circular fires on
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 5: the land, and that's really well documented. I think, though,
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 5: there's a slippery slope and it's just too far to go.
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 5: It's too big of an extrapolation to say with surety
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 5: that Native Americans created open ecosystems of the South. And
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 5: I think what that does is it makes a bunch
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 5: of assumptions. One of the ways I think in my
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 5: colleague who's our chief science advisor, doctor Reid Nass, he
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 5: wrote a book in twenty thirteen called Forgotten Grasslands of
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 5: the South, and it really was a game changer and
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 5: turned the messaging around southern ecosystems. There's one very clear
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 5: line of evidence as to why it doesn't make sense
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 5: that Native Americans created these landscapes. They probably moved into
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 5: them and found them already largely open. They may have
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 5: expanded some of the smaller ones to make them larger,
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 5: But the clear line of evidence that they did not
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 5: create most of them is in the presence of endemic species.
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 5: When you have plants and animals that have, you know,
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 5: through the process of evolution, it just takes time. Most
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 5: of the species that evolve on this planet, they require
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 5: tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. Some of them
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 5: require millions of years to evolve. If we have conclusively
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 5: had people in the South for say thirteen fourteen thousand years,
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 5: most of these modern species likely originated prior to the
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 5: arrival of man into the southeastern United States. Grassland species,
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 5: they're grassland obligate species. That's the biggest testament to that
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 5: longevity factor. Now here's the other one. Very rich fossil
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 5: evidence for grasslands and grassland endemic species in the South.
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 5: And so if you know you say, okay, well, you
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 5: know what if it's true that Native Americans uh came
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 5: into and created these. Again, I am not in any
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 5: way trying to take away the importance of indigenous management.
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 5: I think that is a exceptionally important, you know, component
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 5: to this. But you can go back to the fossil
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 5: record in Florida and East Tennessee and various places, uh
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 5: and find a rich wealth of some of the biggest
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 5: grassland dependent you know, megafauna and carnivores. You can imagine.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 5: You know, there's a recent discovery of the American cheetah
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 5: in the in the the Appalachians of southwest Virginia. Seriously, yeah,
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 5: no joke, found out.
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 3: I was reading there was caribou in Alabama, Georgia.
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 5: Yeah, yes, that you know, uh, big longhorn bison. And
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 5: by the way, that that cheetah was found within the
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 5: county adjacent to Cumberland Gap.
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: Mmm.
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 5: No, kid, yeah, I know, you know, I know you
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 5: love Cumberland Gain.
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, huh.
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 5: So there's a there's a wealth, I mean, the endemic
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 5: species alone. Man, that that that is the biggest piece
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 5: of evidence.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 2: I remember when I was a little kid, man, do
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 2: you remember what did do you guys remember what the
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: It's still around the Epcot Center.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 3: It's very much still, isn't it.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 5: It's a big glass.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 3: It's like a big glass, like a giant.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: I went there when I was just a youngster.
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 2: I went down I remember we went down there to
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 2: we fished, We watched them shoot a space shuttle off,
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 2: and we went to the Epcot Center and they did
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 2: this thing where you were like cruising at very low altitude,
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 2: Like it's like a planetarium experience where it's like you're
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 2: cruising very fast at very low altitude over the country.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 4: Uh.
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: I know, there's like some budget problems.
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 2: Has have you guys tried like any kind of wide
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 2: scale visual representation.
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: Of what a flyover like, you know, I mean, like
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: what a flyover of the area you mapped out looked
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: like in fourteen ninety two.
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 5: That sounds like a good collaboration with meat Eator if
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 5: you want me to tell you about it. But no,
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 5: what we have, what we have embarked on is the
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 5: creation of a web platform we call Grasslandia.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 9: You know it sounds kind of fanciful, right, Come with
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 9: me to the grassland the world of Grasslandia.
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 5: And No, I think that needs to happen. We need
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 5: to have that sort of visual you know, flyover reenactment
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 5: so people can see it, because nobody can can see
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 5: it and understand it today and if you can't see it,
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 5: you can't visualize it. Or the largest remnants you have
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 5: left is the footprint of this building, you know, or
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 5: a quarter of an acre. How are you going to
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 5: inspire people to go back in and care about those
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 5: landscapes and rebuild them and reconstruct them so we can
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 5: prevent the continued collapse of our wildlife and bio diversity
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 5: which is all around us.
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, tell us about some of those patches you found, Yeah, well,
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 2: like native patches of like yeah, historic.
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: Grass and how small they are.
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 5: Yeah. Well, the probably the best patch that we have
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 5: left in Tennessee where I'm from, it's called May Prairie.
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 5: And you know, the story is back in the sixties,
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 5: a couple of professors from the University of Tennessee. We're
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 5: sitting at a cafe across the street on Highway forty one,
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 5: you know, which like goes from Chicago to Florida. And
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 5: they're sitting at this restaurant it's called the Prairie Cafe,
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 5: and they look over to the lady and said, miss ma'am,
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 5: why is this called the prairie Cafe? She said, you
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 5: see a line of trees over there across the highway.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 5: Well look through there. You see how it kind of
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 5: looks open and sunny. There's a prairie in there. And
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 5: these were two botanists, right like I am. So they
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 5: get they finish up their meal and they go out
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 5: across road to walk in and they find May Prairie,
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 5: which is eleven acres and it's still to this day
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 5: is eleven acres. May Prairie is the most biodiverse single
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 5: eleven acres in the eastern interior United States. Kid, you know,
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 5: oh crazy, totally separate side story. In two thousand and eight,
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 5: I was part of the Natural Areas conference that came
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 5: to Tennessee. It was in Nashville, and they asked me,
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 5: I said, will you lead a grass identification hike down
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 5: to May Prairie for the for the conference? I said,
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 5: for sure, will I go down there? And I'm walking
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 5: through this prairie It's October of two thousand and eight,
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 5: and I see this plant. I look down and I said, man,
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 5: this is weird. This is the type of little member
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 5: of the sunflyer family. I said, this is not anything
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 5: currently known from Tennessee. And Buddy Mine says, how you know?
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 5: I said, just trust me. I know, I know the
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 5: floor of Tennessee. There's nothing else like it. I don't
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 5: know what it is. So I get back and later
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 5: that email, I sent an email to the national uh,
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 5: the international expert on that particular group of plants, who
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 5: happened to be in Waterloo, Canada, and he wrote back
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 5: and he said, congratulations, you have discovered a completely new species.
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 5: And not only did it prove to be new, but
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 5: it's endemic to that single prairie and nowhere else on earth.
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: You're kidding me?
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 7: Did you get to name it?
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 5: He actually named it for me, so.
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: I thought you couldn't do that anymore.
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 5: No, I can't. I can't name it for myself.
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 3: So by new it was actually old, like is that
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 3: what you're saying?
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: Like?
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 9: It was endemic to probably all over damn place once
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 9: upon a time, endemic in the sense that it Yeah,
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 9: it probably was more widely distributed because that area had
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 9: had about a million acres.
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 5: Of grass historically. That's one of the last fragments left.
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 5: But yeah, and old in the sense it probably took
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 5: tens of thousands of years to evolve as a species. Yeah,
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 5: the name is sympiatricum estesia. Well not the sexiest name around.
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 3: Like, we've got prairie out here, and it's you know,
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 3: obviously it's diverse and there's different kind of plants and
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 3: animals and stuff. But like, what would like a patch
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 3: of that prairie that size of this table look like
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 3: that year talking like, is it a bunch of different
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 3: flowers and plants and grass and.
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it's gonna look like your tall grass
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 5: prairie and like parts of Missouri or Iowa very similar.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 5: It's just oftentimes it is gonna have a bit more
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 5: tree cover, you know, it's gonna.
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 3: Have what would those be, conifers or hardwoods or both,
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 3: mostly hardwoods.
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 5: So like in lots of the Upper South you'll have
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 5: post oak, black jack oak those those or burroak those
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 5: in my you know, my way of thinking, especially for
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 5: our region, are essentially grassland trees, which is kind of
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 5: a weird concept for people. Like black jack oak won't
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 5: even reproduce anymore, Like it's acorns just never germinate because
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 5: most black jack oaks today are shrouded in forest that
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 5: is unnaturally forested, where the forest has overtaken grassland. So
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 5: you've got an oak that essentially can no longer germinate
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 5: and reproduce itself.
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 2: Like he's dropping his acorn in a place that yeah,
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 2: or excuse me's acorn, that's.
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 5: Right, and it doesn't do any good, and he's on
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 5: his way out, you know, and another generation or two,
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 5: those oaks will die and they will never replace themselves
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 5: without things like fire and buffalo and those kind of things.
