The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 098: Jon Mooallem

Episode Date: January 8, 2018

Seattle, WA- Steven Rinella talks with the writer Jon Mooallem, along with Ryan Callaghan, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects discussed: Anchorage and salmon floating around Steve's head; looking at people, looking at animals; animals making it into the stuffy realm; the rising of the hedgehog's brand; how kids react to the brutality of nature; William T. Hornaday, buffalo, and what enlightenment looks like; claims to moral legitimacy; Ice Age hunters; species level thinking; 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.

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I sound pretty sick. You sound off, yeah. Yeah. Bad time of year um we're just talking i want to pick up on a conversation we're just having real quick cal can you can you revisit what you're talking about john can we talk about where you live or do you'd like to keep that secret no that's fine write about it i don't write about it but it's not like i live in an undisclosed location okay i just live there We're with the writer John Mualem. And you don't go by nature writer. You just happen to write about nature sometimes.

No, I think that's kind of silly. Yeah, you don't like that. No. Do you describe yourself as a generalist? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's accurate. But that is a thing these days, right?

To be a generalist? No, no, no. People take nature writing classes. These days? Dude, yeah. Way. Yeah. Yeah, or science writer. People take nature writing classes. These days? Dude, yeah. Way. Yeah. Yeah, or science writer.

Natural history writers. Do you say that? No. No. Because I feel like it has a softer connotation. Right. Like you're gazing at a valve. Yeah, I'll say that oftentimes if I'm trying to deflect a conversation,

I will say that i'm an outdoor writer because no one knows what that means yeah it's like yeah just if i'm trying to get in and out of the subject real quick i'll oftentimes throw that out there to see if that allows me to just move on right and sometimes it's people like oh okay and it's over. But the writer, the generalist, John Whelm, lives on Bainbridge Island, which is an island in Puget Sound. And hearing this, our other guest, frequent contributor and guest, Ryan Callahan,

shared with us his memories of, Ryan? Fishing for chum salmon on Bainbridge uh you i want to say it was 2010 and i could be screwing this up but we uh it was actually back in the days working with warren miller entertainment and i was in charge of shipping all of our stuff all across the country and i also slipped in a container load of our fishing gear so we could fish wherever we were in the country and we went out and fished the chum run on bainbridge and um everything in this area was pretty economically depressed um on bainbridge on bainbridge and uh the peninsula in general and and i was very confused as to the fishing regulations because there seemed to be an awful lot of people

gut well we we refer to it basically snagging salmon and just dragging them on shore and we were uh you know out there with our fly rod uh fly fishing gear just trying to catch something in the mouth and uh on the way out of uh the creek that we'd walked down into uh ran into some uh fishing game uh officers and fish cops fish cops and i had i had i didn't ask directly but you know you kind of like hey so suppose you observe uh and these uh officers had basically said like yeah we're aware of that we're not really concerned about it because these folks are taking everything home and smoking them so they were they were willing to like look turn turn a blind eye that was yeah yeah to the to the chum thing yeah the reason i wanted you

to tell that is because some reason it stuck to to – it put in my mind two things. One, my brother – man, why is it being so circular? Can I tell about the book you're working on, John? Yeah, sure. John's working on a book about Alaska. And as part of that, we got to talk about Anchorage. So I had sort of Anchorage floating around in my head. Then Cal got to talking about salmon. So having Anchorage and salmon floating around in my head,

I got to thinking about something my brother was telling me that it's a derogatory term. I think like the Moonies. John, you know about the Moonies, right? Yeah. Are you asking me if that's a derogatory term? No, I'm reading it is. Okay.

But can you, because you understand them better. Can you explain it to me real quick? Even though it's not your groove, right? I'd say I have a D minus grade understanding of the Moonies. The Unification Church. Well, there you go. But you knew some of it, right? I know that.

I think it's in We Didn't Start the Fire. The Mass, Shea Stadium, the Reverend Moon converted 10,000, some number of thousands of people. All at once. To the church. All at once. And that was sort of their arrival the beatles kind of got into it yeah they had their heyday and if you see dudes in the airport who are wearing yellow gowns and have a hairstyle similar to the iroquois five nations

groups right but i this is is that still going on i think this is a very like 1970s understanding but it's still a thing and i'm telling you what. The reason I'm thinking about this right now is my brother was saying that the Moonies in Anchorage will rent buses to go fish salmon. I'm telling you. The other thing it got me thinking about, and I feel like

I already brought it up once, but I talk about this every day now, is because the type of salmon you're talking about, a chum, is also known as a dog salmon and it gets this name because um some people find that it's that it's best used to be fed to dogs so people will catch chums and just freeze them whole to freeze the sled dogs it's not a popular food fish chum salmon and dog salmon and i was recently talking about this with someone they're saying that they've tried folks was it was it that the same way the folks on um nunavak is that the same fish yeah they liked it though they love it and i'll touch on that too

because uh chum salmon are coastal spawners so they spawn close to the ocean they'll generally enter rivers in pretty shitty shape already but there's an exception to this that our brother was pointing out is there's a big run of chums in the Yukon where these chums are traveling 1,000 miles. And they'll enter the river very nice and clean and very fatty. And so there they're pretty popular. And people will net them out in the open ocean. But people know that chum salmon slash dog salmon

is a real shit salmon. So they've tried to rebrand them. And for a while, they're trying to sell them as calico salmon. Because when they're up in the rivers, you ever notice they get that calico color to them? Sure, kind of spotty. The other day, I think we might have talked about this. The other day, Dirt Myth went into a Whole Foods

and came out with a little envelope of smoked salmon. And on it, it says, Keta Salmon. And I know my salmon inside and out, or thought I did. And I was like, that's not a kind of salmon. But it turns out that the Linnaean name for the chum is Ancharinthes Keta. Sounds like a Bible verse. Ancharinthians kita sounds like a bible verse on corinthians kita and uh yeah so whole foods is trying to sell chums as kita salmon which is just a play on their linnaean name because people like

get stuff in their head and they won't eat it because of because of its name yeah but it still tastes good enough to sell all right good enough for people to come back and want more, right? And the Chupac Eskimo, they don't like to catch them. They let the chums run in the river and spawn out, and they don't like to catch them until that son of a bitch is washing back out to the ocean, mostly dead, at which point they like to catch them because their climate is so wet it's

very hard to dry fish and a chum is after he's spawned out and mostly dead he's very lean his fat reserve is gone at that point you can dry him down successfully in a climate that is not appropriate for fish drying wow i talked with the uh this guy dave alaska resident who looked at me like i had three eyes because i told him how much i liked the silver salmon that we caught up with the fish shack and he was like you eat oh there's so much bullshit around fish like i wouldn't touch a coho my brother's been doing mass been doing blind taste tests where he's like doing where he's cooking pink salmon for people in coho for people and he's finding about 50 of people prefer the pinks and then everybody says oh yeah but the real problem with pinks they don't freeze well they turn mushy when you freeze them so he starts then freezing it all and doing a blind taste test with it and i think thawed i think 60 of people preferred the pink but it just doesn't market well no so john back back to john okay uh you're general how long have you been a

generalist writer since i've been a writer really i've been writing for the new york times magazine for 12 years and i think uh you know that was not long after I started writing for magazines. And I think just as a freelancer, why would I say no to a good idea? Did you study journalism? I did, actually. I went to the Berkeley Journalism School. That was how I met Michael Pollan. But at that point, I didn't scope out journalism schools to go to. It was more a function of we were moving to San Francisco, my wife and I.

She was going to go to grad school. And I tried to get a bunch of jobs in journalism in San Francisco and got turned down. And then I had applied to the journalism school. My dad had died recently. I had some money that could pay for the graduate degree. And I couldn't get any work. So then I showed up at Berkeley. I went to go visit when I got admitted.

And I was just like, why would I not do this? This is, you know, it's almost like, I'd been freelancing for a while. So I thought I could show up at this place and just keep freelancing. And now I've got the support of all these people around me. And it was too good to pass up. And that was grad school?

That was grad school, yeah. How sick are you of talking about your book? I haven't done it in a while. Really? Can you talk about it for a minute? I got some questions I want to ask you. Yeah, we'll see, but I'm not going to be as up on my own book as I was.

No, I understand. Yeah. Just give me the, give people the rundown of your book. Well, so the book's called Wild Ones. The subtitle is A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.

And it's a book about, basically it's a book about conservation and endangered species, although I didn't always want to describe it that way uh and it's why did you not want because it sounded too dismal i think it shuts some a lot of people down right i think the the thing i was interested in doing was writing about those issues from the perspective of someone who had no direct contact with them um you know i was living in san francisco at the. And as I write in the book, most of my exposure to animals was watching planet earth or wild America when I was a kid.

And then I had my first child and realized how much of a child's life gets flooded with animals, be they on your pajamas or stuffed animals and things like this. And I just started to realize that these animals, which are real animals out there in the ecosystem, are sort of these, also these imaginative constructs that people like me are trafficking in every day. And so the book was really about trying to reconcile those two worlds, trying to take what I thought and felt about animals and go out into the ecosystem of some of these endangered species and really think hard about you know why is it that someone who's never going to see a mountain lion might want to get behind

the cause of mountain lion conservation what are these animals doing for us uh not maybe not in the physical plane but you know just emotionally yeah when you were when you were thinking about that about like you mentioned that your kids pajamas and the way that childhood is so animal rich at least in the imagery of it's rich in the imagery of animals yeah and sort of the the metaphysical realm have you ever thought about like how is it that that how is it decided do you feel um what species sort of make the cut yeah because african megafauna is big with is big with kids it's big and it's like big with pajamas it's big with stuffed animals um and then there are like our many of our own animals

are kind of neglected in that world yeah well i think that's that yeah that's a great question and i think some of it it just speaks to the fact that when we're putting a giraffe on our daughter's you know onesie it's not because of anything having to do with the giraffe itself right it has to do with what the giraffe represents. You know, maybe it's colorful, right? Maybe it's something that we think of as gentle. And I think that there's also the exoticness of it alone is doing a lot of the work

because we want to surround our kids with things that are precious, you know, and give them, kind of take them to another world. So maybe it's a giraffe or maybe it's a fairy or a princess, something imaginary. There's never a possum. No. There are no possum gems. Sometimes it is, but it often maybe won't work.

