Bear Grease - Ep. 190: American Wilderness - Rock and Ice (Part 2)

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

This week on Bear Grease, Clay continues to explore the history of American ideals on wilderness with Dr. Dan Flores, Dr. Sara Dant, Steven Rinella, Hal Herring and Ben Masters. 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.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. This thing that was so rare and therefore valuable in Europe is here in abundance. And I want to claim and tame the wilderness as the advance of, you know, using that loaded terminology, civilization. That's how we civilized Europe.

And that's what we're going to do here. Who knew that American wilderness was such a contested, loaded, loaded. and difficult term to define. In this second episode, I'm still in search of understanding American ideals on wilderness and if, in fact, America's handling of wild lands is globally unique. But really, I'm on a personal journey to understand the genesis of my own ideas on wilderness. I thought they were my own, self-generated. But as I learn about America's peculiar history, I'm seeing more and more that I'm a product of a

culture. I've got the same crew plus one new guy on this episode. We've got authors Dr. Sarah Dant, Dr. Dan Flores, and Hal Herring. Also, author and Thoreau critic, Stephen Ronella. But new to the crew is

documentary filmmaker, native Texan, and Mustang Wrangler Ben Masters. The Bear Greece Academy of Backwoodsmanship, philosophy, and culture is back in session. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. The idea that Americans' energy was capable of literally taking the last barrel of oil out of the last piece of ground, well, that was evident.

This movement began to say, what if we didn't do that to every place? My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in 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 explore. I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem.

And then to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read that my ancestors have torn out many of the finest leaves and grandest passages and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. That was Dr. Sarah Dant, reading a quote from, and I hate to bring him up so early, Henry David Thoreau. We're continuing on in our pursuit. of defining what wilderness is and what it means to America. What is wilderness?

And that's a loaded question. You know, there's the capital W wilderness, and then I think there's the wilderness experience that a person can have, which is different, you know, for everybody. But wilderness to me, I think of my ideal wilderness, and that is the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. in a tributary called the thoroughfare in a place that's called Hawks Rest.

It's 30 miles from the nearest trailhead. The only way to get there is by foot or by horseback. And it's a place where there's no dams, there's no really sign of human civilization at all, except for a handful of trail signs. And it embodies everything that I think of as wilderness. And that's where I get my wilderness experience, you know, very far from humanity.

As far from humanity as you can get in the lower 48. And I feel that whenever I go to places like the Bob Marshall or the Gila or the Teton Wilderness and the Thurrah Fair and the Wilderness of No Return in Idaho, these classic big wilderness spots in the American West. This has been Masters. He's very well-traveled in America's big Western wildernesses. So I think that the idea of what is wilderness, and I've struggled with this, what is that wilderness experience?

And I think every person is going to get that feeling in a different place. And for me, I get that experience when I do a two-week pack trip into a deep wilderness. And for other folks, it could be something as simple as going to, for a weekend camping trip in a 3,000-acre state park. Defining wilderness in terms of geography and defining the wilderness experience are very different things.

We'll learn it gets even harder the further we go back in American history. Here's Meat Eaters' Own, Stephen Rinella, with some opening statements on defining wilderness. This is just how I use it. Okay? the Lee Metcalf Wilderness Area in Montana, the Frank Church Wilderness Area in Idaho,

the north slope of the Brooks Range in Alaska, portions of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, portions of the Mississippi Delta, some of the Sky Island mountain ranges of New Mexico and Arizona, portions of the San Juan's in Colorado, The boundary waters of Minnesota, I could go on. Are wilderness landscapes in my mind because relative to everything else, they most closely resemble relative to everything else what this landscape looked like upon European contact.

So it's the wildest stuff relative to everything else. It's the stuff that most closely resembles what it did at the time of European contact, considering my caveat that then it was inhabited however sparsely by native people and now it's not. And it's vulnerable because once you mess with it, it ceases to be wilderness anymore and it becomes some other thing. And I worry about running out of it. Defining wilderness and what it means to America is an important endeavor. Why you may ask? Partly because of a little word often used in economics, it's used in farming.

