Bear Grease - Ep. 186: American Wilderness (Part 1)

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

This week on Bear Grease, Clay explores the history of American ideals on wilderness with Dr. Dan Flores, Dr. Sara Dant, Steven Rinella, and Hal Herring. Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days in real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. I don't picture running out of roads. I don't picture running out of towns. I don't picture running out of places to go shopping. I picture running out of wilderness.

The term American wilderness is evocative to me, pulling forth a collage of emotions, imagery, and ideals. Oddly, I draw from it a sense of personal identity, even though I live most of my life inside the confines of modern civilization. I'd like to think I came up with all of this on my own. Or I would have got to the same place if I was the first and only human to ever set foot in North America. But I don't think I would have. I'm in search of the unique journey that built American ideals on wild lands or wilderness.

And even more foundational than that, to define what wilderness is. It's ironic. This is a big and complex story, and I think it should be in the survival kit of basic knowledge of every American, because every one of us has a doctrine on it. For this challenging pilgrimage,

I've recruited the help of a worthy group of authors, good authors, Dr. Dan Flores, Dr. Sarah Dant, Stephen Ronella, and Hal Herring. This story is about why wilderness is still here in modern times, how we interact with it, and how the land formed American identity. Let me warn you that this is going to be a lot of work, folks. And let it be known that the Bear Greece Academy of Backwoodsmanship, philosophy, and culture is now in session.

You may be able to find a buck scrape or use your phone to find hunting land, or even catch a catfish on a trot line. But if you don't know the deep history of your own passion, you ain't no backwoodsman. This is going to be good, and I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. Romantics and environmentalists in particular have elevated it to almost a sacred word.

It has a kind of a meaning as an idea that I'm not sure other parts of the world, other cultures completely share. My name is Clay Newcomb and this is the Bear Greece podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight and unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American Made, Purpose Built, Hunting and Fishing Gear that's designed

to be as rugged as the places we accept. What range of mountains is this over here? That's the Hamis range. This is the Ortiz Mountains. Okay. Of course the range behind Santa Fe is the Sangres, the Sangre de Christo. Which means blood of Christ, the Spanish colonizers named it that because at sunset the Alpin Glow made the mountains look like they were, you know, bloody, covered in blood on the snowfield.

You may recognize this man's voice. This is author and historian Dr. Dan Flores. I'm in New Mexico on his back porch. The Sangre di Cristo start in Poncha Pass in central Colorado, with 10 peaks over 14,000 feet. They pushed 242 miles south, ending at Gloriaita Pass near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The landscape closer to us, between here and these blood-colored mountains, is a less intimidating stretch of arid high desert.

I want to describe to you what it looks like. Imagine the rosette pattern of a jaguar's spots, but it's set on the brilliant tan of an American mountain lion. The rolling hills are tinted beige by the dead winter grasses and bleached soil, but littered with dark juniper clumps. Dr. Flores wants to read me a quote. This is the third place. I've had where I have done this.

So I'll read you this. Jay Frank Dobie was a very famous folklorist and author of The Wild. But I thought I'd bring you out here and just stand in this spot and read what he says. The greatest happiness possible to a man is to become civilized, to know the pageant of the past, to love the beautiful. and then retaining his animal instincts and appetites to live in a wilderness. That's powerful, isn't it? That's what we want to do. We want to be able to have, we want to live in civilization.

Yeah, you want to be civilized. You want to have access to the world. Right. But it's, so it's the Thoreau thing. Thoreau had this comment once about, you know, I like to live with one foot in civilization. and one foot in wilderness. And the question is always,

which one do you rest on? Which foot do you rest on? What I've always liked to do is to rest on the wilderness foot, and then town's only 20 minutes what. Jay Frank Dobie, Henry David Thoreau, and Dr. Flores had and have a refined doctrine on dealing with wilderness. Doctrine just means the way that you live. And truthfully, we all have a doctrine on wild places.

