The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 090: The State of the Union

Episode Date: November 13, 2017

Steven Rinella talks with Whit Fosburgh of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: regional conservation issues around the United States; America's environmental grade as a nation; the threats to native forests; what's up with the Farm Bill?; water quality issues of the Southeast; dead zones; chipping away at the feds; wildfire outlook; Alaska's Pebble Mine, and why it won't die; The Land and Water Conservation Fund, the Clean Water Act, and the Antiquities Act; Zinke's Monuments; funding for conservation; trafficking in life and death; how to ensure a conservation legacy; 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. Down to our main thing uh what i have heard i feel like i've even heard you say your last name differently on different occasions that's probably not true i hope not so fosberg so you do do the z yep most people probably say fosberg yeah because you know sometimes you get the s and sometimes yeah so with fosberg. I respond to both. You do? Yeah. You don't correct? No.

You just roll with it. Maybe that's why I feel like I hear different versions of it. Yeah. You've been with Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership for some time. Seven plus years, 2010. So from that perspective, and if you right now had to grade us, if you had to grade us as a nation at this very moment, not the history and all that,

but just like this very moment as a nation, how we're doing with wildlife and wildlands conservation, what would the grade be? Pretty good. Really? Actually, it would be, yeah, because, you know. Oh, geez, let's just put these microphones down. Yeah, yeah.

Nothing exciting to talk about. Think about where we are compared to any place else in the world. Okay. And it may not be as good as we want it to be, and it may be sliding a little bit right now. But in the big scheme of things, you know, we manage wildlife better than any other nation in the world. We've got more public lands to hunt and fish and play on than any other nation in the world. Our water is cleaner. Our air is cleaner.

So, I mean, there's a lot to be thankful of. I mean, people always look at the dark side and think that, you know, climate change, think, you know, the public land development, you know, whatever the issue is that the sky is falling. But, and we can certainly, you know, drift back from where we've been, but let's not lose the fact that we got something great here. In my better moments, I find myself telling people that you live in the good old days right now. I'll tell hunters and fishermen that, because I'm like, the thing you want to imagine

is you may look at your dad, right? And be like, oh, it's not as good as, but. Nonsense. Yeah, it's way better than what my dad. It's way better. My dad came into hunting coming out of World War II in the 40s, and it is way better. Way better.

I mean, you think about back at the time when, you know, Theodore Roosevelt created the modern conservation system. You know, there were barely any whitetail deer left. There were almost no black bears. You know, elk were a fraction of what they are today. Bison were basically decimated. I never saw a wild turkey growing up in upstate New York until I was in my 30s, and I'm 55 now.

So, I mean, we have things today that we never had before. Now, there are some big challenges, but we got a lot of good stuff. What I want to do mainly is sort of, one, I want to imagine like a stroll around the country and hear from you what things you're looking at, what things you're concerned about. You know, from just sort of, like I said,

just imagine like a, however you want to do it, like an east to west or a circular walk around the country. And then I want to ask you just about some specific issues that are big issues that are just things that seem to never go away. Which of those do you want to first do? Well, why don't we do the stroll across the country? And we'll do east to west. I think that there are some pretty significant issues that we're facing in the east, and we talked about some of them at dinner.

Things like on the upper Delaware system, the invasive knotweed that's coming in there just changed that entire landscape. So we sort of take invasive species for granted sometimes. You have things like in my upstate New York, there's a beach blight that's killing all the mature beech, and pretty much all the mature beech are gone. But it doesn't kill them enough to get rid of it altogether.

Instead, you have these immature young beech coming up every place, and the deer don't like them, and they out-compete all the other hardwoods. Deer don't like them because they're not producing mast. Well, they don't produce mast, and they don't eat the buds. I mean, they will if they're starving, but they like everything else better. So we're having this sort of conversion of our forests in the northeast to this beach, diseased, immature beach monoculture. And the only way you're going to deal with it is to get in there and actively manage it. And we're not doing much of that.

The Adirondacks where I hunt, much of that is forever wild. It hasn't been cut since the 1880s. And, you know, which is beautiful and it makes for a really cool habitat and sort of the mosaic of private land and public land. But the downside is over time, those forests are convert. And when they do convert, you're going to have this immature beach, you know, mess that comes up that's not ecologically rich in any way. And we're going to have to deal with that. So you have these forest management long-term, and they really relate to these invasive pests that have come in that are

changing the ecosystem up there. We spend more time talking about non-natives and invasives. Oh, yeah. It's just like. Everything is under assault. I think the only tree in the Northeast that does not have some sort of invasive parasite coming is a red maple. And, you know, everything else, we're losing our ash forest because the emerald ash borer, you know, there's a hemlock, you know, the woody adelphia or whatever it is,

you have a white pine blister rust, you know, so you have these things which have come over from Asia or Europe or, you know, species have evolved with it. But over here, we haven't. And so it's going to have big impacts. And so I think that's one of the challenges we're seeing in the Northeast. If you move a little bit further south... Well, let's back up to that one for a minute just because is it known,

like, is there a thing we could do if we had the motivation and money to do it? Oh, sure. I mean, one is, you know, a lot of it you don't have to deal with right now because it's when the forests start to convert. That's when we're going to have the problem. But we have a property up there where we hunt. It's been in the family since the 1800s.

And it's about 5,000 acres. And a bunch of the families own it together. But we do a lot of timber harvest there. But we are basically, anytime we're cutting beach, and we're cutting a lot of beach, we're hitting it with herbicides afterwards to try to knock it down and give the other hardwoods,

the other softwoods, a chance to come up. And we're having some pretty good success with that. And there's a lot of research going on at Syracuse and Cornell and some of the other institutions in New York about how to deal with this. But everyone hopes that over time, you'll have sort of the beach will figure out how to deal with this themselves. But that

hasn't happened yet. You know, same thing with, you know, chestnut, which was once the predominant hardwood in the eastern United States. You know, they're gone. And, you know, we're probably never going to get them back. Yeah, there's been a lot of research done. There's a chestnut foundation that's developed what appears to be a resistant strain, but you're just never going to have it the way it was in the old days. So I think the forest management, the invasive species issues is a huge one in the Northeast. And obviously you have a sprawl equation there. There are so many people and it's just tougher and tougher to get outside and find places to hunt and fish. I mean, one of the exciting things is in the Farm Bill, there's a program called the Voluntary Public Access Habitat Improvement Program. And it's also known as Open

Fields. And it essentially pays landowners, private landowners, to open up their properties for public hunting and fishing. And a lot of that was sort of started in places like Kansas, in the Midwest, Montana, where they have pretty aggressive walk-in programs, the same thing. But since the Farm Bill program started, it's encouraged states like Connecticut, Montana, where they have pretty aggressive walk-in programs, the same thing. But since the Farm Bill program started, it's encouraged states like Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania to create those programs, which is great because now those are all state areas that have, you know, it's a real struggle

to find public lands in those places. Does it pay them in the form of tax incentives or does it pay them in the form of cash? Cash. So it's a competitive grant to go to the, and the states negotiate it with the landowners. And it gives them cash and it gives them a waiver of liability if somebody steps in a ditch and breaks their leg or something like that. So the state assumes that liability. And it's been, I mean, I think in the first Farm Bill, the 2008 Farm Bill where it was put in, it opened up about 3 million additional acres to public hunting and fishing.

It's going to be a lot more in this one because it was expanded in the 2014 Farm Bill. And so, I mean, there's some positive stuff that's happening too, but access in the Northeast is a huge deal. Yeah. Can I interrupt your walk around the country again to ask about the Farm Bill? Because I know that in looking at materials that TRCP puts out and hearing you talk in various ways, you spend a lot of time,

like conservation is very tied to the Farm Bill. You spend a lot of time talking about what's in the Farm Bill, what needs to be in the Farm Bill. How is it that the Farm Bill has such wide-reaching implications for people to hunt and fish? Well, yeah, 70% of the land in the U.S. is privately owned. And the majority of that is in agricultural production. And so that is a huge swath of land. And the farm bill is the nation's single largest conservation program. It's five or six billion dollars annual or in the, over the course of the farm bill

that goes to private landowners to do the right thing for conservation. And it's been tremendously successful. I mean, originally, a lot of these programs were created when farm prices were really bad back in the 1980s. And you needed farmers, they needed some money in order not to farm. And so things like the Conservation Reserve Program

were created at that time as a way, basically, a price support program. Well, since then, it's really become an incredibly important conservation program. So it wasn't known, the effects of CRP fields, no one was pushing that aspect of that bill for what it would do for wildlife. Some people were pushing it, sure.

Fezzes Forever, folks like that. They knew that it would be good. They knew it would be good. Even though its main goal was taking land out of production to stabilize prices. But the benefits that it had, in addition to producing a ton of pheasant and upland birds and waterfowl and things like that, is it is an incredibly important water quality program, too, because a lot of these CRP strips are along streams and ravines and these areas that are just not as productive to farm. So it has ancillary benefits with that too.

