Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 558: An Aldo Leopold Blowout Extravaganza
Transcript
- 0:08Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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- 0:32Speaker 1: first light dot com. F I R S T L
- 0:35Speaker 1: I T E dot com. All Right, everybody, it's an
- 0:40Speaker 1: Aldo Leopold blowout. I'm looking around the room.
- 0:46Speaker 2: I don't know about that branding.
- 0:52Speaker 1: When we had babies, we'd say they had a blowout,
- 0:54Speaker 1: if you know, yeah, it would kind of I'll tell them.
- 0:58Speaker 1: We were celebrating my boys for birthday the other night
- 1:00Speaker 1: and I was saying, everybody's kind of sharing a memory,
- 1:03Speaker 1: and I said, the thing I remember about you is
- 1:04Speaker 1: when you're a little baby, looking and seeing how you
- 1:07Speaker 1: had a kind of a brownish yellow streak on your
- 1:11Speaker 1: onesie above your diaper line. Oh yeah, going up the back,
- 1:14Speaker 1: and we called a blowout. And I'd be like, and
- 1:16Speaker 1: I would see that and I'd be like, man, I
- 1:19Speaker 1: was like, that's my memory. Uh two huge, So there's
- 1:26Speaker 1: like a there's like a what's your problem, Doug.
- 1:29Speaker 3: It's just an interesting way of starting.
- 1:31Speaker 1: Bubby bubbly Doug. Durn's here expressing disapproval already, and we're joining.
- 1:37Speaker 1: We're joined by uh doctor Carl Malcolm. Uh. These are
- 1:41Speaker 1: both longtime veterans of the show, joined by Randall is here,
- 1:46Speaker 1: Brody's here, Giannis is here, and we're gonna we're celebrating,
- 1:50Speaker 1: and we're gonna we're gonna explain why it warrants celebration.
- 1:52Speaker 1: We're celebrating two sort of Elder Leopold anniversaries. One is
- 1:59Speaker 1: like a real one. One's a big one because the
- 2:02Speaker 1: centennial one hundred year anniversary of the Heat the Wilderness Area,
- 2:06Speaker 1: which is our first wilderness area.
- 2:07Speaker 3: Yep.
- 2:08Speaker 1: And just to throw it in there, the seventy fifth anniversary,
- 2:14Speaker 1: I don't know, is that legit?
- 2:17Speaker 3: That's legit?
- 2:18Speaker 1: I don't like fifty ten, fifty one hundred is seventy five?
- 2:28Speaker 4: Oh yeah, there celebrates seventy fifth anniversary.
- 2:30Speaker 3: All the time, Diamond, I was gonna say, man, if
- 2:32Speaker 3: you were married seventy five years, you sure as he'll
- 2:35Speaker 3: be celebrating.
- 2:36Speaker 1: Hell yeah, well I'd be celebrating how long I've been alive.
- 2:43Speaker 5: The seventy fifth year is known as the Diamond.
- 2:47Speaker 6: And Diamond July.
- 2:48Speaker 1: All right, so it's legit. I questioned it all along.
- 2:50Speaker 1: I never had any hesitation that we were going to
- 2:52Speaker 1: do a thing because and I'm gonna tell you why.
- 2:58Speaker 1: If you're gonna do a mount rush more of American
- 3:04Speaker 1: conservation leaders, you'd put Roosevelt, You'd put Roosevelt on it.
- 3:14Speaker 1: But Roosevelt was you know, he was he was a
- 3:18Speaker 1: political figure, right, he did things outside of politics. He
- 3:21Speaker 1: was a political figure. He would go on it. And
- 3:26Speaker 1: the second one, you'd have to stop and think about
- 3:29Speaker 1: three and four. The second one would absolutely be Eldo Leopold.
- 3:34Speaker 1: Like like Roosevelt shape so much policy from the buldy pulpit, right,
- 3:42Speaker 1: But Eldo Leopold is sort of the philosophical He's the
- 3:45Speaker 1: philosophical father, the philosophical founder of American conservation in that
- 3:53Speaker 1: he was like he talked about things that are still
- 3:56Speaker 1: relevant now. Roosevelt talked a lot about a lot of
- 3:59Speaker 1: things that became He like this helped solve a lot
- 4:04Speaker 1: of problems that got solved.
- 4:06Speaker 3: Right.
- 4:06Speaker 1: One of his first battles was against market like, you know,
- 4:10Speaker 1: market hunting of waterfowl, market hunting of uh feathered birds,
- 4:16Speaker 1: shore birds, right, like, real things that were real issues,
- 4:20Speaker 1: and they solved them. And then Aldo Leopold came along
- 4:23Speaker 1: and talked about He framed up all the discussions we're
- 4:27Speaker 1: still having today.
- 4:30Speaker 3: I would argue, I would agree with you completely.
- 4:33Speaker 1: Here's some Eldo Leopold. We're gonna then we're gonna do
- 4:37Speaker 1: our normal thing and talk about a couple of extra things.
- 4:38Speaker 1: But here's some Eldo Leopold quotes. Unfortunately, these are ranked
- 4:42Speaker 1: by likes. I'm on Goodreads, which I like that. I
- 4:50Speaker 1: like the good Reads that will compile quotes from authors.
- 4:53Speaker 1: You'll find that all of these I believe all of
- 4:56Speaker 1: these quotes are from Oh we never explained anniversary of
- 5:00Speaker 1: the publication of what I would regard to be the
- 5:03Speaker 1: most influential piece of conservation writing ever in that it
- 5:09Speaker 1: still maintains relevance today. Yeah, when you read, Just to
- 5:11Speaker 1: keep this Roosevelt Leopold thing set up. Now, No, Leopold
- 5:15Speaker 1: was a private person. Leopold was a forester, he was
- 5:18Speaker 1: a land manager, he was an agency person.
- 5:22Speaker 3: You know.
- 5:22Speaker 1: Roosevelt was a governor in a president. So we're comparing
- 5:25Speaker 1: apples and oranges. But if you said to people, name
- 5:27Speaker 1: a great conservations, they're going to go Roosevelt. Be like,
- 5:30Speaker 1: name a second one, They're going to go Elo, Leopold,
- 5:32Speaker 1: And then three they're gonna be like, I don't know, uh,
- 5:35Speaker 1: Desert Solitaire. You know, I don't know where they go
- 5:38Speaker 1: with number three. The general public. But his book A
- 5:43Speaker 1: Sand County Almanac, which is a collection of his writing,
- 5:47Speaker 1: maintains relevant today. When you go read Roosevelt today, you're
- 5:50Speaker 1: reading Roosevelt kind of like like a hobby historian. You know,
- 5:55Speaker 1: you're sort of reading it to find out about a
- 5:57Speaker 1: long time ago. When you read a San Connie Almanac,
- 6:02Speaker 1: you're you're reading it and finding out. You're reading it
- 6:04Speaker 1: and being like, holy, this could have been written yesterday
- 6:09Speaker 1: and it would still be relevant.
- 6:11Speaker 3: Wow, Steve, I am really happy to hear you read
- 6:15Speaker 3: all this. So you guys, I'm not reading this. I
- 6:17Speaker 3: mean say all this.
- 6:18Speaker 1: That well, you know, I was before we started recording.
- 6:21Speaker 1: I was pointing out that he was fathered by first cousins,
- 6:25Speaker 1: and I was pointing out that he would take insanely
- 6:29Speaker 1: long shots with the trad bow at deer just to
- 6:31Speaker 1: kind of see what would happen. So Doug thought I
- 6:34Speaker 1: was going to sit here and hack.
- 6:35Speaker 3: On different.
- 6:37Speaker 4: You're not confusing that with some with like Art Young
- 6:41Speaker 4: in Saxon.
- 6:42Speaker 1: Poell, Leopold would take some hail Mary's. I think he
- 6:45Speaker 1: had basically to see what would happen.
- 6:47Speaker 4: You think what?
- 6:48Speaker 3: I think he admitted to it. I think he talked
- 6:49Speaker 3: about it.
- 6:50Speaker 1: He'd take his recurve and cockback and you know, hold
- 6:54Speaker 1: like eight deer bodies high and take a seventy five
- 6:56Speaker 1: yard winger.
- 6:57Speaker 4: Oh well, everybody in the room, raise your hand. I
- 7:00Speaker 4: have not done that. Yeah, you've never launched one at
- 7:04Speaker 4: a deer with a recurve.
- 7:06Speaker 1: What would have happened?
- 7:08Speaker 3: No?
- 7:08Speaker 2: Never?
- 7:10Speaker 1: And Phil has it either.
- 7:11Speaker 3: Well, I don't bow hunt, so I never really had
- 7:14Speaker 3: that opportunity.
- 7:14Speaker 1: Here's some quotes, and again these are ranked accurse. These
- 7:18Speaker 1: are These are listed according to rankings one and seventy three.
- 7:24Speaker 1: People who frequent goodreads dot Com like this one. I
- 7:30Speaker 1: am glad I will not be young in a future
- 7:35Speaker 1: without wilderness. I'm picking here. Here's another one that's that's so,
- 7:43Speaker 1: then that's his number one. Then the next one down
- 7:46Speaker 1: the line has a thousand less likes. That's too complicated
- 7:50Speaker 1: for people. Here's a famous one. There are two spiritual
- 7:56Speaker 1: dangers and not owning a farm. One is the day
- 8:00Speaker 1: of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the
- 8:04Speaker 1: other that heat comes from the furnace. There's another one.
- 8:10Speaker 1: Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our
- 8:15Speaker 1: Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we we
- 8:22Speaker 1: abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging
- 8:26Speaker 1: to us. When we see land as a community to
- 8:31Speaker 1: which we belong, we may begin to use it with
- 8:34Speaker 1: love and respect. Here's another one. I would apply this
- 8:40Speaker 1: to someone taking a Hail Mary with his beau. He says,
- 8:43Speaker 1: ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one
- 8:47Speaker 1: else is watching, even when doing the wrong thing is
- 8:52Speaker 1: legal to those of void of imagination. A blank place
- 9:02Speaker 1: on the map is a useless waste to others the
- 9:06Speaker 1: most valuable part.
- 9:10Speaker 4: I feel like the first quote that you read had
- 9:13Speaker 4: more to it, Like isn't there a follow up to
- 9:16Speaker 4: that that has something about like what good is it
- 9:18Speaker 4: without like places on a map to explore.
- 9:22Speaker 1: Weak you have to take it up with good. Yeah,
- 9:26Speaker 1: you're right, you have to take it up with good.
- 9:27Speaker 4: Reads, right, But that's a part of that same quote,
- 9:29Speaker 4: isn't it.
- 9:31Speaker 7: There's none that he refers to the value of wilderness
- 9:34Speaker 7: and wildness in a number of these quotes.
- 9:35Speaker 1: But that's what makes I mean, we're all clear that
- 9:38Speaker 1: what makes a quote is you've pulled it, like Twain
- 9:42Speaker 1: didn't publish published one sentences, but he published bugs. Then
- 9:49Speaker 1: a feller goes in there and pulls out the quotes
- 9:52Speaker 1: like it's all contextual. It's surrounded by a whole damn book.
- 9:56Speaker 7: But Yanni's mentioning there are some quotes that are in
- 9:59Speaker 7: a similar vein, and what he's referencing is a slight
- 10:03Speaker 7: tweak on the quote that you shared. That's also from Leopold,
- 10:06Speaker 7: and in a similar kind of line of thought. He
- 10:09Speaker 7: talks about the idea of what avails our forty freedoms
- 10:12Speaker 7: without a young place, without a wild place to be
- 10:15Speaker 7: young in.
- 10:16Speaker 1: That's right, Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken
- 10:22Speaker 1: for granted until progress began to do away with them.
- 10:28Speaker 1: Now we face the question whether a still higher standard
- 10:31Speaker 1: of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild
- 10:36Speaker 1: and free for us of the minority, the opportunity to
- 10:41Speaker 1: see geese is more important than television. Here's one on
- 10:49Speaker 1: land management cease being intimidated by the argument that a
- 10:54Speaker 1: right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits,
- 11:00Speaker 1: or that a wrong action is to be condoned because
- 11:05Speaker 1: it pays.
- 11:10Speaker 3: Here's one that I like farmer as a conservationist. When
- 11:13Speaker 3: land does well for its owner and the owner does
- 11:16Speaker 3: well by his land, when both end up better by
- 11:22Speaker 3: reason of their partnership, we have conservation.
- 11:25Speaker 1: We hit to hit me with that one again.
- 11:27Speaker 3: When land does well for its owner and the owner
- 11:30Speaker 3: does well by his land, when both end up better
- 11:34Speaker 3: by reason of their partnership, we have conservation.
- 11:38Speaker 1: There you go. That's that's that's very close to it.
- 11:41Speaker 1: Doug during quote Well, indeed, well, no, that's a Doug
- 11:47Speaker 1: during great You will say, I see what the farmer
- 11:52Speaker 1: gets out of it. I see what the hunter gets
- 11:54Speaker 1: out of it, But what does the land get out
- 11:56Speaker 1: of it?
- 11:57Speaker 3: Yeah? Your memory never ceases to amaze me.
- 12:03Speaker 1: Doug Durn Also another favorite quote of mind. Doug Durn said,
- 12:07Speaker 1: when when he was conjuring other people, if the kids
- 12:11Speaker 1: are gonna hunt, I'm gonna hunt.
- 12:17Speaker 4: In reference to youth season.
- 12:19Speaker 1: In reference to when when they put it to the concert,
- 12:22Speaker 1: when they put it to the Wisconsin when they put
- 12:24Speaker 1: it to Wisconsin voters, do you support expanding youth turkey
- 12:30Speaker 1: from two days to four days? And simultaneously, do you
- 12:35Speaker 1: support expanding youth deer season from two days to four days?
- 12:41Speaker 1: They voted like a slim majority in favor of expanding
- 12:46Speaker 1: youth Turkey, which I'm going to hire lobbyists to work on,
- 12:51Speaker 1: and they had a minority in support of expanding youth deer.
- 12:57Speaker 1: And Doug and if this process plays out of a
- 12:59Speaker 1: gold with these meetings, and Doug was imagining going to
- 13:03Speaker 1: the meeting and was imagining the man who would stand
- 13:06Speaker 1: up and beat the table and say, if the kids.
- 13:09Speaker 3: Are going on? She did not have to imagine that guy.
- 13:13Speaker 1: Many of those guys exist that. Let me tell you
- 13:19Speaker 1: who likes youth season. Let's tell you who likes it
- 13:22Speaker 1: people with.
- 13:23Speaker 4: Kids, well, and kids like under sixteen years of age?
- 13:27Speaker 1: Yeah, And who doesn't like youth season?
- 13:30Speaker 5: People without kids.
- 13:31Speaker 1: Sure, there's there's an area of that. There's like an
- 13:35Speaker 1: area of wildlife law. And I was trying to explain this.
- 13:39Speaker 1: We're working on our next Close Calls edition, which has
- 13:44Speaker 1: these sort of like transformative stories in it. But anyways,
- 13:46Speaker 1: there's there's an area of wildlife law. I'm a juxtaposed
- 13:53Speaker 1: two types of wildlife law. There's an area there's an
- 13:55Speaker 1: area of wildlife law where there's sort of a moral
- 13:57Speaker 1: basis right where you'll look at certain questions and it'll
- 14:03Speaker 1: be like, well, clearly that's the right thing, like shooting
- 14:07Speaker 1: a sow with cubs or something like that. Sure like
- 14:10Speaker 1: it's like that. There's there's things that almost have like
- 14:13Speaker 1: biblical reference about like like like waste okay, like and
- 14:18Speaker 1: and uh like to take the most classic example. You know,
- 14:21Speaker 1: it's generally been understood for a long time, like murdering
- 14:25Speaker 1: your brethren is bad right in the Ten Commandments. It's
- 14:30Speaker 1: generally you find this prohibition around the world. We now
- 14:33Speaker 1: have very specific laws about it. But you look and
- 14:36Speaker 1: be like, oh, yeah, of course wildlife law I think
- 14:39Speaker 1: has some of that. You know, the people would look
- 14:43Speaker 1: and be like, oh, yeah, that's got to be illegal.
- 14:45Speaker 1: You just went shot a whole herd of elk and
- 14:47Speaker 1: has left them laying out the rot in the sun.
- 14:49Speaker 1: That ought to be illegal. Seems like that be illegal.
- 14:51Speaker 1: But then you have areas of wildlife law that are Uh,
- 14:55Speaker 1: wind up, there's no moral background, and it winds up
- 14:59Speaker 1: being argued by who stands to gain the most. I'll
- 15:01Speaker 1: point out that I think I feel like the corner
- 15:03Speaker 1: crossing debate sits outside of morality. People that want to
- 15:07Speaker 1: be able to cross corners are people that want to
- 15:09Speaker 1: go into those areas. People that don't want you to
- 15:11Speaker 1: be able to cross corners are people that don't want
- 15:13Speaker 1: you going into those areas. There's no like, there's no
- 15:15Speaker 1: one coming and saying like I have the moral high ground.
- 15:20Speaker 1: And uh was talking about oh the youth season thing. Yeah,
- 15:24Speaker 1: there's no like more, you know what I mean. It's
- 15:27Speaker 1: like everybody's just jockeying for their own interests. Man on
- 15:31Speaker 1: a bashing damn kids an opportunity away from me. Well,
- 15:34Speaker 1: we had a guy right in. Were you here for
- 15:36Speaker 1: that guy that wrote in why He's like sure? Pat
- 15:39Speaker 1: Dirkin writes an article about it's the same old story
- 15:43Speaker 1: you see all the time, Like during COVID is all
- 15:45Speaker 1: the articles like oh these people hunting fishing. Now there's
- 15:48Speaker 1: all these articles. No one's going hunting and fishing. Wisconsin's
- 15:51Speaker 1: losing all their deer hunters. It's like and you're looking
- 15:53Speaker 1: and be like, okay, like a demonstrable decline, but you
- 15:57Speaker 1: know it's the same up down that has always existed. Anyways.
- 16:02Speaker 1: The guy writes in well, I'll tell you and he
- 16:04Speaker 1: writes it a piss He signs it a pissed off
- 16:07Speaker 1: Michigan hunter. He wrote in being like, I'll tell you
- 16:10Speaker 1: why no one's hunting deer anymore because kids seasons, kids
- 16:17Speaker 1: kill all the big bucks. And he calls it what
- 16:19Speaker 1: was his term for, like the the big hunt. Yeah,
- 16:23Speaker 1: before the big hunt, the big hunt, like the big
- 16:26Speaker 1: hunt in his mind, his general firearm. And he says,
- 16:29Speaker 1: by the time the big hunt happens, they're all dead.
- 16:32Speaker 1: Everything's dead.
- 16:34Speaker 3: Now.
- 16:35Speaker 1: You got this season and you got that season.
- 16:38Speaker 5: And then the kid say it's not the kids shooting them,
- 16:41Speaker 5: it's the kid's dad shooting.
- 16:42Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh.
- 16:43Speaker 3: Yeah, because there's a kid there in diapers with his picture,
- 16:46Speaker 3: you know, six or five creed more or something in
- 16:48Speaker 3: a big giant buck.
- 16:49Speaker 1: And yeah, and like in say anthing with Doug, like
- 16:51Speaker 1: if the kids are gonna hunt, I'm gonna hunt, and
- 16:53Speaker 1: you season, here's my take. I'm gonna hunt. So you
- 16:57Speaker 1: kids start un well, this is nothing new to your ass.
- 17:05Speaker 1: Speaking the cup of extra days.
- 17:07Speaker 3: And it is fun going out with kids.
- 17:09Speaker 1: Man, I love it. But yeah, I'm like, I'm I'm
- 17:14Speaker 1: I'm not like, Well, let me know when you want
- 17:15Speaker 1: to wake up. I'm up. Everybody else, Get up, get up,
- 17:20Speaker 1: get up, away back. Okay, so oh, a quick warning.
- 17:26Speaker 1: But guy wrote in two things. If don't go to
- 17:30Speaker 1: audible dot com and buy a Sand County Almanac, here's
- 17:34Speaker 1: a problem you guys at the Elder Leopold Foundation need
- 17:36Speaker 1: to figure out. Hmm, I just downloaded. This is a
- 17:40Speaker 1: guy writing it. I just downloaded the only copy of
- 17:44Speaker 1: a Sand County Almanac available on audible. He'd already read
- 17:48Speaker 1: his hard copy several times. Okay, he says, imagine my
- 17:53Speaker 1: discuss when I realized someone has added what amounts to
- 17:56Speaker 1: a politically charged high school essay as an introduction, as
- 18:00Speaker 1: well as removing the whole second portion of the book.
- 18:04Speaker 1: Nowhere in the description does it say that it's an
- 18:06Speaker 1: abridged version, with a I haven't listened to it and
- 18:12Speaker 1: apparently questionable the introduction.
- 18:14Speaker 2: The introduction is part of the book that's currently published.
