Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The U.S. Forest Service

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writer Dan Hopper (Ranker, The New Yorker) and comedian Chet Wild (Unpopular Opinion podcast network) for a look at why the U.S. Forest Service is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

The U.S. Forest Service. Known for forests, that's it. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why the U.S. Forest Service is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Two returning guests this week. Dan Hopper is an incredible comedy writer. He's a managing editor at Ranker. He's written for The New Yorker and for The Washington Post and many more fine publications. And then Chet Wilde is a stand-up comedian. He's a podcaster all over, in particular on the Unpopular Opinion Podcast Network. And then Chet is from the town of Towanda, New York, which is near Buffalo,

New York, which made him a key guest in a Passion Project podcast of mine called One Way to Make an Emoji, about me making the bison emoji and so much more. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples. Acknowledge Dan recorded this on the traditional land of the Lenape people. Acknowledge Chet recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and K'iche and Chumash and Fernandinho-Taraviam peoples, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about the U.S. Forest Service, which is a patron chosen topic. Thank you to Jared Halverson for the

suggestion there. He and the people who voted for it gave me a push. I probably never would have thought to do this topic without the suggestion and the push. And I am so glad you did because it turns out there's an amazing show here about a massive chunk of the United States. One other thing, if you are not a U.S. resident, I still think this show is very relevant to you because American forestry practices influence the rest of the world, and those American wildfires you read about, see things about, that influences the world in its own way. And I think that's all the setup you need. So please sit back or keep climbing those branches, you spry tree climber, you.

Good for you. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Dan Hopper and Chet Wilde. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. then. Dan Shett, it is so good to have you. And of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Either of you can start, but how do you feel about this? It's a patron chosen topic. Thank you, Jared Halverson. But how do you guys feel about the U.S. Forest Service? Well, I was just saying to Alex before I came on the show, I was like, Jared Halverson, but how do you guys feel about the U S forest service?

Oh, well, I was just saying to Alex, before I came on the show, I was like, oh man, national parks. I love national parks. They're great. I have all these stories about going to national parks. This is going to be fun. Then I Googled it and, uh, it's not the same thing. So I have no idea what my relationship to it is. And I'm looking forward to finding out just like the viewers. Well, I thought I had a good answer,, and I'm looking forward to finding out just like the viewers. Well, I thought I had a good answer, but now I'm insecure based on his answer, because do I not know what we're talking about? Is there a difference between national parks and national forests? There is organizationally, yeah. And I learned that in the process of researching this. I think

I should have asked Jared why he suggested this, but also a bunch of people voted for it. So I'm curious exactly why the audience is excited about it. Because it turns out there's a bunch of amazing things. And I wonder what they knew. Or I wonder if they knew this difference between the National Park Service and the Forest Service. I just didn't want to come on and be like, oh, yeah, I've been to Yellowstone and have everyone like, you noob. It's not a national forest. I'm really excited to be talking about this topic because I background for people.

All three of us on this show are from the U.S. And I think many Americans have been to a national forest or another piece of land. This this organization handles like it's a very common thing you run into. They handle about a quarter of all the public lands in the country, but not the national parks. That's a whole separate thing. Yeah, the national forests are the ones that the font on the wooden signs as you drive through them is kind of like semi-cursive.

Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah. They won't talk about it much, but we'll link an article from Atlas Obscura about a guy who was a career-long park ranger and then just got into making the signs for them and came up with just really cool graphic design for the signs. Very visual. We won't talk about it much. But it's a cool brown cursive sign. The national parks are trash.

We don't like them. That's what we're here to talk about. They must have to explain themselves all the time that they don't work for the National Parks Department, right? Yeah, probably. Well, I think from here we can get into the numbers because the first one gets into some of that. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And that is in a segment called, of fascinating numbers and statistics.

And that is in a segment called Now is the Winter of Our Discontent, Made Glorious Summer by the Stats of York. And that name was submitted by Josh Brown. Thank you, Josh. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make him as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. I'm going to one of the last ever tapings

of Conan tonight before he retires the show and nothing he can do. No surprise guest will top that bit there. Just there. This is a very big compliment. You've already ruined Conan for me because nothing is going to be more comedically chef's kiss

but richard the third stuff in the stats yeah cool move over martin short did you have to stop doing song versions because you got like sued for royalties and so now it's just public domain stuff where it is like she'll be coming around the stats when she comes. All these 100-year-old songs that probably won't get sued by some estate. Yeah, I believe Josh and maybe some other people have explicitly sent suggestions where they're like, it's not a song. I want to give you options. I want to broaden your horizons.

And so there's a movement. There's a movement in the fan base going on. All right. Cool. Yeah. A famous different Shakespearean monologue each time. I like it. What if I did long monologues?

