The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 105: Chairman Rob Bishop

Episode Date: February 26, 2018

Salt Lake City, UT- Steven Rinella talks with House Natural Resource Committee Chairman Rob Bishop, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects discussed: the Land and Water Conservation Fund; Monument designations and who administers them; Chairman Bishop's perception of public lands; the Outdoor Industry Association's decision to pull out of Utah; access as the primary barrier to entry for hunters and anglers; twisting the intent of public access enhancement; what ought to happen with the Endangered Species Act; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

I'm going to go so far as to say we've got a very special guest in that he's arguably the most influential voice on public lands wildlife management and natural resources management in the country i'm talking about u.s congressman rob bishop from utah who chairs the house natural resources committee now i usually go way out of my way to not burden listeners with my political views outside of those areas where politics sort of intersect with the concerns of hunters and anglers and wildlife. Meaning, I'm not going to go expound on my views around capital punishment or legalized weed, but I have no hesitation about giving my political input

when it comes to things like public lands, conservation funding, and attacks on science-based wildlife management. Over the life of the Meat Eater podcast, I've definitely stacked the deck in my own favor, so to speak, by giving voice to a load of guests who share my basic stance on these issues. In that, I support our federally managed public lands, I support robust protections for game and fish habitat and wilderness, and I support state management of wildlife that allows for a sustainable harvest of resources. And we've definitely taken some heat for that, perhaps rightfully so, by listeners who feel that I haven't been entirely fair to other viewpoints. Well, we are taking steps to fix that right now by sitting down for a conversation with Chairman

Bishop. We have differing views on a lot of the issues that we'll be discussing today, but I'm excited to hear from him and I'm thankful that he's willing to take the time to sit down and talk through a handful of issues that we all feel are very important for us and more importantly for future generations of Americans. One of the things I want to start out with is to discuss the Land and Water Conservation Fund. And before doing that, I'd like to open up to Chairman Bishop. Can you really quickly lay out sort of the scope of the Natural Resources Committee and what your primary goals are

within the committee? Well, one of the things that surprised me, because when I first got to Congress, I was concerned about public lands. Utah is a public land state. But the scope of what my committee does is so much broader than that. It sometimes is almost daunting of what kinds of things I cover with. So anything that deals with public lands, parks, forest, all of those are in the scope of my committee. Anything that deals with energy development that is on public lands or anything that's energy development offshore is all under my jurisdiction. Anything that deals with water development or water maintenance, not just in the West, but actually anything that will

be done by BOR actually becomes under my jurisdiction jurisdiction i have control of all the territories which means uh you know all of a sudden for someone from northern utah puerto rico became extremely important to me so i get puerto rico and virgin islands and and guam and marianas and american samoa those are all now part of my portfolio which i'm grateful, especially in the winter, because I think that's when I should be visiting those places more than the others. And anything Native American, that's in our portfolio. So it's a wide area. Anything that deals with fishing anywhere, commercial or recreational, it's my portfolio. So how long have you served in the House of Representatives?

Far too long. This is my eighth term, right? Yeah. So it will be 16 years next January. And in doing that, how long did you serve before you became involved in the Natural Resources Committee? And how do you get to where you achieve chairmanship of the committee? On the House in Congress? Yeah. Actually, it goes back earlier than that. I served here the House in Congress? Yeah. Because it actually goes

back earlier than that. I served here in Utah in the state legislature. Okay. And I was there for 16 years also. You came out of education originally, right? I've always been a teacher, yeah. History teacher. And in Utah, it's like 45 calendar days. So it's a part-time legislature. So I was teaching all the way I was going through that. I see. And as a teacher, I was not necessarily as involved in that. But at the the end especially when I was Speaker of the House here I had a couple of members who came up to me that got me involved in land issues where I thought yeah I mean some of these people are being screwed over and it's not right. All of a sudden I became deeply involved so the

endurance my speakership we established the Western States coalition to try and bring other Western states in to try and get part of the discussion on how the federal government deals with land issues and that spurred my involvement in it so when I went to congress I wanted to be on resources from the very get-go because Utah 70 percent of Utah is controlled by the federal government you got to be on the public lands on the resource resource committee. That becomes essential. And except for the one term, I was on the rules committee, and they did not let me do both. I've always been on the resource committee.

Now, unlike the Senate, where chairmanships come up totally by seniority, they have limits. The Republicans in the Senate limit their chairmen to six years, but it's the next seniority. They have limits on the Republicans in the Senate limit their chairmen to six years, but it's the next senior member. Seniority plays a role, but it's not the only role that's played in it. So when I went back into the resources committee to get a subcommittee chairmanship, they jumped me over a couple of people. And I also jumped over a couple of people to become chairman of the committee. Is that because of having an expertise or just because having a vested interest based on where you're coming from? I thought because I was so lovable. I think it was the expertise. I had almost been like groomed by the chairman before

me. I did a lot of things in his place. So I had served for what was it like six terms on the committee before I became chairman I'd served in a lot of different subcommittees I knew the issues probably as well as anyone who was on there and and I had what leadership at the time thought was the temperament to be the chairman of that committee if you're good with that are you ready to dive into land and water conservation fund i'd love to okay so what i want to do i want to give i want to give people a background on what it is and then you get but then you get to you get to add color to that if you feel like i'm missing something important here no i'm glad you're doing that because most people have no clue of what land even those who are involved in it don't know what land and water conservation

fund actually is yeah so the land and water conservation fund is a fund that draws its revenues from offshore oil and gas leases offshore is defined like it's like a very specific mileage from shores right 50 or two nine nine miles oh nine okay i'm sorry states get to control nine miles out everything else is federal it's in my jurisdiction so like the gulf of mexico has a lot of offshore yeah a lot of offshore land big time so the this fund provides matching grants to state and tribal governments for the acquisition and development of public parks and other outdoor recreation sites. I was surprised to hear when I first started looking into this that every county

in the country has had a project funded under the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Things like like boat launches, public access sites, and access for anglers and river users, and also oftentimes purchasing easements to give public access to what would otherwise be landlocked public lands. Now the thing used to be funded for a long time, like it used to have like ityear or 20-year funding cycles. But recently, it's fallen into kind of stopgap measures. And it is now set to, the program is now set to expire at the end of September

2018. And I know that if you follow sort of the politics of hunting and fishing, you hear a lot of noise about how we need to get in there and renew the fund, but there's snags in the process and it's not done to everyone's satisfaction. Can you kind of explain a little bit about what sort of shortfalls you recognize in the Land and Water Conservation Fund that might

kind of explain how something that seems so straightforward and just great for everyone, how something like that does become problematic or controversial or have limited support yeah and it goes back to when this was originally developed so that the plan came back in in the mid 60s the idea was as you said to allow well actually it was land water conservation fund was divided into two sections. Okay. So in that time, 60% was supposed to go to local projects, which is what you just said. So recreation areas, parks, access, and easements were all supposed to be funded by the 60% of the money that was appropriated. And that would be determined by local interest.

So people at the local level would decide what kind of recreation they want. They would go after grants. And it could even be used for community swimming pools, right? Sure. Yeah, whatever the locals wanted. 40% was supposed to go to the federal government to buy inholdings in parks and other areas. So things that were totally surrounded, They could do that. It has morphed as that time went on so that instead of 60% going to these funding programs that most of the people who talk to me love and like and support,

that was down to as little as 12% and 10%. The rest of it went to the federal government for buying inholdings. Which, I'm sorry, over the years, the amount of money the federal governments had they could have bought every in holding like four or five times if they really wanted to so instead that money that went to the federal side that has gone to basically buying up more land and unfortunately in not a nice way so instead of the department of interior or the forest service sitting down and saying okay what kinds of areas would be beneficial to us?