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 5: But you know, yeah, visually very similar to what you'd
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 5: see with the eastern tallgrass prairie. That's essentially what ours were.
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 5: They were sort of eastern outliers of but they were
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 5: very different in terms of the plants. They had their
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 5: own species, their own composition, They were unique, and now
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 5: they're mostly gone.
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: What's it look like subsurface in that may prairie.
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 5: Yeah, that particular prairie does have you know, it's it's
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 5: an intact system. So it's the underground is intact too,
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 5: and it's prairie soils and stuff. But that's that's a
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 5: big misnumber, big misconception a lot of people have is
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 5: that prairie is always associated with a given soil type.
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 5: You know, in the Midwest, a lot of your prairies
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 5: are these black prairie soils they call mollosaws. But in
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 5: the South we get prairies on every soul type imaginable,
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 5: So that really doesn't hold much water for us with
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 5: the actual sul type.
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: Got it? Yeah, yeah, What is the history of how
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: that made prairie? How did it stay intact just because
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: something didn't happen.
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 5: Well, that's the sort of the case that we see
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 5: with a lot of our eastern grasslands. Is the thing
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 5: that caused them to survive four hundred years of you know,
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 5: Euro American settlement was Oftentimes they're too wet or too rocky,
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 5: or maybe they're on the natural edge. So in this case,
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 5: it has it's we'll call hard pan prairie. So if
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 5: you dig down them by a foot, it actually has
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 5: a clay hardpan that restricts tree growth and actually favors
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 5: grasses and wildflowers and those kind of things. So it's
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 5: naturally predisposed to being being grassy. But it's also really
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 5: really wet in the wintertime. You can't really develop there.
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 5: It's not a good good for cropping soils are highly acidic,
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 5: so that's one of the reasons why it's kind of
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 5: you know, persistent to the modern day. But a lot
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 5: of these other sites, you know, if they're rocky that
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 5: will preclude development, or if they're in a like a
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 5: power line corridor. We see a lot of our best
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 5: grasslands in power lines and on roadsides. Really yeah, but strangely,
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 5: you know, or not strangely, I guess, but especially in
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 5: the past twenty five years, those are the hardest hit,
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 5: you know, from the usage of herbicides to kind of
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 5: manage those environments. So they were the last to remain
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 5: and now they're the sort of those little last scraps
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 5: are being devastated, and those remnants are key to rebuilding efforts.
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 5: You know, if you want to rebuild prairie, if you
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 5: want to rebuild savannahs, it's important to know where those
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 5: remnants are.
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 2: Can can those remnants if you rate the right conditions.
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 2: Do those remnants want to grow or do they want
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 2: to shrink based on what's on the edge of them.
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 5: Yeah, they do not grow. They that's they're not They
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 5: don't have a natural predispicient predisposition to being able to
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 5: move easily as a as a vegetation type.
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: So it's not like a BlackBerry patch.
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 5: No. Now, in fact, that that's one of the things
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 5: that's really hard for a lot of people to understand.
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 5: You know, in the wildlife biology arena, the term early
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 5: successional habitat is like rampant, right. That's actually one of
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 5: the terms that's least helpful to us, because I think
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 5: people have always looked at grasslands as early successional habitat.
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 5: That's true of some types, but what we're talking about
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 5: are grasslands in some cases that have survived hundreds or
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 5: thousands of years. They are old growth ecosystems. So you know,
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 5: a lot of effort to recognize old growth forests almost
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 5: no effort to recognize old growth grasslands. That's what may
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 5: prairie is. And if people could visualize them like that,
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 5: I think that would maybe add to the appreciation that
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 5: people have for them. But it's really hard for people
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 5: to get by. You know, see is just a grassy
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 5: patch or just an old field. It's hard to It's
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 5: not like an old growth forest where's immediately clear to
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 5: all why it's old.
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: Growth yep, yep, oh.
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 3: What is I mean? You're probably gonna get to this,
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 3: But what would restoration look like? Is it cutting down
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 3: trees and replanting stuff or is it because you said
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 3: it won't grow on its own, right, So you've got
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 3: to step in at some point.
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think it's first important to kind
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 5: of understand what type of grassland you're dealing with, right, So,
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 5: like in our work for this entire southeastern geography, we've
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 5: identified one and eighteen major types of grasslands. Those can
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 5: be further subdivided into probably six hundred types, so you're
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 5: you're dealing with a vast number. First of all, you know,
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 5: coastal dune grasslands versus lonely pine savannah grasslands versus tall grass,
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 5: prairie type grasslands versus the meadow in West Virginia. They
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 5: all are going to require different starting points for healing
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 5: and restoring and rebuilding those landscapes. That's kind of the
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 5: first thing. So you know, if we go into let's say,
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 5: an area that used to be prairie in central Kentucky,
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 5: we first want to know is there any remnant potential left?
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 5: Most times it's no. We have a landowner says, yeah,
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 5: I want to build prairie out here. Tell me if
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 5: it's a good site. You know, we don't want to
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 5: necessarily rebuild a prairie that naturally should be in a
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 5: forested landscape. You're fighting a losing battle there. So we
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 5: try to use our knowledge of the local history. We
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 5: try to use our knowledge of biodiversity too, you know,
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 5: constructively and very thoughtfully suggest what should be there to
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 5: begin with. That's all based in science.
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: Real quick, let's say you had this hypothetical landowner, yeah,
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: in central Kentucky on what you Let's say we're in
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: a spot where you know, categorically like you know that
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: this was prairie. Is it possible that the guy comes
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: forward and he's got a thousand acres and you go
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: look and there's none?
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 5: Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, it's just gone. Yeah. We're working
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 5: on a five thousand acre farm right now, just south
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 5: of the Kentucky line. It was founded by George Washington's cousin,
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 5: and it was the second largest tobacco plantation on earth
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 5: in the decades before the Civil War. There's nothing left.
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 5: There's no prairie there are.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: You know that it was prairie and now there's none, right.
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 5: Yeah, And there's there's none left. And so you know,
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 5: the three states. Essentially you can think of is that
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 5: those areas with really fertile, agriculturally productive soils in all
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 5: cases in the East, all of them have been decimated
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 5: by ninety nine point ninety nine percent. That's not hyperbole,
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 5: that's demonstrated loss. The second group is what we're formerly like,
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 5: less fertile, but they were meadowlands. Shennonto a valley of
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 5: northern Virginia comes to mind, the new river settlements that
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 5: I know you and I have read a lot about
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 5: the River Valley on these areas. They were really fertile,
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 5: but not like good for plant and crops. They were
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 5: fertile for grazing lands. Well, those got overgrazed in the
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 5: early periods of American history. Then they got improved by
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 5: planting tall fescue and you know, Scottish grass and all
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 5: these other kinds of invasive species. And today they're like
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 5: ninety nine point nine to nine percent pasture lands dominated
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 5: by Eurasian grasses. And in the third category, like you're
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 5: more rolling, sandy, sort of rocky grasslands with trees, those
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 5: were savannahs. Those really dependent on fire, you know, places
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 5: like tall timbers in South Georgia, for example, you take
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 5: fire out of the equation, you take big animals out
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 5: of the equation, those grow up and become forests.
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: God.
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 5: So the you know, vast swaths of our public lands
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 5: today in the south Piney Woods of East Texas, big
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 5: game lands in central Virginia, into Piedmont big lands in
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 5: the Florida Panhandle that are today densely, densely forested and dry,
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 5: used to be open savannahs. God, and we've lost it.
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 5: But that's actually the greatest potential for recovery. And so
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 5: you know, back to your question, Brodie, is how do
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 5: you how do you rebuild these? Well, again starting with
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 5: knowing what they were, But you know, what you do
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 5: to recover a savannah is very different what you do
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 5: to plant a prairie. So savannahs are probably the trickiest.
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 5: They're the easiest to restore, the most potential right now
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 5: as a nation, to restore millions of acres of savannah
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 5: that are just suppressed under artificially forested conditions. It's not
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 5: gonna be popular because you're gonna have to cut trees.
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 3: That's what I was kind of getting that people don't
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 3: like that, And unfortunately the biggest.
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: It comes from a good place though, Yeah it does.
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 2: It comes from reading low Rex and all that, like
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 2: it comes from a good day.
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 7: Well, to circle back to the earlier point, I mean
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 7: when I growing up, when if someone said they're going
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 7: to restore something, I thought, oh, you're going to plant
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 7: trees there, Just more trees is restoration.