I mean, owls, I feel like owls have a good pr right now like we think of owls yeah they do owls do make it into the stuffy realm yeah exactly exactly squirrels though not so much not heavy i was just trying to think of a squirrel and the only character i come up with is uh rocky from rocky and bullwinkle yeah but kids aren't into that anymore no definitely not anymore the hedgehog has gone his brand is rising you think i think the hedgehog is coming into his own as a child's thing i really like my kids awareness of animals i really liked how it was eye-opening for me anyway like the your story of the teddy bear oh that's the next thing i want to ask you address that i thought

that was fantastic yeah can you yeah why the hell yeah can you because we're on the thing with like what sort of like the the the fantastic sort of representation of animals and kid stuff that you got interested in can you talk about um and i me, I will move on to more recent things with you, but can you talk about Teddy Roosevelt and the bear? Yeah. I didn't know this. Oh, you didn't? No, I feel like I knew some...

No, I didn't. Okay. I knew that it had something to do with... I knew that the teddy bear was Teddy Roosevelt, but I didn't know how. Yeah. I'll do a little pitch for the book right now. I think it's worth buying just to read your explanation of that story because i've heard

that story numerous times and i could you know vaguely probably tell it to you and someone say oh yeah you you know what's the nuts and bolts of it but you added in just a few details that i didn't know i was like now that's fascinating he did the same thing in a way i don't agree with with hornady like i know the hornady story very well yeah i would not tell it the way you told it how would you tell it just different are we gonna can we skip right to that one can we skip to that one or we'll come back to the table now you now i'm scintillated no okay i have to sit with that discomfort tell us about tell us about so the roosevelt story, yeah, I don't know if I knew that story or not. I mean, I think like you, I at least knew that Teddy Bear is Teddy Roosevelt.

There's a relationship. Yeah, yeah. And the story goes, I believe it's 1903. I could have the year wrong at this point. That was the year that Scafier published the Culinary Guide. Well, a lot happening that year. Clearly, a big year. Roosevelt goes down to Mississippi and is going to go bear hunting.

And the press is following him there. And long story short, they're not finding any bears. One of the last days of his hunt, they go out. Can I stop you for a minute? Yeah. one of the last days of his hunt his uh they go out can i stop you for a minute yeah um what year when was uh uh you know who's the mississippi bear hunting writer falconer when was falconer like active later i believe okay i don't know go on not my not my area of expertise i barely am expert on my own book anymore yeah well uh we're forcing you to revisit yes i should have i should have brushed

up a little bit more in any case uh all of a sudden uh roosevelt is uh you know he he gives up he goes to have lunch and the they're hunting with hounds they're hunting with hounds and a guide you know so his guide was this sort of famous black mississippi former slave bear hunter guy who you know was a very storied figure. Yeah, Roosevelt wouldn't cross the street without a guide. I would assume so, yeah. So this guy, suddenly he starts blowing on his bugle, calling Roosevelt back out into the field because he's found a bear. And it's this kind of mangy looking scrawny animal that he's tied to a tree.

And the hounds have cornered it. He's tied it to a tree so that the president can come shoot it, have the honor of shooting it. Now, this is where the story and the truth kind of get diverged a little bit, get a little muddy. The story goes that Roosevelt found this all very unsportsmanlike and spared the bear's life. And there's a famous cartoon done of this moment in a Washington newspaper where they show Roosevelt declining to shoot this very cuddly-looking bear. And the bear becomes the teddy bear. That bear in the cartoon looks fluffy and cute and cuddly and a little vulnerable. That becomes the teddy's bear.

And toy companies start making these stuffed animals, name them after the president to sort of celebrate that moment of mercy. The truth is, as far as I could tell, that he did refuse to shoot the bear. Instead, he asked his buddy to knife it

and put it out of its misery. That part did not get carried over into the myth um right because it was supposedly like a worn down scrawny it was out it just like wasn't doing very good it was a bad looking bear yeah it was a bad looking bear so he did feel that it was unsportsmanlike but it was more to protect his own sense of sportsmanship than the bear's life that he he declined to shoot it. So that in and of itself I thought was interesting. The parts of the story that we wanted to repeat

and the parts that we wanted to ignore. But yeah, in any case, that was the sort of birth of the teddy bear. And there's other competing stories. I actually got a lot of emails from various people marshalling historic evidence. About what happened that day? About what happened that day or about

linking the origin of the teddy bear to different things you know, marshalling historic evidence. About what happened that day. About what happened that day or about the, you know, linking the origin of the teddy bear to different things. And then it was this moment with Teddy Roosevelt that kind of gave it its popularity. Yeah. So that it wasn't necessarily invented because of Teddy Roosevelt, but that was what made it a sensation. Gotcha.

Like the teddy bear was already a thing, but it became more of a thing. There's camps. As far as I remember, there some some argument about that as well um but yeah but but in the book i link that to the condition of sort of actual bears in america at that time where we were sort of shifting from a perspective where they were these menacing threats to something that we had pretty much brought to its knees and now needed to show mercy yeah since roosevelt started to rebuild it yeah it sort of resonates you know as of course now is the time to spare the bear's life

and we can make them into this adorable thing that we give to our babies whereas you know in 1830 nobody out on the frontier is going to think of a bear as a cuddly thing that their child should should play with right it would be like giving your child a monster. Yeah, and you'd said on the manufacturing kind of backstory, and that's the thing that just like light bulb went off for me was that one manufacturer had a stuffed bear on the market that was kind of fierce looking with the hump on its back and more of an actual depiction of a representation of a bear complete with a hook through its nose or a ring through its nose and a chain did not sell very well oh really yes yeah well that was the

thing is that when you look pre teddy bear theredy Bear, there are no, you know, I haven't done it. The historians have looked at toy catalogs. You just didn't see bear toys. And when you did, this was one of the few examples where it was clearly a scary toy. It was meant to frighten children. It wasn't meant to comfort them. And even when the Teddy Bear starts taking off, as often happens,

the kind of old guard of the toy industry is late to catch up they can't get their heads around why suddenly people think bears are adorable and they're because they're displacing baby dolls you know this is scandalous so there's a lot of uh there's a lot of backlash you know as what is the world coming to that uh these we're giving these children bears and there were actually poems epic poems about the um fights between teddy bears and dolls at christmas time you know and that the bears were slaying the dolls and things like this so the the more i think there was one called the passing of the dolls which uh you know it was it was just slow to catch up to the zeitgeist man do you uh can you explain shifting baseline syndrome yeah but can we talk about possums first

because that's the i think the footnote on the teddy bear story because you were saying that you don't often see possums that possums are not widely represented in children's shit right and so meaning mobiles pajamas teddy bears not at all we do have a book a children's book um that was sent that my brother and sister-in-law sent us for our kids because the favorite of theirs and it's a children's book that was written in the 60s or 70s called possum now to show kind of like changing our changing attitudes towards what's appropriate for children possum is largely about the whittling down of a large family unit of possums where there's the mother has it starts out the mother's in her den has a litter of 12 or 13 and throughout her summer's travels, they are whittled away from snakes, other things,

snapping turtles, cars, to where there's just a couple of them. And then one female survives, and she gets bred up by a male and goes back into the den to have more. And it's just like the decimation of a possum family. But it's presented as a children's book. Do my kids love it? What's the moral? What do you take away from it?

Life is fleeting? Just make more? Life is fleeting and the natural world is at least as harrowing as ours. That's a good book. So I volunteered to go, last year when my kids were in first grade, you had to volunteer to go read a book and my wife signed me up to go read a with my kids in first grade. You had to volunteer to go read a book.

And my wife signed me up to go read a story to the kids in class. And I went and read Possum. And yeah, I didn't feel like, I felt like the kids like it. I felt like it made the teacher uncomfortable. Well, that's interesting because that's a point you bring up in the book. How you're saying how there's some research done with how kids react to like the brutality of nature and right. And the young kids are kind of like, yeah, like whatever, like protect me and it's fine. I don't really care if all those things die, if I can live on. And it's only as we get older that we sort of

don't like that stuff anymore. like how nature really yeah there's there's good research i mean there's this whole field of uh you know human human dimensions of wildlife they've started calling it but this guy steven kellard at yale i don't know if you ever come across this stuff i think he passed away now but uh yeah in the 70s he he kind of led this whole body of research to just look at how do people think about animals you know what do we actually think and the the findings are are really counterintuitive and kind of crazy i mean also some of the questions they asked i mean he asked them to rate animals you know do you like lady bugs more than cougars and uh what's smarter you know like a lobster or a dolphin you know just

things like they just got instincts yeah but one of of the things that he did was he got very interested in how children think about animals and they don't think about animals the way adults think about children thinking about animals. So he showed, for example, that we want to think of children as these innocent, peaceful things. And, you know, that's probably why we give them animals, which we also want to think of as innocent, peaceful things. But it turns out, you know, you ask a three-year-old or I don't know the exact ages, but there's an age at which

you ask a small child, do you want to camp around other people or do you want to camp among animals? And they're going to say other people because they're afraid of animals, obviously, right? I mean, this is evolutionary in some sense, but we forget all that, right? We put these presumptions on them. So yeah, or they want to, you know if a if a wolf i may be getting the species it could have been a coyote but you know if a wolf or coyote comes and kills the farmer's chickens what should the farmer do kill all the kill all the wolves right that's the answer that the kids give you um and a slight few adults will give you this well absolutely absolutely but i think that we think that you know i think for a lot of conservation minded people there's there's this presumption that you know the the rancher

wants to kill the wolf he just has to get back in touch with his childlike love of of all living creatures right yeah what i like about not what i like about kids an interesting thing about kids and you see it i see it my own all the time is the the hardwired things about animals that come from just our species history like just the innate uh distrust of serpents right there's a lot of things a kid will want to go up and grab but there's something they just i'm sure there's plenty of exceptions but i find that kids are generally without having someone discuss snakes with them are generally like repulsed by a snake well i know that there's research about that i don't necessarily remember what it shows but i do remember reading studies where they showed a kind of laddering of fears

of animals so that you know younger kids are afraid of snake think when you're on the ground when you're crawling you know you have a fear of snakes and maybe spiders and things like that and then you're but you're not afraid of predator you know you're not afraid of a bear yeah because you're probably not gonna have the opportunity to be put face to face with the bear and how our fears are the sort of innate fears that you're talking about seem to be triggered as you as you age which is kind of it's like a good operating on a need to know right need to know basis right yeah like crawling around on the ground before you can walk you're running into arachnids snakes potentially poisonous you'll find that kids are kind of like they know don't put that that's right and they're not and they're

not afraid of guns you know no right all right oh you know i because because you were feeling uneasy about it um i want to get into william t horn today but do you want to do that first or do you want to explain i had this is another thing i'd never heard but i love it shifting baseline syndrome no i want you to talk to me about horn today first so i can tell you tell the story of Hornaday. No, you tell the story. Okay. So first off, we share a tendency to still use the word buffalo. Okay. And there's like a type of dude. I mean, you say buffalo. There's a type of dude who wants to sort of, he feels like he's engaging in a who knows

most about wildlife contest where he'll like to point out that there's that it's called a bison as though you could know as much as you know about it like as though i could have for instance written a whole book about the subject but not picked up on the fact that the name now is bison like that eluded me and so someone needs to make sure to get a hold of me because having written several hundred pages about this animal's history from the pleistocene into the future i had missed that fact so there's like a there's like a uh who knows mosty sort of thing about bison buffalo but uh i still have a great affinity for the word buffalo i noticed that you use it well hornaday himself encouraged people.