If you live near one or have never been to one, you have a doctrine. You can't be doctrineless. I'm in search of America's wilderness doctrine and how I got mine. I think a good starting place in this conversation is to define wilderness, which will learn is tricky. I asked Stephen Ronella about his definition. I'll tell you what I think when I hear the word American wilderness. My working present day, 2004 definition of American wilderness,

my usage is relative. There are landscapes where I would go, as an example, the north slope of the Brooks Range in Alaska. I would say that's wilderness because relative to everything else, that is why. wild. If we put wildness on a one to 10, a one being Manhattan, and then we had to find a 10,

when I say wildness, natural ecosystem, I'm going to use another controversial term, and I'm going to say absence of man, okay? Absence of man. If Manhattan is a one, we need a 10. The north slope of the Brooks range is the 10. It's wilderness. And then let me say that if we imagine that framework, that scale, one to ten. I would say, I suppose wilderness starts at around eight. Here's another, I'm going to add another thing

that's going to trip some people out that's going to trip some philosophers and academics out. They're most, they most closely resemble relative to everything else what this landscape looked like upon European contact

with one important caveat. Those places were sparsely inhabited by individuals at that time. Potentially with great absences. that any given spot might go 10 years, 20 years, 30 years without seeing a person. There were people on the landscape. That's my sort of working definition.

I can't ever look at it in isolation. I have to look at it like compared to what? So I'm like, it's wilderness compared to everything that's not. You're not going to find two people that are going to give you the same definition of this. On the Ronella scale of wildness, the wild o meter, wilderness starts at 8 out of 10. The spectrum swings from Manhattan to the Alaskan Brooks range. That's a helpful analogy, but shows the subjective nature of the term.

We'll learn that there are more concrete ways to define it. The word wilderness was first used in the 13th century, the 1,200s, but gained steam in the 1300s when John Wycliffe's English translation of the Bible use the new word to describe the uninhabited land that's spoken of all throughout the old book. The deep etymology of the word stems from the Norse languages, and its root is the word willed, as in self-willed or willful. From willed comes the word wild, which is also connected to the old Swedish word for boiling water, meaning unruly, chaotic, or confused.

The second part of the word wilderness, the dir, wilderness, is the old English word for animal, Dior, D-E-O-R. Put this together with this new word wild, and you get wild deor. And then you add a ness, and you can see the word wildeor nests, which essentially means self-willed or uncons. controllable land of wild beasts. Holy smokes, I like the sound of that. It kind of makes me quiver a little bit.

But this word needs more definition. Dr. Sarah Dant is a professor and author, and she works at Weber College in Utah. She just published a book called Losing Eden. I asked her to define wilderness. So wilderness, I think, can be many things. It kind of depends on who you ask. If we went into a bar and asked 15 different people, what's wilderness?

We'd get 15 different ideas and probably a small bar fight in the process. So, you know, if we think about it just as kind of an emotional reaction to it, it is this place that we go where there aren't other people, right? It's the place that we go and get to be much more one-on-one with nature. And I think fundamentally for a lot of people, that's wilderness. But that's not, you know, what the political definition is that creates boundaries and puts up signs and creates management plans. That's a very different idea about wilderness. In that case, it's the law says basically it's an area that has been untrammeled by man where man is a visitor who does not remain.

And so it's this idea that it's a place that a lot of people would probably. use the word pristine. But I think those kinds of ideas, how do we talk about places that are not developed? How do we talk about places that don't have roads and motor vehicles and houses? Those places have real value in part now because they're so scarce. Dr. Dan brought up two important components of our conversation. Number one, there is a legal definition of wilderness, as in federally regulated wilderness with a capital W. We'll get to it. Secondly and most importantly, wilderness, this self-willed land of wild beasts, has value because of its scarcity. We'll come back to this. I want to introduce you to another fella, but don't let the Alabama gravel in his voice

fool you. Hal Herring is a lifelong rider and spokesperson for wild lands, who's lived most of his adult life in Montana, but he was born and raised in Alabama. I asked him to define wilderness. Well, when I was younger and living in Alabama, when I was a kid, I didn't really have a definition of it. And then when I was older and started traveling, like in Montana and Wyoming, it was beyond the legal definition or the federal, you know, regulation type definition, the designation. I think it was a feeling that there were these places left on this earth that you could enter. I mean, the language in the Wilderness Act is where it will remain untremeled, where man is a visitor who doesn't remain all that.