- 18:19Speaker 2: It's written by a Pulitzer Prize winning essay asked Barbara Kingsoliver. Right, Yeah,
- 18:24Speaker 2: that's what's Yeah, there's a couple of people that are
- 18:27Speaker 2: upset about the politics of the intro, which I think
- 18:30Speaker 2: is actually.
- 18:30Speaker 1: I thought that was highly I thought that that choice
- 18:33Speaker 1: of an intro was highly questionable.
- 18:35Speaker 2: It's not a bad intro.
- 18:37Speaker 1: I've read her work. Yeah, I just really felt that
- 18:40Speaker 1: that was a bad move. Yeah, I mean I could.
- 18:43Speaker 2: See what it's one of those things and not to interrupt,
- 18:45Speaker 2: but it's one of those things where like she mentions
- 18:47Speaker 2: the fact that people disagree about climate change and this
- 18:52Speaker 2: and that, but she takes a pretty even handed approach
- 18:54Speaker 2: to it.
- 18:55Speaker 3: I don't know what.
- 18:56Speaker 2: That's not how I would have had right the intro.
- 18:58Speaker 2: Oh No, I mean it's an interesting choice for sure. Nonetheless,
- 19:02Speaker 2: I've seen several people. I looked at the comments on
- 19:04Speaker 2: Audible after reading this email, and there's a lot of
- 19:07Speaker 2: people that claim it's a high school book report.
- 19:10Speaker 1: It's just like, eh, but as a part of the
- 19:14Speaker 1: book missing.
- 19:15Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems to be. There's like ten or so
- 19:17Speaker 2: people that make the same claim.
- 19:19Speaker 3: So the sketches here and there part they say.
- 19:23Speaker 2: It's like a chunk out of the middle.
- 19:26Speaker 3: Well, that would be the middle it's really three parts. Yeah,
- 19:29Speaker 3: Carl and I of course have old copyright, don't have
- 19:32Speaker 3: the intro. Yeah, his is signed by one of the
- 19:35Speaker 3: Leopold kids.
- 19:36Speaker 1: Okay, so anyways, you guys got to figure that out.
- 19:39Speaker 1: Yeah at theold Yeah, once you get someone to read
- 19:43Speaker 1: the sum bitch, do like a proper version. Put it
- 19:48Speaker 1: on audible.
- 19:50Speaker 3: I'll work on that, please. I have an idea. You know,
- 19:52Speaker 3: there are no recordings of Leopold's voice.
- 19:56Speaker 1: Hmm, there aren't. So you can't do an ai him.
- 19:58Speaker 3: No, you can't him. But I listened to both Kurt
- 20:02Speaker 3: Mighty and Stan Temple, who held Leopold's position at the
- 20:06Speaker 3: University of Wisconsin, talk about Leopold, and if you close
- 20:09Speaker 3: your eyes when Stan Temple's talking, you kind of feel
- 20:13Speaker 3: like you're in the presence.
- 20:14Speaker 1: He'd be a good guy to read it.
- 20:15Speaker 3: I think he would be.
- 20:16Speaker 4: I would agree with that. The current We also bought
- 20:19Speaker 4: it on audible and the narration was not great.
- 20:22Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I also picked that up from the comments.
- 20:26Speaker 2: I didn't go so far as to buy it, so.
- 20:28Speaker 1: I can't really speak to that, but understood you put
- 20:30Speaker 1: on your company card, Randall.
- 20:32Speaker 2: I don't have a company card.
- 20:34Speaker 1: Maybe Chili can put it on his company card for you. Okay,
- 20:39Speaker 1: we have Okay. A long time ago, we did a
- 20:42Speaker 1: special drop episode. I think it was called we had
- 20:46Speaker 1: when Renee Cross came out.
- 20:49Speaker 8: The title of that was, come on, Phil, good Lord,
- 21:01Speaker 8: where did you come from?
- 21:02Speaker 1: Yeah, Karin's sitting in here, Karen's on the floor.
- 21:09Speaker 2: Title for this episode.
- 21:12Speaker 1: Back in the old days, that would have been the
- 21:13Speaker 1: title on the floor. Back in the old days, when
- 21:16Speaker 1: we had titles that told you nothing, what was it called?
- 21:21Speaker 4: Are you bitter about them?
- 21:23Speaker 9: Yeah?
- 21:24Speaker 1: I'm bitter about it. When we had to switch when
- 21:27Speaker 1: you switch titlings so people could tell by the title
- 21:29Speaker 1: what it might be about. Yeah, I remember we had
- 21:32Speaker 1: an episode of call it an Object in Its Shadows.
- 21:41Speaker 1: You look at it like, what the hell's that supposed
- 21:42Speaker 1: to be about?
- 21:43Speaker 3: Listen to that?
- 21:44Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like an easter egg.
- 21:46Speaker 9: Hut.
- 21:46Speaker 1: You got to figure out where they got the title from. Yeah,
- 21:49Speaker 1: I explained it at the very end. I explained with the
- 21:54Speaker 1: concept of an object in its shadow. Now that I
- 21:58Speaker 1: brought it up, I'll just point out it means like
- 22:02Speaker 1: I'll splay a smart time it takes too long from
- 22:06Speaker 1: bass to blue Water yeah, Okay. A while back, me
- 22:10Speaker 1: and Janni had in we did a appis. We did
- 22:12Speaker 1: an extra drop, so a Friday drop? Did it? A
- 22:14Speaker 1: Friday drop?
- 22:15Speaker 3: Krinn?
- 22:17Speaker 5: Yeah, Thursday?
- 22:18Speaker 1: Whatever the hell? An extra drop called from bassa Blue Water.
- 22:21Speaker 1: We had in a guest Renee Cross. As we explained
- 22:25Speaker 1: back then, I became friends. Renee Cross owned Cypress Cove
- 22:29Speaker 1: Marina in Venice, Louisiana. There's kind of like two marinas.
- 22:34Speaker 1: There's a big, huge marina. I don't mean to knock it,
- 22:38Speaker 1: but it's like very like a very touristy marina of
- 22:40Speaker 1: the Venice Marina, and then there's Cypress Cove Marine, which
- 22:42Speaker 1: is a smaller kind of I don't know, more intimate marina.
- 22:48Speaker 1: We would I've been down there. I've been going down
- 22:49Speaker 1: there to spearfish last few years, and we hunted ducks
- 22:52Speaker 1: down there and did some filming down there. The owner
- 22:57Speaker 1: of the marina came up one day and introduced himself
- 22:59Speaker 1: to me while we're cleaning fish, and that was Renee Cross.
- 23:02Speaker 1: And as we explained the special drop, I just became
- 23:04Speaker 1: friendly with Renee Cross and we started coming up with
- 23:07Speaker 1: this idea of doing a sort of a like a
- 23:10Speaker 1: takeover of Cypress Coved Marina in October, and we have
- 23:15Speaker 1: a thing called Meat Eater Experiences, and so we lined up.
- 23:18Speaker 1: So we're starting out with we lined up two mediatter experiences.
- 23:21Speaker 1: One is a waterfowl hunting Kansas in cooperation with foul Planes.
- 23:27Speaker 1: So we're gonna have like Yanni's gonna for the times
- 23:32Speaker 1: we're there, Yani's gonna be there. I'm gonna hunt there
- 23:35Speaker 1: for a while. A couple of turns, Brent Reeves, Clay
- 23:40Speaker 1: cal I don't know who all the hell is gonna
- 23:42Speaker 1: be down there.
- 23:42Speaker 2: There's one more.
- 23:43Speaker 4: You got five out of six. I can't think who
- 23:46Speaker 4: the six is.
- 23:46Speaker 1: But bunch of people going there at foul planes. Now
- 23:49Speaker 1: foul planes, they're already a waterfowl guide. We're taking time
- 23:54Speaker 1: there to kind of make our own curriculum at foul planes. Okay,
- 23:58Speaker 1: so you'll still go. And how many days of hunting?
- 24:01Speaker 1: Is it? Three days of hunting?
- 24:02Speaker 9: Yes?
- 24:03Speaker 1: Yeah, three days of hunting because you can only transport
- 24:05Speaker 1: three day limited birds. So they kind of do waterfowl
- 24:08Speaker 1: hunts three days because you can have You could kill
- 24:10Speaker 1: limits all three days and still go home. So what
- 24:13Speaker 1: we're gonna do is the way it normally works is
- 24:16Speaker 1: like you know, you go there, people clean your birds whatever,
- 24:19Speaker 1: out of sight, you go have a cocktail. We're gonna
- 24:21Speaker 1: kind of change the format up. We're gonna we're gonna
- 24:23Speaker 1: hunt together, but we're also gonna do a lot of
- 24:25Speaker 1: stuff around cleaning, food prep, nighttime entertainment, do trivia stuff,
- 24:30Speaker 1: do some different lessons on waterfowl and lectures on waterfowl
- 24:36Speaker 1: and make it a more educational experience and just more
- 24:40Speaker 1: hanging out and really fill it out. So we have
- 24:42Speaker 1: that with foul planes, and those are all happening in
- 24:44Speaker 1: December and January. Okay, there's still some spots left there,
- 24:48Speaker 1: and that's hunting waterfowl at Kansas. Hunting waterfowl in Kansas
- 24:53Speaker 1: with foul planes with the Meat Eater Crew. Cypress Coved
- 24:57Speaker 1: Marina trip is in October. Now. The reason we went
- 25:01Speaker 1: with October is because October is kind of like an
- 25:03Speaker 1: unsung time down there where the fishing is absolutely spectacular,
- 25:07Speaker 1: but the sort of summer rush is laying off, and
- 25:10Speaker 1: we're taking over the whole Cypress Cove Marina.
- 25:13Speaker 4: From October fourth to the sixteen.
- 25:15Speaker 1: October four to sixteen, So we're gonna come down and fish.
- 25:20Speaker 1: We got a lot of guys from the crew coming
- 25:22Speaker 1: down to fish. We got a lot of friends coming
- 25:23Speaker 1: down to fish. We're gonna go down and fish, and
- 25:26Speaker 1: you can go in and book trips, so it's all
- 25:31Speaker 1: like when you book the trips, it's all your lodging.
- 25:34Speaker 1: We have a ton of guides lined up because there's
- 25:37Speaker 1: a lot of guides that fish out of Cypress Cove Marina,
- 25:39Speaker 1: that run their own businesses out of Cypress Clost Marina.
- 25:41Speaker 1: We took those guides and booked those guides for the
- 25:44Speaker 1: time that we're there. And the cool thing about Cypress
- 25:48Speaker 1: Cove Marina is you're sitting in Venice, Louisiana, so you
- 25:50Speaker 1: have an amazing inshore fishery and then right there the
- 25:55Speaker 1: continental shelf is twenty miles away. So when you're sitting
- 25:58Speaker 1: there at Cypress Cove Marina, this is no joke. You've
- 25:59Speaker 1: got guys launching bass boats to go fish largemouth bass.
- 26:04Speaker 1: They're going upriver and like literally right next to them
- 26:08Speaker 1: are people gearing up to go out for bluefin, tuna
- 26:11Speaker 1: and mahi. It's like that crunch together. You got guys
- 26:15Speaker 1: fishing bluefish, calffish. You got guys doing tons of redfish,
- 26:20Speaker 1: speckled sea trout. We go down there for red snapper,
- 26:24Speaker 1: we go down there for what they down there called
- 26:27Speaker 1: lemon fish or kobia. It's just like it is the
- 26:33Speaker 1: greatest fishing I would say globally of everywhere I've been,
- 26:38Speaker 1: it is the greatest fishing spot I've ever been to.
- 26:42Speaker 1: It's what I mean, like I love Alaska, it's just better.
- 26:44Speaker 1: I mean, like the fishing is just better than Alaska.
- 26:46Speaker 1: There's so much more to do. So we have when
- 26:50Speaker 1: Renee Cross came on. When Renee Cross came on and
- 26:54Speaker 1: talked about it, we weren't like the seats weren't We
- 26:57Speaker 1: hadn't opened availability to book yet. It was just kind
- 27:00Speaker 1: of a precursor to the whole thing. But it's open
- 27:03Speaker 1: to booking to go and get trips to come to
- 27:06Speaker 1: Cypress Cove. Fish with us, clean fish with us, eat
- 27:10Speaker 1: cage and food at night. It's gonna be a great time.
- 27:12Speaker 1: And like you're doing like guided fishing, so you're gonna do.
- 27:16Speaker 1: You got three fish days you're gonna do in short
- 27:18Speaker 1: and off shore. We'll be swapping out and jumping on
- 27:21Speaker 1: the different boats. We'll be hanging out at night we'll
- 27:23Speaker 1: be cleaning fish together. We'll get all your fish packaged
- 27:26Speaker 1: up so you bring your fish home recipe ready. They'll
- 27:29Speaker 1: be educational, be a ton of fun. Booking is available.
- 27:33Speaker 4: Now, are you going to tell a couple of good
- 27:36Speaker 4: stories while we're hanging out after cleaning fish.
- 27:38Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell some great stories, and I'll be able
- 27:41Speaker 1: to tell the stories I would never tell on air.
- 27:44Speaker 1: Bumped Doug. Doug teld me a really good story I
- 27:49Speaker 1: can't tell on Oh. I got a number of stories
- 27:51Speaker 1: I've heard from Doug that I can't tell on air.
- 27:52Speaker 1: I came home and he told me a funny one.
- 27:55Speaker 1: I came home and shared it widely. I would get done, people,
- 28:00Speaker 1: that's not funny.
- 28:02Speaker 3: That's my favorite kind of story.
- 28:04Speaker 1: It has to do with your little health scare. Oh,
- 28:07Speaker 1: I thought I like that story. I thought it was
- 28:13Speaker 1: a delightful. Dude, I heard I heard a turkey hunting
- 28:18Speaker 1: story the other day that I vowed I like, I
- 28:20Speaker 1: can't like, I really can't tell it on air. Yeah,
- 28:23Speaker 1: I heard a turkey story the other day. That's just
- 28:25Speaker 1: my new, absolute favorite story. You know, when you go
- 28:29Speaker 1: to some comedy clubs where they tell like racy humor.
- 28:31Speaker 1: And now they got that thing where you got to
- 28:33Speaker 1: put your phone in that bag. When we do this
- 28:36Speaker 1: Cypress Cove deal, I'm gonna get some of those bags
- 28:42Speaker 1: and put your phone in one of these bags. So
- 28:44Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you a turkey hunting story.
- 28:48Speaker 3: If you're going to tell me those other stories about yeah,
- 28:53Speaker 3: well that one. You know, there were a couple of
- 28:56Speaker 3: others that you that you know that I'd rather you
- 28:59Speaker 3: didn't share, or that someone might hit record.
- 29:02Speaker 6: Here.
- 29:02Speaker 1: Let me tell you a quick version. I'm not gonna
- 29:06Speaker 1: just don't even chime in. Okay, dog Doug had to
- 29:09Speaker 1: have a battery of tests done and he came back
- 29:12Speaker 1: with a and like the doctor calls him okay, And
- 29:16Speaker 1: Doug wound up having a false positive, which is not
- 29:19Speaker 1: a false positive you want. And they called and go, hey,
- 29:22Speaker 1: we have your results, and Doug's like, oh, I'm sitting
- 29:23Speaker 1: here with my wife. I'll put her on a speakerphone
- 29:28Speaker 1: because she's real concerned about my health, you know, like
- 29:31Speaker 1: the follow on as one would.
- 29:35Speaker 9: Phone.
- 29:35Speaker 1: And he's like, well, Doug, you're blank came back positive,
- 29:43Speaker 1: to which Trish is like, what.
- 29:48Speaker 3: Made for a really interesting weekend While waiting for how
- 29:52Speaker 3: long did I sorted out? Well, the interesting thing about
- 29:56Speaker 3: it was that we both then kind of had well,
- 30:00Speaker 3: you know, before we were married, kind of talks. It
- 30:07Speaker 3: was uh, yeah, no, it was. It was a Monday,
- 30:11Speaker 3: and in the meantime I had to I was doing
- 30:14Speaker 3: a talk at an environmental education center. We were selling
- 30:18Speaker 3: a house, and all these things are bombarding me. And
- 30:20Speaker 3: you know, when you go and do one of those talks,
- 30:22Speaker 3: you try to gather your thoughts before you go out there.
- 30:24Speaker 3: But I'm getting phone calls and checking messages and to
- 30:27Speaker 3: see if the test results had come back. And I
- 30:31Speaker 3: walked out there and I started doing my talk, and
- 30:33Speaker 3: interestingly enough, I was talking about Leopold and the Riley
- 30:36Speaker 3: Game Cooperative, which maybe we'll get to, and then I'm
- 30:41Speaker 3: transitioning to the next part of the talk, which was
- 30:44Speaker 3: about sharing the land, this initiative that I've started that
- 30:46Speaker 3: was inspired by Leopold. And in the middle of the talk,
- 30:51Speaker 3: I stopped and all of these things were going through
- 30:54Speaker 3: my mind at that particular moment, and it just stopped me,
- 30:59Speaker 3: and I'm like, well, we're going to sell that house,
- 31:02Speaker 3: and I wonder what's gonna happen with those test results.
- 31:04Speaker 3: And oh, this is in my head and I'm standing
- 31:05Speaker 3: in front of two hundred people.
- 31:07Speaker 1: He started crying, and.
- 31:08Speaker 3: Then I and then I went and then went into
- 31:11Speaker 3: the next part of it. And my wife said later,
- 31:13Speaker 3: I said, did you notice that I kind of freaked
- 31:15Speaker 3: out there for a minute. She goes, no, I thought
- 31:16Speaker 3: it was a dramatic pause. It was, yeah, it was.
- 31:26Speaker 1: Oh another thing about cypress calls. We're gonna record We're
- 31:31Speaker 1: gonna record podcasts down there, and we'll, uh, we're gonna
- 31:36Speaker 1: have a way for for people that that We're gonna
- 31:39Speaker 1: have a way for people that come down and fish
- 31:41Speaker 1: with us and book trips to We're gonna work on
- 31:44Speaker 1: a way for people to join in the podcast recordings.
- 31:58Speaker 1: Trivia board game, bag and stock How did it? When
- 32:00Speaker 1: was it ever out of stock?
- 32:02Speaker 10: Uh?
- 32:03Speaker 4: Not long after we ran.
- 32:05Speaker 1: Ran ran of them. If you wanted a trivia board game,
- 32:08Speaker 1: they're back in stock, you know, go camping with your family,
- 32:14Speaker 1: be able to play some trivia. And also Spencer's plugging
- 32:16Speaker 1: away on Spencer's plugging away on the the packs expansion
- 32:21Speaker 1: which I totally disagree with the avenue he took. What
- 32:25Speaker 1: are the expansion packs he's doing?
- 32:27Speaker 3: I don't know.
- 32:27Speaker 5: He's talked about white tails, talked about I don't know.
- 32:31Speaker 1: What what ones is he doing?
- 32:33Speaker 4: I want to say, is uh is Mountain Man one
- 32:35Speaker 4: of them?
- 32:36Speaker 3: Not?
- 32:40Speaker 1: Yeah, he's doing expansion packs. I'm sure everybody will like it.
- 32:43Speaker 1: I would have made him a little weirder m hmm.
- 32:47Speaker 1: I would have done the I was like more trivial,
- 32:50Speaker 1: like the weird I would have called it. I've done
- 32:51Speaker 1: an expansion pack called the Weird Ship mm hmm, and
- 32:55Speaker 1: then and then Frontiersmen the mountain Man. But he's doing
- 32:58Speaker 1: like white tails that people like those deer.
- 33:04Speaker 4: Here we go.
- 33:05Speaker 1: Before I'm joking. Before we started recording, all you Leopold fans,
- 33:10Speaker 1: hang tight, we're getting to it. Before we started recording,
- 33:13Speaker 1: We're gonna Before we started recording today, we were hitting
- 33:16Speaker 1: on some reminiscing about about spring turkey hunts. I got
- 33:20Speaker 1: some turkey hunts in the highlight of my turkey season
- 33:24Speaker 1: was as always going to the Lovely during family farm
- 33:28Speaker 1: for youth turkey season. Uh, we've had phenomenal hunts. We've
- 33:32Speaker 1: had some bad weather now and then this year was phenomenal.
- 33:37Speaker 1: We had four kids hunting, two got birds. Everybody had
- 33:43Speaker 1: an opportunity. My little boy, it was his first year,
- 33:47Speaker 1: my younger boy, it was his first year on the shotgun,
- 33:51Speaker 1: had a miss, kept stoic with Doug. He was hunting
- 33:55Speaker 1: with Doug. So my daughter was hunting with Doug when
- 33:56Speaker 1: she got a turkey. My little boy was hunting with
- 33:58Speaker 1: Doug when he had a miss. He kept stoic, got home,
- 34:01Speaker 1: went upstairs at the farmhouse and cried. And then the
- 34:04Speaker 1: other night my wife said, what's up with Matthew because
- 34:07Speaker 1: he was crying about that turkey quite a number of
- 34:11Speaker 1: weeks later.