Like I just made the guests watch me do Iago for five minutes. You know, that'd be great. Let's try it out. We stats. We happy stats. We stats. We happy stats. We brand of statistics. Anyway. Yeah, so we all knew the gist that there are national forests in the U.S.

and that's somehow separate from the national parks. First number here is 1905. And the year 1905 is when the U.S. Forest Service was founded. It is part of the federal government. It's also part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management and a bunch of other things are part of the Department of the Interior, which has like a bison logo and is more famous for doing public lands, nature stuff but the forest service is part of the department of agriculture uh partly because it's involved in sustainable logging like

some some of those forests and lands are used for cutting down the trees in a way that they can come back cool yeah i know that's a lot of like uh federal administration bureaucracy information so it's not amazingly exciting, but it is. It's like the division and why these guys aren't National Park employees. What if this is the episode that finally breaks the show? You're like, you're like, oh, this isn't fascinating. Yeah, you said you finished that sentence and neither guest chimed in. Yeah, well, I was stuck.

It seems like an organized administration, I suppose. I have no idea how to riff on that. This would probably be an episode of itself in itself, but sustainable logging. Is that really a thing? Like, how does that? You cut down the trees and then you plant more trees and then you wait 200 years. Not that long. It doesn't take that long. Plant more trees more quickly and cut them down even faster. Yeah. Some people want them to do that. It's actually a thing going on. Yeah. And as far as how much power they have to do that,

the next number here is 193 million acres. And 193 million acres is how much land they handle. They say that also no one knows what that means. But 193 million acres, according to their website, is about the size of Texas. All right. The sites I found say that Texas is about 7% of texas all right the the sites i found say that texas is about seven percent of the country yeah that's that's significant for some reason i immediately think of uh that scene in castaway when he's calculating how big the search area is and he's just like that's twice the size of texas and it's just like tom hanks's character just offhand calculates exactly the square mileage of two Texases. I'm just like, damn. All right.

I mean, it helps the audience because you're like, oh, now I understand how big that is. Isn't there also a floating garbage mass in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas? That could be. The bigness of the world, I feel like we try to use Texas as a way to capture it. Yeah. And it just becomes kind of more confusing. Then I'm like, okay, so when we drove to Austin from San Antonio one time, if I did that more, you know, like that becomes my system and it doesn't work.

It's wide. It takes a long time to drive through Texas. Yeah. Even driving across the narrow part up top took like two thirds of a day yeah it's a large state there's a lot of this these guys have a lot of responsibility i'm secretly incredibly fascinated i'm just trying to get in the super t's at the beginning of the season so so you see this ad i'm to keep dropping quotes so I'm in the trailers. This is going to be some kind of night.

Our biggest episode yet is the thing you could say. Whoa, no way. A Texas-sized episode. Alex pulling a sheet off of something and we're just like, whoa. And you're like, I got to tune in to see what is under that that sheet even though it's an audio podcast i'll be able to tell from their voices how fascinating it is when uh as far as how much they do the next number here is 20 because 20 sorry i'm just i'm just like i gotta up the energy and then i just like way overshoot it and i'm like like okay you don't need to like patronize us just loose screaming

as the episode goes on 20 like i didn't even say what the thing is yet yeah so 20 that's the number of designated national grasslands in the united states so the forest service handles 154 national forests and less famously handles 20 national grasslands which cover about four million acres so they're also doing like prairie stuff on top of the forest really very busy like challenging how few preconceived notions I have about a thing. She's like, how many, you know, how many grasslands they have? I'm like, I don't know, like 20. I'm like, all right, sounds right. Probably, probably about how many they have. You're making me question why I live in Los Angeles when there's all this available land

out there. Oh, yeah. That's one of my more significant national forest experiences is going into Angeles National Forest, which is a huge forest just like northeast of the main part of LA. And we went from LA weather and then it was chilly up there. We were in winter coats in one drive. There's a bunch of loose, public, open environmental land all over the country, especially in the West. A lot of the story country especially in the west a lot of the story will be in the western u.s because that's where they put a lot of these so is the is their reasoning the same as the national parks it's funny to preface with this but i'm like i watched uh three episodes of that ken burns national parks thing before quitting but it was very interesting

but yeah i think that i think they're some of the impetus behind forming the national parks was the U.S. realizing that for tourism purposes, they couldn't compete with a lot of Europe's history because they had so much man-made history. And there's Rome and Greece and all these old cathedrals and stuff. And so like their one leg up, even though it was only a hundred year old country then, was having Yellowstone, Yosemite pieces of natural beauty that like didn't really exist in a lot of places in super metropolitan areas around the world. The basic pitch is here's how great things would look if humans didn't inhabit it. Yeah. And I think it was accelerated because Niagara Falls really quickly became the tourist bleep hole that it is. So I grew up 45 minutes from Niagara Falls. Nice. And it always blew my mind. That was like the lazy field trip that our high school would take, you know?

Yeah. But like how many people would travel from around the world to visit Niagara Falls, arguably the shittiest city in the entire country? On both sides or just the U.S. side? Well, that's the thing. So the Canadian side is much better in terms of the city. But the downside is you have to look at the U.S. side. Whereas on the U.S. side, you get to view the better side, but you're stuck in the tourist trap.