And the problem is that in the, you know, the last farm bill, the last farm bill was done in 2014 when farm prices were really high. You're talking about $7 corn, and it was just very hard for conservation programs to compete. And we were seeing, you know, millions of acres being moved out of CRP and put into row production. So the cap on CRP was reduced to 24 million acres. It had been at 36 million at one point. And now we have the exact opposite situation. Farm prices are low and farmers are clamoring to get into programs that they've, so they can, you know, have some

additional revenue so they don't have to sell off the farm or whatever. And so now we have a program that is woefully inadequate to meet the demand, whereas we couldn't fulfill. There was way more program than there was demand five years ago. So five years ago, people looked at it and they're like, well, let's take some of the money out because people don't want to use it. Right, exactly.

As though that was going to be the new normal. Right. And that money was reinvested in other programs like the Regional Conservation Partnership, People don't want to use it. Right, exactly. As though that was going to be the new normal. Right. Yeah. And, you know, so, and that money was reinvested in other programs, like the Regional Conservation Partnership programs and the other things that are sort of longer-term conservation, you know, wetlands-type programs, you know, EQIP, which does a lot of water and, you know, retrofitting of irrigation systems.

So it was, you know, the money was put into other places. But Conservation Reserve Program right now is, you know, not nearly big enough as it needs to be. So we're trying to get that back up to like 32, even up to 36 million. Who knows in the next Farm Bill. And there's people waiting in line to get it. Waiting in line. Yeah, there is, you know, any acre you open up,

people will sign up for it immediately. So, but it's just not happening. And that has to be done in the Farm Bill, but that costs a lot of money. And, but I would argue that the benefits on this, especially if you're not going to take a regulatory approach to things like clean water, you better be doubling down on the voluntary approaches, and that's the Farm Bill.

So that's going to be a challenge for our faith to come up here, but that's a national program. So even if we're doing the regional walk around the country, that program's huge in the Farm Bill and the Prairie Pothole Estates. But it's a big deal even in places like New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia. You know, they all have pretty significant agricultural economies. So it is a program that really impacts everybody. So that's the main program for private land conservation there. And it has that public access component of it too. So that's a big deal. I think if you sort of, you know, we wander down

toward the Southeast, you know, we're dealing with, you know, a lot of, you know, pretty significant water quality issues, which, you know, stem from things like, you know, too much fertilizers and pesticides on, you know, fields. But you look at the dead zones have been created off the coast of Florida. Last couple of years, we had sort of the, you know, dirty water coming out of Lake Okeechobee. And that really impacted the recreational fishing industry, both the east and the west coast of Florida. And you get down to Florida

and it's after this hurricane, especially, I mean, at some point, folks have really got to bite the bullet and do what's necessary to restore those Everglades because that is the natural sponge for that entire system. And if we don't have that working, you're going to exacerbate the flooding and the pollution problems, runoff problems that we're seeing there. And we're not just seeing it there. We're seeing record dead

zones in the Gulf of Mexico because of all the crap that's coming down the Mississippi River. So we've seen dead zones in Lake Erie. Explain a dead dead zone so a dead zone is just get too much essentially nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus in that water and it comes down and you get these algal blooms that kill off everything underneath them coming down from chemical fertilizers and animal waste yep exactly yeah i mean it also could be from you know people putting it on their lawns it could be from septic tanks i mean a lot of you know, Florida, even around the Chesapeake Bay, you know, the issue is, you know, septic tanks. So, but, you know, we have just this water quality problems, especially in the eastern part of the country, which is so much more, you know, a lot more people that we're going to have to, you know, get a handle on. And that doesn't even think about things like Flint, Michigan, where we have, you know, major

water quality problems with drinking water. Yeah. So I'd say that is a major deal. And then we even get into that sort of Midwest and the farm country, and we've talked about the Farm Bill. But that is a place where I think we really need to invest in terms of the next Farm Bill and habitat for all sorts of species, but also water quality. We move out to the West. I mean, obviously now we're talking about the public land states. And that's been a lot of our focus for the past, you know, seven years since I've been there, is sort of one knocking back this notion that for some reason we ought to be getting rid of our public lands,

either selling them off or transferring them to the states. And that was, you know, those ideas have been kicked around forever since the time of Theodore Roosevelt. But they gained some traction back in the 1980s and the sagebrush rebellion but it was kind of easy but can you stop stop on all these to explain a little bit like sure like talk about how it was how controversial it was in roosevelt's time i mean and then talk and then explain the sagebrush rebellion and then the new iteration you know so you know think about you know what roosevelt was doing and it you know and roosevelt obviously was not a guy who was shy about taking on controversy

i mean trust busting and all the rest but you know he had been out to the dakotas he had been you know around the west and and he had you had really sort of credited the wild lands of this country to make him the man that he was. And that was hunting in Maine and the Adirondacks. It was his time spent in North Dakota after his wife died. And he wanted all Americans to have that experience. And so what he did was, we had that time, we were still in the process of getting rid of public lands. We had the Homestead Act, and there was no real thought at that time of conserving them. But it was really what he saw back in New York State

when he was, even before he was governor. They created the Adirondack Park, the Catskill Park. It wasn't because just to preserve open lands. At that time, it had a lot to do with the fact that that was a drinking water system in New York City and Albany and a lot of the municipalities in New York. And they recognized this was being clear-cut and you were getting fires and huge erosion that it was impacting folks way downstream. So they created a six million acre park called the Adirondack Park in New York,

of which half of it was public and the other half was private, but then heavily regulated within the blue line, as they call it. And that became a model that Roosevelt saw could be done for the rest of the land. So at that time, you were getting the, he had gone out there, he had seen it, you were getting, Yellowstone had been created back in the 1880s.

So there was starting to be this burgeoning conservation movement to protect these special places. And Roosevelt recognized they passed the Antiquities Act back then, and he set aside 230 million acres during his presidency for the people in perpetuity. And the guys that he had to fight were the timber barons, the mining, you know, barons. I mean, it was all these sort of captains of industry who had planned on making a lot of money off these lands at some point. But, you know, basically through sheer force of personality and, you know, his political skills, he was able to accomplish that. And, you know, that sort of set the standard, you know, for, you know, what was carried on for generations.

We now have about 640 million acres of public lands in this country. A lot of that was added in when Alaska came into the nation. But it's a remarkable resource. Yeah, there was so much opposition to Roosevelt's designation of national forest. A lot of the terminology was different. We had preserves and other things and timber preserves, but there was so much opposition to what he was doing

that at one point he had a bill coming that would prohibit the president's ability to to do this and he thought about vetoing it but he knew that his veto would get overridden so there was like like it's rare to get that kind of consensus that you can override a presidential veto yep and that's how unpopular what he was doing was. Oh, amazing unpopular. And I always like to point out that they then went and carved his face into a giant mountain.

Yes, they did. So he was on to something. Yep. Well, and he was, I mean, obviously, I mean, it was controversial at the time, but I think that the legacy he created back then has been carried on and amplified by presidents ever since.

I mean, you had a tremendous amount of new parks and forests were created under FDR. And he created the whole CCC to put people back to work doing conservation projects. We had the Interstate Highway Program under Roosevelt, I mean, or Eisenhower, which really allowed people to finally

get out and see a lot of these places. And then under Johnson's administration in the 1960s, you had things like the Wilderness Act, Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, you know, which, you know, was these seminal parts of, you know, the modern, you know, conservation fabric. We get to Nixon, who, you know, probably never went outside in his whole life, but he arguably was the greatest environmental president since, you know, Roosevelt. I mean, EPA was created, Clean Water Act, NEPA, Dangerous Species Act.

All these came during Nixon's time, not because he thought it was something he was passionate about, but he saw it as a way of healing the country after Vietnam, race riots, Watergate at that time. And this was something that could bring the country together. So, I mean, that was the sort of, you know, public lands and the environment

were not a partisan issue at all at that time. Yeah, did you know the Wilderness Act in the U.S. Senate had 99 votes? Yep. The dissenting vote thought it didn't go far enough. Can you imagine? I mean, Land and Water Conservation Fund Act had basically the same vote count.

Yeah, so, I mean, these things were incredibly popular. And it wasn't until really it was sort of in the beginning in the 1980s, but the 90s got amplified and all of a sudden became partisan issues. So what happened with the sagebrush rebellion? I mean, it was Reagan sort of paid homage to it. As he was campaigning for office, you know, he's expressed support for the folks that wanted the federal government off their back. I mean, it was sort of political rhetoric for him. He ended up adding about 10 million of acres of wilderness during his tenure as president.

Yeah, that's the funny part. But, and at that time it was easy to write it off as a bunch of kooks. And then you had, you know, a little bit later you had the Shovel Brigade in Elko, where the Forest Service was going to close this road to an outhouse, and you had the locals rising up in a National Shovel Brigade to go and open the road back up. I mean, it was easy to write off this whole movement as kooky. And since then, a lot of money has gone into it.

The same people that fought Roosevelt back in the 19-teens, same industries, were back doing the same thing. But this time, it was much more sophisticated. They've been funding things like the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, to craft model legislation for states demanding that the feds turn back their lands to them. You have nonprofits created to do nothing but lobby against public lands, all funded by industry.