In the testimony our committee came, had, we had former employees of the Department of Interior who came and simply said what they do is sit around and say, what land is owned by a special interest group that we want to reward by buying their stuff? So what has happened on the federal side, not the state side, but the federal side, is that groups will go out there

and they'll buy property from a private owner. They'll sit on it for a short period of time and then sell it at a nice profit to the federal government using land and water conservation funds. And it has become a funding mechanism for special interest groups to keep up their lobbying and their litigation efforts. So to me, the Land and Water Conservation Fund has morphed into something it was never supposed to be and never intended. And that's why I was literally surprised at the feedback that came

when I said, maybe we should take that money and do something useful with it that actually helps people out. There are a lot of groups that just came unglued and started spreading out what I think is misinformation because I was attacking their funding source. And I don't think the federal government should be a revenue source for special interest groups. And that's exactly what it has become. So what we were trying to do, and normally programs are authorized for seven years okay that's what i'm supposed to do is seven years the last reauthorization was done for three years primarily so i could be around when it's going to be reauthorized again but what we try to do is say okay let's put some parameters in here let's divide the money back up again 50 50 so 50 still goes for the funding projects, not the 12 to 18% the last couple of years.

And 50% go to the federal governments for getting inholdings, but some parameters on what those inholdings have to be like, actually inholdings, or an area that abuts federal land. I have a personal experience with this with some relatives I knew who had a piece of property. Please, I'd love to hear it. Yeah. Who will be nameless because I want to go to family reunions again. They had a piece of property which was not terribly productive, very steep. They sold it to one of the special interest groups who be nameless for but can you give me a sense

of like what sort of special interest group well like in what in what field an environmental group okay that that practices conservation and protection okay they sat on it for a few months and and look they sold it for six figures to a relative and the first figure was not a one. They sold it, and then they sat on it, and then gave it back to the, this was to Forest Service land, Forest Service to use land and water conservation funds and made a nice healthy profit for themselves by doing it. Supposedly as mule deer habitat.

The problem is, there's no vegetation on the thing, and it was surrounded on three sides by homes. So the community up there would have, in fact, they did like it. They came to me and said, can we get this piece of property for a city cemetery so we can finally use it and make it useful? As it was sold as mule deer habitat, it was totally useless. There was no vegetation.

Mule deer didn't go there. It was just land that was controlled by the Forest Service. Ultimately, we finally did legislation, although it took a hell of a long time, like six years to finally get it through, just to transfer this acreage back to the city so it could be put into useful production. Now, that's the invitation I had to finding out about

how land and water conservation fund works on the federal side. But please realize on the state side, I'm all for it. I think it's a great idea. It was originally authorized to be up to 900 million dollars can be spent on that. It has never been funded more than $450 million. Usually it's around $300 million. And I put that in some kind of perspective, like the Robertson-Pittman Fund, Pittman-Robertson Fund, that generates a billion dollars a year from sportsmen.

Land and Water Conservation Fund is $300 million. And if we were justifiablyably as it was originally intended to be half of that would go to to recreation opportunities that were that were desired by local people so what i simply said okay let's keep the half um people can't use eminent domain on this on these properties which i think fair. Keep the half for them. And that includes the easements that you talked about. It's probably the most popular element of that. Oh, I can imagine.

I think the easements are hugely important to people who are coming from the perspective that I hear from the most, the people who have a goal to increase access opportunities on public lands. They are extremely important for those who do want access. They're also extremely important opportunities for especially those in rural areas that want to maintain agriculture while they're around. So they grant the easements.

They can maintain their property, but it still will be there for agricultural purposes. And they have, but it's also, some of those easements takes place in urban areas too. Like on the Baltimore, the highway between Baltimore and Washington is actually owned by the Park Service,

and they have easements on it. Gotcha. And they're part of this LWCF funding for those easements. So with that, no eminent domain, but then take the other half that goes to federal government and say let's make sure that we can do something useful with that money the federal side of the money the federal half for example we have a 17 billion dollar backlog in the park service let's put some of that money into actually solving our park service fish and wildlife and blm also

have double digits in the millions of dollars, in back, billions of dollars, I'm sorry, in backlog in their areas. Put that money in there. We do payment in lieu of taxes to states so that they can actually provide services on the county level where there is a massive amount of federal land. That has always been, we're doing better

than when I first came here. But that's around 400 million a year put some to boost up that at the same time let's take the federal side of the money and not just spend it to reward special interest groups but put it on programs that actually help people that's what I'm trying to do but it would but it would steer money away from acquisition yeah but I'm telling you that acquisition I think has pretty well been steered away already. So, but

I want to move on to other stuff, but I just want to make sure I understand something. When it originally came out, was it not were the percentages not codified by law? It was just sort of a loose understanding? Originally it was, 60-40, and then they... How did it drift? They removed it. I see. Congress later on, about eight, nine years after that,

simply removed it. So the understanding was they would continue on with that 60-40 split, but they wanted to give some flexibility to both sides. The flexibility was basically the stuff that actually gives... I'm sorry. Flexibility was actually moved over to the federal side from the local.

But also when you say the local access, especially to some of your listeners, that comes through the state side, the local funding, not through the federal. Acquisition of the land does not mean there's going to be access for any kind of recreation that takes place. It's simply acquisition of land. But if you really want to have any process that actually helps with the access for sportsmen, that usually comes through the stateside funding of that program, which I want to maintain. Actually, I want to maintain the entire program. If you could actually put

the boundaries that I want so that I know the money is going to solve problems, I would really like to go and lobby to make sure that we could spend all 900 million of it. In fact, some of the things we said is the money, as you said, comes from offshore energy development. That's the money that keeps going in there. We have an aging workforce. I mean, the workforce that works on offshore is really becoming, they're all reaching retirement age. We don't do anything to try and train people to go into those good, high-paying jobs. Most, as Americans are retiring on those offshore projects, most of them are being replaced by people from South America. A lot of Brazilians that are coming out for them.

So I said, why don't you take some of that money and put it into colleges? Get programs to try and train environmental and petroleum, not petroleum, engineers. There's a word. Don't ever become my age. I'm sorry, names and nouns go first, and this is the time it happened. Do some of that.