It's used in farming, it's used in life, called scarcity. In our current times, wilderness is one of the earth's scarcest resources, and scarcity dictates value. It's ironic, but scarcity is often a more powerful force than overflowing bushel baskets of plenty. Here's Dr. Dan on where some of our big wildernesses are. The big ones that are, of course, up in Alaska. The biggest one in the continental United States is in Death Valley. So it's not like we're all going to go camp there. And the second biggest one is the Frank Church River of No Return in Idaho.

So there are lots of big wilderness places, but there are also a lot of small wilderness places. And there are wilderness places in the east as well as in the west. And that was, again, something Frank Church really worked hard on because he said, we should have these rare and valuable places. Rare and valuable. rare and valuable, large and small, in the west and in the east. The largest wilderness in the lower 48 is in Death Valley in California and Nevada, and it spans over 3.1 million acres.

That's news to me. In the last episode, Dr. Dan Flores told us wilderness is an idea and a reality. It's these two things. The idea part being the abstract way we talk about places where humans don't live, and natural ecosystems dominate. Hal Herring told us that wilderness was a feeling. The reality of wilderness, the second part,

is 111 million acres designated as federal wilderness with a capital W. That's roughly 5% of American soil, which is governed by the strictest land designation in America, only open to human foot in equine traffic. You can't use anything with wheels. You can't even use a hang glider. True story, it's on the little signs. And you can't use anything with a motor.

But to understand modern wilderness, we've got to understand the macro-scale journey of mankind. For this series, I've leaned heavily into a book written in 1967 by Roderick Nash called Wilderness in the American Mind. I nerded out hard on this book and loved it. Here's Dr. Flores with a critique on this past era of American ideals on wilderness. Remember, the Wilderness Act was signed into law in 1964, so there was a lot of activity around this stuff in the 1960s when this book was written. Yeah, so, I mean, that's a fantastic book. It's also 50 years old.

I mean, one of the things that we began to cope with about 25 or 30 years ago was an emerging critique of not just Nash's story of wilderness, but a critique of what mischief of what misperceptions lay at the foundation of what wilderness was in the American cultural story. Because the idea of wilderness in America, which begins very early with people coming out of Europe who, of course, have lived in towns and villages and have done so for a thousand years. And in a part of the world in Western Europe where all the charismatic animals have long since been wiped out. I mean, they're hunting partridges in things. And of course, ordinary people are kept out of the kings and the nobleman's forests because they preserve stags and deer hunting and so forth for the wealthy.

So being introduced to a continent that struck them as being a wilderness continent, virgin America, was the term that was used so often, you know, the name given to Virginia for the virgin queen was also carried on to the continent itself as a virgin place. It was a misperception of what America was because America was actually an anciently occupied place. there had been people here for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And I mean, as one of the geographers, William Denevin, who wrote a fantastic article in 1991, put it, he called it the pristine myth was his. One of the things he said in that article was that it took Europeans and their presence in America three centuries before they had imposed the kind of lands. changes on the continent that they found from native people when they arrived.

But for a couple of reasons, they just sort of ignored that. One of the reasons, of course, was that as soon as Europeans arrived, they're bringing these old world diseases with them to a population of people who have never been exposed to things like smallpox and influenza and cholera and so forth and so on. And almost immediately within the first 50 or 75 years of European arrival in North America, the native population goes from nearly 5 million people in what is now the United States and Canada down to about 900,000 people. And so suddenly the native population has shrunk by 500 percent.