And so you have a much more sophisticated effort to chip away at that federal estate, which you also have starting with Reagan. In David Stockman, there was a whole theory of shrinking federal government known as starving the beast, that if you keep systematically denying the agencies the funds they need to operate, eventually you shrink government to the size,

and Grover Norquist's famous quote was, to the size where you can drown it in the bathtub. That's eloquent. Yeah. And it hasn't done a great job in terms of entitlement spending, defense spending, anything like that, but it did a pretty darn good job of cutting back the authority and the ability of the agencies to do their jobs.

And what that did is just continually breed discontent locally that the Forest Service doesn't manage this forest and we're getting these big fires, which is all true. And so I think there's, so that's been a well-orchestrated campaign to sort of keep the agencies from getting the resources they need to operate well. I mean, the Forest Service today, I think, has something like 1,800 campgrounds that are closed because they can't afford to keep them open. And you can take, you can complain all you want about the agency's priorities and they could do a better job with this and that, and that's

probably a legitimate debate to have. But the idea that they're going to do more with less, they're not. They're going to do less with less, you know, they're not. They're going to do less with less. And they have been for years. Yeah, it's a cynical approach. And, you know, there's that reason. I don't know where it ended up. I'm sure you know the answer to this. I think it was, was it 622? That was going to be the one that stripped

law enforcement. Oh, yeah. That's just the case. That's the case of just like you said, like shrinking it till you can draw it in the bathtub to strip law enforcement capabilities from the Forest Service and the case of just like you said, like shrinking it till you can draw it in the bathtub to strip law enforcement capabilities from the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Rob Bishop has another bill right now and they had a hearing on it last week. I can't remember what the title is,

but essentially what it does is turn over oil and gas permitting and development authorities to the states away from the feds. And oh, by the way, you don't have to comply with NEPA or the Endangered Species Act or the Administ away from the feds. And oh, by the way, you don't have to comply with NEPA or the Endangered Species Act or the Administrative Procedures Act.

So it essentially waives all the federal requirements. The states oversee it all, but we're the ones still paying for everything on those agencies' lands. Paying for it short-term and long-term. Right. Can we set up something where maybe if you live in those states where they let that

happen, that then like 10 or 20 years down the line when all those people want to move somewhere else that we can somehow be like, no, no, no, no, no. You're living in Utah when you let all that happen. So you don't get to come up here to Montana.

Or maybe live in... So anyway, the public lands issue Montana. Yep. Or maybe 11. Yep. Okay. Oh. So anyway, the public lands issue has been a big one. And I think that, you know, listen, you guys were, you know, Steve, you were instrumental in this sort of pushback against Jason Chaffetz and HR 621, the whole idea of just selling off lands to, quote, balance the budget. Which I feel like that idea is starting to fade, though. Oh, it is.

And it's becoming a different, now it's like, I feel like that idea is starting to fade, though. Oh, it is. And it's becoming a different, now it's like, I feel like that idea is starting to fade, and what the new idea is, is you'll be like, okay, we'll maintain the ownership structure that we have, but we'll just strip away all the protections we have for those lands. Yeah. So that they become like industry playgrounds. Right.

So you're seeing this, you know, the change in tactics now to, you know, to the chipping away at the federal authorities. And that's going to be the next battleground. In fact, we've just launched a whole new site called sportsmanscountry.org that basically the mantra is, it's not enough just to keep it public. And we

need to, and it has sort of a group of tenants that we ought to demand from our public lands. They need to be well-funded. Et cetera. I mean, the things that we know they need, it's not. They need to be well-funded, et cetera. I mean, the things that we know they need, it's not enough just to keep them public and then not give them the resources they need to manage them. That's not the way it works. 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 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. Okay, so now I'll let you continue on to other parts. I imagine you're going to want to jump over to California, maybe the desert southwest. I don't know. Yeah, you know, it's, I mean,

what we're seeing right now is all the fire stuff. And, you know, obviously California's a little bit different situation because that's mostly private lands out there. But, you know, in the northwest where you had, you Northwest, obviously you spend a lot of time in Montana, and that state burned a lot of acreage this year, 20-some-odd different major fires over the course of the summer. And we're going to be seeing probably a lot more of that. One, the climate's changing.

But two is we've just been in a poor job of managing these lands for so long that we have this big fuel burden built up that just is not sustainable. And we've been trying, and of course, that feeds right into the narrative, well, we need to go in and clear-cut them, and that's not the goal.

I mean, sure, someplace maybe you want to do that, but what we just need to do is just basic, sensible forest management, especially near that urban interface where a lot of the problems are. And again, that requires some money and there are different ways of doing it. And there are some really sort of cool models

of groups like Turkey Federation and others going in there and actually doing the sales for the Forest Service and returning what they call stewardship contracting, returning a lot of that money back into improvement of the resource. So you can get creative in this stuff. Because people don't want to spend the money preventatively. They'd rather just have catastrophic financial losses after big fires. Yeah, apparently. Yeah. So I mean, you know, cynically, again, that sort of plays into that narrative that, geez, the feds can't be trusted with any of this stuff. But the fact is that,

you know, if they were, you know, the fact is that the way we treat fire overall as a budget issue is crazy. It's the only national disaster that's not considered a national disaster. So hurricanes, tornadoes, any of that comes out of FEMA. And fire has to come out of the core agency budget. So as a result, I think in the 1990s, the agency Forrester was suspending about 17% of its

budget fighting fires. Today, it's in that 55 to 60% range, which means they literally have no money to do anything else like preventing future fires. So it's just an insane way we do this. And we may actually get that passed this year to change that. And so you have the catastrophic fires that get paid for in emergency funds so they don't have to come out of the agency's hide. But it's just insane the way we deal with this right now. I was going to ask about that. Have people always been trying to work to change that,

to turn them into... Well, I mean, it hasn't been an issue until the last 20 years when these sort of catastrophic fires really started coming down. But since then, yeah. And we thought we had a deal several times during the Obama administration that got killed the last second and largely got killed because of sort of the radical environmental community not wanting to sort of see a return to the old days of major clear cuts,

which is not what this would do at all. And because it was always sort of combined with the way you change the budgeting with some modest forest reform to make it easier to actually go in there and do some of this management. Because part of the issue, too, is that any time a timber sale is proposed, you're going to go through years of litigation before you actually cut any wood. In the meantime, a bunch of mills have already closed in the West, so it's much harder to do. So we've got to get this thing fixed, and fixed pretty fast.

And nobody wants to go back to the old days of just sort of way over harvest and the spotted owl controversies and all that. But there's a happy median in there someplace. And if you do good forest management, it's good for wildlife generally. It's good for all sorts of things know there's an area where forest fires and the public lands debate came together maybe you can touch on that real quick where

some states had looked at just ran models to see what the world would look like should all this land fall into the states. Are you familiar with this? No, I haven't seen that. And I remember some stuff came out of Wyoming where they looked at just the forest fire costs. Right. Because states need to run on a balanced budget.

Well, that's exactly right. And I don't even know whose offices came out, but someone just took a look at it and they're like, as far as us assuming control of this mass amount of federal land, thanks, but no thanks, we couldn't even pay for the firefighting. Well, I mean, you have governors like Matt Mead in Wyoming just saying, we couldn't afford to take over these lands. And people have to remember too that state lands and federal lands have very different mandates. A lot of the states, the state lands are used to maximize revenue, largely for education in the state.

And they don't have that multiple-use mandate that the federal lands do. So it would be a very different management. But the point about fire, you just couldn't pay for it. So if you're a Republican, Western governor, legislature, and all of a sudden you have a catastrophic fire or, and your projections about the oil being a hundred dollars a barrel, it's only $50 a barrel, and you're going to run a deficit. You have a couple of choices. You can either raise taxes or you can sell off an asset. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what they probably do. Yeah. The asset being the land. Yeah, exactly.

Um, okay. What's next in the walk being the land. Yeah, exactly. Okay, what's next in the walk around the country? Well, I mean, I think that you move up toward Alaska. Please, please. And I mean, obviously, you've got a lot of experience up there, but Scott Pruitt, the director of the, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has just opened up, basically given the green light to the Pebble Partnership to proceed with permitting for the Pebble Mine in Alaska,

which would be potentially the world's largest open-pit copper or gold mine right at the headwaters of the Anushagak and Kwejak Rivers, which are the most productive salmon rivers in the world. The Obama administration had sort of laid out some very high hurdles that any mine in that area would have to clear in order to get permitted. Essentially, doing a veto of that mine before it even got applied for permits. Because the company had laid out in its SEC filings what it intended to do, which was to create a massive mine up there.

