The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 116: Senator Heinrich

Episode Date: May 14, 2018

Washington DC- Steven Rinella talks with Senator Martin Heinrich, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: thinking long-term; the path to becoming a Senator; the politician and the elk; the Sabinoso Wilderness as a big win for hunters; what's up with the HUNT Act; why reforming the fire budget is so damn important; stream access issues and how they affect sportsmen; why the Land and Water Conservation Fund is always imperiled, and why it shouldn't be; what's up with the Antiquities Act?; National Monuments; 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, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, we're coming from Washington, D.C., the nation's capital, and we're joined by a very special guest senator martin heinrich but first

um i want to touch on something real quick so the meat eater podcast live tour we're coming out to four different cities soon we have denver colorado tempe arizona minneapolis minnesota columbus ohio if you want to check out about getting your tickets Colorado, Tempe, Arizona, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Columbus, Ohio. If you want to check out about getting your tickets to come meet me, the Latvian Eagle, our special guest that we'll be announcing soon, you can go to www.meateater.live and get all the info you need. I look forward to meeting you. How far into you are on your- So i'm five years into my first senate term i spent four years in the house before that

you guys like senators get a nice generous term compared to i would i would agree i think the the house term the two-year term, is part of the problem. It's really hard to do any long-term thinking when you're in the House of Representatives. Because you have a two-year term. You have a two-year term. A year in and you're already completely consumed with your re-election. So everyone's got to be, like a senator has even longer than the president. But then, you guys, it's not as nice as the Supreme Court justice.

Well, I guess everybody has their advantages and disadvantages. The thing I like about the Senate is as soon as I moved over from the House, I was able to take on projects that would have a longer time horizon and to really think about more difficult long-term problems. And when you think about conservation, we have a place, the Valles Caldera in New Mexico that is now in public hands. It's a huge success story, but people started working on it 100 years ago in like 1916. So you need to be able- I mean, that's when the idea first took shape.

That's when the idea for a bill to do something to put that in public hands first took shape. And, that's when the idea for a bill to do something to put that in public hands first took shape. And so it's good to have the room to think big. And you can do that in the Senate. You still have to deal with all the day-to-day stuff and the things that are right in front of you. But you can also look out into the future and say, what are we going to do to get to where we want to be? I want to get into some of that stuff i want to get into some of the the details with you about the thinking on long-term

conservation projects but can we back up a little bit or back not a little bit back way up can you walk me through sort of how how your uh kind of like how your career went and how you came to be, you know, sitting in the U S Senate. So like when you became aware, when you became aware of that, that would be a thing that was possible. I can do that. It, it won't seem particularly planned out or logical to you. Um, so I'm an engineer by training. And if I had known that I was going to go into public service, I would have spent a lot less time taking differential equations and heat transfer classes because those were hard. But I was always interested in politics, but there was a moment back in the 90s when I had settled down in Albuquerque after college when I really started thinking about running for office.

What was it that made you interested in engineering? I just like how things work. And I had an aptitude for math and science. And probably a high school guidance counselor said, I've seen your score. You should be an engineer. And I didn't discover something along the way that necessarily pulled me off that track until after I had the degree and settled in New Mexico. Did you start doing engineering work? I did.

Right out of the gate, I was doing some work out at Air Force Research Labs and working on directed energy, which is an area, lasers and microwave stuff that I still work on today from a policy point of view yeah because you got in i know you've got interested in renewables and and being in new mexico interested in solar sure yeah no that that too i mean that was something that grew out of my engineering days in the early 90s a group of us built a carbon fiber solar car that we raced from dallas Minneapolis. And that's when I first started thinking that, you know, this stuff is scalable. Yeah. So tell me what happened in

