The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 072: American Wilderness

Episode Date: July 13, 2017

Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Karl Malcolm, Bjorn Fredrickson, and Jerry Monzingo of the U.S. Forest Service, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: The National Wild and Scenic Rivers Systems; the Cascades as a nexus for the climbing world; Karl's unlikely cure for not drawing an elk tag; the many homes of Aldo Leopold; Curt Meine's Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work; Howard Zahniser and the Wilderness Act; the societal challenges of Wilderness; dudes who just love a good conspiracy theory; Wilderness as a part of the American identity; Frederick Jackson Turner; Frontier Anxiety; helicopters in Wilderness and the "Minimum Requirements Necessary" concept; does Wilderness need to justify itself financially?; Ben Lilly and other rogue wildmen of the Southwest; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by First Light.

Go farther, stay longer. All right, so right now we're sitting in, what do you call this place? We're in Albu do you call this place? We're in Albuquerque. Regional headquarters? Yeah, this is the Southwestern Regional Office. The Southwestern Regional Office of the U.S. Forest Service. Do you guys mind going around and saying what you do and what your job titles are?

So I'm Jerry Monzingo. I'm a wildlife, fish, and rare plant program manager on the Gila National Forest, which is in southwest New Mexico. And you grew up doing a little fur trapping. I did. I did, yeah. When growing up, I lived along the Gila River, which is headwaters are in the Gila wilderness. And my grandpa started me out probably when I was 10 or 11 years old. Gave me three old number two Victor Long Springs

that were, the springs were just about worn out. And that started me. I walked to the river from the house, set out a few traps. And then, of course... course for what muskrats no coons raccoons gray fox the occasional bobcat lots of skunks um occasional you're saying ring tails too ring tails yeah what was like what's the market like for those back well you know that was back when like fur prices were good fur prices were good then um you know ringtails were 12 bucks really yeah a little gray fox was worth 45 yeah i started trapping right at the tail end of the super good fur prices

and it was the same single spring number one single spring single long spring victors that that launched me into the biz but then you also came out like uh you came out of a mining family i did yeah um my dad worked at the local copper mine um all my life that's you know that's all he knew was the copper mine i think he ended up when he retired he was 36 years at the copper mine i spent a three and a half year stint at the copper mine and about a year into that i figured that wasn't for me it was shift work i'd grown up with that my whole life and the graveyard shift around my house me and my sisters always left because you know when somebody's trying to sleep during the middle of the day and a bunch of kids running around the house,

and even if it wasn't us that woke him up, we got blamed. So we just stayed away from the house. I stayed at the river, fishing, trapping, whatever. Just to be clear of home. Just to be clear of home, yeah. And then you did mining for three years? I did, three and a half years. And then wound up going from that into school and came up through wildlife biology right yeah when i got out of um high school what i wanted to do was was get a degree in wildlife

management pursue a career with a state agency at that time about the time when I graduated, the mine shut down. My family was always very serious about not being in debt. So really the only place that they could afford for me to go to school was the local university, which was 30 miles away. That university didn't offer a degree in wildlife management, nothing really even close. So it was the typical 17-year-old that thinks they know best. I decided I wasn't going to go to college, and my mom decided for me that I was. So I went to the local college, got an associate's degree in welding technology.

And prior to that, during high school, the summers and during the college, I had worked for a local ranch in Hayfields working cattle. I got out of college with that degree. I went back to the ranch for two years, a little over two years, making 25 bucks a day, 14, 16 hour days, sometimes seven days a week. Like around what time, what year was that? Oh, 80. I worked at the ranch in the summers from about 81 till 84 when I graduated. And then I went back to work for a little over two years solid, about 85, 86. So now when you, like as a biologist now working, how far from where you grew up are you,

now that you work for the forest service like how close and what proximity to all where you were trapping and growing up and and mining is your work now like right there yeah it's right there yeah so i i grew up do you work now in places you were familiar with as a kid yeah yeah yeah i didn't do a whole lot of hunting and all on the National Forest growing up. I mean, we gathered fuel wood there to heat our house. I grew up hunting with my grandfather on my mom's side because my dad just, my dad wasn't an outdoorsman. And my grandfather's family had settled in the Cliff Gila Valley, you know, in the late 1800s along the river. And so he knew all the local folks that had been there a long time.

He, you know, was friends with the large land owners, the ranchers. So my early time was spent hunting private property. I mean, I fished some on the National Forest because it was an hour's drive and hike basically into the Gila wilderness from my house where I grew up. So I did spend a lot of time along the river in the forest, but most of my early hunt and all was done on private land.

Yeah. How long have you been with the Forest Service now? 22 years. Oh, is that all? 22 years, yeah. Man. Long time. And on the same forest for 22 years, which is very, you don't see that very often, people

staying that long. But it's, I love the country, I love my job, and I really have no desires to go somewhere else. You know, if you're doing good work, why leave? Yeah. Now, Bjorn, you're from far off. Yeah, I grew up in Seattle. Yeah. How did you come to be here and do what you're doing?

It was a long, long journey. You know, I grew up playing on public lands in the Northwest. Uh, you know, my dad was, uh, um, before he had me and my, my brother and sister, he was an Alpine climber and climbed all over the world. Yeah. So I think he was like on the, on the cusp of doing some pretty big things. And, you know, as, as things go in the mountains, never, never quite pulled off some of these big climbs, but, uh, so he inst instilled in us really early this kind of ethic or passion for the outdoors and was dragging us all over the Cascades growing up. And so I have many a fond memory of camping trips and backpacking all over the place growing up.

And so left Seattle when I was 18 after getting out of high school. Went to school on the East Coast. Had an interest in environmental issues due to that upbringing. And growing up in Seattle and just hearing a lot about, yeah, there's a lot of interest in that part of the world, as I'm sure you know, about environmental issues and sustainability. And it's kind of a weird, like, I'm not a climber, but it's a real nexus for the climbing world. It is. It is. I mean, there's some really famous folks who, yeah, who grew up there, live there today in the climbing world.

Alpine climbing in particular. You talk about rock. The emphasis is down in Yosemite. He spent a lot of time down there too. Yeah, like international alpinist. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, went to school, studied environmental studies

as an undergrad. Had an interest in international applications of that sort of field of study. And so along the way, I spent about a year in China, went to grad school and did an environmental science degree. And based on my experience in China, I wanted to get some other exposure in India, being another huge kind of developing country, you know, that's going to be amazingly significant on the world stage and in the context of environmental issues. And during my time abroad, you know, what I really missed was the outdoors,

you know, in our public lands. And so I did a lot of reflecting. I miss my family and friends too, of course. And I was meeting expats who had spent their whole lives abroad, their whole adult lives anyway. And it just kind of concluded, this is not the lifestyle that I want to live. And, um, I think, you know, there's a lot of good, important work that we can be doing at home. So I kind of did this mental shift in terms of where I thought I was going to be taking my career, came back and had an opportunity to, to start up with the forest service in Washington, DC. So I was joking, that's like a backwards career path. Um, you know, it looks like Jerry started in the field on a national forest, and those who aspire work their way up to D.C.

toward the end of their careers and had the chance to start out there. Fascinating experience. Met a lot of really great people who had had rich careers and turned around after two years there and did a brief stint in eastern Washington on the Colville National Forest and then went down to the Cleveland National Forest in Southern California for about four

to five years before coming out to Albuquerque. And part of your deal, did you say caves? Caves, yeah. So I'm the regional program manager for wilderness, wild sink rivers, and caves. And it's kind of an odd grouping of programs that face value. But the rationale behind it is that we have federal law that protects each of these resources. And so I'm, in essence, the specialist to protect our special places within the region. That's my job in a nutshell. What is the law that protects caves?

Like, I know, like, when you say wilderness, so as we're going to be discussing it today, and we say wilderness, like, we're talking about wilderness of the capital W, like, federally designated wilderness. we're talking about wilderness of the capital W, like federally designated wilderness. We'll get into what that is. But in wild and scenic rivers,

that's its own piece of legislation, right? When we designate generally a stretch of river, explain that and explain the cave thing and what kind of administration occurs around caves. I had no idea there was anything like that. Yeah so wilderness is actually kind of the odd one out in that bunch in the sense that it's just a broader landscape that's good that gets protected where you have rivers and caves that are discrete resources and so Wild and Sanct Rivers so the Wild and Sanct Rivers Act passed in 1968 basically allows Congress to designate stretches of free flowing. So, you know,

rivers that are free of dams and other impoundments and diversions, rivers that have high degree of water quality and what we call outstandingly remarkable values. So these really, when you look at a regional or national context, these really special values, they might be fish or wildlife species, that might be recreation, that might be scenery or geologic resources. And so there's gotta be something about that free-flowing river that has really kind of really especially unique qualities. And so we place that protection over it.

Wild and Sink Rivers Act really in a nutshell, it prohibits dam building as the biggest, most direct thing. Any kind of FERC hydroelectric type of project is outright prohibited. And then we have this mandate as managers to protect that free flowing condition to protect water quality

and protect those outstandingly remarkable values. That was 68. 68. So next year- When was the Wilderness Act? 64. So that was kind of, they're both in that era

of really significant major environmental legislation being passed in this country. And you get into the 70s and you have the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act. And so that was really the heyday of these big deals. Yeah, and then like the ESA with Nixon.

That's right. Yeah, ESA, of course. Yep, yep. And then break down the cave issue because I didn't know there was any kind of special. There's like a protective designation for caves. That's right. So there's a Federal Cave Resources Protection Act,

kind of like the Wild and Stink Rivers Act. And it basically says that, or Congress has the ability, actually, in this case, Congress doesn't have the ability, they delegate that to the agency to identify and protect significant caves. And so it's similar to Wild and Stink Rivers. It's these caves that have some special, unique value to them. Again, recreation, wildlife, scientific values. And so that law, once we designate as an agency, these caves as significant, we have to protect, we're required by law to protect those special values. Got you.