And the reason it's called the Pe pebble deposit is that it's not just one deposit. It's scattered all over the place, like a bunch of little pebbles. So there's no way you go in there and do a little bitty mine. It wouldn't be economical. The only way it makes sense is to do a really big mine, which then requires really big infrastructure and require eternal mitigation because you have to create the world's, you know, probably the world's largest tailing pond. And, you know, you have to make sure that doesn't fail because if it fails, it takes out, you know, those rivers. And that would require literally mitigation and basically remediation forever. It's hard to understand who is for Pebble Mine, except for the people who stand to run the business, because it's one of those few issues

where the commercial fishing industry, hunters, recreational fishermen, the tribes, tourism, no one wants it. I mean, even the former Senator Ted Stevens, very Republican conservative Senator, you know, said that this was the wrong mind in the wrong place, which it absolutely is. So it doesn't even have the sort of traditional political allies that most development projects in Alaska do. But that has not stopped the proponents from going to the Trump administration

and getting them to very quickly, without even talking to their scientific team. And there was a great piece that CNN did on this just last week or the week before. Decided to green light the mind again. And literally not even talking to their scientific team. But the public comment period has ended just recently. That's probably not going to matter. That's not going to matter.

I mean, listen, we're going to still beat this mine. You know why it'll get beaten? Because, you go ahead, and I'll tell you why I think it'll get beaten. I'd love to hear your theory first. I think it'll get beaten because it'll become a,

it'll become maybe one of the biggest standoffs. I mean, like literally a standoff. I think that there's, people are so vested in saving that area that I think that you will see a, you will see a mass gathering of such disparate types of individuals

who are interested in wild lands and wildlife physically there on the ground i just think that like i i think that if it came down to like breaking ground i just don't think it'll happen because it has just it's just gotten i mean that area has gone from being a place that few people really knew about to becoming almost a household term. And it's one of those, I think it's going to be one of those environmental or conservation fights that really motivates people to get involved on the ground.

And I don't think it'll ever be like, oh, they beat us legally, we give up. Never. It won't be like that. No. But the problem is that it's hard to kill these mining proposals.

I mean, like zombies. Every time you think it's dead, it pops up by some other name. And we saw that in the Blackfoot in Montana, which we finally managed to kill. But it was 20 years, different mine proposals

come up there with the McDonald mine. But I think the public partnership, the conventional wisdom, what they're trying to do now is to give it enough, you know, legs, enough momentum that, you know, they can get some investors and then sell out. And because, you know, I think that there's, I think it's going to be a very hard lift for this thing to be developed.

But, you know, I think it's something we ought to try to, you know, kill once and for all now with the you know the stake through the heart yeah it was it was i try to remember the year i didn't even like i didn't have a kid yet okay my kids my oldest kids seven i didn't even have a kid yet and i was they had a thing about pebble mine um at a fundraiser for you know to fight pe fight Pebble Mine. Oh, yeah. And I remember saying then, I'm like, they'll never build this mine. What are you talking about?

And then since then, I've grown increasingly fearful. Yeah, no, I mean, when you can't kill it, then it's still alive. And it just keeps popping back up. And, you know, the consequences, you know, of it being built are just so dramatic that i don't think any of us can get complacent on this one yeah like you said the most productive salmon fishery in the world a significant portion of all salmon yep in this country come out of there oh yeah and it supports an entire economy up there. Commercial fishermen, recreational lodges, hunting industry is phenomenal around there. And it'll be totally changed if that mine goes in. And plus you don't just pop up a mine, you put in the roads, you put it,

you got to build a power plant and you got to do the tailing ponds. I mean, this is major industrial development. Yeah. And that's one of the biggest fears about the mine is, as you said, it has a large open pit. So it'll create a large lake of toxic material. Correct. In an active seismic zone. Yeah. In a

seismically active area. A lot of volcanoes right there. Yeah, those two go hand in hand. Yep. Held back by an earthen dam. Yep. I think one of the longest earthen dam held, or the longest earthen dam contained tailing ponds in the world it would become.

Yeah. I mean, of course, now the company is saying, no, no, we're just talking about a little mine. We're not talking about, ignore what we said in our SEC filings. This is going to be a little bitty mine. It's not going to cause any damage. Nobody's going to believe that.

Yeah. Except maybe Scott Pruitt. Yeah, can you talk about how much can you can you talk about Scott Pruitt? I mean, I don't know the guy. I've never met him, but everything he's done has been anti-conservation.

I mean, usually there's a certain amount of balance even if there isn't. I mean, there's a rhetorical balance. There's none now. I mean, it's all about, you know, just giving industry its, you know, green light, cutting back on regulations. Listen, nobody loves the EPA and nobody loves, you know, regulations. Nobody loves bureaucrats. But, you know, I remember as a kid as a kid, the Cuyahoga burning in Ohio. We have come so far that I don't think anybody really wants to go back to the bad old days.

But is that maybe... Sorry. No, you go ahead. I was just going to say, is that maybe why? Because we don't have a river that's on fire right now and that's why we're so complacent about it and letting something like that happen yeah no i think you're exactly right and and listen epa has done all sorts of stupid stuff over the years oh like a lot of overreaching a lot of there's some legitimate

there's some legitimate complaints but i don't know that that's ever caused to i got complaints of my wife right there's like legitimate complaints that people have, but it's like, you don't, you know? Yeah, no, it's... Burn the damn house down. Yeah, exactly right, yeah. So no, it's been really, really distressing to see. But I mean,

there are some bedrock environmental laws that still have to be, unless Congress wants to go and amend the laws, which they can't do. I mean, they could do, but they can't even pass

a new post office. You know, it's going to be very hard for Scott Pruitt to get away with a lot of this stuff. So what is it, like, I know you don't know him, and I don't know him, and I'm sure that he's absolutely convinced that he loves his family and loves his country. What is the vision, like, what is the vision

that you're pursuing? Unfettered industry and unfettered, you know, sort of capitalism. Thinking that it'll just, that they'll find a soft spot down the road and retain some semblance of clean air and clean water and wildlife and hunting and fishing resources. I guess that's the thinking.

I don't get it. I mean, sure, there are a lot of companies that do a good job out there and they're good actors and I trust some of them to do the right thing. But I also know that there is a place in this country for strong regulation because people don't always do the right thing, particularly when a lot of money is involved.

I was having a conversation with, you involved. I was having a conversation with, you mentioned, I was having a conversation with Governor Meade from Wyoming. And he was telling me something that kind of made me feel better about things. In some way, where he was like, when it comes to mineral and energy extraction in his state, he's found that like

some of the more forward thinking companies working on the ground are looking ahead, like people in the mineral extraction industry, there are some forward thinking companies that are looking ahead for environmental

issues and conservation because they're in it for the long run. And they realize that creating trouble on the ground causes a lot of problems for their business. And he was speaking particularly to sage-grouse issues because the one sure way to screw yourself for doing business on the ground in Wyoming was to push the sage grouse

down into such low numbers and habitat destruction that it would need to be listed under the Endangered Species Act. So he was talking about a smart company is going to see that problem and whatever your motivations, whether you love the bird or not, you're going to see that problem.

What's good for that bird is going to be good for our business at this point. I mean, what industry wants is certainty. I mean, responsible industry. They want to know what the rules are. They don't want it swinging back and forth every four or eight years when a new administration is in place. And you're exactly right.

And Matt Mead's right that something like the sage-grouse is a long-term play because it's not just the sage-grouse. If the sage-grouse starts going down, there are 350 other species that defend on that same ecosystem, and you're going to start to have this cascade of listings that potentially could shut down everything. Or just cause the undoing of the Dangerous Species Act. And I don't think anybody, well, some people do,

but most people really don't want that to happen. And I think that industry is, I think actually you're going to start seeing industry pushing back pretty hard against what this administration is doing on things like water and air. And I think that you're already seeing that on the climate front because the industries, I think, recognize that climate change is real. They got to do something about it. Things like the Paris Agreement were eminently reasonable and voluntary. And, you know, it does not help them

and their businesses to have, you know, say clean energy technologies, you know, coming out of China and not out of the US. So we're not going to go back to the days of, you know, West Virginia fueling the nation by coal. I mean, it's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen because, the reason it's not because of anything Barack Obama did is because, you know, gas is so much cheaper than coal now.

Natural gas. Yeah, natural gas. And so, I mean, that's the crazy thing here is we're kind of letting the tail wag the dog on a lot of those things that are being proposed. And, you know, it's not the future. I mean, we need to be looking forward, not in the rear view mirror all the time. Can we move on and can you give me, explain for people, unless you think this is boring, I don't think it is, the land,

like, the Land and Water Conservation Fund and why it's always in the news. So, 1965, there was a deal struck when oil and gas companies wanted to start developing

the outer continental shelf. So, tell me what that means. So, that's the, basically, offshore oil and gas companies wanted to start developing the outer continental shelf. And tell me what that means. So that's the basically offshore oil and gas development and which the federal government regulates. So because it's in our waters, but not owned by any. Yep, exactly. So it's the sort of, you know, three, it's outside the state waters, it's out in federal waters. And there was obviously Gulf of Mexico off California. There were a lot of areas that industry wanted to get in and develop. And the quid pro quo that was done at that time was in exchange for opening it up.

The industry agreed to pay into a fund $900 million annually that would then be used for basically developing a non-renewable resource to invest in protecting natural resources. And so that was used for land acquisition, for city parks, for basically outdoors things. Boat launches. Yep, yep. So they're like in Montana,

I think about 70% of the fishing access sites were purchased by Land and Water Conservation Fund. So it can be used for a bunch of different things. You know, obviously, you know, use it to buy in holdings in federal lands to sort of, you know, just, you know, make management easier and better. So it has, you know, a huge variety of benefits.