Am I doing a who knows more thing right now? No, no, please, please. Hornaday, in one of his books, he starts out by saying, the technical name is bison. But I'm going to call it buffalo. And I believe Americans should call it buffalo because that's the popular term right now. And it gives us a greater investment in the animal

to go with the populace right yeah yeah it's i have never in my life registered any confusion where i had said to someone hey man did you notice all those buffalo like out that away and they registered confusion when they didn't know what i was talking about like no i saw a bunch of bison. Yeah, you don't mean the bison nickel, do you? Like, I've never had someone register confusion. So Hornaday, now, the last big... I never know where to begin this story.

Like I said, it begins in the Pleistocene. But at the end of the Civil War, there's two big herds of buffalo War, there's two big herds of buffalo here. There's two big herds of buffalo left. People sort of perceived the remaining animals as being in these two large herds.

There's about 15 million of them. There was what they called the Southern Herd, which was sort of, you can kind of imagine it being centered around Dodge City, Kansas, and down in the Texas Panhandle, the southern plains or south of the railroad. And then you had the northern herd, which you can kind of imagine that being centered around, say, centered around Mile City, Montana, being up into Canada, south into Wyoming,

and that was like the Northern Herd. And there was two big groups. They kind of shot, they killed the Southern Herd off in 18, they kind of reached its apex of slaughter around 1871, 1872. And it was about a decade later that the Northern Pacific Railroad made it to Miles City. And then they tapped out the last of the Northern herd. And in that, you know, they killed a million or two million or some number.

The hide hunters did. And I think it was 1873, right? Pretty quick. When they thought the last one? Hornaday, like William T. Hornaday collected specimens for the Smithsonian. Was actually very influential in the Smithsonian. Wound up being very influential in the Bronx Zoo. He was a specimen collector.

Hornaday knew that the animals were on the way out. He was even sending letters to people trying to find places where it might be feasible to go get some specimens. And determines that the best chance would be to take the Northern Pacific Railroad into Miles City. Now, this is months, months after the hide hunters were still shooting them for commercial markets.

He's out just trying to find some. And he goes up into the big sandy area north and a tad east of Miles City, I believe. And going up around the muscle shell, I think. And was just trying to shoot museum specimens.

The parts of the story that I think are most interesting to me was when I said that we would have told the story differently, is I didn't really see, one, I didn't see a ton of irony there, which I feel that you did. Irony in the sense that he was killing animals to preserve them. Yeah, I felt like you were being a little judgmental of him. As though he had

sort of a... Who's the guy in the Bible that's on his way to go kill a bunch of people and get struck blind? Saul. Yeah, he has sort of... You kind of tell it as though he had some sort of epiphany. You don't think he did? No. Well, maybe not in that moment. I think the irony is that

he himself went on to move from taxidermy to conservation i mean i think in some ways he invented but he was already very he when he went out to collect his specimens it wasn't like um he wasn't like he was glad about this no he was tortured by it yeah but but i just got the sense like um that you kind of felt like oh my god and then he's so short-sighted oh i see the distinction yes i appreciate that's a that's a i get that critique i guess he's like there's i feel that he was thinking there's nothing anyone's gonna do absolutely there are guys out there right now including teddy roosevelt trying to shoot him at least we would have some specimens for future generations to even understand this thing

right so my question to you would be and that's not the part i get to the part yeah go take over definitely there's two parts i thought were interesting. Was that he was wading through, during this time, wading, almost literally wading through the carcasses and remains of the hide hunters. And two, that he had this observation that the people in Miles City, when he later wrote about this experience, that the people in Miles City, when he later wrote about this experience, that the people in Miles City,

the hide hunters, were waiting in Miles City having no idea what they had done. And that they were just waiting there for the next big herd to show up. And over time, just while waiting for the next big herd that they thought would come out of Canada, some magical thing would happen where a million more would flow through town. They would get back to their business. Just kind of gradually got into being saloon keepers or ranchers. And only gradually over the years realized that like, oh my God, we killed them all. That there was no comprehension of the finiteness of that resource. Like that's important to me because I feel that people oftentimes go and look at the

hide hunters and find a sort of like, there was maliciousness and greed for sure, but there was also just a general like not understanding what you were doing going on. And I feel that relative to the people who were actually out doing this, Hornaday went into it a very enlightened individual. Not just like yet another asshole laying on yet another layer of pathology onto this whole problem. Yeah, I agree. And I regret that you felt that I was lumping him in. I mean, if that's what you took away from it,

then I can see that that was irresponsible. I might have been reading in heavy. But now go ahead, like talk about it. Yeah, well, I agree with you. I think he was incredibly enlightened relative to the thinking of his day. And I think that is what I wanted to call attention to, is what did enlightenment look like in that context? I think that a big takeaway I had from looking at a lot of the issues in the book

was the arbitrariness with which people often decide what is possible and what is impossible. Right. He decided that all that was possible was to shoot a dozen Buffalo and stuff them. And that was going to be how he preserved the species. Yeah. He later proved himself wrong very quickly you know within 15 years by actually setting up captive breeding programs reintroducing you know what is maybe one of the first you know reintroduction programs from a captive breeding program that he was doing at the bronx zoo hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Yeah, and that's an interesting story that people don't know. Yeah. It got so bad that they later, to repopulate the West, were bringing animals from the Bronx Zoo back west by rail.

Yes, and he was probably the major force in that project so i think it's interesting that the william temple horn today of 1920 could probably could look back on the william horn today of 1890 something and say man that guy didn't really even understand what was possible the same way that and that's how i'm looking at him you know because you kind of get into a similar thing about polar bears not similar but another thing of like of people sort of feeling they're at the end of something and trying to prevent the end yeah for a species i think that we're quick to i think the polar bears good example i think that we're quick to, I think the polar bears is a good example. I think that we're quick to,

when we don't know the future, fill it in with negative assumptions. Right? And that was what Hornaday is doing. I think that, I guess I don't necessarily see the parallel to polar bears. Do you want to frame that a little bit better? Well, yeah, that right now,

it's not a perfect parallel, but the effort that you're talking about, like the effort that people go through on the Hudson's Bay to move polar bears out of the troubled path. I just mean like extraordinary things we do for beleaguered species.

Yeah, that was the that was what got me going on the book. Just realizing the degree to which these animals are being managed. You know, I talk about sort of stage managing a lot of the species. That where a lot of endangered species

are being captively bred, reintroduced into ecosystems that we're also engineering so that they can thrive in them. So all of this work is being done on their behalf. Every part of the equation is being micromanaged. The example with the sea turtles. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that was a story I did for the Times Magazine during the Gulf oil spill. I went down and they were digging up, I don't know if you guys remember, this was a big news story at the time, but the government was digging up sea turtle nests on the Gulf Coast, shipping the eggs, driving the eggs in a FedEx truck to the east coast of Florida, to the Atlantic coast of Florida, and reburying the...

I don't know if they were reburying them or just letting them hatch and putting the hatchlings out in the water because they didn't want the turtle hatchlings in the Gulf Coast to be swimming directly into the spill. And I went down to Alabama and hung out with this, uh, uh, group of mostly retired folks who had been for years, had just been walking around the beach, barricading the nests so that people wouldn't trample them or, you know, accidentally dig them up to protect them. And then what they would do is when they were getting close to hatching, they would just camp out on the beach around the nests. And when the

turtle hatchlings started to boil out of the sand, since they wouldn't want them going away from the water toward the artificial light, because their instinct is to go toward the light, and they often get stranded in parking lots and things, they go in the wrong direction. They wanted them going to the ocean. wanted them to go into the ocean. So they would sit around the nest. When the hatchlings started coming up, they would dig a trench to funnel them toward the ocean so they had no other options but to go right into the ocean.

And then they would stand with tarps around the trench to block the light so that basically they were just escorting them. I mean, they could have just dug them up and carried them out and sometimes they had to do that too but they would stay up all night waiting for these hatchlings i mean that is people's lives an inordinate amount of their time is being spent to get this these nests and during the spill it turns out they were the the experts that the the government had to call on they were the people with the relevant experience who could go dig up these it was sort of like this armageddon situation you know like the movie armageddon and if you're a retiree that's the phone call of your lifetime oh they were so psyched you know and they were and they

were also uh i don't want to say this with a tone of uh you know i want to judge them harshly for i thought it was amazing they were uh let's just say they were they were feeling good about themselves you know they were telling people what to do they knew they were the let's just say they were feeling good about themselves. They were telling people what to do. They knew they were the experts. This was their moment, and they weren't going to let anyone fuck with their turtles. And it was great to see. It was great to see someone who just had this sort of zany hobby, whose kids and nephews and nieces probably teased them about,

you get up every morning and you walk on the beach looking for turtle tracks, you know, and, uh, you know, these people, they had turtles painted on their, their cars and turtles hanging from their, uh, rear view mirrors and their whole life had been about sea turtles. And now they were stepping in to save this, uh, this generation of turtles. It was amazing. Yeah. We like in the hunting world, you're by that um all the time with the way that people like people who kind of pulled off the turkey reintroduction right in recovery and even then so i know people who've like devoted their lives who've devoted their life to elk or people who devoted their life to quail or people devote their life to turkey and there i'm always like i just understand it right because i see like what it was born of

but it is i look at the turtle thing and i'm like man and those people will do it without even the promise of having turtle soup it's not even part of the equation for them right yeah and so what is that value i mean that's what i'm that's exactly what I'm interested in, is when the value of the animals gets unmoored from any practical use. It's just emotional. A guy would be like, man, I've always just dreamed of hunting turkeys. So I got real involved in bringing turkeys back to my state. But for a turtle guy, it's just that turtle hits the water and you will never lay eyes on it again.