And it not only allowed for an ecological release of wildlife all over America, because there wasn't the same hunting pressure that had been imposed on animals that there had been for 10,000 years. But it also, the relative scarcity of native people in many parts of North America sort of confused Europeans into thinking that they actually had inherited a place that didn't have any prior human history to it. And so it made them think from the very beginning. It made us think from the very beginning that we had. snagged ourselves, you know, this original garden of Eden. Those are some deep waters. And I think that perspective is very important to consider

when we think about wilderness in America. I've heard Dr. Taylor Kean, a member of the Cherokee and Omaha tribes, say that upon first European contact with North America, there was no wilderness, but rather a great Native American civilization. And this is where this stuff in history gets continued. I think every side looks back and wishes it could have been handled differently. But that's beyond the scope of this conversation. However, it's useful in framing the foundational definitions of wilderness

because a fundamental tenet of our definition of wilderness is that people aren't on the landscape, altering it in any way. That's kind of what wilderness is. And Dr. Flores is saying that you'd have to go back so far in history to find this place humanless that it's almost pointless to think about it. I'll also say that since the release of the first podcast, a friend of mine from the Choctaw Nation named Clay from Oklahoma, he told me that they do have a traditional word similar to the English word of wilderness. We had made the statement that there were no words in the Native American languages that were similar to the English word

wilderness, I stand corrected. Here is Clay saying the word in his native Choctaw language. You would say these Kongwi, Hayaka, a wilderness. That is interesting. He also said that the central stories of the Choctaw and Chickasaw people tell about how they came into an uninhabited land and settled there in the southeast. Here's more from Dr. Dant. this idea that when people first come from somewhere else not so we're not talking about indigenous people we're talking about people coming from somewhere else

when they get to america part of what they see is all the things that are gone from where they've been in england in france in germany and they come to america and here are trees and here are wild deer and here are here's this wealth of nature and they think of it in those terms that this thing that was so rare and therefore valuable in Europe is here in abundance. And I want to claim and tame the wilderness as the advance of, you know, using that loaded terminology, civilization. That's how we civilized Europe. And that's what we're going to do here. And the way you do that is to get big on nature. You cut down the trees, you drain the swamps, you harvest the animals.

And that's a way of creating value, both because those things are rare in Europe and also because then you're converting these wild chaotic landscapes into something that's ordered and knowable. But again, it has to do with those ideas of value. What has value is what is rare. And once those wild places become rare, then we have that shift where romantics are thinking, you know, has some demigod come before me and harvested the best of the stars. I want to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. Converting wild, chaotic landscapes into something ordered and knowable. Now that's interesting. What's hard to debate is that as a species, globally, we've worked extremely hard to get away from the instability of wild lands.

You remember the etymology of wilderness, right? Self-willed or uncontrollable land of wild beasts. Here's Stephen Ronella with an interesting observation about human nature. People who inhabit wilderness, again, acknowledging that it's a somewhat squeamble. wishy definition. People who historically have inhabited wilderness have jumped at every chance they could get to chip away at that wilderness. There are some exceptions. There are some rare exceptions, but for the most part, they've jumped at any chance. Our own Western European ancestors obviously jumped at it in a big way 10,000 years ago.

On this continent, Native Americans, we're very receptive to firearms. We're very receptive to steel axes. We're very receptive to different building materials, to different modes of transportation, to things that just would strike us as development, strike us as having the means to make a greater, faster, more profound impact on their environment.

So yes, people that have, when I say people, I just mean like us, humans, outside of all these differentiations we create like Western Europeans, Native Americans, just people across the globe have marched willfully and readily in the direction of civilization. Very few exceptions. So if I didn't have this civilized veneer, if I didn't have this thing that I just was born into,

raised in civilization, and came out of that respecting wilderness, yeah, I think it's fair to say that had I just been born of wilderness, I probably would be just like everybody else and that I would grab at any chance to make it a little less hard to be there. I'll tell you this, Clay,

if you and me were in next, situation where we were indigenous hunter gathers who for thousands of generations have been on the same patch of ground and all of our implements all of our building tools building equipment were just made of natural naturally occurring things that we could find in the landscape stone bone hide and someone showed up and gave us a palette of ready mixed concrete we would have laid that ready mixed concrete down in some fashion or another we would have said this stuff is amazing Look at, I made me a big old paved area. And here's where I'm going to start cooking.