That makes a lot of sense, actually, right? On The Office, when Jim and Pam get married in Niagara Falls, Jim does like a 20-second thing about like, turns out Niagara Falls isn't that great. And it captures what Niagara Falls is perfectly. It's like a casino and a bunch of closed businesses. Well, it's interesting because it was like that in the 1800s, early 1900s, too. Like really quickly, people bought up all the area around it and to charge money to like look at it. And so I think, you know, federally designated Yosemite was an attempt to have that not happen, to have people be like, this is beautiful. And

then immediately buy it and kind of carve it up and put up wax museums everywhere. And so we did something right. Yeah. Also, cause you're both from kind of the same part of the country. Chet's from Western New York and Dan is from Western Pennsylvania. And I, from further away in Illinois, I think I've still been to Niagara Falls three times. It's just a thing, partly going to Syracuse and it's on the way, but it's a thing that I think is a real mecca. And that and the national parks are more famous than our national forests. I think that's just a bigger landmark. Yeah, I think on my bucket list was to visit all the national parks, and I'm going to change it to national forests. They seem less popular. I am not going to do that. Sorry, episode. That's okay.

And also this U.S. Forest Service has some responsibilities and goals beyond and different from what the Park Service does. And another number here that gets into that is 100,000 acres. So 100,000 acres, that number is the minimum size for a forest fire to fit the definition of what's called a mega fire. And the New Yorker says that term was coined in 2011 following just a series of fires that big all happening at once because we have a ton of fires out west now. So they invented the term mega fire for the U.S. Forest Services business dealing with forest fires. Climate change is happening so aggressively that we only recognize the mega fires now. If you don't burn at least 100,000 acres, get out you're not news yeah what are you even doing here yeah yeah it's probably not good that we've invented an entire new class of national disaster in

this decade after like millions of years of earth's existence it's like it got pretty bad around 2011 okay not good yeah that's why you guys moved back east you didn't want to deal with the two to three months of smoke-filled air that's part of it when you when you live in southern california psa for for viewers because i'm the East Coast, lived in LA for like five years. At least twice a week in the summer, you'll get a text from a relative saying, are those fires near you? And she's like, oh, I got to check the news. Something's on fire. And they're like, yeah, it is, but it's only 96,000 acres. So it's not even a mega fire yet. thousand acres so it's not even a mega fire yet you just get so mad when people try to put out non-mega fires you're just like why even bother save the water who cares i mean that is a problem

right we're we're going into a drought again megafires plus less water equals even more megafires. Yeah, we'll have another class by 2024 or something like hyper fires. When I when I did live in L.A., I managed to train my family out of checking on me for every earthquake and fire. And I think I got them trained right before the fires were directly next to all the freeways in la and then like visible from burbank and and then they stopped asking me and i had to be like uh uh hey i'm fine you know it was a real real bummer for them boy who cried fire yeah yeah and you died in a fire. This podcast is dedicated to Alex.

What? So this is great. If you go to the Wikipedia for the Angeles National Forest, item one, geography. And then there's 1.1 wilderness areas, 1.2 climate. Under item two, history. Then 2.1 wildfires. Then 2.11 loop fire. 2.12 stationfires then 2.11 loop fire 2.12 station fire 2.13 2012 like there's there's a greater list of fires than anything else on this page racial slur controversy you're like what unrelated in between fires they said some on Twitter that they got in trouble for.

Well, and this department, too, it's more than just land. It's rangers handling it and a whole operation. And we have three big takeaways for this episode. That takes us into the first one. Takeaway number one. The U.S. Forest Service was created by one eccentric, grieving rich guy. Nice. And by his president best friend. One more time.

The U.S. Forest Service was created by one eccentric, grieving rich guy and his president best friend. Does he have a name? Yeah. His name is Gifford Pinchot. Oh, that's a rich guy name if I've ever heard it. Big time. Yeah. Oh, that's a rich guy name if I've ever heard it. Big time. Yeah, and also before talking about that specific creation, it feels like necessary to mention that the real context for creating all these national forests is partly pushing native people off the land and genocides and imperial war against Mexico and just a lot of hunting and pillaging and colonizing that created the Western United States.

That's the roots of it. That's where it came from. In the process of that, also colonists who came in did a lot of destructive logging and mining and other human development. And so that, like we said, was the spark for national parks. And it also ends up being a spark for our national forests, pushing humans off it. There were people there before. So lands that could have been native reservations, they kicked people off so they could reserve the land.

Yeah, and part of the whole process of arranging these national forests involved shifting existing native people into specific reservations that were separate from the forests. Yeah, there was a lot of taking land and organizing it in forcible ways in in the history of this well figure it would turn evil at some point on the podcast yeah yeah um what was the grieving portion what was he well i just for we'll do his background in general, but also the the creation of the very first steps toward a U.S. Forest Service were that the Department of the Interior was formed in 1849 to manage federal land. And then they were in charge of Yellowstone National Park when that was created in 1872. But then from there, the question became, like, what do we do with all the rest of this land we seized as a country? Like like we we took it. Now we have to do something with it.