- 34:13Speaker 3: Yeah, and I thought that he was. He was so
- 34:17Speaker 3: good about it after it happened. And I'm still playing
- 34:20Speaker 3: it through my mind. So he's not alone in his disappointment.
- 34:25Speaker 3: Haunted the lung, Yeah, I am. You're always haunted, haunted
- 34:29Speaker 3: by the ones that got away, right, But we outside
- 34:32Speaker 3: of the outside of the blind, and I was just
- 34:35Speaker 3: I was crushed by it. And I said, Matthew, I'm
- 34:39Speaker 3: so sorry that that happened, and talked about it a
- 34:43Speaker 3: little bit, and he just kind of shrugged his shoulders
- 34:45Speaker 3: and said, well, that's okay.
- 34:47Speaker 1: No, he like he's he's private about Yeah, he kind
- 34:50Speaker 1: of he kind of spills his guts at night. Yeah,
- 34:53Speaker 1: but he spilled his guts upstairs at the farmhouse.
- 34:55Speaker 3: Do you know. My favorite story that he told me
- 34:57Speaker 3: when we were in the blind was about how the
- 34:59Speaker 3: kids at school, because he's kind of bulky. Not my
- 35:04Speaker 3: mom would have called it husky. He goes the kids
- 35:07Speaker 3: at school thought I was a bully.
- 35:09Speaker 1: Yeah, they call it. He says, I have a bully body.
- 35:12Speaker 1: He's got a bully. He's got the build of a bully,
- 35:15Speaker 1: but not the temperament.
- 35:16Speaker 3: Yeah. No, he's such a sweet kid man, which makes
- 35:20Speaker 3: me feel even worse about him. About that.
- 35:23Speaker 1: He'll be fine. Yeah aa next year. It's like game on,
- 35:26Speaker 1: full pressure on him.
- 35:30Speaker 4: Oh, in the end, it's better this way.
- 35:34Speaker 10: No.
- 35:34Speaker 1: I like getting them.
- 35:36Speaker 6: I'll like get it even Moore though.
- 35:39Speaker 1: I like getting the turkeys. Brody Haten had a good year.
- 35:43Speaker 4: You don't think that's some failure for your kids, and
- 35:46Speaker 4: these hunts is a good thing.
- 35:49Speaker 1: Really. I like getting them turkeys. I like cutting spurs off.
- 35:52Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 35:52Speaker 11: I understand all that tell me that you think that
- 35:56Speaker 11: the dry, but I never sit there.
- 36:03Speaker 1: Okay, let me ask you this.
- 36:04Speaker 3: Do you hope you're.
- 36:07Speaker 1: When you're sitting there in are you saying yourself, I
- 36:11Speaker 1: hope she misses, or it'll be more meaningful if she missed.
- 36:14Speaker 2: Afterwards that you got and taking photos. Are you like, man,
- 36:18Speaker 2: it would have been nice if she just do.
- 36:20Speaker 1: You spookle out of the turkeys?
- 36:21Speaker 2: Are valuable experience if she just missed this, do you.
- 36:24Speaker 1: Spookle out of turkey so your daughter doesn't get the
- 36:26Speaker 1: chance it'll be more meaningful to her, Or take her
- 36:29Speaker 1: to really bad spots because it'll be more meaningful to her.
- 36:34Speaker 4: No, but.
- 36:39Speaker 12: Builds characters, what don't We don't take them to spots
- 36:44Speaker 12: where there's a corn pile and just try to guarantee
- 36:48Speaker 12: a turkey fe feeding there that they can shoot their
- 36:51Speaker 12: head off of.
- 36:55Speaker 1: In hindsight, yes, in the moment, that's how I put it. Yeah,
- 36:59Speaker 1: in the yeah you did. And in the moment, I
- 37:02Speaker 1: was like, oh, of course.
- 37:04Speaker 5: And it's wazier for you to say that than to
- 37:07Speaker 5: convince the kid of that at the time.
- 37:09Speaker 1: His daughters will take out.
- 37:11Speaker 4: You ain't never gonna convince the kid of right at
- 37:14Speaker 4: the time.
- 37:14Speaker 1: But I think you're right, honest, bro, your boy got
- 37:16Speaker 1: a double Yeah, he hadn't.
- 37:18Speaker 5: It was actually his first spring turkey, first two he
- 37:21Speaker 5: had killed a gobbler in the fall or.
- 37:24Speaker 3: A year or two ago.
- 37:25Speaker 5: But yeah, we had a We had a gob a
- 37:28Speaker 5: gobbler dragon, five jakes and he got two of them.
- 37:33Speaker 1: So he shot the big boy and then got the jake.
- 37:34Speaker 5: Yeah, that that that they were coming in. There's a
- 37:37Speaker 5: log on the ground, and that I had ranged at
- 37:40Speaker 5: fifty yards. I was like, they got to come closer
- 37:41Speaker 5: than that log, and that gobbler when he got to
- 37:44Speaker 5: that log hopped up on a branch on that log
- 37:46Speaker 5: and sat there for like three minutes, didn't move, and
- 37:49Speaker 5: all those jakes were bunched up behind him, and Hayden's like,
- 37:53Speaker 5: can I shoot him?
- 37:54Speaker 1: No?
- 37:55Speaker 9: Shoot him?
- 37:56Speaker 5: Finally hopped down, got one and I was like another
- 38:00Speaker 5: one got him. By the time he handed me they
- 38:03Speaker 5: I had left. We had repositioned, so I had left
- 38:05Speaker 5: my gun away from us, so I didn't have a chance.
- 38:08Speaker 3: He handed me the gun.
- 38:09Speaker 1: They were all finally all scattered. But yeah, it was cool.
- 38:12Speaker 3: You got a triple.
- 38:13Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe a quadruple quad I've never been present for
- 38:21Speaker 1: I don't think I have either, but yeah, that's a mess.
- 38:26Speaker 3: Yeah, John, he got a triple. You know, it was funny. Yes,
- 38:28Speaker 3: I got in yesterday and I walked down to the
- 38:31Speaker 3: from the hotel and walked down to the Mediator store,
- 38:33Speaker 3: which I have to say is beautiful. I liked it
- 38:35Speaker 3: a lot. Which buy a little thing for my wife? Yeah? Yeah,
- 38:40Speaker 3: and what I thought I had got some kind of discount.
- 38:44Speaker 3: But those guys and they held me right up for
- 38:46Speaker 3: the Yeah, not that guy. You know, if they don't recognize.
- 38:50Speaker 2: Do you have any idea who I am?
- 38:53Speaker 1: So when you went into the media store, they didn't
- 38:55Speaker 1: know who you were.
- 38:55Speaker 3: They immediately recognized me. Anyway, was interesting because the the
- 39:03Speaker 3: you've got that YouTube videos running on loop and here
- 39:07Speaker 3: was the Turkey hunt that you did with Miller And
- 39:11Speaker 3: I'm talking to the guy and I'm kind of looking around,
- 39:13Speaker 3: and I was like, this doesn't get interesting until they
- 39:15Speaker 3: leave Yanni's property and come over to my farm. And
- 39:20Speaker 3: the guy goes I've seen this so many times already.
- 39:23Speaker 5: How did how did I not see you guys get
- 39:25Speaker 5: a triple? You know how Turkey populations are declining in
- 39:29Speaker 5: this country because of guys like you.
- 39:34Speaker 1: It's better when you don't get one.
- 39:36Speaker 10: Yeah, not getting one?
- 39:42Speaker 3: Yann. He's walking away. He's got a big gobbler in
- 39:45Speaker 3: the middle of two, Jake's.
- 39:48Speaker 1: It's always better to go.
- 39:51Speaker 3: But you guys, you guys have had hunted quite a
- 39:53Speaker 3: bit before you all of a sudden got into him.
- 39:56Speaker 4: Oh yeah, we put our time the Durn Farm, didn't
- 40:00Speaker 4: We had it.
- 40:00Speaker 1: It didn't save one of our episodes, but it really
- 40:03Speaker 1: helped it. Oh yeah, when we had to come over
- 40:07Speaker 1: with Melroy, all over from Melroy.
- 40:10Speaker 3: With your cheese curds on the dashboard.
- 40:13Speaker 1: Uh, Carl, you got you hunters your kids this year?
- 40:16Speaker 3: Yeah?
- 40:17Speaker 1: Yeah, how'd that go?
- 40:18Speaker 7: Had an awesome hunt And back to the connections to
- 40:21Speaker 7: farms and and sort of the meat Eater crew after
- 40:25Speaker 7: meeting Chester. He grew up about forty five minutes north
- 40:29Speaker 7: of where I'm living in southeast Wisconsin, on a beautiful
- 40:33Speaker 7: chunk of land, and his family has welcomed me there
- 40:36Speaker 7: the last three springs on the farm where Chester grew up,
- 40:41Speaker 7: and it's beautiful and actually the work that they're doing
- 40:44Speaker 7: on that farm as stewards of the land ties nicely.
- 40:51Speaker 7: They're doing a beautiful job. It is a beautiful piece
- 40:54Speaker 7: of property. And so I've gotten to know both of
- 40:56Speaker 7: Chester's parents and also his brother Ike. Ike's a cool dude.
- 41:02Speaker 7: Trad bow guy, total entrepreneur and had a chance to
- 41:08Speaker 7: take my four year old son along this year and
- 41:12Speaker 7: we had just a phenomenal, phenomenal hunt with perfect conditions.
- 41:19Speaker 7: First morning, got in there in the dark as things
- 41:24Speaker 7: are getting light. We've got deer close to the blind,
- 41:26Speaker 7: so my son's checking out the deer. He's got his
- 41:29Speaker 7: farm and fleet plastic practice shotgun along and have a
- 41:34Speaker 7: bird goblin on the roost. Had a possum come out
- 41:38Speaker 7: in front of us, real close and walk by. I
- 41:39Speaker 7: got to watch this possum, sand hill cranes, Canada geese,
- 41:44Speaker 7: the just amazing diversity of dawn bird's song, everything just
- 41:51Speaker 7: like ten out of ten in this incredible farm, just
- 41:55Speaker 7: a beautiful spot. And as the morning wore on, we
- 42:00Speaker 7: had a hen kind of calling back and forth with me,
- 42:04Speaker 7: and my son was totally on edge listening to this hen.
- 42:08Speaker 7: Hen comes out into the field into the decoy spread,
- 42:11Speaker 7: and my son immediately is like, you're gonna shoot that
- 42:13Speaker 7: You're you're gonna shoot that turkey, and I'm telling him no,
- 42:16Speaker 7: waiting for a gobbler. You know, this is the spring hunt.
- 42:18Speaker 7: Of course, it's got to be a male turkey. And
- 42:21Speaker 7: every once in a while, you'd hear this gobbler gobble
- 42:24Speaker 7: at the sound of us call him back and forth
- 42:25Speaker 7: with the hen and every gobble. My son's getting more
- 42:28Speaker 7: and more amped up. And I don't know, I think
- 42:31Speaker 7: many of us here have been in the blind with kids.
- 42:33Speaker 7: My son is the loudest whisperer ever. He whispers like
- 42:37Speaker 7: borderline yelling. Right, It's like, did you hear that gobble?
- 42:40Speaker 3: Yeah?
- 42:41Speaker 7: I heard the gobble man, and we got to keep
- 42:42Speaker 7: it down. So I'm trying to keep him quiet, and
- 42:45Speaker 7: the hen comes in. I've got a strutting tom and
- 42:48Speaker 7: a hen decoy out in front of us. The hen
- 42:51Speaker 7: comes in. She's purring and making all kinds of very
- 42:54Speaker 7: very subtle vocalizations, and she gets right in there with
- 42:57Speaker 7: the two decoys, the gobbler and the hen. And I
- 43:01Speaker 7: know this Tom is somewhere nearby, right, and he's he's
- 43:04Speaker 7: been coming to the sound of the hen. And so
- 43:07Speaker 7: I'm telling my boy, I'm like, just two things, do
- 43:10Speaker 7: not move and don't speak. Don't move, don't speak. And
- 43:16Speaker 7: it's that that moment where you know the gobbler is
- 43:18Speaker 7: somewhere nearby, but we haven't seen him yet, and you
- 43:23Speaker 7: could you could cut the silence with a knife, right,
- 43:27Speaker 7: It's just like perfectly, there's not a breath of wind, nothing,
- 43:30Speaker 7: And I'm just waiting for this gobbler to appear at
- 43:32Speaker 7: any moment. And that's when my son farts, like loudly.
- 43:37Speaker 7: Did he shot with a super add that to the list?
- 43:42Speaker 7: And he's got just like a totally innocent look on
- 43:44Speaker 7: his face. And I look at him, I'm like, dude,
- 43:46Speaker 7: what the heck man? And he looks at me like
- 43:48Speaker 7: what I'm like. When I said don't speak, I meant like,
- 43:52Speaker 7: don't make any noise. And we're whispering back and forth.
- 43:56Speaker 7: So you know, he's dude's four, right. So so then
- 44:01Speaker 7: I'm wondering did the tom hear this? Because I'm serious.
- 44:05Speaker 7: It's like that moment where any if you're thinking that the
- 44:06Speaker 7: gobbler is going to show up any second, and ten
- 44:09Speaker 7: seconds go by twenty seconds, we probably get close to
- 44:12Speaker 7: a minute.
- 44:13Speaker 6: And then at the edge of.
- 44:15Speaker 7: The field, this gobbler comes strutting out and as soon
- 44:18Speaker 7: as my son peeking out, you know, we got we
- 44:19Speaker 7: got a ground blind step. As soon as as soon
- 44:21Speaker 7: as the gobbler starts coming out, my boy starts reaching
- 44:24Speaker 7: for the other side of the blind to get his
- 44:25Speaker 7: farm and flight shot on the little little toy gun.
- 44:28Speaker 7: I'm like, don't move, don't move like you can shoot
- 44:30Speaker 7: the turkey in a second, you know, after after we
- 44:32Speaker 7: take care of business. So the gobbler struts out right
- 44:35Speaker 7: into the the spread and he's all fanned out, get
- 44:39Speaker 7: starting to nudge right up on the on the streading
- 44:41Speaker 7: gobbler decoy. So shot the gobbler went out there. My
- 44:46Speaker 7: son was over the moon, you know, turkey's flopping around
- 44:48Speaker 7: and he's asking questions about you know, is the turkey
- 44:51Speaker 7: still alive?
- 44:52Speaker 2: And we're talking is it.
- 44:52Speaker 1: True that you can't stop the flop Daddy.
- 44:54Speaker 7: I've got I've gotten to the point where, you know,
- 44:57Speaker 7: I used to stand on the stand on the neck
- 44:58Speaker 7: and all that anymore. If you I know you've made
- 45:00Speaker 7: a good shot, just kind of wait for the flopping
- 45:02Speaker 7: to stop. So took some pictures and then went back
- 45:07Speaker 7: back up to the farmhouse and Chester's mom, dad, brother
- 45:11Speaker 7: all there. I bump into Chester's dad Greg first, and he's.
- 45:15Speaker 6: Over the moon.
- 45:15Speaker 7: He didn't know I was going to have my boy
- 45:16Speaker 7: along with me, right, So he sees my son and
- 45:19Speaker 7: my son walks up to him without hesitation. He says, Hi,
- 45:21Speaker 7: I'm Alexander, thanks for letting us hunt on your farm
- 45:24Speaker 7: this morning, and Greg Greg Flood, Chester's dad says, hold on,
- 45:29Speaker 7: I need to get my wife and brings her out.
- 45:32Speaker 7: And that was the first time i'd met her. You
- 45:35Speaker 7: can you know Chester is a super solid dude, and
- 45:38Speaker 7: you can see when you meet his mom and dead brother,
- 45:40Speaker 7: like why he turned out the way he did. They're
- 45:43Speaker 7: just a really awesome family. And so his mom took
- 45:46Speaker 7: a few more pictures of us up there at the
- 45:48Speaker 7: farmhouse and we shot the shot the breeze a little
- 45:51Speaker 7: bit more. And then his brother has a cookie business
- 45:55Speaker 7: going right now, and he sent us home with a
- 45:56Speaker 7: few of the cookies. So like we show up on
- 45:59Speaker 7: at the farm, were treated like royalty by these folks.
- 46:03Speaker 6: They send us home with they give you present.
- 46:05Speaker 2: I know, man, I know.
- 46:07Speaker 7: So we went we went right home, and my boy
- 46:09Speaker 7: and I wrote a bit. He's getting the point where
- 46:10Speaker 7: he can write a L e X pretty well. So
- 46:12Speaker 7: he and I collaborated on a thank you card and
- 46:14Speaker 7: send him a send them a little token of our appreciation.
- 46:18Speaker 7: But super cool and seeing the way I mean that
- 46:21Speaker 7: that farm, not unlike the little bit of property that
- 46:24Speaker 7: my family and I live on has been heavily impacted
- 46:26Speaker 7: by the Emerald ash boarer. So they've got dead ash
- 46:29Speaker 7: trees everywhere, and they're also at the headwaters of a
- 46:33Speaker 7: really important trout stream tributary. They're doing so much work
- 46:36Speaker 7: to remove the dead ash trees to plant new trees.
- 46:40Speaker 7: They're obviously they're they're big. They're big deer hunters. They've
- 46:42Speaker 7: got deer blinds all over the place. They're thinking a
- 46:44Speaker 7: lot about deer. But they're also they're approaching the stewardship
- 46:48Speaker 7: of that property with a focus on back to what
- 46:51Speaker 7: Doug was saying, like what does the land need from us?
- 46:54Speaker 6: And they're providing it.
- 46:56Speaker 7: And then you pull out of the driveway and I
- 46:58Speaker 7: think at the end of the driveway they've got a
- 46:59Speaker 7: bunch of big rounds of dead ash stacked up with
- 47:03Speaker 7: a sign free firewood donations accepted. Oh so anybody wants
- 47:07Speaker 7: to roll up and grab firewood and if they want
- 47:09Speaker 7: to throw a few bucks in, like that's the kind
- 47:11Speaker 7: of people that they are. So it just felt felt
- 47:13Speaker 7: really privileged and that experience with my boy, like the
- 47:18Speaker 7: the getting a turkey is always cool, but having that
- 47:22Speaker 7: morning and seeing all the wildlife and the woods waking
- 47:24Speaker 7: up and his excitement and just all those details. It
- 47:29Speaker 7: was one of the most fun turkey hunts that I've
- 47:31Speaker 7: I've experienced in my life for sure. So good, a
- 47:34Speaker 7: good start to the spring. And up next week, man,
- 47:37Speaker 7: I'm taking the week off to float some rivers up
- 47:39Speaker 7: and up in the up and catch trout and uh
- 47:42Speaker 7: and hunt some gobblers in the north country.
- 47:46Speaker 1: We're going to talk about Yanni's Arizona. We're gonna we're
- 47:49Speaker 1: gonna move on. I want to digging on Leopold, Okay,
- 47:53Speaker 1: because it happened. First, we're here to we're here to
- 47:56Speaker 1: celebrate the hundred one hundred years of the HeLa Wilderness
- 47:59Speaker 1: heal Wildern yep. And then we're going to talk about
- 48:02Speaker 1: more about San Countie Almanac. Yeah, but you want to
- 48:05Speaker 1: take the Helo, Carl.
- 48:07Speaker 6: You want to dive into the HeLa.
- 48:08Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, tell me like like how it happened, why
- 48:11Speaker 1: it happened, what the repercussions were.
- 48:15Speaker 7: Well, A good place, A good place to start the
- 48:19Speaker 7: conversation as it relates to Leopold is just a reminder
- 48:22Speaker 7: of the fact that that Aldough was a Midwestern boy
- 48:26Speaker 7: by birth, grew up in Burlington, Iowa, spent a lot
- 48:29Speaker 7: of time actually growing up, summer vacations in the Upper Peninsula,
- 48:32Speaker 7: Michigan over in the Lasiano Islands, a lot of formative
- 48:35Speaker 7: experiences in the Midwest that definitely shaped his philosophy ultimately
- 48:39Speaker 7: around around private land management. But at a very formative
- 48:43Speaker 7: period in his career, after just graduating from the Yale
- 48:45Speaker 7: School of Forestry, he did what basically was really the
- 48:49Speaker 7: only option for an aspiring young conservation professional at that
- 48:52Speaker 7: point in time, which was to get a job with
- 48:54Speaker 7: the also young United States Forest Service, the agency I
- 48:57Speaker 7: work for now.
- 48:59Speaker 1: I want to hear you with a quick question. Yeah,
- 49:00Speaker 1: on biography. Yeah, we've joked before about how he's one
- 49:04Speaker 1: of these people that has multiple places that claim him totally.
- 49:07Speaker 1: You know, like the writer Jim Harrison is like Montana
- 49:10Speaker 1: claims him, Patagonia, Arizona, crailing Michigan baby, Right, So so
- 49:13Speaker 1: you get these people like they're claimed by Yeah, you know,
- 49:16Speaker 1: a bunch of spots.
