Latest / Wired To Hunt Podcast / Ep. 870: The Public Land Grab Returns with Hal Herring

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Ep. 870: The Public Land Grab Returns with Hal Herring · Wired To Hunt Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: the White Tail Woods presented by First Light, creating proven
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: the show, I am joined by Hale Herring to discuss
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: the return of the public land grab movement and other
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: conservation related issues and threats that we're going to have
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: to keep an eye on heading into the new year.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: All right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast,
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: brought to you by First Light and their Camera for
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: Conservation initiative. And today we're continuing our series looking forward
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: into twenty twenty five and the new year, and the
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: focus today is public lands and conservation related issues. We
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: talked the big beginning of the year, kind of looking
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: back on twenty four and things that Tony and I
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: have learned as we look towards planning our next year
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: worth of projects. Last week, I think it was we
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: talked with Jake about planning and looking forward to a
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: new year of habitat improvements. Now today we're going to
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: go a little bit bigger picture, looking across the nation
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: at the issues that are going to potentially impact all
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: of us who enjoy hunting and fishing on wild public
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: places and also private land related places too. But today, unfortunately,
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: we need to kind of turn back the clock to
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: a set of issues that was talked a lot about
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: here on the podcast you know, five, six, seven, eight
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: years ago, and that being the land transfer movement, the
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: public land grab movement, folks trying to get rid of
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: our public lands, transfer them, sell them, degrade them, overutilize
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: them for things that are not conducive to hunting and
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: fishing and healthy wildlife populations and clean air and clean water.
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: All that kind of good stuff.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: This is a set of topics that has to be
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: discussed again, and my guest today is someone who's perfectly
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: suited to do that. It's Hail Hearing. Hell is the
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: host of Backcountry and Hunters and Anglers podcast. He's also
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: a long time outdoor writer and journalist. He's covered the
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: conservation and environment related beats and kind of the intersection
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: of those topics with hunting and fishing. He's covered that
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: for decades, I believe, and he's actually now working on
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: a book exploring some of these topics, in particular the
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: history of our public land. So Hell is a wealth
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: of information and he's someone who has been tracking the
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: latest iteration of these public land threats. And I think
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: that's one of the key things that we need to
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: understand now, is that maybe for a minute, we felt
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: like we'd won the battle, we'd kind of stopped this
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: land transfer movement in its tracks. Back in eighteen nineteen twenty,
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: there was a decent bit of good news on the
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: public lands side of things, and over the last four
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: years there has been a lot more of that positive
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: changes when it comes to management of our public lands,
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: expanding public lands again, increasing protections on our public lands again.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: But it appears that new forces are ascending. New leaders,
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: new influencers, new political think tanks and groups with different
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: goals and different aims now are in a position to
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: influence change for us in a not so good way.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: And we've started to see the beginnings of that. And
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: one of those ways has been what Hell has described
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: as the slickest land grab attempt yet, which was this
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: lawsuit that the State of Utah recently filed back at
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: the end of twenty twenty for looking for the disposal,
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: asking the Supreme Court for the disposal of eighteen point
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: five million acres of public lands in Utah.
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: And then in.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: Another like thirteen fourteen, maybe fifteen other states signed on
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: in support of that lawsuit, states like Idaho, Iowa, Wyoming, Alaska.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: These states were in support of this. So this is
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: a new way. This is a new back door way
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: to try to get folks to get folks hands on
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: our public lands. And of course, as we've talked many times,
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: we got to keep public lands in public hands. So
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: our discussion today is going to be about what this
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: latest land grab attempt means and the good news on
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: that front, which is just a couple days ago the
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: lawsuit was struck down by the Supreme by the Supreme Court.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: So we're going to discuss what this lawsuit was about,
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: why the Supreme Court shot it down, what that means
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: for the future, what a all of this might point
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: towards over the coming year or years, as far as
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: how the public land grab movement might be shifting. In
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: what we need to do as hunters and anglers and
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: outdoors people to make sure that we are ready for
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: this and ready for some new challenges coming down the
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: pipeline because it is now time to re engage. We're
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: going to discuss this. We're going to discuss why twenty
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: twenty five. In the next few years, we as a
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: hunting and fishing community are going to have to kind
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: of get on it again. Maybe we've been sitting back
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: on our laurels a bit recently, sitting pretty feeling comfortable.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: No longer we need to rally. We need to stand
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: back up and get busy, because if we don't, we
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: are once again faced with the very real threat of
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: losing places we really care about. Places like the Boundary Waters,
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, places like the
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: Tongus National Forest, places like the hundreds of millions of
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management across the
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: American West. That's what we're discussing today. Hale is the
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: perfect guy to discuss it with. I will give a
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: one quick soft plug. If this whole land transfer movement thing,
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: if the history of how our public lands have been
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: traded and managed and now are under threat, if that's
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: kind of new to you, if you haven't been following
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: this story over the last decade with us here on
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: Wired Hunt, I gotta plug my book. You can see
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: it behind me if you're watching the video. It's called
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: That Wild Country and Epic Journey into the past, present,
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: and Future of America's Public Lands. That book was my
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: my attempt to try to get the average person up
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: to speed on what's going on and do it in
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: a fun, adventurous, compelling way. So there's a bunch of
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: stories about my adventures on public lands, hunting and fishing
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: and backpacking and rafting and doing all that kind of stuff.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: And along the way, I'm going to get you all
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: up to speed on how we acquired six hundred and
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: forty million acres of federal public lands, how we is
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: America and have access to these things, and the crazy
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: story that led to that, as well as the debates
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: and controversies and concerning threats that we will be facing
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: here in the future to make sure we maintain that
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: access in these incredible places for us to go out
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: there and camp and hunt and fish and have a
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: hell of a time. So check out That Wild Country.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: There are maybe autograph copies still on the media website.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: If not, going over to Amazon pick up a copy
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: and lets.
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: You do that.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: Tune into the rest of this podcast with hal Herring.
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: It's a good one. It's an important one.
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: Thanks for being.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: Here all right here with me now on the line
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: is mister Hale Herring.
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: Welcome back to the show.
• 7:49
  Speaker 4: Hell thanks for really having me man man Mark.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I always appreciate you making time to do this.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: These are some of my favorite chats. And that's for
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: another reasons. One because you're just a wealth of information
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: and second because you are someone who from afar gives
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: me both hope and inspiration when it comes to the
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: future of our wild places, public lands, wildlife through your podcast,
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: through your words you have You've done that for a
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: lot of people. Hell, so I want to thank you
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: here at the outset for doing that.
• 8:30
  Speaker 4: I appreciate that. It ain't really I wasn't really trying
• 8:34
  Speaker 4: to do that. That's how I feel. I've had it.
• 8:39
  Speaker 4: If it comes through, it's just it's just the way
• 8:41
  Speaker 4: I've lived it. Like my life has been so I've
• 8:45
  Speaker 4: been so lucky, raised my kids and my family with
• 8:49
  Speaker 4: the public lands and hunting and fishing Missouri River catfish
• 8:54
  Speaker 4: and I mean I just and all the way back
• 8:57
  Speaker 4: where I grew up in Alabama. It's like I've been lucky,
• 9:00
  Speaker 4: so my passion for all this is kind of borne
• 9:03
  Speaker 4: in and.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hard to fake that when it's that deep
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: in your bones and your history.
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: And same for me. It's uh, it's these things.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: They have given us so much, So much of our
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: lives have revolved around these places, these pursuits, these critters
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: you can't help but want to make sure they're still wrong.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: I want to make sure that this this pumper can
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: keep on ticking right, you know.
• 9:34
  Speaker 4: I feel like there's a there is kind of in
• 9:36
  Speaker 4: my case, I've been so lucky with it. If there
• 9:38
  Speaker 4: is a quid pro quo. Yeah, And then being a
• 9:42
  Speaker 4: reporter like Field and Stream, I got to deep dive
• 9:46
  Speaker 4: into like some of the things that can go wrong
• 9:48
  Speaker 4: and some of the things that have gone right.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: You know, and and and that's I guess why I
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: wanted to have you back on here again. I wish
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: we had good things that we maybe do have some
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: good things to talk about. But I think the major
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: impetus for giving you a ring again is the fact
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: that the boogeyman of six, seven, eight, nine years ago
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: that we were talking about with the public land transfer movement,
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: the divestment of public lands, the idea of selling or
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: transferring public lands that was getting really concerning in twenty fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: Somewhere in that window, we're starting to see that starting
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: to rear its ugly head again. I think for a
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: minute there folks kind of felt like, all right, we've
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: got it tamped down. We got this thing as a
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: political poison pill. If you try to mess with our
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: public lands, it's going to be political suicide for you, right.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: And in some of these recent years we felt pretty
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: good about things. But there have been some recent changes,
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: some recent attempts I think that are maybe forcing us
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: to open our eyes again to a new series of threats.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: In this lawsuit coming out of Utah is maybe the
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: most glaring of those. And literally the day that we
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: started record, the day that we're recording this, some big
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: news has opened up on that front. Can you just
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: give us a quick rundown of what this latest attempt
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: to take our public lands was coming out of Utah,
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: why that was so concerning, and then what happened today?
• 11:24
  Speaker 4: Sure, and we can all be thankful that we live
• 11:29
  Speaker 4: in a country with a you can argue with however
• 11:33
  Speaker 4: you want, but with a functioning Supreme Court of the
• 11:36
  Speaker 4: United States. You know, anyway, we can argue about its
• 11:39
  Speaker 4: composition and all that, but the court did rule. It's
• 11:46
  Speaker 4: not for me or for you. The court ruled on
• 11:49
  Speaker 4: the basis of the lawsuit. The lawsuit was the State
• 11:54
  Speaker 4: of Utah filed a lawsuit against the United States federal government,
• 11:59
  Speaker 4: our government claiming that and I'm not sure how they
• 12:05
  Speaker 4: picked eighteen point five million acres of BLM Bureau of
• 12:09
  Speaker 4: Land Management managed public lands in Utah had to be
• 12:13
  Speaker 4: gotten rid of, had to be disposed of. They claimed
• 12:16
  Speaker 4: that it was unconstitutional for the US government to maintain
• 12:22
  Speaker 4: control or management of those lands under the good okay,
• 12:26
  Speaker 4: because they were unappropriated. And to try to get that
• 12:32
  Speaker 4: short but make it understandable is like people, if you
• 12:36
  Speaker 4: know about the homestead Acts. Right, So the United States
• 12:40
  Speaker 4: government gave away, for a very small fee, starting in
• 12:44
  Speaker 4: eighteen sixty two, parcels little land to settle the West.
• 12:48
  Speaker 4: We had already given away huge amounts in the east, right,
• 12:52
  Speaker 4: but in the West was opening up after the Civil War,
• 12:55
  Speaker 4: and so those lands, they were unappropriated lands that were
• 13:00
  Speaker 4: given to homesteaders. The great piece of history. It's one
• 13:05
  Speaker 4: of the reasons the United States is the way it is.
• 13:08
  Speaker 4: You know, it was a Jeffersonian concept from the beginning.
• 13:13
  Speaker 4: You know a lot about it, Mark and I. But
• 13:15
  Speaker 4: I'm just trying to boil it down. But yeah, so Utah, nobody,
• 13:19
  Speaker 4: nobody wanted these desert rock lands in Utah at that time,
• 13:24
  Speaker 4: and so they remained a part of the federal lands.