And I agree with you. The turkey guy on an intuitive level makes a lot more sense to me. And I think that's why I'm drawn to figure out the other side of it. The other part of it. Okay, I was going to have you, I can't decide now,

but I still want you to talk about shifting baseline syndrome. Oh, the term that you've been talking about and also i want to talk about i want you to touch on conservation reliance of species but i also want to talk about pedals the bear from your perspective is it do you see a good order to do that uh well conservation reliance i think we can get through pretty quickly i mean that's basically just what i was talking about that's the the technical term for the idea that it's going to take intensive management on the part of humans to keep endangered species alive so there was a

study that came out that introduced this term i believe in early 2000s by a guy named mike scott who at the time was maybe with Fish and Wildlife, some federal agency. And he came up with this term conservation reliance because they looked at every species on the endangered species list and they tried to forecast what outcomes are possible and basically realized that some huge percentage, something in the 80s, I believe, just 80-something percent of these species are going to be reliant on human intervention for the foreseeable future. And that doesn't mean that it could just be getting weeds out of their ecosystem so that whatever plant they need is there.

Or it could be a much more intensive captive breeding type of thing. But the equilibrium in which these species evolved has been disrupted to such an extent that we're always going to be, like I'm saying, stage managing. It would be fair to say, you could probably name a bunch because of your research, but the California condor lives in a state of conservation reliance. Absolutely. And that goes from everything from, I believe they're still captively breeding them, but they teach them not to perch on power lines. They have to train them to live in the world

where they have to live now. Yeah. Exactly. Can you think of other ones? Sure. I mean, the one I write about in the book is this butterfly species, the Lange's metal mark, where it's been winnowed down to such an extent where they go out, they collect butterfly eggs off leaves of its host plant.

They take it to a lab in Southern California. This is outside San Francisco. They take it to a lab in Southern California. They breed them there. They let the eggs hatch. And then they put the larvae back on the plant then they go back collect some of the live butterflies bring them back to the lab have them uh breed and do the whole process all over again meanwhile they've got a full-time fish and wildlife service employer at least did

as of a couple years ago i know whose job was to groom the ecosystem he was basically like a caretaker for the butterflies property and he was doing all sorts of invasive controls to make sure that that host plant could get a footing on the sand dunes where it lives. So that's a pretty extreme case, I think, where every part of what used to be a natural process has to be done by hand, by a human hand. Yeah, there's a certain type of person who looks at that and they feel like an anger toward the species yeah i think there's part of that in me really honestly i mean i think that's why i was so wrapped up in this because i couldn't see my way through to any you know discernible clear defensible position

yeah i i've always lived or i just live with this sense that it's deeply immoral to allow species to go extinct because of our influences on the environment. To be like, there's parts of creation, whether you take that in a religious way or in just like an ecological way, that there's parts of creation that we've decided are that we can just throw away or allow to be thrown away because we don't want to be inconvenienced

by it. I feel like if we've arrived at, if we're there, if we've arrived at if we're there if we've arrived at that point we really don't have any claim to any kind of moral legitimacy anymore do you think we're not at that point i think a lot of people are at that point yeah the person i run into on this i mean yeah plenty of people are at that point and i think they don't have any kind of claim to moral legitimacy either is uh we started talking about well like a migration corridor you know you had to be great if you didn't graze that down to nothing it'd be better if you uh had you know a clean single top strand

with no barbs on it on your barbed wire fence be better if there was no barbed wire fence um and you always hit this point or well where does it end yeah you know and that's the person on these when we get into these arguments and talks on this subject that's the person always shows up like yeah but how far are you gonna take yeah so where does it come on well like i can't i put you know dim it or i uh i had the no light ordinance on my beach front house okay i did that but you know you're now you're asking me to you know not you know use my back porch at all. Where does it end?

Yeah, that's the thing that comes up. People are like, let's run this out to the point where everyone will see the absurdity of it. Yes, exactly. And yeah. And there's another thing about it, like in the case of the Condor, there's an interesting argument to be made that the Condor

could be considered to be one of the Pleistocene extinctions. It just took a long time to arrive there. So at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, when we lost mastodons, woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths, short-faced bears, we lost all these animals. And a sort of i think you should fill us in on what what did it because it wasn't human caused right it's mysterious it's mysterious some combination of some combination of climate change at the at the end of the last ice age. Some combination of climate change, influence from successional waves of humans coming from Asia.

You know, ice age hunters. Possibly disease issues. No one really understands. Possibly there's this idea that never really dies whatever really gets going of um some like cosmic disturbances that cause the extinctions but you have this big ass bird that's a feeds on carrion and whether you know lead ammo or not or power lines or not you'd have just seen that bird fizzle out the way that many many dozens of other species fizzled out at the end of the

licensing one because they were just took a long time to happen they were all over the i believe all over the continent right and they just the last remaining ones just happen to be the ones at the very western edge. They found a way to exploit dead marine mammals and that people will be like, there's nothing you were going to do or it was just going to happen.

The same way if we had caught the tail end of some other, the end of the mammoths and we grappled and be like, wow, wow why what did we do when maybe it was just gonna happen yeah but how do you guys answer that because it's like okay well who gets to choose are you steve ranella or john i am not gonna be the guy that signs the paper that says let it go okay for all humanity we just stop right now. I will not be the guy that says it. All right, so I still want to touch on pebbles.

I want to touch on giant sequoias and the Karl Marx tree. I want to talk about pedals. I already said pedals. Shifting baseline syndrome. Right. Because it's like an important part of your book. Yeah, I think at this point it's an important part of my life life i think it really has colored the way i think about a lot of things uh shifting baseline syndrome i want to interrupt you to say this is all in everything we've covered

mostly so far is in like plug your book again oh it's in wild ones yeah we're going we're going through the book john muellem's wild ones still available still available uh shifting baseline syndrome so yeah this is the idea i stumbled on when i was actually writing about that that butterfly and i find that it's something that gives a name to a lot of phenomenon that we come across all the time. Shifting baseline syndrome was, the phrase was coined by a marine fisheries scientist named Daniel Pauly in the 90s. And what he realized was that people in his field were coming in and spending their careers

documenting the crash of different fish species. So they were looking at everything happening in the ocean from the time they started their career to the time they retired. I mean, obviously they knew more than that, but this was their focus. And then the next generation of academics would come along or scientists would come along and they would start basically with a clean slate intellectually so they would start documenting the decline of fish species

further but because we're always looking at the world through this window of of the present we never really see that i should start that all over again i'm not doing this idea no i'm tracking i'm tracking but i'm tracking because i already understand it and i've thought about i just know there's a word let's do it again shifting baseline syndrome was a phrase coined by daniel paulie who's a fishery scientist. Don't get discouraged, man. I'm not discouraged. It's a discouraging idea, I guess.

The idea basically that he was noticing that people were documenting the crash of marine species, but no one was really putting together that the crashes that they were, or the declines that they were documenting within their own careers were actually just slivers on a much longer graph of time

so that each time a new generation would come along, they would accept the condition in which they were looking at the ocean as normal and they would document the decline relative to that normal. But if you zoom out and you look at, instead of a 50-year span or a 30-year span, you look at a 100-year span or 200-year span,

you see a much steeper decline. So that these little line graphs that we're drawing and freaking out about are actually just slivers of this much, much bigger graph. And I think that there's another term for pretty much the same phenomenon. Peter Kahn is a psychologist at the University of Washington. Around the same time, he coined the term environmental generational amnesia,

which I actually think is a cooler term. It didn't catch on quite as much. And that was more widely applicable. So he would go to kids in Houston who live among oil refineries, and he would say, do you think your neighborhood's polluted? They say no. Right. Uh, because that's the, you know, we just kind of assume it's normal. Whatever we inherit, it's normal. Uh, and so we watch all this stuff happen and, you know, people get old and grumpy and talk about how it used to be. But of course, when they were kids, they were grumpy people, you know, who were old at that time talking about how it used to be a generation before that they were kids there were grumpy people you know who were old at that

time talking about how it used to be a generation before that yeah and i think this is like a really important thing to recognize and then having recognized it i don't know what the fuck to do about it because it it just screws me up i still cannot what do you do with this information what do you do with the information that your perspective is sort of inherently flawed? I struggle with it all the time. And reading that term, like I've been, my mom still lives in the house where I was brought up and born. And it's on a lake. So I've been a very careful observer of that lake for 43 years. And yes, the Eden,

Eden for that lake is when I was five and first was able to take it in. But I do oftentimes wonder about like the time machine thing. It wouldn't be my first pick, but if I had 10 picks with a time machine, one stop would be that lake in pre-human times to go like so what is the actual baseline right but you're right i in my mind it was like that

lake's history began when i first gazed upon it and everything since then and and now my child my boy who fishes that lake a few days every year will someday have it be that that moment when i first took him there to fish bluegills was eden and everything will just be whatever has slipped from that point and my story is about what it was like, he'll be able to understand it, but it won't factor into his own monitoring of its decline. Right, and which... It'll be that that lake was born on that day. And which baseline do you attach the legitimacy to?

Because you could dial up your time machine and go back to whatever year. I tend to think of things as being, for me, just because it allows me to begin to sort of put my arms around things. I tend to, when thinking about wildlife in America, the arrival of human beings tends to be where I,

for me, that's where the story begins. And I agree with you. I think instinctually that makes a lot of sense. Well, no, because some people will be in Wyoming and they'll be thinking about when it was the great inland sea whose shorelines were populated by dinosaurs. But I don't care about that. I automatically go to, what was it like 14,000 years ago?

For whatever reason. Just because in our effort to understand and make sense of and begin having a conversation, that's just where I jump. Right. But that basically invalidates our presence here. That says that our goal as responsible citizens of these ecosystems is to have zero, is to be as if we were not here. That they would be repopulated with mammoths.

Yes. And that is impossible. Yeah. I think you're setting yourself up for failure there. But yeah, it's... It's just where my mind goes. And it's a problem thinking ahead too, right? It's a problem thinking, you know,

I use the example in the book, is the bald eagle recovery, right? You know, that when the bald eagles were delisted as endangered species, there was a lot of triumphant talk about how many, you know, bald eagles there were. Of course, it was just a minor fraction of the number of bald eagles that there were, you know, at, well, for example, at your baseline, right? Yeah. And so when do you know how many bald eagles... Or when Benjamin Franklin was criticizing them as being scummy.