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 2: I found myself trying to explain to someone the other
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 2: day that we're talking about conservation, and I was talking
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 2: about it's so regions specific, like what that means. And
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 2: I'm saying that there's a perception among the general populace
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 2: of well meaning people the conservation means not doing anything.
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And I was trying to explain the concept of
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 2: active land management that if not doing anything doesn't give
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 2: you what in some places, not doing anything doesn't deliver
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 2: what you want.
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 5: Oh absolutely. And in the case of grasslands, which they
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 5: either require most grasslands not all, but most require either
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 5: some combination of big animals bison, elk especially fire. Again,
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 5: not all types. The blue grasses of animals, the blue
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 5: grass of Kentucky, for example, was probably a bison elk
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 5: dependent ecosystem, not a fire dependent ecosystems. Right, yeah, But
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 5: you take those two combinations of factors out and you
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 5: then you know, interject you know, conversion to crop land
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 5: or overgrazing. That's how you lose what we had. But
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 5: if they're done well, they almost always require people to
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 5: be involved in the process. I think that's part of
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 5: the success story is the people who love land and
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 5: conservation and hunting. There's a great opportunity and it's enjoyable.
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 5: I mean, I think about the farms that we work with.
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 5: One of the best is this eleven thousand acre farm
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 5: in Alabama. This farm's nine miles wide and this family
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 5: it's been in their farm since nineteen eighteen. They've never
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 5: needed the federal government or the state government or anybody
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 5: to tell them what to do with it. And they
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 5: just they've made managed it perfectly in one hundred years.
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 5: And it's like stepping back into a time capsule to
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 5: about the eighteen teens in west central Alabama. It's amazing.
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 3: You mentioned her. Besides having a big impact on you know,
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 3: killing all this stuff, do you in order to combat
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 3: all those Eurasian evasive grass species, do you have to
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 3: whatever hold hands with the devil and use that stuff? Also?
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 5: Absolutely? Yeah, And boy, that's a big hot button issue
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 5: for us because you know, right now the technology and
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 5: then know how to take something from a field of johnsngrass,
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 5: which is this nasty invasive from Africa. For us to
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 5: do something better than Johnson grass, we have to nuke
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 5: it like six times, you know, and we don't want
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 5: to do that. But guess what once we take care
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 5: of the Johnson grass problem. Like we're doing a project
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 5: right now with Google, and you know, we are treating
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 5: a site and preparing it, but once we get it
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 5: planted with the most diverse species mix it's ever been
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 5: planted in Central Tennessee, you know, except for coming back
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 5: in and just with our volunteers and spot treating a
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 5: couple of problem areas, we'll never again have to use
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 5: that stuff there. And you know, we've got American bumblebees
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 5: coming back, We've got grasshopper sparrows, got Northern harriers, We've
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 5: got otters coming in from the Creek Bank. So hopefully, Yeah,
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 5: that's a big problem here. I mean, I have some
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 5: really high profile clients that say, no, this is a
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 5: certified organic farm, and we don't want to give up
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 5: on doing it organically. It's just really right now, very
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 5: challenging to do it at scale. You could do it
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 5: at one to two acres, but the how you're going
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 5: to do it at one hundred acres you know, or
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 5: even ten acres is very challenging right now.
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 4: That's to take a lot because you're throwing off the
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 4: balance in the soil as well, so you probably need
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 4: a yeah, a lot of layers deep.
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 5: It's it's very complicated. I mean we've had to turn
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 5: away some you know, high profile clients that said, hey,
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 5: this is this is a certified organic farm. You won't
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 5: be using that stuff on my place, and there's just
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 5: nothing you can do. Then no, And then they actually
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 5: did plant before we came in. They tried to plant,
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 5: and it fails because if you don't take care of
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 5: the invasives all, it takes about three years to get
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 5: on top of it. I know that's a lot, but
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 5: if you can, if you can manage the invas as
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 5: well for three years to make sure that you are
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 5: planting into something that is very you know, receptible to
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 5: all these you know species of grasses and wafflars that
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 5: you need for healthy wildlife habitat. It's just a three
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 5: year quick sacrifice.
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 3: And once it's established, it can kind of hold that
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 3: stuff at bay.
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 5: Yeah, it can. Now, it may depending on the severity infestation.
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 5: You know. Again, what we're trying to do is build
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 5: a team of young men and women who come in
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 5: and we stay on top of it. Right And that's
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 5: the thing is that you can't just build a prairie
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 5: and walk away. That's one of the reasons why it's
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 5: exceptionally hard to get a lot of people on board
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 5: with this idea of eastern grasslands is because it does
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 5: require perpetual management.
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: How many years of management or do you mean perpetual perpetual?
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I think perpetual, you know, and you know it's
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 5: going to need most of them are going to need fire.
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 5: You know, some of them would benefit from grazing, you know.
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 5: So where we have the greatest success is working on
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 5: you know, nothing's guaranteed, but we're right now we're having
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 5: the greatest success. There's probably some of the private lands
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 5: where people are still young and active and they're like,
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 5: my kids are into this, and it's all hands on deck. Otherwise,
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 5: it takes a fairly steep monetary investment to get into
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 5: some of this and right now, we're trying to. What
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 5: we're trying to basically inform the American public on is
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 5: that we can't afford not to because so much of
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 5: our Eastern bid diversity, northern bob white countless songbirds, pollinators,
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 5: you know, they're in free fall collapse in the eastern
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 5: part of the United States. We would argue largely in
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 5: part because we're not doing what we need for our habitat.
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: Do you think that's what that's what is ultimately has
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: happened to the bob Wait Quail.
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 5: One thousand percent? Yeah, And I you know, I enjoyed
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 5: the episode that you guys had on Quail recently. Not
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 5: everyone did well, you know, I enjoyed it, but uh
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 5: and I learned a lot about eye parasites, you know.
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 5: But I was thinking the time the whole time I
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 5: watched it. Well, when you take an ecosystem or a
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 5: collection of open, brushy, grassy ecosystems that offered Quail everything
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 5: they needed, and then you take away ninety five percent
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 5: of that, what the hell do you expect? What do
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 5: you expect? And even even I'm not even just talking
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 5: about pre settlement landscapes. Uh, As a boy growing up
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 5: in southern middle Tennessee. In the eighties and nineties, every
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 5: hillside for miles around was just broomsedge fields, you know,
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 5: golden broomsedge Athropogon virginicas standing through the winter.
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: What is that?
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 5: It's a it's a type of blue stem native blue
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 5: stem grass. It's it's it's shipped for forage. So farmers
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 5: don't really like it, and it's often a sign of
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 5: beat up pastures and stuff. But you know what, Quail,
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 5: Quail loved it. And we had BlackBerry patches everywhere. I mean,
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 5: this is this is not your ideal, pristine, high quality habitat.
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 5: It was very much an agricultural beat up, brushy pasture
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 5: land on somewhat poor farms that I grew up on.
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 5: But the thing is it was everywhere. But then by
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 5: the latest nineties, everybody, everybody in their mama started mowing religiously,
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 5: and oat side started getting sprayed and fence rows started
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 5: getting taken out. And I think what we hear a
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 5: lot of times is I've heard some colleagues push back
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 5: and say, well, yeah, but you know, Quail, they really
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 5: made a big spike in this sort of era of
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 5: land disturbance and clearance, and this agricultural revolution. I think
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 5: that most people saying that don't really have a grasp
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 5: on what we just lost. They're working from this nineteen
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 5: fifties mindset that it was all easternsiduous forest. They got
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 5: opened up into brushy, scrubby great quail habitat. They're not
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 5: even stopping to consider the three point seven million acres
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 5: of prairie lost from central Kentucky, the barons, the Big
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 5: Barons as it was called, that today less than one
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 5: hundredth of a percent remains.
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: And that was quail country.
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 5: That's quail country.
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah. You know what's kind of funny is my buddy
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: Kevin Murphy. I was down hunt with him in Kentucky.
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: Where is He's not? Is he Paduca?
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 5: Yeah?
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 2: I thinks Anyways, he gets permission on an Amish farm,
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 2: gets real exciting because that's where the game's at. And uh,
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 2: he was right, only quail I've ever seen walking around, Kevin.
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: They grew up on quail.
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 2: The only quail I've ever seen walking around with Kevin
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 2: Murphy's One day he got permission on an Amish farm,
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 2: And I'm like, why is that just different?
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: He's like different practices. The fence rose right, but.
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 2: Again highly disturbed, highly disturbed landscape. But he had he
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 2: had said a couple things, hell on predators not cutting
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 2: fence rows, dirtier areas meaning like you know, like big
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 2: areas full old equipment that kind.
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: Of grew up and cover.