And two of the big sources for this episode are two amazing books. One of them is called Natural Rivals, John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America's Public Lands by John Clayton. And then the other is The Big Burn, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Fire That Saved America by Timothy Egan. If you want like a super complete rundown of how this process happened, those books are great for that. The short version is that the US created a set of interlocking agencies for running public land. A key one is the US Forest Service. And this guy Gifford Pinchot is like single handedly created the US ForestS. Forest Service. He's why we have one. And no one's heard of him, for the most part. Yeah, I've never heard of him. I sent you guys a portrait of him in his prime. It's a skinny guy with a big mustache. And he was born into wealth in Connecticut. Part of his family's money came from logging, which is fun, as just a fact. But he was educated at the Exeter Prep School and then Yale and was in Skull and Bones. He spent his summers at his family's castle in

Pennsylvania. It was called Gray Towers. It had a bunch of tourists. It had 23 fireplaces. He was a very, very rich guy. And then he decided to devote his life to the wilderness and the outdoors and forestry. And I still can't tell if this is for good or for evil. Yeah, I think I would say it's for good. But also, like those books, especially get into a lot of debate as far as exactly how we run our public land. And people like John Muir were saying, let's just leave it totally untouched. Like people can visit carefully. Otherwise's just leave it totally untouched. Like people can visit carefully, otherwise just leave it how it is.

And Pinchot was all about completely controlling that natural land. Like let's do things that let us cut all the wood down in a sustainable way. Let's do things that let people visit it and do recreation in specific ways. And also he believed that we needed to run those lands to prevent wildfires and to prevent stuff from burning down. Well, yeah, that last point is perhaps the middle point that I would imagine that I sit in, which is like, let's for the most part not touch the land, but if there are certain things that are catalysts for mega, mega, mega fires all the time,

maybe let's dig some fire trenches or listen to the greatest president of all time of any country ever and you know rake the forest that would prevent the forest fire did uh so was john muir against like even draw like you know the loop that goes around yellowstone that takes you to the main attractions? Something like that? Not have buildings on the land or anything? That's a good question. I think basically as minimal as possible.

But yeah, I'm not clear on his exact plans there. One sign that says, welcome to Yellowstone. Like 10 million acres. Right. It's like, this is it. Good luck. Well, there was a debate between those two guys when there was a proposal to build a dam at what's called Hetch Hetchy. And Pinchot said, let's build a dam.

It can just be part of the system we built here. And then Muir said, no, that's way too much changing of the land. And the dam ended up getting built. Mir lost. But yeah, and so Pinchot, he has then a few different things going on that guide him into forestry. One is that he pretty quickly decides not to build an entire family for a long time because he falls in love with a lady who has tuberculosis, falls in love with Laura Hoteling, and she loves him back and they do everything together. But she is like dying of tuberculosis the entire time, passes away in 1894. And then for the next 20 years, he in his private

time is still writing letters to her and like mentally asking her for advice when he has issues. letters to her and like mentally asking her for advice when he has issues. He also uses psychics and seances to stay in contact with her. He basically spends the next 20 years or so grieving this lady and working on building a forest service. That's his whole deal the entire time. I'm married to my forests now. More or less. Yeah. Yeah. And like her in death. Yeah. He's definitely told someone that later in his life. Yeah. Oh, well, yeah, that too. That's very much the, was this early 1900s, did you say? Yeah. It's very Victorian stuff. Yeah. So that's like right in the spiritualism craze where, you know, everyone's going to seances and stuff like that.

Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. It's like very, it's like really like proper and acceptable to like talk to your dead loved dead loved ones in the 1910s and 20s. And then the other thing he does is he basically invents the job of forestry in the US. He wanted to study it, needed to go to France to go to a forestry school. Later on in 1900, his rich family will found a forestry school at Yale, which is the first one in the US. But before that, he needed to study it there. And then he declared himself a consulting forester and started working

for cities that were laying out their parks and the federal government. But the trouble is that in the late 1800s, the US government loved just selling public land to businesses. It was a really big source of money. And so Pinchot is working for the government, but specifically in a role where he can't do anything. And then what happens is in 1901, his personal friend and buddy becomes the president because William McKinley is assassinated and Pinchot's friend, Teddy Roosevelt, becomes president. And where was William McKinley assassinated? Buffalo, New York, I believe. There we go. New York. It's all coming together.

They named a mall after him. So totally worth it. McKinley Mall. Yeah. This is becoming a big like New York through way episode. Like Buffalo and Syracuse and getting a Niagara and stuff. We'll do a Wegmans bonus show. Just we'll really focus. We have Wegmans Wegmans bonus show. We'll really focus.