Yeah. How many stretches of river are wild and scenic rivers? Because that's all over the country. Yeah, it's all over the country. I used to fish smallmouth on one, a stretch of the Delaware River. Yeah. Which is like very you know i mean

it's houses cottages right so it's not like like wilderness is so wilderness designations like a criticism of them is that they're all high country in the west not a criticism but like when someone looks at the scope of them it feels like a very western issue because they're in these like very remote areas in the mountains, generally at higher altitudes. But then the wild and scenic rivers, man, I mean, they're all over. They plaster the East, you know? Yeah. We joke with wilderness, it's like the rock and ice, you know, back in the day where there

were no other, you know, really immediately accessible economic values. And so they were remote, undeveloped. And so a lot of the early wilderness were these kind of rock nice type of places and there are people doing good work to try to diversify the system so we have representative set of ecosystems that you know are protected as wilderness and like you said wild sink rivers um a little different all over the country off the top of my head you know because i spent all my time thinking about the southwest um i don't know the the the number of rivers designated um you know but rivers designated. But it's not whole rivers. No, it's segments. Chunks of rivers. Yeah. So we have one here in New Mexico called the Rio Chama that

designated Wild and Sink River, and it's right between two dams. Oh, is that right? Yeah. But again, in that stretch, there are no effects to the free flow. So the river is free to do its thing, meander across the landscape, go know, go through those channel formation processes and has a whole slew of outstandingly remarkable values. And so that's kind of a unique thing. People always talk about like, well, that's kind of weird. It's, you know, it's a river that's dam controlled, but you call it free flowing. And it's not about, you know, looking at the entirety of the river itself. I mean, there are very few rivers in the West that would be free-flowing for their full duration. The Gila may be in one of them. Yeah. Is there a river that is protected from

its headwaters all the way down to the mouth or confluence? Not in the Southwest. I would say, I mean, let me step back. And the reason the Wilding St. Rivers Act passed was really a response to this heyday of dam building in kind of the early and middle part of the 20th century. Like the Floyd Domini era. Exactly, the Floyd Domini era. And so there had been a lot of dams built by the time the act passed. And so, again, that's a question, stuff I should probably know, but I would hazard a guess that we might have something in Alaska. But I'm not aware of anything in the lower 48 because there was so much was so much river development and that's not to say it doesn't exist,

just not off the top of my head. But we went through so much river development before we got to that point in 68, when Congress passed that act that, um, you know, it was about protecting some of these really high value segments that we had left that, that were not yet developed. Yeah. I want to get into, I want to move on and introduce Carl, but reintroduce Carl. But I want to get into like what was going on, like why so much of this stuff came out of the 60s. Yeah. And like what was happening culturally at the time.

But Carl. Yeah. Now Carl joined us before. He's been on the show a couple times and then joined us before and told the fascinating story of the Wisconsin Super Sow. That's right. Is that what it's told the fascinating story of the Wisconsin Super Sow. That's right.

Is that what it's called? Wisconsin Super Sow. Wisconsin Super Sow. But yeah, just revive people's memories on what your story is. Yeah, so I work here in the Southwestern Regional Office. I'm the Regional Wildlife Ecologist. The Cliff Notes version of my journey to this agency is growing up in Northwest Lower Peninsula, Michigan. Doing a little fur trapping? A little bit. Getting really good at doing chores for private landowners.

And I had a plat book that I pasted pages of on the wall and took a highlighter and drew outlines around the properties where I had obtained permission to hunt, fish, camp, trap, and really didn't have easy access to public land. So I was baling hay, doing chores, splitting wood. And over time, I accumulated what in hindsight now looks a lot to me like a map of a national forest where you have little inholdings where you don't have access. Especially those Eastern national forests that are crazy on maps. Right.

And then I went to college for natural resources program. I too spent some time working overseas in China as I was working on my PhD. And through that experience, realized that we are way luckier here in this country than I had acknowledged growing up. And as I was finishing up grad school and considering different career tracks, I became increasingly interested in getting involved with our public land system. So once I wrapped up my degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I looked west of the Mississippi,

really zeroed in on states that had a very high ratio of public land to population. And my wife, who also grew up in Michigan, was interested in states where the winters weren't quite as long and gray and rugged. And so those two key criteria helped us really zero in on the Southwest and on New Mexico in particular. So we moved down here in late 2011 and started working for the USDA Forest Service on the Lincoln National Forest. And during my relatively short tenure with the organization, I've had a chance to work at our Washington office headquarters,

work at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, and now I'm based here out of the regional office. And the position covers 11 national forests between Arizona and New Mexico, and then there are also four national grasslands administered by the Cibola, and those also fall under the purview of the position I have. So anything related to wildlife monitoring on a scale that expands beyond a single forest would be something I would work on as an example. And you drew a bull moose tag in Idaho.

Man, I got to say. So one of the things, aside from a lot of public land, one of the things that drew me to New Mexico was the ability to hunt elk, mule deer, and pronghorn. Growing up in Michigan, all about whitetails. I love whitetails. Whitetail hunting's amazing. Don't get me wrong. But reading all the Western hunting magazines growing up, I was like, God, I'd love to be able to chase this diversity of big game. So I moved to New Mexico and my strategy with applying for big game tags here, you know, you get three choices in New Mexico. I put choices that are great for first and second. And then my third choice is always just please give me a tag.

So my third choice elk tag is the tag I've drawn every year. I've had an archery elk hunt every year I've been here. And then this year, 2017, I failed to draw an elk hunt every year i've been here and then this year 2017 i failed to draw an elk hunt and i was so sour you know it's like i moved west to hunt elk and now i do not have an elk tag and it turns out there is no better cure for not drawing an elk tag than to draw a moose tag yeah you know uh uh just quick thing i'll add man you hear about like the plat books when i was a kid i worked like i hunted and trapped muskegon county ottawa county nuago county and there they have township um and townships are six miles by six miles and plat books would come in township plat books or no you'd get a county but it'd be broken down and i remember going around

like i would identify i would go through plat books identify every place i wanted to where i wanted my trap lines and i would make a list on a legal pad and my old man would you know late summer every year just as a favor would get on the phone and he grew up doing sales you know because he was an insurance salesman he would get on the phone and just work that list. And I mean, he would score 90%. Like if I put a name down, he would get on the phone and right away it'd be like some, he'd find some connection to church, whatever fraternal organizations, any, something he'd find some connection. He would just check them off. And I had, yeah. And I would put that up in my little trapper area i had all those plat maps with all my like property circle and it was like yeah you'd build out a thing and that was one of the things that drew me to public land was the amount of uh

sort of administrative duties surrounding maintaining like a network of properties and then when you would look at these states that had like a bunch of public land, you realize like, my God, what a shortcut. That you just have like this, you know, this is right to go out there and be out there. And that's it. No one can tell you. As long as you're a law abiding person, no one can tell you no.

But yeah, so back to- I have a quick question, Carl. Have you stepped foot on all those forests and grasslands that you oversee now? No, I have not. Nearly all of them. But I've not yet visited the Black Kettle National Grassland, which is the farthest east most of our grasslands. But I'm tempted because reports are, the Bob White numbers are like through the roof over there. Yeah. And phenomenal turkey hunting too. So if you look at the expanse of country that include Southwestern regional administrative units, it's a ton of land and the diversity is incredible. But, you know, having worked out of

this office for a few years, it's still a pretty good feat that I've been to each of the forests. And then remember, within each of those forests, you have another level of administrative unit, the district. And I'm nowhere near having visited every district. So for example, on the Lincoln National Forest, there are three different districts. And I've been involved with projects on each of those districts. But how many districts on the Gila, Jerry? Six. Six districts. And I visited a couple of the districts on the Gila, mostly the Wilderness Ranger District,

because that's one of my favorite chunks of ground in the whole region. Yeah. Was it that the first, like, is it that, Carl, you can tell the story. Is it the first wilderness, the first thing that we now recognize as federally designated wilderness was an idea put forward by Aldo Leopold? Yeah. Is that true? It is true. And, you know, these guys.

But he wasn't calling it that then. Well, so there was an essay that he published with the title, A Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds. And Leopold was in this mode of authorship where he was pleading for a lot of different things during this kind of- He was like throwing that word around? Yeah, he had a number of them. Another one was, there's a place in Northern New Mexico, if I remember right, called Stinking

Lake. And he had a plea for a special designation of this stinking lake as a wildlife refuge for waterfowl. But this plea for wilderness hunting grounds, would you guys agree that's kind of seen as one of the key kernels that ultimately grew into the Gila wilderness? Yeah, I think so. And you read that, and he wrote that in 1924 for Outdoor Life, actually.

That's where it appeared? Yeah, yeah. And what's funny, though, it actually, at least by what I've found out, it wasn't published until after 24 when, administratively, the Gila Wilderness had already been set aside. So it wasn't designated yet, but all those early wildernesses were administratively set aside by the agency. And, you know, in there he compares, you know, he lists all of these areas that in the southwest that he thinks should be wilderness, and he talks about losing them, and he compares that to the city block in town somewhere. And there's five city blocks left. And they start building. And those blocks are disappearing.

And he talks about, shouldn't we have one left that has nothing on it? Yeah. That the kids can go play in and the weeds can grow on. So that's what he relates. The municipalities all call green space now and spend a ton of time talking about it and trying to hang on to it. So in that plea, that's what he's comparing it to. And in the Southwest, I don't know, at the time there was five or six areas

that he was talking about and they were just getting chewed up. Roads pushed into them. And here's a guy coming out of, he was born in what state? Carl doesn't like when I point out that he married his cousin, but he was born in what state? No, first of all, you don't have that right. That is

not a fact. That's not a fact? Let me correct a little history for you. He actually married a New Mexican woman, and that's a really kind of unique twist on the story. Oh, his dad? His parents were cousins. That's what it was.

So that's why you don't like when I point that out, because it's not correct. I don't like it when you point to false facts for sure so yeah he was born in burlington iowa yes born in iowa midwestern guy he's claimed by he's claimed by three places he's probably claimed he's claimed by by more than three places claimed by new mexico because it was kind of he like came of age here he had he had an epiphany here he he had a number of epiphanies here for sure yeah and then later went to Wisconsin where he wrote much of, wrote about the epiphanies he had in New Mexico and in Arizona.