The problem is that Congress didn't require that money to be spent. So instead of it just being like an entitlement, something that automatically goes out after it comes in, it has to get appropriated by Congress. So only one time in the 52 years of land and water conservation fund has it been fully funded. And every other year... I'm not understanding. So basically they said the oil and gas industries pay $900 million every year into a fund for land

and water conservation. They're paying their share. They're paying their share. The problem is that instead of going out the way it had been intended by Congress, Congress raids that money for other things or deficit reduction or whatever it might be. So it's not protected in the way that,

like Pittman-Robertson money is protected. Correct, exactly. Where it has to stay on task and get spent within a window of time. Precisely. Yeah. So that is what the fight has always been, is that there was a deal cut,

but Congress has never lived up to the end of the deal. Was it just a mistake or an oversight that it didn't carry with it like a through plan? I mean, it depends on who you talk to. Probably not. I think they thought Congress at that time, listen, it depends on who you talk to. Probably not. I think they thought Congress, at that time, listen, it passed unanimously, basically.

It wasn't controversial. Everyone thought this was a good idea. I don't think there was really an intent at that time. It had to be made mandatory because who's going to fight doing this stuff? Yeah. And just the, but then things changed.

So where does it stand now? So, like, why do you always, why does it seem that you're always hearing about it? Well, it's the, you know, in terms of our community, the hunting and fishing community is probably the single most important, you know, sort of access program we have in terms of providing new access. Because, you know, those areas and there's, you know, a lot of them are used directly for, I mean, let's think about how the demographics have changed in the western United States. You have the Forest Service, say, owns all the mountaintops, and the more productive river bottoms owned by private individuals. Old days, you could knock on anybody's door, cross their land,

get to the forest, go hunting and fishing. That's changed. So you have a lot of posted signs. You have a lot of that lower lands leased. It's just shut off a whole bunch of access. So Land and Water Conservation Fund is an incredibly important tool for sort of reconnecting the public

with a lot of their public lands. And it doesn't all just outright acquisitions. It could be just, you know, buying an easement on some property that includes an access easement or includes conservation easement. And, you know, so it can be used in a lot of different ways. It can be used to, you know, maintain traditional forest management practices on forest lands. But what it does is it opens that land up to the public.

So what's not being done that needs to be done? Well, Congress needs to appropriate the money, is one. And so that's, you know, the first thing. And then there's a huge backlog of projects. So, I mean, if Congress were ever to, you know, kick out, you know, $900 million, And so that's the first thing. And then there's a huge backlog of projects. So if Congress were ever to kick out $900 million, like they're supposed to, or even $450 million, there are plenty of projects in the queue that are not controversial.

They're just waiting to be done. And it's also things like historic battlefields and things like that that can be purchased with this. So what needs to happen is that Congress needs to, I mean, I think at this point it needs to go off budget and maybe not the full, you know, Mike Simpson has got a bill in the House

that would basically take $450 million off budget so it automatically goes to the agencies every year for these programs. And then the other $450 million is dedicated to basically the maintenance backlog we have on our national parks, national forests, BLM lands, refuges. And one of these bills would make it take care of itself for some number of years. Yeah, I mean, it depends on the way the bill is written. It could be forever. It could be

five years. It could be 10 years. I think Simpsons is a 10-year program, if I recall. Because there was previously a long, there was like a long quiet period, right? But then it expired. Yeah, so it expired two years ago. Congress did a three-year reauthorization. Okay, that's why. When I said why you're always hearing about it,

I guess because they're doing short-term renewals instead of long-term renewals. And the idea was do a short-term renewal and then try to find a longer-term fix because I think nobody was happy with the fact that it wasn't getting the money that it needed. Okay. But that hasn't happened.

And I don't think it's going to happen. So we'll see. But in the meantime, it's supposed to expire next year. Now, even if it expires, it's not the end of the world because there are plenty of federal programs that have expired and Congress still

puts money into them. But it just makes it much more tenuous. And I think that it's just bad government, too. I mean, you want if this program is important, reauthorize it and make it work. But don't play these games.

Can you do a similar thing and break down on clean water rulings and headwater rulings and explain that? Yeah, so the whole issue is there were two Supreme Court decisions in the early 2000s that basically put into question what is and what is not under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act. And in particular, wetlands. Well, back up and even just break down the Clean Water Act. So the Clean Water Act was passed in the early 1970s

and it had a focus on navigable waters. That was the term in the bill. And it was always interpreted until the 2000s as navigable waters include even unnavigable headwater streams that are critical to making that headwater, making that main river function. Because if you screw up the upstream, those headwaters, the tributaries, it's going to screw you know, stream as well. It's a, you know, scientifically, you know, accurate, you know, interpretation. Same thing with wetlands. Yeah, you may not be able to float a boat through that wetland, but it's, you know, hydrologically connected to the river. It plays an important filter system and hence is under the

jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act. Okay. That was thrown into question by these two Supreme Court decisions that basically told EPA and Congress to go back and do a better job of defining what is and what is not in, because there's a lot of ambiguity and confusion. And, you know, as a farm pond, you know, a part of the Clean Water Act is an irrigation ditch. There are all sorts of examples you can throw out there that are ambiguous at the time. And so Congress, of course, didn't get his act together to sort of revise the act. And it's just like an annoyance that festered.

Like, what are we talking about when we talk about what constitutes these waters? And so you had this ambiguity from the 2000s on about what was covered and what was not covered, which basically meant that if some dude wanted to go and dredge his wetland in order to put in a parking lot, he could probably do it because of this ambiguity under the courts. So the Obama administration comes in and they say,

okay, fine, we're going to settle this. We're going to do what the Supreme Court asked us to do. And they did several years of science that defined what is and what is not hydrologically connected and then produced a new rule called the Waters of the U.S. And it was controversial right from the bat because, you know, obviously the developers and, you know, especially the developers

had gotten sort of comfy with the ambiguity. So the Obama administration produced a new rule. They did a several-year scientific study that showed very clearly that headwater streams and adjacent wetlands were hydrologically connected and hence part of the navigable waterways. And they released the rule, which immediately developers especially came out

sort of really hard against it. And in addition, they got a lot of the farm groups to come out against it too, even though the rule specifically exempted literally every agricultural practice you could think of. Farm ponds, ditches, everything else were specifically exempted by the rule. I think the real estate guys and the developers

are smart enough to know they should not be the face of the opposition, so they got the farmers out there to be the face of the opposition. And as a result, it became, you know, super controversial. A ton of lawsuits, you know, were filed. And Trump administration, or Trump when he was running for a Senate, or the president, excuse me, railed against it as, you know, government overreach, which it isn't. And then, so now Scott Pruitt and EPA has taken the first steps to reverse it. Now, it's not that easy just to immediately reverse a rule like that,

because there is a long rulemaking process that the Obama administration went through in order to put that rule into place. And they've got to unwind that through a similar type process. It involves public comment and all the rest. So it is, I mean, it's going to be in the courts. It's going to be fought administratively for the next few years. And there's just still going to be a lot of ambiguity over what is and what is not covered. In the meantime, EPA is probably not going to enforce many of these, you know, laws involving headwaters, streams, and wetlands. But, you know, we'll see.

It's going to be a big battle for several years to come. But that's one where, you know, I think the people really need to stand up and, you know, we'll see. It's going to be a big battle for several years to come. But that's one where, you know, I think the people really need to stand up and, you know, really talk about the importance of clean water. Yeah, and it also have huge implications for fishing and waterfowl. And I mean, every species. I mean, and listen to me, we have lost so many wetlands in this country. And I mean, the notion that you continue to keep draining wetlands and getting rid of them and, you know, not have an impact on, say, waterfowl hunting is just ludicrous.

I mean, you've seen the flooding we've had this year, you know, and, you know, if you sort of restore wetlands, you take care a lot of that without having to build more dikes. You know, we've talked already about the, you know, clean water problems off the coast of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Erie. I mean, those are all, you know, coming from not, you know, a pipe someplace, but from runoff, you know, coming off of fields. And, you know, coming off of pavements and parking lots and people's lawns. So, I mean, that's where, you know, there really needs to be something done here.

And, I mean, I thought that personally what the Obama administration proposed was not draconian at all. It was common sense. And, but now we're throwing back into this limbo because of the, you know, the changes coming out of EPA right now. So it's frustrating, but you know, hopefully we'll stick with it. Now, the last one I want,

and then you can do whatever ones I haven't hit. But these are just things that I feel like people know there's something, but they don't really know what. You're just hearing about it all the time. The interpretations of the Antiquities Act and how it applies to monument designations and what's going on right now.

Can you do a little bit of a deep dive on that? Thank you. So Antiquities Act was the vehicle by which Theodore Roosevelt used to protect 230 million acres. And it allows the president to basically create monuments out of the federal estate. And it's been used, I mean, the way the law was written originally, it was for historical artifacts and unique places.