Exactly. So how many are there supposed to be, right? How do we know if we've succeeded? And how do we know if we've failed? If we we know if we failed if we can't agree on what the legitimate you know what the should be of the equation is i don't know but you can find out because we're having this conversation all the time right now we're engaged in it around the idea of wolves and grizzlies in the lower 48 how How many? What is the most reasonable picture of recovery based on

the fact that there's this thing we have to deal with called reality? How many do we want? That's the question I like to ask. I think that's a much more complicated question. There's a lot of cases of species that have rebounded only to be greeted by distaste yes or take take the case oh go ahead

no i'm just gonna say like yeah man it quickly swings that pendulum yeah to where like oh canada geese canada geese you know save them save them. And now you can't find a person probably walking in our country that can even remember when people were trying to save that bird. Yeah, that's a good point. Things that we've recovered. There were states who were doing active reintroductions of deer, white-tailed deer. So now the new villain is the aggressive turkey.

Yeah, I read that article. Keeping people from getting out of their cars. And meanwhile, we had to go through extraordinary measures to recover the species. And now it's like these dumb, violent birds preventing me from getting in and out of my car. And now you've got the de-extinction people. Oh, yeah no they want to bring back passenger pigeons well i don't think american civilization is ready for swarms of passenger pigeons they're gonna block out the sun yeah can you refer our listeners back

to our episode can you look up what episode we did with the yes ancient dna expert dr best about de-extinction sure can just be good would be good. Both the goose and the turkey, I mean, there are significant portions of our population that if you were to mention that species to them, they'd be like, oh, the goddamn things that shit all over my lawn, scratch up my car. They have no reference of those animals

anywhere other than that. It's like I live on a golf course and i have to step in their poop every day i hate those things yeah very short-sighted yeah or yeah looking at it from the perspective of your own lifetime did you find the number 75 episode 75 we explored de-extinction with a professor and we covered just that topic about what it would really be like to have you know billions of passenger pigeons back again and why she thinks you don't really need to worry about it too much um but here's another version of the here's another version of how

much is too many and what does recovery look like so we've got it now we're up to over a half million buffalo and so people say like what does recovery look like and they'll say well there's two types of recovery there's dealing with its genetic extinction which we've dealt with it's no longer at risk of genetic extinction but it's there's still a risk of ecological extinction because of the half million that we have 94 are privately owned are managed as livestock so there's no risk of losing the animal but what we've lost is the the species interaction the species native interaction with the landscape so we haven't like that won't maybe won't be recovered or we'll recover it in just small little spots

where we can kind of replicate what the animal was beyond just its its genetic makeup but how it influenced and was influenced and was influenced by the landscape on which it lived um but yeah it's going on all the time. What should the world look like? I don't know. I mean, I think that gets back to what you were saying before about, you know, when do we give up on something because it's inconvenient? Well, the reason why it's often perceived as inconvenient is because the context in which it existed is gone. You know, I mean, I think the questions start to parallel

like palliative care questions, end-of-life kind of questions. It's not necessarily quality of life. I'm not going to get into the emotional well-being of the animals, but in some sense, these critters become invasive species in their own ecosystem. They're just not locked in in the way that they used to be. And I don't have an answer for that.

I don't know when it's not worth preserving them. Yeah, it's like keeping a person alive in a vegetative state. Yeah. What is your prime example of a native species becoming an invasive species in their own ecosystem? Well, I think that butterfly goes a long way to explain i mean this was a sand dune ecosystem about an hour east of san francisco called the antioch dunes that very quickly became uh leveled after the i think the big burst was after the 1906 earthquake in san francisco when they were mining the dunes for bricks.

But just wave after wave of exploitation of that resource until literally you could see, talking about shifting baselines, you could actually see the baseline of the dune lowering when you look at photographs. And it stopped being a dune ecosystem. The sand stopped shifting. Trees took root. It became a savannah.

It became like there's oak trees growing there now. So to come back and say, we want to preserve this butterfly that is used to living on a particular kind of plant that grows in a sand dune ecosystem, you got to do a lot of work to the ground before you start putting the butterfly back. And I mean, I think the condor in some sense too,

as you're talking about, like the entire matrix of circumstances that allowed it to evolve, it's just not really there. It's just hanging on to this because it learned to probably eat you know marine mammal carcasses and things like that so it adapted a little bit but it's not behaving the same way that a condor would have yeah in the past and you know

i'm not judging it no but it's con something about its condor ness is gone yeah yeah and i don't know i mean i just think the the point I got to, you know, basically, and I'm surprised that some people find this discouraging because I find it really encouraging, is the point I got to is just a kind of deep acceptance of the fact that these questions are not going to be resolved. That being as powerful a species as we are

and trying to exist in a world that's as complicated as it is, is going to mean that we're creating all this friction around us all the time and it's kind of amazing we feel somewhat compelled to even be responsible to the rest of the planet and to try to minimize that that friction or at least you know put back together whatever we're breaking as we kind of trundle around so i don't have any fantasy. This whole idea that there's some hope that if we just all stop drinking bottled water

or whatever it is or drive in Priuses that suddenly the earth is going to be restored to this beautiful equilibrium and we won't have to think about these things anymore I think is sort of ludicrous. And I think that what we need to be doing is figuring out how to exist in this tussle of priorities and clumsiness

and just kind of hashing it out, it's just like a brawl we just got to be in there swinging away trying to fix all this stuff because we're going to be constantly destroying it all the time too There's a quote you have for another piece you wrote that I wrote down

The future is always somebody else's problem it will very likely feel as authentic and only as horrific as our moment does to us yeah i think i said i think i actually said the future is always somebody else's present which is the shifting baselines thing is that oh what did i say problem i have it right here the future is always somebody else's present. It will very likely feel as authentic and only as horrific

as our moment does to us. They won't have a new... People won't recalibrate to experience another level of horrific. I hope not. I think even if Corm even that's the only hope even at cormac mccarthy's the road right there's only so much anxiety to go around right i don't think you find a new way

to achieve a new level of anxiety it's normal it's your normal it's just no and i think the perfect example of it is going back to hornaday is you're saying now he was lamenting that all the kids were playing indoors none of the kids were getting outside enough and what what is our generation of with young kids lament about right now you know a hundred years later it's the same thing right yeah I think we're if anything maybe we're less concerned than he was you know he was driven nuts by that yeah I'm just living my life. I wish my kids played outside more, but I'm not writing screeds about it. Have you read his book of going up into BC?

No. Hunting mountain goats, grizzlies, and bighorns? That was Hornaday, right? You sent me that book. Yeah, Campfires in the Rockies, right? Campfires in the Northern Rockies. No, I've never read that one. You haven't read it?

No. Yeah, he was a big game hunter. Yeah. He liked it read it? No. Yeah, he was a big game hunter. Yeah. He liked it. Oh, yeah. Okay, now, how big, explain to me how big a sequoia is. It's fucking big. Yeah.

I just read your piece about sequoias. And it's funny because in the beginning, our guest, John Mualem, is saying, like, I suppose I need to talk about how like big they are yeah that's i just figured everyone talks about how big they are but no let's focus on how big they are i figured i'm gonna sit down and write a piece about sequoias i can't really try to be cute about it we're gonna deal with with this head on and just get it out of the way because you really need to even if you're not going to understand the the feeling of being next to something big that i'm telling you you at least need to remember that it's all it's a

preoccupation yeah we can't gloss over it but you you first off um before we talk about how big they are how did it come to be that you did a piece about visiting the sequoias so the because it wasn't like a doom and gloom piece no so the times magazine uh does a travel issue a couple times a year yeah a couple times a year and this one this was about a year ago their idea was to just ask writers to go somewhere you've always wanted to go in the US that you've never been before. There was a lot of places I wanted to go and partially it was dictated by the timing. I didn't have a lot of time,

so I needed to go somewhere relatively close. But I'd always wanted to go. I'd spend some time in the Redwoods, but something about the Sequoias and I think honestly it might just be the name. It might have just been the exoticness of the name. Redwood,

it's all right there. Sequoia, there's a little more mystery to it. It leaves something to the imagination. It sure does. It feels a little more magical. I've just always been fascinated by them so i just wanted to see what would happen if i went and stood around some really big trees yeah it's a cool piece and in it you're trying to you're struggling with how big they are and

one of the ways you express it would be that if you filled the the biggest one is what's his name i know that they used to call the carl marx general general sherman tree that it went from the carl marx tree to the general is that right is that the general sherman tree i think yeah sherm they call it sherm for short yeah yeah that if you filled that thing with water you're saying so it's the largest tree on earth by volume and if you filled it with water a person could draw a bath from that reservoir of water every single day for 27 years before exhausting the water yeah or that a limb fell off it so a branch off a coniferous tree seven feet thick 150 feet long and you point out that that would be one of the biggest, that limb would be one of the biggest trees

east of the Mississippi. West of the Mississippi. No, east of the Mississippi, sorry, yes. Big damn trees. Yeah, that was the kind of thing that drove it home for me. Yeah, I've never heard that one. A branch that's seven feet across. Yeah, yeah, that one gets repeated a lot around the park.

Does it? Yeah. What's funny is you talk in the piece about how you wanted to take a photo. How frustrating is like you cannot take a photo of the tree because people looking at it will just, they'll shrink the other trees. So the trees that it's towering above, they'll be like, oh, those are shrubs. And your head will always make the tree make sense. And John's talking about how he finally gets a picture

that he really likes and sends it to a friend and she mistakes it for a tree in his backyard. Yeah, it was amazing. Everything I did to try to get a good picture of these trees backfired. At one point I had someone take a picture of me on a ridge overlooking five or six sequoias. And so all that's in the picture is me and these sequoias. And when you look at it, you think that I'm standing in front of a few regular sized trees that are right behind me instead of like 200 feet behind me.

Yeah. Because your eye just brings them right up. It just finds a way to make them seem normal. Like it doesn't want to deal with it. It just can't deal with it. It just can't deal with it. But when you get up to it, do you feel it then? Yes.

Yeah, I really did. I'm not, as we discussed, I'm not a nature writer in the sense of someone who wants to go stand next to a tree and feel things. But yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. I was there to go see what it feels like to be next to a tree. So I was turned on a little bit more than if I was just walking around. But I cannot see how those trees can disappoint you if you go to see them. I mean, if you do, I think there's something dead inside in you. Yeah.