We have Wegmans in PA. I can chime in on that. Yeah, good. You're tempting me to drift off path even more with these possibilities, Alex. Yeah. Thank God you edit this. So we'll end up, the final product will be a coherent, seemingly dialogue that's on point. That pieces together this conspiracy of McKinley's assassination that we've just cracked

in real time on this podcast. What's our conspiracy? That Pinchot killed him? Well, yeah, he's rich, rich connected guy. Yeah. Can't get anything done. Right. President selling off all of the, you know, he's grieving. He's grieving for his physical homeland and he's grieving for his dead spouse. Oh, yeah. And, you know, if that's the case, you know, sometimes you have to commit a small evil to serve the greater good. Right. So. That's been shown for teddy roosevelt in the rest you know keep keep going where's it go from here it's for the trees yeah this tracks

yeah other than it not being true it adds up like all the parts are there totally upstate new york we mentioned it two or three times that's i don't know that's that's weird right pattern yeah sure yeah kill he kills him i mean that's not near that's right pretty close to buffalo right yeah you want to send the president a message that we're selling our most beautiful public land to private business interests where would you kill him right in your niagara falls boom boom boom we got him it's just me saying a lot of correct stuff pretty much yeah that's what it's like no i'm just sorry anyway well with the with roosevelt roosevelt is basically our first president other than a little bit grant and lincoln but Roosevelt's the first president to be really enthusiastic about nature. And also he and Pinchot had been friends for years and years.

They also spent a lot of time doing like stereotypical Teddy Roosevelt sports together. They would box each other. They would wrestle. They would both note it in their diaries that they'd gotten together and done man stuff. Roosevelt in 1901 ascends to the presidency. According to Timothy Egan's book, a full week before he's even in the White House, he's meeting with Pinchot about how to build a huge federal forest service. In one letter in 1901, Roosevelt says, quote, we dream the same dreams, end quote to Pinchot. same dreams, end quote to Pinchot. Too bad, Mick K stands in the way, dot, dot, dot. Never figured out what that meant, though. Right, who could say? Yeah. And then, so from there,

Roosevelt is excited to make Pinchot in charge. And then in the next election, when Roosevelt actually runs in 1904, He wins by the biggest margin in American history at the time. And so from there, he feels empowered to found in 1905, the U.S. Forest Service with Pinchot as the first U.S. chief forester. And it's this guy who wants to start the practice of forestry where you have rangers managing it and specific contracts for limited amounts of timber and like a real systematized version of nature that's the goal without that we'd never have the cartoon yogi bear probably ruin the whole premise of of a ranger so i mean there's there's really not many times in american history where i feel like the course of events bends against like the collective

business will, right? Yeah. So like, did they try to sell this to like, you know, business magnates as like, in the long run, this will help sustain your business? Or was it like clearly like, this is kind of making a public good choice against business. And that was like a huge fight because I feel like that never happens now ever. Right. That's an excellent question. And I think the answer is the second thing. They basically did it over the objections of businessmen. And in the long run, this helps split the Republican Party. There will be a very boring controversy called the Pinchot-Ballinger affair, because Pinchot, under the next president Taft, gets in a fight with the secretary of the interior, Ballinger,

because he believes Ballinger is giving too much stuff away to businesses. And then Pinchot is fired, and it makes Roosevelt so mad. He runs against Taft in 1912, and Woodrow Wilson wins. And there's a whole three candidate thing. Wow. Partly because TR's favorite buddy, Pinchot, got fired for trying to do Forrest stuff too much. Now this is the podcast really back on track. Seriously, it's like this innocuous thing that led to like huge repercussions that I had no idea. I've never heard of any of this.

Yeah, later on in Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography. Teddy Roosevelt? Who's that? No, I had no idea. I've never heard of any of this. Yeah. Later on in Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography. Teddy Roosevelt? Who's that? No, I'm just kidding. I mean, I never heard of the controversy. Two Roosevelts? What? That doesn't make sense. There was an America then? What? It's like, wait a minute. What? Yeah. Later on in Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography, he will write that Gifford Pinchot was like the best part of his administration. I'm paraphrasing, but this is a surprisingly important person in a really famous administration that just nobody's really heard of. A Forrest guy. a forest guy yeah i guess i mean i guess it's not surprising what we know historically that you'd think that the you know them making that decision and saying hey this is what we're going

to do sorry the first thing business interests would do is like be like all right next election we're going to put our guy in there and like rally behind some friendly wash of your hands you want your you know secretary of interior, some ex like logging firm guy becomes like, you know, in the cabinet, that kind of thing. Thousands of people putting tons of money behind the thing is always going to be like, have stronger momentum than like, oh no, who'd be good at that? Yeah. So it's cool when the latter wins for a little bit in American history. Yeah, absolutely. It's a really. Yeah, this is a really exciting story because it's especially a thing where under Grover Cleveland, there had been some acres of

forest set aside, but nobody was empowered to protect them. And then under Teddy Roosevelt and Pinchot, they set aside an additional 16 million acres of general land. They transfer 63 million acres from the interior to agriculture so Pinchot can run it. And he hires and trains hundreds of forest rangers who are all very specifically molded in Pinchot's image and beliefs. New York Times in 1909 said, wherever you find a Forest Service man or woman, you find a devoted believer in Gifford Pinchot. He is the little father of his people, end quote. Cool.

And also apparently after he was fired from his job, he went into the office the next day to get his stuff and everybody was crying. Like full on weeping about losing this amazing leader of this unique thing. Like there was no other guy who's this good at Forest. It's a dead poet society moment in American history. Yeah. All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife.