And he came out to New Mexico and Arizona before there were even states. Yep. His first position was on the Apache National Force. And then kind of settled into being an old man and a public intellectual in Wisconsin and had his property where he, much of Sand County Almanac, which is sort of his seminal work, Sand County Almanac, he wrote there. And that was collected and published after his death. Yeah, yeah. His son had a big stake in helping to see that through to publication. And there was a lot of back and forth with various publishers leading up to his death at a fairly young age fighting a wildfire there.

And there is no Sand County. He died fighting a wildfire on his own property in Wisconsin. On his neighbor's property. Yep. And the county's called Sauk County. And the shack is in a, it's close to a little town called Baraboo, right on the banks of the Wisconsin River. And if you spend any time in that country, you can see where this poetic name of Sand County comes from because it is really sandy, poor soil. And he obtained that farm in a state of very poor ecological health.

It had been essentially pillaged by the previous owners, turned back over the bank. The prior owner forfeited it. And then Leopold and his family, an important point about Leopold's legacy is that his children, I think in large part due to their experiences on that piece of ground, all have been very involved conservationists in their own right and contributed very importantly to various fields of study related to ecology.

Yeah, his son became a hydrologist. Yeah, Luna. And has a quote, you probably know the quote better than me, but I think that he said, rivers are the gutters through which run the ruins of continents. Yeah. The poetry that that family have collectively been responsible for is amazing. You talk about the wordsmithing and another, one of his children in the wildlife arena, Starker Leopold, was one of his sons. And he was a phenomenal biologist in his own right as well.

So the family, you know, you could go on, Nina, Leopold, Bradley. Yeah, he practiced a certain poetics with his children's names. Yeah, oh, absolutely. He named his kids things you'd expect someone, like if you met someone in Hollywood. Well, there's reason for it. Luna, Starker. So let's talk about Luna. And my Spanish is not great, but when I first moved here just south of Albuquerque, there's a town called Los Lunas.

Okay. And when I looked at Los Lunas, I thought to myself, isn't that bad Spanish? Because Lunas is a feminine word. So shouldn't it be las lunas? Yeah. And this is the town that Leopold's wife, she had deep roots in that town. And the reason it's masculine as opposed to feminine is they're referring to the family, the lunas. Gotcha. As opposed to the feminine moon in Spanish. So, yeah, he certainly put some thought into naming his kids.

But he is claimed absolutely by the Southwest, absolutely by Wisconsin, absolutely by Iowa, and then a number of lesser known points along the way that he visited. He's an alum of the Yale School of Forestry. Yeah, the first school of forestry. Yeah, the first school of forestry. Yeah. So he's claimed by them. You've spent some time in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. As a boy growing up, Leopold spent a lot of time in the Les Cheneaux Islands, Eastern UP around Cedarville, Ketch and Perch. And if you're really interested in the history of Aldo Leopold, there's a writer by the name of Kurt Miney who did like the indisputed ultimate Leopold biography. So check out Kurt Miney's book if you really want to know the ins and outs of Leopold's.

I believe it's Aldo Leopold, His Life and Work, something along those lines. Yeah, but don't read that until you read San Conny Almanac. Oh, no, no, no. I mean, Miney's treatment is phenomenal as a biography. Leopold's work in a Sand County Almanac is poetry and poetry with an ecological twist that every hunter-angler conservationist can resonate with.

And so he, I want to get back to like when he first comes up this idea of wilderness because he was trying to sell it and you guys probably know this better he was selling it being like uh hey listen this the the piece of ground i'm talking about here the best value it could bring us is as itself and so now we talk about wilderness like when we have federally protected wilderness or federally designated wilderness, it's like everybody says like rock and ice.

But I think that he kind of knew that that was how it was going to have to work where he couldn't take some area that had been identified as being rich and easily extractable natural resources or premier grazing land and be like, hey, I got an idea. How about we designate this as wilderness?

He had to go and find something where he could say, it just isn't of value for anything but being wilderness. That's its most apparent readily available worth is it just as it is and i think that want to be like like a good strategic move probably if you look at what his long-term goal was hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers. You're irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Yeah, and this discussion about the various uses of a piece of ground i think played a lot into the the lead up to the passage of the wilderness act in 1964 and bjorn would be a phenomenal person to

speak to the the kind of wrangling that went into finally getting that law passed and also what some of the trade-offs were in terms of the language that ultimately was encapsulated in the Wilderness Act. Yeah, and when you talk about that, talk about whether people were annoyed by this at the time. Oh yeah, I mean, originally there was pretty strong pushback to the idea. And so, I mean, just for context,

the act was passed in 64, but Congress had been debating it for eight years by that point. So since the mid fifties and they wrote 66 drafts of the bill. Yeah. What would be an equivalent of that today? Man.

I know the, I'll defer to you. I, you know, in the context of my, my job right now, I'm, I'm reluctant to hazard a guess at that,

but you know, I mean, there's something I can't, I'm trying to think of something that like, cause even like, like the affordable care act, which was criticized about how slowly it moved, that went through in a year. In a year. Yeah, exactly.

So they kicked it around for eight years. Yeah. And so what happened is the first draft, you look at the main part of the act and it talks about wilderness is untrammeled, which is a word for free willed, free of restraint from mankind or humankind. It's natural. So it has these functioning intact ecosystems in the full suite of indigenous biota. It's undeveloped. And so these sort of developments of humankind are few and far between if present at all. There are outstanding opportunities for solitude or primitive and unconfined recreation. And then lastly, there are these other features of values at times. And so that was basically it in the original act.

It was this very purist sort of sense of wilderness. And again, just given the political landscape at that time, you know, you have, you know, again, the context in the middle part of the 20th century was we were chewing up natural resources at a pretty alarming and efficient rate. And public lands were really seen as a source of natural resources. So we're mining, we're cutting timber, grazing was a big deal. We're developing water resources all over the place. And so in order to get support from all of these extractive industries

and the broader public and the congressmen at the time, they had to put in some pretty significant compromises by this 66th draft that ultimately passed. And so you have this list of what are called special provisions in the act. And those include grazing where it was pre-established, can continue. It included- So back up with that one. So if someone held a grazing lease. Grazing permit. It would be grandfathered in. Exactly. Mining was another thing. I mean, mining is kind of interesting because there's a provision in the act that says any valid existing right, and that's a term for in essence a property right. So someone who has an established mining claim, that's basically a property, right? And so that can still be grandfathered in with new designations,

but the Willingness Act allowed until December 31st, 1984, so full 20 years, you know, a few months after its passage, new mining claims to be established in wilderness as another compromise. Motor boats where the use existed, and that's mainly in the boundary waters up in northern Minnesota, that kind of use was allowed to continue. But let me stop you for a minute. Yeah.

In 64, when they're getting ready to do it, were they actually throwing around specifics about what places they're thinking about? No. Was that part of the bill or was it just allowing them to? No, these uses where they existed prior to the passage of the act or subsequent designations but did the act carry with it um spots that would become wilderness oh yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely so um it was i it was 50 some instant i think it's 54 instant wildernesses all managed by the forest service so it wasn't just like giving the right to create them but was also saying and here's a list. Exactly. So we had this initial list and then the act directed.

It was kind of, it's actually an interesting history. It directed the agencies. And at that time it was Forest Service, all the incident witnesses were National Forest System lands, but also directed the Department of the Interior for the National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service as well, to basically go out inventory and recommend additional designations to Congress within the next five years. And so the Congress intended at that time that this would be a very agency-driven

process. And within, I mean, it was less than 10 years where really the public took over in this very democratic sense and worked outside the channels of the federal government to advocate for additional designations. And that's really the way that it works today is these grassroots movements and kind of on the ground collaboration among interest groups to hash out, you know, support for designations and other uses of specific federal lands for designation. But it's slowed greatly, right? In the last few years. yeah. I mean, I'd say, you know, in the last 10 years or so, it's dramatically slowed. And we had the first

Congress a handful of years ago that did not pass a single wilderness bill, you know, the two-year Congress. And so that was a testament to things really slowing down recently. As far as new designations? New designations, correct. Were the boundary waters in the initial round they were what were some uh like when the bill went through yeah what are there some examples of of places that they identified as being like like the type sites of wilderness where they were saying like here is a thing that would be a great one to start with. They like the places that were like early, like early on identified as eligible for federal

wilderness designation. And most of these had already been identified by the forest service, you know, as these, you know, like the Gila wilderness with a little w in the sense that it was administratively designated and the forest service had gone on after and so that was put in place in 1924 full 40 years before the wilderness act passed by the agency and then they went on to develop these series of regulations that prompted the agency to identify other administrative wilderness designations and primitive areas and so it was all these agency identified wildernesses and primitive areas that were designated in 64 by the act as the instant wildernesses. So the Gila was one.

We have, it's really these big, large, iconic wildernesses that we have today. So like in Arizona, the Mazatzals were another. The act says wilderness should typically be 5,000 acres or greater. There are a lot of exceptions to that. But when we look at those original wildernesses it's these big vast landscapes that were protected yeah yeah does it i almost hesitate to bring this up because it's so like

it's so kind of out there well yeah yeah as you bring it up tell them what we have a friend i'm not going to name them tell them what our friend thinks because i'd like to talk about like tell them like sort of the the the whisperings around the campfire sure about what wilderness is what will happen to wilderness and i'd like to speak to the legality of this occurring yeah his he has uh uh i don't know if it's conspiracy or not, but he has a worry. And I believe it's not just him. Obviously, like Steve said, there's like these whisperings and there's people that have this idea that whether it's just the people that manage the wilderness or the people that promote it, private organizations that promote wilderness, that there is this hidden agenda that in the end, way down the line, that eventually... Like what they're really driving for.