Can you touch real quick on, as well as you remember it, can you touch real quick on the sort of history with this utopian colony? Yeah. And how they wanted to finance their colony. Yeah, so there was a Kiowa colony. So the history of the park was really interesting in the sense that we think about these... Well, there's a couple things.

First is that people had always been trying to cut down the sequoias from the time that white people discovered them. They thought, it's a bonanza, right? There's huge trees. And the problem with sequoias is you can't really cut them down very well because they splinter. So there were a lot of trees that were cut down, and then just basically you couldn't use them.

Like when a tip starts to crack. Yeah, well, and when it hits the ground, it's not good lumber. I got you. So a lot of people wasted a lot of trees trying to figure out how to use them as resources and just couldn't figure it out. But they kept trying. So in any case, this, uh, there was a, uh, federal act that was encouraging people, the Timber and Stone Act, I believe it was called, that was encouraging people to go out West and, and, uh, you know, log trees. And this group of people in San Francisco who were socialists, utopian socialists decided that

they were going to team up and buy a lot of land inside what is now sequoia national park and this was going to be how they were going to fund their utopia was by cutting down trees and i don't know how do you remember how long they were the first they had to build a road well an interesting thing about it was because they all lived together. Yeah. They all had the same address, and they found that corporations would do bogus stuff to do land claims. So their land claim got messed up because they thought it was just a corporation using fictitious names. Right? Yeah. That's the end of the story.

The whole beginning of the story is that they actually got the land. They started building a road. And started building a road. Started building a road. They spent a year or something cutting this road, you know, straight uphill for miles to get to the biggest stand of sequoias. To chop them down. To chop them down. And this whole time. Socialists.

There's a kind of a clerical, you know, there's a bureaucratic wrangling over their claims. Because as you say, there was that sort of raise a red flag that they all had the same address. At this time, corporations, they would just go into saloons and they'd buy someone a beer to go down to the office and make a claim on a piece of land so that they could buy it back from them. So the fact that all these utopians were all using the same address made them seem like a corporation.

So in any case, this is all playing out. They're just building their roads on good faith that eventually the government's going to see that this is an honest mistake and validate their claim. But in the meantime, it was actually partially due to the railroad interests who wanted to build the railroad along a certain route. They built, they founded Sequoia,

the federal government founded Sequoia National Park and stripped them of their claim, which they never officially had in the first place. So they had improved all this land. So yeah, big government coming in and screwing the socialists. Screwing the socialists at the behest of large corporations in order to create a national park and preserve this kind of national natural treasure.

How far we've come. It's all scrambled up. How far we've come. It's really hard to see the typical good guys and bad guys in that story. But they recognized the tree as they knew like the biggest one, Sherman. They recognized it as like, man, now there's a tree. Yeah. They named it the Karl Marx tree.

They did. They used to have picnics under it. And they would have cut it down or anything? I don't know. I mean, they had a lot of trees to go through. I mean, I also wonder if they would have maybe figured out pretty quickly that these trees were not going to really, you know, no one had figured out a way to basically monetize these trees.

And they were just optimistic enough to figure that they could do it, I guess. Yeah. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew! Our northern brothers

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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. How lucky for the Sequoias that they're not good for lumber.

That's right. It's a touching article though. I liked it. Thanks. And then I still want to come back around and talk about your piece about Pedals the Bear. Yeah. Pedals the Bear. Yeah. Pedals, the bear.

Should I give a little synopsis here? Yeah. Because you were asked to write about influential people, right? So the influential people of what year, 2000, this was last year. This is a,

so the magazine also does a lot, the lives they lived. It's an issue. It's like obituaries. It's obituaries. It's every year between Christmas and new year's where there's 20, 25 remarkable people that have died who each get a short essay about them. And the idea, I think, is you've got your David Bowies,

people like that. There'll be definitely some of those. But I think the bulk of the issue is always devoted to people who you may not have heard of, but they've had this profound impact in one way or another. And so it's a good time to kind of look back on the people who maybe didn't get their due, either in life or in the year in which they died.

I'm doing one right now about a sociologist that no one's ever heard of. But last year, I did one about a bear, which I think was maybe only the second time there'd been an animal. I can't say it was the first. They'd also done one about the remember when the chimp tore off the woman's face?

Yep. Yeah. So the chimp got one. Oh, that was nice. But yeah, Petals the Bear was Oh, earlier speaking of chimps, earlier I was trying to think of ways to explain Hornaday and I was thinking, what if Jane Goodall had gone out to shoot chimps? That's a way of having a couple stuffed ones laying around

this would be a very different story yeah i think that's a good way to think about i think that's exactly what it must have been like instead she's like you know what i'm gonna hold off on that and try to do um but no but she's just studying them anyways i didn't mention it because i didn't think it was a good analogy but it did cross my mind but yeah pebbles petals petals petals show some respect for the dead right yeah petals was a black black bear in new jersey northern new jersey which is also where i grew up and uh he had some kind of injury or deformity on his paws and uh so he had learned to walk upright so he spent a lot of time just cruising around through suburban neighborhoods on his hind legs had an affinity for bird feeders yeah i'm sure and garbage cans and so people would you know

there were a lot of videos of pedals on the internet because it was crazy looking you know i mean it looked people would always describe it as looking like a man in a bear suit yeah he would go quite a few steps he was good yeah yeah he could move he could move and so they call them pedals uh and then he was shot by a bow hunter i believe um or as uh one i can't remember what publication in New York he was assassinated. Yeah. There had been a big effort. I mean, what I was basically writing about was the big argument that unfolded the summer before he died about what to do about him. Whether there was a big camp of pro-pedals, partisans who believed that he needed to be brought in from the wild and sent to a rehab facility yeah live out his days in deeper background is that when we talk about how many

is enough uh new jersey had very successfully this is me talking now new jersey had very successfully recovered the black bear absolutely to the point where the state Fish and Game Agency felt that in execution of their mandate about allowing democratic access to renewable resources, felt that the species had been recovered enough that it was warranted to allow hunting. For a couple reasons. One, because there was a harvestable surplus of the animals. And two, that they had hit a point where they felt that they could not have anymore or in somewhere needed the lower populations to limit their spread into higher conflict areas so this is a determination they made and they allowed and they came up with a quota system and started a bear season and i think pedals people knew what this might mean for pedals

oh yeah and i think pedals people all along i mean that that decision to reinstate the bear hunt did not go down well among a huge share of the population of new jersey yeah so i think a lot of the the feeling for pedals was already triggering you know triggered by a lot of upset over the fact that bears are being hunted. Petals became a proxy. Yeah. It's always a proxy, isn't it? Because people can't, because not people, a lot of people can't think species level.

Yes. They can only think individual level. I think that's exactly right. And even when comprehending their own species, I find that a lot of people do not think individual level. I think that's exactly right. And even when comprehending their own species, I find that a lot of people do not think species level. When I hear that a plane went down and then I see that that plane went down in Belarus, I'm like, oh,

glad it wasn't America, right? Or if a plane went down in America, I quickly run in my head, would that be a flight that people I know would be on? I wouldn't know anyone on that plane. So we do. We have a difficult time with species-level thinking. We focus on the known and finite.

Well, especially when you give the animal a name and it becomes a internet celebrity and yeah so go on what was special in some way so yeah follow us through on pebbles well so in the you know as pedals rises to fame why do you call him pebbles i don't know he pedaled along right yeah that's the joke because it's stepping on the joke pebbles is the uh flintstone girl no no pedals because he like would pedal along yeah he's got a wheel he's moving uh so yeah so there was a there was a lot of talk about what to do about pedals and a lot of anger that among you know this one side of the debate that the state was not helping pedals that the compassionate thing to do would be to bring petals out of the

wild you know and let them live in captivity and when i say captivity i mean you know at some sort of sanctuary not in a cage and what was the state's attitude toward the state's attitude was this bear has adapted to its condition seems to be well. It's doing all the things a bear needs to do to survive. The compassionate thing to do is to let the bear be wild. And that's what intrigued me, is that fundamental predicament where both sides

had the same exact facts and both wanted to do the compassionate thing and had completely different ideas about how to do it. And then he was killed. So the debate was over. You didn't have any chance to talk to the guy that got it, did you? No.

So that's not public information because there were some rumors about various people who were the hunter who took pedals down and those people received death threats. And so I think one actually sued some people for defamation after that. For outing his name or suggesting that he was the... Yeah, I don't know what ended up with that.

But yeah, so it was very tense. I do wonder about the guy that got it. I'd like to imagine that he was not i hope that he was just not aware yeah well that's the question i asked in the pieces we don't know if so pedals did not only stand on two i mean he he did walk around on all fours like regular bear at times so it's possible you know that whoever killed pedals caught him on all fours caught him on all fours like a regular bear at times so it's possible you know that whoever killed petals caught him on all fours caught him on all fours had no way of knowing that was a different bear on the other on the other hand if the bear was upright then the very thing that made petals

such a survivor ultimately probably drew attention to him causes death which i think is a sad irony yeah and i imagine new jersey's a state where you have to report your harvest immediately upon kill check station and they knew the minute it pulled up i read that once petals showed up they're like oh god no way because someone shot markings on it well someone shot petals am i still saying what was the nature of the deformity well i believe i could have this wrong i believe he was missing one paw and the other was either uh it was sort of bent inward so it was kind of useless okay um this is really some sort of accident yeah and and I should stipulate here that the state to this day does not confirm that Pedals was the bear that was brought to the check station.

They will just say that it fit Pedals' description because they had never tagged Pedals, and so they don't like to identify the bear. So I don't know if that's significant in any way. I thought it was sort of interesting that there's a sort of Schrodinger's bear aspect to it. Even that is uncertain, technically. That's where it always makes me cringe.

We have a running joke about New Jersey cat ladies, but it always makes me cringe when people who I feel like aren't equipped to begin talking about wildlife when they enter wildlife conversations. Like they haven't really earned their place at the table, in my opinion, in my estimation. They haven't earned their place at the table. And I don't think that a position at the table is reliant on the fact that you're pro-extraction of wildlife resources or pro-use. I feel like you can have a place at the table and be ardently anti-hunting or anti-use of renewable resources. It's like, sure, I welcome those conversations.