Make the money useful. But you mean, so by that are you suggesting that by training oil professionals and engineers, geologists, whatever, that you would be facilitating more extraction, which would be allowing more money to feed in? Or just kind of like finding a whole new purpose for the funds no i mean the no the the fund could actually if you're trying to solve problems on the federal side you could solve more of those problems but the idea is this is kind of like the goose that's laying the golden egg yeah so feed it make sure it stays vibrant so it can actually put money into that

that's one of the things that zinke has emphasized as he's been Secretary of Interior, that there used to be a whole lot of revenue that was coming in from extraction industries that funded programs within the Interior Department. That, over the last 10 years, has dissipated to almost virtually nothing. Put it back in there. Make sure that you can do a whole lot of money

with the royalties that are coming off those programs so it it's it's the extraction industry is going to exist regardless it's just will Americans be part of it will they actually have good paying jobs out of it or will they all go to foreign workers coming in there and can we actually boost the long jib longevity so we can get more money to actually do better things for people it is a funny thing that that i find like when you sort of sniff out your internal like self-hypocrisies uh personally would be like if you do if you look at you want a vibrant well-funded land and water conservation fund because you like the things that it delivers to in in my case like that

delivers to people that i think of as being like me hunters and anglers who use boat launches and access sites like that i want right yeah but then i look and i'll oftentimes have a little bit of a suspicion or a leeriness about offshore oil operations and you do find in there there's there's a tension between those two ideas because that's where that money comes from. Yeah, they funded your boat ramp. I recognize that it winds up being a world that's like a bit more complicated than you'd like it to be. And some of the things, you know, it depends on where your listeners are living. Especially out here in the West, there is so much land, there is so much space,

that the idea that there has to be a competition between preservation, access, and development, preservation, recreation, and development, that's a phony concept. There is plenty of area to do all three of those. There can be development. There also can be a whole lot of recreation. And there can be conservation at the same time. What I would rather like to do is make sure that we have a wiser way of how we're defining where those lands are so that people know where they can, so businesses know where they

can actually develop and people know where they can recreate and what will be set aside strictly for conservation and protection which which usually excludes people who want to recreate when you have those kinds of lands there's there's enough for all of it the same thing out in the ocean there's there's plenty of times for fishing rights as well as the economic development that can take place there's lots of areas that's it that's a good moment there to jump into the next subject I'd like to talk about with you and this one has been a real hotbed

issue is to get into monuments you probably stick to talking about monuments or maybe maybe you love talking about monuments um either way I'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions about them and again I want to jump in and give a little background, and you can color that background if you feel I'm missing something. So when we talk about a monument designation, I'm not educating Chairman Bishop about this. I'm educating you, the listener.

When we talk about a monument designation, this goes back to the Antiquities Act, which was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. And famously, his first monument designation was Devil's Tower, which had tremendous cultural, archaeological significance. And it was... Especially for Spielberg. Especially, yeah, because Close Encounters, right? Close Encounters ends at Devil's Tower.

I've been there. Did not see any spaceships but it is it is a beautiful sight and initially the antiquities act was used for things like i mentioned earlier battlefields places of archaeological significance cultural significance and over time people started to rethink, reimagine. People might use less flattering, less flowery terms for this transition, but to think on more landscape-scale issues. And we had in the last handful of administrations,

we've had some big landscape-scale monument designations. And these are things that a president can just declare through proclamation and create a monument, not without friction. Now, the reason this became very newsworthy recently is President Obama, toward the very end of his term, had gone in and done a couple large monument designations in Utah, including the Bears Ears National Monument. About a year later, President Trump came in and did a proclamation that eliminated the majority of the Bears Ears National Monument.

So put it back to where it was before it had become a monument. Just sort of set back the clock on the majority of that land and also simultaneously cut the grand staircase escalante national monument in about half so moving the land designations back to where they began i think that there wound up being like a lot of confusion where you heard people say that your land had been stolen or various things like that but just land management decisions or land management designations were just set back to where they

had been earlier. The reason that shook everybody up really bad is that doesn't happen. So President Kennedy made like a minor change to Bandelier Monument in New Mexico but in the modern era no president had acted to go in and reduce a national monument through executive action, even though people create monuments through executive action.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery,

24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all.

Am I cool so far from your perspective? Am I saying stuff that's making you cringe as I say this? Well, yeah, but you're okay. Go ahead. Oh, okay. No, I want to get into the parts. Just before we get into the next part, I want to hear like... Look, I'm a history teacher.

Okay. So there's an element of history that's attached to it. No, I would love to hear your perspective on this. I'm trying to do the most even-keeled walkthrough of the monuments. You're doing very well at that, by the way. Okay. Because I'm going to get to the question. So I'm going to get to the question now.

And then you can go in and... Wait, wait. Let's go back through the history first. Oh, please. All right. Okay. It did start in 1906. Okay.

I was right. Yeah, that perfectly. And it was to protect... The reason it was called antiquities, it was to protect antiquities, specifically Indian ruins and Indian sites. So it had to be a specific thing. And it had to be a specific man-made structure

that was supposedly there. So that's why a lot of people get upset with landscapes, especially when you're doing it on water. Because I'm sorry, a fish is not an antiquity. So if that's what you're trying to preserve, you're expanding what the Antiquities Act was supposed to be. So the Antiquities act was put in there and the debate on the antiquities act was whether it would be basically a half a square mile

or a square mile and then someone said well maybe maybe you want to have more than actually 640 i think is a square mile maybe you want to get like to 800 and And they said, okay, 800 acres. So let's not put a specific language in there. We'll say smallest footprint possible. Yeah. Which is still a slippery term. Yes, it is. That's the problem. Because it still means, it's still a legal requirement has to be the smallest footprint possible.

Yeah. But 840 acres is a little bit different than the 1.3 million acres of Bears Ears. Okay. Just slightly. But it also had to be about something specific. That's why this idea of landscapes was not in what the original presidents did. Most presidents have done it, but they also did it very, very, very discreetly. I mean, most presidents have done a monument designation.

But for the bulk of them, the average was 5 000 acres or less for every monument monument that they did so you did not get and 11 of them did reduce the size of monuments so there's precedent in doing that too i i think the last one was not kenny i thought the last one was eisenhower but i may be wrong on that who actually reduced the size of something well the the bandolier was like an adjustment of border. Well, and if it reduced it, then there has been some reductions too. And in fact, technically, that's what Trump did. He adjusted the boundary by 85%. With a chainsaw.

Yeah, yeah. So the issue was, and many presidents didn't do it at all. So from Reagan and Bush 1 and Ford, nothing. They didn't do it at all so from Reagan and Bush one and Ford nothing they never they didn't do anything didn't designate anything at all the change came with basically for the last five presidents maybe for the last six Jimmy Carter was the first one went up to Alaska and I saw him once do an interview where he said I know the people in Alaska didn't like what I was doing but I had the power to do it so I did it anyway he used antiquities and took half the state and then smiled

about it in the way only he can do yeah but but he had there was a lot of work done in Alaska at that time I mean if you factor in like the Native Claims Settlement Act I mean there's a tremendous amount of stuff happening there but like a lot of just deferred decisions that were being... Yeah, but that was all done legally by legislation, ultimately. Not what he did on the Antiquities Act. Then Clinton did it big time. Didn't happen again until Clinton.

Clinton did it just on his re-elect, and that was the Grand Staircase-Escalante, which is the first time you had a president who, in the internal memos that they were sending back and forth, clearly realized that they did not have tradition on their side in what they were about to do, and they couldn't claim that there really was an antiquity that needed to be preserved. They also had to realize that they could not have any input whatsoever. By the law is if Clinton had asked the Interior Department to give him recommendations about stuff, it would have triggered NEPA,

which would require open public meetings and a very long process. So what it had to be is a gotcha moment. The president had to announce something without any kind of input whatsoever. It had to keep coming from him. Or you trigger NEPA, and the Antiquities Act is not allowed as an access point for them. And then Clinton did the first one in Utah, and then he did about 18 of them, somewhere in that area, just as he was in his last two years of presidency. Bush only did a couple. He did six total, but the one was over water, and that one was a whopper, too. That was huge. And then Obama came in there, and once again, in his last term, as he was going out of the office, then he went bananas with them all. He did 23, or 22, or 23

total monument designations, including Bears Ears, which we were trying to do with some other process. So that's why what has happened with the Antiquities Act is it's not being used as it was intended to be used. That's why I always say it's an abuse of the Antiquities Act, not a use of the Antiquities Act, because it's not about a specific antiquity. It's not the smallest footprint possible, and you can't claim that there is an impending damage that was taking place. And that's the other reason why they gave the power to Roosevelt.