- 49:17Speaker 7: Harrison gets claimed by Michigan though. We'll just put that
- 49:19Speaker 7: to rest right now.
- 49:20Speaker 1: Yeah, like the big claim, does Iowa take any like, Yeah,
- 49:24Speaker 1: Wisconsin loves Leopold, Yeah for sure. New Mexico loves Leopold
- 49:28Speaker 1: for sure.
- 49:29Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 49:29Speaker 1: Iowa was a little bit like, yeah, that community, this.
- 49:31Speaker 7: Is where his his the house that he grew up
- 49:34Speaker 7: in is still maintained as a very important historical site
- 49:38Speaker 7: right on the banks the Mississippi River and Burlington, Iowa
- 49:41Speaker 7: is you know. Inarguably that's where he got got to
- 49:43Speaker 7: start watching watching the birds in the yard with opera
- 49:46Speaker 7: glasses that his mother okay him.
- 49:48Speaker 6: So that's that's.
- 49:50Speaker 7: Where it began, absolutely influential experiences throughout the Midwest. Yale
- 49:55Speaker 7: School of Forestry graduates and does the one thing that
- 49:59Speaker 7: a young forester can do at that point in time professionally,
- 50:02Speaker 7: which is get a job with the United States Forest Service.
- 50:04Speaker 7: They promptly ship him out to the Arizona Territory. Like
- 50:08Speaker 7: bear in mind this this predates Arizona in New Mexico
- 50:11Speaker 7: statehood and is what you're this would be early nineteen hundreds.
- 50:16Speaker 3: Like I'd have to I'd have to get.
- 50:17Speaker 7: A time nineteen oh ninety gets shipped out. Yep, okay, good,
- 50:21Speaker 7: we can tag team this. So and and by the way, anybody,
- 50:25Speaker 7: anybody who wants to get into Leopold's biography in a
- 50:28Speaker 7: very detailed way. A friend, a friend of ours, Kurtmine,
- 50:32Speaker 7: wrote a phenomenal biography of all the Leopold, All the Leopold,
- 50:35Speaker 7: his life and work. Grab a copy of that if
- 50:38Speaker 7: you really want to get into the details. It's fantastic.
- 50:42Speaker 7: So young Leopold, straight out of college, shipped out to
- 50:46Speaker 7: essentially cruise timber on the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest what
- 50:51Speaker 7: is today the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest, which is right
- 50:53Speaker 7: on the sort of southern end of the border between
- 50:58Speaker 7: what is now the state of Arizona in the state
- 51:00Speaker 7: of New Mexico. And so his job is to quantify
- 51:04Speaker 7: essentially how much timber is out there. And bear in mind,
- 51:06Speaker 7: at this point the history of the Forest Service, the
- 51:10Speaker 7: genesis was rooted in a recognition that these landscapes were
- 51:15Speaker 7: important for producing timber and also important for protecting the
- 51:19Speaker 7: headwaters of critical drinking water sources, particularly in the Western
- 51:23Speaker 7: United States. So early on in the Forest Service, the
- 51:26Speaker 7: focus was really on watersheds and timber, and it wasn't
- 51:29Speaker 7: until nineteen sixty there was a piece of legislation called
- 51:32Speaker 7: the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, which broadened the set
- 51:35Speaker 7: of responsibilities that the agency has to go beyond timber
- 51:39Speaker 7: and water and include fish and wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation,
- 51:43Speaker 7: and also brought in rangeland management as one of the
- 51:46Speaker 7: five pillars of the multiple use mission that the agency
- 51:48Speaker 7: has today. But at that point in time, timber was
- 51:51Speaker 7: essentially king. So Leopold's out cruising around filing reports with
- 51:57Speaker 7: the headquarters office, letting folks know how much timber out there,
- 52:00Speaker 7: of what different varieties and potential merchant ability and logistics
- 52:04Speaker 7: of accessing that timber, et cetera, which is what he
- 52:07Speaker 7: was trained to do in school, and spending a lot
- 52:11Speaker 7: of time. You got to bear in mind like that
- 52:13Speaker 7: field work was on horseback, extended periods of time out
- 52:17Speaker 7: in the back country, exploring a landscape that would have
- 52:20Speaker 7: been totally unfamiliar to Leopold and quite like.
- 52:25Speaker 6: And quite remote, quite remote back then.
- 52:27Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I mean part of that landscape is one
- 52:31Speaker 7: of the prominent features there right on the New Mexico
- 52:33Speaker 7: Arizona state line is escadea Mountain, and there's an essay
- 52:37Speaker 7: in a Sand County almanac called Escadia, which was the
- 52:40Speaker 7: home of one of the last grizzly bears to live
- 52:43Speaker 7: in the southwestern United States. So Leopold is seeing and
- 52:48Speaker 7: experiencing all these things, including those those stories he's hearing
- 52:52Speaker 7: about the grizzly bears, and coming to have a real
- 52:56Speaker 7: appreciation for what that landscape has to offer, in addition
- 53:02Speaker 7: to the timber that he's out there cruising and over
- 53:05Speaker 7: the course of his time in the southwestern United States
- 53:09Speaker 7: and ascending into different positions and thinking a lot about
- 53:13Speaker 7: the change that he's watching occur on the landscape, he
- 53:16Speaker 7: starts posing some questions that at the time were extremely radical.
- 53:20Speaker 7: And this was a period of time where there was
- 53:23Speaker 7: a huge expansion of the road network basically every corner
- 53:27Speaker 7: of the western US, it felt like to Leopold and
- 53:30Speaker 7: others had new roads being built into wild country in
- 53:33Speaker 7: part to extract resources, but also to support people's tourism
- 53:38Speaker 7: to these places and economic development. And this is when
- 53:42Speaker 7: the automobile is becoming more commonly owned by middle class
- 53:47Speaker 7: families throughout the country. And so Leopold started asking some
- 53:50Speaker 7: questions about whether or not certain places, including the Hila,
- 53:57Speaker 7: if we want to talk about highest and best use
- 53:59Speaker 7: of these landscapes, does it not make sense to refrain
- 54:03Speaker 7: from having that development incur into at least some of
- 54:08Speaker 7: these remnants of wildness that exist. And he was able
- 54:13Speaker 7: to do that because he was a well respected sort
- 54:16Speaker 7: of insider within the agency. He wasn't you know, he
- 54:19Speaker 7: wasn't seen as some radical from the outside with these
- 54:24Speaker 7: crazy ideas. He was trained at the Yale School of Forestry.
- 54:27Speaker 7: He was very much indoctrinated in agency culture.
- 54:30Speaker 6: But he was also.
- 54:33Speaker 7: Asking questions that nobody else at the time was really
- 54:35Speaker 7: was really posing. And so with the Hila coming up
- 54:38Speaker 7: here in just about two weeks time, right at the
- 54:40Speaker 7: beginning of June will hit the one hundredth anniversary of
- 54:43Speaker 7: the administrative designation of the Hila as the first wilderness
- 54:49Speaker 7: area anywhere on the planet. And it was really at
- 54:51Speaker 7: Leopold's urging that he convinced the regional forester or the
- 54:55Speaker 7: big boss of the Southwestern region to make that administrative
- 54:59Speaker 7: designation that then carried forward another forty years. So that
- 55:03Speaker 7: was nineteen twenty four that the HeLa was administratively designated.
- 55:07Speaker 7: It took forty more years before, in nineteen sixty four
- 55:10Speaker 7: the passage of the Wilderness Act, and then the HeLa
- 55:14Speaker 7: and a number of other wild landscapes around the United
- 55:17Speaker 7: States were included in that first batch of congressionally designated
- 55:21Speaker 7: wilderness areas a full forty years later. So Leopold is
- 55:25Speaker 7: widely seen as one of the one of the critical
- 55:30Speaker 7: players in helping set the stage for now. We have
- 55:32Speaker 7: about one hundred and ten million acres of wilderness that's
- 55:35Speaker 7: managed under the National Wilderness Preservation System, about two percent
- 55:39Speaker 7: of the country.
- 55:39Speaker 3: Right.
- 55:40Speaker 5: Yeah, how big was the HeLa the area that he identified.
- 55:45Speaker 7: It's in the ballpark of five hundred and fifty thousand
- 55:47Speaker 7: acres And what's cool now, and there's actually some really
- 55:51Speaker 7: interesting history here. But for anybody who's familiar with that landscape,
- 55:54Speaker 7: you have the HeLa Wilderness and then just to the
- 55:56Speaker 7: east of it, you have another wilderness area called the
- 55:59Speaker 7: Aldo Leopold Wildern And there's a road that divides the
- 56:04Speaker 7: two wilderness areas. I think it's Forest Road one point fifty,
- 56:07Speaker 7: also referred to as the North Star Road, and that road.
- 56:13Speaker 7: One of the reasons that that road was put in
- 56:15Speaker 7: was actually to provide easier access to the burgeoning deer herds.
- 56:19Speaker 7: And this relates to some of the other things that
- 56:22Speaker 7: Doug and I were talking about earlier. Today about Leopold's
- 56:25Speaker 7: questioning of predator control, his work on trying to argue
- 56:31Speaker 7: in favor of more aggressive deer harvests, including antler list
- 56:35Speaker 7: deer harvest, at times when that was wildly unpopular. But
- 56:39Speaker 7: one of the concerns that he had back in the
- 56:42Speaker 7: twenties was the idea that predator control had been so
- 56:44Speaker 7: effective at promoting these burgeoning deer numbers that then the
- 56:49Speaker 7: need to access and manage those deer numbers was one
- 56:52Speaker 7: of the reasons that management agencies like the Forest Service
- 56:55Speaker 7: and state game and fish agencies were using to build
- 56:57Speaker 7: new roads into wild country to get more hunter to
- 57:00Speaker 7: kill the deer that the predators no longer could control.
- 57:03Speaker 7: And he published some research papers. There's a paper that
- 57:07Speaker 7: he published in nineteen forty three titled Deer Eruptions where
- 57:12Speaker 7: he evaluates a couple of different case studies where for
- 57:17Speaker 7: various reasons. In the case of the Kibab Plateau this
- 57:20Speaker 7: is post predator control, the deer herds, inflated by orders
- 57:25Speaker 7: of magnitude, over browsed the range and then had massive
- 57:30Speaker 7: die offs in the winter, and that impacted the ability
- 57:33Speaker 7: of the forage in the near term. After those years
- 57:36Speaker 7: to actually sustain the deer population rebounding. And then another
- 57:39Speaker 7: case study where I've got a really personal connection is
- 57:43Speaker 7: a research reserve in southeast Michigan called the Edwin S.
- 57:46Speaker 7: George Research Preserve. It's a twelve hundred acre property near Hell, Michigan.
- 57:51Speaker 7: If anybody's familiar with that, which is fenced. And the
- 57:55Speaker 7: man who owned that property at the time in nineteen
- 57:58Speaker 7: twenty eight, he brought in four doh and two bucks
- 58:00Speaker 7: from the up of Michigan released him on the property
- 58:03Speaker 7: at a time when there were virtually no deer in
- 58:06Speaker 7: southeast Michigan, and over the span of just a few years,
- 58:10Speaker 7: the population demonstrated essentially exponential growth in the absence of predation.
- 58:15Speaker 7: Went from the four dos and two bucks to one
- 58:18Speaker 7: hundred and sixty deer in the span of I think
- 58:20Speaker 7: it was four years, six years somewhere in there. I'd
- 58:23Speaker 7: have to go back and revisit the digits, but exponential growth.
- 58:27Speaker 7: Leopold uses these two case studies to make the argument for.
- 58:31Speaker 1: Did he have some real studs on that place?
- 58:36Speaker 7: Well, so, I said a personal connection to that property
- 58:41Speaker 7: because when I was an undergrad at the University of Michigan,
- 58:44Speaker 7: they had no management planned for that deer herd, and
- 58:46Speaker 7: so one of my first forays into wildlife management was
- 58:49Speaker 7: incorporating a little consulting business and bidding on a contract
- 58:53Speaker 7: to manage the deer herd at the Edwin S. George Reserve,
- 58:55Speaker 7: where also some of the most important white tailed deer
- 58:58Speaker 7: population ecology work was published by another scientist named Dale McCullough.
- 59:03Speaker 7: So this is a really well studied herd that had
- 59:04Speaker 7: a history of really good management and then they basically
- 59:07Speaker 7: did nothing for a number of years. And so I
- 59:10Speaker 7: was out there doing winter kill surveys and seeing we
- 59:13Speaker 7: would find thirty to fifty winter killed deer per year
- 59:17Speaker 7: inside this reason of that because there's no predation.
- 59:19Speaker 3: How many how many acres was it again? Twelve vendre yep.
- 59:24Speaker 6: Yeah.
- 59:24Speaker 7: So there's another book for folks who really want to
- 59:26Speaker 7: If you're in the wildlife management realm and really want
- 59:28Speaker 7: to get into it, look for Dale McCullough's book The
- 59:32Speaker 7: George Reserve Deer Herd, which is one of the foundational
- 59:35Speaker 7: sort of wildlife management books on the reproductive capacity and
- 59:41Speaker 7: population dynamics of white tail deer and Dale McCullough also
- 59:46Speaker 7: did a lot of research in Australia with kangaroos, and
- 59:49Speaker 7: he's a big population dynamics guy. Coincidentally also a student
- 59:53Speaker 7: of one of Leopold's sons as a graduate student as well.
- 59:57Speaker 7: So Leopold just tying this back to the HILA, he
- 1:00:02Speaker 7: was the driving force for pumping the brakes on the
- 1:00:06Speaker 7: idea that all of these National Forest System landscapes should
- 1:00:10Speaker 7: be looked at through the lens of how much timber
- 1:00:11Speaker 7: can they produce? Stepping back and saying like, wait a minute,
- 1:00:15Speaker 7: in some of these places, these vestiges of wildness might
- 1:00:19Speaker 7: actually serve us a much higher value over the long run.
- 1:00:23Speaker 1: And this is what I wanted you to jump into next. Yeah, sure,
- 1:00:26Speaker 1: And just to tee it up a little bit differently,
- 1:00:28Speaker 1: at a point, Leopold has like make a non emotional case. Yeah,
- 1:00:35Speaker 1: like he needs to go to and he needs to
- 1:00:37Speaker 1: go to administrators like bureaucrats, Yeah, who are serving a
- 1:00:42Speaker 1: mandate well delivering value. Yep, all right, And he needs
- 1:00:47Speaker 1: to say maybe he feels something spiritual. Yeah, probably he's
- 1:00:52Speaker 1: like feeling a spiritual need to preserve wild places in America.
- 1:00:58Speaker 1: But that's not going to f.
- 1:01:01Speaker 3: Right.
- 1:01:02Speaker 1: He's got to put it into he's got to make
- 1:01:05Speaker 1: it pragmatic. Yeah, in some way. Yeah, like talk about
- 1:01:09Speaker 1: that that process, because so you still wind up with it,
- 1:01:13Speaker 1: you still is you know, you still have people critical
- 1:01:16Speaker 1: of wilderness.
- 1:01:16Speaker 6: Yeah.
- 1:01:17Speaker 7: Well so thinking back, I like where you started our
- 1:01:20Speaker 7: conversation today, Steve and sharing some of those quotes, and no,
- 1:01:23Speaker 7: no that doesn't seem relevant particularly, but where you did
- 1:01:28Speaker 7: some of the language used in those quotes where Leopold
- 1:01:32Speaker 7: is using language like beauty and love.
- 1:01:36Speaker 6: There's there's.
- 1:01:39Speaker 7: A number of points both in a Sand County Almanac
- 1:01:43Speaker 7: and in many of his essays where he's using language
- 1:01:46Speaker 7: that departs from the objective voice of a scientist. Right
- 1:01:56Speaker 7: he he he wears it on his sleeve that these
- 1:02:00Speaker 7: are these are places, are these are issues that are
- 1:02:06Speaker 7: of deep importance to him, Right he clearly cares, which
- 1:02:10Speaker 7: in the science realm, if you're working on a peer
- 1:02:12Speaker 7: reviewed research paper, the culture of our western science approach
- 1:02:18Speaker 7: is to purge virtually all of that from the conversation.
- 1:02:23Speaker 2: And he and he was like very conscious of that,
- 1:02:25Speaker 2: Like he wrote specifically about the need to balance the two. Yeah,
- 1:02:32Speaker 2: Like there's some quote he has about like you don't
- 1:02:36Speaker 2: need something like you don't need a PhD to see
- 1:02:40Speaker 2: the land for what it is. But if you have
- 1:02:44Speaker 2: a PhD, you run the risk of being like a
- 1:02:47Speaker 2: mortician looking at a dead buy and you're not appreciating
- 1:02:51Speaker 2: the actual what's you know, the magic of it, all
- 1:02:55Speaker 2: the mystery.
- 1:02:55Speaker 6: I'm going to hit you with it. It's damn it.
- 1:03:02Speaker 7: I'll buy you just a minute, because the part that
- 1:03:03Speaker 7: you're the part that you're getting into is it sort
- 1:03:08Speaker 7: of represents an evolution of Leopold's thinking about the significance
- 1:03:11Speaker 7: of these places in providing opportunities for people to participate
- 1:03:16Speaker 7: in a form of outdoor recreation that he holds in
- 1:03:18Speaker 7: very high regard, which is essentially observing and learning about
- 1:03:22Speaker 7: the natural world.
- 1:03:32Speaker 2: I think the other I mean, I'm not a leopoled expert,
- 1:03:36Speaker 2: so I'm just sort of chiming in with what I've
- 1:03:38Speaker 2: taken away. But yeah, one of his sort of utilitarian
- 1:03:46Speaker 2: purposes that he identifies as specifically hunting pack trips. Yeah,
- 1:03:50Speaker 2: in the HeLa, Yeah, He's like, we need places that
- 1:03:52Speaker 2: can sustain a pack trip, And that's sort of his
- 1:03:55Speaker 2: measurement of, like, what's a big enough chunk of wild country.
- 1:03:58Speaker 6: Large enough to contain a two week trip.
- 1:04:00Speaker 2: Yeah, and he's like, and I believe he proposed calling
- 1:04:06Speaker 2: it like the the HeLa Hunting primitive hunting ground, Yeah,
- 1:04:10Speaker 2: something like that. Really, Yeah, like it was baked into
- 1:04:12Speaker 2: the idea. Yeah, so he had it.
- 1:04:14Speaker 7: There was there was an article not included in a
- 1:04:16Speaker 7: San County Almanac. I believe it was published an Outdoor Life,
- 1:04:18Speaker 7: but it was entitled a Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds,
- 1:04:21Speaker 7: where he lays this whole case out. So Steve, just
- 1:04:23Speaker 7: going back to the question that you posed about what
- 1:04:25Speaker 7: was the pragmatic argument that Leopold had to make, Because
- 1:04:28Speaker 7: you're right, you can't necessarily go in with a bunch
- 1:04:31Speaker 7: of flowery language about beauty and love and these emotive
- 1:04:35Speaker 7: arguments that are that are such a compelling aspect of
- 1:04:38Speaker 7: a San County Almanac and have that work in the
- 1:04:40Speaker 7: bureaucratic space of a federal agency. So Leopold did bring
- 1:04:44Speaker 7: a number of arguments and talking points to bear in
- 1:04:48Speaker 7: support of this vision that were very pragmatic in nature,
- 1:04:51Speaker 7: and one of the points was related to different forms
- 1:04:54Speaker 7: of outdoor recreation. And he makes this argument essentially, if
- 1:04:58Speaker 7: you have a whole universe of people who want to
- 1:05:00Speaker 7: engage in different types of outdoor recreation. And you've got
- 1:05:03Speaker 7: folks who want to go out in their ford and
- 1:05:06Speaker 7: park and camp on the road side, and they've got
- 1:05:10Speaker 7: ninety percent of the opportunity already locked up. And you've
- 1:05:13Speaker 7: got other folks who want to be able to get
- 1:05:15Speaker 7: off the beaten path and escape and get into the
- 1:05:17Speaker 7: back country and get away from all that and experience
- 1:05:19Speaker 7: some solitude. Doesn't it make sense to maybe hold on
- 1:05:22Speaker 7: to the remaining five percent or ten percent and try
- 1:05:25Speaker 7: to provide a diversity of opportunity types for the different
- 1:05:28Speaker 7: ways that people want to engage. So that was one
- 1:05:31Speaker 7: aspect of the argument. And then in the case of
- 1:05:33Speaker 7: the HeLa, one of the points that he makes that
- 1:05:39Speaker 7: maybe helped carry the day.
- 1:05:40Speaker 6: And you've a.