It's hard. It doesn't wash away. It doesn't get muddy. And we would wish we had more. We would want another palette. We would quickly want another palette of ready-mixed concrete. Yeah. Yeah.

I guarantee it, dude. But knowing what we know right now and you, knowing what we now know, we might say, uh-uh, man. You get that ready-mixed concrete out of my face. I know where this is headed. That's an interesting point, and it's hard to argue with. There are exceptions, but in general, mankind has been moving away from wilderness lifestyles. And to go back in the Bear Greece Academy, the Shawnee Leader, Ticumseh, also in the Bear

Greece Hall of Fame, and his brother, Tinskwadawa, the prophet, preached that going back to the traditional Indian ways of life, and getting rid of all influence of Europeans, that would be their salvation. That's what he preached. However, they were met with stiff resistance from within their own tribe and the majority of other tribes. And in modern times, us trying to imagine ourselves

not leaning into modernization is kind of a stretch. It would be like in modern times someone who chooses not to have a sense. cell phone. I mean, it's almost unimaginable. 99% of people can't pull that off, nor could our ancestors resist

modernization. That's not a perfect analogy, but I think it's helpful. 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 it's 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 Phelpsgamecalls.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. We've covered some ground already, and if you remember, Dr. Flores talked about the peculiarity of American history that gave us a unique perspective on wilderness, which we've covered the first part, which was the European perception of the North American continent upon arrival. However, things shifted once wild lands became scarce. And this is one of the most interesting parts of this conversation.

This will be on the Bear Greece Academy quiz at the end of this series. We've got to learn about a census in 1890 that shook the nation into an identity crisis. Dr. Dan is about to tell us about a pivotal moment in America's development of our modern wilderness doctrine. There was a census in 1890 that no longer said there was a, you know, and they use the word frontier, which is the, I mean, it's the census says that frontier is two or fewer people per square mile. That's the definition of frontier. And there was no obvious demarcation between those lightly settled places and the more heavily settled places by the 1890 census. And for a lot of Americans in particular, that sort of provoked this crisis of identity. If that had been what had made us uniquely Americans, that's what Frederick Jackson, Turner,

and some others argue. You can hear the Darwinian idea in there that we're evolving from Europeans into this unique American species, homo-americanus, I'd like to call it. If that's gone, then how do we retain our uniqueness and our, our, our, our, our, our, specialness. So it all gets amplified then at the end of the 19th century when Frederick Jackson Turner writes that famous essay of his, the frontier, the significance of the frontier in American history, where he argues that it's the interaction with wild lands that turn Europeans into Americans. Right. And that, of course, leads to when we get to the 20th century and it looks like, you know,

the census in 1890 announces that the frontier is over. I mean, it throws some Americans into a kind of a crisis of identity that historians sometimes refer to as, you know, a wilderness angst or frontier anxiety. Because we didn't have it. Because you don't have it anymore. And so how are we going to create more Americans if you don't have it? Right. I mean, in the, an American had to have a frontier. Had to have a frontier. That's what made us Americans. We had this frontier. And then Frederick Jackson Turner was like, the frontier's dead. The frontier, well, he doesn't say necessarily it's dead, but he publishes this essay in the early 1890. And it happens to come at the same time that the U.S. census announces in the census of 1890

that the frontier has been so broken up by bodies of settlement that it's no longer possible to say that there is a frontier line in America. And that's what throws people into this frontier anxiety notion. And, you know, I mean, out of it emerges things like the Boy Scouts, for example, where, okay, we've got to go out and teach kids something about living in nature before they lose it. An amplification. We've got to have this formulated organization to do this. Because before Americans would have just intrinsically had these opportunities and known these things. Absolutely. Now we have to be a lot more proactive about setting up the possibility for kids in particular

to be able to experience the wild. And it's one of the reasons that hunting the Booting Crucket Club at the time becomes most very important in conservation, for example. In fact, in the lead up to the passage

of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the debate on it started in the late 1950s, supposedly Frederick Jackson Turner's essay, the significance of the frontier in American history, was mentioned in testimony more than 200 times. So the people who passed the Wilderness Act were reaching back that far. Yeah. And they were what they were saying is that we need wilderness because this is how