• 13:29
  Speaker 4: And Utah is claiming that they are unappropriated and so
• 13:33
  Speaker 4: they have to be gotten rid of. Okay, So the
• 13:38
  Speaker 4: problem with that, there's a lot of problems with the lawsuit,
• 13:40
  Speaker 4: which the Supreme Court found quickly this morning, was that
• 13:45
  Speaker 4: these lands are appropriated. They are federal public lands managed
• 13:51
  Speaker 4: for multiple use for the American.
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: People by the Bureau of Land Management.
• 13:55
  Speaker 4: By the Bureau of Land Management. In this case, the
• 14:00
  Speaker 4: problem with the lawsuit was that if it had been successful,
• 14:07
  Speaker 4: thirteen other states signed on to this boondoggle. And that's
• 14:11
  Speaker 4: a problem of the American culture wars right now, I
• 14:15
  Speaker 4: can tell you because the state of Alabama signed on
• 14:18
  Speaker 4: to this, and I guess they figured it unappropriated. Bankhead
• 14:25
  Speaker 4: National Forest, where some of the greatest public land in
• 14:29
  Speaker 4: the Southeast was also they're going to get a hold
• 14:32
  Speaker 4: of that. I don't know what they're planning. What the
• 14:35
  Speaker 4: concept was. I think it was a culture war thing.
• 14:37
  Speaker 4: We're all against the federal government. We better prove that
• 14:40
  Speaker 4: by signing on to this nutball lawsuit.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because by signing this amicus brief, as I understand it,
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: that was nothing more than kind of ceremonial, right, I mean,
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: they're signing onto this would not in any way change
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: the outcome of the lawsuit, right.
• 14:55
  Speaker 4: No, it would not, but it certainly threw a gauntlet
• 14:59
  Speaker 4: down as to who what these people believe about our
• 15:03
  Speaker 4: public lands and hunting and public hunting and fishing in
• 15:08
  Speaker 4: the Southeast and there we've got a big We've got
• 15:12
  Speaker 4: a big problem. This is this the amicus brief with
• 15:17
  Speaker 4: the additional signings shows us that we have a big
• 15:23
  Speaker 4: problem in amongst conservation, hunting and fishing and public lands
• 15:27
  Speaker 4: users in the United States.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: Basically fifteen or sixteen states with a government that is
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: antagonistic towards our public lands.
• 15:35
  Speaker 4: Yes, was what that would show well? With with elected officials, Yeah,
• 15:40
  Speaker 4: I would say, yeah, I mean, the governments, whatever we
• 15:43
  Speaker 4: make it, we vote for these dudes.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Wyoming, Yeah, Wyoming, Alaska, Iowa, Alabama.
• 15:50
  Speaker 3: I think one or two of the Dakota's. There was
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: a long list of them.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think a whole lot of our listeners
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: live in those states. Yes, And I think that's a
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: clear sign that we've got some talking to do to
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: our representatives.
• 16:03
  Speaker 4: We do, and and so the so the the lawsuit
• 16:08
  Speaker 4: was tossed out this morning, dismissed this morning by the
• 16:10
  Speaker 4: Supreme Court, with this enormous list of case law behind it.
• 16:16
  Speaker 4: Behind the dismissal that this this lawsuit is not valid.
• 16:21
  Speaker 4: Right that those lands are appropriated and they are appropriated
• 16:25
  Speaker 4: by That's not what this frime court said. They just
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: said the lawsuit wasn't valid. But the fact is is
• 16:32
  Speaker 4: that you know, the origins that we were talking before
• 16:35
  Speaker 4: we get record that the origins of this were the
• 16:38
  Speaker 4: anger from the off road vehicle community. This is what
• 16:43
  Speaker 4: I understand at the Bureau of Land Management for closing
• 16:47
  Speaker 4: down and trying to recover some places that that had
• 16:49
  Speaker 4: been become very overused by damaged right damage totally. Uh
• 16:56
  Speaker 4: And like Labyrinthe Canyon and the mo Ebb. I mean,
• 17:01
  Speaker 4: if you've ever gone to the Rock Crawler festival down there,
• 17:03
  Speaker 4: you know it's pretty pretty big. It's huge are these
• 17:06
  Speaker 4: are This is a huge industry.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: I ended up down there once by accident at the
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: same time as the Easter weekend GSA.
• 17:15
  Speaker 4: Festival or whatever.
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it was it was wild, that's for sure.
• 17:19
  Speaker 4: Wow. And and I don't share in rock hopping and
• 17:25
  Speaker 4: you know, like like mad Max in on the on
• 17:28
  Speaker 4: the desert, right, but it's cool that other people do.
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: And that was, you know, one of my big takeaways
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: while I was down there. And what makes federal management
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: of our public lands so special is that we have
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: this multiple use mandate on them, right that stipulates that
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: this land is not just for the cattle grazers, not
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: just for the rock climbers, not just for the deer hunters,
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: or the miners or the oil drillers or the loggers
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: or the bird watchers. It's for all of us. And
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: there has to be some compromise there to to manage
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: for that.
• 18:02
  Speaker 4: Right. Yeah, nobody can get everything they want. I mean,
• 18:05
  Speaker 4: it's just like living in a family or or sharing
• 18:08
  Speaker 4: a house with people. But the what what made me
• 18:14
  Speaker 4: amazed about this was that the impetus for this lawsuit,
• 18:18
  Speaker 4: and this we talked about this is kind of this
• 18:20
  Speaker 4: is like with the Bundies and all those other folks
• 18:22
  Speaker 4: too that were in the in the more it advised
• 18:24
  Speaker 4: Sagebrush rebel movement was if they got what they said
• 18:29
  Speaker 4: they wanted, they would be the ones that would be
• 18:32
  Speaker 4: the first loss. They would have to pay to go
• 18:37
  Speaker 4: rock hopping on the desert, and there would be huge
• 18:40
  Speaker 4: places like like when you think about the Amungiri Resort
• 18:43
  Speaker 4: down there just south of the Utah border in Arizona
• 18:46
  Speaker 4: where they charge what thirty eight hundred dollars a night
• 18:49
  Speaker 4: and they pick you up and fly you up in
• 18:52
  Speaker 4: a helicopter to do sunrise yoga on the mesa and
• 18:56
  Speaker 4: they have like, you know, little servants that come and
• 18:59
  Speaker 4: bring you the dates or whatever and make sure that
• 19:02
  Speaker 4: you're hydrated in the h you're not going on like
• 19:06
  Speaker 4: a good camera. But those people would be happy to
• 19:10
  Speaker 4: buy another thirty forty fifty thousand acres of this, of
• 19:13
  Speaker 4: course they would.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: And so that's I mean, that's the same worry that
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: we had back in twenty sixteen about the land transfer
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: movement was basically, if federal public lands go to states,
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: states have a mandate to have a positive ROI on
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: those state lands. They have to make money off of them,
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: and they simply would not be able to do that
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: with this level of land and the management needed the
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: risk of wildfires and a thousand other things that would
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: just bankrupt a state inevitably leading them to have to
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: sell these lands. Right, isn't that still the case with
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: this situation.
• 19:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's for sure that case. I mean Idaho did
• 19:54
  Speaker 4: a full study of that, and like they had to
• 19:55
  Speaker 4: cut down every tree, all the timber immediately in order
• 19:59
  Speaker 4: to p off like the management you know, costs. But
• 20:06
  Speaker 4: this this lawsuit was even more kind of wild because
• 20:12
  Speaker 4: if you look at the PR campaign for it, it
• 20:14
  Speaker 4: was stand for our Land or something, you know. But
• 20:18
  Speaker 4: the lawsuit actually said that the lands have to be
• 20:21
  Speaker 4: disposed of, that the federal government couldn't hold them. This
• 20:25
  Speaker 4: one didn't say they had to be transferred right to
• 20:27
  Speaker 4: the states. So this this was this was you're basically
• 20:33
  Speaker 4: a taxpayer in Utah was basically paying a PR firm
• 20:37
  Speaker 4: and a law firm to carry a lawsuit to take
• 20:40
  Speaker 4: away the very place they hike, hunt, or ride their
• 20:44
  Speaker 4: rock crawler. This one was like we're talking about the
• 20:50
  Speaker 4: Overton window, the things that are acceptable. This one was
• 20:54
  Speaker 4: throwing the Overton window over way off to right field
• 20:57
  Speaker 4: left field? And is that why?
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: I heard you say this on your on your podcast
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: at one point that this was maybe the slickest attempt
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: yet that you've seen for stealing our public lands. And
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: and there's a little bit of I think one thing
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: I worry about is issue fatigue over this thing. Right,
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: we keep on talking about challenges to public lands, the
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: threats to our public lands, and folks have been hearing
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: this for years and years and years now, and there's
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: this worry that eventually folks will stop paying attention. But
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: this one seemed like one that rose a lot more red.
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: Flags than usual. Why why was that?
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: Why did this one stand out as so concerning and
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: and maybe pretending something even more concerning in the future.
• 21:40
  Speaker 4: Well, because it was an incredible propaganda campaign. This one
• 21:45
  Speaker 4: was better. I was coming back we did uh we
• 21:48
  Speaker 4: were working Bureau Land Management uh sagebrush planting job in
• 21:53
  Speaker 4: October and we had one of them was in Colorado
• 21:57
  Speaker 4: and we came back to the Utah cardor Wassat's cardor there,
• 22:02
  Speaker 4: you know, and I saw those giant signs with these
• 22:05
  Speaker 4: like super nice looking people standing on them with their kids,
• 22:10
  Speaker 4: going stand for our land. And I thought it was
• 22:15
  Speaker 4: I mean, did you see the billboards. No not, They're
• 22:18
  Speaker 4: very very high end. Uh. And then it would say
• 22:22
  Speaker 4: go to stand for our land dot org. And then
• 22:25
  Speaker 4: there would be a map of the United States which
• 22:27
  Speaker 4: was like completely red west of the Mississippi, you know,
• 22:30
  Speaker 4: like the federal government controls everything. And it was funny
• 22:34
  Speaker 4: because they had even put all the Indian reservations on there.
• 22:41
  Speaker 4: And it was a but it was a slick propaganda campaign,
• 22:45
  Speaker 4: something like the Bundees and the the old Sagebrush rebel guys.
• 22:50
  Speaker 4: They would have never they would have never done this.
• 22:52
  Speaker 4: This was the governor of Utah and using the taxpayer
• 22:56
  Speaker 4: money to create a slick propaganda campaign to divest the
• 23:00
  Speaker 4: American people of some of the greatest red rock country
• 23:04
  Speaker 4: in the world.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: This idea, though, that they're putting out there, the federal
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: government owns all your land. The big bad boogeyman bureaucrats
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: in DC are making horrible decisions. We the state, you,
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: the people here close to these lands, you should have
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: You should be able to control these places. The states
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: should be managing these places, et cetera. That it first glance,
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: might seem like an appealing message. Why And one other
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: thing I'll add is that we often hear and sometimes
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: have seen real shortcomings with federal management sometimes of our lands. Right,
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: it's not always perfect. There's a lot of challenges. Yeah,
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of a lot of issues, right, So
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: it's not perfect over there. So people love to complain
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: about federal management of everything. But in this case public lands. Sure,
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: why I guess what would you say to someone with
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: that set of critiques? Why is federal management actually a
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: good thing to continue? And why is it that this idea,
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: this alluring idea of local control, Why is that a
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: little bit of snake oil.