I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because yes, listening is mandatory. The J club with janet varney is available every thursday on maximum fun or wherever you get your podcasts thank you and remember no running in the halls

yeah they're yeah they're they're forester like oh Forrester. Yeah, that was basically. But yeah, and from there, there is kind of a push to destroy this organization as soon as Pinchot is gone. And that takes us into the next takeaway. Takeaway number two. One massive wildfire saved the U.S. Forest Service, and they also might have overreacted to that. Thanks to one huge wildfire, we still have a U.S. Forest Service, partly because all those business interests that objected to it just tried to destroy it immediately. They were like, great, Pinchot's gone. We can do it. So what happened with the forest fire?

A massive fire happened, and they were like, maybe we need this. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Then it was widely justified. Because they couldn't put it out because they couldn't manage it, right? Yeah, they did a lot of heroic work to slow it down and ultimately manage it. And then people said, oh, not only do we need a forest service, we need to fund it like crazy because Western wildfires are going to be a thing. That's something we need to watch out for.

crazy because Western wildfires are going to be a thing. That's something we need to watch out for. They just sent strike breakers after the fire to hit it with clubs. It didn't work. And they're like, hmm, maybe we need someone who knows what they're doing to do this. Like pouring a bucket of Pinkertons on it, like a bunch of guys come out of the bucket. Yeah. And then they were like were like oh we need more people to put these fires out we better build a for-profit private prison industry where we can exploit free labor labor yeah and not call it slavery can we put the prison around the fire and imprison the fire imprison the fire the fire is breaking rocks in a jumpsuit like okay well I am guilty of being a fire

makes sense but and I don't mean to bypass it we'll link about what chat described about prison labor especially in California being used for firefighting it's it's basically slavery it's not good there's some there's some good recent updated legislation, I mean, basically

out of necessity last year because we need more firefighters, where Newsom signed a thing in July, I believe, where people out of prison who are trained as firefighters in prison can now be eligible to become firefighters of the public service. It was insane before

that you could fight fires and when you're an inmate and then once you're out of prison they're like, no, no, no, you're not allowed to be a firefighter. Not if we have to pay you

a living wage. Because, yeah, because you can't be paid prison wages. It's ridiculous. Well, just, you know, whatever stigmas there are about, you know.

But hey, that's how you reform a convict. You, you provide, you arm them with skills and provide them with opportunities. And we need more firemen and especially for forest fires. It's a, it's a very, in many ways, a very thankless, you know, job that you're risking your life. Well, and, and to get into like saving the Forest Service, they made that job hard when they tried to kill it.

And they being congressmen bought by businesses and then also just businesses in the US. Timothy Egan's book talks a lot about specific newspapers just pushing anti-forest service propaganda because they were bought and paid for by Western businesses. Like saying that public forests were a burden on the land and useless. Also, Congress squeezed the budget of the Forest Service. It started in 1905, but by 1910,

one single ranger had to cover an average of 300,000 acres, which is a bonkers amount of land. And then once Pinchot was out of office, apparently businesses got so confident that they could eliminate this that they started targeting individual forest rangers. And in some cases, they chased them off their assigned land by hiring killers who issued death threats. Wow.

So there were like gunmen hired by businesses to tell forest rangers they would be murdered if they didn't stop working so it's not really that far off from what we were joking about a second ago yeah bucket of pinkertons yeah it's pretty much pretty much the goal yeah yeah jesus and so and pinchot so pinchot got fired in january of 1910 and from the research i could find it seems like these businesses were pretty much going to succeed in killing it but starting in august of 1910. And from the research I could find, it seems like these businesses were pretty much going to succeed in killing it. But starting in August of 1910, the you know, so within a year is one of the biggest wildfires in American history. And the winter before it was extremely

snowy, but then light on rain. So that made the forests very dry and hard. And starting around Wallace, Idaho, there was what's now called the Big Burn. And it's a fire that in just two days burned 3.25 million acres across Idaho, Montana, Washington State, and the Canadian province of British Columbia. So in two days, over 3 million acres burned all at once. 85 people died, and most of them were firefighters or forest rangers who stood in the way of the fire and didn't evacuate and tried to prevent it. And so there are a bunch of heroic stories from this time of forest rangers working for the Forest Service and fighting the fire and helping. Jeez. What did you say the mega fire was? 100,000 acres?

Yeah, 100,000 acres. And this three over three million yeah yeah so even this is like i know we have huge wildfires now but even by modern standards this is an absolute tragedy just a disaster magnitude bigger yeah they don't have you know all these helicopters they can drop down it and all the technology to track you know easily track the winds can drop down it and all the technology to track you know easily track the winds and movement and drones and all this other like yeah the the evacuation stories in these books involve trains that's how like that's how they could get people out of town and if you couldn't get to a rail line you were stuck and probably burned up they're also there's one there are a bunch of heroic firefighters in it one One of them is a guy named Ed Pulaski, who was leading a 45-man crew in Idaho and knew the land so well that he knew an abandoned mining tunnel they could hide in when the fire got really bad. And so he was able to save 40 of his 45 men by getting them in this tunnel and also keeping them in there until the fire cleared but they you know there were like people like this doing really exciting and impressive things so after this