If there was something that's about to be destroyed, let the president make a quick declaration. And then the idea was always Congress would go back then and codify it, which they make a big deal about, like Zion's, Grand Canyon, all those were antiquities designations originally. Then Congress, though, went back in there

and made them into parks and expanded all of them too. That was how it was supposed to have been done. It has not been done in either the Clinton, lesser extent with George W., and especially the Obama years. So that's the history of it. And that kind of is your unease with it, is that it sort of drifted off purpose.

But it also specifically does not allow for any kind of public input. If you do that, it triggers NEPA. So it has to be a gotcha moment. It has to be something that surprises everyone. And that's what most of the people in these areas who live around those, they're complaining about. Like, you just did this to me,

and I didn't have a chance to say anything about it. Now, they often say, well, we did have that process, but to be honest, if it was a real process where you're talking about maps and talking, so Sally Jewell can go down to the Bears Ears area and say, I'm going to have a meeting, come and tell me what you think about this entire area. Very general. But if you had a map of specifics and say, is this where the line should be? That triggers the NEPA process. You can't do that. That has got to be a gotcha moment. There needs to be reform of the act. I don't want to do away with the Antiquities Act per se. I want to put some sidebars on there. So once again, it insists that there is some kind of public input,

and it allows the people who live in those areas to have some kind of real say in how it is developed and what is going to be developed in those areas. And there's also one of these other things. I'm getting off topic because I haven't even allowed you to ask the question yet. I apologize for this. No, no, but you already entered in on the question. But oftentimes, these are said as we're making these monuments to protect these areas.

It has to be federal land in the first place. So in Bears Ears, it was all federal land. It had the same federal protections on all these lands. When you made it a monument, you didn't add any other protection except that you allowed a land manager to go in there and make decisions on how this area that's now protected would be used oftentimes and that's a problem we've had in other monuments that were created oftentimes that protection is to deny access to

people and so mode of access no any kind of access you can and What the proclamation says doesn't even have to be obeyed, to be honest with you. So when Clinton did Grand Staircase, he said there would be no reduction in grazing. There's a total reduction in grazing, a 70% reduction in grazing, even though that's what the proclamation said, but how the land managers then decide to impute that language is the problem. And that's one of the problems I've had, especially why when we were trying to deal with lands in eastern Utah as well as this area,

I tried to codify specifically what those access rights would be and put them in there that says, you know, if the land manager decides that something needs to be closed, they have to provide an alternative opportunity in something that is of equal value. So you can't take away the access or opportunity rights. And that doesn't happen in any of these designations. If the land is just federal BLM land, the default is always open access. Anyone go in there. You can recreate to your heart's content. It's when you start designating

titles to it, like monuments, that's when you actually authorize the land manager to come in there and put specific restrictions. And that happens, that's the one thing I don't, that's not, I'm rambling, I used to teach speech, I'll get a complete sentence out here eventually. That's one thing I want to do in my committee, is actually codify all this stuff. So you put into law what will be accessible and how it will be accessible so for example in Bears Ears the natives Native Americans who about that area are basically the white Mesa Utes and the Navajos they go in there for for gathering a firewood it's a ceremonial purpose as well as some of them sell it

for just substance purposes. They go in there by truck. That's what they want to do. The proclamation Obama used said nothing about it. He said, actually, it didn't restrict anything. It didn't say anything about it, but it allows the land manager to go in there later on and say, I don't think you should have a truck

going into my monument, and he could then stop that process. So what we're trying to do in our legislation is say, no, these activities will always be legal, and they will be allowed by the land manager, including going in there with a truck to get the firewood, going in there for herbal. You have to do that, because if you don't specifically state that access and opportunity rights, some land manager eventually down there will make an arbitrary decision that actually cuts off that kind of access. That's what bothers me. All right, you brought up a ton of things I need to a little bit back up because I want to hit on a couple points.

We haven't yet drawn a distinction between when you declare a monument, who administers the monument. Because there's a lot of confusion, I think, where people feel that the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase monuments, there was some sort of restriction on hunting, for instance. But generally, the monuments that are administered by the BLM and monuments administered or handed over to the Forest Service, they have a multiple-use doctrine. And so part of that multiple use usually includes hunting. So we haven't seen a loss there. I think that the nervousness that people have is what could happen with monuments

that are administered by National Park Service, where they have a bigger toolkit to restrict activities. There are only two National Park Service monuments that allow any kind of hunting activity. I think six, yeah, have some kind of snowball billing activity. But BLM traditionally is supposed to be much more flexible. What I'm trying to say is

there's nothing that guarantees that. And any land manager can change and make arbitrary and capricious decisions that does the restriction unless you put in statute. And that's why I think it should be done not by an antiquities designation, but letting Congress pass a law that says we are guaranteeing in law these activities will be allowed. Yeah, I think that it would make a lot of people feel more comfortable to have those things put in place

because I think one of the things that winds up killing people is the uncertainty about what's going to come in the future and that sort of generates the rumor mill and and that's that's kind of the weird part about this that if it's not monument designated as a monument the fallback is you got it open access as soon as you designate it as a monument then all of a sudden you bring up the opportunity of putting restrictions on it. So the designation of itself does not necessarily add protection to the land. It actually can put in restrictions on the land. I want you to revisit for a minute something that you mentioned earlier,

and I want you to kind of reconcile it with what we're talking about now. It was earlier we were talking about the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and you had said you were talking about like original intents and how because needs change and situations change, you wanted to kind of change that original intent to match the future. What would you say if someone brings up to you that the Antiquities Act could be something that evolves and morphs over time to match up with our needs today the same way that you would suggest the land and water conservation fund like like how do you kind of balance out those two ideas which someone might point out and think that it could be regardless like mildly hypocritical no the land no antiquities act is is words and the words have meaning okay if you want to change the focus of the antiquities act to do what they're doing right now change change the law. Words have meaning and words have impact.

So if I'm just sitting here saying, okay, that's what the word tells me to do, but gee, I think I'd like to do something else. I'm sorry, that is not the way the rule of law happens and that's not the way a civilized society works together. So if indeed you want to have the Antiquities Act doing landscape preservation, change the law to allow that to take place.

And that will then have people being able in public to debate whether that's a good idea or not. How far do you think that idea would get? Depending on... Actually, okay. Personally, I hope that doesn't get to that point because I don't think it was ever intended for landscape preservation.

Okay. And as I think I've also said earlier, giving those designations doesn't mean you actually improve the land. Like, there is... If indeed President Obama was saying he wants to have more protection for these artifacts, his proclamation doesn't do that. President Obama was saying he wants to have more protection for these artifacts. Yeah.