Yes. Is going to be a place where humans are not allowed either. That we will just have these landscapes just for the landscape and the animals that live there. So I would debunk that right away in the sense that Congress explicitly said in the original act, one of the core values of wilderness is a human use. It's opportunity for solitude or primitive and unconfined recreation. So to get out a modern society for the public in the United States, to get away from modern society, get away from the masses and engage in these kinds of primitive activities, primitive travel, hunting and angling, have freedom from all the rules and constraints of society. So, I mean, that's a core value in the act. And, you know, as managers, we're beholden to the direction that Congress- So it would take an act of Congress.

Precisely, precisely. And then I can say from a personal level, I, my job is managing. I don't manage wilderness on the ground. We have folks, wonderful, wonderful people who do that. But, you know, I provide program leadership in the region and I can speak for myself and everybody I've ever known, literally a hundred percent of folks I've known who work on wilderness management. And we all love wilderness in large part because of our personal experiences in wilderness. You know, there's certainly a whole host of other values that it brings to the table, but, um, and I, I, it's, it's pretty, um, pretty out there kind of thinking in my view. Has anybody sitting here at this table ever heard this ever, ever even heard of a group or

like even an organized group that somebody's even out there thinking that way well and actually i would say so we're in the midst of our forest planning process right now in the southwest and that's an exercise um you know per another law plan directs us to develop these land management plans um and we need to update them every so often because the world changes our our understanding of science changes we have other pressures like you know we have a change in climate right now. So we update these plans periodically. And part of the legal framework

in directing us to do that says, we should be looking at identifying, in essence, lands that are suitable for a wilderness designation to recommend to Congress. And there's all this rumor going around in the context of these discussions, these planning processes, which are very rooted in public process. You know, we want a lot of collaboration and public involvement, but people are going around saying, you're trying to close the forest to all human use. You're

locking it up. And that's fundamentally not true. And so, so a little bit illegal. Yeah, it would be, I would say, you know, we have provisions that allow us to implement discrete kind of closures. But yeah, to close, you know, all of wilderness would be counter to the act. Absolutely. Like an example of a closure would be one like fire hazard. Yeah. And that's even, yeah. So that's an example that occurs around here.

You know, when I was in Southern California, we put a closure in place because we had a superfund site due to unmanaged target shooting for decades and decades. And so people were shooting up appliances and using lead ammunition for long term in a concentrated place. And so we ended up with heavy metal levels in the soil that were dangerous. You could kick up dust and breathe in all kinds of gnarly stuff. And so we put a closure in place so that we could get in there and clean it up and get the public back in there in the future. So, I mean, those are the kinds. Usually it's public health and safety. Sometimes it's to protect a very unique, sensitive resource.

I think what's been happening a lot lately that people are freaked out about, and I know personally people that have had gates put across roads that they used to use for access, they used to drive on, and because of limited budgets, that road hasn't been able to have been kept up. And so now there's huge gully washers going right down through the middle of it.

I'm guessing that they're closing that access because the roads become dangerous. But that's not even a wilderness issue, though. No, no, no. It's not at all. But an access issue that feeds that kind of stuff. Exactly. The closing of the forest. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a fairly complicated question

in the sense that some of it is just inability to maintain our massive, massive road system. You think about most of our roads were built in the timber heyday. And we had receipts coming in from timber sales as an agency big time. So we had resources coming from our timber program that have with the industry changing just due to global economic forces are not available. And so we not only can't continue building roads like we used to, to provide access to these timber stands that were being harvested, but to maintain these roads for public safety and also natural resource protection in terms of erosion into salmon streams

in the Northwest, for example. And so that's been a part of that is really just a change in economics with regards to natural resources in this country, which has driven a change in the kinds of resources that we have available to us as an agency. And that has affected our ability to maintain our road systems in places. And then again, you think about these systems being put into place for timber harvest. We're managing land for a much broader suite of values in many cases these days. For ecosystem health being a big driver, we're doing a lot of restoration work as an agency. And so sometimes it's determined that the presence of these, I'd call legacy timber era roads on the landscape are counter to some of these efforts to provide for restoration to say, we want to defragment wildlife habitat,

for example. So there's, there's that side of the story too, I think. And then you get into the whole, there's a whole private landowner access thing, you know, in the, in the Bozeman area, if I'm not mistaken, there are whole sections of the Gallatin that are really not even accessible to the public because they're surrounded by private lands. And that's another, you know, as populations grow, we get more and more people interested in the outdoors. Landowners, in some cases,

who used to sort of allow public access have closed off access. And that's the agency, you know, we all, I can say, I mean, with a, you know, a strong degree of confidence, value and love off access. And that's the agency, you know, we all, I can say, I mean, with a strong degree of confidence, value and love public access on public lands. I mean, we work for the public, the American public, and we manage these lands on their behalf for a whole slew of benefits that they provide.

And so when we get access being closed, and I see that differently as our closing roads at times, we're still providing access to the national forest when we entirely lose access due to public landowner decisions where we have really no right of way, for example. We hate to see that as much as the rest of the public. That being said, that's a private property owner sort of right and decision to make. You know, I think I said when I'm having this conversation with people about road closures, the thing I often bring up is that even if you look at private timber companies or large like native corporation lands in Alaska,

they'll build roads for timber extraction. So they're cutting a road for a very specific purpose, like to let out a sale, a timber sale. And the road is, it's course and purpose are designed for timber extraction. Right. The timber extraction happens. It takes how many ever decades? Sometimes you're talking almost in terms of close to a century

before you're going to go in and do, before it's viable for another harvest. And so the road was there for that purpose and it's closed because it's not serving the purpose it was viable for another harvest. And so the road was there for that purpose, and it's closed because it's not serving the purpose it was built for, and there's no sense in maintaining that road during this passage of many decades that would occur before you cut it again. And private timber companies and tribal corporations do the same exact thing with their roads.

But you oftentimes don't hear the criticisms there. There are people who just take it as a matter of course that that's not a thing, but I have this conversation all the time with people who feel that when a road gets closed on National Forest, it's like meant as a personal affront to them or somehow is positioned in their mind as like a condemnation of their activities rather than looking at like a very broad category of reasons for why this might be closed at this moment. Yeah, I mean, I can appreciate that in the sense that, I mean, I think we can all around this table agree that we've had some really formative experiences

in our lives on public lands that we treasure, we hold dear to our hearts. And folks out there, they may have their special place that they really hold near and dear to them, closed to motorized travel for these reasons that we've talked about before. And again, in a nutshell, the agency is just trying to balance the amount of resources it has available to maintain roads and these other purposes in terms of natural resource

management or restoration and make these decisions. Of course, yeah, I'm not thinking about any particular person or place, but I could see how folks feel that it hurts at a personal level because they may be not able to drive to where they used to, the place that they love. I have a follow-up to just the restrictions around wilderness and people thinking that it could become more restricted than it is now, right?

I mean, it's no bikes, it's horses, foot travel, a couple airstrips that you can land on. Steve, you said 18? Well, the Frank Church had 18. Again, you talk about like grandfathering in. So when, like the Boundary Waters. Yep. Motorized boat traffic.

Where it existed. Yeah, it was like some, I'm sure argued, like imperative to travel in the area, right? And it got grandfathered in. Yeah, I think it was just, I've traveled pretty far in the Boundary Waters in a canoe. I guess what I would say is that there was a stakeholder group of people

who had a really high value on the motorized recreation or travel they were doing. And that's probably more why I got grandfathered. Yeah. That they held it really to be very important to that group of folks as opposed to necessarily being imperative. Got you. Yeah. And so there was like flexibility within the act to do that. Right. And in the Frank church, when it became a wilderness,

they honored flights in 18 airstrips. And that's the same. I was talking about that list of exceptions that we call special provisions in the act and airstrips are one of them where aircraft landing predated wilderness designation, it could be allowed to continue. Yeah.

When again, that's, you look at the first part of the act defines wilderness, you know, these activities that are really antithetical to wilderness, you know, from the pure standpoint of the way Congress defines it. Again, we have this list of exceptions, which was what it took to pass it. And I actually want to add what was really cool in 64, the Senate was unanimous in voting for the act. Are you serious? And the House had one dissenting vote. No way.

And the rumor is, I mean, I haven't confirmed. Dude, that's like voting to go to World War II. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. Like Jeanette Rankin was. The rumor is the one dissenting vote was represented out of Texas. And he felt that it wasn't strong enough in terms of protection of the land. That's the rumor.

So it's pretty amazing. They had unanimous support in the Senate? Yeah, it's amazing bipartisanship work to get this legislation passed. Who are the people that stuck with it through the eight years? Like Lee Metcalf was involved in it. The man at the center of it. You want to jump on this, Jerry? Well, I think, you know, Zaniser for sure.

Who's that? Howard Zaniser. Yeah. So he was not in the senator house. I mean, he was the primary advocate. Right, right, yeah. He's the one really we can credit for making it happen, though. I've never even heard of this guy.

So you need to check him out. One of the stories about Zaniser. Who was he? Where did he work? Wilderness Society. At that point, I mean, at that point, early in his career, he worked for what is now

the Fish and Wildlife Service. But he ended up being the kind of primary advocate for the act. He wrote it. He was the one rewriting and rewriting the drugs. And rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. But home, it wasn't okay. But wasn't it,

um, the writer, the guy that wrote a hard rock candy, like big rock candy mountain. Um, man, no, I know you're talking about,

no, it was, it was this, this, um, this guy, Howard's on either. And so he,

you know, he had experience in the federal government. He knew the way the system worked. And then he just was this, um, unstoppable,heiser. And so he, you know, he had experience in the federal government. He knew the way the system worked. And then he just was this unstoppable, passionate advocate. And unfortunately, he passed away months before the act passed. Is that right?

Yeah. Oh, you know what I'm thinking of is Wallace Stegner. Yeah, that's right. I mean, he was an, like Stegner was an advocate. Yeah, and there were a ton of people advocating. I mean, of course.