And that's true. That was required maybe to hold on to this feeling. But it's the feeling of, you're now entered a place that's ruled by something other than the endeavors of human beings. and it's a place that's ruled still by older laws, nature's time, the world's time, not yours. But to me it was freedom. Freedom was the first thing. Wilderness is a feeling, a place not governed by man's laws. Now that's interesting.

And the legal definition of wilderness was designed to preserve a feeling. That's even more interesting how. Aldo Leopold, who's considered the father of modern American wilderness, will get more to him later, defined wilderness as, quote, a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, and other works of man. End of quote. That's really functional.

But his description of absorbing a two-week pack trip probably delivers the most understandable definition to this day. And I did think it was cute that he used the word cottages. I have a question for Steve Ronella. What does the word wilderness do for you at an emotional level? Like what does it make you feel warm and fuzzy inside? Does it make you fearful? Does it make you want to go there? Does it make you not want to go there?

What does that term do for you? Makes me want to go there, but I don't need to go there to love it being there. I have a great. What do you mean about that? I have a fear of running out of it. I don't picture running out of roads. I don't picture running out of towns.

I don't picture running out of places to go shopping. I don't picture running out of airports. I don't picture running out of subdivisions. I don't picture running out of golf courses. I picture running out of wilderness because you don't get it back. We've never gotten, you don't get any of it back. Once it's gone, it's gone, man.

It's like, when you lay some concrete over it, it's gone, gone. Everybody we've heard from so far values wilderness. They like it, which is a very new idea to mankind. Well, sort of. In his book, Wilderness in the American Mind, Roderick Nash states that all ancient cultures had an idea of paradise as a garden, which is actually the antithesis of wilderness. A garden is ordered and protected, delivering resources and security.

It's controllable. It's manipulated by man. Considering that primitive man's number one concern was simply survival and lack of control was a dangerous variable, Man's greatest good was to live a life that rose out of this self-willed land. This has been a roadmap to man's journey over the last 10,000 years, rising out of wilderness. And the rudimentary mechanism of man's control over nature were, number one, fire, initially used to beat back the vegetation and make clearings that offered visibility and safety. Yeah, it's like super primitive. Number two, the domestication of wild animals to secure meat sources.

And number three, domesticating wild plants and cultivating land to create predictable food sources through crops. These things congregated people, increased birth rates, and probably most importantly, joined human minds in greater numbers into collaboration on what it means. meant to be human, of which a primary definition became humans overcome wilderness and bring it into control. I am very aware that this is a very general summation of human history that does not include modern hunter-gather tribes that are still functioning at some level even today. The word wilderness is used 245 times in the Old Testament of the Bible and 35 times in the New Testament.

The Garden of Eden was the antithesis of wilderness, and God's first punishment of man was to cast him out of the garden into it. Later, the Israelites would wander in the wilderness for 40 years as a judgment and a time of testing and tribulation. In the New Testament, Jesus met Satan himself in the wilderness in the temptation of Christ. The wilderness was a dangerous place. The wilderness is where you went to die. A first century Roman poet named Kyrrhus criticized the earth as greedily possessed by mountains in the forests of wild beasts.

In Greek mythology, a half goat, half man creature named Pan was the Lord of the Woods. And the English word panic stems from the striking, fear one feels when in the woods and you hear strange, unexplainable sounds. It's clear that wilderness cuts deep into our culture. It's also important not to confuse the old world's appreciation of rural pastoral settings with wilderness. Art, folk tales, and music celebrating livestock and farming were very real and popular, but that's not wilderness.