America and Americans are created. Americans were created by interaction with wild lands. Now that's interesting. Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis is important. It's kind of wild. I'm not sure that it's true. But this is how national identity is formed. This pioneering spirit, independent, self-reliance are all very American things applied in modern times in a whole bunch of areas of life outside of land management. Hanging in my home for the last 15 years is a framed quote from Aldo Leopold's San County Almanac. It says, quote, to the laborer in the sweat of his labor. The raw stuff on his Anvil is an adversary to be conquered. So was wilderness an adversary to the pioneer. But to the

laborer in repose, able for the moment to cast a philosophical eye on his world, that same raw stuff is something to be loved and cherished because it gives definition and meaning to his life. End of quote. Do you all remember the infamous question I asked Steve Ronella about how much be being an American impacted his way of thinking about wilderness? As I learned this deep history, it's as clear as a bell to me that I've been influenced by my culture. What the things hanging on your walls celebrate is a window into your culture. And I didn't even know about FJT's frontier thesis when I hung Aldo's quote on my wall. I'm sure y'all remember Alabama's son, Wildlands author Hal Herring.

Here's how on the wimpification of America and F.J. Turner. Some of the arguments made for conserving the last of the wilderness were coming from Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier hypothesis or frontier theory that what defined the American spirit was the adversity and the self-reliance required by the frontier or the wilderness. And people like Teddy Roosevelt particularly wrote about this. They were worried about kind of the wimpification of Americans, you know, coddled by civilization. And they wanted to make sure that there were places where people could still test themselves against nature, you know, raw and unaltered. And so there's a lot of currents here.

I want to say wimpification one more time. Maybe the algorithm will pick it up and direct people here who are, looking for a cure. I asked Hal for more about American identity being wrapped around wilderness. Here's an interesting sequence. In the United States, the reason that we kind of have this designated wilderness, how we got to that, came from the earliest days of the frontier when, say, the Buffalo were gone, 1876, 77 in Miles City, Montana. people were looking for the last of the commercially

huntable buffalo, right? And the Civil War had shown Americans the true bloodiness of our national experiment. So 1867, you're seeing like a lot of the Plains Indian Wars starting, and you're having all these people back east, and I don't want to say this in a derogatory way, but people back east are realizing that the frontier is being pushed so hard so fast that there may be absolutely nothing left of that if we don't make some choices

and these are people who are more insulated from it although they may might make expeditions but one of the things so you're listening to i always talk about john murer and gifford pinchote as these two dynamos that are working against each other. And John Muir was completely immersed in the beauty of solitude and the grandeur of untrampled spaces in wilderness. Whereas Gifford Pinchot was a man who believed in managing landscapes and getting the most out of them with sustainable yield, right? And those two dynamos are kind of like a picture of America.

we have these hugely contradictory notions at all times, and I always like to talk about it, like two turbines. It's two magnets in a turbine, and they're spinning, and they're making this electricity through their contradictions. And it's part of what I love about our country the most is there's all these contradictory ideas that are spinning at the same time. In our case here, it was the kind of preservation of the wilderness versus the absolute expectations. that people were witnessing at that time, right? The eastern forests were going down like wheat in front of a combine. The white pines were going down clear to Michigan at that point, I think even into Minnesota.

And so the idea that Americans' energy was capable of literally taking the last barrel of oil out of the last piece of ground, well, that was evident. This movement began to say, what if we didn't do that to every place? What if we didn't do that to every place? Sometimes it's shocking to me that we slowed down enough to ask that question. I really like Howell's talk of America's contradictions. We wiped out the wilderness, and then right at the end, right when we were about to lose it all, we decided to save some of it. I'm going to dig in with how, and I'm still trying to quantify if America's wilderness doctrine is unique. Here he brings up a unique point.