• 24:21
  Speaker 4: Well, because you have way more input into federally controlled
• 24:26
  Speaker 4: public lands. Federally manages public lands, and you ever will
• 24:29
  Speaker 4: under SITTLA. If you look at this, that SITTLA is
• 24:33
  Speaker 4: a state Land Board of Utah and they've been selling
• 24:37
  Speaker 4: off state lands at a great clip. Now, this that
• 24:44
  Speaker 4: state transfer movement will tell you right away that well,
• 24:48
  Speaker 4: we're not letting these aren't school trust lands. We're taking
• 24:51
  Speaker 4: over huge sections of federally managed public lands and we're
• 24:55
  Speaker 4: not going to make them school trust lands. So we
• 24:58
  Speaker 4: can do whatever we want with them. But the fact is,
• 25:02
  Speaker 4: what do they want to do. Do you think you
• 25:04
  Speaker 4: would have more local control over Sittla lands. You can't
• 25:10
  Speaker 4: even you can't even camp on state lands in Colorado
• 25:14
  Speaker 4: without permission, if I if I understand that right. Montana
• 25:19
  Speaker 4: fought a huge lawsuit in the nineteen eighties over public
• 25:22
  Speaker 4: access to state land Section. I mean, it's just let
• 25:28
  Speaker 4: me tell you, I think there is a lot of
• 25:31
  Speaker 4: mismanagement of every kind in America all the time, and
• 25:36
  Speaker 4: in Sudan and in Brazil and in Finland. Human beings
• 25:41
  Speaker 4: do good things and they do bad things, and federal
• 25:46
  Speaker 4: management of public lands is always in conflict, and it
• 25:50
  Speaker 4: should be. If you and I are inherit a great,
• 25:53
  Speaker 4: big mansion with our twelve siblings, we're going to argue
• 25:59
  Speaker 4: over whether the bathroom fixtures ought to be gold, how
• 26:03
  Speaker 4: steep the steps ought to be. When Grandma comes, we're
• 26:06
  Speaker 4: gonna argue over that, and we're gonna make mistakes, and
• 26:10
  Speaker 4: somebody's gonna paint the living room, you know, purple, and
• 26:14
  Speaker 4: you're gonna be furious about that. But that doesn't mean
• 26:18
  Speaker 4: that you give the mansion away to some dude from
• 26:21
  Speaker 4: Norway and everybody in the family live out on the
• 26:25
  Speaker 4: streets looking back at the mansion and going like, oh, man,
• 26:27
  Speaker 4: remember when I had that bedroom upstairs and we.
• 26:29
  Speaker 3: Played chess, and wasn't that nice?
• 26:33
  Speaker 4: Wasn't it great? And so I'm a big fan one.
• 26:38
  Speaker 4: I think that if we look at public land management
• 26:41
  Speaker 4: since eighteen ninety one when we had the first forest
• 26:44
  Speaker 4: reserve signed by President Harrison, you will find missteps, and
• 26:49
  Speaker 4: you will find all kinds of all kinds of things.
• 26:52
  Speaker 4: You will find good mostly good people working very hard
• 26:58
  Speaker 4: to try to do the right thing as they understand
• 27:01
  Speaker 4: it at that time, and you will see one of
• 27:04
  Speaker 4: the greatest success stories that Aldo Leopold. Aldo Leopold would
• 27:08
  Speaker 4: approve of seventy percent right. Sixty percent even Aldo Leopold,
• 27:17
  Speaker 4: the great conservation thinker of his time, who worked for
• 27:20
  Speaker 4: the Soil Conservation Service during the dust Bowl and was
• 27:24
  Speaker 4: the proponent of the first wilderness area, he would approve
• 27:29
  Speaker 4: about sixty percent right. And dude, when you have this
• 27:34
  Speaker 4: wonderful thing, you got to argue over the management. And
• 27:37
  Speaker 4: that's what we do. And this is good. It's good
• 27:40
  Speaker 4: to argue over. It's good for the OHV people to say,
• 27:44
  Speaker 4: bolm is stepping on my toes. I want to do this,
• 27:48
  Speaker 4: I want to do that, and people argue over that,
• 27:51
  Speaker 4: and they go out and look at Labyrinth Canyon and
• 27:53
  Speaker 4: they look at the places and they say, ah, this
• 27:56
  Speaker 4: is too much impact for me. And then somebody else goes,
• 28:00
  Speaker 4: ain't no impact here. This is wonderful. I love this.
• 28:03
  Speaker 4: Shooting on public lands is always going to be a
• 28:05
  Speaker 4: big It's going to be a big issue going forward.
• 28:08
  Speaker 4: Of course, can you take your refrigerator out there, you
• 28:11
  Speaker 4: blow it up with the ak and you drive off,
• 28:15
  Speaker 4: and somebody else goes like, oh my god, look at
• 28:17
  Speaker 4: this horrible thing. Right, and so you can't really do
• 28:21
  Speaker 4: that if you want to keep on acting that way. Yeah,
• 28:24
  Speaker 4: so we but it's not just compromise either. It's bringing people.
• 28:30
  Speaker 4: This is the great unifier the United States. Public land
• 28:33
  Speaker 4: unifies right left, Republican, Democrat, Independent. This is the last
• 28:39
  Speaker 4: of the great commons in this country.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: And I think a key thing to remember is despite
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: the fact that we can point to plenty of things
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: that aren't just raight, we're plenty of things that we
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: personally aren't quite happy with we have. We are the
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: envy of the world in many cases with what we have,
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: with this imperfect yet still really damn good system. To
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: carefully manage these lands as best as possible for the
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: greatest number of people. With this multiple use mandate, we
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: have built in a set of people hate bureaucracy, but
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: sometimes when you have something as precious as this public
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: land estate, we should have a lot of guardrails in place.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: We should have a lot of process in place, We
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: should have a lot of public input opportunities. But yeah,
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: it slows things down sometimes. Yes, it causes some speed
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: bumps and challenges, but it's that important. If you if
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: the states had this, none of that's.
• 29:36
  Speaker 5: There, no no, and and people, you know they the
• 29:41
  Speaker 5: nineteen seventies were the environmental decade, you know, when we
• 29:44
  Speaker 5: set a lot of that federal policy and law in place.
• 29:48
  Speaker 4: Flipmu for instance, in nineteen seventy six, the need for process,
• 29:52
  Speaker 4: a National Environmental Policy Act. Night was that seventy six, I.
• 29:55
  Speaker 3: Think somewhere in the ballpark.
• 29:57
  Speaker 4: Yeah, And these are onerous and they're difficult to deal with,
• 30:01
  Speaker 4: and sometimes we we'll go back and look at them
• 30:05
  Speaker 4: and say do we need this? And that's the beauty
• 30:08
  Speaker 4: of having the mansion, having the land. We can figure
• 30:12
  Speaker 4: out and we'll make mistakes, and you know, if the
• 30:16
  Speaker 4: bureaucracy has gotten so overwhelming and bloated that it's not
• 30:21
  Speaker 4: working for public land management anymore. We have the voting power,
• 30:26
  Speaker 4: we have the citizen power to change that.
• 30:29
  Speaker 3: Well.
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: I think a great example of that was, you know,
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: twenty nineteen, twenty twenty whenever.
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: That was when.
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: As we moved through this land transfer movement, we were
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: able we as a collective outdoor collection of communities, hunters
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: and anglers and climbers and mountain bikers and outdoor enthusias
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: of all stripes, really stood up and rallied around public
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: lands and said, hey, this is not okay to transfer
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: these to states, this is not oka to to dispose
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: of them. And it got to a point where where
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: to get re elected in twenty twenty as a senator,
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: several Republican senators had to really make strong stands on
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: public lands and get the president at the time to sign,
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: for example, the Great American out Doors Act into law,
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: things that would show a win on the public lands
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: side of things. To help get the support of hunters
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: and anglers and other people who care about these things.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: We were able to make it a political necessity. We
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: were able to influence change, and that that was just
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: for me a very encouraging sign that when we come
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: together on some of these things, we can steer the
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: ship that's right.
• 31:40
  Speaker 4: And I mean I envision a day when, you know,
• 31:44
  Speaker 4: never it's never going to stop people trying to get
• 31:47
  Speaker 4: a hold of the Utah pubbet lands, when somebody will
• 31:50
  Speaker 4: buy them or you know, and there's money to be
• 31:53
  Speaker 4: made off of getting rid of our public lands. I mean,
• 31:58
  Speaker 4: you can imagine what somebody would pay for the Talladega
• 32:01
  Speaker 4: National Forest in Alabama for instance, like like it would
• 32:04
  Speaker 4: be a lot, you know. So you have to choose.
• 32:08
  Speaker 4: The people have to choose to keep this institution that
• 32:12
  Speaker 4: we've inherited. You gotta choose. You gotta choose every and
• 32:15
  Speaker 4: kind of it's kind of like being on a personal
• 32:19
  Speaker 4: level of self discipline. You gotta choose every day today,
• 32:22
  Speaker 4: I'm gonna work hard, I'm gonna I'm gonna get up early,
• 32:25
  Speaker 4: I'm gonna get to work. I'm gonna make my things happen.
• 32:28
  Speaker 4: You got to choose this every day because the world,
• 32:32
  Speaker 4: if you just let this slide, you'll lose the public lands.
• 32:36
  Speaker 4: It's just they're too valuable.
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: Well, and the thing about other people, it's it's an
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: unfortunate imbalance. We have to show up for every single fight,
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: and we've got to win as many of them as
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: we can. And even if we win one of these fights,
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: like you just said, there's gonna be another one next
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: month or next year, five years down the road, are
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: fifty years down the road. These will continue over and
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: over and over again. On the flip side, if we
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: lose one of these battles, we lose some piece of
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: land or some classification of whatever it is. You lose
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: one of these battles, you lose these places forever in
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: many cases. So it's it's it's it's something we can't
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: take lately.
• 33:18
  Speaker 4: No, and for one of the dangers of living in
• 33:20
  Speaker 4: a functioning country is that you become incredibly complacent. I
• 33:27
  Speaker 4: mean it's like I would I often I oftn ask
• 33:31
  Speaker 4: people to imagine what the United States would be like.
• 33:35
  Speaker 4: Say you're raising your grandchildren in a place where the
• 33:39
  Speaker 4: public lands have been that whole idea has been lost,
• 33:42
  Speaker 4: and maybe you kept the national parks where you can
• 33:44
  Speaker 4: go if you you know you can't take your dog.
• 33:47
  Speaker 4: You gotta obey all the rules because everybody's there. You know,
• 33:51
  Speaker 4: you can't go out on the Blm Lands and walk
• 33:54
  Speaker 4: for a week. You can't go out in the Missouri
• 33:58
  Speaker 4: Breaks of Montana and and go illk hunting without paying
• 34:02
  Speaker 4: or getting permission. You know, you can't float the Missouri
• 34:06
  Speaker 4: River in camp I just ask people. You can't go
• 34:10
  Speaker 4: to the Sipsy Wilderness in Alabama or the Bienville National
• 34:13
  Speaker 4: Forest in Mississippi and just go down to the creek
• 34:17
  Speaker 4: with the kids. You gotta either pay or you got
• 34:20
  Speaker 4: to own it. I ask people all the time, what
• 34:23
  Speaker 4: would that would your country? How would that affect you? Well,
• 34:27
  Speaker 4: for a growing number of people, mark they don't care.