To this day, Western Cold War II. culture often views disassembling wilderness and making it productive as a moral obligation. Roderick Nash wrote, This intellectual legacy of the old world to the new not only helped determine initial responses, but left a lasting imprint on American thought. When Europeans got here, we thought it was our moral obligation to tame what we perceived as wilderness. The word wilderness has forces behind it that may not be evident, and on these ideas form the basis of understanding of modern wilderness. And it's evident that our current situation on Earth, comparing it to early man, has massively shifted.

Once civilized areas were scarce, and the greedy wild lands filled with awful beasts dominated this place. But this last epic of man's journey has turned the tables, and now from the world, the dominating platform of civilization, we're trying to save an artifact of wild lands. The contrast between the old world's ideas about wilderness and many ideas today are vastly different. Here's Dr. Flores breaking down what wilderness is, which will lead us into a broader picture of America's wild o' meter. I think I would have to say that wilderness

is both a reality and an idea. And there's certainly overlap between the two, but one of the fascinating parts of the whole wilderness concept, and especially the role that wilderness has played in America, where environmentalists, romantics and environmentalists in particular, have elevated it to almost a sacred word. It has a kind of a meaning as an idea that I'm not sure, other parts of the world, other cultures completely share. It's probably more important to us as a

people than it. To Americans. To Americans. Then it has been to anyone else around the globe. And that has to do with the peculiarities of American history. The peculiarities of American history. I'm very interested in this, Dr. Flores, but like a load of unfolded laundry sitting on the table before the company shows up. We've got some work to do before we can talk about that. He said it's an overlapping reality and an idea. We've been talking about the idea of wilderness, but the reality is the actual federal designation of public land called wilderness areas. The Wilderness Act of 1964 instituted this, but the idea of wilderness can be experienced outside of these areas.

This is going to be the most boring part of this podcast, but we've got to do it because you're enrolled in the Bear Greece Academy. Here is an excerpt from the Wilderness Act of 1964. It's ridiculously boring, but this is modern man's attempt to preserve wildness. I'm kidding. It's really not that bad. Here goes. In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization,

does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring. resource of wilderness. For this purpose, there is hereby established a national wilderness preservation system to be composed of federally owned areas designated by Congress as wilderness areas, and these shall be administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness. A wilderness,

in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this act an area of undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable. It has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation,

has at least 5,000 acres of land, or is of sufficient size as to, make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition and may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historic value. We're done. Steve Ronella probably could have jazzed that writing up a little bit, but that's pretty descriptive. But holy smokes, has there been some controversy around the definition of wilderness and

in the last hundred years. We'll get to it. But wilderness with the capital W is the strictest, most conservative land-usick designation in America. Today, there are 806 federal wilderness areas that encompass over 111 million acres of land. That's larger than the state of California. Wilderness encompasses about 17% of all public land

and about 5% of all American land is federal wilderness. That's a lot of land. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for.

I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelps game calls.com.

I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. I now want to redirect the conversation back to the deep human history with wild lands. This is a transition. So here's Dr. Flores talking about the time before these Greek poets, before agriculture and civilization, and when humans were hunter-gatherers. I think that wilderness is a very recent idea in history, frankly.

Wait a minute. What? We just said wild lands are ancient. But what we now call wilderness, raw land, uninfluenced by man, is the oldest natural thing there is. Yes, but the idea of designating it out as something different and calling it wilderness is new. Carry on, Doc. I mean, I spent a good deal of time writing about why people migrated around the world 25, 30,000 years ago, ultimately finding the Americas, the last of the great continents on Earth that we found. And the reason we left Africa, went to Europe, then went to Asia, and finally found our way into North America and South America, was essentially a search for what the modern idea of wilderness implies. We were looking for places without prior human presence. And the reason we were looking for places without prior human presence

is because of the ability of those places to harbor big animals with no prior experience with humans as predators, and that made them easy to hunt and to. take down and so that search for a place out there in the world where you are not finding human footprints you weren't finding campfires you didn't see smoke from an encampment on the horizon but the world appeared to be pristine that was a very compelling thing that drew people around the world and so this whole idea of wilderness without humans present is probably a really ancient thing it goes back to that sort of search for places with animals.