I mean, you know, Leopold, I mean, there's a whole, whole long list of folks. I mean, Bob Marshall. Frank Church. Another, Frank Church. Edward Abbey. I mean. And know, Leopold. I mean, there's a whole long list of folks. I mean, Bob Marshall. Frank Church. Another Frank Church. Edward Abbey. I mean.

And then, because a lot of these guys wound up with, these guys wound up with wilderness areas named after him. Frank Church, Bob Marshall, Lee Metcalf. Aldo Leopold. Aldo Leopold, yep. So, but the main, I never heard of this guy. Yeah, I know. He didn't live to see its passage.

Unfortunately, he did not. But I don't get how could it be written 64 times and take eight years to get through and then get through with a unanimous vote? It reached like some level of perfection. I think it was all those compromises. You know, I talked about like the early draft. They've done so much. Yep.

Yep. So they're like, we need to get the grazing industry on board. We need to get the mining industry on board. We need to get the sort of recreational, you know, aircraft community on board. And so that's what, you know, like I said, early on in this conversation. But someone had to be pissed. Well, I guess they weren't that pissed. They were, yeah, they were rallying together all, you know, pretty nearly unanimously across the board. Knowing that it would designate

50-some wilderness areas. Right. And it was 9.1 million acres nationally at that time. But wilderness is less than 2% of the country. That's not true. So it's 5% for the full country, including Alaska. It's about 2.7% of the lower 48.

2.7% for the lower 48. And I can speak on behalf of the Forest Service. You know, I don't know the stats for the other three federal agencies that manage wilderness. But it's just about 19% of national forest system lands are designated wilderness. So, you know, it's a small proportion of the country. You know, when you look at the actual land mass, you know,

that the Forest Service manages, it's a decent chunk, just shy of 20%. I think it's 36 million acres plus. Yeah, so total in the nation, there's 765 wilderness areas. 1964, you had 9.1 million acres designated. Since 1964, it's gone from 9.1 million to 109 million so 100 million of the 109 million have come through subsequent legislation yeah and uh fairly recently our home state of michigan gained one the sleeping bear sand dunes designation coincided with the 50th

anniversary of the wilderness wilderness act in 2014. Oh, that's cool. How big is that? I know that area. Yeah. Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes. That's my backyard. That's where I grew up. 32,556 acres. So that was 2014. And you talk about the slowdown since then. There were three designated together in Idaho in 2015 and nothing since then. And New Mexico gained a wilderness and it's interesting the legal wrangling now that goes into designations. So the most recent addition for our region came through basically a rider in the National Defense Authorization Act that designated Columbine Hondo. Well, and actually in addition to that, it modified the boundary of Wheeler Peak, which was one of the original 64 wildernesses

because the mountain biking community placed such a high value on this trail opportunity in Wheeler Peak that part of the compromise in getting Columbine Hondo pushed through was to make this minor boundary modification. So they could ride mountain bikes. They could ride. They had this loop ride opportunity.

So that's what Carl said, this kind of like this this wrangling and and high level of uh compromise and when working through a whole host of issues yeah i i definitely appreciate the flexibility and being able to look at individual places but if you get like when you guys think now like what are the biggest challenges in, sort of the biggest social challenges in managing wilderness and talking about wilderness? what it is and the value that it holds for, for people, for all Americans and for, you know, whether it be, you know, through personal experience, visiting wilderness or providing wildlife habitat, fish habitat, clean air, clean water. Um, and, and so it's just a lack of awareness and understanding of, of how, how really essential it is, um, to our wellbeing as a nation. And really, if you look at the deep history, I don't want to spend a lot of time on this necessarily, unless you guys want to talk about it, but as we were, if you look at the deep history, I don't want to spend a lot of time on this necessarily,

unless you guys want to talk about it. But as we were, as we were, as you know, kind of the European Americans that came over and started spreading across North America, developing and taming the frontier, people started to look around and say like, hey, we've been pretty effective. And this notion of wilderness and wild places is really unique.

You know, when we all came from Europe, this European American community, this doesn't exist in Europe. This is something that's unique. This gritty frontier kind of wild place is unique to the American identity. And so I think that's something, part of our national history

that we don't talk about as much anymore. And again, you look at the contemporary social and ecological values of wilderness, people don't perceive that as well as I personally wish they would, just because there's a lot of demands on our attention and it's something that slips under the radar a little bit. So I think that's our biggest challenge

long-term personally, is relevance. It's funny, like the patriotism element of wilderness is something that I think it's lost. But if you go back to the 1890 U.S. Census, after they conducted the 1890 U.S. Census, they realized that there was no frontier left. Before that, they'd always looked at population levels, and they had sort of a line and they looked at population of course we settled in the east and settled the west coast and still had a chunk of ground in the middle that didn't meet the basic threshold to pull it out of the frontier and the 1890 census turned up that there was no discernible line of settlement in the country anymore and a prominent historian at the time frederick jackson

turner came out with this this influential paper and and speech he gave which was about uh a thing that quickly became known as frontier anxiety where he had argued that the American culture and American spirit and American institutions were all built around the idea of a frontier, of conflict with and engagement with wilderness, right? That we'd come out of that, that frontier spirit was integral and like shaping who we are and he pointed out that it made us different than the genteel europeans where there was no availability of land and resources for people and he pointed out that our sense of rugged individualism was built around our interactions with wilderness and like at that, we were in this interesting

spot because we were at that moment where we had within our grasp to completely destroy all vestiges of wilderness. Like it was wilderness existed at first in spite of our best efforts to get rid of it. And then we had to very quickly transition into this idea that we were going to have to have it because of our best efforts to preserve it. And that would have been like a really important moment. And figures like, like early figures like Theodore Roosevelt were impacted in a dramatic way by that, that shift in American history there. And at the time it was like, it was described as sort of a thing

you would like to preserve wilderness, to have a forest system was a thing you were doing to preserve like American integrity. I think since then there's some, some element of that history has been lost to people where they look at it now that we've come to see it different than this thing that we were going to do to salvage our you know to save our somewhat feral wild some some aspect of what made us feral and wild and american in the first place where now people look at it some people are guilty of somehow having kind of lost sight of the factors that went into our decisions to have federally managed public lands. Yeah, I mean, that's a very complex problem,

but I think it goes back, a big part of that is lack of exposure. And so there are a couple of films out there. One is, I think it's called American Values, American Wilderness, and it's this film put together that just talks to ordinary citizens about they get them out in wilderness and what does it mean to you? What's its importance to you?

And a second one called Untrammeled that our northern region up out of Missoula put together a few years ago for the 50th anniversary, where they took a group of kids out into, I think it was the Bob or one of big montana wildernesses for the first time ever and in both films these people who are being exposed to a wilderness uh for the first time are just they're astounded at like the vastness of the places and the fact that they're set aside uh for you know to to have ecological systems run their course free of human intervention and it's pretty moving um but, but it just, it really resonated with me in the sense that it's like these folks, uh, you know, and again, you know,

just a small handful in these films, you know, it's not necessarily representative of all of the United States, but first time visitors and, and, and just have these amazing emotional reactions, um, about how special these places are. And so it says to me that I think, again, as a broader community of people who are interested in conservation and public lands, that working to provide access and exposure is a really important priority, in my opinion. What about cultural engagement with people who don't realize sort of what we have?

Is that a thing you guys worry about? Do you have people in the East who live away from large tracts of federally managed public land who might not view it as pertinent to their lives? Yeah, and I think public land in the East is people look at it as, at least hunters, as a sc as discouraged because that's where all the you know you can't fight your way through the people um and but i don't i don't think they realize that you come west and and that public land is in such big swaths that that isn't an issue. You know, I think the whole wilderness concept and where we're seeing people not realizing what's out there,

I think it started a long time ago. And if you look at the late 1800s and all, when all these folks that were fighting for it, early 1900s, but if you look at the settling of the west and when that line disappeared there is no more frontier it wasn't long after that that the demographics changed of where people were living people moved to the city they weren't in the wilderness anymore um and i think it started way back there with people losing that touch with the land um and it's just grown from there a lack of engagement right now i sometimes feel that that's like one of the more that's one of

the bigger things is is getting people to realize that they sort of have a stake in this and they have an ownership because i think that even even you hear people say like you always hear like federally owned right and other people will be like well no like federally managed because it's owned by the u.s people and i feel like people don't have that stake and it's hard because it's like a learned activity when i was growing up i grew up near the manisteeee was now the manistee here on national forest we had no comprehension of how it came to be you know i told people before we just viewed it like it fell from the sky there was no idea that it was like a thing there because people fought to have it be there so there

was no like you you we used it all the time. We were always out there. But it never made this connection in your head that public lands were sort of a system that we worked for and there's people who've dedicated their lives and careers to maintaining and that it was like a thing that required some public involvement and public awareness. Because until someone goes to take something away from you, you just don't realize.

And so I hear from all kinds of people all the time. I have friends who are always expressing some skepticism about public lands management, but all of their activities occur on public land. They're not even making the connection within their own lives. You know? And that's one of the things that's most alarming to me about that's just like ongoing conversation where i was engaged in about the validity

of federal land management is his like uh historic amnesia and then also certain like personal hypocrisy about utilizing things without having any sort of sense of maintaining their well-being. Carl, what do you think about all this? I want to go back to that question you posed about the challenges that we face in terms of wilderness stewardship. And I agree wholeheartedly these cultural issues and the lack of awareness about wilderness. And I think furthermore, it applies to public lands in general, as you've described is really relevant. But a couple of things more specific to wilderness stewardship that I view as really pressing challenges right now are the trade-offs between these different elements of wilderness character. I'll give you

a couple of specifics. So one of them is the trade-off between providing for an opportunity for people to experience solitude versus people having an opportunity to experience freedom from regulation or unconfined recreation. So we've talked about the boundary waters a little bit already. Is freedom from regulation articulated anywhere? Yeah. So one of the elements of wilderness character, and help me out if I'm wrong here, Bjorn, but it's outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation. And by primitive and unconfined. Man, that seems like a, like you're a building,

you're almost purposefully creating a contradiction. Well, in some cases you are. So for example, in the boundary waters, you Waters, if you want to go on a trip in the Boundary Waters, they have a permit process. The fact that you have to apply for a permit and get approval to go in there, that dampens your ability to experience unconfined recreation because they have this whole system to get a permit. If you look out the window over here, we've got the Sandia Mountains and it's adjacent to an urban center, Albuquerque. And there are trails here. If you were to hike up, for example, the Laloos Trail right now, especially on a weekend, you might pass literally a hundred or more other hikers on that trail.