• 34:30
  Speaker 4: They don't go outside. They're own their game boys or
• 34:33
  Speaker 4: whatever you call it. And you know, and they don't care.
• 34:38
  Speaker 4: But for us, for the people who know, and the
• 34:44
  Speaker 4: people who know what our country, the beauty of our country,
• 34:48
  Speaker 4: American dirt, right, American water, American mountains. This is how
• 34:54
  Speaker 4: you get to experience this. This is where the rich
• 34:56
  Speaker 4: and the poor they all get the same. This is
• 34:59
  Speaker 4: America to me, and it's not just to me.
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And you know, I think there's a lot of
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: different parts of our American society, government, political system that
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: feel very out of our hands, that fear feel out
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: of our control, that feel so far above us and
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: what well, yes, yes that is true. But my point being,
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: I personally don't feel like I have much influence over
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: or could really change something when it comes to let's say,
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: artificial intelligence policy and how that's going to impact the
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: future of our government and defense system and privacy matters,
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: let's say, but public lands and wildlife. Actually, we have
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: some pretty strong tangible means to influence decisions there. There
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: are there are systems in place, and it's it's really
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's still huge, but it's still relatively approachable
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: enough that our voice is actually mattered. There are clear,
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: simple things we can do that can help, Like, we
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: can change this. This is a part of our country
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: that we should not feel nihilistic about because we actually
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: can change the narrative.
• 36:22
  Speaker 4: And we have since eighteen ninety one podcast I was
• 36:28
  Speaker 4: looked up. They had this guy, I think it was
• 36:30
  Speaker 4: in the twenties. They were the Week's Act had been
• 36:33
  Speaker 4: passed nineteen eleven, which allowed the federal government to buy
• 36:36
  Speaker 4: like logged out and abandoned lands in the East. Right,
• 36:39
  Speaker 4: they wanted their own national forests, and they had this guy,
• 36:42
  Speaker 4: Uncle Joe Kennon. He was a Senator from Illinois, and
• 36:46
  Speaker 4: every time anybody brought up in Congress that you know,
• 36:48
  Speaker 4: to purchase like the Apalachical and National forests, he would say,
• 36:55
  Speaker 4: not one cent for scenery. And he would yell the
• 36:59
  Speaker 4: same thing over and over, rope and uh. And so
• 37:03
  Speaker 4: we have we have had this. We have had Uncle
• 37:07
  Speaker 4: Joe Cannon with us since eighteen ninety one. At least
• 37:11
  Speaker 4: we had him with the robber barons in Montana, you know,
• 37:14
  Speaker 4: who said those who follow us can damn well take
• 37:16
  Speaker 4: care of themselves and then like drink some kind of
• 37:19
  Speaker 4: like super good liquor, you know, and while making fun
• 37:23
  Speaker 4: of all the people like working in the mine. But
• 37:26
  Speaker 4: we've had these people forever, and I think of Uncle
• 37:30
  Speaker 4: Joe Cannon. They still set up the Bankhead National Forest
• 37:34
  Speaker 4: in Alabama, Appalachian in Florida, the White Mountains National Forest.
• 37:39
  Speaker 4: He was yelling not one ship for trainery while we
• 37:42
  Speaker 4: while the rest of us were getting all this beautiful
• 37:45
  Speaker 4: stuff done. Right. Yeah. So what's happened more recently that
• 37:52
  Speaker 4: I really want to see changed is that we have
• 37:56
  Speaker 4: thrown public lands and conservation and clean water and the
• 38:02
  Speaker 4: future of our hunting vision in a culture war basket
• 38:06
  Speaker 4: where somehow it landed on the left side when it
• 38:10
  Speaker 4: couldn't be no more.
• 38:11
  Speaker 6: The most destructive environmental regimes on earth have been communists
• 38:19
  Speaker 6: have been leftists, true, and like Pinochet, and Chili was
• 38:23
  Speaker 6: a right winger and he was pretty bad.
• 38:25
  Speaker 4: Rady gave away the really sold their rivers. But the
• 38:29
  Speaker 4: trick was authoritarian regimes on right or left have been
• 38:32
  Speaker 4: terrible for people's freedom and for the environment. But we
• 38:37
  Speaker 4: have got to get conservation in the public lands out
• 38:40
  Speaker 4: of the culture wars basket. And we it's not in
• 38:44
  Speaker 4: there for me, it's not in there for you, But
• 38:46
  Speaker 4: we've got to get them out, and we've got to
• 38:49
  Speaker 4: bring them in front of the two political parties and
• 38:52
  Speaker 4: say this is what we're gonna do, buddy, little little feller.
• 38:57
  Speaker 4: We're keeping the National Forest Bureau of Land Management lands.
• 39:01
  Speaker 4: We're keeping all of our public lands and our National
• 39:03
  Speaker 4: Wildlife refuges, which are unbelievable crown jewels. We're keeping all
• 39:08
  Speaker 4: that stuff. We're gonna have clean water to fish in
• 39:11
  Speaker 4: and drink and big, strong, healthy kids raised on big
• 39:14
  Speaker 4: clean air because this is America. And now you can
• 39:18
  Speaker 4: argue over how to achieve that yeah, boys and girls
• 39:21
  Speaker 4: in Congress. But that goal is one that is going
• 39:26
  Speaker 4: to be outside of your political like grooviness, whatever it
• 39:30
  Speaker 4: is you're doing with the big signs where you're taking
• 39:32
  Speaker 4: the tax payer money and making big signs in Utah. Yeah,
• 39:37
  Speaker 4: and with that action.
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: And rather than this being an argument over is this
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: a goal that you know one party is going to
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: pursue and one's not. How about we argue over the
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: solutions rather than like doesn't matter, because it matters. We
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: have to make it known to both parties that this
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: matters to us. And then yeah, let's get the right
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: side and the left side to then debate and argue
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: and you know, butt heads over the right ways to
• 39:59
  Speaker 2: get there. But when it's all on one side, we're
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: in trouble.
• 40:04
  Speaker 4: We're in trouble. And it's not I mean, I just
• 40:07
  Speaker 4: don't think, well, I know people, people who know if
• 40:10
  Speaker 4: you fish or hunt, particularly, you know that you can't
• 40:13
  Speaker 4: do that without clean water and public lands and public access.
• 40:19
  Speaker 4: I mean, it's not like some kind of theory. It's
• 40:22
  Speaker 4: not abstract. And the other problem is is we inherited this.
• 40:27
  Speaker 4: I'm older than you are, but you and I have
• 40:29
  Speaker 4: come up in a time where we had these things
• 40:33
  Speaker 4: based on the work and hard fault battles of our forebears.
• 40:38
  Speaker 4: I mean, the same kind of way we fought King George,
• 40:42
  Speaker 4: like we got this, we don't really have the right
• 40:45
  Speaker 4: to go, like, ah, it's just too much, you know,
• 40:47
  Speaker 4: like Beavis and butthead that thing where they were going
• 40:49
  Speaker 4: to save the people in the burning airplane but they
• 40:51
  Speaker 4: couldn't get the door opened, and he goes, he go
• 40:54
  Speaker 4: Beavis says, a, this is too hard, and the other
• 40:57
  Speaker 4: guy goes, yes, something's hard, it's not worth doing, and
• 41:00
  Speaker 4: they just leave and the planet bloods up. It's like
• 41:04
  Speaker 4: we inherited something wonderful, yeah, and we just can't. It
• 41:09
  Speaker 4: ain't gonna go on my watch.
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: No, so so it I'm I'm happy that our conversation
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: today is one that has some good news, which is
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: that this lawsuit that was still concerning for a lot
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: of people has been thrown out, so that battle was won.
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: We got you know, that gopher was knocked on the head.
• 41:26
  Speaker 4: That's yeah, that gopher. There's many other gophers coming.
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, some more gophers coming, right. It seems like this
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: is a sign of more to come. Can you can
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: you can you elaborate a little bit of what you
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: think might be coming next or what we need to
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: be keeping an eye out, because it seems like this
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: is not an anomaly, right right.
• 41:47
  Speaker 4: So the the problem with politics in the United States
• 41:51
  Speaker 4: right now is that it's become oversimplified, you know, And
• 41:55
  Speaker 4: that's true, and in this public land so that the
• 41:58
  Speaker 4: public land thing should not be a political issue, but
• 42:00
  Speaker 4: it is. So what I think is coming is that
• 42:06
  Speaker 4: we are going to see more and more defunding of
• 42:10
  Speaker 4: the agencies that manage these lands. I know that the
• 42:13
  Speaker 4: wildlife refuges are kind of in funding crisis now, and
• 42:18
  Speaker 4: you're gonna see more and more. It's it's there's actually
• 42:20
  Speaker 4: a strategy here that's been going on since the seventies eighties,
• 42:25
  Speaker 4: where it's called defund and decry. So Congress doesn't allogate
• 42:30
  Speaker 4: the money to the to the say the US Forest
• 42:32
  Speaker 4: Service or the Forest Service has to spend all its
• 42:36
  Speaker 4: money on fires that doesn't get any more, and then
• 42:39
  Speaker 4: there's no trail work done, and then there's no there's
• 42:43
  Speaker 4: no creek restoration work done, there's no logging clean up done,
• 42:48
  Speaker 4: and people go like the the campground isn't clean enough,
• 42:52
  Speaker 4: and people go, this is ridiculous. I didn't bring my
• 42:55
  Speaker 4: family out here to look at a turned over outhouse.
• 42:59
  Speaker 4: And then you say, then somebody goes, you know, what
• 43:01
  Speaker 4: would really be good is if they didn't have this
• 43:04
  Speaker 4: far service stuff anyway, because they're not doing the job,
• 43:07
  Speaker 4: are they so? And that's what is that. I see
• 43:11
  Speaker 4: that coming big time, and and I see overcrowding of
• 43:15
  Speaker 4: public lands. I thought it was gonna bring more constituents
• 43:18
  Speaker 4: in just to celebrate public lands. But in places overcrowded
• 43:22
  Speaker 4: on public lands, like during the COVID years year or
• 43:26
  Speaker 4: whatever that was, uh, people are going, man, this is awful.
• 43:30
  Speaker 4: There's too many people. And so I see that people
• 43:35
  Speaker 4: the ones who want to divest us of the public lands,
• 43:38
  Speaker 4: they're gonna be getting working the budgets down and they're
• 43:42
  Speaker 4: gonna be pointing out every instance of mismanagement and then going,
• 43:47
  Speaker 4: wouldn't it be good if like you didn't even have
• 43:49
  Speaker 4: this mansion?
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, you know, like you said, politics has unfortunately
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: gotten I guess I don't know how to describe it.
• 44:11
  Speaker 3: But politics are tribal.
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: They raise a lot of emotions that you get these
• 44:17
  Speaker 2: like team kind of ideas where if you identify as
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: a Republican or identify as a Democrat, you feel like
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: you're kind of you have to take everything in that bucket, right.