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 2: So you start to associate quail today, You associate quail
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 2: with man made ecosystems that somehow give them what they need.
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: But then you got to try to remember that that's
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: not what they came from.
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 2: They use it as refugeia, but it wasn't like the
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 2: main thing. Yeah, the main thing was like grasslands. Otherwise
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 2: whitetail deer.
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 7: You just think they came from tracktomes in suburbia, right.
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: Exactly right, yeah, exactly right, Like you drive around exactly
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: what they need. Yeah, you see a big bucket?
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 5: What did they do before all this?
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: What they do before that neighborhood? Well, you know that
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: big buck lip.
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 5: And in the archaeological record, we've got you know, we've
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 5: got records of quail going back you know, ten thousand
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 5: years ago. In North Alabama. There's a cave called Dust
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 5: Cave near Florence, Alabama, And uh, dust Cave is one
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 5: of these sites where these academics that study these sites
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 5: basically detailed all that the Native Americans were utilizing from
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 5: the landscape that they could that they could find in
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 5: the remains of those cave settlements. Right, They put together
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 5: like a list of one hundred animal species. It's crazy,
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 5: at least dozens. Every kind of duck and waterfowl and
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 5: thing you could imagine being in the backwaters of the
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 5: Tennessee River. They were utilizing it. Every kind of turtle,
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 5: every kind of major fish species. They had fragments of it, rattlesnakes, boom,
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 5: they got it. But they all said quail and greater
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 5: praid chickens, you know, and we see greater prayer chickens,
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 5: which has often thought of as this classic sort of
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 5: Midwestern species. But you know John James Audubon when he
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 5: painted in his original paintings of the species hardin County, Kentucky,
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 5: you know, just south of Louisville, greater prairie chickens, greater
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 5: prayer chickens. And before we end today, I hope it's
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 5: not right now, but when it is, I need to
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 5: tell you one of my favorite quotes. I'll tell you
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 5: right now.
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: Tell me.
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 5: I need you guys close your eyes. Okay, we're gonna
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 5: do a little prairie preaching right here.
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: Okay is the lap? Okay, I'm ready.
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 5: We're gonna ask Wanda to come up and play on
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 5: the Oregon. We're gonna have an ultra call.
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 4: Well, where's the music job?
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 5: It would be difficult to imagine anything more beautiful, For
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 5: as far as the eye could reach, they seemed one vast,
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 5: deep green meadow, adorned with countless numbers of bright flowers
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 5: springing up in all directions. Only a solitary tree now
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 5: and then a scattered post oak were to be seen.
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 5: It was here where the wild strawberries grew in such
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 5: profusion as sustained the horses hoofs a deep red color.
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 5: It was here that I afterwards met with the prairie bird,
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 5: or the barren hen, as we called it, which I
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 5: afterwards met with in such vast numbers on the great
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 5: prairies of Illinois. Ruben Ross eighteen twelve.
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: Hallelujah, Where was he?
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 5: This is right on the Kentucky Tennessee line, just about
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 5: an hour southwest of Bowling Grain, near well my town, Clarksville, Tennessee,
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 5: where we're based.
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: It'd be a sweet deer hunting permission.
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 3: Strawberries got me strawberries, and I butchered that quote a
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 3: little bit.
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 5: The strawberries actually coming to the end.
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 2: But you know, if you you use the term earlier tertiary,
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 2: what's that mean tertiary forest.
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like the third you know, it's you know,
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 5: secondary tertiary, quaternary.
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 2: I've been so much more familiar with the West and
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 2: my adult life. But like, let's say you have a
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 2: let's see you go twenty miles from here in the mountains, okay,
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 2: and something burns. I mean it burns down to the rocks.
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 2: Let's say, like that kind of fire. Right, It's like
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 2: dirt and rocks are done. It's hard to picture, but
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 2: I would say to my kids, like it'll go through
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 2: a bunch of steps, and if nothing happens from people
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 2: or whatever.
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: It'll it's hard to picture, it'll.
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 2: Wind up just like it was when it burnt. It'll,
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 2: you know, a lot of these forests, it will wind
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 2: up being that. It winds up being like it'll be
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 2: big lodge poles and it'll bet those little knitic knick
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 2: berries growing on the ground or whatever.
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean.
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 2: It'll like find its way back to that is that
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 2: does that wind up not being true in the east
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 2: because of non native plants?
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: Meaning if you'd gone in fourteen hundred and you would
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: put round up on a patch of this prairie, you
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: put round up on it till it, put round up
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 1: on it till it, put round up on it till it,
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: and just till it's good and dead and left by
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: fifteen hundred whatever the hell, it probably would have been
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: back to being right.
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, what you're described back to be in prairie. Yeah.
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 5: I mean, well, there's a couple of things there. One
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 5: is you're describing that pioneer process, right, that's primary succession.
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 5: So when you take something back to you know, just
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 5: bear subsoil, right, the things that are first going to
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 5: colonize that are the weeds, you know. So broom sedge,
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 5: which I mentioned earlier, is a type of native grass,
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 5: but it's a weedy native grass. It has a very
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 5: low what we call conservatism value. It's like a one
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 5: or a two on a scale of one to ten.
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 5: Something that's a one, two three can just move right
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 5: on in. It tends to persist for a little while
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 5: as other things then invade and stabilize that ecosystem over time,
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 5: and some natural communities are really adapted to long term stability,
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 5: you know, like meaning like not just complete disruption. You know,
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 5: prairies are pretty stable, you know. But then but most
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 5: of your native prairie grasses are not pining your species.
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 5: That's why don't call them early successional. You know, you
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 5: go open up a new cornfield, you let it go
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 5: follow and let's say you got a prairie next to it.
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 5: You can hope and wish all damn day, but those
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 5: prairie species are not going to move into your cornfield. Yeah,
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 5: they don't do that. They don't behave that way. It
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 5: takes a long time for these natural communities to assemble,
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 5: what's called assembly time. And in the case of doctor
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 5: Joseph Weldman at Texas A and M has published a
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 5: paper a few years ago, twenty fifteen or so that
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 5: talked about old growth grasslands, they require thousands of years
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 5: to assemble. That's god man, nobody's thinking about that stuff.
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the term you're using, is helpful assemble, Yeah,
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 2: because it's not like how you're going to have fire
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 2: weed but then all of a sudden, immediately you're going
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 2: to have all these little lodge pole pine things and
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 2: then pretty soon lodge pole pine is.
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: Gonna win out.
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and you're talking about two things coming together, right,
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 2: which which would be like dwarf wortleberry, lodge pole pine, whatever,
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 2: two things you're talking about.
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: How do you get these perhaps dozens?
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 5: Yeah? Well, and you also were asking about invasive species,
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 5: So yeah, now that's the factory that gets in a way. Right,
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 5: You've got a site that it's going through this early
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 5: phase of disturbance. Invases are going to move in and
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 5: sort of suspend that natural successional pathway, and that complicates
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 5: things for us out there in the habitat restoration world
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 5: a big time. You know. But you're always gonna have weeds.
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 5: You know. Where you would have had this weedy flora
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 5: in the east, let's say three thousand years ago, would
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 5: have been around a Mississippian probably a thousand years ago
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 5: Mississippian Native American village. You know, a lot of cornfields
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 5: and stuff where they were disturbing. You would have expected
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 5: native weeds to be all in and around their settlements. God,
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 5: where you had a bison wallow, you know, three hundred
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 5: years ago, the weeds would have been around that bison wallow,
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 5: But you're more ecosystems that are not, especially when it
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 5: comes to soil disturbance. That's the big thing that they like,
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 5: the weeds like. But your other forms of disturbance, like
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 5: you know, grazing, pressure or fire, they don't have the
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 5: same kind of detrimental resetting effect that like plowing till
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 5: and wallowing half.
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 3: Is there, like in your eyes, is there an acceptable
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 3: like approximation of the original as far as restoration where
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 3: it's like it's not perfect, but it's close enough that
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 3: like it's pretty damn good.
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 5: Yeah. What we do is we look to remnants where
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 5: they exist. You know, I mentioned Long Island earlier, right,
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 5: there was sixty thousand acres of prairie up until about
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 5: nineteen oh five, nineteen ten. That prairie lasted longer than
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 5: the prairies near my home at for Campbell Army Base
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 5: or in Middle Tennessee, Kentucky.
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 1: Did they have that moor hen out there.
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 5: Where they had the what they called the heath hen. Yeah,
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 5: you're right, and it went extinct a decade or two later.
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 5: But today, out of that former sixty thousand acre landscape,
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 5: there's only twenty four acres left adjacent to Nassau Community College.