His proclamation doesn't do that. You had one BLM officer for a million miles. When he had made his proclamation, there was still one for a million miles. What we're trying to do in the law that Curtis introduced, saying, okay, we're going to have BLM contract with local officials to have a minimum of 10 people there to protect those areas. Now, that's what you should be doing. And that's what a proclamation doesn't do. That's what the Antiquities Act doesn't do. If you really want to do that kind of stuff, change the law to allow that to take place. I also think not everything is going to be defeated in Congress. I know that's the viewpoint even I have right now, but there

are a lot of these things that can go through. I am allegedly, by some of the things I have read about myself, hating of wilderness. I created wilderness in my first, actually it was the third term, but I had a specific reason for creating it. The first bill I let go through when I became chairman was a wilderness bill in Idaho. I'm not opposed to that. I just want the process to be done correctly, and I want it to make sense. And I want there to be some kind of balance.

Let's say for a minute you didn't have to participate in government. You could just do things by fiat. If you were going to come in and impose the sort of discipline you'd like to see around the Antiquities Act, what would it look like? Actually, I have a bill that we introduced

that would be what I said. Let the president designate 5,000 acres or less at will, at whim, especially if there's an emergency basis. But if it's going to be bigger than 5,000 acres, then you have to have an EIS. This is HR 3 990, right? Okay.

Have an environmental impact statement. Okay. You have to go through the NEPA process. And if it's going to be more than 86,000, and we picked that number specifically because that's the average that Teddy Roosevelt did in all of his stuff. Okay.

You have to involve the local state and local governments, so they have to be involved in it. To what extent? They have to prove it. They have to sign off on it if you're going to be bigger than that. 86,000 acres. Then involve local governments so they actually have a sign-off on it. I think that's fair and that's appropriate.

In addition to that, if you're going to shrink shrink it down we went through the same kind of process in reverse if it's going to be a big shrinkage you got to have local government sign off on it if it's going to be a small shrinkage the president can do that by simply designating so I I there are sideboards at some point you can't just go in there and say I'm going to take that entire map and this big section I'm going to do it because I want to, without at least letting people have some kind of say in it who live there, affecting their lives and their futures. Do you feel that there was some lesson learned in what we've seen here?

Because I know that you were involved for a long time. And before Obama came in and did Bears Ears, you had were involved for a long time. Before Obama came in and did Bears Ears, you had been involved for a long time in trying to strike a compromise and perhaps have made him feel that it wasn't necessary. No, I was. Yeah, that's true. Looking at it now, looking at what happened now, what do you feel went wrong? Was it a lack of compromise on two sides? A lack of compromise on one side?

Like what led to the current problem or what led to the hostilities around Bears Ears from a mile high perspective? I think we're talking about a couple of different things. So there was always a group that wanted to do um i'm sorry bear's ears in my estimation was still a political statement that was made not necessarily conservation statement i got you and in fact calling it bear's ears instead of giving it a native american name kind of emphasizes this was this was something that's going to be cute and sellable butable but I never I'd never thought of the marketing implications well

there's certain groups that got involved and put money up and that's what they said I know can we trust working with the Indians and I don't know I don't want to have a Navajo name in there we change or Trump changed it in our legislation we've continued that just Sasha which is the Navajo word for bear's ears. I like that a whole lot more. But what I think you were referring to is I was trying to do what we call the public lands initiative by going into the seven eastern counties in Utah, getting everyone to sit down at the table and come up with some kind of compromises.

Both sides will point to the other one as having broken that. And in part, it was a unique experience because these are groups that had never compromised before, and so far they haven't still. But the tipping point, and once again, I did those three things I wanted to do. I wanted to say land can be designated for economic development, for recreation, and for conservation.

And actually, I thought I was really kind of cool with the numbers I was coming up with. So for every one acre of economic development and recreation, I put four acres aside simply as wilderness conservation. I thought those were, who could complain about those numbers? Obviously, everybody did. But the tipping point was when I said, okay, if we come up with this compromise,

no more screwing around with these lands in which antiquities has got to be off the table for these seven counties. If we make this deal, you can't go back in there and then you can't say, okay, thank you for the wilderness. Now I'm going to go after the recreation and economic lands and we'll make those wilderness too. So it has to be, we're done. We're finalized. No more discussion.

No more litigation. You've got to agree to that. And that's where the environmental groups that were at the table basically said, screw you, and walked away. Now, I was told, and this is totally anecdotal, but one of the groups were in varying degrees of cooperation. And that, on both sides. Some of my counties were in varying degrees of cooperation and that on both sides some of my counties were really great to cooperate some were a pain it does the same thing on the environmental ngos that were there some of them were nice i like them some of them i you know i can still turn around you can get their their cutlery out of my back if you want to but one

of them came to me and said rob i feel sorry for you because you were sincere in what you were trying to do, but some of the groups on our side never intended to cooperate. They were there to watch us. And I feel bitter about that entire process because we were trying to come up with a solution that I thought would be fair and truly a compromise, and everyone just said, screw it.

And then when when he did the Bears Ears proclamation that was it that was like the final straw we're not going go and go back into that route again I also feel frustrated because there was language I was asking from Department of Interior and other the groups and then they never gave it to me. They kept saying, eh, we'll get it to you, we'll get it to you. It never happened. And then said, well, I never came up with a bill. I didn't actually push my bill forward.

Well, I was waiting on you guys to give me the language you promised. I feel somewhat disenchanted about that process too. Do you have any concerns about the legality of what Trump did when he shrunk the monuments? No. But you'd like to see it explained in greater detail or codified in some other way that settles some of these disputes down in the future? If I'm codifying how you do it, it seems only fair you codify how you undo it at the same time. And then once again, let the people's representatives, their voice, I'm told when I read the constitution,

let them actually make those kinds of decisions in open and in legislation. Do you have anything else you want to add on the subject of monuments specifically? No, but I'm glad you went into that kind of detail because there are a whole lot of what I consider still to be misinformation. There are a lot of groups that are out there trying to equate a monument with a park as if it's the same thing.

You're right, it's not. It's totally not. And you also, I'm pleased you did that because most people don't don't differentiate between a park service monument and a blm monument they are different they are different creatures so i think everybody's gotten i mean when i say everybody people who follow these issues have really got recently gotten like a sort of a crash course whether they wanted to or not i mean in the last six months there's been a lot of people who've come to, like,

struggle with these definitions. That's true. And you can play around with this. What is conservation? What is protection? You can play around with that all the time. And you're right. I get frustrated because, like I say,

this goes back to me, the Carter administration at first. When I was a state legislator here in Utah, we were talking about this stuff. It's frustrating that we're still talking about this stuff and having a lot of misinformation about what it is, especially some of those phrases like, you know, when it came out there that Trump stole your land. Yeah. I'm sorry, give me a break. It was federal first, it's federal now. If anything, he gave you greater access opportunity by reclassifying it simply as federal land

and not monument land. I'll be honest with you. I was disappointed by the decision, but I was equally disappointed by the way some people were explaining what was going on. Even people who I might agree with their general motives, I thought that the stole your land was a real reach and misleading. it was kind of embarrassing to come from um

you know to come from a side of an issue that i was sympathetic to and i felt that it uh i don't know i i feel like now... But it is simple in itself. Yeah, but in the polarity that we're seeing, I see oftentimes from both sides things that embarrass me about how inaccurate they are. So hopefully, maybe we'll, in our chat here, clear up a couple of these things for a couple people.