And it was supposed to be a size equivalent to protect those special resources. Yeah, like battlefields, archaeological sites. Yeah, but that's been interpreted very broadly, and obviously by Roosevelt himself, to protect the view sheds and water sheds and all the rest. That's what surprised me that you said earlier. I didn't know that he was using it for, that he used it for things that weren't like cultural sites.

Grand Canyon got protected as one of his national monuments. Yeah. And that was a big chunk of land. Yeah, there were a bunch of cool cultural things in there, but it was basically the grandeur of the place that moved Roosevelt. Presidents have used it ever since to set aside

parcels big and small. Then in the 1970s, the BLM finally had its own organic act, the Federal Land Management Policy Act, FLIPMA. And that sort of created a real agency for what had been basically the Bureau of Lands before, whose job had been to dispose of lands largely. And since then,

there's been a variety of other monuments. Part of the problem here is that, first of all, there's a lot of misconception about how the Antiquities Act works. First of all, it doesn't take private land. It only changes protections on federal lands that exist. I think that a lot of people don't understand that. Yeah. So it's

this whole notion that it's a land grab is ludicrous. And it can be changed by Congress. And Congress has gone in and changed many times, sometimes adding protections generally. They've taken a monument and turned it into a national park. And so Congress, first of all, Congress can go back and if they don't like the Grand Staircase monument

or Bears Ears, they can go back and fix it. But the Utah delegation doesn't have the votes to do that. And there are other places like in Idaho. There was a wilderness bill that Mike Simpson had been pushing for years. And he hadn't been able to get it through. And then finally, he heard that the Obama administration was the Boulder White Clouds Wilderness. He was going to come in and do a national monument there.

And that was a galvanizing force for the folks in Idaho to come together and pass their bill. And so there was no need for the Obama administration to do anything there. And that's the way it's supposed to work. But the problem is that Congress has been so broken now for a long time, they're not really doing lands bills anymore the way they used to, you know, wilderness bills, wild and scenic river bills, things like that.

And, you know, in their absence, I think that the Obama administration felt probably correctly that it had to go in and protect some of these areas like Beirut-Ziris, which are getting kind of looted and, you know, beat up. And, you know, just, there was up. And there was a lot of pressure on the Obama administration from the tribes to come there and do something to protect this area, which everybody agreed needed protecting, even the Utah delegation. And I think that the problem was

that a lot of the politicians out there didn't like the process by which it had been done, to which I would respond, go in there and pass your own bill. I mean, that's the way it's supposed to work. If you don't like what they did, go back and fix it. And the notion that we're going to just undo the Antiquities Act and go back or use and come back in,

have President Trump go back and undo a bunch of monuments that were done before, I mean, I think it's a lousy precedent because then that opens up basically any monument that's been created since the beginning of the Antiquities Act was used back in Roosevelt's time, potentially for any administration to come in and say, I'm going to undo that one or that one. And all of a sudden it's, you know, open season on these lands.

And over time, most of these areas, I think probably all these areas, you know, I think local communities learn to embrace them and really like the fact that there's something special. I I mean you've hunted up in the Missouri breaks in Montana and that was that was created by antiquities act as a monument designation it was highly controversial at the time but now I think there are very few people up there that think that's a bad thing and I think a lot of folks really like the fact that it has been protected and that it brings some notoriety to that area and brings some tourism in. So with people now, like now you hear that just reviewing the last 30 years worth of monuments. So can you explain like how this review idea came from, where the review idea came from,

how they carved out that window of time and what the review process is revealing. Well, I have no idea why they picked back to the Clinton administration. So it was Clinton administration, George W. Bush. George H. W. Bush. Oh, okay. And Obama.

And Obama. And so that was the time period. And I guess it was Grand Staircase, you know, which was Clinton did back in the 90s, was probably the impetus to why they, you know, started that was the timeframe. And, you know, but, you know, and then how they did the review process.

If you read the report, it was leaked by the, you know, Washington Post. Yeah, yeah. And to say that it is austere would be an understatement. It is really skimpy, and it has minimal facts, and a lot of the facts they put in there are just flat-out wrong. I mean, they tied two of these national monuments under review in New Mexico, Rio Grande del Norte and another one.

And I've talked with Martin Heinrich, as have you, and basically they claimed that there were road closures when there were none. They claimed that funding in fishing had been disallowed, which it hadn't been. So, I mean, it was just replete with these factual inaccuracies. And this was a report that was sent to the president. And Heinrich was grilling the deputy director of BLM, John Ruse, in a

hearing a couple of weeks ago and basically saying, none of this is true. I mean, how did you come up with this stuff? And Ruse basically says, we were never asked to look at it. So I can't really say. So this thing goes out of the secretary's office to the president without the career people who actually know something about it having reviewed it. I mean, it's just a pretty crappy way to sort of do policy in my mind. And kind of detail what some of the recommendations might be. Well, they've cited, I think, up to six, there would be boundary reductions. They didn't say how much it would be, but they just said it was too big and ought to be reduced. And those are things like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase.

Others, they said management needed to be changed and to allow more development, more hunting, fishing, whatever. I mean, I was up in Maine yesterday and with a guy who was the proponent for the whole Katahdin Woods and Waters, which is the monument that was donated to the federal government by a family up there, 85,000 acres, and then turned into a monument. So one of Zinke's recommendations in the review that went to the president was that the management plan be changed to allow more hunting and fishing

and timber harbors. Well, there is no management plan. It was just created. There's a three-year process to develop a management. There's nothing to change. So, I mean, this is the sort of amateur hour we've been kind of dealing with on this thing, is that a lot of these recommendations that have gone to the White House just don't make much sense. So, what are the hunting and fishing restrictions? None. But

there are some timber restrictions. So, part of it, the way they did that one, part of it is off-limits to timber. The other part is open for, you know, limited timber harvest. But it's just sort of pandering to some of these voices that want Maine to return to a timber economy that it's never going to return to. I mean, yeah, there's going to be some,

but again, this was private property. Nobody had any right to do anything on it before, and it was donated to the federal government for everybody, and it had some minimal stipulations as to what had to be respected. So I think we got a pretty good deal out of that. I'm not sure why we're going back and looking at it.

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 our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x 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 MeatEater 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. All right. Are there things that I haven't brought up that you wish I'd brought up or that you want to bring up? Like little issue things?

You know, I think that one thing we probably ought to talk about is just the whole broader issue of funding for conservation in this country. Because we talked about it a little bit in terms of the Forest Service. We were talking about that today. Yeah, the agency's not having the budgets they need to do stuff. But, you know,

we think back all the way to the, you know, 1970s. And, you know, at that time, you know, the investment in conservation in this country, and that is sort of EPA, the land managing agencies, was about two and a half percent of the federal budget. Today, it's less than one percent. And so we've had this sort of gradual erosion. And that is seen not only in just things like campgrounds on the Forest Service lands, but just in much other ways, in a lot of other ways. I mean, right now, the states are sort of required

to carry the burden on a bunch of things like managing non-game species. I mean, hunters and anglers basically pay for conservation in the States through excise taxes, through license sales, through stamps, to the extent that about 80% of the state's fish and game budgets are paid for by sportsmen. But at the same time, they use those dollars, and we understand, to manage monarch butterflies and owls

and a lot of other species that are not game species, and that's okay. But at some point, especially given the erosion of funding over time, we've got to find some new revenue sources. So a Bluebird panel was put together that was led by Johnny Morris at Bass Pro Shops and some others that sort of laid out almost a land and water conservation fund model for much broader non-game. And they were going to take a much bigger chunk, about $1.2 billion off budget that would go to the states to basically pay for non-game management. And oil and gas industry is supportive of this. Shell was on that panel. A lot of other folks are. But the problem we're going to have is that, again,

it's just additional spending in a time we already have these big deficits. And that's going to be the problem because it's not new money. This is money that's already going to the general treasury that now gets being dedicated to non-game management as opposed to just paying for whatever the government pays for. So I think we're going to have to get creative over whatever the government pays for. So, I mean, I think that's,

we're going to have to get creative over time about funding of conservation because at some point, particularly with some of the trends we're seeing in hunter numbers, the money is not always going to be there that it has in the past. So we've got to find some additional sources of revenue.

And that's another thing we ought to probably talk about too is just sort of those numbers that came out of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which show that sort of a decline from about 13 million hunters down to about 11 million. But it's weird because they kept saying that everything was statistically insignificant. That sounds pretty statistically significant. I don't know if it meant because they're counting it differently. I don't think so. But even in the report, it keeps saying like statistically insignificant even though it's like like a couple like millions more fishermen less hunters but it called all it called those numbers statistically insignificant in the report

which i never understood yeah and i don't get that either i mean but because i think that everybody in the industry thinks it's significant and you know the the folks it was after like a and it was coming on the heels of an uptick. Yep, we'd had an uptick before, and now we've got a downtick. It could be tied to so many... It's so hard to suss out what it's coming from. Well, I think it's a combination of things. Because the economy always factors into it.