Do you think it's even inside of our DNA somewhere to search something like that out? Yeah. Is that a romantic stretch? Well, it could be a romantic stretch to say it's part of our genetic makeup, but I'm enough of a romantic to actually say that. I think if this is probably intrinsic to who we are, that we instinctively find a kind of of a satisfaction and sometimes even a euphoria in places that seem to harbor no signs of other people. And it's a very ancient thing. When you think about humans today, not in wilderness, business people are looking for unexploited

parts of society. There's something that you feel, you know, my good buddy James Lawrence always says, you know, found a bird nest on the ground, meaning like, wow, this is an incredible. incredible opportunity. I mean, really, that's what humans have been looking for forever. Yeah, there's a wonderful study somebody did in E.O. Wilson's book, the Biosophilia Hypothesis about landscape art around the world. And landscape art around the world tends to portray, and we tend to, the observers of landscape art, tend to react most positively to representations of places that show trees that don't appear to have been stripped of fruit or branches, of undisturbed

herds of animals that don't seem to be reacting in alarm. And the argument in that particular essay was that this is a replication of what we were looking for as we were migrating around the planet. We were looking for places that had evidence of us being the first there. And it's that kind of sense, I think, that powers this instinctive reaction about wilderness. Designating wilderness is a new idea on planet Earth, but it's an artifact from deep human history. In Dr. Flores' book, Wild New World, he argues that a major factor in early human migration was to find blank spots on the map with unmolested animals easier to hunt. We were biologically rewarded for finding the most humanless landscapes possible, and that's been translated into our epigenetics.

I had to Google what that term meant, but it's a change in the way our genes work as influenced by our behaviors and environments. So interaction with wild places didn't change our genes, but it changes the way our body reads DNA C. We developed a taste for places without humans and were biologically rewarded for it. I cannot say if it's nature or nurture, but I have felt that reward for most of my life. I want to go to the wildest places. Did Gary Believer Newcomb teach me that and I adopted the doctrine? That was part of it. But then who taught him?

It's like looking in a mirror with a mirror behind you. Here's Dr. Flores on some info on indigenous ideas on wilderness. To be sure, indigenous people occupying landscapes, so for example in North America, after the Pleistocene extinctions, after that first 15,000 years of the human presence, once all the many of the big charismatic animals are gone, there's this 10,000 year period, which which I refer to in the world as Native America, when native people go for 10,000 years in North America and manage to preserve most of the biological diversity of the continent

by the time Europeans arrive, that diversity is still present, still exists. But I don't think, at least there's not any evidence from any of their cultures, their traditions, or their stories, that they looked on parts of North America as wilderness places. I mean, they certainly would, for example, go and seek out a particular butte or a mesa in order to do a vision quest experience

to look for something that would direct their future actions or some ally in the world, a wolf, an elk or something like that. But they didn't seek out what many Europeans in the last 500 years sought out when they were trying to find wilderness. So that means to me that wilderness is a relatively recent and unique phenomenon, and it probably does come about as a result of a reaction to emerging civilization.

As civilization begins to particularly spread across the Middle East and Western Europe and Asia, there comes to be, as so often as the case in human affairs, an appreciation for what's being lost. And what's being lost are those lands where the human imprint is not nearly as impressive. Native Americans didn't have a word equivalent to the English word wilderness. However, it's hard not to imagine that they knew when they were in places far away from home, a place they wouldn't stay. place that was more absent of human existence. Their worldview was vastly different from the Europeans, but I still think they probably had that feeling that Hal Herring spoke about earlier.