Dude, you're living in the land of you know the land of twitter yeah and i'm very proud that well my committee tweets i'm still proud i've been i've been outed by hill mag hill paper back there in washington yeah the hill as the only member that actually has a twitter account who has never tweeted a single character and now they've outed me. I'm taking it as a challenge. I'll be damned if I'm actually going to do one ever, ever. So people that follow you, they don't have an exciting morning when they open it up.

No, and I don't think I can be snarky. Now, my staff thinks I can easily do that, but I'm going to have to use that in some other traditional form. What percentage of your colleagues do you feel like say tweet on a daily basis? I don't know, but there's a whole... Well, first, whether they tweet or they have a staffer tweet for them. Actually, I have no clue. I would guess like two-thirds.

Okay. Well, yeah, I was just you saying it's the age of Twitter, so I was wondering how prevalent it is. When I was first elected, blogs... No, that's making me sound really old. I'm not going to go there. But I've seen the evolution of social media coming through there, and I still use legal pads.

Let me just leave it at that. Where you can generate big, long, complicated thoughts. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I have all sorts of files of my writing. It's cool. I want to bump along, too. And monuments falls under public lands, of course. But I want to just jump into kind of like general thoughts around public lands.

Again, I'm going to lay a little bit out, and you can go on that. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers

get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there OnX is now in Canada the great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting

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

on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out

if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. There are polls that suggest that 72% of hunters in the American West, and that area, like the Intermountain West, includes your own constituents here in Utah, 72% use public lands. All across the country, the number shrinks significantly

when you reach over to the eastern U.S., but you still find that 36% of hunters in America use public lands. Everyone sitting at the table knows it's critically important for sportsmen and Utah sportsmen. Now, you're no stranger to this. A lot of folks will tell you that the Utah delegation has been the tip of the spear in calling for the transfer of public lands to the states. Or oftentimes you'll hear pushing for the privatization of public lands. Can you lay out your biggest, I used the term earlier,

your biggest sort of mile-high perspective on what you generally think about when you think about public lands, federally managed public lands, like what's sort of your guiding principles and how we distribute, manage, organize the public lands of state? Yeah, I only recoil at the word privatization because no one's ever talking about that. That's one of the words that has a connotation you throw out when you want to make a cute public statement. Okay, so give me a minute now,

because states, all states that have had federal land grants have unloaded a lot of their land i think i mean utah maybe from from original from what the state originally held through actually like from land grant from federal down to state like 50 of it is gone or i don't see i don't mean to say gone 50% is no longer held by the state. That's accurate in California. They sold off most of their stuff. And Texas got rid of virtually all of their state land.

I don't know. They don't have any federal, so I don't get involved in that at all. But it depends on how you actually write the bill. So for the PLI I was doing for Eastern Utah, everything that I was transferring to the state, we always had the caveat put in there that it had to be held for public purpose, which simply meant you can't sell it. You can't privatize it. So why is that point missed? No one wants to hear it.

I keep saying it. You tell me. I don't fully know so you will tell me now forget what happened in the past forget what might have happened in different states what they did with school trust lands and things you're comfortable with the idea

that if this day going forward you're comfortable with the idea that federal lands that would be handed over to the states, you'd be comfortable with some sort of compromise saying that these would always stay in the public domain. So they could be used, yeah. Is there a difference between so they could be used in public domain? No.

Public purposes has to be. If you use public purpose language, that means it has to be government-controlled in some way. It has to be used for a public purpose, which is not the same thing as... Yeah, public purpose is the phrase I want to put in there. Because ultimately, as I look at it, is land... Land has to be able there to help people. And I actually think that in most cases, the states do a better job in maintaining the land

and helping people than the federal government does. I mean, states don't have a $17 billion backlog in the maintenance of their state parks. And especially in Utah, Coral Springs down in southern Utah and the place outside of Moab, all of those were lands that either were given to the state or they went into a state partnership with them. The state occupied them and did them and used them so they could become really recreation opportunities and destination spots that the federal government simply wasn't doing. They either didn't have the desire or they didn't have the money or the

manpower to do it they allowed the either in the case at Moab the county to manage it and run it as a great recreation destination spot and in Kanab Kane County area it was the state that took it over and ran it as a very well-run state park I think states can do that, but that is the issue. What you want to do is make sure that the land is managed for the greatest access for people. And that's why sometimes a lot of the conservation efforts that are out there simply to designate lands as monuments or whatever you want to, or even as wilderness, it stops that kind of access. That's why when I was going through the PLI process in eastern Utah, the idea was let's designate the areas that could be specifically their primary purpose,

their focal purpose, their number one priority purpose. Especially, once again, I'll get a complete sentence out here eventually, I'm sorry. A lot of people talk about multiple use. It's a great thing, which is good. But multiple use also can give you some problems when somebody's use of what their version of what is multiple use is more important than their version of multiple use. So what I was trying to do is say, okay, give me the areas in which the primary use should be for recreation opportunities. That means in bike trails, that means in hiking trails, motorized trails.

We even took some specific areas, book cliffs, that's the word I was looking for in the book cliffs, to make sure that that was always set aside specifically for hunting and fishing. And make that as the number one most significant issue. And if you then can put in other areas with that that doesn't take away from that primary issue of recreation, fine. But that has to be the primary area. And then put in other areas the primary purpose will be for development. If you can do recreation around the development, fine. But make sure there's a primary area. And there's plenty of land for all of that. So if the federal government

will actually do that, I'm cool with that. But what I've said on history, I have seen that federal land managers oftentimes make arbitrary and capricious decisions in which they actually close the access to those areas without ever trying to talk to people, and they don't care. They don't give a damn whether it hurts anybody or not. Having forest areas that have always had a triathlon run

in their forest land and all this stuff, they decide we're not going to do that anymore because we don't want to. And they didn't ever give a reason nor did they give an alternative access to it. Well, okay. I have very seldom seen state and local governments do that. And besides, if you're a person there and that's run by the counties, run by the state, you have a better chance of getting to that person who's making that decision and voicing your objection than if it's run by the federal government. If you don't like what DOI did, you can come back here and throw rocks at their windows, but there's very little access that you actually have to say, I don't like how

you're managing my lands. And a lot of the bills that were coming through us are decisions that have been made by federal land managers that legislators and their constituents just think they screwed us. They weren't supposed to do that. They took away an opportunity. And it's not just in the West. We passed one in Michigan where the federal land managers decided to cut off boating activities and recreation activities on the shore of this area just because. Even though the locals didn't want it, it had always been there, the locals were upset about it, we actually had to pass a piece of legislation that said, no, we reinstate those kinds of activities. I have found the federal government has a more cavalier attitude about lands than state and

locals do. But once again, for me, it is, are we using the lands actually to be a benefit and actually helping people? And that includes sportsmen, sportsmen, hunters and fishers. They are extremely important to me. That's also why, actually, sportsmen are having, I think, an undue burden to try and make sure that we keep these lands open.

I said the Pittman-Robertson Act comes up with a billion dollars. You guys are funding that. Land and water conservation, which is offshore, that's 300 million dollars. I mean, you are spending, and another reason, without mentioning any kind of names, there are groups out there that make a whole lot of money on federal lands, but actually, besides their taxes, their corporate taxes they spend, they don't put an extra dime into the maintenance of those those public lands but they insist those public lands be open to actually fatten their bottom line that bothers me too you've mentioned a number of times the the maintenance backlog on federally managed public lands and not having the resources to manage the land that you do have

i'm sure you're familiar with this but i want to idea, but I'd like to bring it up to get your feedback on it or how you feel about it, is oftentimes you'll hear people articulate it as a design to fail situation. And there's an analogy I've used, and I'll use it here. So it's a far reaching analogy, but I think it kind of explains it. Like in my home, we have a dishwasher, a dishwasher machine.