In wilderness. In wilderness. So this, you know, I don't want to overstate the disconnect between people, our culture, and wilderness areas, because the fact is we have a number of wilderness areas that are essentially getting loved to death. And that trade-off between outstanding opportunities for solitude and this primitive and unconfined recreation, that's one big challenge, especially for wildernesses that are adjacent to major metropolitan areas. So that's one. The other one that I think is a little bit more interesting and where I have a lot of mixed emotions personally

as somebody who values wild places, but also really values the indigenous biota of the landscape is this notion that you have a trade-off between the untrammeled element of wilderness character, how free the landscape is from active management and naturalness. Okay. So one of the things that Jerry can speak really well to are the trade-offs associated with trying to conserve native species in wilderness through active management. And you're conserving those native species in the interest of protecting the naturalness of the

landscape. He's done a lot of great work with Gila trout as an example. But by simply engaging in the meddling of the system, you are by default impinging on the untrammeled character. So some examples of this, you knowle royal up in lake superior yeah right that had that that island is virtually all wilderness and historically there have been predator prey dynamics between the wolf pack there and the moose population on the island had a wolf had a wolf moose for a long time and then during a severe winter wolves were able to cross a large expanse of ice on Lake Superior. Not only once.

And landed in paradise. Yeah, right. Yeah, there was food galore. But not only did that happen once, it happened fairly often to the point where the wolf pack was sustained by this regular infusion of genetic diversity from the mainland. Okay. by this regular infusion of genetic diversity from the mainland. So there's been much debate, including people like Howard Zonizer's relatives have weighed in, like descendants of Howard Zonizer, on what the right answer is. And if you ask different people who share a lot of our values, you'll get different perspectives on this. But the question has arisen in light of the fact that Lake Superior has not frozen

to the banks of Isle Royale in however many years. Should we be taking wolves from the mainland and releasing them to support the genetic diversity of the wolf pack, which is suffering as a result of low genetic diversity? So in 1964, when this act was passed and during the decades leading up to it, there was this mindset that you could draw a line around a chunk of ground, set it aside and have it be preserved and free from human manipulation. Over the course of the last 50 years, we have come to understand that there's no place on the face of this planet that has not been altered as a result of human activity. Even the very most remote place in the

most remote wilderness up in Alaska has experienced change as a result of human beings existing on the face of the earth. I mean, the last 15,000 years of human history on the landscape. Yeah. And I mean, particularly the last couple hundred years as we're burning fossil fuels. So if you think about the fact that every square inch of the planet is somehow affected by human activity, this notion that you can draw a polygon on the map and then protect it as free from human influence is a fundamental fallacy. So the question is, what's the appropriate

amount of meddling in the system we should do to respond to exogenous outside factors that are human induced? What should we be doing, for example, to protect cold water bull trout fisheries in the high country in the face of global change. So that conundrum, that trade-off is a really fascinating question. And there's a lot of active debate right now in the wilderness community around that question. Without way, I'm not asking you to weigh in on it, but can you explain as well some issues about some issues that come up surrounding the use of aircraft by state agencies doing management duties and how even those cases bring people up against the intent. Yeah, that's a perfect example.

The intent and lettering of the wilderness that's that's exactly what exactly what i'm getting at here so let's take for example helicopter used to manage bighorn sheep okay state agencies oftentimes want to take management activities to move bighorns around on the landscape helicopters are the easiest way to do that in rugged remote country. Yeah, and back up on that, because we're still, like if you look at a map of historic bighorn range

and current bighorn range, we haven't really scratched the surface on bighorn restoration. Yeah, and I think probably we never will scratch the surface very deeply because frankly, a lot of the historic bighorn range has been so altered and compromised that it will never support bighorns again. So I'm very much in favor, and I think everybody here is very much in favor of doing everything we can to restore native bighorn populations on the landscape. Yeah, where they existed historically and where they've been extirpated

as a result of human activity. But this issue hits at the heart of the trade-offs between managing for naturalness, with bighorns being a key element of the indigenous biota of a particular landscape, and a couple of the qualities of wilderness character, one certainly being untrammeled because you're taking a management action and it doesn't matter what the management action is.

If you're manipulating the system, you're degrading the untrammeled character, even if it's for the betterment of the naturalness of the landscape. And then also the undeveloped character, because when you start landing aircraft in a wilderness area that degrades the undeveloped character of of the wilderness and so in order to justify uh an activity like that you go through a process of analyzing these trade-offs and we use a minimum requirements analysis and where those words minimum requirement come from is the the word of the act it talks about a variety of uses being expressly prohibited in wilderness unless they meet the minimum require the minimum requirement for the administration of the area's wilderness the minimum necessary my brother is a he's an ecologist in Alaska. And a long time ago, we were having a conversation about the nature of doing recovery. And he was describing his job up there.

And he was saying, Alaska is still relatively so pristine that we're not really engaged in recovery work in Alaska. He described it as like in places, we're still just trying to describe what's there. And so you're afforded the luxury of a much more hands-off approach because you're not in the restorative phase yet. You're still in the phase of like what's here, what steps do we need to take to maintain it? And so natural systems can play out more. But in the lower 48, we're really engaged in saving things that are on the brink and doing recovery work,

which has to be so much more complicated than just sitting back and trying to still get your arms around what we have. They're still describing fisheries in alaska they're still describing and trying to quantify salmon runs in alaska that are bigger than any runs that we have in the lower 48 and so it's like you really like the the borders here like to what carl was saying he realized that you can pick these little spots like this little island and say it's wilderness and sort of dream up this scenario where it's protected from outside forces, but it has to be the borders are so porous just from factors that are way outside of your control. Like the fact that we haven't maintained some of our fisheries,

and now it turns up that maybe an unintended consequence, I guess it would be an intended consequence of wilderness designation, is that you sort of created a place where this fish species can exist. And maybe at the time when we were articulating the benefits of wilderness, we didn't think to include that, but it winds up being that,

not quite accidentally, but we saved something that would otherwise probably be gone. So an important point along those lines, Steve, you're spot on about the species benefits, but it's important to recognize that human beings are on that list too. And the reason we have Gila trout in the Gila wilderness is because it's these headwater, cold water systems.

And if you look at where our nation's water supply comes from, especially in the relatively dry western side of our country, a lot of our most important treasured drinking water supplies have their source in the high country. And I think one of the reasons that we still have some really great, clean, healthy water resources is the fact that we have these big chunks of uncompromised high country where that cold, clean waters bubble in forth and melting off every spring. And so you have cold water fisheries certainly benefiting. You have a whole host of other fish and wildlife species protected. And this is where the conversation about the relevance of wilderness broadly to the American people, I think really gains a lot of traction too. It's the fact that

there are direct benefits to people who will never go to the wilderness. There are direct benefits that people are experiencing right now. And they're completely ignorant of the fact that they have this linkage, oftentimes through water, through clean air, these benefits of big chunks of ecologically intact land. Yeah, the thing that's troubled me is when people, and people on my side of the argument do it too is people try to draw to apply dollar figures to things that sometimes oh go ahead well actually that's something i wanted to interject about to talk about because we haven't really spent any time talking about why would we forego the most efficient tool in wilderness like a helicopter um in which we can't authorize as jerry was talking about and we we did use helicopters determined it was the minimum necessary to do the gila trout salvage following the fire and we've done some follow-up helicopter work to reintroduce them

as conditions have improved but the the reason um for we we use these primitive skills we emphasize these primitive skills that's one thing in this untrammeled quality where we're trying to be hands-off and let nature run its course. That's a pretty unique approach for a federal land management agency to say, let the ecosystem manage itself, ideally. And the reason, can we talk about why that is? I mean, I think that's an important context here for the public who kind of wonders what we're doing with wilderness or thinks it's hands-off. So that untrammeled quality came about through these series of lessons where we as managers had the best of intentions, thought we were doing the right thing

using the most up-to-date science we had available at the time. And we proved to ourselves later that we really didn't know much about the system. And in fact, our work in the best of intentions was actually hugely detrimental to the ecosystem. So an early example of that in Leopold's era is these efforts by the federal government in predator control, you know, to enhance game species and provide for, you know, improved grazing resources. And, you know, weopold writes about in the Southwest, this extirpation of predators leading to booming

deer populations and, you know, vegetation being denuded and, and, uh, starvation events. Yeah. That was one of his tasks, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. He was, I mean, he, he has the story about the wolf with the green fire in her eyes that occurred on the Apache sick reefs national forest. Um, and it was a kind of a, yeah, an aha moment for him in his growing ecological awareness. And so again, back in the day, we thought this was the right thing to be doing. And we had some pretty, that was a case where we had some pretty rapid evident consequences from that line of work where we had, you know, a game species starving. We've seen in follow-up, you know, our understanding of actual ecological systems has continued

to improve, like with the reintroduction of actual ecological systems has continued to improve, like with the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone, totally changed predator-prey dynamics, you know, where you had an absence of this keystone predator and changed ecological conditions as a result as the wolves got reestablished. So that's an example of why we have

this untrammeled quality of wilderness, you know, why Sennheiser and other thinkers, you know, Leopold's land ethic contributed to that. The intelligent or the sign of an intelligent tinker is to not throw away all the pieces, right? So we, you know, we, we may not ever know at all, given the complexity of these ecosystems. And so the untrammeled quality, I describe it as in essence, a small insurance policy to have some of these landscapes, uh, left, you know, in North America, or at least the United States, 5% of the United States where we're trying to let nature run its course

because we may not know it all, right? Another good example here in the Southwest as we're looking out the window at some smoke right now too is a hundred year history of suppressing wildfire from the landscape and thinking that that was the best thing we could be doing for the national forests, you know, from their inception, keeping fire off the ground. And now we're doing

everything we can, like Jerry mentioned, to encourage these naturally ignited wildfires to burn. And we acknowledge the fact that fire is a key element of these systems. Some of our forest types here in the Southwest evolved in the face of fires that burned somewhere in the neighborhood of every five to 30 years or so and we've got chunks of ground here including that mountain out the window that haven't burned for over 100 years so and when those places go they tend to go in a catastrophic way yeah so you go from high high frequency fires that burn at a low severity so fires that burn at a low severity, so fires that burn often but consume a lot of leaf litter, fine fuels, they burn across the surface of the forest. In the absence of those fires, you get a lot of fuel

building up so that when there is a fire, it could be on the order of hundreds of thousands of acres burning at very high severity where even mature trees are eliminated. So Bjorn's making a really important point here that, you know, as an ecologist, I often contemplate, what is it 100 years from now that they're going to be looking back at our generation and going, you idiots. Like, what were you thinking? Because hindsight's 20-20. Like, what will be the putting cigarettes in people's C-rations?