What we have in America with our system of wilderness land, it's unique in the world because it was a choice that the American people through Congress and everything made. So if you go, I've been in places in Mexico that I would be wilderness. They are wilderness quality lands, as they say. But a lot of the things that are left in the world, I think of parts of the Amazon, and I've been in the Amazon, but I've been not into the farthest back country. Those are only there because people lacked the means to get at them. You think of some of the Himalayas or Kazakhstan. You know, those are places you couldn't build roads into, right?

They weren't looking for anything there. Whereas in the United States, after the frontier, we found ourselves capable of getting everywhere, right? Like you look at the system of roads in the, say, Shoshone National Forest, or you look at how people were using the Sierras of California. We could get everywhere, and we were getting everywhere. And so the American system, and I don't know about the largeness of it, the size of it, say vis-à-vis what's in Russia and Siberian and the Taiga. But I think what the difference here is that America was a choice to have it. The fact that we chose to designate and protect wilderness, especially in the early days, was unique globally.

And I think that's really important. I'd say today, though, more lands globally are being protected on purpose. But in many parts of the world, the remaining wilderness was a byproduct of not being able to get to it. And I do think that intent is important. It's also only fair to bring up that wilderness preservation is a direct result of financial prosperity. We had the luxury of being able to preserve wilderness. Sometimes in other parts of life, you wonder how somebody, is able to do something so good.

And often, it's simply an issue of the financial ability to pull it off. If 70% of us didn't have jobs and we couldn't feed our families, perhaps our ideas on setting aside wilderness would be much different. Here's how, with an interesting thought about prosperity and wilderness as a status symbol. Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico was a leader of the conservation movement in the 88th Congress. And during the wilderness hearings, he said, wilderness is an anchor to windward.

Knowing it is there, we can also know that we are still a rich nation, tending our resources as we should. We're not a people in despair searching every last nook and cranny of our land for a board of lumber, a barrel of oil, a blade of grass, or a tank of water.

And so what I thought, I think that Senator Anderson meant right there was exactly what they were talking about in 1867, 68. He was talking about making a choice that we were the kind of people who could make a choice. Yes, we could destroy this, but we choose not to. We don't have to sack every last corner for every last piece of grass. That was good. Here's Ben Masters on America's Uniqueness with Wilderness. And hey, my first intro to Ben was through his 2015 film called Unbranded, where he and some buddies rode Mustangs from Mexico to Canada through the Rocky Mountains.

It was a really cool film. I'm sure he's done a bunch of other stuff since then that he's way more proud of. But here's Ben. I think that our American ideals of wilderness of preserving places that should be untouched by humankind isn't unique to the United States. but I do think that it is truly remarkable that the United States was the first country to in policy and within government value that. And I think that that should be something that should be recognized and treasured. I feel like there's this sense within our modern day society that the United States is a country that, you know, the United States is a country that, you know, is very materialistic, that is very consumer-driven, that really only cares about the economy.

But in reality, the fact is that we have, we kind of set the stage and set the precedent for a lot of governments to emulate around the world of the value of conserving wilderness. To bring us further along on this reality of wilderness, actual geography, on March 1, 1872, federal government bought two million acres in northwest Wyoming for $40,000. It was Americas and the world's first large-scale preservation of wilderness, and they called the little track of land, Yellowstone National Park. I think this was a landmark moment in human history. The trajectory of Homo sapiens up until very near this point had been fighting to get out of the wilderness. But at this tipping point, we reach back to save some of it.

Alanis Morset should have added a fourth verse to her 1996 hit song, ironic, about the irony of the preservation of wilderness. I can't believe I'm about to do this. For 20,000 years, he fought against the wild. Too many variables to keep his family safe and fed. He cut down the trees. He planted grains with his wife. In an 1872, we bought two million acres outright. Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?