happened did the government or the press or you know someone used it as pushback against the business interests or who was like the catalyst for being like this is our shot to like save this thing that's a good question. And it's partly Pinchot's after effects. So what happens is he had been fired right before this, but while he was running it, he'd always pitched the department as a firefighting organization. And he'd even claimed that they need to stop all fires permanently in the West. That was the goal of this forest management. And so between that and the

news of this fire, people said, Oh, well the, the organization that exists to do this needs all the funding in the world. Like let's keep the U S forest service going to handle this. Were the business interests like, Hey, this actually might help us and we shouldn't fight it as hard. Or were they like, let's just eat it for a second and then undo this in a couple of years when people stopped caring. More of the second thing. Yeah. There, let's just eat it for a second and then undo this in a couple of years when people stop caring? More the second thing. Yeah. There's no clear signs that any businesses were helping. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Very cool. Yeah. But, and also then the last thing with this takeaway is that the forest service ended up surviving because it's a firefighting organization, but that maybe led to worsening fires all the way in the modern day because the goal became total fire prevention. By 1935, they had a rule called

the 10 a.m. rule, which means that any time a fire is reported, it needs to be completely controlled and contained by 10 a.m. the next morning. But the thing is, we've known for a long time that small fires and controlled fires in a forest can be good. Like it burns out old undergrowth and some species benefit from it. And we'll link a couple amazing National Geographic articles where they explore the idea that the Forest Service, after this big burn,

prevented the policy of doing small fires and control fires. And then that has maybe led to worsening wildfires, especially in the modern day, because not only is the undergrowth not burned out, but also the Forest Service will plant a lot of agriculture-style pine trees, they call it pines and lines, that are very easy to burn because they're very easy to log. So there's ways that this like firefighting job ended up making the fires worse in the end.

So it's a strange organization. I mean, it's definitely one of those topics where it's like, I feel like you would have to, you know, the common person probably doesn't know much about it. So you would just be hearing two different experts and who knows what their incentives are saying like we have to do this to the forest no we have to do this and you're just like i i have no idea who's right you know yeah like yeah that's part of it and even even in the past there there was kind of an internal u.s forest service pride in just managing the forest as much as possible. There's a historian named Steven Pine, who National Geographic talked to. It's spelled P-Y-N-E. I know it sounds like a pine tree. It's really fun. But he says that in the mid-1910s, there was a debate in California

about whether to start doing light burning. And California's chief engineer was in favor of it. There were logging companies that got on board with being in favor of it. There were logging companies that got on board with being in favor of it. But the US Forest Service prevented it. And according to Pine, quote, it was seen as a challenge to public forestry, to public land and to forestry as science. And so the light burning Native American style approach was dismissed as piute forestry and unacceptable to a new world power end quote. Wow. So he's arguing that they refused to do some light burning partly because

they wanted to like be different from the Native American approach in a way that was probably racist. Oh, another common theme on this podcast, right? Yeah. The origins of so many different things. You're like, oh, yeah, they just were racist. Yeah, it kind of goes into its own.

Yeah. But and wildfires are complicated. And another definite contributing factor is some recent administrations cut the budget of the U.S. Forest Service. So if they also just have less money to fight fires, that's not good, too. Remember when there was like a frozen budget and the parks weren't staffed at all and like people were volunteering to like clean the park bathrooms and like joshua tree has irreversible damage because people are just going in there with their jeeps plowing trees over having the time of their lives the thing is there's so

much dysfunction yeah in that four years it's all a blur it is this topic is interesting though because it's like i know there's like very few things you could call bipartisan anymore and certainly like funding the government is not something the right has ever wanted to do i feel like if you talk to like you know average republicans people have so much pride in like national parks, travel, preserving the land and nature and stuff like that. And yet there's, you would think it's like one thing that people could be like, yeah, of course, keep Yellowstone where it is. It's like history, it's nature, it's vacation, it's a tourist spot. But, but yeah, in the end, it's like someone has to fund the government apparatus around it. And people don't really want to do that.

I grew up in the reddest county in New York State and voted something like 78 percent Trump. But I imagine a lot of the people that I grew up with that are still there would be pro national forest here because they're hunters and they love the idea of like untouched land and like let me just go out and let's let the deer population get out of control and then up my license so i can go knock out a nine point you know point nine point is the amount of points on the horns of the the buck that you kill i feel like it's good to know about each bureaucratic organization like this like the u.s forest service yeah totally because you're you guys are right that like all of us are excited about nature and the woods and the environment to at least some extent even if it's just for sport but then if we don't if we aren't aware of these different chunks it's easy

to be like i love nature and that's why i why I love this bill that funds the national parks. And then you don't know it's slashing fish and wildlife and forest service and the other parts too. Because it turns out it's a bunch of interlocking complicated things. Yeah, and you can abstract it and make people hate it easily. It's just like you want to fund more government Like these park rangers who sit around doing nothing, you know. Right. You could make it, you know, into anyone who doesn't want to fund any government ever. You can make them hate it in the abstract really easily, I think.