Exactly. Of the future yeah yeah it's a it's a it's a good question so what do you think it will be fire suppression i think we already kind of know that one man you don't have to answer i got some ideas you got some ideas of what we might later realize were big mistakes you You don't have to give them to me. Think about it. I'm going to go back into the thing I want to talk about. The dollar figure thing. I find that people often want landscapes to

justify themselves constantly financially. To be where people look at something and like, what value is it bringing us or me right now and that's inspired some some thinkers and some wilderness advocates to be like okay um let's play this game and let's start assigning dollar values to clean air and clean water um it's an interesting concept. And on one hand,

it makes me uneasy because I'm like, but I don't think everything in the world needs to justify itself financially all the time. Like when I wake up in the morning and my kids are, my three kids are waking up and they climb into bed with me and my wife, I don't look at them and be like, how are you going to justify your existence today financially to me? Right? Because some things are bigger and better and more important than that. And so I do struggle a little bit with people feeling that it's necessary, but it is a really interesting idea that we would start looking in the West or across the country at what dollar value is there to place on sources of clean air and clean water. And I don't even think people have really even probably haven't made much progress in this

because it's such a huge idea and difficult to quantify. But I wonder if that in the end will in some way be something that helps people realize the importance of wild landscapes in this country. And when we do have that more, when we do take a more holistic approach to looking at natural systems. Yeah. The whole ecosystem services conversation. I mean, a quick example, you know, I was in Southern California before coming out here and growing population, changing climate, stress on aquifers, so less water available. And San Diego County is building a new desal plant. And you talk about the billions and billions of dollars it's going to take to

build that thing and then operate it in the long term so that we can have fresh, clean water, you know, out of the ocean. Were we to invest in, you know, protecting our lands or where we still have intact ecosystems that provide clean water, that's a huge... We're avoiding a huge economic cost. I think it's a hugely relevant conversation. I get you that we're at a place where

we've had to really craft these complex analyses and arguments about the dollar worth of these ecosystem services, but that's just where we're at. But it wasn't part of the language in 1964. Absolutely not, no. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps

that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing

on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com

slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. What did 100 senators, in 1964 what were a hundred senators voting from an emotional standpoint in some way it had to have been it couldn't have been a matter of like practicality you don't know yeah no i mean i i'm not i'm not able to get into their heads i mean i think again you know folks saw the value and we were, again, look at the historical context, right? I mean, we, our natural resource economy and extraction was booming. We had this also kind

of parallel boom in tourism and outdoor recreation, you know, look at the national parks, we're building lodges and roads and the Forest Service was trying to, you know, keep up with them in terms of, you know, post-World War II, people want to get out and enjoy their public lands. And so we were massively developing resources and lands parallel from the extraction of natural resources to grow our economy. And then they get people outdoors. And so I think, again, you get to this thinking about the role of the frontier

and taming the frontier in American history and as an American identity. I think, I mean, just this pace of all of a sudden booming pace of natural resource development, I think was pretty alarming to folks. And that's what, you know, really, I think galvanized by the middle of the 20th century, galvanized the public and their elected representatives to do something about it. Yeah. Or you could look at the time and be like, we're rolling, we're going to keep rolling, but let's sort of put a built-in cap on how far this might go.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think it's worth noting, though, that the economic arguments have been there all along, getting back to Leopold's stance that these were the landscapes that had very little value otherwise. And here's a Leopold quote that kind of agrees with you and kind of disagrees with you. Hey man, I'm open to that. Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health

than they will to its pocketbook. And to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us. So he's saying these landscapes aren't really that valuable financially anyway. And if we treat them as if they do, we'll be negating these other inherent intrinsic values. So the economics have been there all along, but I think there is utility. And I like the comparison to the kids greeting you in the morning in terms of trying to weigh everything in dollars and cents. There's danger in attempting that. I don't mean to say that.

I mean, there's danger in thinking that just as a life philosophy, I think there's danger in thinking that every aspect of our lives and society and humanity is a dollar figure. wildlife and public lands on that list, along with my family, along with my relationships with friends. I mean, you can't put dollar figures on that stuff. The stuff that we hold most dearly is indescribable in terms of dollars and cents. And yet, when we have to have conversations about the value of these places, there are a lot of ways to argue in terms of dollars and cents. So you feel like bring it on. I'll talk to you about dollars. the value of these places, there are a lot of ways to argue in terms of dollars and cents. So you feel like bring it on. I'll talk to you about dollars.

So yeah, outdoor recreation. Let's chat about that for a second. $887 billion a year, 7.6 million jobs in the USA from outdoor recreation. You take away public lands. What does that mean in terms of jobs and in terms of the economic engine? There's a powerful one. Think about the ecosystem services, clean air, clean water. Hard to put a dollar figure on, but there are people, there are professors who make six-figure salaries thinking about how to do that. So you can make those arguments. But I agree with the fundamental notion that there are some things of such great importance to us as individuals that they defy economics but bring it on if you want to chat in that language yeah no i do notice that in that you see a high level of engagement with some businesses that are involved in the outdoor economy where

they hear some of the murmurings that we're dealing with politically and they're like hey man you are uh fixing to be like infringing on my business yeah here because i'm in the outdoor business and if we're going to talk about business friendly to me that means public access on land because that's my client base so it is i do man i welcome the input yeah so there's one arena that we haven't touched on about wilderness that I think would be of particular interest to a man of your reading tendencies and general conversation points. And that is the cast of characters that we have stemming from the southwestern wild country at the turn of the last century. Some of the mountain men who came into their own in landscapes on the Gila. And there's some stories around the last few grizzly bears in the southwest and some of these mountain men of the late 1800s, early 1900s

in the landscapes we've been talking about, particularly around the Gila, that you need to add to your reading list i will characters like ben lilly they haven't heard of nat straw you hear that guy no how about uh bear more another dude you got to check out ben lilly this guy from the age of 55 to 70 so a 15 year period ben lilly is claimed to have hunted every single day except for sundays for 15 years it's estimated that down in the gila country he was responsible for killing somewhere between 600 and a thousand mountain lions really not with how over his lifetime with hounds and along the hounds front front, there was one particular hound he had named Crook. And on the box in which Ben Lilly buried his treasured dog, Crook, he wrote,

Here lies Crook, a bear and lion dog that helped kill 210 bear and 426 lion since 1914, a period of 11 years, owned by B.ly and that uh that bear that dog's buried somewhere near sapio creek down in jerry's neck of the woods in the gila country so this guy he literally lived outdoors and um man some destructive fellas though so that that's it yeah you could get away with that's that's exactly point. It's like in some ways you can look back at the woodcraft. Yeah. And you talk about having like the hunting bug to the point that it gets to be a disease that you're hunting like six days out of the week for 15 years. That's the hunting bug there.

When you're talking about the figures that extirpated wildlife during the unregulated years. On one hand, I always look at them in two ways. On one hand, I'm like, you know, sort of a even at the time would have been regarded by many people as a morally grotesque figure. But the outside authorities account for like, it's not easy to find that stuff.

And the level of woodsmanship. And the age of 55 to 70 years old. Yeah, like Boone killed 13 bears before he ate breakfast one day. And it's like, that's no easy feat for anyone. Right. Yeah. And it is tempting to venerate the woodcraft that it takes to accomplish something like that. But if you start looking into the folks who were actively pursuing predators in Southwest New Mexico, Eastern Arizona,

during that timeframe that these species were extirpated, and by these species, I'm talking, you know, the last grizzlies being killed, Mexican wolves being eliminated, you could probably narrow the bulk of that mortality down to like a handful of folks. And they approached their work with almost like a biblical fever in terms of how they hunted these species. And if you read some of their journals, you know, they were, it was very much like a good versus evil mindset that they were in to cleanse the landscape of

these predators. And thinking about grizzlies, one of the quotes that I loved was along the lines of, you'll hear people say that bears and men are inherently good and not looking to get in trouble, but you don't have to go far to find exceptions. When did the last grizzly vanish out of New Mexico? I'm not sure out of New Mexico, out of Arizona. So like this kind of chunk of wild country on the border of Arizona, New Mexico, the last one was on Escudilla mountain. And there's an essay in a sand County almanac by Leopold titled Escudilla. And that was in the mid 1930s that that bear was killed. Um, and that essay, it's, uh, it's a, a beautiful Testament to the bear and one of the, and to the mountain. And one of the, one of my favorite quotes, I'm grabbing my copy here right now, because Leopold took issue with the fact that this bear was killed in June.

Right. And here's what he said. The trapper had packed his mule and headed for Eskadilla. In a month he was back, his mule staggering under a heavy hide. There was only one barn in town big enough to dry it on. He had tried traps, poison, and all his usual wiles to no avail then he had erected a set gun in a defile through which only the bear could pass and waited the last grizzly walked into the string and shot himself it was june the pelt was foul patchy and worthless it seemed to us rather an insult to deny the last grizzly the chance to leave a good pelt as a memorial to his race. All he left was a skull in the National Museum and a quarrel among scientists over the Latin name of the skull. Really?