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: But if you were to look at the administration coming
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: in here next week and set everything else aside, everything
• 44:36
  Speaker 2: else that might that they're doing good, every decision that
• 44:40
  Speaker 2: we might be in supportive and if you look simply
• 44:42
  Speaker 2: at what happened last time around when it comes to
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: public lands, there are a series of trends which I
• 44:48
  Speaker 2: think fall in line with what you just said. I mean,
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: for example, last time the guy put in charge of
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: the Bureau of Land Management was one of the most
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: prominent folks speaking out against public lands, speaking out about
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: disposing of public lands, and that guy was put in
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: charge of the public lands last time. The playbook was
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: written by this guy again for the upcoming administration on
• 45:08
  Speaker 2: how to get rid of public lands, how to like
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: you said, defund, decry, etc. There was this death of
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: a thousand cuts that was taking place over the course
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: of that four years, where you saw many of our
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: national monuments significantly reduced in size, like Bear's Ears, where
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: I know you spend a bunch of time recently, Ascalante,
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: you saw some of some very special places, there's been
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: a lot of conversation around whether they are the right
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: place for really risky mining projects, things like you know
• 45:41
  Speaker 2: the Boundary Waters area where that was opened up possibly
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: for leases, and then most recently that was a moratorium
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: was put in place, but there we might see that
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: opened up again. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: an incredible iconic landscape of America, has been debated for
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: many decades, and whether or not that's to be opened
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: up for drilling never was opened up until this last administration.
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: The Roadless Rule something that's protected these last roadless areas
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: across our national forests that was rescinded in the areas
• 46:13
  Speaker 2: such as the Tongest National Forest. So there's there's all
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: of these different examples where public lands and healthy wild
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: places were kind of slashed away at, picked away at,
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: picked away at, picked away at, defunded, et cetera. Everything
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: else aside in this one arena, there's a lot of
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: sign for concern based on what happened last time around.
• 46:35
  Speaker 4: Yes, do you expect a.
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: That to continue as it was? Do you think it's
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: going to accelerate given the fact that there's not a
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: second time around they're shooting for.
• 46:48
  Speaker 3: This is like, this is it?
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: Do you have any other thoughts predictions on as far
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: as what we need to be keeping tabs on, prepared
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: to fight back on anything like that.
• 46:58
  Speaker 4: I do so. One the last one twenty sixteen through
• 47:07
  Speaker 4: we saw the rescinding of the monuments in Utah, right,
• 47:11
  Speaker 4: so there was a weird quid pro quo there where
• 47:16
  Speaker 4: Utah kind of delivered for President Trump and so they
• 47:20
  Speaker 4: got these things in return. And that's a big can
• 47:25
  Speaker 4: of worms. It's really interesting. I think people should that
• 47:28
  Speaker 4: are listening to this should be looking at that, like,
• 47:30
  Speaker 4: you know, you deliver so x number the majority of
• 47:33
  Speaker 4: the vote and you'll get this. You know, did the
• 47:36
  Speaker 4: American people want the reduction of Bears, Ears or Grand
• 47:39
  Speaker 4: Staircase Escalante? They did not, and they said that repeatedly,
• 47:44
  Speaker 4: but they got that. That's what happened to us anyway.
• 47:46
  Speaker 4: So in a sense that was a but in a
• 47:50
  Speaker 4: sense that was a quid pro quo to the Utah.
• 47:52
  Speaker 4: So I think that's really repulsive and I don't think
• 47:56
  Speaker 4: that the American people are going to accept that. But
• 48:00
  Speaker 4: like the appointment of William Parker Penley as head of
• 48:03
  Speaker 4: the BLM, who is this fossil from the early Reagan
• 48:08
  Speaker 4: years who was so scandal ridden even then as a
• 48:11
  Speaker 4: young man that he went out with James Watt back
• 48:15
  Speaker 4: in those days. Right, But so so there was this
• 48:17
  Speaker 4: fossil there that they found because they were, as President
• 48:22
  Speaker 4: Trump said, the first time, we were highly unprepared to win.
• 48:27
  Speaker 4: We were really not prepared. We didn't understand so much
• 48:31
  Speaker 4: of what we wanted to do during those four years.
• 48:34
  Speaker 4: Whether you agree with that or not. Right, So, on
• 48:38
  Speaker 4: this administration this time, as my wife said this the
• 48:42
  Speaker 4: other day, the American people voted to kick over the
• 48:45
  Speaker 4: apple cart for a lot of different reasons. Yeah, and
• 48:49
  Speaker 4: a lot of apples have spilled out, and we're going
• 48:53
  Speaker 4: to determine. Now, this is way different than the first administration,
• 48:58
  Speaker 4: although it's so similar in that it is radically pro business. Okay,
• 49:04
  Speaker 4: so if you can make money mining out right outside
• 49:08
  Speaker 4: the boundary waters, that's going to be on the table,
• 49:12
  Speaker 4: and the America people will be asked to engage deeply
• 49:16
  Speaker 4: to say we're pro business as well, we understand these things.
• 49:22
  Speaker 4: To have a multinational global company come and put in
• 49:26
  Speaker 4: jeopardy to boundary waters, it's not our dear idea of
• 49:29
  Speaker 4: good business. We're not going to do that, Okay. Ambler
• 49:33
  Speaker 4: Road in Alaska probably not good business to open that
• 49:37
  Speaker 4: up again. I would ask anybody to listen to the
• 49:40
  Speaker 4: podcast I did with John Leshie about the eighteen seventy
• 49:43
  Speaker 4: two mining law. We're talking about expanding mining on public
• 49:47
  Speaker 4: lands in the United States East and West under a
• 49:51
  Speaker 4: law written in eighteen seventy two to encourage a guy
• 49:54
  Speaker 4: with a pickaxe and a burrow to go grab public
• 49:58
  Speaker 4: land to make it his own and dig a hole
• 50:00
  Speaker 4: and find something that we needed. That law has to
• 50:03
  Speaker 4: be reformed, repealed, rescinded before we can do mining in
• 50:08
  Speaker 4: America in a in a sensible fashion of good business.
• 50:12
  Speaker 4: So the fact that that law is not on the
• 50:16
  Speaker 4: table here, that's very concerning. People should be working on
• 50:20
  Speaker 4: that now. The American people should demand that American minerals
• 50:24
  Speaker 4: are used for by American companies to produce American jobs
• 50:28
  Speaker 4: and American resources. All right. So there's going to be
• 50:32
  Speaker 4: a radical pro business emphasis in the Trump administration, Okay,
• 50:38
  Speaker 4: but I myself am not afraid. I think that we
• 50:42
  Speaker 4: should be wary, and we should say that's good business
• 50:45
  Speaker 4: and that's not good business, and we will stand for this,
• 50:48
  Speaker 4: and we will not stand for this, and we're going
• 50:52
  Speaker 4: to be able to do that. And for instance, the
• 50:55
  Speaker 4: government efficiency or whatever, the department of whatever that extraining
• 51:00
  Speaker 4: this extracurricular thing is, we could use that mark, We
• 51:04
  Speaker 4: could use that, We could use that in public lands management.
• 51:08
  Speaker 4: How do we make public lands management better, more efficient?
• 51:13
  Speaker 4: How do we get local communities employed finn and timber
• 51:17
  Speaker 4: in the Tongus? How do we get local communities employed
• 51:21
  Speaker 4: restoring creeks in the bitter Root after those fires? Right?
• 51:24
  Speaker 4: Because we are not doing that right now and it's
• 51:28
  Speaker 4: not good.
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: Doesn't that come back though, to the budget issues?
• 51:31
  Speaker 4: So much of it we don't on prioritization of the budget.
• 51:35
  Speaker 4: I noticed that we have lots of budget for certain
• 51:38
  Speaker 4: things that I don't particularly think are healthy. I'm saying,
• 51:44
  Speaker 4: like the American people are going to have to say,
• 51:47
  Speaker 4: you know, creek restoration on public lands is a priority
• 51:51
  Speaker 4: for me, and you can do whatever you want with
• 51:55
  Speaker 4: this money, but we would like to see it allocated
• 51:58
  Speaker 4: in this way more efficiently as well. You know, I'm
• 52:03
  Speaker 4: not sure that that building new RV parks is really
• 52:08
  Speaker 4: a great use of the money. For instance, Yeah, when
• 52:12
  Speaker 4: you have areas where you could, you could fence off
• 52:16
  Speaker 4: rapoia in places and create incredible fisheries in clean water
• 52:20
  Speaker 4: down Street when you have just all of this work
• 52:25
  Speaker 4: that we could be do with. So I just I'm
• 52:28
  Speaker 4: not afraid of this. I may turn out to be
• 52:31
  Speaker 4: a Pollyanna or overly optimistic, but I believe that when
• 52:36
  Speaker 4: the American people decided to upset the apple cart here
• 52:40
  Speaker 4: that it doesn't mean that we want filthier water and
• 52:43
  Speaker 4: no public lands and and all of us to have
• 52:46
  Speaker 4: our all our rare earth materials stolen by some company
• 52:50
  Speaker 4: from Chili.
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: Would you would you say, though, given what seems to
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: be a pretty clear, as you said, probi business emphasis
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: for the next four years, very pro business, if we
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: were to grow complacent and bury our heads and our
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: phones and our Netflix shows, and or just being out
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: in the woods by ourselves, hunting and fishing and just
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: doing our own thing, if we were to do that
• 53:19
  Speaker 2: and not engage, whether it's going to come up in
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: the next four years with this radical, very pro business agenda,
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: would it be fair to say that we could.
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: Expect to see a lot of these special places.
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: In danger if we don't make sure we're in it.
• 53:34
  Speaker 4: One hundred and Not only that, but they're the the
• 53:38
  Speaker 4: the powers that wont to take over public lands and
• 53:42
  Speaker 4: sell them to their wealthy friends. Our ascendant right now, Yeah,
• 53:46
  Speaker 4: I mean, I mean the I mean, we have probably
• 53:50
  Speaker 4: the most billionaires making policy that we've ever had, and
• 53:54
  Speaker 4: the few is like normal people. So you're gonna have
• 53:58
  Speaker 4: to counter that. But there's three hun undred and forty
• 54:01
  Speaker 4: something million Americans. Let me, I have a quote that
• 54:06
  Speaker 4: I always use, and it's perfect for this thing. The
• 54:14
  Speaker 4: struggle may be a moral one, or it may be
• 54:16
  Speaker 4: a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical,
• 54:19
  Speaker 4: but there will be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without
• 54:23
  Speaker 4: a demand. It never did, and it never did. Will
• 54:27
  Speaker 4: find out just what any people will quietly submit to,
• 54:30
  Speaker 4: And you have found out the exact measure of injustice
• 54:33
  Speaker 4: and wrong which will be imposed upon them. And these
• 54:38
  Speaker 4: will continue until they're resisted with words or blows or both.
• 54:42
  Speaker 4: The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of
• 54:45
  Speaker 4: those whom they oppress. That was Frederick Douglass talking about
• 54:49
  Speaker 4: slavery in the South. Wow. So that's what I think.
• 54:54
  Speaker 4: If you are not willing to stand up, or if
• 54:58
  Speaker 4: you're watching and the running on the treadmill at the
• 55:02
  Speaker 4: gym watching Fox News. They're making you think there's only
• 55:06
  Speaker 4: two kinds of Americans and they hate each other and
• 55:12
  Speaker 4: they won't ever agree on anything. And I don't know
• 55:15
  Speaker 4: why the other side does it too, I guess, but
• 55:19
  Speaker 4: I don't know why they're what motive we have for
• 55:22
  Speaker 4: dividing the American people, But if we remain this divided,
• 55:28
  Speaker 4: we'll lose the public lands and the conservation that supports
• 55:31
  Speaker 4: hunting and fishing. We shouldn't be divided over that.