Yeah, it does. But think about, first of all, there are some broader sociological demographic changes. I mean, you know, the, you know, the guys like, you know, me, 55 year old white guys, you know, we're starting to, you know, in my father's generation, you know, they're not hunting anymore. And, you know, so you have that sort of cliff of these guys that are sort of carried the industry for a long time that aren't going to be there. And so I think that's one thing that we're dealing with. I think that, you know, just how we've, you know, done, look at the fishing versus the hunting. The fishing side, you know, Pittman

Robertson is, you know, the, is the hunting side, Dingell Johnson's the excise tax for the fishing side. Dingell Johnson allows the states to use a small portion of those monies they get for recruitment, you know, reactivation, retention, the three R's. And so that's what funded the whole Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation has just done the Take Me Fishing campaign, which you've probably seen. They have sort of a similar program for the Spanish-speaking folks, Vamos a Piscar. I'm not a Spanish speaker, so I said that probably wrong. But they've done really aggressive outreach promoting fishing and boating that has, I am positive, has driven a bunch of those fishing numbers up. Okay. Hunting side, they're not allowed

to use the excise tax for any of the three R activities. So you don't have an equivalent program on the hunting side that you do on the fishing side. There's no take me hunting campaign out there. And we're trying to get, you know, there's a bill in Congress right now that we're pushing called basically the PR Modernization Act to allow the states to use a small portion of those PR funds for recruitment, retention, reactivation, which they've got to do if they're going to stay ahead of this curve because, you know, it's just, you know,

the people that are basically in funding, you know, hunting and fishing in the future, I mean, we're coming to a cliff, you know, as these baby boomers, you know, start to get out of the game and we don't have those young generation coming up behind them. And so we, it's not going to happen organically. We got to make a real effort to push that. And then I think in the hunting side too, you have things like, you know, I've, I'm going off script here, but you know, things like the hunter education Program, which I think is kind of a 20th century program and we need to be thinking about the way kids learn these days.

My kid, my son, who's 20 now, he probably took Hunter Education six or seven years ago. He had to do the 11 hours of classroom time. Oh, yeah, man. I remember you had to spend the whole, when I took it as a kid, you spent the whole weekend in class. And kids nowadays, you got soccer practice,

swim practice, study halls, whatever it is. They're just super scheduled and busy. And especially around Washington, D.C., where I live, it was not easy finding a class. We found one down in Fredericksburg, Virginia, like an hour south of D.C. You could do the whole class in like 11 hours. And he said it was the worst day of his life.

He said it was just so incredibly boring. And he wasn't allowed to do it online. I mean, it sure seems to make sense to me to allow kids to do it online. That's how they learn these days. And then you have them go out in the field with somebody who has a hunting license, who knows how to do it,

who can basically certify they've taken them out and been a mentor to them and i see i see both sides of this issue man like i definitely see where you're coming from that it shouldn't you shouldn't be coming in and making it hard for people to go participate in the activity. On the other hand, I see that it's like a serious discipline. Sure. And it's like a real thing. Yeah. You're out there dealing with, you're out there trafficking in life and death.

Yep. And I totally agree with you. But think about it. I mean, a lot of the online classes now are really good. They're a lot better than some old dude standing in a VFW hall sort of droning on about something and kids spacing out,

not paying attention anyway. You're right, because that's the thing I'm not looking at. It's almost, yeah. You could probably put something together. Not probably. You probably, surely put something together that's equally educational.

It doesn't require parents changing their work schedules around and taking days off work in order to make it happen. Plus, just the kids are so scheduled these days. I mean, you'll get to this point soon with your kids, but they have so much stuff going on, and it's tough to do. And especially if you're in an urban area, there's just no place close, at least there wasn't in D.C. And that was a huge deal. And I mean, I think there has to be a sort of an outside component to the whole thing. They need to go out with somebody. They have to have that experience. They have to have somebody to explain to them how it's done because, I mean, the classroom is not enough by itself. But one of the good things the states have done is they created these apprentice programs now.

And, you know, that's, I mean, I've taken a bunch of people out with that. And that's a huge step in the right direction. Make sure to get them interested before they have to sort of sink that investment of going through the whole process. Yeah, I think I do like those programs a lot. And that seems like a really, that seems like a good solution to go through it and i'm sure it's not something that probably gets abused too much but it has been nice to see that allowing people uh there was no vert when you know when i was younger there was no version of that at all right you know i think you for firearm deer you're 14 years old but if you got your i think that if you got your dad uncle neighbor sitting in the blind with you focused on what you're going on, I don't see any reason you need to wait to be 14. Nope.

Totally agree. Yeah. I mean, my other pet peeve is just how complicated the licensing systems are. And you have, every state has their own system that's different than the other states. And you have, you know, a bunch of states don't even have mobile friendly. You know, I was out in Wyoming a few weeks ago and their site's not mobile-friendly. So you're trying to buy a phishing license

and you're expanding it and trying to find the right button and it's just a total pain in the ass. And the notion that you can go to Amazon and I can type in my information, I can buy anything anywhere in the country with just a click of a button. I ought to be able to do that with hunting and fishing licenses.

I probably buy a dozen every year. And some states do it really well, others don't. I mean, there are a couple of states that will send me email reminders that I ought to get my hunting license, and I do, but most don't. And so, I mean, the states have got to come into the 21st century in terms of marketing

and making it consumer-friendly. And plus, if you look so, I mean, you know, the states have got to come into the 21st century in terms of marketing and making it consumer friendly. And plus it was just, if you look at the regs for, you know, you hunt all over the place. I mean, just going through those regs and figure out what you can do, where you can do it, what the limit is here is so complicated. We got to figure out a way to make that. Oh, but I fetishize those things.

I agree that they're complicated, but I do, but. You know how to read them, but imagine if you. No, because here's the thing, I don't. I know how to read them, but I do. You know how to read them. But imagine if you... Kind of. No, because here's the thing. I don't. I know how to read them, but I still find myself... We have a great network of people around the country who are very enthusiastic hunters and fishermen. So every time I'm going somewhere,

I still will get the reg, look at it, and I'll still, while I don't have to call somebody, and be like, hey, man, I'm it, and I'll still, I don't have to call somebody and be like, hey man, I'm like, am I looking at this right? Like you can do this and not that. Because even after a long time, after decades of looking at a lot of regs, I still look at regs. I'm like, I don't understand what they're talking about.

Yep. I rest my case. And I call. And at that point, I like call buddies. We're talking about. Yep. I rest my case. And I call. And at that point, I call buddies. We're doing that all the time. All the time. Trying to figure out like, so what now? But you're right.

Just as an example of how hard it is to get a license, I was trying to get licenses here from Maryland a few days ago online. And I get to like the final stage where I'm supposed to make a password, you know, to set up some account so I can have a license. And all it says is one, it has to be alpha and numeric characters, right?

Well, that's not true. It actually also has to have a special character, except it's not written there. So I'm calling all my connections here, like, dude, what is going on? I'm pulling my hair out. And it's not written there so i'm calling all my connections here like dude what is going on i'm pulling my hair out and it's just like yeah we almost just showed up here with no licenses and had to do the walmart thing at midnight you know yeah so i mean we got to do a better job with things like yeah here's the thing that i think's doing it uh i'm sure that licenses are a pain in the ass is a factor. I'm sure that restrictions are a factor.

But I think I noticed two things go on. One, if you go and talk to a hunter who isn't concerned about conservation, just hasn't been engaged in those conversations, has been exposed to long-term thinking about the well-being of fish and wildlife and hunting and fishing,

they're not going to tell you, man, the one thing this world needs is more hunters. Because they already know that they're in bad competition for hunting spots. So it's hard to get someone. I would think that most people look and they're like, oh, you know, some percentage less hunters and fishermen than there were five years ago. Great. Because that means more spots for me.

Yep. That's exactly the attitude. And I think the other part of it is, is that it's still for people getting into it who didn't grow up around it, it is hard to find a place to hunt and fish unless you're an obsessed person. Yeah, access is a huge issue on this

because look around D.C. I mean, a guy who works in our office, you know, talks about he was when he was a kid hunting quail in Falls Church, you know, which is 10 miles outside D.C. Well, I can tell you right now, there are no quail in Falls Church. You walk down the street with a shotgun, you're going to jail. Yeah. And, you know, it's just gotten harder and harder to get to those places. And when you do get to them, there are a lot more people there because we have less places to go. And that's not going to change.

What we have to do is just things like that Farm Bill program I talked about that encourage private landowners to open up their land. Things like Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is actually creating new hunting territories, fishing territories. So I think there has to be a major push on access. And listen, I'm going to give Zinke a little bit of credit here because they've done a bunch of stuff on access,

which is good. And I think that's part of the equation. And I think we can't ignore that. But we also have to have conservation that goes with that because, again, you can't just sort of open up access if there's too many people there, if there's no game there, if it's been industrialized.