When you mentioned park rangers doing nothing as a trope, I'll bet some people think that. And they don't have a mental picture of like, we'll link to articles where you see guys in pretty smoked up forest service jackets because they were just fighting a fire in California. There's a lot of people doing very hard and sometimes life-threatening work for these forests. And even more challenging, they have to put up with tourists on a daily basis. Yeah. Imagine how hard that is. Yeah.

And not just tourists, American tourists a lot of the time. Can you believe it? I read a quote from a forest ranger recently. He was asked why garbage cans and garbage receptacles and recycling receptacles aren't more bear-proof at National Forest. And he said, because there's a significant overlap between really smart bears and really dumb tourists.

Like that's why they can't make a better bear proof can because people are idiots. What are they just like, I can't open this and they just throw it at the can at the garbage can. They're like, they can't get it open either. So it's like, well, this is worse at the garbage can. They can't get it open either. So it's like, well, this is worse than no garbage can. Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

It's as bad as that is. And there's one last main takeaway for the main show, and it's pretty short. Takeaway number three. The U.S. Forest Service recruited America's first black paratroopers. The whole show could be hero forest firefighter stories, but there's an amazing World War II story of a group called the Triple Nichols. And I never heard of them until researching this. And they worked with and for the U.S. Forest Service.

So they got out of the war and kind of transitioned into public life? So the tricky thing is it was for the war and these guys were chosen mainly because of racism. So what happened is the, the triple nickels were a U S army unit. It was the 555th parachute infantry battalion. So five, five, five triple nickels. And it was black soldiers who wanted to be paratroopers. The trouble is they were organized in 1943, they were fully trained, but the US military was still segregated at the time. And according to KGW8 Portland, most black soldiers were relegated to support roles, they were rarely trained as combat units, let alone elite paratroopers. And so the brass did not want to

send these guys to Europe to fight because they wanted to keep them separate from white troops. And they also, I think, trusted them less than white troops. The other thing that happened is Japan at the end of 1944 started using experimental balloon bombs to float in the jet stream from Japan all the way to California, Oregon, Washington. And so the triple nickels were sent to the West Coast to find and extinguish Japanese balloon bombs to prevent forest fires. Did they make it there? Did like balloon bombs make it all the way to the US? That sounds like one of those like, you know, plots that you read about and they scrapped because it was ridiculous. Right.

The jet stream is pretty powerful. Man. And it's a long way, but they apparently Japan launched about 9000 bombs and about 300 made it. But most of them either harmlessly didn't explode. But there was one that killed six people in Oregon. There was one that caused a blackout at a facility that was producing plutonium for the Manhattan Project up in Washington State. Wow, what are the odds that it lands there? Yeah, I know. Yeah, that's crazy. Forest Service and a smoke jumper is a parachute fireman who fights forest fires by parachuting in.

And the Triple Nichols answered 36 fire calls and made more than 1,200 jumps in the summer of 1945 on the West Coast and did some really revolutionary and important forest firefighting, partly because of racism. They also weren't allowed in the USO at the military base, and they built a second one for them. It was a very segregated time. But they stepped up and did very dangerous and important work because that was what was made available to them. Well, it came around to being inspiring in the end. I mean, the circumstances aren't the best, but that's really impressive. Crazy convergence of skills.

Right. They were accidentally looking for bombs and then it was just like well the forests are full of fires too do you want to just do that and then they did that yeah i i was just distracted i was imagining a very slow balloon bomb just hitting harry truman in the face or something it just like makes its way all the way across and it's just like oh like this balloon like very slowly. But I'm glad they prevented that or at least the after effects. Yeah, right. I'm just terrified to go outside.

Add that to another reason you might get hit with a flaming balloon in the face. From World War II. It just stayed up there. Yeah, it might still be hanging around. Who knows? Yeah. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Dan Hopper and Chet Wilde for joining me in wanting to visit Gifford Pinchot's castle, or at least I want to. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating

stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the surprising origins and character universe of Smokey Bear. Smokey the Bear. He's a U.S. Forest Service creation. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than four dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring the U.S. Forest Service with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Take away number one, the U.S. Forest Service is the brainchild of one eccentric, grieving rich guy and his president best friend.

Take away number two, one massive wildfire saved the U.S. Forest Service and they might have overreacted to that fire. And take away number three, the U.S. Forest Service recruited America's first black paratroopers. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Dan Hopper is a managing editor at Ranker.com. He has many amazing comedy pieces all over. I'm going to link a couple of them. And then he tweets at Dan Hopp.

That's Dan H-O-P-P. One of the best Twitter accounts ever. Just great. Chet Wild is all over the Unpopular Opinion Podcast Network. He's all over Twitter at Chet Wild, C-H-E-T-W-I-L-D. And then if I may self plug within Chet's plug, he's a guest on the fourth and final episode of my podcast miniseries entitled One Way to Make an Emoji. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. And the two key ones are two books. One is called Natural Rivals, John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America's Public Lands. That book is by John Clayton. The other book is called The Big Burn, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Fire that Saved America. And that's by John Clayton. The other book is called The Big Burn, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Fire That Saved America, and that's by Timothy Egan. Beyond those, there's a ton of

internet articles backing this, in particular from National Geographic. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly

fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.