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 5: What Yeah, So if you want to rebuild a grassland
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 5: on Long Island, one, you got to where you're gonna
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 5: do it right. But then you could go look at that,
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 5: at that last surviving remnant, harvest the seeds from it,
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 5: learn how to then structurally attempt to rebuild it across
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 5: the road. That's the approach we're using all across our region.
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: Now.
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 5: We go look at the last surviving remnants on army
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 5: bases or someone's private ranch or farm, and then those
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 5: we collect seeds from and we work with seed farmers
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 5: like Roundstone Native Seed out of Kentucky or Earned Native
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 5: Seed out of Pennsylvania. We buy the seed from them
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 5: and then we rebuild those ecosystems to the very best
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 5: that we can.
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: And what's like to Brody's point, to put a finer
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: answer on it, like, what.
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 2: Is what's as close as we could get to good enough?
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 2: I think sixty of the species biodiversity? Like like when
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 2: do you go, like, sweet, let's go find a new spot.
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 5: That's a great question. I think I'll give you just
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 5: I'll just give you a real scattershot of what people
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 5: have been doing. Right. So you know in the nineties
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 5: and two thousands, Uh, we have a saying back where
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 5: I'm from, where native warm season grasses, everybody planning the
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 5: native warm season grasses like twenty years ago, and they
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 5: would use three species big blue stem indian grass and
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 5: little blue stem sometimes ate out of fourth switch grass.
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 5: That's not cutting. You're not adding sore three in enough.
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 5: You're not adding what we call groceries on the ground.
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 5: You don't have the seeds, the nectar, the cover, the
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 5: structural diversity needed to support a diverse array of wildlife,
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 5: including polleners and songbirds. You need to hold package. So
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 5: then about ten years ago people were stepping up because
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 5: a big limitation is where you're going to get the seeds.
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 5: If you don't have farmers producing seed, your shit out
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 5: of luck.
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So you know, was that little eleven acre patch
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 1: isn't going.
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 5: To right and you off the Yeah, and you would
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 5: exhaust those patches too, right. They need their seeds to
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 5: rain back down on that site to some extent. So
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 5: you do need these native seed producers, these private companies
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 5: mostly to go and buy the seed from. And so
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 5: ten years ago most people were just barely able to
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 5: get like a mix of like ten fifteen twenty species,
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 5: and it wasn't really that cost effective to be able
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 5: to You couldn't really afford to do a lot more
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 5: even if they did exist. But in the last ten years,
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 5: that's five years, those same companies now are offering to
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 5: three hundred species. So what our project with Google when
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 5: we planted it in twenty twenty, we used seventy seven
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 5: species in our mix. That was the most at that time.
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 5: We just planted an eighty nine species mix on a
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 5: private farm in Tennessee. So you know, we're trying to
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 5: get our mixes up eighty nine. Yeah. Now that's not
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 5: for everybody, you know, but I would say you need
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 5: to be somewhere, but you need to be somewhere in
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 5: a twenty to forty range is a sweet spot.
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 3: Let's say someone has a whatever, one hundred acre farm
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 3: and they've got a twenty acre pasture. It's like ideal
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 3: for a storing. They restore it. Can they then use
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 3: that as a pasture or is it like hands off
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 3: now because the animals might graze somewhere else and then
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 3: bring in in base or it just can't handle the.
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 5: Yeah, you can. It depends on the kind of grassland, right,
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 5: Some are really conducive to being great for grazing. You
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 5: do need to pay attention to like what you put
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 5: in your forage mix. You know, for example, horses. Horses
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 5: can't tolerate certain types of grasses that maybe cattle can.
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 1: For example, Oh, like you might have a toxic plant.
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 5: You could have a toxic plant, or you could have
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 5: a plant with bristles on the spikelets of the grass
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 5: that get into the mouth parts. So those are all
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 5: considerations and we try to be real mindful of those
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 5: kind of things. But now this same farm is called
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 5: the Wessington Plantation north of Nashville. Uh, you know, we're
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 5: putting eighty nine species in that mix, but we're absolutely
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 5: going to be lightly grazing that. That site's really cool.
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 5: It's got a two documented buffalo fords just down in
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 5: the valley and you can still go and see the
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 5: impressions where the bison would across the screen ship. Yeah,
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 5: it's pretty awesome.
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: Hey, I got a tactics question for you. Uh you
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 1: were talking earlier. You use the expression nuke in the ground. Yeah,
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: to get it ready. I appreciate the term we hate
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: to do it. I'm assuming you're talking about glefil Sate.
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 5: Glyfe Sate, and a few others. Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh.
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 2: That winds up you know earlier we're talking about political complexities.
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 1: To return to the beginning of the return to political.
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 2: Back in there, yeah nah, going back in there, springing
• 1:59:59
  Speaker 2: up like we had a Feller sitting in that seat
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 2: one time.
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 1: That is.
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 2: Very adversarial to round up. Right, how do you like,
• 2:00:13
  Speaker 2: is there another.
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 1: Emerging technology that gives you what you need if the
• 2:00:20
  Speaker 1: tide against roundup turns with like the class action lawsuits
• 2:00:25
  Speaker 1: and stuff. If round it becomes like can't get it,
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: can't put it under ground, do you then have to
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: be like, oh shit, this whole thing's over or is
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: there is there a plan B.
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 5: Well, yeah, that that's a great thing to consider, and
• 2:00:41
  Speaker 5: it is something we worry about, you know, because right
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 5: now it's just the knowledge and the the technology and
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 5: the cost right of doing other options. And people could say, well,
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 5: it's about the cost. No, it's not about the cost.
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 5: It's about some of the top experts that I've been
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 5: able to talk to on this issue have not found
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 5: a way to do it. Above one to two acres
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 5: at a time, and if we're tackling one or two
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 5: acres at a time, damn it, we're not doing enough. We
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 5: have to think about scaling this. And you know right
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 5: now we've got six big anchor grasslands that were just
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 5: been funded to begin restoring, and some of these are
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 5: in very bad shape. They're going to require two full
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 5: years of getting on top of the weeds so that
• 2:01:27
  Speaker 5: we can have something better. If we were presented with
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 5: an option where you can't use it, it would completely derail
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 5: conservation efforts for grasslands.
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 2: Now, Randall, do you remember how many acres of dan
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 2: floories do by hand?
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: Oh? I think that was.
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 7: I think that was twenty or forty acres.
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: It was.
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 2: It was like a arid grass landing. But he had
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 2: I think he did spot a nap weed and leafy
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 2: spurge years years any spare moment.
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 7: Yeah, Now, so what is the what is the current
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 7: footprint of your organization look like in terms of on
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 7: the ground being here, done that, or under underway.
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 5: Let me just answer one last thing that Steve brought up,
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 5: which is, uh, we are about to experiment with using
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 5: a flame scorcher to do probably somewhere between five. It's
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 5: a propane fuel flame scuorture, so you know, hot hot,
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 5: and it even for those you know, then that gets
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 5: into like fuel consumption and carbon emissions kind of territory.
• 2:02:31
  Speaker 5: Either either way you go. You don't have a good approach,
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 5: like you could get.
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: That ship so hot that you wind up with an equal.
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 5: Yeah, you'd have to do it several times. I mean,
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 5: otherwise you're looking at solarization. You'd have to put black
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 5: plastic down. Can you imagine trying to cover black plastic
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 5: on one hundred acres? It's just not feasible.
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: And everybody's all mad at plastic.
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 5: Now right, you know, and that's what's going to break down.
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 7: I just can't win these days.
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 5: You could, You could disc the hell out of it,
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 5: but that don't work on a slope where you're subjected,
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 5: subjected people after you. And then the last one that
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 5: comes to mind is, uh, you could graze the hell
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 5: out of it for a long long time with.
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 3: A bunch of goats.
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 6: Yeah and all that.
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 5: Yeah, but then you there's all these come with complexity. Sure,
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 5: the quickest and most efficient is the approach we use,
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 5: but it does have its you know, it comes with
• 2:03:24
  Speaker 5: its drawbacks for sure.
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a complicated world. Complicated, Yeah, the world. It's
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 2: annoying this world.
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 5: Yeah, it's uh. And now, Randal, you asked me what's
• 2:03:35
  Speaker 5: our footprint?
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 7: Yeah, like, how how many acres are you working on? Now?
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 7: How many acres have you worked on? What's how's the
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 7: scaling been?
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 5: Yeah? So the region is twenty four states. We're actively
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 5: working in or contracted before the freeze to work in
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 5: seventeen states. We just this year, with the funding that
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 5: the pro we've already started and what we've been funded
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 5: to do, we would be able to begin our first
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 5: ten thousand acres of restoration. So that's that's a big
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 5: accomplishment for us because just a year and a half
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 5: ago we had sort of reached our first thousand acres.