I have sort of an aesthetic fundamental dislike of the thing my wife likes it a lot i will argue that it's not as efficient and not as effective as hand washing okay and she will argue that hand washing is not as efficient and not as effective as using the dishwasher so i have like a fundamental distrust and dislike of the contraption if i were to go in and damage the machine internally so that it would clearly stop working well and i could then later point at and say you see it doesn't work as well as this i think that some people would look at the federal backlog on maintenance of lands and say that there are people who have a sort of fundamental dislike of federally managed public lands,

and they do their best to strip them of funding so that they can then point to how poor of a job they're doing. Do you feel that that argument has merit, or do you not think that that could in some way explain it like like now actually I well first of all I understand because my dishwasher at home works my one in my apartment in Washington doesn't so everything by hand so yeah so you're

intimately familiar with both strategies and I haven't fixed it so you'll be happy with that dishwasher. I'm not going to discount the validity of the argument that you're making. I think it has, it could, I don't know how to verify that, nor do I know how to quantify it. Yeah. I also do think, though, that a lot of the backlog

has come from decisions that are being made that are counterproductive. Okay. For actually... How do I put this? Once again, for example, a park, if we're talking about that. To me, to fulfill the purpose of a park,

people have to go there and see it and experience it. Yes. There are some people within the Park Service that don't believe people should be seeing their parks. They have this idea that parks should be conserved. That's their purpose, not to experience it, but to conserve it. So they will put roadblocks and make it more difficult for people to go in there. I don't think we do enough to try and attract people into the national parks.

We put roadblocks. We put fees that are silly. We put restrictions on how you access it. You can't take bottled water into whatever it is. They put restrictions on that. I think that's the bigger problem. I also think that some of the money has been misused that goes into the Park Service as well. So in the Obama administration, when they did the big increase in federal funding at the very beginning of his administration, a lot of new money went to the park service. Most of that park service money, to my mind, went to administration and to buy new uniforms and to hire new administrators, as opposed to putting into a park. We have tried with the centennial fund that we passed last year

to try and change that dynamic so that we have real businessmen who are now part of that fund that are trying to leverage private money to come in there and buy things to add to parks and cut down on that maintenance and do things. But they also are clearly, Ryan, that if you are a private person, you want to put personal money into a project,

there are some projects you want to see. You want to see roads and campgrounds. You're not going to put personal money into a sewer system. That's just not sexy enough. But if we actually have those things working together so the Centennial Fund can be leveraging corporate money and private donations to get the outward display, the money that Congress appropriates to the Park Service can be put into the internal functions that are not

sexy and exciting to do it. And if we get them working together. Now that's with the new centennial fund. And I like the process that's going. The person who's chairing that fund right now, as well as the new Park Service interim director, are sympathetic. They see eye to eye, and they're working towards that. That, to me, can help solve the problem. And I don't necessarily think they're trying to screw up the park system so we can say, aha, see, I told you so. Although, I can buy that, especially if there's somebody that believes having visitors coming to the park is not what I want. I want to close it all down so it will always be preserved in my park and once again we have have anecdotal examples but they are real examples of land managers in parks that simply said i don't

want people in there because it's too noisy for the rest of my park. Well, what do you say to people? Let me approach this a different way. I agree with you. From the things that I've seen in my lifetime, I agree with you that people will take something they perceive as necessary, and they will look at the available tools that are out there to achieve it.

So if someone says, we are running out of undisturbed landscapes, or we're running out of pieces of habitat for wildlife species that are very sensitive to habitat loss or habitat destruction, and they recognize the problem, and then you have to go and look and say, well, what tools are at my disposal? And when you look, you might wind up being, there's nothing tailor-made for what I'm after. So I will. I'm going to take this Antiquities Act and try to apply that to get what I'm after. Or I'm going to take the park mandate and apply that to achieve what I'm after. Do you feel that there's a better way for people who are trying to address those concerns?

Clearly, I do. And once again, well, the thought that came to mind recently is the person who's now in charge of fish and wildlife. Okay. Came from state government. And state government's goal was to actually enhance wildlife. And they realized that to do that, you had to get the hunters and fishers to be paying those fees to put the money in to the enhanced wildlife.

So if you get more fees, you can get better wildlife. If you have better wildlife, more people will be hunting and fishing, and therefore it can work together. You solve that problem. On the federal level, I don't necessarily see that

actually happening okay and sometimes and and that's probably a good reason why the states are in charge of wildlife because i think simply see they do a better job i see a lot of people saying all right if i want to enhance wildlife let's just carve it out so no one ever touches it or talks to it and make sure those people who could benefit by me by you know hunting and fishing they don't get a chance to actually put in any input they don't get a chance to actually fund that process and if we did it differently so on the federal level we were also saying let's try to learn how that we can enhance wildlife by allowing people who hunt and fish to pay into the fund that enhances it and make sure

and that that also has to say is you've got to get the kind of wildlife that people want to hunt and fish and i don't think that's wrong no but that wildlife does pretty well you know i think that we had a conversation with someone the other day i think you know the year i was born there were about 1.5 million turkeys in the u.s there are now 7 million turkeys the explosion of turkeys and they're all in my neighborhood they come in my yard and eat my grapes all the time the explosion of turkeys created like a whole new population of hunters who are paying into the fee structure to support hunting so it is like enhancing wildlife is enhancing spending on wildlife i think that that's pretty clear but i think that a problem or frustration some people have and i want to move on to other ideas but a problem or frustration i

think people have is what do we do about if if we as a nation have decided that we want to set aside that we want to save some places and just have it be that, that we want the most pristine landscapes to remain intact, I think that people are going to continue to try to strive to find tools to make that happen. And the question would simply be, how much of the land do you want to have that classification? I think wilderness is one or two percent of the country. But you can also, land regenerates itself.

You leave something alone long enough, it reverts back to wilderness characteristics. The deck on my apartment will eventually become wilderness if I don't do anything with it long enough. So it doesn't mean that it has to be it has to be now you can reclaim land and use that and it can be regenerated into that process so you don't have to get recreation off of something in order to eventually reclaim it as wilderness you don't have to get economic development off of something in order to eventually someday reclaim that as pristine land that you can recreate on or use for wilderness i i still think it can be a win-win situation the outdoor industry association

recently pulled i mean as you i'm sure you well know recently pulled their trade show from utah due to what they perceived to be anti-public lands position. It's an $887 billion industry. Do you have, I mean, are you glad to see them go? Think it was a misunderstanding, a mischaracterization? No, I'm obviously not glad to see them go because there are a lot of small industry personnel that show was very beneficial to them. The problem I have, obviously, is I think there were a few very rich companies, big companies that were motivating that. They were making a lot of demands all the time on the state of Utah, which I found funny.

But I wasn't in state government, so I didn't have to deal with that at all. I do think that some of the rich companies that mandated that move have provided misinformation. I feel personally abused by some of them. I think they have lied about my state as well. And I'm somewhat bitter about that. But, you know, with any private sector, you have a right to do whatever you want to do. And I think you as much as anyone would respect that right. I acknowledge that right. I don't know if I respect that, but I'll acknowledge it. Sorry, I didn't acknowledge the right. I want to play a definition game.