I can't believe that made the final cut. Cut that out, Phil. Back on track. And to understand more of the general timeline. And I really hate to do it, but we've got to bring back up Henry David Thoreau again. But in the 1850s, he was credited as one of the first voices calling for practical action to preserve wilderness in America. He believed that each town should have a primitive forest from 500 to 1,000 acres where people could just go. He also believed in this larger scale preservation of wilderness and that that would be an intellectual reservoir and nourishment for civilized man.

And as far as I can find, Arkansas's hot springs. is the oldest land set aside in America as what they had originally called a National Reserve. And that was done in 1832. Later, that would become a national park. So the first preservation of land started in 1832. Thoreau was a recipient of this message in the 1850s, and then it wasn't until 1872 that the first National Park, Yellowstone, was actually preserved. But in case we're getting too proud of,

of our American wilderness efforts. Here's how bringing us back down to earth. Remember these two words, rock and ice. I mean, American wilderness is similar to wilderness and other parts of the world because it's like, it's not the rich grasslands, you know, it was still lands that you could not make them pay. Like you couldn't, you couldn't, if there's,

I tell you, Nevada would have all kind of wilderness, but it has gold. Right? There would be all kinds of places in America that would be kind of wilderness, but there were something there that you could make pay. And so those are not wilderness. Like there's no wilderness in Iowa because it's all black dirt, right? Our wilderness areas share something in common with the rest of the world in that they were the last places people could go and find something that would, you know, that would pay. early like 1960s, 50s wilderness folks in the United States, they were kind of admitting that this every wilderness bill was a rock and ice bill. They were saying, well, all the wildernesses that we got are basically lands that you can't do anything with anyway.

And so it was kind of like de facto wilderness because you'd have to get a climbing rope, you know, and hardware to get up there. That's not totally true. and especially not true like in the Bob Marshall, which encloses a large grassland system in the upper north fork of the Sun River. So there is grass in there. And that was made it very controversial because people said, well, there's grass in there.

I want to keep running the thousands and thousands of sheep in there. And so we have mostly set aside as wilderness the places we couldn't do anything else with. That's true. Shucks, man. that takes some of the nobility out of the story of preserving wilderness. But I guess that doesn't matter. Maybe nobility in matters like this is a myth anyway.

Here's another mic dropper, pragmatism. So the other thing here, I don't want to miss this, because there is a enormous pragmatism in American wilderness that was not in other countries. Okay. So the Bob Marshall Wilderness, which is one I'm most familiar with, it was set aside very early because it is the headwaters of the Sun River. And the Sun River is the Gibson Dam project, which is a huge irrigation project on the Fairfield Greenfield bench here where I live. And so the Bob Marshall Wilderness owes its existence to the need for irrigation water down below. And if you go through the American West, the same thing applies in almost every, every wilderness area that I know of, was set aside.

Originally, the idea was to protect some kind of headwaters. 62% of all the available water in the American West originates on federal public land. And that is not a mistake. Pragmatism is a good word for taking the romance and fun right out of the story. Nah, I'm just kidding. It actually makes American wilderness a tighter story and more understandable. There are multiple reasons these lands were preserved and multiple reasons why people celebrate their preservation today.

I think all of this stuff is fascinating, and it's helping me unravel and decode who we are as Americans. And oh, did I just hear the 330 bell ring? Sounds like the Bear Grease Academy is out for this session. But we've got one more session on wilderness, and it won't be easy. Turns out there are even more problems and challenges ahead. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. At first light, we just launched our new Circa, Big Game Western hunting pattern, camo.

I've worn it extensively out west, and it's good stuff. Brent and I will be at the Black Bear Mananza on March 9th in Bentonville, Arkansas. We hope to see you there. And I look forward to talking with everyone on the Bear Grease Render next week. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag.

And there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper,

from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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