- 1:05:41Speaker 7: Number of us in the room have been down in
- 1:05:43Speaker 7: that chunk of ground. It is rugged, it is gnarly,
- 1:05:45Speaker 7: and it is not a place where getting at that
- 1:05:47Speaker 7: timber would be particularly easy to do. And so he
- 1:05:50Speaker 7: also makes an economic argument that in the case of
- 1:05:53Speaker 7: the HeLa, at least that landscape, you'd have to put
- 1:05:56Speaker 7: so much investment in the infrastructure to access the resources
- 1:06:01Speaker 7: that you want to extract that the net gain wouldn't
- 1:06:04Speaker 7: really be all that big anyway, So maybe just don't
- 1:06:08Speaker 7: mess with it and keep it wild and spare yourself
- 1:06:11Speaker 7: the hassle of all of that additional road building and infrastructure.
- 1:06:16Speaker 1: So yeah, I feel like in a fact at a
- 1:06:18Speaker 1: time he had said basically giving into the giving into
- 1:06:23Speaker 1: the value thing, saying okay, let's talk about.
- 1:06:27Speaker 6: Value, right, like you're saying economic values.
- 1:06:29Speaker 1: Yeah, He's like, like, arguably the greatest value of this
- 1:06:34Speaker 1: in time will just be itself. Yeah, And a criticism
- 1:06:39Speaker 1: you hear a wilderness areas as you hear people say
- 1:06:41Speaker 1: like it's a lot of rock. I mean, like like
- 1:06:45Speaker 1: you go you look at a mountain range out here,
- 1:06:47Speaker 1: you know, and be like, well, let me guess where
- 1:06:48Speaker 1: the wilderness area is. It's up there at the back.
- 1:06:51Speaker 1: It's like at the back end. And in time, know
- 1:06:54Speaker 1: what we now know there's probably enormous mineral there's probably
- 1:06:57Speaker 1: enormous mineral wealth in a lot of these places.
- 1:07:01Speaker 3: Yep.
- 1:07:02Speaker 1: Right, Like in hindsight, a gelgist might now be like
- 1:07:05Speaker 1: being like, boys, you set the wrong stuff aside, because
- 1:07:09Speaker 1: like gold whatever the hell in those hills. At the time,
- 1:07:14Speaker 1: though you could kind of go, well, look at it, yeah,
- 1:07:17Speaker 1: like what really what are we really leaving on the table.
- 1:07:22Speaker 2: It's a pragmatic decision.
- 1:07:24Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not like there's not a ton of mature timber,
- 1:07:27Speaker 1: you know, in some not all, but in a lot
- 1:07:29Speaker 1: of the wilderness areas. It's like, it's like, be hard,
- 1:07:31Speaker 1: it's not a lot of it. It's hard to get
- 1:07:33Speaker 1: at a lot of rock, a lot of ice.
- 1:07:36Speaker 6: Yep, yeah, rock and ice is set.
- 1:07:37Speaker 1: It's like, we're just not leaving a ton of money
- 1:07:40Speaker 1: on the table, and in time it might be that
- 1:07:42Speaker 1: people are just glad to have that stuff.
- 1:07:44Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a good chance Leopold wouldn't have won that
- 1:07:47Speaker 5: argument today.
- 1:07:48Speaker 1: Oh if you if Leopold, no today for sure. And
- 1:07:50Speaker 1: if Leopold would have said, like I got an idea,
- 1:07:52Speaker 1: all these big, huge valleys in the West, let's make
- 1:07:56Speaker 1: these all giant riparian wilderness areas.
- 1:07:59Speaker 3: Noah.
- 1:08:00Speaker 1: Yeah, he had to point to the stuff that was
- 1:08:02Speaker 1: like no one had touched and been like, listen, no
- 1:08:04Speaker 1: one's gonna no one's gonna mess with that.
- 1:08:07Speaker 6: Yeah, I just said it.
- 1:08:08Speaker 3: Aside.
- 1:08:08Speaker 7: Well, and a lot of the stuff that you're talking about,
- 1:08:10Speaker 7: like the Ryperian Valley wilderness model, a lot of that
- 1:08:14Speaker 7: was already wrote it up. You know, like if you
- 1:08:17Speaker 7: think about that point in history, so nineteen twenty four,
- 1:08:20Speaker 7: and you look at the remaining chunks of big wild country,
- 1:08:23Speaker 7: And in a couple of these essays, Leopold highlights specific places.
- 1:08:26Speaker 7: Another spot in New Mexico, he specifically specifically highlights as
- 1:08:30Speaker 7: the Pecos up on the border between the Santa Fe
- 1:08:33Speaker 7: and Carson National Forest northeast to Santa Fe, as another
- 1:08:36Speaker 7: sort of opportunity. And coincidentally, the Pecost Wilderness was also
- 1:08:40Speaker 7: included in that original batch of congressionally designated areas in
- 1:08:43Speaker 7: nineteen sixty four. But there were not that many of
- 1:08:46Speaker 7: them left, is the point. There had already been so
- 1:08:49Speaker 7: much expansion.
- 1:08:50Speaker 2: Of the of the road network in congressation, just throwing
- 1:08:53Speaker 2: money at building roads. Yeah, both on the agency side
- 1:08:57Speaker 2: and you know in the state side.
- 1:09:00Speaker 1: Brody talk about or touch on what you were saying
- 1:09:03Speaker 1: that you wouldn't be able to pull it off now.
- 1:09:05Speaker 5: Well, I mean it's it's an argument that's been going
- 1:09:09Speaker 5: on since for one hundred years, right, Like there are
- 1:09:12Speaker 5: those people who will want to extract resources from it.
- 1:09:16Speaker 5: So what good is it if it doesn't pay pay
- 1:09:19Speaker 5: off in some way, some tangible way. But there's also
- 1:09:23Speaker 5: I mean, you still hear this argument. You know, as
- 1:09:25Speaker 5: far as the wilderness hunting area goes, there are people
- 1:09:28Speaker 5: who are like, I can't get in there, you know
- 1:09:32Speaker 5: what I mean? Like, yeah, like you young fellas that
- 1:09:36Speaker 5: can hike all day long can get in there, but
- 1:09:39Speaker 5: it doesn't do me any good. I've heard you say like,
- 1:09:42Speaker 5: well you had your time.
- 1:09:43Speaker 1: But well, Jim, I was gonna say, you remember how
- 1:09:45Speaker 1: Jim Poswitz the conservationists, Yeah, Jim Poswitz put it. He's like,
- 1:09:51Speaker 1: I used to get back in there. I'm too old now,
- 1:09:54Speaker 1: I've been too old for a long time. But man,
- 1:09:57Speaker 1: am I excited for you guys that can Yeah?
- 1:09:59Speaker 5: Yeah, but I think these days it's more of a
- 1:10:02Speaker 5: resource extraction thing that would not allow it to go
- 1:10:07Speaker 5: down the way it did.
- 1:10:08Speaker 1: This is a frustration I have about memory and politics
- 1:10:13Speaker 1: in America would be and I say this every time
- 1:10:19Speaker 1: the subject of Roosevelt comes up. I'm like, any politician
- 1:10:23Speaker 1: would welcome a favorable comparison to Roosevelt on conservation.
- 1:10:27Speaker 3: Record, right, yep.
- 1:10:33Speaker 1: They would hang that guy from a tree nowadays.
- 1:10:36Speaker 5: Yeah, and the amazing thing about the wilderness.
- 1:10:38Speaker 1: And they wanted to then he would be a he
- 1:10:42Speaker 1: would be regarded today as an insane lib tard tree hugger,
- 1:10:50Speaker 1: but because he wanted to create a national force and
- 1:10:52Speaker 1: people were pissed back then, but they were living, and
- 1:10:55Speaker 1: now we're like, oh, let's carve him on a big mountain.
- 1:10:58Speaker 1: Sure they felt that God he gave us the national
- 1:11:01Speaker 1: force system. The same people that would be pissed now
- 1:11:05Speaker 1: were pissed then, the same thing with with with with
- 1:11:07Speaker 1: Leopold Leopold, I bring up all the time, the fact
- 1:11:12Speaker 1: that the Wilderness Act passed the way it did. You
- 1:11:15Speaker 1: wouldn't never pass the point.
- 1:11:16Speaker 5: That I'm trying to make, like there was a time
- 1:11:19Speaker 5: when both sides were like, this is a really good idea.
- 1:11:23Speaker 5: It makes sense, like for a lot of reasons, Like
- 1:11:27Speaker 5: one dissenter wasn't there in Congress, and only because.
- 1:11:31Speaker 3: It wasn't big enough.
- 1:11:33Speaker 1: Yeah it was. It was something like the senator, one
- 1:11:36Speaker 1: of them. They both were like overwhelmingly and I think, yeah,
- 1:11:41Speaker 1: this is something I talked about all the time. I
- 1:11:43Speaker 1: gonna talk about it.
- 1:11:44Speaker 2: What's interesting about Leopold, I think, is that he's got
- 1:11:47Speaker 2: these two sides, Like he speaks the language of utility,
- 1:11:51Speaker 2: and he also he's a talented enough writer and a
- 1:11:56Speaker 2: deep enough thinker that he also has like this element
- 1:11:59Speaker 2: of the row and sure mirror and you can sort
- 1:12:03Speaker 2: of see what you want in him when you read it.
- 1:12:08Speaker 2: You know, like you could you could have someone on
- 1:12:11Speaker 2: the far left read this and think, oh, like he's
- 1:12:14Speaker 2: in touch with the spiritual aspects of nature. And you
- 1:12:19Speaker 2: could also, you know, people on the right side of
- 1:12:21Speaker 2: the spectrum look at him and be like, here's a
- 1:12:23Speaker 2: very like agency man. You know, forester works on the land,
- 1:12:30Speaker 2: like has this sort of rural authenticity about him, which
- 1:12:35Speaker 2: I find like there's just I don't know, I find
- 1:12:39Speaker 2: like it's really he's he's hard to sort of wrap.
- 1:12:41Speaker 1: Your mind or you can't box him up.
- 1:12:44Speaker 2: He's a poet, yeah, exactly.
- 1:12:46Speaker 1: He's a poet, he's a farmer, he's a forester. He's
- 1:12:50Speaker 1: a big game hunter. You can't box him up. And
- 1:12:54Speaker 1: that gave him room to do what he did, Yeah,
- 1:12:57Speaker 1: because people had to take him seriously. And there's also
- 1:13:00Speaker 1: a little bit of a he's going to be the
- 1:13:02Speaker 1: smartest guy in the room, oh yeah, you know, which
- 1:13:06Speaker 1: is hard for people to fight against sometimes darkness speaking
- 1:13:16Speaker 1: of the smartest guy in the room, the smartest guybaby Doug.
- 1:13:20Speaker 1: Let's move. Let's let's move into our set. What do
- 1:13:22Speaker 1: you call the diamond anniversary? What's a one hundred?
- 1:13:25Speaker 3: You believe?
- 1:13:26Speaker 1: What's the hundred? Platinum? Airlines had to think of a
- 1:13:30Speaker 1: new thing? Silver diamond?
- 1:13:37Speaker 4: Does come after the diamond?
- 1:13:39Speaker 1: No? Diamond?
- 1:13:40Speaker 3: I think one.
- 1:13:42Speaker 1: Hundred, centennial, centennial, obsidian, obsidian. If you said to me
- 1:13:48Speaker 1: you want to.
- 1:13:48Speaker 5: Hunker, natural, other other terms that are like natural.
- 1:13:53Speaker 1: The obsidian anniversary. Who are these people, the centennial people who.
- 1:13:59Speaker 3: Have the interest in obsidian?
- 1:14:02Speaker 1: Apparently so big obsidian one hundred to your anniversary? Yeah, well,
- 1:14:07Speaker 1: I got Well, I got one last question before we
- 1:14:09Speaker 1: move into San Countie Almanac, which I want you both,
- 1:14:11Speaker 1: you guys to talk about. But if you had to
- 1:14:14Speaker 1: crystal ball it, okay, if he hadn't did, if he
- 1:14:22Speaker 1: hadn't set this concept into motion when he did with
- 1:14:25Speaker 1: the Heila, do you feel that we would have landed
- 1:14:29Speaker 1: where we did anyway with wilderness areas?
- 1:14:31Speaker 6: No, you don't, I think he I think.
- 1:14:36Speaker 3: So.
- 1:14:36Speaker 7: There's there's a lot of other rich history we could
- 1:14:38Speaker 7: get into. Another very cool example from up in Colorado,
- 1:14:42Speaker 7: like in the in the White River National Forest, flat
- 1:14:45Speaker 7: tops wilderness area. There's a place called Trappers Lake.
- 1:14:48Speaker 1: There's Jianni's old stop ground.
- 1:14:49Speaker 7: Yeah, so you know Trappers Lake, right the story there.
- 1:14:52Speaker 7: There was a another Forest Service colleague, Arthur Carhart, who
- 1:15:00Speaker 7: helped inform some conversations about it.
- 1:15:02Speaker 1: Had one pair of stiff bibs on and some stiff.
- 1:15:04Speaker 7: Bibs that they got supple when they were broken in.
- 1:15:08Speaker 7: It became real trendy about the pros and cons of
- 1:15:11Speaker 7: developing more infrastructure on that Trapper's Lake property for recreation
- 1:15:18Speaker 7: and debating whether or not it would be better left
- 1:15:20Speaker 7: with an undeveloped lake shore. He had folks up in
- 1:15:26Speaker 7: what's today the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness advocating for
- 1:15:30Speaker 7: the importance of that wild landscape. But I think for
- 1:15:34Speaker 7: a concrete administrative step to be taken in nineteen twenty
- 1:15:38Speaker 7: four and to be able to hold that up as
- 1:15:39Speaker 7: an example and an extension of that. One of the
- 1:15:43Speaker 7: things that's really challenging about Leopold is there's so many
- 1:15:45Speaker 7: different little anecdotes and alleyways that you can go down.
- 1:15:49Speaker 7: But we didn't even mention the fact that he's one
- 1:15:51Speaker 7: of the founders of the Wilderness Society as well. So
- 1:15:56Speaker 7: not only was he advocating for that specific piece of
- 1:15:59Speaker 7: ground to be administratively designated, but he was also instrumental
- 1:16:03Speaker 7: in convening a community of other thought leaders to help
- 1:16:08Speaker 7: push that vision more broadly, and that organization is still
- 1:16:14Speaker 7: alive and robust today. But I don't think we would
- 1:16:18Speaker 7: be in remotely the same situation with Howard Zohneiser's success
- 1:16:24Speaker 7: in shepherding the Wilderness Act through to signature in September
- 1:16:28Speaker 7: of sixty four without not just the HeLa, but all
- 1:16:33Speaker 7: of that hustling that Leopold was a part of leading
- 1:16:36Speaker 7: up to the HeLa and after the hela's administrative designation,
- 1:16:39Speaker 7: and right through the end to the end of his life.
- 1:16:41Speaker 7: I mean, these were concepts that he was helping try
- 1:16:43Speaker 7: to advance and build community around into the late forties
- 1:16:47Speaker 7: when he passed.
- 1:16:48Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's a good point about the He was
- 1:16:51Speaker 1: doing the conceptualization right.
- 1:16:53Speaker 7: It wasn't just like the HeLa came into being and
- 1:16:55Speaker 7: then he moved on to other things, right, that was
- 1:16:57Speaker 7: a very important milestone on that timeline, But he was
- 1:17:00Speaker 7: helping foster a ground swell of movement around those concepts
- 1:17:04Speaker 7: much more broadly as well.
- 1:17:05Speaker 1: He came at this interesting moment in American history, a
- 1:17:10Speaker 1: really pivotal moment in American history where if you look
- 1:17:13Speaker 1: at pre Leopold, like pre Roosevelt, pre Leopold, you have
- 1:17:19Speaker 1: we had wilderness in spite of our best efforts to
- 1:17:23Speaker 1: get rid of it, you know.
- 1:17:25Speaker 3: What I mean.
- 1:17:26Speaker 1: It was like it was there because we hadn't gotten
- 1:17:28Speaker 1: to it yet. Yeah, and then there was this this
- 1:17:33Speaker 1: this minute, this moment where it also became not a
- 1:17:37Speaker 1: thing that we were we we we like fought foughtought, fought,
- 1:17:40Speaker 1: fought to rid ourselves of it. Yeah, then all of
- 1:17:42Speaker 1: a sudden it immediately had to become we fought, fought, fought, fought,
- 1:17:46Speaker 1: fought to keep it. Right, Like a lot of countries
- 1:17:49Speaker 1: never got never a lot of countries never had the
- 1:17:52Speaker 1: luxury to hit that inflection point. Right, they barred, you know,
- 1:17:56Speaker 1: they like go to great survivalent yea, like go to
- 1:18:00Speaker 1: like England's history. Yeah, you know, I mean they deforced
- 1:18:06Speaker 1: the entire island. Right, There was no like inflection point
- 1:18:09Speaker 1: where someone had the sort of like power and public
- 1:18:13Speaker 1: backing and wan not to go like, hey, at what
- 1:18:16Speaker 1: point should we just not do this to some parts?
- 1:18:21Speaker 2: And the quote that you read earlier about the trading
- 1:18:25Speaker 2: off the geese for the television. I mean, I think
- 1:18:30Speaker 2: what's really interesting when you read Leopold is he recognizes
- 1:18:35Speaker 2: that conflict. He doesn't have like this utopian you know,
- 1:18:38Speaker 2: if you look at like previous resource managers, there's this
- 1:18:43Speaker 2: very like progressive idea of we can just manage it
- 1:18:47Speaker 2: better and manage it better and squeeze everything out of it.
- 1:18:51Speaker 2: And he recognizes these trade offs. And it strikes me
- 1:18:55Speaker 2: as like a very fundamental concept to our modern sensibility
- 1:19:00Speaker 2: about wildlife and environmental issues is like someone's good. You know,
- 1:19:06Speaker 2: someone is going to pay somewhere for any little decision
- 1:19:10Speaker 2: that's made. You know, like every bit of you know,
- 1:19:12Speaker 2: sure you could, is the juice worth to squeeze? Is
- 1:19:14Speaker 2: kind of Leopold's big question and a lot of these things,
- 1:19:18Speaker 2: and that's where it's sort of the ethic.
- 1:19:20Speaker 1: He might be the father of fathers arguing with their
- 1:19:23Speaker 1: kids about television. He might have been the first person
- 1:19:28Speaker 1: that God bless him. He might have been like I
- 1:19:29Speaker 1: picture a future conflict, yeah, between nature and TV.
- 1:19:35Speaker 7: So that point you made Steve about sort of the
- 1:19:40Speaker 7: tipping point between wilderness being this thing that we're stacked
- 1:19:43Speaker 7: up against versus wilderness being this thing that we're trying
- 1:19:45Speaker 7: to steward. One of the things Leopold had to say
- 1:19:51Speaker 7: in that space, I'll try to I'll try to quote
- 1:19:53Speaker 7: it here, but it gets at that idea that you
- 1:19:54Speaker 7: were hitting earlier, on the blank place on the map.
- 1:19:57Speaker 7: He talks about man always killing the things we love,
- 1:20:02Speaker 7: and so we the pioneers, have killed our wilderness.
- 1:20:06Speaker 6: You be that as it may. I am glad.
- 1:20:09Speaker 7: I will never be young without wild country, to be
- 1:20:12Speaker 7: young in of what avails our forty freedoms without a
- 1:20:16Speaker 7: blank spot on the map.
- 1:20:17Speaker 1: He did what his eyes closed.
- 1:20:20Speaker 7: I think, I think that's the quote I was trying
- 1:20:21Speaker 7: to get at earlier, and then Steve before we move off,
- 1:20:23Speaker 7: got written back there.
- 1:20:24Speaker 6: I want to, I want to.
- 1:20:26Speaker 7: I want to touch on just like two very quickly,
- 1:20:28Speaker 7: two principles that I think, in and of themselves could
- 1:20:31Speaker 7: be a whole other conversation.
- 1:20:33Speaker 1: But hit him then we're gonna get into the book.
- 1:20:35Speaker 7: Well, hit him quick, so there is ample room to
- 1:20:40Speaker 7: have a discussion about what the future for wilderness management
- 1:20:46Speaker 7: holds and all of that complexity and what we know
- 1:20:49Speaker 7: now that we didn't know at the time of Leopold's
- 1:20:53Speaker 7: effort with the Hila or the Wilderness Act, and even
- 1:20:58Speaker 7: the language in the Wilderness Act and the deeper history
- 1:21:00Speaker 7: of these places. So a lot of that conceptualization of
- 1:21:04Speaker 7: these wild lands is rooted on an idea that these
- 1:21:07Speaker 7: places were uninhabited, the idea of terra nullius, that this
- 1:21:11Speaker 7: was just wild land waiting to be So that's a
- 1:21:15Speaker 7: whole that's a whole thing that needs to be acknowledged
- 1:21:18Speaker 7: right it is. And in the Wilderness Act there's language
- 1:21:22Speaker 7: of places where man is a visitor who does not remain.