• 55:38
  Speaker 2: We have talked about various permutations of this issue, you know,
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: at least over the last decade. You and I I
• 55:46
  Speaker 2: know what You've talked about many many other people over
• 55:48
  Speaker 2: many decades. So now in twenty twenty five, we're quarter
• 55:52
  Speaker 2: of the way through this new millennia.
• 55:56
  Speaker 3: I guess it'd be or sorry century. What can we
• 56:02
  Speaker 3: do now?
• 56:04
  Speaker 2: What are the most positive productive means for not just
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: enduring what might be coming, but also influencing in a
• 56:13
  Speaker 2: positive way. What's the battle cry? What's the game plan
• 56:18
  Speaker 2: here of these coming years?
• 56:20
  Speaker 4: I think we're going to have to So the energy
• 56:25
  Speaker 4: is on the right wing at the moment, and we
• 56:30
  Speaker 4: as conservatives or whatever you political label you want to
• 56:36
  Speaker 4: put on most hunters and fishermen are going to have
• 56:40
  Speaker 4: to get through to the elected people, the people we
• 56:45
  Speaker 4: vote for, that these things are priorities and that they
• 56:50
  Speaker 4: will not be thrown in some basket of culture war topics.
• 56:56
  Speaker 4: That these are the wildlife refuge system. It's so wonderful,
• 57:01
  Speaker 4: like it is such a crown jewel of America. The
• 57:04
  Speaker 4: national forests are so important to us, our us as
• 57:08
  Speaker 4: as Americans, our identity, our freedom. Okay, these are not
• 57:13
  Speaker 4: political footballs. And so we're going to have to get
• 57:19
  Speaker 4: through into this pro business community that we that there
• 57:23
  Speaker 4: are certain things we will not be, we will not accept,
• 57:30
  Speaker 4: you know. I mean this is another topic. But we
• 57:34
  Speaker 4: we have huge success stories all the way back to
• 57:38
  Speaker 4: eighteen ninety one on conservation in America, and huge the
• 57:43
  Speaker 4: dextervation of the bison, the loss of almost all the
• 57:46
  Speaker 4: waterfowl that you know. So we we had these huge
• 57:50
  Speaker 4: failures and these enormous successes, and we're doing both right
• 57:55
  Speaker 4: now again. But we're like we're failing with clean water
• 57:58
  Speaker 4: throughout the Midwest, really failing. And we let the Clean
• 58:05
  Speaker 4: Water Act be trimmed back to its original definition in
• 58:10
  Speaker 4: nineteen seventy two to the point where we're failing to
• 58:13
  Speaker 4: protect the clean water that supports fishing and swimming and
• 58:17
  Speaker 4: all that. So we have these huge failures, and the
• 58:20
  Speaker 4: folks that we just elected are not the ideal people
• 58:25
  Speaker 4: to address that. Let's say that I'm going to be
• 58:28
  Speaker 4: very objective here. The folks that we just object elected.
• 58:32
  Speaker 4: Donald Trump, for instance, will tell you that he doesn't
• 58:35
  Speaker 4: know anything about that. That's what he told the Farm
• 58:37
  Speaker 4: Bureau when they rescinded the Waters of the US rule
• 58:40
  Speaker 4: last time. He said, I don't even know what it is,
• 58:44
  Speaker 4: but it's terrible, and you folks told me that we
• 58:47
  Speaker 4: don't want it, and so I'm getting rid of it.
• 58:49
  Speaker 4: He said the same thing about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
• 58:52
  Speaker 4: He said, nobody cares about this. It's open, right. So
• 58:57
  Speaker 4: obviously people didn't speak up and say that's not true.
• 59:02
  Speaker 4: We do care about it. And you may not support
• 59:06
  Speaker 4: the Waters of the US rule, but I'll bet you
• 59:08
  Speaker 4: don't support eating drinking blue green algae in de moins.
• 59:13
  Speaker 4: So these folks, I see this as an opportunity, mark totally.
• 59:19
  Speaker 4: I don't think somebody like Elon Musk is so focused
• 59:24
  Speaker 4: on Mars or Venus or whatever that planet they want
• 59:27
  Speaker 4: to go to, which is fine with me. I'm like,
• 59:29
  Speaker 4: have at it, man, little rockets, you know, like I
• 59:33
  Speaker 4: like smart people. Sure, right, But here's the thing. A
• 59:37
  Speaker 4: guy who's spending a lot of time thinking about Mars
• 59:40
  Speaker 4: and stuff, he's probably not thinking about the water fishing
• 59:44
  Speaker 4: in Des Moines, yes, or in Sioux Falls. And that's
• 59:49
  Speaker 4: our business and that's what we know. And so but
• 59:53
  Speaker 4: I would say this, I doubt that President Trump or
• 59:57
  Speaker 4: Elon Musk or vvak Ramus, I bet none of them
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 4: actually are going like, you know, what I really want
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 4: to do is get rid of the Talladega National Forest, right,
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 4: you know, you know what I bet i'd like to do.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 4: I'd like to pollute mobile base so nobody can fish
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 4: in it or have a nice house on it. They're
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 4: not doing that. And these are jd Vance for instance,
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 4: when to Yale whatever, the guy has some education, he's
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 4: not gonna say that clean water is not important. So
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 4: it's up to us now to put some apples back
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 4: in this apple cart and say this apple's really important.
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 4: Don't let that one go down the hill. And I
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 4: honestly think that we're in a place where we could have,
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 4: We could effect positive change in the United States right
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 4: now that to me, we've been a little too complacent
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 4: to do. We've kind of rested on the laurels of
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 4: the nineteen seventies and a Wilderness Act of sixty four
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 4: and the dust bowl stuff. You know, that's what I think.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 4: I'm pretty excited. Actually. I think it's a very dangerous
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 4: time for all the reasons you mentioned, and I think
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 4: that times of danger kind of make me feel better.
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 2: So what are some specific tactics or actions that we
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 2: as individuals can take to help make sure that we
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: grab this apple, put it back in the cart, and say, hey, folks,
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 2: this one's really important. Do not screw this one up,
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 2: give this one some tender love and care. Listen to us.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 3: How do we actually do that?
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 4: Hell?
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: Because I it's an idea and it's a sentiment that
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 2: makes a lot of sense, But I think a lot
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: of folks then still wonder, like, well, what does that
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 2: mean to my daily life, or what does that mean
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 2: for me this week? Or how do why is an
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: individual in Des Moines, Iowa actually do that?
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 4: Well, I've decided and it's I do handle the podcast
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 4: or back undrenders and anglers. So maybe I have a
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 4: conflict of interest there, but I decided in the last
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 4: ten years looking, I've been writing this book for five
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 4: and a lot of the research was on how did
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 4: we get like how did you get the Clean Water
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 4: Act passed? You know? And one as a as a
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 4: as an individual, read books and listen to podcasts and
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 4: and and really concentrate on what it is that you
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 4: think is important in life. I'm this is kind of like, like,
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 4: like what this is. I wrote a piece for Field
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 4: and Stream years ago and it was in response to
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 4: unfettered energy development on their own plateau which I went
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 4: to see and I thought, this is not good, right
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 4: this We can get the energy without doing this right?
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 4: And uh, I wrote a piece called what do you
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 4: really believe in? And so number one, I'm going to
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 4: answer this as quickly as I can. What do I
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 4: really believe in? You know, like clean water and having
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 4: kids swimming and catching crawdads and a creek that doesn't
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 4: poison them, having public lands where I can go, like
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 4: a person can go hunting for a week or even
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 4: a day, or you could just take a six pack
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 4: of beer out and sit on the river, you know, right,
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 4: so I think that the hunters and fishermen are listening
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 4: to your podcast are going to say, I do believe
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 4: in these things. I believe in them strongly. And the
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 4: second thing, which it took me a while because I'm
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 4: kind of highly individualistic, was that old Hemingway thing from
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 4: to have and have not, where the guy says a
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 4: man alone just ain't got no chance. And the truth
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 4: is is Trout Unlimited backcountry hunters and anglers, Isaac Walton
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 4: League Ducks Unlimited to the Mix is probably the greatest
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 4: wetlands conservation group in the world. They all have problems.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 4: They're running by human beings, and human beings are fallible, yes,
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 4: but Americans in large teams have really driven the positive
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 4: changes that we're talking about. And that I hate. I
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 4: don't hate to say it, I just it took me
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 4: a long time to get to this is you gotta
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 4: join with like minded brothers and sisters. And those numbers
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 4: equate to a politician going like sending the staff. We
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 4: got to meet these folks. Sorry, I don't want to
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 4: hear about clean water in Iowa, but there's like twenty
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 4: five thousand people who might not vote for me next time.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 4: And then one of the old time politicians. I think
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 4: a guy told me this once in DC. He said, yeah,
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 4: it's a good idea, Now make me do it. That's it. Yeah,
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 4: And it's tough because used to be sportsman. In the
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 4: nineteen thirties, they had all of these local sportsmen groups
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 4: and Montana was full of them. I don't know about
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 4: where you grew up, if it was or not, but
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 4: Montana was full of them. Or Valley County Sportsmen, great
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 4: prickly pair of sportsmen, Hellgate hunters and anglers in Missoula,
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 4: and they were incredibly politically active on a statewide and
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 4: local level. And those they got older and older. I
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 4: would go to the meetings, you know, and everybody got
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 4: older and older, and then they just kind of they're
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 4: still around, some of them, but they've they've waned in power,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 4: and so I would like to see that again. But
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 4: I don't think we're gonna see that because people are
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 4: so busy, man, Like you got little kids. My kids
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 4: are grown and I'm still like like college tuition. Oh,
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 4: and everybody's busy, but it's not. You're not too busy
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 4: really to join like back huntry hunters and anglers or
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 4: or Trout Unlimited or something. Yeah, and they're thereby amplify
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 4: your voice, multiply your voice. That's my answer. I guess. Yeah,
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 4: what is the public lands equivalent to that? Like National
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 4: Forest Foundation?
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, like you said, BHA is about as
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 2: good of a modern day version of these sportsman's clubs too,
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 2: right with Pine Knights and things like that. Like that's
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 2: that's the best example I've seen of the younger crowd
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 2: activating as a community.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 4: Yeah. I would let me add this to And you've
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 4: done some of this, I've done some I've done some
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 4: of it, But I would like to do more volunteering
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 4: with like these BHA things and in meeting people of
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 4: like mind. Ye. I gotta tell you. I was. I
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 4: was feeling very beat down the other day, and I
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 4: was working on a chapter in my book which involved Alabama.