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 5: I mean, you know, as an organization where you're starting
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 5: from scratch to build what is now a fifty person team,
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 5: you know eight years ago, first no one really knew
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 5: about southeastern grasslands as a thing, so we had to
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 5: educate why they're here. Then you know, we had to
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 5: just build the team organically, you know, administrative assistance, communications,
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 5: team on the ground, representation, fundraising, all that stuff, and
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 5: it took us a good eight years to reach our
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 5: first thousand acres.
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but you're using as inspiration ten acre.
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 2: Patches, that's right, Yeah, which is when you put it
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 2: in that like, when you consider that, that makes it
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 2: more all the more extraordinary.
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 5: And it's so it's so difficult, so to go from
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 5: one thousand acres in twenty twenty three to now ten
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 5: thousand acres. But our ability to do that, you know,
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 5: is currently in limbo with the freeze that we're currently facing.
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 5: We were super excited at the beginning of this year.
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 5: We had just received major funding from a few major
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 5: federal agencies to begin working on forty US National parks
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 5: from Mississippi Vermont to do a few thousand acres of
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 5: much needed eastern grasslands focused representation. And I'm talking about
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 5: some of the most iconic landscapes that we have, like
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 5: Gettysburg Battlefield. People don't realize that southeast Pennsylvania was home
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 5: to grasslands before seventeen twenty. Great Smoking Mountains National Park,
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 5: CAD's Cove. You know, these are places that are really
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 5: well stated. It's Tennessee.
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 1: These are all Republican states. They might still get it, Yeah,
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 1: they might get it.
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 5: You know, they might get it so.
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 2: Battlegrounds now they need to keep them happy. They might
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 2: send some of that money over there, hopefully and assuming
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 2: they're going to use that money and strategically into.
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 5: Like I'm gonna be positive, I'm gonna hope it's gonna
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 5: clear up and go through. But I think if if
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 5: things don't clear up into three to four week five
• 2:06:15
  Speaker 5: six week process, we risk losing ninety percent of our team.
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 3: Is there, seriously, Yeah, And there's no hope to like
• 2:06:23
  Speaker 3: working directly with state agencies, They're just not the mould.
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 5: And we've we've been cultivating what we've built for eight years,
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 5: you know. And I had a farmer I don't want
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 5: to say his name or getting in his business, but
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 5: you know, when we got the agreements in place to
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 5: work with the US National Park Service, you know, and
• 2:06:43
  Speaker 5: these are mostly funded through the Inflation Reduction Act in
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 5: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, you know, those those two two
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 5: and a half to three years of discussions to get
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 5: in place. We signed them all well ahead of the
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 5: past several months, and those have been all obligated.
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 1: Those are obligated, congressionally approved, all.
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 5: Congressionally approved, and so then We spent all of last
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 5: year staffing up to get ready for that. So we
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 5: hired almost twenty five employees in the rounds of going
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 5: through searches and interviews, et cetera. We had then build
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 5: up our partnership base on the East coast, and so
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 5: we reached out to a couple of private companies and said,
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 5: do you guys have the capacity to join us with
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 5: this effort. One major seed producer said, you know, I
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 5: need about two or three weeks to deliberate, as this
• 2:07:34
  Speaker 5: is a big, big opportunity for our small business. You know,
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 5: they employed about forty people. They said, need some time
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 5: to think about it. They came back two or three
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 5: weeks later they said, we're in. We're going to work
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 5: with you to help make sure you got all the
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 5: seeds that you need to be to restore these lands,
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 5: restore this wildlife habitat. And when the freeze took effect,
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 5: it now puts that farmer, that small business, those forty
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 5: people employed in that business at risk. My friend had
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 5: to go out and take a one million dollar business
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 5: loan to be able to have the to staff up
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 5: and have the capacity needed to meet this federally obligated project.
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 5: And I'm not trying to bitch about our situation because again,
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 5: everybody's in the same boat. But you said it when
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 5: it starts coming back and biting people in the ass
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 5: who are just everyday Americans trying to have kids and
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 5: babies and care for their elder aging parents and go
• 2:08:31
  Speaker 5: out and hunt on some good lands. I don't know,
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 5: you know, And so as the leader of our organization
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 5: and the co founder, and I'm deeply worried about with
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 5: the next three weeks. I just talked to a good
• 2:08:43
  Speaker 5: friend of mine and a philanthropist and an advisor. I mean,
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 5: I'm looking at the reality of needing to go raise
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 5: thirty million dollars in six months. I got friends that
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 5: tell me it's physically impossible. I got this mighty man
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 5: attitude that says I can do it. I really don't
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 5: know where to go, but I know I don't want
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 5: to face the reality of letting my ONTUR team go.
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 5: And we were we were standing at the world's highest
• 2:09:07
  Speaker 5: point three and a half weeks ago. It just feels
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 5: like we got our damn teeth kicked in. And so
• 2:09:14
  Speaker 5: many of my friends are going through the same situation.
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 5: M both sides of they this is a bipartisan, you
• 2:09:21
  Speaker 5: know effort.
• 2:09:21
  Speaker 1: Ye. That feels pretty America first to me. It does
• 2:09:25
  Speaker 1: get in the grasslands.
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 5: It does. Yeah, and we're telling them about brother Yeah, man,
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 5: this is America.
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, put that first. Mega make America grassy again.
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 5: Man, I've heard that somebody's mentioned that before.
• 2:09:40
  Speaker 3: Is there any way for like someone on land and
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 3: they wanted to like try to do some of this
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 3: on their own, Like, could they contact you and get advice?
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 3: Or is there like a handbook for so to speak,
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 3: for doing this or is it something that needs to
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 3: be done on such a larger scale that it's not.
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean there's definitely a lot of people doing it,
• 2:10:01
  Speaker 5: you know, on their own properties and stuff. I think
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 5: you guys are going to talk to my good friend
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 5: Kyle Iibarger coming up in a while, you know, with
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 5: a Native habitat project. You know, Kyle does this kind
• 2:10:10
  Speaker 5: of work. You know, he came up about five or
• 2:10:12
  Speaker 5: six years ago, started this kind of work. You know,
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 5: increasingly we're beginning to see a lot more attention. All
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 5: we ever wanted was to give eastern grasslands an equal
• 2:10:23
  Speaker 5: seat at the conservation table. I went to a conference
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 5: recently and I got right with these people. You have
• 2:10:28
  Speaker 5: been right with somebody, Steve, I don't know what means.
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 5: That's when you start throwing out a couple of by gods,
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 5: you know, yeah, yeah. So I went into I went
• 2:10:38
  Speaker 5: into this gathering of about one hundred people, and I said,
• 2:10:41
  Speaker 5: by god, it is pastime for y'all to start having
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 5: a damn conservation conference in the southeastern United States. There
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 5: better not ever be another conservation conference where grasslands don't
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 5: get an equal seat at the damn table. I said,
• 2:10:59
  Speaker 5: you can have forest and you talk about wetlands, and
• 2:11:03
  Speaker 5: you talk about coastal ecosystems, and you talk about climate change.
• 2:11:07
  Speaker 5: Grassland's harbor half the biodiversity of temperate eastern North America,
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 5: and their biodiversity's collapsing. You got to do something about it.
• 2:11:18
  Speaker 5: So I had a by god moment. I do apologize
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 5: forgetting to the here you well, I don't know. I
• 2:11:22
  Speaker 5: think they're hearing. I think we're witnessing the explosion of
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 5: interest in this topic. But we ain't got it far
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 5: enough yet.
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 1: Steve, Well, I'll tell you this is.
• 2:11:34
  Speaker 2: I'm new to the whole conversation, you know, the whole
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 2: thing that I even started thinking about it. I would
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 2: never even become aware of it had I not had
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 2: such an interest in this particular era, in these early
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 2: accounts of people rolling into these spots and describing them
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 2: for the first time. If I had an encounter that
• 2:11:52
  Speaker 2: I would never even have thought of it. I would
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 2: have still tell them everybody about the squirrel running from.
• 2:11:58
  Speaker 1: You know wherever. That's one am I going to the
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: Mississippi never hitting the ground.
• 2:12:01
  Speaker 5: Yeah, the long Hunters are one of my gateways into this.
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 5: But I do need apologize. I just committed blasphemy.
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 1: Oh we can beat it out.
• 2:12:09
  Speaker 7: No, No, I appreciate that people know what was said.
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 4: Yeah, God, well not even that.