- 1:21:27Speaker 7: But in the case of the Hila, in the case
- 1:21:29Speaker 7: of the Boundary Waters, in the case of every one
- 1:21:30Speaker 7: of these places, there's a much deeper history that you know,
- 1:21:33Speaker 7: a whole heck of a lot about, and we would
- 1:21:35Speaker 7: be doing a disservice, I think, by just clossing over
- 1:21:37Speaker 7: that reality. And then another aspect that I think is
- 1:21:41Speaker 7: a nice segue to a Sand County Almanac, and I
- 1:21:45Speaker 7: think the lifestyle that Doug lives, the lifestyle of Chester
- 1:21:52Speaker 7: and the whole Floyd family with their property. This idea,
- 1:21:56Speaker 7: and you've touched on it already on this podcast, Doug,
- 1:21:58Speaker 7: but the idea of the reciprocal dynamic between providing what
- 1:22:04Speaker 7: land needs from us and us getting what we need
- 1:22:07Speaker 7: from the land. That active involvement, where human activity in
- 1:22:12Speaker 7: a landscape can both make the land better and people better.
- 1:22:17Speaker 7: A lot of the conservation and ecology discussions we have
- 1:22:21Speaker 7: at this point in history are rooted in the notion
- 1:22:24Speaker 7: that all people do is screw stuff up. You've got
- 1:22:26Speaker 7: too many people, we're burning too much fossil fuels, We're
- 1:22:30Speaker 7: having this many impacts with overpopulation and all this development, etc.
- 1:22:35Speaker 6: Etc.
- 1:22:36Speaker 7: But we are also capable of providing so much value
- 1:22:39Speaker 7: to these places, just as these places provide so much
- 1:22:42Speaker 7: value to us as human beings. And in the case
- 1:22:45Speaker 7: of wilderness, one of the foundational tenets there is this
- 1:22:49Speaker 7: idea of an untrammeled landscape, a place where we're not
- 1:22:52Speaker 7: meddling in the system, and that made a lot of
- 1:22:54Speaker 7: sense in nineteen sixty four. And as we're moving forward
- 1:22:59Speaker 7: and trying to wrestle with some of these big conservation
- 1:23:01Speaker 7: challenges of non native invasive species and climate change and
- 1:23:05Speaker 7: the disruption of historic disturbance regimes like fire, we are
- 1:23:11Speaker 7: quickly awakening to the fact that the land needs a
- 1:23:14Speaker 7: lot from us. In terms of active management and taking
- 1:23:18Speaker 7: a totally hands off approach in a lot of situations
- 1:23:23Speaker 7: does not necessarily serve ecological outcomes. So that's a good
- 1:23:27Speaker 7: pivot to thinking about a Sand County Almanac and this
- 1:23:29Speaker 7: reciprocal relationship between land and people. What does the land
- 1:23:32Speaker 7: need from us?
- 1:23:32Speaker 1: It's a good pivot to talk about Doug because Doug
- 1:23:36Speaker 1: started Doug has started an organization. When I talked about
- 1:23:40Speaker 1: Doug's quote earlier, I'm going to talk about the contextualized
- 1:23:43Speaker 1: contextualized Doug's quote. Doug has started an organization, a nonprofit
- 1:23:47Speaker 1: group called Sharing the Land, and looking at the increasing
- 1:23:53Speaker 1: trend we see all around the country of leasing agreements,
- 1:23:58Speaker 1: like it's birthplace was in Texas, but it's it's spread everywhere.
- 1:24:02Speaker 1: It's everywhere. It's in the it's in the Northern Rockies,
- 1:24:04Speaker 1: it's everywhere now, which is landowners who might have traditionally
- 1:24:10Speaker 1: generations passed their fathers, their mothers, might have just had
- 1:24:16Speaker 1: granted permissions to neighbors, granted permissions to relatives, granted permissions
- 1:24:19Speaker 1: to whoever it was. When I grew up, it was
- 1:24:21Speaker 1: like loosey goosey. We hunted this the zerlots farm. We
- 1:24:24Speaker 1: hunted the zeld Rose farm shiitloads of people hunted the Zerlots.
- 1:24:28Speaker 1: Very much of their church hunted the Zerlots farm and
- 1:24:31Speaker 1: the zeld Rose farm. And then it kind of came
- 1:24:33Speaker 1: this awareness of like, oh, man, we have like as
- 1:24:36Speaker 1: much as we're raising they raised apples, alfalfa, dairy, right,
- 1:24:39Speaker 1: They're like, man, there's another like cash crop here in
- 1:24:43Speaker 1: the cash crop, here is wildlife, right and people want
- 1:24:46Speaker 1: it and they're willing to pay for it. So leasing
- 1:24:50Speaker 1: as come in, You're not going to change it to
- 1:24:52Speaker 1: just come in. And when when Doug looked at sharing
- 1:24:55Speaker 1: the land and started to set up this organization, he's
- 1:24:58Speaker 1: taking the same perspective like there's a landowner and the
- 1:25:03Speaker 1: landowner holds a thing of value and there's people that
- 1:25:06Speaker 1: want access to the thing of value it Well, rather
- 1:25:08Speaker 1: than maybe taking that interest and leveraging it into cash payment,
- 1:25:14Speaker 1: maybe we can solve that question of what does the
- 1:25:16Speaker 1: land get out of it? So landowners through Shane Land,
- 1:25:20Speaker 1: a landowner can have conservation work they wish they could
- 1:25:23Speaker 1: do on their place. I wish I could do tree
- 1:25:25Speaker 1: planning on my place. I wish I could take up
- 1:25:27Speaker 1: old fences on my place. I wish I could fight
- 1:25:30Speaker 1: non native invasive plants on my place. I wish I
- 1:25:33Speaker 1: could restore my stream bakes on my place. Well, those
- 1:25:38Speaker 1: hunters that are lined up waiting to hunt your place,
- 1:25:40Speaker 1: put them to work, right, like through an organized fashion.
- 1:25:45Speaker 1: Be like, here's your choor list, buddy, you know, and
- 1:25:49Speaker 1: then let's talk about hunting. Let's get some chores done
- 1:25:52Speaker 1: on the ground, right And that's kind of it's a
- 1:25:54Speaker 1: very Leopold concept, right.
- 1:25:56Speaker 3: Well, the concept was inspired, borrowed, possibly even stolen, but
- 1:26:04Speaker 3: from Leopold and the idea of the Riley Game Cooperative.
- 1:26:07Speaker 3: When Leopold, when he was living in Madison in the
- 1:26:11Speaker 3: early thirties, looking for a place to hunt, he pulls
- 1:26:14Speaker 3: up on the side of the road and here's a
- 1:26:16Speaker 3: farmer working, and he starts chatting with him, this fellow
- 1:26:19Speaker 3: named Ruben Paulson, And he gets around to that where
- 1:26:23Speaker 3: one would about asking permission, and Paulson says, well, yeah,
- 1:26:28Speaker 3: I guess you could hunt my place, but you know,
- 1:26:30Speaker 3: I have to tell you there really isn't much game
- 1:26:34Speaker 3: around here. And he thought it was because of trespassers
- 1:26:38Speaker 3: more than anything else. Or poachers is actually what he
- 1:26:41Speaker 3: called him. And Leopold one. I have this vision of
- 1:26:45Speaker 3: these two guys meeting, you know, because people do stop,
- 1:26:48Speaker 3: and I just have this vision of this meeting. And
- 1:26:53Speaker 3: Leopold in that moment said to him, well, you know,
- 1:26:58Speaker 3: you could have more a game if you had better habitat.
- 1:27:02Speaker 3: And they came up with this idea, as as Leopold
- 1:27:07Speaker 3: called it, and there Riley was born the Riley Game Cooperative,
- 1:27:10Speaker 3: where his his buddies from town came out and Leopold
- 1:27:15Speaker 3: put a plan together and then helped his buddies helped
- 1:27:18Speaker 3: put implement that plan, and then they all they all
- 1:27:24Speaker 3: benefited from that that work, and the land benefited, the
- 1:27:30Speaker 3: members of the biotic community benefited, and the hunters and
- 1:27:34Speaker 3: the farmers benefited. And from that a community also developed.
- 1:27:38Speaker 3: That it became a community, a gathering of people who
- 1:27:45Speaker 3: shared those ideas, and some of them kind of came
- 1:27:48Speaker 3: to it because of that, and some of them were
- 1:27:50Speaker 3: farmers and some of them were students of Leopold. Is
- 1:27:53Speaker 3: a fascinating thing to me. You know. I learned about
- 1:27:55Speaker 3: Riley about the same time I met you, and it
- 1:27:58Speaker 3: was about fifteen years ago, and I was riding a
- 1:28:01Speaker 3: bicycle through Riley and here's this they're putting up this kiosk,
- 1:28:04Speaker 3: and it's I had no idea. I thought I knew
- 1:28:07Speaker 3: a lot about Leopold, you know. And then they talk
- 1:28:09Speaker 3: about there's this whole thing about the Riley Game Cooperative,
- 1:28:14Speaker 3: and Uh, it's something that was in my head for
- 1:28:17Speaker 3: a long time. And so that's where sharing the land
- 1:28:21Speaker 3: was was born from.
- 1:28:23Speaker 1: Uh And can you can you explain you got to
- 1:28:27Speaker 1: him coming to Madison, Okay and his and we talked
- 1:28:31Speaker 1: earlier about all the states that claim them. Can you,
- 1:28:34Speaker 1: being from Wisconsin, can you set up what what Sand County?
- 1:28:39Speaker 1: If you're looking for that on the map, what that is?
- 1:28:42Speaker 3: Yeah, you won't. You won't find a Sand county that
- 1:28:44Speaker 3: I'm aware of. But he was in uh near Barriboom
- 1:28:49Speaker 3: in sauc County, right on the Wisconsin River. In the
- 1:28:53Speaker 3: Wisconsin River is very sandy. That whole area is is
- 1:28:57Speaker 3: Wisconsin Rivers, ever changing river. There's lots of sand, a
- 1:29:01Speaker 3: lot of sand dunes, sandbars and a little side note,
- 1:29:06Speaker 3: he ended up buying this piece of land sounds like
- 1:29:09Speaker 3: pretty much for the back taxes that it was an
- 1:29:11Speaker 3: abandoned farm. So if you're in Wisconsin and southwest Wisconsin,
- 1:29:17Speaker 3: it's right on the banks of the Wisconsin River. So
- 1:29:20Speaker 3: from our place, I guess you wouldn't necessarily know, but
- 1:29:24Speaker 3: to the east of us on the Wisconsin River and
- 1:29:27Speaker 3: very thirty miles away, and it's very very different terrain
- 1:29:30Speaker 3: than what we have over in our driftless area, very sandy,
- 1:29:36Speaker 3: lots of bogginess and water, lots of mosquitoes if you
- 1:29:40Speaker 3: go over there. So a very different place, but about
- 1:29:45Speaker 3: a half an hour forty five minute drive from Madison,
- 1:29:48Speaker 3: and it was, you know, it was within reach and
- 1:29:52Speaker 3: sounds like for the most part, it was exactly the
- 1:29:55Speaker 3: property that he was looking for, the kind of property
- 1:29:58Speaker 3: he was looking for, one that had been degraded that
- 1:30:01Speaker 3: he could then practice these conservation ideas that he had
- 1:30:06Speaker 3: been talking about, the whole idea of wildlife ecology and
- 1:30:11Speaker 3: what kind of habitat that the wildlife that he was
- 1:30:15Speaker 3: interested in, and that we tend to be interested in
- 1:30:17Speaker 3: it as hunters, what kind of habitat they needed. And
- 1:30:23Speaker 3: so he bought this and began working.
- 1:30:25Speaker 1: On which you guys, best equipped you can decide among yourselves,
- 1:30:37Speaker 1: is best equipped to explain what a Sand County Almanac
- 1:30:42Speaker 1: is meaning like structurally meaning And I don't even know
- 1:30:48Speaker 1: the details on it. He was dead when it came out, right,
- 1:30:51Speaker 1: he did, and he didn't sit down and write it
- 1:30:54Speaker 1: like beginning, middle end, like you write a book. Yeah,
- 1:30:58Speaker 1: do you know that? That's about the extent of what
- 1:31:01Speaker 1: I understood. That what I've come to understand.
- 1:31:06Speaker 3: He had been putting these essays together in a logical manner,
- 1:31:10Speaker 3: or what he thought was a logical manner, and his daughter, I.
- 1:31:17Speaker 7: Think it was his sons who took I think the
- 1:31:19Speaker 7: kids had a critical role in working with the publisher
- 1:31:22Speaker 7: after he had gotten a letter of acceptance for.
- 1:31:24Speaker 3: The Yeah, the book had been accepted, but it wasn't completely.
- 1:31:30Speaker 5: It was a more those individual essays were not like
- 1:31:33Speaker 5: previously published another place.
- 1:31:35Speaker 7: Well, so if you look right at the right at
- 1:31:36Speaker 7: the beginning, I've got my copy here in front of me.
- 1:31:39Speaker 7: And one of the first things that you see as
- 1:31:41Speaker 7: a grateful acknowledgment made to the editors of the following
- 1:31:44Speaker 7: magazines and journals who have kindly allowed to be reprinted
- 1:31:48Speaker 7: in book form from portions or all of individual articles.
- 1:31:52Speaker 7: And here's a list of the periodicals. American Forests, Audubon Magazine,
- 1:31:59Speaker 7: The Condor Journal of Forestry, Journal, of Wildlife Management.
- 1:32:04Speaker 1: Meter dot com.
- 1:32:05Speaker 7: Uh, perhaps if you'd been in existence at that point.
- 1:32:09Speaker 7: Outdoor America, Silent Wings, Wisconsin Agriculturist and Farmer, Wisconsin Conservation Bulletin.
- 1:32:20Speaker 10: So on.
- 1:32:21Speaker 1: Parts of a Sand County almanac appeared in the Wisconsin
- 1:32:24Speaker 1: Conservation is Bulletin's.
- 1:32:27Speaker 7: I can give you the specifics so and actually one
- 1:32:30Speaker 7: of my favorite essays Skydance, Burrow and Skydance. I believe
- 1:32:35Speaker 7: that's right, if I've got the order here. There's a
- 1:32:37Speaker 7: lot of semi colons to make sense of. But the
- 1:32:40Speaker 7: short answer is it's a collection of a life's worth
- 1:32:42Speaker 7: of work that he brought some structure to.
- 1:32:45Speaker 1: But when you're reading it, it isn't like that. No, I
- 1:32:51Speaker 1: read it without knowing that. I read it like a
- 1:32:53Speaker 1: dude sat down and wrote this book. Do you know
- 1:32:56Speaker 1: what I mean. It's not like you know when you
- 1:32:58Speaker 1: when you get a writer you like and you read
- 1:32:59Speaker 1: all their work and then you're stuck reading like the
- 1:33:01Speaker 1: book of their like letters and correspondence, and this is
- 1:33:03Speaker 1: how it's terrible. This is not that no, right, No.
- 1:33:07Speaker 3: It's really it's really a lifetime of work. And I
- 1:33:10Speaker 3: think that's one of the beauties of it. To me,
- 1:33:16Speaker 3: the most beautiful thing is the first sentence in the
- 1:33:19Speaker 3: or the first two sentences in the forward. There are
- 1:33:21Speaker 3: those there are some who can live without wild things,
- 1:33:24Speaker 3: and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and
- 1:33:28Speaker 3: dilemmas of one who cannot. The delights and the dilemmas yep,
- 1:33:35Speaker 3: And and then the rest of the book just goes
- 1:33:39Speaker 3: from there, so divided in three parts. As A as
- 1:33:42Speaker 3: a young man, a sixteen year old walked into the
- 1:33:46Speaker 3: high school library and our librarian, I'm sure I was
- 1:33:49Speaker 3: going into study or something and not talk to girls
- 1:33:52Speaker 3: in the corner or anything. But miss Hendrix handed me
- 1:33:56Speaker 3: the book and said, I think you'd be interested in that.
- 1:34:00Speaker 1: Really, how old were you?
- 1:34:01Speaker 3: Then?
- 1:34:02Speaker 2: I'm sorry?
- 1:34:02Speaker 1: What was this?
- 1:34:04Speaker 3: When was that a long time ago? It was nineteen
- 1:34:07Speaker 3: seventy five.
- 1:34:07Speaker 1: Of the book had just come out. He was still
- 1:34:10Speaker 1: writing as a as a new release.
- 1:34:13Speaker 2: Well it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't immediately like this iconic,
- 1:34:18Speaker 2: Oh not at all. Yeah, Yeah, that's why I was. Yeah,
- 1:34:20Speaker 2: and I didn't think you were a teenager in nineteen
- 1:34:22Speaker 2: forty nine. I was kind of curious because it was
- 1:34:25Speaker 2: a slow burn up until the early seventies.
- 1:34:29Speaker 3: Late so it was like, yeah, late sixties, like sixty
- 1:34:32Speaker 3: nine I think was when it was published. In sixty
- 1:34:34Speaker 3: eight or sixty nine is when it was published in paperback,
- 1:34:37Speaker 3: and of course that coincided with the new environmental movement
- 1:34:40Speaker 3: that was happening, and so it became, you know, incredibly
- 1:34:44Speaker 3: important and really spoke to a lot.
- 1:34:46Speaker 1: Of people, and it has sold millions, yeah, millions of.
- 1:34:53Speaker 3: Copies in a bunch of different languages. So yeah, so
- 1:34:59Speaker 3: I wasn't reading I was whatever in nineteen sixty eight
- 1:35:03Speaker 3: or sixty nine. I was nine years old, but nineteen
- 1:35:06Speaker 3: seventy five to have miss Hendrix, who was our librarian,
- 1:35:11Speaker 3: hand this to me and say this, might you seem
- 1:35:15Speaker 3: like kind a guy would be interested in this?
- 1:35:17Speaker 1: And what a compliment?
- 1:35:19Speaker 3: Yeah, well that is a great compliment. I think she
- 1:35:24Speaker 3: was really searching for some way to get me moving
- 1:35:28Speaker 3: along a little more. And at that time in my life,
- 1:35:32Speaker 3: the first part of the book, which is the Phenology
- 1:35:34Speaker 3: of our Area, really where he goes through the seasons
- 1:35:39Speaker 3: and he talks about these different things. I was just
- 1:35:41Speaker 3: fascinated by that because he was putting giving voice to
- 1:35:43Speaker 3: things that I was I don't know if that I
- 1:35:46Speaker 3: was thinking about him, but I was certainly experiencing them.
- 1:35:49Speaker 3: You know, I was sixteen years old. We were going
- 1:35:51Speaker 3: hunting and you're hearing this different stuff and what's this
- 1:35:53Speaker 3: and what's that? And I had kind of Karl and
- 1:35:56Speaker 3: I were talking about this earlier when we're having breakfast
- 1:35:58Speaker 3: that I walked along with my grandfather when I was eight, nine,
- 1:36:03Speaker 3: ten years old and with a bucket of paint and
- 1:36:05Speaker 3: a paint rush and I was marketing. He was telling me,
- 1:36:07Speaker 3: paint that one and I put these. So I was
- 1:36:09Speaker 3: having the marking trees, marking trees, and I was having
- 1:36:12Speaker 3: this experience that I didn't think about for another you know,
- 1:36:19Speaker 3: fifty years that my grandpa was teaching me that, whether
- 1:36:23Speaker 3: he knew he or not, but I remember as every
- 1:36:25Speaker 3: eight or nine year old kid would ask why why
- 1:36:29Speaker 3: do I paint this one? He said, well, we're going
- 1:36:30Speaker 3: to cut that one, and then why are we cutting
- 1:36:33Speaker 3: that one? I mean, that's that was one of my
- 1:36:36Speaker 3: earliest experiences with that sort of thing. And then spending
- 1:36:39Speaker 3: time on the farm with my dad.
- 1:36:41Speaker 1: So by the time just button on neck, because it's
- 1:36:46Speaker 1: interesting that you had that because you came from an
- 1:36:47Speaker 1: agricultural family, and that you had an introduction to conservation
- 1:36:51Speaker 1: thinking like that, like landscape care, landscape manipulation. I would
- 1:36:58Speaker 1: say that I that I was completely unaware of anything
- 1:37:04Speaker 1: surrounding conservation, the conservation movement until I read the San
- 1:37:09Speaker 1: County Almanac. I was raised with the get it while
- 1:37:12Speaker 1: the gitting's good.
- 1:37:14Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I get it again.
- 1:37:16Speaker 1: Like my dad was like brought up in a house
- 1:37:18Speaker 1: where they spoke Italian. He was raised by Italian immigrants
- 1:37:22Speaker 1: born in the Great Depression, right, the like these people
- 1:37:28Speaker 1: aren't coming from Italy to be in the America in
- 1:37:34Speaker 1: the Great Depression in.
- 1:37:37Speaker 3: You know these.
- 1:37:38Speaker 1: Trees, right, It's just like it was. It was good.