Albuquerque then when you kind of had your political, uh, you know, awakening or, you know, I, um, I decided that, uh, I would run for the city council. And before that, I worked on some campaigns to understand how stuff works. And so I ran some campaigns. I ran a statewide land commissioner campaign that didn't work out. I worked for the Speaker of the House, trying to maintain his majority and helped not day-to-day manage, but keep all of his candidates moving in the right direction. And that kind of gave me the skills to then take on a city council race. And that was as far as I was looking out towards the horizon. And once I was on the council, people started encouraging me to run for a congressional seat. It was a very

contested seat. It had never been held by a Democrat in its history. And that was 2008. I won that seat. And then a few years, a little over two years later, the senior senator retires. So another Senate seat opens up. So it was all sort of very, very quick and not, not something I planned out. I didn't, I never planned to be an elected official, much less a United States Senator. When did you, within that, like in your life, when did you become kind of aware of the natural world and become interested in, I was, you know, environmentalism, conservation. I was hugely interested in the natural world as a child. We had a small sort of cow-calf operation

when I was a kid in Missouri. And when we didn't have that, we were living at sort of the edge of a small town where there were creeks and places. I would come home after school and I'd just disappear into the outdoors. And I always had a strong interest in that. My parents really fostered that. They thought it was great. My mom didn't always appreciate snakes coming home into the house or the day that my dad brought a tarantula home and left it on the kitchen counter

in a fishbowl. And by the time she came home, it wasn't in the fishbowl anymore. But for the most part, they really fostered my interest in the outdoors. So did they come from an ag background? Yeah, my dad grew up, interesting story, he immigrated here in the 30s from germany as a young child um but uh quickly learned to cowboy when he was just becoming a teenager and had years of history running feedlots and running cow-calf operations riding quarter horses so he was a sort of a legit cowboy from germany in the 30s yeah got out when the getting was good yeah they did they got out at the right time i think they saw the the writing on the wall his his parents um you know saw what

was going on in lots of quarters and said we we want a different deal yeah that's interesting yeah so then he kind of became a german-american cowboy Yeah, exactly right. And then, but did you grow up around, did you grow up around hunting and fishing? Were those things you picked up around? I grew up around fishing. My dad was great about, he enjoyed trout fishing. He enjoyed fishing for, you know, warm water fish, catfish, and bluegill and stuff like that. But he was not a good hunting mentor. He had worked exploration, I think, in his 20s and 30s for Anaconda copper and was really into geology. And if you got him out on a hunt, he would want to look at rocks on the ground

instead of looking out at the horizon. It doesn't really lend itself to being a good mentor on on that guy that finds more arrowheads and it's exactly right yeah i got so yeah i have i have the i have the looking out far away that's a good skill to have if you're going to be a hunter and not looking at the ground tendency so i tried to teach myself uh when i was 12 13 14 um didn't have a lot of success. And then when I got into my 20s, really took it back up again, found some people who were good mentors,

was really getting into wanting to control my own food. We were growing a lot of food at home and it just fit into that in a way that, I think your show really appeals to a different demographic of young hunters. And I saw this when you were in New Mexico for the New Mexico Game and Fish, their annual fundraiser, and spoke to that crowd. It was interesting to me to see the sort of new hunter, old hunter groupings in that crowd and how demographically different

there's this younger generation of backcountry hunters with their trucker hats and a real focus on food. And all of that really appealed to me in my 20s and 30s. And it's been a kind of adult onset hunting. Do you, in this atmosphere that you're in, when you're like in your professional life as a senator you know in washington dc how unusual is it um how unusual is it to have the background interest that you have the outdoor background interest like when you're talking to your

colleagues do you find there's a real disconnect when you're speaking about conservation issues there were people like that do they there are a handful that that's part of the challenge is i i think in our country's history you look back at uh you know the the founding fathers you look at people like jefferson they they prided themselves in being naturalists um that that doesn't exist so much anymore. There are a handful of people who, you know, Dean Heller hunts from horseback on public land. Uh, you know, he's got a real interest in it, but there aren't a lot of us. There are a handful that, that are real passionate about ducks. Uh, Senator Boosman from Arkansas, for example. But boy, it is not, you know, I think it used to be something that really ran through both parties and was much more

baked into who people are. And that's why I think it's so hard to get things done today. I mean, I sit on the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission commission we met this morning you know that we that whole effort to use duck stamps to buy habitat which has been going on since i don't know 1929 whenever we passed the original migratory bird conservation act it still functions but we can't even get NACA reauthorized. And the NACA program that does so much habitat work, most of these bills expire at a certain time. And in the past, you would have such a focus on the importance of these things.