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 4: And I called a young guy there who's a biologist
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 4: and a fanatical hunting and fision guy, and he was
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 4: on his way to waterfowl hunting up in North Alabama,
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 4: and it happened to be in a place that I
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 4: went to in high school. And we got it on
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 4: Google Earth and we looked at it, and I felt
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 4: better for three days after just talking with Joe Jenkins
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 4: and his enthusiasm for going hunting down there, and I
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 4: realized that there's all these people who love the same
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 4: things I do and are are really motivated to fight
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 4: for them, and that you meet those It's like those
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 4: fence removal things they had in Colorado and in eastern
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 4: Montana while wetlands restoration planting projects. It's, yeah, we gotta
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 4: we gotta seek out people of like mind and begin
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 4: to form tribe.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, get that snowball rolling and those little local volunteer
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 2: efforts might not save the world today, but those are
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 2: those start points. And like you said, you bring community together,
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 2: you establish new connections, you build energy off of each other,
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 2: you gain your tank is refueled by being around other
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: like minded people. Yeah, so such a great example.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 4: You know, stories and then and I just saw it
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 4: like if I were, if I were really young now,
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 4: I'd be volunteering on a lot of those to try
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 4: to find people of like mine. Man.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that was such a great You know, I've
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: done ten of those over the last twenty four months
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 2: or so for the Working for Wildlife tour, and that
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 2: was my biggest takeaway from that was just the power
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 2: of bringing these people together that all care about this stuff,
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 2: and so many signs of hope just by being around
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 2: each other and hearing stories and doing something actual, tangible,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: positive right here and now you're making a positi difference.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: Right now, you are regaining agency. We talked earlier about
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 2: how so much feels outside of our control. But when
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 2: you're out there on the ground planting a tree alongside
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 2: another guy or girl who also loves hunting or fishing
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: in the outdoors, you can't help but feel a little
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 2: bit better, and you can't help but be inspired to
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 2: do a little bit better the next time too.
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 4: I mean that's how we've been doing it since cave
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 4: man days, right, Yeah, Like get that mammoth and then
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 4: everybody think happy everybody was when you got the mammoth,
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 4: and like you're clapping him on the back. You might
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 4: hate this guy, you know when you're not hunting, but
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 4: you're going like, man, what a good shot with that
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 4: at laddle, right, Like this is community and the and
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 4: the ladies are all happy. They're like hauling the meat back,
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 4: you know, and it's like this is community, this is tribe.
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 4: It's something in us. It's as old as human beings, right, yeah,
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 4: And I was I was following y'all when you were
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 4: doing that. We were actually and see, I've been doing
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 4: this big planting job, but that's a paid job with
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 4: the Mule Deer Foundation. It's it's a beautiful job, but
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 4: it's not the same. Everybody's there to you know, it's work.
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 4: Everybody's with a huge gold but it's work. And those
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 4: volunteer things. We rolled fence, and dude, it was so
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 4: I know you've been doing this, but it was so
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 4: it is actionable, quantifiable yep. Right, we were taking they
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 4: were dead. There was hair and dead mule deer at
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 4: this crossing and that fence was completely useless. It was
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 4: just left there from after a forest fire like twenty
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 4: years ago. And we rolled that fence right out of
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 4: that mule deer trail that came from the high country
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 4: to the to the winter room.
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 3: You did it.
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 4: Yeah, Observable, actionable, quantifiable. That's that's what I kept asking people,
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 4: like with the climate chain stuff and all that that
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 4: I got so dis engaged from because I was like,
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 4: I was like, I just need to see something actionable, quantifiable,
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 4: and observable, and that's you know, planting, restoring wetlands, restoring grassland,
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 4: clanton trees, burning fuels reduction yep. I was like, I
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 4: won't add actionable, quantifiable, observable, and those volunteer projects are
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 4: all of that.
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, such a great example. So I was going
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: to ask you a question which you just already answered mostly,
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 2: but I will give you an opportunity to add anything
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 2: else to it. The question being, you know, one of
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 2: the first things you said that we should do entering
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 2: this era is to get educated, right, to pay attention
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: to this stuff. And so I think this is something
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 2: I've brought up to you maybe every time we've talked
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 2: some version of this. But you know, there's the famous
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 2: Leopold quote the curse of an ecological education is discovering
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 2: that you live in a world of wounds, something along
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 2: those lines. He said, Basically, the more we educate ourselves
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 2: on these issues, the more we pay attention to the
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 2: news about the environment and public lands and wildlife, the
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 2: more you're going to realize there's a lot of stuff
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 2: in danger, there's a lot of stuff getting you know,
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of stuff that's not doing great right.
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 2: So what I'm always looking for are ways to maintain hope,
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 2: ways not to feel like, man, this whole thing's going
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 2: to the shit or eventually. You mentioned a couple of
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 2: great examples ways to do that, getting involved community volunteering.
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 2: You mentioned just talking to someone who's going on hunting
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 2: and being.
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 3: Reinvigorated through that.
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 2: Do you have any other things in your life that
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 2: help you stay positive, because sometimes when you zoom out
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 2: and you look at the long term trajectory of our
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 2: natural world and the environment and clean air and wildlife
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 2: across the world and all that kind of stuff, it
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 2: can get a little dark and dreary.
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 3: How do you stay hopeful?
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 4: Boy? I hope you don't edit that. You may have
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 4: to edit this out. But uh So, the all species
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 4: go through population overshoots, and not all of them, but most,
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 4: and they fill up their ecological niche and then they
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 4: decline in numbers. They don't go extinct. It's not like
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 4: apocalypse and fire and that you right. So, human population
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 4: on our planet is supposed to peak at like nine
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 4: point eight ten billion, maybe twelve, I'm not sure, but
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 4: it peaks at about two hundred and fifty years much
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 4: less probably, and at that point, the children, our great
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 4: great grandchildren are going to be living in a world
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 4: that is in recovering from all of the things that
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 4: people did to get insatiable resource demand. Right. So here's
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 4: my point, and I call this carry in the fire.
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 4: Those of us who understand how powerful the rivers and
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 4: the forests and the wildlife are have a unique moment
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 4: in history. What we prioritize, conserve, protect, steward now is
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 4: what's going to be in that recovering world in one
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 4: hundred and fifty years. And so there has never been
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 4: a time where it was more important to teach your
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 4: children to hunt and shoot and how beautiful it is
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 4: to hunt squirrels and to take food from the land
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 4: and fish from the water, and know that that water
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 4: is clean enough that it's going to make you strong
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 4: and healthy so you can run one hundred yard dash tomorrow.
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 4: It is or this is physicality too, like to teach
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 4: children and to keep ourselves fit right to be powerful
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 4: and strong, and to teach our children like health and
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 4: connections to nature. Because this is the fire that we're
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 4: going to carry through what this population overshoot into a
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 4: future where maybe there's one billion people on earth and
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 4: there are incredible numbers of wildlife and fish and oceans
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 4: pouring around without big plastic garbage patches and stuff. Right
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 4: but right now is the moment. And I think about that,
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 4: and I think about Doug Talamy's Homegrown National Park stuff
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 4: where they're saying, man, you don't have to have twenty acres.
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 4: You can plant a pollinator belt of native plants in
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 4: your yard and those pollinators are going to drive in
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 4: that place. Like my own backyard garden has so much
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 4: diversity in it now of these insects that I've just
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 4: never seen before, and it's kind of like it's not
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 4: very big, and they came from somewhere and they came
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 4: there because I planted these pollinators. And it's a microcosm.
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 4: But what is the microcosm except for these made up
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 4: of these small things. So I'm I'm actually and it's
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 4: my bias, right, Like I already wanted to teach my
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 4: kid how to pike fish. And my daughter is a
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 4: fisherman and and a hunter, and my son is a
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 4: hunter and a fisherman, and and they they know the
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 4: power of these things because my wife and I taught
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 4: it to them. But it's they're carrying this fire and
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 4: they're young they're not like in big conservation groups going
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 4: to d C advocating with that. That's our business, right,
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 4: but they know what they know where the bread's buttered,
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 4: they know what's powerful. Yeah, and it's our it's our
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 4: business to carry that fire through this time and so
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 4: that that making sure that it goes on.
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 2: It's a hell of an obligation. But we're awfully we're
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 2: awfully fortunate to be able to do it.
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, it's a beautiful obligation because for me it
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 4: involves doing what I already want to do.
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 3: True, it's a there's a lot worth fighting for still,
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 3: that's for sure.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 4: Oh my, so much, there is so much left to
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 4: not left. There's just so much there. Like I mean,
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 4: I live near the Lewis in Clark National Forest, and
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 4: I don't know where you're at on this, but like
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 4: this morning I went, I was going to the dump
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 4: and the wolf. It's called the wolf moon, this moon,
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 4: this January moon, and I don't know if it's an
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 4: optical illusion or not, but it was like five feet
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 4: it was the biggest moon I've ever seen going down
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 4: over the mountains.
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 4: And I thought, just how lucky I was one to
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 4: have the Bob Marshall wilderness out there west of my house,
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 4: and two to see this moon and had gotten up,
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 4: you know, before you've got light. So I got to
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 4: see this and it was it was a thing where
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 4: I just felt lucky. And to who much is given,
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 4: much is expected. I think.
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 2: Yep, so so true and perfect, perfect sentiments to kind
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 2: of send us out here. Can can you tell us
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 2: how you've you've alluded to this book project you've been
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 2: working on for a few years now. Are you at
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 2: a point you can tell us anything about that yet?
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 2: Can you tease it? Can you give us anything as
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 2: far as what to look forward to or when to
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 2: look forward to it?
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm I'm gonna finish this year.
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 3: I don't know that.
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 4: I guess it'll be out next year. I'm a but uh,
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 4: it's a public lands book, and it's a lot of
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 4: it is profiles of and of trips like on national
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 4: forests and part of it. I mean I read your
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 4: book early, and you and I are how many years
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 4: ago is that we talked about these projects?
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 2: Well like seven, yeah, something like that, because my book
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 2: came out at the end of twenty nineteen, right, so I.
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 4: Think seven years ago you told me. I said, well,
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 4: I got this contract, I'm working on this book, and
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 4: you're like, I'm working on one too, and you'd been
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 4: at it for a couple of years. But it's and
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 4: your book is also experiential. You know, are talking about
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 4: this before we hit the record, I wanted to do
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 4: a it did turn out to be brief, but a
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 4: history of how we got public lands and an understanding
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 4: of all the issues regard to that. But I wanted
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 4: the second part of the book to be journeys, just trips,
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 4: and so I've done some incredible trips. Mostly I've sat here,
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 4: as you know, as a writer, sat here like a
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 4: limpet glued to this chair. But the it's like places
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 4: like the Tuskegee National Forests in Alabama. It's kind of
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 4: a deep dive into the history and what's there, and
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 4: based around a trip there on the Bartram Trail, which
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 4: if anybody's listening to this, you know, go like as
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 4: the winter gets went towards spring, man, go go look
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 4: at the Bartram Trail, And that's James Bartram, the naturalists
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 4: who went to the Creek Nation back in seventeen nineties,
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 4: I think, and recorded all the plants and all the
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 4: stuff he saw. It was William Bartram, and he he
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 4: wrote a book called The Travels with William Bartram, which
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 4: you should people should read like this is like and
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 4: that was that. That's Alabama. There's another one apple a
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 4: Chicola Forests where you go through the Bradwell Bay Wilderness,
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 4: which's like the strangest likes. It's water up to your
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 4: waist for miles and miles. Should shone National Forests, first
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 4: national forest in America, right with the Yellowstone Timberland Reserve,
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 4: that very first natural forest. We do about a forty
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 4: mile trip through that nice So that's where I've been
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 4: man for all the last you know, three years really
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 4: and it's it's like I said, I've been glued. You're glue.
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 4: You get to do the trips, but then you're glued
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 4: to your you really got to be glued.
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 2: To the You're you're living vicariously through your own words
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: for a while there you're wishing you could be out
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 2: there adventuring again, but you're just you gotta get it
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 2: on the page.
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 3: I'm definitely in that.
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 2: I'm in that phase right now for the new project.