Man. You guys got any last thoughts besides that? I have to ask a still, I have a last thought question still about the wilderness thing just so that we can appease all my friends' worries. You're going to dig into the conspiracy theories again? Yeah, because the other question that comes up is that if it's all primitive and at what point are they going to say you can't use modern firearms anymore in the wilderness? I think that's maybe not even really the question that needs to be answered,

but just answer it to me. You already said it, that it would take an act of Congress to make any of these changes. That's ridiculous because in 1964, it's not 1764. You had rifled barrels. These guys were shooting 270s. No, I know, but it's a mechanized piece of equipment, right? Let me go back. No, it's not.

Motorized and wheeled conveyances. Yeah, so the act in this listing of prohibited uses talks about landing of aircraft, motor vehicles, motorized equipment, and mechanized transportation, mechanized transport. So these wheeled vehicles or sailboats, anything that allows one to travel or to carry goods via mechanical advantage. So a firearm doesn't fall within any of those categories. So again, you go back to the act and that's our guidance as

the four wilderness managing agencies. And we have no legal basis to ever even entertain something like that. Excellent. That's exactly what I needed to hear. Are you emailing somebody right now about this? No, no, no, no. This is from a recent conversation I had, but that's exactly what needed to be stated. That's awesome. Thank you. You know, in Joan Didion's book,

she wrote two books about the 60s. One was called The White Album and one was called Slouching Towards Bethlehem. And I think it was in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which was written in the pre-internet age. Okay, so the internet wasn't even here yet. But in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she's talking about people

who live in an intellectual fantasy land and she describes it like that that we have so much and she again pre-internet which some we have there's so much information out there and there's so much like factual information out there that people get overwhelmed by the duties that they would have to inform themselves about certain issues. And it's such an overwhelming, daunting task to really go out and find out the truth of a matter. That you just kind of get to a place where you're like, screw it. It's a lot easier just to listen to what my buddy at the bar said because that saves me that gives me this thing where i feel like i know the real story without having to do any of the

work of finding out like what actually is going on and i think that that is only be it's like only become worse as the amount of information has increased. People's tendency to retreat from information has increased. Because it's hard to go find out, like, to get a nuanced perspective on things. It's just so much easier to be like, yeah, well, what Bob told me. That ain't what Bob said. So kind of along those lines I mean still in the mode of closing thoughts

I mean I just wanted to share that oh we dragged the closers on go ahead yeah that's cool I know everyone around this table values fish, wildlife, wilderness and other wild lands and these experiences that you can have and you know I feel like

I'm a new hunter we didn't't talk about that. Started last year in earnest. Grew up in Seattle, like I said, running around public lands. I joke around that I'm like the long haired, you know, for you guys can't see me on the podcast. I'm like a long haired, big Southwest haircut, granola eating, you know, Seattleite wilderness guy. But recently, I mean, through my upbringing in that context and value on local food where you know where it comes from and you have ethics about the wellbeing of any kind of animal products that you eat, hunting was a natural fit for me.

And so I make friends with guys like Jerry and Carl who I know value, they span these kind of traditional communities like the hunters and anglers and the wilderness people. So I'm pleased, and I know the two of you are the same, pleased to have a company like that. But there's still a ton of work to be done where we share. I look at my friends who don't know as much as about wilderness who value hunting, my wilderness friends who are not hunters and anglers,

and you look at their value systems and there's far more overlap in common value than difference. You know, there are going to be some minor differences. And so my closing thought as a person who cares deeply about, you know, wilderness, wild places, ecosystems, and biodiversity is for folks to get out of their comfort zones, get out of their communities and where they don't have these established relationships, you know, with the quote other side, you know, build those relationships or get out and give back to your public lands, volunteer for one of your, your national forests and in some kind of stewardship activity, get involved with, you know, I'm going to speak on, on behalf of the wilderness community. You know, we have organizations like the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance

who do, they, they do advocacy, which we don't do in the government, but they also have a stewardship program. They're helping us take care of these wild places, keeping them natural, keeping them wild, get engaged. And they've actually done a great job in working with the backcountry hunters and anglers and New Mexico Wildlife Federation to find and sort of, you know, act upon that common value system. But I think there's a lot more really fruitful work to be done on behalf of public lands and acknowledging we all have a lot of interests in common to continue building those relationships, you know, kind of outside of our traditional communities. So that's something that I, you know, strikes me as sort of a, again, a long-term sort of a part of the wilderness community that's newer to the hunting and angling community. Yeah, my allegiance, my lifelong allegiance to hunting and fishing is what delivered me into wilderness advocacy.

It wasn't the other way around. it was like my question all the time is like when faced with an issue i usually ask myself um what's best for hunters and fishermen and wildlife you know that's like my guiding principle on things that pertain to that space and it was in asking myself that question all the time that I came to be a proponent and advocate for wilderness. I would flip it around though and say, what's best for wilderness? And there are certainly multiple things, but hunters and anglers, people who get out, enjoy,

take advantage of these wild places and will turn around and advocate for their stewardship. And so I'd say it's a two-way street. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone else? I got a couple thoughts. Please.

I'll throw at you. So first of all, I think, you know, these two guys, Bjorn and Jerry, are a really interesting kind of pair, the direction that took them into this line of work. If you compare the process by which Jerry came aboard with Federal Land Management Agency to that of Bjorn, you got a rural guy, an urban guy, but both of them very passionate about the public land system. And our agency and the folks who work for other agencies at the state level, other federal land management agencies, we all tend to have a very strong relationship to the resources that we manage. And I think there's a tendency when you're talking about a big organization like the Forest Service has more than 30,000 employees, it becomes kind of faceless. For sure.

It's just this big, mysterious organization. But I think it's important for people to realize that a lot of the folks working in this outfit and others, again, at the state and federal level, are coming into these jobs from a place of deep passion and reverence over the resources that we're managing on behalf of the public. And we share a lot of the same motivations and passions, even though we come from a lot of different directions like Bjorn and Jerry. And then the parting shot I'll take gets back to this question you asked about the biggest threats that we face in the long run here. And I'm just going to speak about this country because I think there are some challenges we face as a global community that are very pressing as well.

Before I say that, I want to back up, just clarify, because you're saying something that's kind of blowing my mind. Are you saying you guys didn't come to work for the Forest Service for the money? Well, so let me respond to that. I will say, I think a lot, you know, people who go into natural resource management tend to be motivated primarily by things other than making millions of dollars. Yeah, it's not like going to work for Goldman. That being said, for folks out there listening who are contemplating career tracks in natural resources management,

for the young men and women who are in high school right now listening to this, there are jobs, there are career tracks available in these agencies where your quality of life can be phenomenal. And when you get up and go to work and you're doing a job that feels like important work and it resonates with you on a personal level, you have a form of wealth that few people on the face of this planet can lay claim to. To feel like the work that you're doing is important and you get up wanting to go in and contribute is something very few people experience. So if you think that's something you might want to do. I did not mean that as a hack.

I just meant that, and I'm talking about relatives of mine and my dearest friends. It's like adventure, right? A sense of adventure, a sense of wanting to see new things, a sense of wanting to do public service, a sense of wanting to find a way to have a life that has a strong outdoor element. These more than other factors seem to bring people to public service in land management agencies. I didn't mean to take me the wrong way. I just want people to know, these agencies, state agencies, federal agencies, we need people coming into our doors, into public service careers who embody what we're talking about, that passion for the resource. And that

being said, you know, the salaries are very competitive. If you're in this line of work, I feel very thankful for every aspect of the job I'm in and have a comfortable lifestyle, very comfortable lifestyle. So along these lines, I've got and have a comfortable lifestyle, very comfortable lifestyle. So along these lines, I've got a TR quote for you, Steve. Far and away, the best prize that life has to offer is working hard at work worth doing. The best prize that life has to offer. And I feel like the work that Jerry, Bjorn, I, and 30 some thousand other people in this outfit are doing. We're working hard at work worth doing, and we're doing it for the public. And that's a really sweet thing to be doing as a professional. And then getting back to your question about the biggest challenges, like what do I see as kind of the existential threats to our culture and how it relates to wilderness. We talked a lot about the

rugged individualism and this notion of self-reliance and how wilderness has played into our history and our ethos as an American culture. And I'm speaking personally right now, but I feel like our increasingly tame existence as a species is inherently a threat to our wellbeing. And I mean, in terms of our mental and physical wellbeing, and I mean, in terms of our ecological awareness and literacy. So if we have places where people can immerse themselves in a natural setting and become acutely attuned to our relationship with and dependence upon the natural world, that translates into a whole host of behaviors that I think are imperative for our persistence on a healthy planet. Yeah. Just relevancy and engagement.

Yeah. So the big threat to summarize, our lifestyles are becoming too tame. Wilderness, in contrast to the normal routine of an American's life now in this era, is an opportunity to escape that tameness, to be humbled, to experience humility, to be really uncomfortable sometimes, to be challenged. And all the opportunities for recreation, hunting, fishing, et cetera, feed right into that. But the key ingredient is having those places on the map where you have

an escape and most countries around the world do not have that at their ready disposal the way that we do yeah i once heard wilderness described as the nation's proving grounds and uh that that resonated with me because at the time that I discovered it, it served that purpose. I mean, it gave shape to my life. That it, Yanni? I was just going to say a nice closing thought, but yeah, that wilderness is a set place

where you can go and you can really feel how small you are in the universe. You go there and you're humbled and you just realize that environment doesn't really care about you. My brother always talks about how much he likes it because he likes how scared it makes him feel all the time. Fear is an important emotion that I experience for sure

that I would add it to Carl's list. What's the Leopold quote, man? Poor is the life that achieves freedom from fear, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, man. Laying in bed at night, just waiting for that old bear to get you. That's good for you.

I'm glad I shall never be young without wild places to be young in. Yeah. Gone all day. All right. Thank you. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this.

OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.