But oftentimes there's little things will happen that all of a sudden just invite people who are ill-prepared, not up to speed to get in on it. And that was one of those cases where all of a sudden just everyone kind of became a bear expert for a minute. And you saw a similar thing happen. There was no poster child for it. But did you write about or follow? I want to ask you about hunting the deer in your yard. There was no poster child for it. But did you write about or follow? I want to ask you about hunting the deer in your yard.

But did you follow the Florida bear hunt when Florida went through a similar thing and initiated a bear hunt? Vaguely, yeah. They had a population estimate of bears in Florida that is just based on modeling, so it's a soft number. They set a quota for their bear season. They opened the season up.

I think it was in two days. They were getting close to this. In two days, they got close enough to their quota, their mortality quota, that they shut the season down. Because were they to run it a whole other day they felt they might go over the quota so they shut it off before they hit their mortality cap some of the world looks some of the country looks at this and says wow florida did a great job with bears It almost seems like their model was low

and they have more bears than they thought they had. They planned out this hunt and had all the measures put in place to make sure that they didn't surpass their mortality quota, had the restraint and conservative management strategy to shut down before reaching their quota what a successful launch of a bear hunt hooray for florida or as some um as one i can't another new york uh online news magazine i can't remember the name of put it at florida executes 280 bears like or there's that version you know and the fact that these two versions can just exist

together out there it just like it befuddles me but i think it's this kind of conversation we're having in general now about the the polarized nature of america yeah i mean i wasn't gonna say this kind of partisan deadlock that everything is about now the wildlife people this is like the most familiar thing in the world right that like i was saying before two sides can have the exact same information see the situation completely differently and not want to budge that's the story of wildlife but also in the case that in this case kind of sort of want the same thing if you went to and said do you want to have a stable well-managed population of bears in Florida

I feel that most people would be like yep but then the next question would reveal all those differences you know well because it comes down to killing yeah

I mean if you are against hunting an animal, I don't see how you can argue your way into feeling good about it. If it's morally reprehensible to you. Now, I want to get personal with you, if you don't mind. Sure. I've been at your home, and we looked at the deer and talked about the deer out in your home.

How is it, what is sort is your thing? If you imagine just as a writer or whatever, if you imagine you eat some meat, not a ton of it, but you eat some. Yeah. You'll eat deer meat. Sure. What do you think about, and I'm honestly curious

about this because, like I said, in my mind, you very much earned your seat at the table. Thank you. What do you think when you imagine that when you imagine yourself like like shooting a deer to eat like what are sort of the the pros and cons that run through your head or the like the emotional wrestling or whatever it is that happens in your head i have many times imagined myself shooting a deer that walked through my property maybe not with a gun maybe more with a bow okay for for aesthetic reasons or uh for uh earthquake preparedness in an earthquake sort of a post i mean the gun versus i want to do the gun versus bow just because it wouldn't be plausible i'm not sure why you just picture it with a bow.

Yeah, I guess I just... I don't know. You picture it suffering a little longer. I guess I have some discomfort around guns. Yeah, that it would suffer a little longer before it died. Yeah, but I would suffer less. I don't know. I guess I haven't thought it through.

I haven't thought it through. That's a good case. Maybe I should start thinking about it. Well, I guess because I don't have a gun, but my daughter has a bow. So I could shoot it with a kid's bow but my daughter has a bow so i can shoot it it gives you a way to start picturing it yeah okay yeah picture i've also pictured i mean this is way crueler but like so i'm writing a book about an earthquake right now so i constantly am looking

at the world around me thinking about if there were an earthquake you're hyper alert yeah it's just sort of running in the background all the time and i have so that has made and also on bainbridge you live on an island you're told to be prepared for i think two weeks because the idea is that there's a bridge that connects the island to the peninsula that may or may not survive an earthquake and that the ferry service may not run and so you know supplies and whatnot will have a difficult yeah because when when it hits they imagine a mass tsunami well i don't, that's something I need to research

because I haven't looked into that myself, but I don't know that Bainbridge is necessarily at risk of a tsunami. No, but the ferry boats. Oh, yes. Well, yeah. So I have actually thought, and this was a while ago,

but I do remember thinking, like looking around and being like, it happens right now, what do I do? How does my family eat? I mean, we have an earthquake kit, but it's probably not good for two weeks. And I thought we have a garden, right? With a fence around it. And I thought this is how far I was going. I'm not necessarily proud of this, but I thought, is there a way to lure a deer into the garden, lock the gate,

and then it's just hand-to-hand. Yeah. Right? No bows, no nothing. Well, I didn't have any. I don't have any. I have an axe, right? But that would be the first step, maybe, right?

So this is my experience with hunting so far. This is the level, the sort of fantasy. Fantasy makes it sound good. It took no pleasure in it. But you realize that that's not, the axe is not a legal method of take. You're post-apocalyptic now.

I'm post-earthquake. I can say it's apocalyptic. I've just emptied all of my thoughts regarding killing deer. That's all I've thought about. That's the extent of it. You're going to make me think about it more now. Yeah, well, I'm a little bit curious. Only because I sat there and looked at the deer trails cutting through your

yard with you and like i said i just want to like find where you are so you would never like you you you and i'm definitely not trying to i'm not trying to like like unveil or reveal some sort of inherent hypocrisy or whatever, but you will buy flesh. Yeah. So what is it that you don't go like, oh, I'll just shoot these deer and eat them. There's a bunch of them. I don't think I have,

I don't think I'm squeamish about that. Yeah. I don't think I would have a problem hunting. It's just something I don't do. Is this like a lack of interest? I've never been, yeah, I've never been driven to go try i did go once you know i went with a friend of mine went elk hunting yeah i couldn't fire the gun or we didn't even see any elk that day but you know i was curious to see what it was like um i'm not actually anti-hunting you know i don't have i don't

have any aversion to it. My entire life I've gone to the supermarket. I used to be a butcher. I've been on that side of it too. I'm someone who goes to the store and buys meat. I'm not someone who kills it myself. I don't have to.

That's what it comes down to. There's a lot of things. I could make my own clothing, right? But it's for the same reason. For sure. I've never been drawn to do that. I've tried to. I've made that point.

It's funny you bring that up about making your own clothing because I've made, when I've been interviewed, I've been asked by people oftentimes, they're like, so you think that everybody should go out and shoot it? You know, that's what you think. The only legitimate, and I always point out, no, there are a lot of things that people used to have to do that I don't do myself.

Like process my own raw sewage, stitch my own clothes, right? I've bowed out of all kinds of stuff and allowed people to step in and handle it for me. It just happens to be that that, well, a handful, growing vegetables is very important to me. I guess I've really centered around food ideas. Like somehow food remains, like being in the driver's seat as much as possible

on food remains very important to me i feel the same way i think i just haven't gone as far as you have gone you know it's i think we have the same philosophy it's just i i have not executed it to the degree that you have to the extent yeah so you don't imagine anytime soon you're going to take up deer hunting i don't i mean i don't know i want you to so badly why because i want you to write about it huh i mean i might that might be the most likely context in which i would go hunting to be honest yeah well maybe maybe asks me to. Well, maybe they will. All right. I want to strongly steer you away

from the axe situation. Yeah. Just trust me. I was raising the axe situation to kind of put my naivete on the table just as a baseline for the rest of the conversation. More for your personal safety.

Yeah, you don't do cheesy cold opens, though. You're not like, the sharpened ax was raised over my head. No. If I was driven to kill an ax inside my garden fence, to kill a deer inside my garden fence with an ax after an earthquake,

I would probably write about it. That seems like a remarkable experience that should be documented somewhere. But I hope it doesn't come to that. If it came to that, you would later, when tapping into the old well, you would stumble upon that story. Eventually, yeah.

All right, last thing. Do you guys got, the last thing I want to talk about is the new book. But we'll talk about that, then you can ask your final questions. Are you guys good to move on to the new book? Yes. Yeah. To what degree are to move on to the new book? Yes. Yeah.

To what degree are you comfortable talking about your new book? Oh, I'm comfortable with it. Well, cause here's the thing. A lot of the people listen to the show have an intense interest in Alaska. Right. Because they come at it from a hunting and fishing perspective. And that's like, you know, well known for that kind of stuff. I don't know if you're aware.

Oh, I'm pretty aware. A lot of people killing deers with axes up there that's what i've heard so uh yeah yeah talk about talk about the book yeah well my book has everything to do with alaska and almost nothing to do with hunting and fishing but um this was actually grew out of a project i did uh for a podcast called 99 invisible which um you know anyone listening to this who wants to go check that out would would get a lot better understanding of it um can you also do talk about the the shows you do with the yeah so this was a project i did with a a bunch of musicians who are um in the a band called the decemberis so it was uh you know everyone but one member of the decemberis uh used to be in this

uh other band and who I've done some collaborations with over the years um it's sort of tricky now because they don't exactly have a name anymore but they used to be called Black Prairie so we uh we basically do these projects where um I tell a story and they write a score to the story um and often songs uh sort of based on characters they did a soundtrack for Wild wild ones where they wrote songs about different people in the book. They wrote a song about Hornaday. Yeah. Um, it sounds a little weird, but it works out. All right. And so in this last project, uh, we did for 99% invisible,

it's called this is chance, which is probably gonna be the name of the book as well. Um, and it was about the 1964 earthquake, uh,aska uh mostly mostly i'm dealing with anchorage and i'm just basically telling the story of the first three or four days after the earthquake and thankfully i found just a tremendous amount of archival material that's letting me do that in a really intimate um detail-oriented way can you talk about just how big and bad that earthquake was? So it was a 9.2 earthquake. It was so big that it's hard.

It's like the sequoias. You filled it with water. Yeah, it's hard. It really is like the sequoias in the sense that your mind cannot accept. It has no way to intuit the size. The Richter scale ends at 10. Well, the richter scale is exponential oh it is so a nine is 10 times worse than the eight yeah it doesn't end at 10 uh i don't know how can there be an end right well that's yeah i don't know because you just know how bad the earth can get

bound up yeah i mean this is a you know know, some of what I find really interesting about this, it may be true of all earthquakes, but the degree to which the damage was sort of freakishly random, you know, I mean, it wasn't random. It had everything to do with the underlying geology and whatnot, but just looking at pictures of the damage, you know, you have on 4th Avenue,

which is sort of the main drag of Anchorage, you had one side of the street, which for two and a half, three blocks, sank about 20, 30 feet just in place where all the buildings were still mostly intact. You had cars parked next to the parking meters just 20 feet below. You had guys coming out of bars,

just looking up, trying to figure out how they're going to get out. The other side of the street, totally fine. Yeah, I was telling John today that my brother hunts ducks in a marsh that used to be farmland but it just instantly shot downward and became underwater yeah there was an entire little town called portage we were saying earlier that the same same scenario um yeah so so this the the magnitude and the destruction from this quake were pretty catastrophic and yet the death toll was was uh miraculously small i think there was 111 people um around alaska and that included that may or may not have included a handful of people that died from tsunamis down in the lower 48 as well.