Dr. Flores also said scarcity produces value. That's very important to the modern conversation about wilderness. Here's Dr. Sarah Dant. So let me see if I can kind of put this together in a way that that makes sense. So one of the things that we, as a, almost as a species, we're almost hardwired to find value in things that are rare. And when we look first at the colonial experience, there's a lot of wilderness and not much, you know, controlled lands. You know, I don't want to use the word civilized. It's pretty loaded. But, you know, farming land, grazing land, managed lands. And so wilderness isn't valued. It's feared.

But as we transition from the 19th into the 20th century, there becomes this growing awareness that, wait a minute, we're about to cut all the trees down, build houses in the last places. Thank you, Dr. Dant. And I'd like to officially transition and call this next section, the introduction to early American doctrine on wilderness that produced our modern ideas about wilderness. that flows right off the tongue

will now embark on understanding, on a more specific level, the flow that produced the American worldview on wilderness. The 17 and 1800s were a romantic era in America in regards to wilderness. Society had begun to move beyond the longstanding fear of desolate places, and it started to become trendy to like them. And guess where it all started? In the cities where live, and art were being digested.

In 1757, Edmund Burke wrote a piece called The Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Roderick Nash would write that Burke expressed the idea that terror and horror in regard to nature stemmed from the exaltation, awe, and delight, rather from dread and loathing. This was a shift. In the 1770s, botanist and writer William Bartram would take Burke's word sublime and use it extensively to describe wild places. He'd write that God's wisdom and power were manifested in wilderness.

And Bartram was also the founding father of romantic primitivism, stating that man was content and at his best in his primitive state inside of wilderness. This was really trendy. Man had fought to separate himself from wilderness for thousands of years. and now that civilization had begun to conquer it on a massive scale, we were going back to it, but in smaller doses, because we could still live in civilization. Daniel Boone's firsthand account of hunting in Kentucky in 1784, written by John Philson,

was wildly philosophical about the pleasures of wilderness and man's harmony in nature. This was a new idea. In 1818, Estwick Evans wrote, how great are the advantages of solitude, how sublime is the silence of nature's ever-acting energies. There is something in the very name of wilderness which charms the ear and soothes the spirit of man. There is religion in it. End of quote. We're beginning to hear strong spiritual vibes in the narrative.

And I know this is kind of boring. It's really not. It's fascinating. But we're in the Bear Greece Academy, folks. So suck it up, Buttercup. So we move on. But I haven't told you the whole story of how the Bible viewed wilderness. It was a howling, dangerous place, a place you went to die.

But it was also the place that you might find God. Moses encountered the burning bush and God's direct speaking in the wilderness. Elijah heard the still small voice of God in the wilderness and was fed by ravens. Jesus retreated to the wilderness to pray. It's dangerous there, but has potential of great reward. American writers and thinkers began to focus on this. By the 1840s, wilderness was very popular in literature. And Roderick Nash would write,

The capacity to appreciate wilderness was, in fact, deemed one of the qualities of a gentleman, enjoyment of wilderness for them was a function of gentility I now want to go back to dr. Flores I would argue that one of the reasons you know so we start with with the idea of wilderness very early then the romantic age which is when Thoreau is writing Walden and writing in his journals and writing about you know in wildness lies the preservation of the world as he puts it right right I think early misapprehension of what North America was, which downplayed the Indian presence, and then the

romantic movement of the 19th century, which lasts from the 1820s to the 1880s or so, which doesn't just produce people like Thoreau. I mean, it produces many of our great early American painters of wild lands. Albert Beerstadt, Thomas Moran, the Hudson Bay painters of upstate New York. their conception of what they were portraying in wild country was you were getting to see the face of God. They were all influenced by Christianity still. And their notion was, wild country was the last best expression of God's handiwork. And so when you stood before a wild landscape with soaring mountain peaks or a waterfall, you were standing in the presence of the divine. Right. And that's one of the things that began to give wilderness a kind of a sacred feeling and almost began to turn it into a kind of a religious pilgrimage to particular places that preserve this idea of the God's last great handiwork. And we're looking at this mountain range. We're looking at the face of God. I mean, it's the idea of what the romantics called the sublime. And the sublime is a landscape that as you're standing in front of it,

looking at it, you're so moved emotionally that you feel a kind of a religious, almost a flight. For the natural and the spiritual kind of overlap. Absolutely overlap. And so the painters like Beerstot and Moran and the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole and people like that, that's why they were trying to portray. They were trying to portray God's hand in nature. and the people who sought out those places, like Thoreau climbing Mount Todden in Maine, and getting to the top and saying, contact, contact, I've finally come face to face with it.