- 1:37:40Speaker 1: All the getting's good was the attitude. And I didn't
- 1:37:43Speaker 1: know about I didn't know about any of these even
- 1:37:46Speaker 1: thoughts until I read a San County almac. So it's
- 1:37:48Speaker 1: like to have an upbringing where he was at least
- 1:37:51Speaker 1: talking about something you've been exposed to. That you picked
- 1:37:53Speaker 1: this tree and not that tree.
- 1:37:55Speaker 3: It's cool, right, oh yeah, And you know that because
- 1:38:01Speaker 3: of the number of times visited my family. The reason
- 1:38:04Speaker 3: they came from Germany in the eighteen fifties is they
- 1:38:06Speaker 3: were looking for a place to set up sawmills, and
- 1:38:10Speaker 3: they did over there en Durham Road, and then our
- 1:38:15Speaker 3: and who knows whether the name was already named Durham
- 1:38:18Speaker 3: Road or not. But the property that we own they
- 1:38:23Speaker 3: bought because it had timber on it. My people weren't
- 1:38:27Speaker 3: really farmers, they were sawyers. So my great great grandfather,
- 1:38:34Speaker 3: my great grandfather, my grandfather all had sawmills. And they,
- 1:38:40Speaker 3: you know, it's not like today where you're going through
- 1:38:42Speaker 3: and you're just ripping. You can go through a lot
- 1:38:44Speaker 3: of trees in a hurry. They were being selective about it.
- 1:38:48Speaker 1: And Leopold speaks to those people at one point in
- 1:38:54Speaker 1: Santa County Almanac. He's like talking about axe biting into
- 1:38:58Speaker 1: a tree. Yeah, And he goes and he does a
- 1:39:01Speaker 1: history lesson flap right out flies a chunk of the tree,
- 1:39:06Speaker 1: and you think about the growth rings. And he walks
- 1:39:08Speaker 1: you through where you're at, and you take a cup
- 1:39:10Speaker 1: more wax, and where you're.
- 1:39:12Speaker 6: At cross.
- 1:39:14Speaker 1: Strokes.
- 1:39:18Speaker 6: You're right, you're right there.
- 1:39:19Speaker 1: That as that saw bites into that tree, he walks
- 1:39:22Speaker 1: you back into time as you go into those growth rings.
- 1:39:25Speaker 3: Right, it's.
- 1:39:28Speaker 6: With his with his partner on the other.
- 1:39:30Speaker 3: End that kind of exposure is not something that you
- 1:39:38Speaker 3: think about at the time. It's just happening to you.
- 1:39:40Speaker 3: Right Even now, identifying trees, I can't explain. It's difficult
- 1:39:45Speaker 3: for me to explain to people that that's a a
- 1:39:47Speaker 3: red oak, that's a white oak, and here's why, because
- 1:39:50Speaker 3: the way it is, yeah, it's just right, you.
- 1:39:52Speaker 2: Know when you see it.
- 1:39:55Speaker 1: I mean pretty much everything in the woods just like
- 1:39:58Speaker 1: you know, that's just the way.
- 1:40:00Speaker 3: Well right, well, actually, my dad always used to say
- 1:40:02Speaker 3: that's what they call and then insert whatever there, that's
- 1:40:07Speaker 3: what they call. But had those experiences and I guess
- 1:40:14Speaker 3: didn't appreciate him. It was more or didn't understand that
- 1:40:17Speaker 3: there was a lesson being taught. And I don't think
- 1:40:19Speaker 3: it was an intentional lesson at all. It was just
- 1:40:21Speaker 3: this is what we do, and a farm was carved
- 1:40:25Speaker 3: out of that land. And you know, to this day
- 1:40:28Speaker 3: the farmland is one hundred acres or sixty acres of
- 1:40:30Speaker 3: pasture and there's two hundred and forty acres of woods.
- 1:40:35Speaker 3: And so I remember my father telling me fifteen years ago,
- 1:40:42Speaker 3: you remember when we did the cutting of those big
- 1:40:45Speaker 3: trees that I mean, this was one of these ethic
- 1:40:48Speaker 3: things right. We were sitting there as I had gone
- 1:40:50Speaker 3: through the management plan the shelter would harvest, and I
- 1:40:53Speaker 3: was talking with him about it, and he looked at
- 1:40:55Speaker 3: me and said, well, Douglas, this, I know this needs
- 1:40:57Speaker 3: to be done. I just didn't want to be the
- 1:41:00Speaker 3: one to do it, which was meaning he didn't want
- 1:41:02Speaker 3: to be the one to kill those big trees because
- 1:41:04Speaker 3: he's ninety years old at the time and he grew
- 1:41:06Speaker 3: up with them.
- 1:41:09Speaker 1: I've left. I've had that conversation with Yannie.
- 1:41:15Speaker 3: Oh, killing killing trees.
- 1:41:16Speaker 4: He doesn't want me to kill the trees, just.
- 1:41:19Speaker 1: Cutting into them big old Yeah.
- 1:41:20Speaker 10: You know.
- 1:41:20Speaker 3: Here's the thing about that. The one of the my
- 1:41:24Speaker 3: favorite lessons from Forrester was that kills the trees kill
- 1:41:27Speaker 3: each other. That over time, the bigger they get, the
- 1:41:31Speaker 3: fewer of them there are, and that what we're doing
- 1:41:34Speaker 3: in our timber stand improvement process is we're selecting for
- 1:41:39Speaker 3: the better trees so I can support you and your
- 1:41:43Speaker 3: timber stand improvement. There's some things that maybe not so much,
- 1:41:47Speaker 3: but I like what you're doing with your place. You know.
- 1:41:51Speaker 3: It's Oh, I would never expect to speak for Leo Pulled,
- 1:42:00Speaker 3: but I think much what Yanni's doing is Leopoldion. I
- 1:42:04Speaker 3: don't think 'apoldion like that.
- 1:42:06Speaker 4: Well, I mean I think I would certainly fall in
- 1:42:09Speaker 4: like the greater than than rather than the lesser than category,
- 1:42:15Speaker 4: you know, as most of what I'm doing he'd be into.
- 1:42:19Speaker 3: I think you're right and the part in all of us. Right.
- 1:42:26Speaker 3: So here I am sixty five years old, sitting here
- 1:42:28Speaker 3: talking with all you young bucks.
- 1:42:29Speaker 1: One second for folks at home. Yanni has taken a
- 1:42:33Speaker 1: property that's he's spent his life around, and his family
- 1:42:37Speaker 1: has deep history, and he's he's improving. He's taking steps
- 1:42:42Speaker 1: to improve it as wildlife habitat. Particularly he's trying to
- 1:42:46Speaker 1: attract big giant bucks and squirrels and squirrels. No, not anymore.
- 1:42:54Speaker 4: It started, I'll be honest. Two years ago, when it started,
- 1:42:58Speaker 4: I would have I would have said that's correct to say,
- 1:43:00Speaker 4: particularly big giant books. But two years into it, it's
- 1:43:04Speaker 4: just improving wildlife habitat.
- 1:43:06Speaker 1: Yeah. And when I dog on Yianni, I'm joking. I
- 1:43:10Speaker 1: know what he's doing. He's learned more about I don't.
- 1:43:12Speaker 1: I've never done that project. He's studied up on it, right,
- 1:43:15Speaker 1: I'm just teasing.
- 1:43:17Speaker 3: Yeah, No, it's fantastic what he's doing. And I think
- 1:43:21Speaker 3: what Leopold would like is that you're you're thinking, you're adapting,
- 1:43:26Speaker 3: you're managing, and you're looking at uh, that bigger biotic community.
- 1:43:33Speaker 3: And I think that's the part of the thought process
- 1:43:36Speaker 3: that I was learning and didn't really understand it. So
- 1:43:41Speaker 3: then I'm sixteen years old and I read this book,
- 1:43:44Speaker 3: and by that first part the phenology was just fascinating
- 1:43:47Speaker 3: to me. Then I got a little older and I
- 1:43:50Speaker 3: traveled a little bit, and so the central part, which
- 1:43:53Speaker 3: sketches here and there, where he's talking about these different
- 1:43:55Speaker 3: parts of the country where he visited and the different
- 1:43:58Speaker 3: experiences that he had in there and how they were
- 1:44:01Speaker 3: beginning to shape it all through it, you can see,
- 1:44:02Speaker 3: you can hear that these essays are the delights and
- 1:44:05Speaker 3: dilemmas of one who cannot about wild places. So he's
- 1:44:10Speaker 3: you can see what he's going towards. And then at
- 1:44:12Speaker 3: the end it's the upshot the land ethic, and he
- 1:44:17Speaker 3: says somewhere in there about I don't pretend to say
- 1:44:21Speaker 3: that this is something that I've known all along, that
- 1:44:24Speaker 3: this has been the evolution of life, is something that's
- 1:44:27Speaker 3: learned over a lifetime and when.
- 1:44:31Speaker 1: You I want to button out of things, you brought
- 1:44:33Speaker 1: a thing up that reminds me of something I'd like
- 1:44:36Speaker 1: to touch on with him. Is you mentioned the biotic community?
- 1:44:39Speaker 1: That was a like somebody will say Eldo Leopold is
- 1:44:41Speaker 1: the father of a cology because Eldo Leopold was looking
- 1:44:45Speaker 1: at community like the wild, like nature as a community
- 1:44:50Speaker 1: of parts. And he has this metaphor where he has
- 1:44:54Speaker 1: this metaphor where you have a clock, right, and you
- 1:45:00Speaker 1: have a person who doesn't know a lot about clocks,
- 1:45:03Speaker 1: and they start going, what the hell could this wheel
- 1:45:05Speaker 1: be for? That doesn't do any good?
- 1:45:09Speaker 3: Right?
- 1:45:10Speaker 1: And you start pitching parts. And he looked at nature
- 1:45:14Speaker 1: that you have to have an appreciation that there's components
- 1:45:17Speaker 1: of this that you don't understand. This is a collection
- 1:45:22Speaker 1: of cogs and wheels that function together to do a thing.
- 1:45:27Speaker 1: You cannot throw out little parts because you don't see
- 1:45:31Speaker 1: what it's doing. That can't be helping this clock, right.
- 1:45:36Speaker 2: He I think like as a game manager prior to Leopold,
- 1:45:43Speaker 2: very generally speaking, it's like, if you want more game animals,
- 1:45:48Speaker 2: you either stop people from hunting, you kill predators, or
- 1:45:52Speaker 2: you you know, transplant animals or propagate animals and breathe them,
- 1:45:58Speaker 2: and his his sort of generation. And it's not that
- 1:46:02Speaker 2: he was just part of it, but I mean he
- 1:46:04Speaker 2: was a leading figure in this recognition that all of
- 1:46:07Speaker 2: these parts matter and that one way to get game
- 1:46:11Speaker 2: animals is to improve habitat right. And like previously, there
- 1:46:15Speaker 2: was a much more sort of narrow focus on like
- 1:46:20Speaker 2: the number of deer in the woods and not necessarily
- 1:46:23Speaker 2: like how the brows is doing and all that.
- 1:46:28Speaker 3: And you've probably all heard the part about when he
- 1:46:33Speaker 3: shot a wolf and saw the green fire go out
- 1:46:35Speaker 3: of her eyes. I don't think that he was saying
- 1:46:38Speaker 3: we should never control predators.
- 1:46:41Speaker 1: He was, I feecially after that research just came out
- 1:46:44Speaker 1: of British Columbia recently.
- 1:46:45Speaker 6: That was interesting, but.
- 1:46:47Speaker 3: The idea that they are members of the biotic community.
- 1:46:51Speaker 3: And then later he wrote in the I think I
- 1:46:54Speaker 3: sent it to you summary and I don't have it
- 1:46:55Speaker 3: in front of me, but essentially where he said where
- 1:46:57Speaker 3: rifles can control the antler the game populations, but they
- 1:47:03Speaker 3: rarely do. As you once said to me as we
- 1:47:07Speaker 3: were talking about white tail deer, you said, well, what
- 1:47:10Speaker 3: do you mean too many deer. You were playing Devil's
- 1:47:12Speaker 3: advocates to.
- 1:47:14Speaker 1: Make that point all the time, and I don't make it.
- 1:47:16Speaker 1: I make the point all the time when something the
- 1:47:17Speaker 1: minute someone tells you something's overpopulated, I always point out,
- 1:47:22Speaker 1: ask yourself, according to who right?
- 1:47:25Speaker 3: From whose perspective?
- 1:47:26Speaker 1: And I think my perspective is it overpopulated?
- 1:47:28Speaker 3: And my response that day was.
- 1:47:30Speaker 1: It's not like there's just not like an objective truth.
- 1:47:33Speaker 7: Oh there is, please, there is one dog Leopold. Leopold
- 1:47:39Speaker 7: told us what it was too right versus wrong. Okay,
- 1:47:43Speaker 7: what a thing is right when it tends to preserve
- 1:47:47Speaker 7: the beauty and integrity of the biotic community, it's wrong
- 1:47:52Speaker 7: when it when it tends otherwise. And so if you
- 1:47:55Speaker 7: have the land telling you there are too many deer,
- 1:47:57Speaker 7: if you have the ecosystem telling you that there are
- 1:47:59Speaker 7: too many deer, objectively, there are too many deer.
- 1:48:03Speaker 1: As opposed to somebody who's like car insurance, car insurance company.
- 1:48:10Speaker 2: It's not a number like fifty thousand and two and
- 1:48:13Speaker 2: eighty two deer.
- 1:48:14Speaker 7: Go on, Doug, Right, Yeah, you take a stance there
- 1:48:21Speaker 7: too many.
- 1:48:22Speaker 3: Absolutely, you're absolutely right, And that's uh, that is what
- 1:48:26Speaker 3: he was getting at and all of that. When you
- 1:48:29Speaker 3: when we had that discussion, I said, well, how about
- 1:48:31Speaker 3: from the perspective of the land or something to that effect,
- 1:48:34Speaker 3: And you're like, and I understood the position you were taking,
- 1:48:40Speaker 3: but that that also goes to the biotic community. When
- 1:48:44Speaker 3: we see ourselves as a member of the community, will
- 1:48:47Speaker 3: treat it more lovingly as opposed to that that the
- 1:48:51Speaker 3: first quote you read about one of the first quotes
- 1:48:54Speaker 3: was that we are the masters the abrahamick that it's
- 1:48:58Speaker 3: here for us to deploit. Essentially, that when we see
- 1:49:03Speaker 3: ourselves as a member of it, we'll treat it more lovingly.
- 1:49:07Speaker 3: And that's the kind of stuff that I've really taken
- 1:49:10Speaker 3: the heart. I mean, I want a healthy biotic community.
- 1:49:15Speaker 3: I want a healthy ecosystem, healthy forest, I want a
- 1:49:18Speaker 3: healthy deer herd. I want big giant bucks when when
- 1:49:21Speaker 3: you start boiling it down to my place in my
- 1:49:24Speaker 3: area and I want turkeys a guy.
- 1:49:26Speaker 5: But when it comes to hunting, like, what was Leopold's like,
- 1:49:34Speaker 5: what was it about hunting for him? Was it that
- 1:49:37Speaker 5: that game was a resource like timber or soil or water,
- 1:49:42Speaker 5: or was it that that game was an indicator of
- 1:49:47Speaker 5: a healthy landscape or did he just love hunting or
- 1:49:50Speaker 5: was it everything?
- 1:49:51Speaker 3: It was all of that, And again, I think that's
- 1:49:53Speaker 3: an evolution and thought that that as my dad used
- 1:50:00Speaker 3: to like to say, well, it's all part of it.
- 1:50:04Speaker 3: And I think that's very My father was very Leopoldian
- 1:50:08Speaker 3: when it came to things like that. Right now, it's
- 1:50:10Speaker 3: all a part of it. And when we're in a
- 1:50:13Speaker 3: situation very different than the HeLa and those wilderness areas,
- 1:50:18Speaker 3: where I'm in a situation in southwest Wisconsin where ninety
- 1:50:21Speaker 3: five percent of the land is privately owned and almost
- 1:50:25Speaker 3: one hundred percent of that land has had this heavy
- 1:50:28Speaker 3: impact of humankind and farming and and things that seemed
- 1:50:34Speaker 3: like the right thing at the time, like the planning
- 1:50:36Speaker 3: of multiflora rose or autumn olive or uh that kind
- 1:50:40Speaker 3: of thing. And Yanny knows about this autumn alive, buckthorn,
- 1:50:44Speaker 3: Japanese barbery, all of these different plants that we're really
- 1:50:47Speaker 3: spending our time and we're out there managing invasive species
- 1:50:52Speaker 3: now that we're introduced by us. Because it seemed like
- 1:50:54Speaker 3: the right thing at the time, the same agencies that
- 1:50:58Speaker 3: maybe encourage some of that planting are now also encouraging
- 1:51:03Speaker 3: well will never eradicate it with the management of it.
- 1:51:05Speaker 3: So that heavy hand of man and you know, in
- 1:51:08Speaker 3: agriculture and and all of that is a real interesting
- 1:51:12Speaker 3: part of this discussion to me. And I think one
- 1:51:16Speaker 3: of the beautiful things of Leopold is that he was
- 1:51:19Speaker 3: both this advocate for these wilderness areas and this this wildness,
- 1:51:25Speaker 3: but then he was also heavily involved with private land conservation.
- 1:51:30Speaker 1: That's a great that's a great point man that he like,
- 1:51:35Speaker 1: when I look at my social circle, right, I got
- 1:51:39Speaker 1: the friends right that are the you know, the last
- 1:51:44Speaker 1: vestiges of wilderness and just like leave it be, leave
- 1:51:48Speaker 1: it be, leave it be. And I got friends that
- 1:51:50Speaker 1: are very steeped in like proper land management. We recently
- 1:51:54Speaker 1: had Becky humphries On. Becky Humphreyes is like the ships
- 1:51:57Speaker 1: sailed man. For most of the stuff, the lee even
- 1:52:00Speaker 1: in alone ain't working. Yeah, it needs we need effort, money,
- 1:52:06Speaker 1: time put into active land management. Leaving it be is
- 1:52:10Speaker 1: not helping I, right, And it's like that here's this
- 1:52:13Speaker 1: guy that at that time saw that these things are
- 1:52:17Speaker 1: like was able to sort of see the world and
- 1:52:19Speaker 1: these things that were like these two different conversations that
- 1:52:21Speaker 1: needed to happen depending on location.
- 1:52:24Speaker 3: Right, that's exactly right. So here in Uh, it was
- 1:52:28Speaker 3: in nineteen twenty four that he moved to to Madison.
- 1:52:33Speaker 3: You know, he was transferred to the Forest Products Lab
- 1:52:36Speaker 3: in in Madison, Wisconsin, and he you know, he did
- 1:52:39Speaker 3: that for about four years and ultimately quit and was
- 1:52:44Speaker 3: hired by the Shooting and Shooting Arms Sammy. Sammy, tell
- 1:52:52Speaker 3: me what it is, the Shooting Arms and.
- 1:52:54Speaker 2: Orditions, Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute.
- 1:52:59Speaker 3: Yeah, there you go to do. Uh, that is really well.
- 1:53:02Speaker 3: On tribune, it was just yeah, bro, are you kind
- 1:53:05Speaker 3: of yeah? I know, I wonder if you're both going
- 1:53:08Speaker 3: to play later tape their minds shut.
- 1:53:10Speaker 2: I'm I'm looking forward to.
- 1:53:15Speaker 3: Is he talking about if I ever have a podcast?
- 1:53:18Speaker 2: The guy for Sammy? After quitting the Forest Products.
- 1:53:21Speaker 3: Right, he quit and so this is in the nineteen twenties.
- 1:53:25Speaker 3: You know, things are going pretty well and he quit
- 1:53:27Speaker 3: and then he convinced that group to hire him to
- 1:53:30Speaker 3: do a game survey of multiple ones of the Upper Midwest.
- 1:53:35Speaker 3: So the folks who are selling guns and ammunition, we're
- 1:53:39Speaker 3: beginning to recognize that if we're going to sell guns
- 1:53:41Speaker 3: and ammunition for people to hunt. Boy, they better have
- 1:53:45Speaker 3: something to hunt, and what can we do about it?
- 1:53:48Speaker 3: So he spent a lot of time in the Upper Midwest,
- 1:53:50Speaker 3: uh doing these game surveys, and what he came back
- 1:53:53Speaker 3: from with that from was it's not just regulation and
- 1:53:59Speaker 3: in fact regulation of well it, you know, just don't
- 1:54:02Speaker 3: shoot any deer for a while and you'll come back,
- 1:54:04Speaker 3: or don't shoot any of this. That they have to
- 1:54:05Speaker 3: have the habitat too, whatever that species happens to be,
- 1:54:10Speaker 3: that they have to have that habitat. So let's start
- 1:54:11Speaker 3: to work in that work on that. And then of
- 1:54:14Speaker 3: course in the nineteen thirties when the depression came and
- 1:54:17Speaker 3: the things like the Civilian Conservation Course started and the
- 1:54:20Speaker 3: Soil Conservation Service that we all know as the Natural
- 1:54:23Speaker 3: Resource Conservation Service now and the programs that Becky Humphries
- 1:54:27Speaker 3: was talking about, the farm Bill, stuff like the Conservation
- 1:54:29Speaker 3: Reserve Program, Stewardship program, equip all of those things. The
- 1:54:35Speaker 3: precursor to that, Leopold was involved with that on private
- 1:54:38Speaker 3: land between Madison Lacrosse is this place called Coon Valley,
- 1:54:44Speaker 3: and they wanted to do something they being the Soil
- 1:54:47Speaker 3: Conservation Service, to conserve the land, you know, those were
- 1:54:50Speaker 3: the dust bowl years been in that area. It was
- 1:54:52Speaker 3: erosion from just over use, over pasturing, over planting, you know,
- 1:54:56Speaker 3: just plowing right across the side hills, all of that.