Partially because there just wasn't the population density in Alaska or even in Anchorage at that time. But it happened on Good Friday. So what I'm writing about is the story is mostly focused around a radio station in Anchorage called KENI, which was sort of like the community radio station. You know, they were the people around town. Everyone knew the broadcasters. And there was a woman who worked part-time at the station named Jeannie Chance, who for a variety of reasons wound up sort of

being recognized as the voice that carried a lot of Alaska through that quake. And it was her voice that just solely by coincidence wound up being played all over the world. Both her giving reports to stations all over the world, but also just recordings of her that people were picked up outside of Anchorage on the station, just doing local announcements about people, so-and-so, your brother is at this place, he's fine. I'm just kind of reconnecting the community. So I'm following her story, and she just turned out to be a totally fascinating character both before and after the quake, and then a couple of other people around Anchorage at that time

taking them through these first few days just of that Good Friday, Easter weekend. When did she die? She died in the 90s. She actually went on to be a state state legislature a legislator in alaska for a few years and had a pretty distinguished career and um you know was really remembered as a you know really fondly by people there for you know she was real big on kind of feminist issues at a time when that was not necessarily that was real popular um and did a lot of work with uh she

had uh you know been abused by her husband at the time around the time of the earthquake. She was in this kind of, you know, uh, tough marriage that way and, uh, came out of it and did a lot of work for, um, you know, other women suffering from that as a legislator. And, uh, so yeah, so I'm not necessarily dealing with her later life all that much, although I am, I'm looking into it, but, uh it but uh uh yeah i think there's just something that really captivated me about the unpredictability you know the way that that lay a situation like that lays bare just how chaotic the earth is and you know just i want to say metaphorically but not really even metaphorically just literally just the uncertainty that we all kind of have to live with

yeah and then what do you do when when that cleaves your world right open and all these things that you thought you you thought you took for granted, it's just the way things were just aren't true anymore, which more and more seems like a condition where a lot of us are living with too. So, yeah. What was her name again? Jeannie Chance.

What jumped to my mind when you're talking about that is the woman who, when Folsom, New Mexico, was destroyed by a flash flood, there was a woman working a switchboard trying to alert everyone and stayed at the post and was killed. Sacrificed herself to the... That's an interesting thing. It didn't take long after I started doing just the basic research for this book that I realized that as remarkable as her story was and what she did was,

there were lots of other people, even just around Anchorage, ham radio operators who stayed up for 36 hours just relaying messages to the South 48. All sorts of people were doing miraculous things. This is what I was telling you before is that just so happened that this sociology research institute

had been set up at Ohio State a few months before the earthquake. And their whole thing was they were going to study the way people behaved in natural disasters in the aftermath. And they were bankrolled by the military. The military thought this was like a natural laboratory in which to study nuclear war, what was going to happen, what was pandemonium was going to unfold after a nuclear strike, and how are we going to control it or minimize it. And it turned out that these sociologists who came to Alaska, this was their first big chance to study a real disaster. And they did hundreds of interviews around town, documented everything. And I, you know, have access to their materials is a big

way I'm telling this story. You know, they started to look around and they realized it's not at all what, you know, the military thinks it's going to it's going to be it is a lot of people acting very heroically calmly rationally collaboratively and that's the way these aftermaths tend to play out you know sometimes there's mismanagement by authorities you know looting turns out to be mostly just a myth although as soon as anything looks like looting it gets widely reported because you know the fear of looting is is very high yeah um so uh yeah they just kind of that was the beginning that alaska study was really the beginning of like a half century of social science just debunking a lot of these very pessimistic myths about human nature that stuff persists because i think there's still this thing when people who are into disaster preparedness like when i imagine my own because i live in a seismically

active area when i imagine my own disaster i live in a seismically active area when i imagine my own disaster preparedness i like to think that there's some room in my mind for ways in which i would assist my neighbors but a lot of guys start thinking about disaster preparedness and they're out shopping for a gun with which they will use to kill their neighbors i feel like there's like two mentalities at play there. Yeah, and even though we see it again and again, it's funny because I'm just writing about this a little bit. Even this year and all the disasters we've had this year, and there have been so many great stories

about just ordinary local people helping each other, but it's always framed as this very surprising thing. It's just who we are in Houston. We help one another. But actually, it's who we are in houston you know like we help one another but actually you know everyone it's who everyone is right um and so there's this weird mix of what we just can't quite accept uh you know that maybe the the goodness is not so special you know that it's this it should be very reassuring but it just feels deflating so i think it takes a few it takes a few days of feeling abandoned to start bringing out the bad yeah it may be i don't know if you just look at like natural disasters it's oftentimes it's not a meat people aren't

immediately like well let's run out and cause mayhem it's sort of like man we've been completely let down yeah and then tensions, what they say is, I guess my understanding of the research, and I don't know it in and out, but... I definitely don't know it. I guess there's a shift that happens when in a natural disaster, everyone's suffering together. So everyone has the same...

Everyone's afflicted by the same thing. And then when you can stop feeling collectively joined by your suffering from that disaster and start pointing fingers at you know whoever is has botched the recovery to the disaster yeah that's when the when the trouble starts to you know at least the ill will i think starts to rise up i don't you know that's my sense from reading what i've read so far no i fear for people finding out about my giant rain barrel and just how much mountain house i have stashed around and they're gonna come for it matt shouldn't just let it out just let the cat out of the bag right there so uh cal do you have any concluders any final um things questions for our guest john

mualem oh man his work can be found at any number of places online and in his book, Wild Ones. I should say thanks, Wild Ones. I admit I am not through it, but it's been great. Thank you. And, yeah, a couple little twists and additions to some of the stories in there just in a way that I wasn't thinking and, and have really enjoyed it. Um, yeah, man, I, I, what is, what is your response to those people? He was like, Oh, well, how much is too much? Like when, when do you, John say, yeah,

you got to pull the plug on that sea turtle. I wish I was that organized to have a rubric to make these decisions yeah I mean I'm just you know going clumsily on my way like everyone else I think or is it better to go to Steve's 14,000 years ago you're the you're the first man to that lake what if what if you you're on your pristine lake and there is not a panfish to be found it's full of you know northern pike you know lake there 14 000 i wonder if that's why i'd like to go visit that's why i'd like to go it's an unrealistic it's an unrealistic goal but if i it's just where i've decided to fall and how tempted would you be to add something to it? But it's like academic, too.

It's not like I'm like, thinking will arrive there, but it's just a way that I, it's how I begin to understand things. It's a way I strive to understand things. That was the baseline conversation. That was day one. That was day one. And then...

This is as good as it gets. And as best as I can understand what happened on day one through day well i don't know what day we'd be on now in the hundreds of thousands as best as how we'd get there it's actually pronounced bison okay bison bison bison is how it's pronounced try it's trinomial nomenclature would be bison bison bison yeah um

yeah it's a good book I think if you like listening to this show you'll probably like reading the book I feel like a lot of the things that and I was surprised by it because I really didn't know what to expect you know I just kind of got it you know thinking I better read it because we're going to talk to John and uh it's like a lot of the concepts that you've brought up to me just

over the last few years john sort of brings up in that book and then talks about him in just a different way than you and i talk about him so it's it's been the eye opening for me i really i've i've really enjoyed it i mean i could ask all kinds of questions you need to get deeper about what i learned in that book so far. But I don't really have any follow up. I think if your whole understanding like mine, like my understanding of wildlife is inspired, has been inspired by and is kind of based around, right, like a hunting and fishing perspective. Yeah. So it's useful um it's useful to go

to to go read people read about wildlife from from a different perspective now and then because they just notice things completely different it's good that's what i mean that's that that's kind of why i would sell it to our that's kind of why i would sell it to the type of guy that's listening to this, type of lady that's listening to this. Yeah. Expand outward a little bit. Yeah, totally. Ain't all about turkeys.

How good turkeys are doing right now. Anything else, Janice? No, I think that's all I got. John, do you have any final concluding thoughts if there's anything you want to just wedge in you couldn't find a way to wedge it in but you're like man the one thing i got to make sure to talk about is blank and you never got a chance now's your chance i don't think i mean i would just say like you're asking me how do you make those decisions i'm not really interested in making those decisions you know but i think that there's value in trying to acknowledge how complex a lot of these questions are and how complex your own like you're

saying well this is my baseline but what how can i really defend that i think the more people do that the easier it is to deal with this kind of you know partisan gridlock we find ourselves in a lot of stuff because you won't feel so violated by whatever decision is made if you can understand that it's happening in this kind of climate of great complexity. It gives you some sympathy. If you think that your thing is absolutely right and there's easy ways to think about all this, then when the decision doesn't meet your criteria,

it's going to feel a lot worse. That's funny you bring that up, because I really, there's a handful of things that I remind myself about every day. And one of the things I remind myself about every day is not becoming one of those people who has this sort of attitude like,

oh my God, what do they think of next? Yesterday it was this, and now it's that. Like to be like that type of guy scares me. I think it gets harder too, right? It's just so easy. It's so easy to become a guy like that. I like them always like, hey, don't get divorced.

Don't get divorced today. And don't become a guy who's like, oh my God, what next? They're probably related. I think those are related goals. Yeah, they work. Yeah. Your efforts on each of those work in tandem.

All right. John Muell, thanks for joining us. Tell us again, because Wild Ones, but give us the great subtitle because I'll mess it up. Wild Ones, a sometimes dismaying, weirdly reassuring story about looking at people, looking at animals in America. And all kinds of writings.

You write primarily for New York Times Magazine. Yeah. Not the newspaper, but the magazine, which are brothers walking hand in hand. Yes. And then in your forthcoming book, you're not done with it. And then it takes them a year to do it. It's a ways out. I mean, I just started writing it.

So this is a long range teaser. Yeah, I'm deep in the dark tunnel. But in the future, in future Christmas times, a Christmas time or two from now, when you're like, what do I get my brother or my sister or whatever? Get them this as yet unnamed book yeah put it on your calendar now your calendar shopping years from now all right john thanks again thank you guys 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

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