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 2: I think you should bleep it out, Phil sleeping out, Yeah,
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 2: bleeping out. Get that I had earlier that loud that
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 2: could be the new bleep we use.
• 2:12:27
  Speaker 7: And my terrible, my terrible guess at the BLM's annual budget.
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 7: I'd like that one stricken from the record as.
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 2: Well anytime randalled Yeah he has something, Regrettably, he says,
• 2:12:37
  Speaker 2: just put his belch in there.
• 2:12:42
  Speaker 1: Hey, I keep meaning asked, what's up with that wedding
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 1: ring you got on there?
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 5: Uh, dude, I'll tell you what probably been married almost
• 2:12:48
  Speaker 5: twenty five years? What yeah, man, Yeah, you got married
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 5: at five.
• 2:12:53
  Speaker 7: Or you're just a age gracefully.
• 2:12:56
  Speaker 5: It's probably twenty two, twenty three. Yeah. My wife and
• 2:12:58
  Speaker 5: I've been together since like two thousand and two. That's
• 2:13:00
  Speaker 5: when we got married. Been together since ninety seven. Yeah,
• 2:13:03
  Speaker 5: long time first girlfriend ever.
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: Good for you.
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 5: My first girlfriend turned into my wife. Yeah.
• 2:13:07
  Speaker 1: You guys got kids?
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 5: We do, got three kids. What's your wife's name, Shauna?
• 2:13:12
  Speaker 5: I got an eighteen year old, sixteen year old, and
• 2:13:14
  Speaker 5: a ten year old named Boom.
• 2:13:16
  Speaker 1: You guys got right to it.
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 5: I'm right, bro.
• 2:13:20
  Speaker 1: See that was a good move. My buddy Clayed the
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 1: same thing, got right to it young.
• 2:13:25
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 1: Like I keep thinking about, you know, like the kind
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 1: of being the kind of old dude where you go
• 2:13:30
  Speaker 1: get your grandkids because your kids don't want to hang
• 2:13:32
  Speaker 1: out anymore. But I'm so far away from that happening, man. Yeah,
• 2:13:38
  Speaker 1: like picking up your grandkids, taking them turt young your back.
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 1: You're right on the cost.
• 2:13:44
  Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, that's true.
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 1: You'll still be all walk around. I'll be rolling up
• 2:13:48
  Speaker 1: in a wheelchair if at all. Huh, give me a
• 2:13:56
  Speaker 1: piece of marriage advice.
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 5: Oh gosh, man, my wife's always right. That's for one. Yeah,
• 2:14:05
  Speaker 5: and uh.
• 2:14:08
  Speaker 1: You're not telling me that she is. You're just saying
• 2:14:10
  Speaker 1: you pretending.
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 5: Yeah, pretending. I tell you I got lucky, Man, I
• 2:14:14
  Speaker 5: got lucky. I'll tell you this. I will say this.
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 5: All credit to you there. You know, there's a reasons
• 2:14:20
  Speaker 5: why the Southeastern Grasslands Institute exists.
• 2:14:23
  Speaker 1: Are we off marriage?
• 2:14:25
  Speaker 5: No? No, no, I was.
• 2:14:27
  Speaker 1: Gonna shout this is this is gonna bring this, gonna bring.
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 5: It coming full circle.
• 2:14:30
  Speaker 1: I'm with you, strong one.
• 2:14:32
  Speaker 5: It wouldn't exist if a philanthropist from New York City
• 2:14:35
  Speaker 5: hadn't discovered us and said, I want you guys to
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 5: dream big, think programmatically, and create something special. But it
• 2:14:43
  Speaker 5: also wouldn't exist without the relentless support of my wife
• 2:14:47
  Speaker 5: because man, this to grow a new organization from nothing
• 2:14:51
  Speaker 5: to a team of fifty soon to be sixty five, man,
• 2:14:55
  Speaker 5: I had to have a strong woman in my life,
• 2:14:57
  Speaker 5: and all credit to her.
• 2:15:00
  Speaker 1: Uh.
• 2:15:01
  Speaker 5: When I had to work sometimes thirty hours straight, got
• 2:15:04
  Speaker 5: no sleep day in, day out, she made sure I
• 2:15:07
  Speaker 5: had what I needed to keep running. And I'm deeply
• 2:15:10
  Speaker 5: appreciative to her for that.
• 2:15:12
  Speaker 1: It's great.
• 2:15:13
  Speaker 2: You know, to quote, my friend told me, what's that
• 2:15:15
  Speaker 2: behind every successful man is a woman who thinks he's
• 2:15:18
  Speaker 2: an idiot, right, right, because.
• 2:15:22
  Speaker 1: It pushes you, keeps you, it keeps you awakening and
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 1: gets you up in the morning.
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 5: That's right.
• 2:15:30
  Speaker 1: I'm not that bad. Come on, I'm going to get to.
• 2:15:33
  Speaker 3: It, Dwayne. Are you guys? Are you guys like a
• 2:15:39
  Speaker 3: nonprofit that people can donate money to.
• 2:15:42
  Speaker 5: Yeah, so you know, we are housed out of a
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 5: university because I've been a professor for eighteen years, right,
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 5: we currently function in sort of two capacities. We function
• 2:15:52
  Speaker 5: as a nonprofit. Part of the university is our fiscal sponsors,
• 2:15:57
  Speaker 5: what we call it. And then we function very much
• 2:15:59
  Speaker 5: like an acidic department out of our our university, and
• 2:16:03
  Speaker 5: that that really gives us a lot of amplitude and flexibility. Uh.
• 2:16:07
  Speaker 5: This year, we are going to be creating our own
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 5: you know, nonprofit still affiliated with the university.
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 1: We'll run like a foundation.
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, right, so well you know, we'll have our
• 2:16:18
  Speaker 5: own board of directors. We're going to be assembling that
• 2:16:20
  Speaker 5: this year. And uh, I think that's gonna help us,
• 2:16:23
  Speaker 5: you know, get to a point where we need to be.
• 2:16:26
  Speaker 5: It's part of our business plan already.
• 2:16:27
  Speaker 1: Anyway, what tell me the university you're out of.
• 2:16:30
  Speaker 5: Yeah, it's called Austin P P E A Y. And
• 2:16:34
  Speaker 5: our motto is let's go pee and uh.
• 2:16:38
  Speaker 3: You guys that you guys are occasionally do well in
• 2:16:41
  Speaker 3: the uh in the march madness.
• 2:16:43
  Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, you know, I know that. Yeah, And a
• 2:16:46
  Speaker 5: lot of people say Pa or Paya or whatever, but
• 2:16:49
  Speaker 5: it's just Austin P named for one of our former
• 2:16:51
  Speaker 5: former governors. Yeah, it's good school.
• 2:16:54
  Speaker 3: So at some point people will be able to jump
• 2:16:57
  Speaker 3: on a website and donate some cash.
• 2:16:59
  Speaker 5: Yeah, if they do check it out at you know,
• 2:17:01
  Speaker 5: our website, Southeastern Grasslands Institute Segrasslands dot org. And of
• 2:17:05
  Speaker 5: course we're on you know, Facebook and substack and you
• 2:17:09
  Speaker 5: know all that stuff.
• 2:17:11
  Speaker 2: And if you're sitting there and you got a big
• 2:17:12
  Speaker 2: property within yourself, the Dwayne South, Yeah, and you're just
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 2: wading through piles of money and you're thinking about it's
• 2:17:23
  Speaker 2: how you want to do something good for your land
• 2:17:25
  Speaker 2: because as Doug Duran says, it's not ours, it's just
• 2:17:30
  Speaker 2: our turn that's right, And you want to do something
• 2:17:33
  Speaker 2: right by your land, Maybe go check these guys out.
• 2:17:35
  Speaker 5: Yeah, and I would like to. There's there's three things
• 2:17:38
  Speaker 5: in particular, I'd love for your listeners to kind of
• 2:17:41
  Speaker 5: help us think through Okay, and you guess too. One
• 2:17:46
  Speaker 5: is we got so much existing public land and private land,
• 2:17:52
  Speaker 5: it just needs to be managed in a better different direction. Right.
• 2:17:56
  Speaker 5: Our organization, through this web portal that's been funded by
• 2:18:00
  Speaker 5: the USDA called Grasslandia, is designed once we roll that
• 2:18:04
  Speaker 5: out next year in partnership with EZRA, is designed to
• 2:18:07
  Speaker 5: be that decision support tool that both public land managers
• 2:18:12
  Speaker 5: and private landowners can come to Grasslandia and you'll better
• 2:18:15
  Speaker 5: go into that world and see maps of where the
• 2:18:17
  Speaker 5: grasses used to be, see the quotes from the early
• 2:18:20
  Speaker 5: historians who follow the Long Hunter's work or Native Americans,
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 5: and have that at your fingertips, along with information the
• 2:18:29
  Speaker 5: photos what they look like, and the information of how
• 2:18:33
  Speaker 5: to restore the seed mixes the fire regime that you need.