We talk, like in the sports community, we talk a ton about access, and we've talked a lot about it just sitting here today. Traditionally, my understanding of the word had been that access was, if I were to say like an increase in access for hunters and anglers, increase in access for sportsmen, I would mean that lands that you couldn't practice your discipline on, that you couldn't hunt and fish on in the past, would be made available for those activities.

So an increase in access would be that you're opening up places where you're allowed to do the activities. I feel that now people are looking at this idea that people love access and you find people coalesce around this idea that we need more access because oftentimes when you go out and poll people who are coming into hunting and fishing they will cite access as a significant barrier to entry. Many people name it as the primary barrier to entry, meaning a place to go.

But I think people have taken the fact that people like the word access and applied it to different things. And now I think part of the conversation around access is almost like we had a misunderstanding and that access might in fact just mean increasing the ways in which people can access land, building new roads, removing restrictions on travel restrictions, and that is access enhancement.

Do you have a working definition of public access, like what it means to you and how you view it? Isn't it the same thing? No. Having more area sometimes requires the ability of getting people into those areas yeah so let's take this but it still opens more areas for their their use yeah so i would view if i was going to go look and say like what would be a great access story i would look at what recently happened in new Mexico, where we had a wilderness area that was landlocked. So you have a small wilderness area, well, a significant wilderness area,

that the public literally could not get into, because they would have to trespass, and leaving the public road, they would have to trespass to get in there. A landowner who owned one of the buffer, the barrier pieces, donated his property to the federal government. It came with certain caveats. Some, the senators from New Mexico, Heinrich and Udall,

worked with Secretary Zinke, and we got a new piece of land added to the federal estate that provides access into the wilderness area. No one changed the travel restrictions within the wilderness area. It's a non-motorized wilderness area. But now Americans can park their car and hike in and access this wilderness area, the Sabanosa Wilderness Area.

So in my mind, I would look like that is a beautiful access story. I like that one a whole bunch. That would be like a definition of access. And I feel that some people are taking access and meaning just trying to remove travel restrictions on land that already is technically accessible to hunters and fishermen and i think that that causes a certain amount of tension because people will look and feel that we have a finite amount of space that is off limits to mechanized use and vehicle travel and they are working hard to try to preserve those intact spaces.

Do you feel that there's merit to wanting those spaces? If I understand your question, yeah. You do? I think so. I mean, the example you gave in New Mexico, cool. I don't have a problem with that whatsoever. We did have, when we lost the majority and went minority, there were a couple of hearings we had in the resource committee again

in which they brought some union people out because they thought they would be very positive about conservation concepts, and they were. But they quit doing that soon because they found out that when you had economic development, like an oil rig or something that was an oil well that was developed, they had to have roads that went into there. And the fact that they had some new roads developed opened up a whole new area that was not part of the economic development for hunting and fishing that wasn't there before because they didn't have the road. So oddly enough, these union members were very positive about the economic development aspect

because it allowed them to actually get into areas that they didn't have before. And I think that's the same thing you're saying, isn't it? Well, I apologize for being a little bit opaque, but it's not my intention. And compared to some of the other things we talked about, it's probably a little bit not something you hear as much about. But it has to do with, I feel that in a little bit of a way, we're twisting the intent of access enhancement to make it be that we're trying to increase vehicle traffic

and motorized use in areas where it wouldn't have been and camouflaging that as an achievement of access enhancement but that you don't seem particularly like inspired and talk about that um and i'd like to ask you can we we're running out of time can we go into one last idea for a minute i gotta think about what you just said because I don't know whether I agree with you or not, but I don't disagree with you yet. Okay. Maybe we'll return to it next time. Can you give me mile-high perspectives

on the Endangered Species Act? It's had some remarkable successes. It has some remarkable failures. It leads to a lot of tensions. What are some of the things that you would like to see happen with the ESA? As we increasingly talk about modifying it, there's been talk about outright appealing it. Do you have a general guiding principle when you're looking at the Endangered Species Act? Yeah, frustration because they don't know how to fix it. the problem is right now with most of the

species that are put on the endangered species act the goal is simply to control land area around it it is not to improve the species which is why the success rate of this program is probably one of the lowest of every program two percent we yeah actually i got a good baseball story that goes even better than that. But the bottom line, because I know you're running out of time, is I would love the Endangered Species Act to be better written so that what we do is having matrixes that are in there on what it takes to actually rehabilitate a species and then moving towards that.

I don't think we're doing that enough. In fact, we're not doing that at all. Right now, it's simply to control an area as if that will magically rehabilitate the species. That's not the same thing. I wish it was function more as how you actually do the job, as opposed to saying, okay, we list this as a species. Let's hope if we leave it alone, it will get better. That doesn't work.

So, yeah, earlier I mentioned people that are trying to do landscape preservation reach out and try to find tools and apply those tools to get the job done, even if the tool isn't intended to be that way. And you feel that the ESA is being used like that as well yeah and yeah that clearly that happens sometimes sometimes it just happens that we don't know how the hell to actually rehabilitate the species but it's listed anyway what do you feel like uh in short term what kind of thing do you feel that we're going to see movement on ESA modifications or rewriting the ESA or clarifying the ESA? I hope we could clarify it in some way to add those modifications so you can find out, so it can actually be successful and you can monitor and you know where you're going to get that success.

To be honest, I don't know how to write that into the language of the bill, which is why it is frustrating to me. So I have sarcastically said, you might as well just get rid of it all and start over again. I don't mean I really want to get rid of it and start over again. It's just, I don't know short of doing that how you start over, how you fix it. I've seen where you've said that, and I've asked people what you might mean by that and they've said that you were saying that it needs work and you were starting at an extreme hoping to find some solution in the middle ground now sometimes I just say stuff for the fun of it do you have any uh we've touched on a lot do you have any final thoughts you'd like to add in?

It's been great to, I mean, admittedly, I mean, I've been, you know, reading your name for so long. That's ominous. It's been great to hear from you, you know, how you think and how you approach the world. And I think that people really appreciate it. But do you have any final things you want to touch on or add on no i i appreciate the chance to discuss things um and and the way you presented them and given me the opportunity to talk about it oftentimes um as much as i said you know words have meaning they can also be confusing and sometimes we're not really talking

at an issue we're talking around it and using the same words with a different meaning to it all together and i think that's a lot of the problem that we have in the issues that deal with lands and public lands we all have a common goal but we have different meanings of how you achieve that common goal so some it's easy to talk about this stuff in fact maybe that's one of the issues i mean we've gone through haven't really gone through that many different topics but you've gone into in depth with it so like what an hour and a half in depth usually it's sound bites it, sorry. Usually I don't get a chance to talk this level, this intensity of how we can try and solve some of these issues or bring people together.

I don't get that kind of opportunity. This is kind of unique, so I appreciate you doing it. Oh, I appreciate you coming on. And I think that as much as different people and different organizations have wildly different perspectives on how to solve some of these problems I think it says a lot for our times and a lot for the country that we have the luxury of being able to have a conversation around public lands and wildlife that we still have a lot of it and it's very beautiful and we're all hopefully all of us are deeply invested in seeing that those things continue into the future so

thank you for your time i know you're a very busy man i appreciate you sitting down with us to discuss these issues. Thanks for the invitation. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada.

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