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 2: And uh, it takes some takes some discipline that's for sure.
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 3: It's not always the easiest.
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 4: Are there days where you don't get it?
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 3: Are there days?
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 4: Yeah?
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 2: Sure, there are some days. I I've really tried to
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 2: stick to a little bit. Every day has been my
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 2: mantra this time around, because the first time around, I
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 2: had a lot of days I couldn't do it because
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 2: I couldn't do it quite right. And so my new
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 2: my new method this year, not this year, this project
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 2: has been a little bit of progress every single day
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 2: of the work week at least, and so that it's
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 2: just kind of you're slowly chipping away at it, and
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 2: it's always in the back of your mind, even when
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 2: you're not the computer. You're in the shower, on a
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 2: walk or something, and an idea hits you. So that's
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 2: that's been my approach this time, and so far, so good.
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 2: But you ask me in five.
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 3: More months and I'll tell you whether or not it's
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 3: worked or not.
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 4: Right for sure, Well, I just I mean, I'm very
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 4: impressed with your work, and to some extent, like I
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 4: was when I was talking to you just then, I'm
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 4: listening because I mean, I've been doing this forever and
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 4: I still don't know really, I have never gotten to
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 4: the point where I wake up at eight o'clock, I
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 4: walk in the office at eight o'clock, and I produce
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 4: words until twelve o'clock, and then I go out and
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 4: go fishing. Yeah, or take the kids doing that. I
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 4: never I've never done that. At it's it's always been
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 4: a struggle to figure out where it starts, how to
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 4: I don't know so, but it is a life we've chosen.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 5: You know.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 2: The best thing that has ever happened in my writing
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 2: life might be some of the best advice we could
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 2: give anyone when it comes to trying to tackle some
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 2: of these issues we're talking about, which has been that
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 2: I have given myself permission should just do a little something,
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 2: even if it's not very good, even if it's not perfect,
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 2: even if it's not going to be the best book
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 2: in the world. This is not the best sentence, this
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 2: is not the best paragraph. It's just a little something.
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 2: But I did something, and I gave my self permission
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 2: to just do a little bit of something, even though
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 2: it's not great. And by doing that, it gets the
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 2: ball rolling. And if I can just give myself permission
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 2: to write a few shitty words and not feel bad
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 2: about that it usually leads to me writing a bunch
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 2: of okay words, which then maybe someday I can turn
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 2: into some.
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 3: Page is worth of good words.
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 2: And I think that might be a little bit of
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 2: the trick to making a difference when it comes to
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 2: stewarding our public lands and standing up for wild places.
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 2: It's you know what, you can do a little something today.
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 2: It might not fix it all, but you could sign
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 2: that petition today or maybe next week. You know, you
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 2: could call your representative of your senator and yeah, that's
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 2: not going to fix it all. And maybe you don't
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 2: come across super eloquently on the phone, maybe you're not
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 2: the best speaker, whatever it is, But but do the
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 2: little bit you can today, because all of this stuff,
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 2: little bit by little bit, one crappy paragraph at a time.
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 2: You write a book, or you stand up for your
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 2: public lands, or you save the damn world.
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 4: That is so, that is so you're get on, man.
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 4: I'm glad I know you. One thing, when when you
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 4: finished that, I was thinking about the what the real
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 4: death the doom right is to think that if I
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 4: think about the book all of a sudden, and you
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 4: think about like saving the public lands. Oh and or Daunte.
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 4: Oh my lord, You're like, like, is there going to
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 4: be any fishing in twenty twenty five? You go, I
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 4: don't know. To that is to do small, actionable, quantifiable
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 4: and deserrable things today and and do them while you're
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 4: thinking about it, and then if the rest of the
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 4: day goes the hell you did that? Ye yeah, what's that?
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 3: You had a win, You had.
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 4: To win a small victory. But yeah, I think that's right.
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 4: It's like and that's so much of our conservation world
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 4: has gotten to be this like abstract thing. Oh no,
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 4: like the garbage gyre in the ocean or something. You go, ah, no,
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 4: what am I gonna do? Well, the answer is you're
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 4: not gonna do anything about that today. You know, maybe
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 4: you you good? You go over to the tap and
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 4: drink a glass of water instead of buying a plastic bottle.
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, do every little tiny thing we can is a
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 2: starting point.
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 3: It's the next step.
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 7: It's it's progress because perfect perfect the attempt to reach
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 7: perfection leads to a lot of paralysis at least never starting,
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 7: least never doing anything.
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 2: And uh right, yeah, we gotta fight that temptation. We
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 2: gotta we gotta.
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 4: Don't you think there's a there's a terrible human tendency
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 4: too to go like to go to the macrocosm immediately go, well,
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 4: there nothing I can do about that, and that lets
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 4: you off the hook, yep, and you just like go
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 4: grab the grab the coke and the funions and kick
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 4: back and watch another YouTube. You know.
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of people that have fallen into that trap.
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 4: Myself. Yeah, I mean I kind of I work against
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 4: that trap, like all the time I was. I remember
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 4: back when uh I used to really I was into
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 4: jiu jitsu for like twenty years, you know, and still am.
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 4: But I'm I've aged out of like doing it too
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 4: too hard on as hard as I want to. Uh.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 4: But people would come to class, you know, and they
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 4: would be all excited and they're go, I'm gonna like
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 4: be a blue belt in three months. You know, I'm
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 4: gonna I'm gonna win the butte, you know. Uh intra
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 4: murals like in like Christmas, and those are the people
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 4: who never came They never came back to class.
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 8: Yeah, And the and the people who go like, wow, man,
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 8: that's a really interesting move, show me that again, and
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 8: then and then they would go up the next night
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 8: and the next night, you know.
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 4: Uh, and it was it was very much of what
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 4: we're talking about. Yeah, the people who wanted to be
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 4: great now were the ones who ended up not coming back.
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what's one small step you can take? What's one
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 2: How can you get one percent better tomorrow? How can
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 2: you make some small tangible difference this week?
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 4: I think, Uh, have you got one that you could
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 4: think of right now, Like on the on the public
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 4: lands thing. I think it would be to tell your
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 4: friends about the Supreme Court decision this morning.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, right, I think so.
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 2: I think that passed along the fact that hey, this
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 2: is a thing that reared its ugly head again and
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 2: we're fortunate that it got shot down. But hey, I
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 2: think I think for me, the overwhelming takeaway from this
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 2: conversation and from just kind of the moment is that
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 2: it's time to re engage.
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 4: I think that.
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 2: There's been a little bit of sitting back on our
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 2: laurels the last handful of years. It kind of felt
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 2: like we we you know, won the battle there for
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 2: a moment, and I think it's time to to rally.
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 2: It's time to re engage, start to start really paying
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 2: attention again, because uh, like you said, if we don't engage,
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 2: if we don't stand up on this stuff, there's there's
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 2: folks that have other incentives and other goals in mind
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 2: that are very motivated and in the right position to
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 2: do so.
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 4: They are very motivated and at the moment, if you
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 4: don't don't challenge you, if you don't stand up for
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 4: what you want, those people are definitely ascendant at the moment.
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 4: I mean, like the right wing think tanks like Heritage
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 4: Foundation from the they have an ALEC American Legislatory Exchange
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 4: Council American Lands Council ALC. These people have been deeply
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 4: involved in the in the long term movement to take
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 4: away the American public lands from the as long as
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 4: I can my all my adult life. And these are
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 4: think tanks that are mostly you know there they call
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 4: themselves conservative. It's not conservative to take away the American
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 4: public lands, let me tell you that. Yeah, that's about
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 4: as radical an idea divesting the people of their own
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 4: land as I've ever heard. But they those the planks
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 4: of these think tanks. I'm doing air quotes. They think
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 4: best when somebody's given them money to chair, you pick
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 4: information and prove something that they want, but that they
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 4: already want to get. But they are ascendant at the moment.
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 4: And it is it is. It is our job as
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 4: American citizens and people who know what is at stake
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 4: to say no to the worst impulses. And even if
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 4: we voted for these folks, especially if people say no
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 4: to the especially if we vote right, yeah, I mean,
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 4: you didn't vote to divest yourself of the of your
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 4: hunting ground.
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 2: And I think that that makes us that much more
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 2: influential and powerful in our ability to influence change, because
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 2: we can call these folks up and say, hey, buddy,
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 2: I voted for you, I'm voting for you. I support this, this,
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 2: and this, but on this one, you got it wrong.
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 2: And if you want my support the next time around,
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 2: or for your buddy who's running the next time or
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 2: whatever it is, you gotta change this. I'm on your team.
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 2: We're on your team. We want to support you. But
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 2: this is a deal, and we have the ear of
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 2: these people. They might not listen at all to the
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 2: left side of the aisle, but they will listen to us,
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 2: So we have a we have a huge opportunity there.
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 4: I think that's true. You gotta be careful that they're
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 4: they're taking us for granted at this moment, and the
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 4: elections and stuff have kind of given people, the politicians
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 4: a complacent view of of of what will stand for. Really.
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 4: I mean they that that privatizing the public lands deal
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 4: was in the Republican platform in twenty sixteen.
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 3: Yep, I remember, and.
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 4: You know, everybody I know still voted, and I don't
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 4: know what they thought, right, Like you know Ryan Sinky
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 4: in Montwna, I actually did not support that.
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 3: Yep.
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 4: Whatever you think of representatives thinking, he didn't support that,
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 4: and and that was really good, I thought, And I
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 4: thought that was courageous of him to make that stand. Yeah,
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 4: So I think let's have more of that.
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's that's the rally and cry I
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 2: think for us leaving here today is get ready to
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 2: get ready to re engage, get ready to stand up,
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 2: get ready to be that squeaky wheel and uh not
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 2: be complacent. So hell, I don't know when it will be,
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 2: but when whenever your book comes out next year, you
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 2: have a guaranteed appointment here on the wire Hunt podcast
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 2: to talk all about your book. I'll be recommending every
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 2: one of our listeners to pick up a copy. I
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 2: can't wait to read it myself. And uh, I thank
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 2: you for for everything you've shared with us here today
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 2: and all the all the wisdom and inspiration over the years.
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 3: Thank you.
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 4: Hell it's a great, great time. Man. I've told you
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 4: I was. I feel like you're the voice of your
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 4: particular generation at this moment on this subject, and you're
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 4: coming straight out of the hunting world, which is you
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 4: couldn't have a stronger base. Yeah, I mean, hunter controvationist
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 4: is a large part of why we have what we have.
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 3: We got a hell of a legacy that we had
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 3: to hold up.
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 4: Yeah, well finding dude, thank you hell yeah.
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 3: And that's going to do it for us today.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 2: Appreciate you joining me here on the Wired to Hunt podcast.
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 2: Thanks for tuning in here as hell and I discussed
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 2: what is the beginning I think of an important set
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 2: of conversations that we are going to be continuing this
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 2: year and over the next handful of years, because we
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 2: are going to have some work to do, and I
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 2: believe and I trust that you're going to be joining
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 2: me in doing that work. So thanks for being here.
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 2: Thanks for checking out that Wild Country. If you have
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 2: not already read that book that I wrote a handful
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 2: of years ago.
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 3: It is the perfect way to get you.
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 2: Up to speed on what's happening now and what we
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 2: might need to be preparing for in the future. So
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 2: thank you, appreciate you being a part of this community,
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 2: and until next time, stay Wired to Hunt.