• 2:18:37
  Speaker 5: So we need to do a lot better with the
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 5: land we already have. But the second key points one
• 2:18:43
  Speaker 5: is that we have remnants left on the landscape that
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 5: are clinging to existence. They need us to recognize them
• 2:18:51
  Speaker 5: for what they are. They need our help, and that's
• 2:18:54
  Speaker 5: a hard thing to do. But we can't forget those
• 2:18:57
  Speaker 5: remnants of places like May Prairie. They're critical is the
• 2:19:00
  Speaker 5: building blocks to build back from seeds or to protect
• 2:19:04
  Speaker 5: them because they are oftentimes they need to be protected
• 2:19:07
  Speaker 5: to manage because they're the last of their kinds. That's
• 2:19:10
  Speaker 5: the Model's the model. And then the third is I
• 2:19:14
  Speaker 5: fear that people in the East especially have given up
• 2:19:19
  Speaker 5: on this idea of big scale conservation. And we're not
• 2:19:22
  Speaker 5: giving up. So our vision is in my lifetime, is
• 2:19:26
  Speaker 5: to create two dozen large scale grasslands again in the East. Now,
• 2:19:31
  Speaker 5: large scale is relative, you know, that's the eastern version
• 2:19:34
  Speaker 5: of large, right, So there's no reason why we can't
• 2:19:37
  Speaker 5: build an eleven thousand acre prairie in parts of Alabama
• 2:19:41
  Speaker 5: Mississippi that connects to and integrates farms and you know,
• 2:19:49
  Speaker 5: just all the different kinds of efforts grazing, et cetera
• 2:19:51
  Speaker 5: that needs to happen at a large scale. Now, imagine
• 2:19:54
  Speaker 5: if we did big scale grassland here in central North
• 2:19:58
  Speaker 5: Carolina and western Kentucky. I think people have given up
• 2:20:02
  Speaker 5: on that as a possibility. S g I, the Southeastern
• 2:20:05
  Speaker 5: Grasslands Institute. That's that's where we're heading. That's our future,
• 2:20:08
  Speaker 5: that's our next big thing, and what we want is
• 2:20:11
  Speaker 5: to attract people to come join us on that bold,
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 5: big vision. That's the future of Eastern conservation right there.
• 2:20:20
  Speaker 1: Amen, I'm a convert.
• 2:20:23
  Speaker 5: Come on down, and I have been sold to extend
• 2:20:25
  Speaker 5: a hunting invitation to have you guys come on down
• 2:20:31
  Speaker 5: some turkeys. I tell y'all, Yeah, I want you guys
• 2:20:42
  Speaker 5: to come on down and see that bison trail at
• 2:20:44
  Speaker 5: the at the Wessington.
• 2:20:46
  Speaker 1: Farm, and I would love to see that.
• 2:20:47
  Speaker 5: Come down, see the bison traces you can hunt in
• 2:20:50
  Speaker 5: our newly restored grasslands down there. Really got some amazing
• 2:20:53
  Speaker 5: turkey deer. Come on down.
• 2:20:55
  Speaker 1: I love to have you like sounds of that. You
• 2:20:58
  Speaker 1: know what book you might like to read?
• 2:21:00
  Speaker 5: Man, tell me I'm looking for some good ones.
• 2:21:02
  Speaker 1: Have you read The Land Breakers? No, it's from the sixties.
• 2:21:05
  Speaker 2: So the other day I had dinner with my editor
• 2:21:08
  Speaker 2: and my publisher at random House, and I was talking
• 2:21:12
  Speaker 2: about They were asked me if I'd seen something that's
• 2:21:15
  Speaker 2: out right now that everybody's watching, and I was saying,
• 2:21:17
  Speaker 2: I have a hard time with stuff like that because
• 2:21:19
  Speaker 2: I'll see something that wasn't accurate, historically accurate, and I'll
• 2:21:24
  Speaker 2: forget all about what I'm watching and I'll just be
• 2:21:25
  Speaker 2: real annoyed about that, so I can't watch it, yeah,
• 2:21:28
  Speaker 2: which led us to a conversation of who gets it right?
• 2:21:31
  Speaker 1: And I was making the case that I was making.
• 2:21:35
  Speaker 2: The case that Corn McCarthy gets his stuff right like
• 2:21:39
  Speaker 2: other writers, Alan Eckert gets his stuff right. They're just good,
• 2:21:43
  Speaker 2: which led someone to say, have you read The Land
• 2:21:45
  Speaker 2: Breakers from the six nineteen six? I think it was
• 2:21:49
  Speaker 2: from sixty four and I hadn't. But the land Breakers,
• 2:21:53
  Speaker 2: as you can imagine, it's like seventeen eighty right, and
• 2:21:58
  Speaker 2: it's new people moving in to break the land.
• 2:22:05
  Speaker 1: It's so well done.
• 2:22:06
  Speaker 5: It's just kind of like the Liul Lamore is the
• 2:22:08
  Speaker 5: Sacket series. It's sort of similar.
• 2:22:10
  Speaker 1: Dude, I don't want to hack on Louis the Moore.
• 2:22:13
  Speaker 1: How do I put this? I've read Louis, the more
• 2:22:16
  Speaker 1: Dirt is a big Louis. Dirt is always reading Louis.
• 2:22:19
  Speaker 1: The more I know how to say this in general way,
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 1: just go for it.
• 2:22:24
  Speaker 6: No, I mean I think I think.
• 2:22:31
  Speaker 1: No, it is unbelievable. Uh. It is like like how
• 2:22:37
  Speaker 1: that dude knows what he knows?
• 2:22:39
  Speaker 2: And I've gone and checked a little bit to be
• 2:22:41
  Speaker 2: like what, yeah, including this, but I mean, the stuff
• 2:22:46
  Speaker 2: about trees and plants is unbelievable.
• 2:22:48
  Speaker 1: Like he's done a lot of work. He later got
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 1: involved in politics as an advisor.
• 2:22:54
  Speaker 5: I can't wait to read it.
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 1: Man, The land Breakers, I'll read it. Unbelievable. Anyhow, I
• 2:22:58
  Speaker 1: learned in there, and I went and looked, and this
• 2:22:59
  Speaker 1: is true when you're making leather wang for like leather
• 2:23:04
  Speaker 1: stitching groundhog. Whow strongest ship out there? Wow?
• 2:23:10
  Speaker 2: But no, I think it's like, I think you'd really
• 2:23:13
  Speaker 2: appreciate that novel, The land Breakers.
• 2:23:16
  Speaker 5: I'll check it out. Absolutely.
• 2:23:17
  Speaker 1: I got nothing to gain from this. Well, in fact,
• 2:23:23
  Speaker 1: I take that back. You should go check out Meterre's
• 2:23:25
  Speaker 1: American history. Thanks for coming on.
• 2:23:32
  Speaker 5: Hey, it's a tremendous honor to be here. Thank you
• 2:23:34
  Speaker 5: for having me.
• 2:23:36
  Speaker 1: Is how best to come find you? If people want
• 2:23:39
  Speaker 1: to find you, go to where.
• 2:23:42
  Speaker 5: Yeah, check us out on social media and come to
• 2:23:45
  Speaker 5: our website and there's an email.
• 2:23:47
  Speaker 1: Link there, say the website.
• 2:23:49
  Speaker 5: Yeah, se grasslands dot org.
• 2:23:51
  Speaker 1: S grasslands dot org. And on social what are you?
• 2:23:55
  Speaker 5: On Facebook? And Instagram? At Instagram it's se grass land without.
• 2:23:59
  Speaker 1: The yes all right, Yeah, I like grassland.
• 2:24:04
  Speaker 5: Grass landy is gonna be cool man. Yeah, and it's
• 2:24:07
  Speaker 5: gonna be cool for any research that you need for
• 2:24:10
  Speaker 5: your book projects. So man, it's up excellent.
• 2:24:13
  Speaker 2: We're kind of moving westward on our book projects, but
• 2:24:15
  Speaker 2: we'll come back, come back, We'll double back.
• 2:24:16
  Speaker 1: Come back, man, So far west will wind up back east. Yeah, right,
• 2:24:20
  Speaker 1: just this South yea, thanks for coming on.
• 2:24:23
  Speaker 5: Appreciate, appreciate you guys,