- 1:55:00Speaker 3: And so the Soil Conservation Service, using the CCC, started
- 1:55:03Speaker 3: to help farmers to to slow that down, stop it,
- 1:55:10Speaker 3: you know, improve soil conditions. And Leopold stuck his nose
- 1:55:14Speaker 3: in and said, you know, we can probably improved some
- 1:55:17Speaker 3: wildlife habitat at the same time. So rather than planting this,
- 1:55:21Speaker 3: that or the other thing, let's look at that. What
- 1:55:23Speaker 3: what improvements are going to be made and how we
- 1:55:28Speaker 3: can improve things for wildlife. And they did that. They
- 1:55:32Speaker 3: accomplished that in Kune Valley. But he and at that
- 1:55:38Speaker 3: time when he was talking about he wrote an essay
- 1:55:41Speaker 3: called conservation Economics, which is a really interesting you know,
- 1:55:44Speaker 3: and it speaks to all of what I just mentioned.
- 1:55:46Speaker 3: Conservation economics, and he said that conservation will ultimately come
- 1:55:51Speaker 3: down to rewarding the private landowner for conserving the public's interests,
- 1:55:58Speaker 3: and a lot of that was born of it. What
- 1:56:01Speaker 3: bothered him ultimately, again these are things that you have
- 1:56:04Speaker 3: to learn over a period of time, right, is that
- 1:56:06Speaker 3: farmers were getting paid for this stuff and for doing
- 1:56:10Speaker 3: that kind of work, or the work was being done
- 1:56:12Speaker 3: for them in areas they were improving their pastures, they're
- 1:56:16Speaker 3: stopping the erosion doing all these things. And what ended
- 1:56:20Speaker 3: up happening then once the program was over and maybe
- 1:56:23Speaker 3: the payment stopped, they began to revert to their old
- 1:56:26Speaker 3: practices because we got to get as much as we
- 1:56:28Speaker 3: got to extract as much as we can out of there.
- 1:56:30Speaker 3: And that was definitely a part of his evolution in
- 1:56:34Speaker 3: talking about the land ethic, about having that ethic modern day,
- 1:56:40Speaker 3: we have seen that. I've seen it in my lifetime
- 1:56:42Speaker 3: where if you would have done some of the farming
- 1:56:46Speaker 3: practices that I've seen in our area on those side
- 1:56:48Speaker 3: hills and people do in fall plunging, people would have
- 1:56:50Speaker 3: called you out on that. When I was a kid,
- 1:56:53Speaker 3: we don't do that, you know, big buffer strips and
- 1:56:55Speaker 3: you always rotate hay into it. But now it's corn
- 1:57:00Speaker 3: beans and corn beans and a lot of those areas
- 1:57:02Speaker 3: and they've improved some of the soil conservation practices. But
- 1:57:07Speaker 3: land that came out of CRP marginal highly a rodable
- 1:57:10Speaker 3: land that's come out of CRP and went back into
- 1:57:12Speaker 3: corner beans because there's more money in it in plant
- 1:57:17Speaker 3: and corn and beans than there is in having it
- 1:57:20Speaker 3: in a conservation program like CRP. So that's where he
- 1:57:24Speaker 3: begins to in the last part of the book, the
- 1:57:27Speaker 3: third part of the book that speaks to me more
- 1:57:28Speaker 3: now at this later part of my life about conservation
- 1:57:33Speaker 3: philosophy and having a land ethic and seeing myself as
- 1:57:38Speaker 3: a member of the biotic community. And you know, I've
- 1:57:41Speaker 3: had all this advantage in my life where I'm the
- 1:57:43Speaker 3: steward of a property that's been in my family for
- 1:57:45Speaker 3: one hundred and twenty years. It's easy for me to
- 1:57:47Speaker 3: stand there and think about my dad, my grandfather, my parents,
- 1:57:51Speaker 3: my grandparents, my great grandparents, and them being on that land.
- 1:57:56Speaker 3: And you know, I plane goes down on the way
- 1:57:58Speaker 3: home and that land is still there, the land of bides.
- 1:58:02Speaker 3: How do we influence how that because it's been so
- 1:58:09Speaker 3: I was going to say negatively influenced, but that's not
- 1:58:12Speaker 3: necessarily fair. It's been so influenced by the presence of man.
- 1:58:16Speaker 3: How do we going forward? How do we going forward
- 1:58:22Speaker 3: do the best thing that we can for the land?
- 1:58:24Speaker 3: How can we honor the past while we plan and
- 1:58:27Speaker 3: implement in the present. To do the best we can
- 1:58:29Speaker 3: for the future. Summed up in It's not ours, It's
- 1:58:32Speaker 3: just our turn. I just can't tell you how important this,
- 1:58:41Speaker 3: the essays of this book have been to me. I've
- 1:58:44Speaker 3: been reading through it again knowing that I was coming
- 1:58:46Speaker 3: on and I kind of forgot about that or how
- 1:58:49Speaker 3: he makes these points a lot of quotes, you know,
- 1:58:52Speaker 3: one sentence quotes, but it's the whole paragraph. Yeah, that's important.
- 1:58:57Speaker 1: When you look at like just this revolutionary figure and
- 1:59:00Speaker 1: understood all this stuff so well, it does make you
- 1:59:03Speaker 1: question current prohibitions on cousins, you know, like you know,
- 1:59:14Speaker 1: he right, Yeah, it's a real, real check on the
- 1:59:19Speaker 1: scorecard of the.
- 1:59:21Speaker 3: Yeah, real it worked once.
- 1:59:23Speaker 2: Obviously.
- 1:59:24Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll be like, well, you're saying it's almost unfair.
- 1:59:28Speaker 1: You know.
- 1:59:28Speaker 2: He's like such a brilliant thinker, this incredibly accomplished professional
- 1:59:33Speaker 2: and made it. He's also like a prophet in some
- 1:59:36Speaker 2: respects and a philosopher and a writer.
- 1:59:38Speaker 1: It's just like, yeah, you tell me, isn't it that
- 1:59:41Speaker 1: you tell me? That's no good? Huh.
- 1:59:42Speaker 3: Well, and he was sixty two years old when he died,
- 1:59:46Speaker 3: helping a neighbor he.
- 1:59:47Speaker 1: Had Doug Hayes's joke, the cousin thing. Yeah, I'm he's
- 1:59:53Speaker 1: changing the subject.
- 1:59:54Speaker 3: Yeah, I am going to change the subject.
- 1:59:56Speaker 1: So Leo wrapped the whole show up. I want you
- 1:59:58Speaker 1: to have the last word, Doug.
- 2:00:00Speaker 3: Uh Leopold died when he was night, when he was
- 2:00:02Speaker 3: sixty two years old. Did he really died?
- 2:00:05Speaker 1: I think I knew that and forgot it. He died
- 2:00:07Speaker 1: that young.
- 2:00:07Speaker 3: He was sixty two years old. He died helping a
- 2:00:11Speaker 3: neighbor fight a grass fire.
- 2:00:13Speaker 2: He had a heart attack.
- 2:00:14Speaker 3: Yet when you look at pictures of Elder Leopold, just
- 2:00:17Speaker 3: I defy you, folks.
- 2:00:19Speaker 1: He died at six sixty two years old.
- 2:00:22Speaker 3: Google Elder Leopold and then clicked on images and it
- 2:00:25Speaker 3: will be a whole raft of images of him doing
- 2:00:28Speaker 3: nothing but sitting on his butt. It just amazes me
- 2:00:32Speaker 3: how much this guy did in a lifetime, and seemingly
- 2:00:35Speaker 3: there aren't any pictures of him doing much other than
- 2:00:38Speaker 3: looking off in the distance and maybe writing in a
- 2:00:41Speaker 3: journal and whatnot.
- 2:00:41Speaker 5: But sixty two, sixty two, I don't think that was
- 2:00:45Speaker 5: that unusual back then.
- 2:00:47Speaker 3: Well, you had to be sitting still to get a
- 2:00:49Speaker 3: good photograph.
- 2:00:50Speaker 5: No, no, that you would die had uncle died, burning leaves,
- 2:00:54Speaker 5: smoke in ealation, no fire, it out of control.
- 2:00:58Speaker 7: There's a good action shot on the Rio Grande of
- 2:01:02Speaker 7: Leopold as a young man with a boat like a
- 2:01:05Speaker 7: flat bottom boat that he fashioned for duck hunting, named
- 2:01:08Speaker 7: the Binnacle Bat he called his boat. And he's out
- 2:01:11Speaker 7: there dragging this this duck skiff. He's not sitting that one.
- 2:01:16Speaker 7: But there are a lot of thoughtful he was action.
- 2:01:20Speaker 3: Action in motion. Remarkable and I would ask you all
- 2:01:27Speaker 3: to go and check out the Ela Leopold Foundation. It
- 2:01:31Speaker 3: is the source for information about Leopold and it will
- 2:01:35Speaker 3: take you in a lot of different directions. They are
- 2:01:37Speaker 3: also the Leopold Foundation is located on the Leopold farm.
- 2:01:44Speaker 3: The shack is there. It's open to tours.
- 2:01:47Speaker 1: You should put that in the sports from Atlas Brody.
- 2:01:50Speaker 1: Totally Leopold's farm.
- 2:01:52Speaker 2: We got the HeLa.
- 2:01:53Speaker 5: Yeah, we're gonna get to Leopold. Can landowners enroll? Can
- 2:01:59Speaker 5: they say eyeing up to join your sharing the land program?
- 2:02:03Speaker 3: Please? It's interesting. We have thirty landowners in eight different
- 2:02:07Speaker 3: states and we have about thirteen hundred conservation resumes from
- 2:02:13Speaker 3: access seekers who want to be cooperators. So we as
- 2:02:16Speaker 3: you probably are not surprised. The demand is outstripping the
- 2:02:20Speaker 3: supply and landowners, one of the things that I would
- 2:02:24Speaker 3: tell you is that it's it's very much your What
- 2:02:29Speaker 3: you're able to do is offer access for the things
- 2:02:32Speaker 3: that that you are will. You don't have to offer
- 2:02:37Speaker 3: access for everything.
- 2:02:38Speaker 5: It's like conservation related. It's not like shovel and shit
- 2:02:41Speaker 5: and taking out the trash.
- 2:02:44Speaker 3: You know, it can be. What I've noticed about most
- 2:02:48Speaker 3: of our landowners is that they're really interested. The ones
- 2:02:51Speaker 3: who are interested in sharing the land and are part
- 2:02:54Speaker 3: of sharing the land are very engaged with their property,
- 2:02:57Speaker 3: very engaged landowners who are in interested in spreading conservation education.
- 2:03:06Speaker 3: And you know, the need. The truth is that there
- 2:03:09Speaker 3: is a big need to get things done on on projects.
- 2:03:12Speaker 3: I got a list of stuff at home that that
- 2:03:16Speaker 3: we're going to be getting busy on. I got to
- 2:03:20Speaker 3: tell you what, Steve Ranella works his butt off in
- 2:03:22Speaker 3: the very short period of time usually, but he gets,
- 2:03:25Speaker 3: he gets, He gets more than most people do. We
- 2:03:29Speaker 3: had an elm tree right by the house break off
- 2:03:32Speaker 3: and it was just a mess in the yard, and
- 2:03:36Speaker 3: uh yeah, he got after it to.
- 2:03:39Speaker 1: The Tasmanian devil.
- 2:03:40Speaker 5: That's just because all the windows were there's no more
- 2:03:43Speaker 5: windows break.
- 2:03:45Speaker 3: And the kids helped out, Jimmy mostly the other two.
- 2:03:48Speaker 3: You know. They they come along.
- 2:03:50Speaker 1: And they feel that helping is being in the vicinity.
- 2:03:56Speaker 2: Well they can run, they can run for help if
- 2:03:58Speaker 2: you need it.
- 2:03:59Speaker 1: So so doing a chore they be like, I'm just
- 2:04:02Speaker 1: gonna kind of play like buy the chore area.
- 2:04:06Speaker 3: Right accept or the auxiliary. Steve had Matthew out because
- 2:04:10Speaker 3: I had clearly failed as a guide, and uh, Steve
- 2:04:13Speaker 3: took him out. But Rosie and and uh uh the
- 2:04:17Speaker 3: other one, Jimmy had already gotten their birds, and I said, well,
- 2:04:20Speaker 3: I've got some stuff for him to do. And I
- 2:04:22Speaker 3: had a burroke tree, a couple of fruit trees to plant,
- 2:04:26Speaker 3: a little a little more picking up to do. And
- 2:04:28Speaker 3: they stepped right into its bring your kids. Yeah, they
- 2:04:33Speaker 3: weren't afraid. They got right in there and they did
- 2:04:35Speaker 3: a great job of it.
- 2:04:37Speaker 1: We're gonna wrap it up. Oh no, you were The
- 2:04:38Speaker 1: one that you're gonna say is for landowners that want
- 2:04:41Speaker 1: to participate with sharing the land, you don't need to
- 2:04:43Speaker 1: be like, hey, here's the keys of the farm.
- 2:04:44Speaker 3: Oh not at all.
- 2:04:45Speaker 1: You can be like, hey, turkey's cool. Hey, late season
- 2:04:49Speaker 1: white tailed doz cool, squirrels cool.
- 2:04:52Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's exactly right.
- 2:04:54Speaker 1: Don't shoot my big giant bucks.
- 2:04:55Speaker 3: Okay, well sure, I mean that that can be a
- 2:04:57Speaker 3: part of it too, and and and to be perfectly
- 2:04:59Speaker 3: on honest, I as I think everybody at the table
- 2:05:04Speaker 3: knows here, I don't bow hunt because bow hunts for
- 2:05:07Speaker 3: people don't have enough to do. But I lease my
- 2:05:11Speaker 3: farm to some bow hunters and who do a great
- 2:05:15Speaker 3: job of it, and I'm very happy to have them there.
- 2:05:18Speaker 3: And that revenue I mean they simply pay is a
- 2:05:24Speaker 3: part of it too, right, because that's a part of
- 2:05:26Speaker 3: the a la carte menu that well, you can't bowhunt in.
- 2:05:29Speaker 3: But some of my cooperators literally the day they're like,
- 2:05:32Speaker 3: when are those guys leaving? And there's some good days
- 2:05:36Speaker 3: of the rut left and they're in there right after that.
- 2:05:39Speaker 3: And think about that on both sides, right, So those
- 2:05:41Speaker 3: guys are, well, we've been doing this work, we should
- 2:05:43Speaker 3: get that opportunity. But they know and then the guy
- 2:05:46Speaker 3: who spends serious money to come and hunt, he's like,
- 2:05:49Speaker 3: so will you explain this to me again that we're
- 2:05:52Speaker 3: paying And then tomorrow after we leave. You got these
- 2:05:57Speaker 3: other guys coming. They're not paying nothing. Yeah, that's the deal.
- 2:06:05Speaker 3: Well you sum it up. I've been working with those
- 2:06:10Speaker 3: those guys have been least in my place for eight
- 2:06:12Speaker 3: years now, and that has been and and and then
- 2:06:15Speaker 3: when we come in and then the gun hunting.
- 2:06:17Speaker 1: You know, I'll help you hold up you're end of
- 2:06:19Speaker 1: the deal though, man, Like you have a window of
- 2:06:21Speaker 1: time that they want to hunt, carved out, hunted.
- 2:06:24Speaker 3: And nobody else hunted before them, and they get that
- 2:06:26Speaker 3: period of time and then I.
- 2:06:28Speaker 1: Mean, you're you're you're you're being kind, but like you're
- 2:06:30Speaker 1: taking like peak white tail rut on a beautiful white
- 2:06:33Speaker 1: tail property and that's.
- 2:06:35Speaker 3: Theirs, and that's theirs. And uh and then then they
- 2:06:39Speaker 3: shot fortier last year, and then we came in with
- 2:06:42Speaker 3: rifles and shot forty three more.
- 2:06:46Speaker 1: Well you know, and you wouldn't know what from looking
- 2:06:48Speaker 1: at it this spring. Well, it's like, oh my god,
- 2:06:53Speaker 1: Well that's a whole there's a million deer in that place.
- 2:06:57Speaker 3: That's a whole other thing. I uh, at our seat,
- 2:06:59Speaker 3: I just want to put this in at our sea
- 2:07:01Speaker 3: deck meeting the County Deer Advisory Council which I'm a
- 2:07:03Speaker 3: member of. We actually had someone come in from the
- 2:07:06Speaker 3: public and we had public comments but online. But somebody
- 2:07:10Speaker 3: came in from the public and he was nice guy.
- 2:07:13Speaker 3: I've had other conversations with me. I don't understand why
- 2:07:16Speaker 3: you want to kill all the deer. Why are you
- 2:07:19Speaker 3: killing all Why do you want to kill all the deer?
- 2:07:20Speaker 3: And it's not what we're trying to do. We're trying
- 2:07:23Speaker 3: to give opportunity as much opportunity as we can because
- 2:07:28Speaker 3: we have a lot of deer and ninety percent of
- 2:07:31Speaker 3: land as privately owned. And if you don't think that
- 2:07:34Speaker 3: you have enough deer on your property, then don't kill many.
- 2:07:39Speaker 3: It's a pretty simple premise.
- 2:07:42Speaker 1: All right, man, We're gonna wrap up. Thank you boys,
- 2:07:45Speaker 1: Thank you so much. Carol Malcolm from the US for Service,
- 2:07:49Speaker 1: glad to be here. And Doug Durn from Casanova, Wisconsin.
- 2:07:54Speaker 3: Casanova, that's what you like.
- 2:07:57Speaker 1: To call it, Casanova Wisconsin.
- 2:08:00Speaker 3: And please go and check out the Alder Leopold Foundation.
- 2:08:03Speaker 1: Thank you very much.
- 2:08:05Speaker 9: Mm hmmm.
- 2:08:12Speaker 10: I used to be the one skin datiesy close enough
- 2:08:20Speaker 10: for me and he say up more steps before you
- 2:08:27Speaker 10: click the safety.
- 2:08:29Speaker 9: Off of that O two forty three and do my
- 2:08:36Speaker 9: best to sit there.
- 2:08:38Speaker 10: Quiety say, so you gotta learn to be step. And
- 2:08:46Speaker 10: now it's me telling his grandson all the things he
- 2:08:52Speaker 10: used to whisper in my just a little more patient, son,
- 2:09:01Speaker 10: I ain't gonna hurt no one. He ain't got a
- 2:09:06Speaker 10: picking good shot before he pulled the trigger.
- 2:09:11Speaker 9: Night on, gone on, the study untrue.
- 2:09:16Speaker 10: Man. When you take came, the rest is up to you. Man,
- 2:09:24Speaker 10: you're gonna do great. Just shoot in the street. Now,
- 2:09:36Speaker 10: my daddy's up in heaven. One day I'll.
- 2:09:41Speaker 9: Be up there with them looking down.
- 2:09:47Speaker 10: Oh when watching now the Jemeration show, the next wom
- 2:09:55Speaker 10: a ride.
- 2:09:58Speaker 9: And they through these olds.
- 2:10:02Speaker 10: Awkwards and they teach me everythings they need to know
- 2:10:10Speaker 10: because they ain't learned from their daddy, learned from their daddy.
- 2:10:17Speaker 9: And the story goes, just a little more patience.
- 2:10:24Speaker 10: I ain't gonna hurt no wale. You ain't gotta picking
- 2:10:30Speaker 10: good shot before we pulled the trigger, na on, gone order.
- 2:10:37Speaker 9: Steady in true. And when you two came, the rest
- 2:10:45Speaker 9: is up to you. Man.
- 2:10:48Speaker 10: You're gonna do great. Just shoot street. Just a little
- 2:11:08Speaker 10: more patience. So I ain't gonna hurt no one. You
- 2:11:15Speaker 10: ain't gotta picking good shot before you pull the trigger
- 2:11:20Speaker 10: from that old.
- 2:11:21Speaker 9: Gone hold in steady R. And when you take the
- 2:11:30Speaker 9: rest is up to you. Man, you're gonna do the great.
- 2:11:38Speaker 9: Just shoot up the street.
- 2:11:45Speaker 7: H