What good is access for that? So no, we just need to be thinking much bigger on all these levels. Yeah. Can you go back to the first part when you're talking about how good everything is? Listen, the fact that we're able to have a lot of these arguments is luxury because if you go to much of Europe, you're not going to have these arguments because there's no opportunity. So, I mean, listen, we have a lot of challenges and we need all the meat eaters out there engaging and making their voice heard because you've seen what they can do. But, you know, listen, we don't get, I mean,

you can't get too bummed out because, you know, we've got a great, I mean, this is an amazing resource we have. No, I appreciate it, man. I appreciate how you framed the things that you framed to be acknowledging the great treasures we have

but then taking the threats to them very seriously. Yeah, I mean. I think that if you aren't in all aspects of life, if you are aggressively looking at what's coming around to screw you, you're messing something up.

Absolutely. If, I don't know if you're comfortable with this one. We're so new into the new administration um and a lot of changes and you know personalities emerging and and you know procedure starting what are some of the like if you had to if you had a thing where you could list out three things or four things that you think the new administration and various secretaries and

appointees um could be doing it's not too late the political risk isn't great like what are some just good common sense slam dunk things that we could expect that we might hope to or expect to see out of our the current iteration of our federal government if i were advising over there and you know they had the goal of being you know legacy of being a good conservation administration i mean there are a few things i think you can listen i mean development and you know conservation are not necessarily you know opposed opposed. You can do smart development. You can target it. What's been frustrating so far is the absolute failure of Interior, for example, to articulate any sort of positive conservation vision.

And they've done a good job articulating an access vision, which I appreciate and I think is important. But there has to be that commensurate conservation vision. And it doesn't have to be, you know, it could be things like, you know, how do we do, how do we, you know, get more oil and gas out, but at the same time do it smarter? I mean, how do we do things like, you know, protect migration corridors, you know, which are, you know, sort of iconic big game, you know, areas that are incredibly important. It's a ribbon cutting every time it crosses

a highway. I think there are things that you can articulate that are very positive for conservation that aren't anti-industry in any sort of way. I think that there is a bunch of that stuff that if they were to think about and if they cared, they would articulate those sorts of strategies.

If you don't like regulatory approaches to clean like, you know, regulatory approaches to clean water, for example, I mean, as I said before, you better be doubling down on the voluntary approaches, things like the Farm Bill. But we have not seen any of the rhetoric that connect those dots. It's just been about, you know, getting rid of regulation, unfettered, you know, capitalism, you know, and, you know, not even any thought about how are we going to achieve our clean water, our societal goals with that, our fish and wildlife goals.

And I think there are things we can do, any administration could do if they really wanted to, and if that is the legacy they want to leave, to be strong in development, but also be strong in conservation. And the frustrating part is just we haven't even seen the rhetoric about being strong in conservation. I see.

I've noticed that absence. Yeah. I mean, and technology has changed. I mean, we've done a lot of work with the oil and gas companies in sort of around trying to do it smart. And if you go, I mean, I remember one oil and gas executive showed me a picture of the Jonah Field in Wyoming, which is basically these quarter-acre paths as far as the eye can see.

And he says, using today's technology of, you know, diagonal drilling, reservoir mapping, you know, we can develop that exact same, every ounce of oil and gas in that field with 10% of the surface impact. Okay. And by the way, you know, we can do it more cheaply because that's less pipelines, less roads, less pads. But industry is, a lot of industry is not progressive.

They're going to keep doing it the same way they've always done it, just punch holes as they move along because that's the way they're used to doing it and they've made money doing that. But if you have a government that says, you know what, this is the public's lands, we're going to do it a little bit smarter than that you're going to minimize your footprint we're going to help you do that they can do it and so you could be you know really good on development and be really good on conservation but we just haven't seen that yet

no i think that that's the kind of um i think that that's the kind of approach and the kind of language to be using though in thinking about it and stepping away from this sort of like this adversarial all one way or all the other approach, which winds up being kind of crippling. Yeah, I agree. I mean, that's been, just the debate has been so shrill and so polarized

that it doesn't need to be. I mean, smart people can disagree about the way to approach some of these things, you know there ought to be some basic you know bottom lines you know we want a strong economy we want energy independence we want you know protected lands we want robust hunting and fishing and uh you know just okay how do we do achieve all that and you're not going to do it by administrative fiat you're going to get a bunch of people in the room you're going to figure out everybody's going to compromise a little bit so i was talking to a politician recently who was describing his decision making process and he

described this point at which the the radical environmentalists you measure their anger and then sort of the the radical fringe of the extraction you measure their anger, and then sort of the radical fringe of the extraction, you measure their anger, and when you feel that they're both kind of equally angry at you, you've probably found your path forward. As you feel it, and then you know that you're maybe

somehow coming in on a compromise. I think that's exactly right. And I think that, you know, unfortunately, you know, we see the tail wag the dog sometimes on this stuff and that, you know, squeaky wheel get in the grease. You know, the loudest screamer tends to get the attention.

And what's really frustrating is that, you know, you think about, you know, even just the way the press handles a lot of these issues. It's not sort of a thoughtful discussion about this middle ground. It is so polarized. I mean, it's the drill everything and it's the lock it all up.

And there is no discussion about that 90% of the middle. And that's the space that we try to occupy because I think the hunting and fishing community in this country has always sort of been that sensible center. I mean, pragmatic. I mean, we use the middle. And that's, you know, the space that we try to occupy because I think the hunting and fishing community in this country has always sort of been that sensible center. I mean, pragmatic, you know, we use the land, we drive cars, but at the same time, you know, we have a, you know, legacy that we want to maintain and pass on to our kids. So what does the, what does TRCP need and what's, how do things look with TRCP going forward? Well, how should people follow what's going on and get involved?

What do you need from people? Yeah, you know, we're sort of a coalition of a lot of groups. We have 56 formal partners. It ranged from Ducks Unlimited and Mule Deer Foundation to AFL-CIO and the Outdoor Industry Association. And, you know, that's always a delicate balancing act, but I think that we've always... That keeps you centered.

That keeps us centered because we have sort of various extremes on all sides. And we park a lot of things at the door and we just focus on the stuff we can all agree on. But I think the fault of the hunting and fishing communities over time is we've become complacent. We've become checked out. We haven't let our voices be heard as we sort of fractured into, you know, our little species groups, fixing up our little wetland or our stream or whatever it might be.

Yeah. And we've been, you know, sort of more interested in doing that than engaging in some of these, you know, sometimes, you know, sort of nasty political conversations that, you know, people get mad at you. But, you know, people got mad at Theodore Roosevelt a whole lot. And I think that, you know, if we're going to sort of keep what we have in this country, you know, sportsmen have got to be willing to speak up. And not just about, you know, when somebody, they perceive somebody's going to come and take away their gun. They got to talk about when somebody's going to take away their land too. And, you know, that's where I think we've, we failed over time is as a community from really standing up with that. And so if, what we need is people to get engaged. We need people that then come to our website, trsp.org, you know, sign up, you know, send a check. That's great. But what we're really trying

to do is just sort of, you know, reestablish that voice of the hunter and angler in federal policy. Because it's not the voice of the radical environmentalists. It's not the voice of industry. It's that sensible center that I've talked about that we need in this country. All right.

You got anything you want? That was your end. But do you have another end no no listen i've got all sorts of hands but no listen hey thanks for all that you've done and for the meteors have done you guys have been great yes you got uh anything you want to any follow-up questions no i don't think so you can't tell if I'm in a good mood or in a bad mood now. It is daunting, man. And there's a thing you just said, too,

that the thing you said kind of hit with the species groups. Because I like a lot of that stuff. But it does, you know, when you focus in on that level, if you're like, oh, you know, I like to hunt pheasants, I like to hunt elk, I like to hunt turkey, and you just get involved on that level of conservation, you can plug along and sort of miss big picture issues that are going on. Well, I mean, people come to me and they- Big, messy issues. Yeah, they say, hey, what's your relationship with the NRA? And I say, well, listen, we don't do Second Amendment stuff. Those guys don't need us.

They do just fine. I said, however, I have nothing but respect for the fact that the NRA and the gun community has made any attack on a gun law, any place, an attack on everybody. For us, it's the exact opposite. If it's a mule deer problem, it's not a trout problem. If it's a trout problem, it's not a grouse problem.

And we die this death of a thousand cuts because we're so sort of vested in our own little critters. And we don't come together and recognize that, you know, the water quality issues in Florida may not directly affect me, but we got to stand together in terms of conservation in this country. Yeah.

I'm going to close it on that thought and go to trcp.org. You can also get on your guys mailing list which is great because that's how i even know all that's how i even know what all's going on yeah we'll send out emails regularly to you and you and you keep people apprised of things when they need to do comments on things or contact your representatives about stuff that they should be getting involved it is nice it's like uh was it like usually three or five the roosevelt report yeah like what's up this week yeah yeah

that kind of half read it then i just make wit explain to me later you know we try to keep the folks engaged but we try to keep it light and fun as well and uh because you know you got to have a little bit of you know dessert with your vegetables yeah, it's like a good amount of hunting and fishing stuff in there and a good amount of how someone's going to come screw you on hunting and fishing down the road. There we go. All right. Witt Fosberg, thank you very much for joining us. You're going to have to come back soon and do status updates on this stuff.

Good. Let's actually talk about like hunting and fishing next time. Next time we will. All right. 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 on X 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.