That's what they're doing with this whole kind of pilgrimage to wild places. In the early 1800s, American artists began to paint wilderness, which became a symbol of national identity. We didn't have beautiful architecture and thousands of years of history like Europe, but we had wild places. Wild lands were becoming our calling card, our Instagram bio. Hi, my name is America, and we have wild places. Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 and inherited the momentum of romantic primitivism.

By the 1850s, he was rocking and. and Roland as one of America's leading voices for wilderness, but his message cut deeper into the heart of humanity than did this nationalism and primitivism. At a public speech in New England in 1851, he said, I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.

And he ended the speech by saying, in wildness is the preservation of the world. He was a transcendentalist and believe man's connection to nature to essentially be the salvation of his soul. Man, that was a lot of work, a lot of talking. This is the Bear Grease Academy. We don't take weeks off for pleasure and leisure. I'm the David Goggins of the backwoods discipline of learning who we are.

I'm interested in why I think what I think. I just popped out of the womb in Montgomery County, Arkansas, and found myself immersed in a culture. and as Americans, we value independence. But I think that's often deceptive for how original our ideas actually are. I wanted to ask Steve Ronella a question, and it quickly turned into a total train wreck. Here goes. So Thoreau was the original guy in America that started talking about this stuff.

Yeah, I don't know. Okay. So, okay, you may have answered my question with your. cynicism right there. He really was. He was the architect in America. Oh, he had this deep doctrine of how wilderness effect on thought. You just said the same thing as him. I know, but I'm asking you. I had to read, throw, go on. My question is, as Steve Rennell is the American. But his pond, his pond by his ma's house was not what I would call wilderness. Okay. How much, how much would he have affected you and you not even know it.

None. I find that really hard. I could have fell from, I could have fell from outer space. With my brain, the way it came out of my mother's womb, I could have fallen from outer space. And I would have walked around the planet and mozied around the planet. And I would have wound up saying, I like the north slope of the Brooks Range better than that town over yonder. I just would have. Yes.

Yes. Listen, had I never, ever. heard of throw and I'd be just I almost wish that that was the case would not change my view of whether or not I appreciate wild animals

in wild places I don't care at the most simple level his like crotchety old I don't care no no no I'm not it's insulting that you would come and tell me that I feel the way

I do about wilderness because I had to read Throw and like freshman year of college what I think is you feel the way you do about wilderness in part because you're an American. Man, that escalated quickly. Two things. Number one, it was a very ill-worded question. I shouldn't have even brought up Thoreau.

Thoreau arose as an influential profit for wilderness, but really what I was trying to ask Stevie Boy was how much has been an American influenced your ideas on wilderness. Secondly, I didn't know that Thoreau was such an... emotional trigger word for my distinguished guest. But let's carry on. We're going to start back with my ending statement from the last clip. This is embarrassing for both of us.

Is you feel the way you do about wilderness, in part because you're an American. Oh, that's not true. Because if you were, it is. Oh, so Canadians, oh, yeah, you know, I know those Canadians sure hate the stuff. Come on. Well, I feel the way I do about wilderness because I'm like a hunter and trapper and fisherman, in and I'm a student of wildlife. What I'm saying is other countries in the east, other countries all over the globe in

different hemispheres and on different continents do not have a deep core foundational appreciation of wild places like Americans do. They don't. They might not have access to them. And they might have, perhaps there's a little bit of a different, perhaps there's a different cultural history. That's it. You could find a lot of literature.

figures, you can find a lot of literary figures and historical figures that greatly predate your body Thoreau who I'm not, I'm not giving it, who appreciated wildlife of wild places. No doubt. Huge mistake to have brought up Thoreau. Clearly, he was not the architect. I thought I was being interviewed. Go ahead. Where I was going with the question was, are the fundamental truths of wilderness so strong that

you would have come to these conclusions on your own, which you have emphatically said, yes, you have. And I agree with that. Like you pop out of the womb and, you know, E.O. Wilson's biofilia, like we have this innate love of life, love of things that are alive and this curiosity. And that's part of what makes us so unique in our humanness is that we're interested in other stuff. But I think there's a big component of the way that we think about wild places that That's deeply American. That is not replicated in other places. I mean, we were the first place on planet Earth that demarcated wilderness areas.

Sure. I'm a very, very American person, even though I was just saying if I fell from outer space, that I came from my mother's womb and then fell from outer space, of course, I can't go in and unravel what parts of me are American. But I think that you're getting a little narrow to say that appreciation for wilderness is an American phenomenon. Touche, Dr. Renella, touche. Great point, and I agree with you.

Americans do not have the market on appreciation of or living in wild lands. That's the birthright of mankind. However, that peculiarity of American history that Dr. Flores talked about produced something that was unique in the world for how we manage and think about wild places. And I'm probably going to name my next pack of squirrel dogs, Henry, David, and Thoreau just to aggravate Steve Ronella. I'm sorry, but there's more. I think that you will find among many cultures an insistence on wilderness. How can you say it's American?

How can you look at people who live in the headwaters of the Amazon and tell me that, an appreciation for wilderness is American. Now, they would say, they would say they have an appreciation for their home, but I don't want to get overly cute about these definitions. Well, all I'm saying is that it appears that we have a unique perspective on wilderness, right or wrong. I don't really get where you're saying that because I don't know if you like watching nature documentaries, but you'll find that when you're watching those,

you're not hearing a lot of American accents you're hearing a lot of Brits why do they love it so much they love it because they killed all of theirs so they look at it it's very other it's very other to them right well I mean that's just the point

you've proved what I'm saying no I just prove what you're saying you said it's American to like wilderness I think that that's not true what Clay said in the question was Americans have a unique perspective on wilderness that has produced something. And so you saying the English killed off all their animals is exactly my point. Our ideas and philosophy on wilderness have

allowed it to be preserved at a high level as compared to much of planet Earth. I agree with that. And I mean, that's something to be, that's something to be proud of. As Steve always says, cynicism is the chastity of the intellect and his contribution to this conversation is noted. No, Americans aren't the only people who love wilderness, but America has forged a pragmatic approach to wilderness that came from our peculiar history. I want to end by asking how, Howe-Haring, why we love wilderness, why I love wilderness, and how much we've been influenced by our history. Here's what he said. First, I would say that you probably value wilderness partially by cultural, for cultural reasons, but also you value wilderness because you're

an autonomous hunter and a person who values individual sovereignty and freedom. And so the feeling that you get there is probably independent of any kind of cultural preparation you might have. I think certain people, just like in the old days, it would have been like somebody like Jim Bridger, you know. Like Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone, certain people simply respond to the freedom of wilderness. They always have and they probably always will. I like it, Hal.

That's an answer we can all understand. What we'll hear next time is how the last 50 years of the 1800s set us up for the conservation movement of the 20th century. Don't worry, the bear grease, Academy of Backwoodsmanship, philosophy, and culture will start right where we've left off. I'm grateful for our heritage, and I'm interested in how when I arose to consciousness in this mortal realm in 1979 that wild beasts and wild places still existed and were still accessible to the common man like me. I'm grateful for a father and a culture who took me to them

and taught me to value them. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Come on down to the Black Bear Bonanza in Bentonville, Arkansas, on March 9th, 2024, and see Brent and I. Thanks for sharing Bear Grease with your pals, leaving us a review on iTunes, and I look forward to talking with the folks on the render next week. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls

and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast, Guaranteed Human.