And you know, hunting and fishing doesn't happen without habitat and the people who wrote these bills knew that and that's why we have duck stamps and that's why we have a a north american waterfowl conservation act knocker program that invests in maintaining and improving that habitat in our wildlife refuges and in other places across the country and basic things like that just don't have the same resonance particularly among leadership i think that they used to have for this body and that's one of the things that really worries me do you think it's because people have it too good right now not i don't want to say too good, but do you think it's because people don't feel like things are quite on fire the way they might have felt in the 1930s or the 1960s?

Anybody who actually experienced a time in this country where elk were extirpated from New Mexico, we had zero. That's the thing I point out often when I give talks. 70,000 elk now. Your home state there was down to zero elk. And I'm sure you could pick a particular year on the Carson National Forest and see how many mule deer were harvested, and you'd probably count it on a hand or two or maybe two hands and a foot. Like not a lot of big game ungulate wildlife left in the state.

And anybody who's experienced that, I think has that sense of urgency. But I also think there's a disconnection now that is not helpful. And getting people reconnected to the outdoors, finding ways for folks who are completely plugged into their iPhone and living in a more urban environment to understand what actually pays for some of this conservation and create a sense of urgency is a challenge. One of the things, I want to jump back to that real quick, but it's just a thing that I'd like to mention that really kind of made me interested in you when we first met was that you had, it just seems like so kind of strange that a sitting U.S. senator would apply for a muzzleloader elk tag in the Gila National Forest and then go and do the trip. Because I just have in my mind.

I think for most of our history, it's been the other way around. But yeah, I just have in my mind that like, I was like, oh, if a senator went hunting, it would be at some like some duck club. But that's, you know, that is how New Mexicans, for people who rely on that, it's such a part of who we are. Those public lands are, I would put that experience up against any ranch tag anywhere in the country. You know, to have, plus it's a challenge to hunt pressured elk too. I mean, it's like, as as you know they behave very differently than the ones who like file into the alfalfa field at uh 5 30 uh in the afternoon and uh and i enjoy

that that that's that's the time of of my life that really resets me to who i am and it keeps me much more centered here i i think that that like i think that's kind of what that centeredness is what I'm sort of referring to. Because I would imagine when hearing that, I was like, well, here's a person who presumably has a lot of connections and points of access. But to just kind of be in there. I also like to go and not be, you know, just be one of the guys and not be trying to roll like a quote unquote U.S. senator. It's really good to go out and just, you know, bump into people in the national forest who are doing the same thing you are. Yeah. And you're out on the lands that, you know, are owned by the people and managed at the federal level, which you're involved in.

And you need that feedback to, to, to get through some of the rhetoric back here. I mean, people are saying things that are working art and the opposite. So staying very much at the ground level in touch with that, I think is really important. And then I have a followup question.

Cause I'm sure everybody's going to want to know, were you successful on your, on that? So I should, I should step back and it was actually the seabowl on national forest that particular elk uh but i you know if you can pull a tag on the gila you're doing great um and i was i i it was um i got a great bull that year uh it was a really hard hunt and did not get a lot of opportunities and um finally found a water hole where this really

old bull had been coming in late at night and got him right before last shooting light. Scheduling has to be hard. Well, that's actually why it was a muzzleloader hunt. Oh, because you had to look at your calendar. So here's the deal. Here's how this works. We get a calendar. Usually it comes out early in the year. Leadership sets it. And my hunts are based around, is there a week when we're at home in October, September, November that we're not working and we can be in state. Those are the tags I apply for. So it can be a bow tag, it can be a rifle tag, it can be a muzzleloader tag. That gets determined by my schedule. And so you just try to overlay the timing that works in this job with what's available in the proclamation and hope it matches up. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Would you mind walking us through real quick the story of the Sabinoso. Am I saying that right? Sabinoso? Sabinoso.

Sabino is a juniper tree okay yeah can you talk about what happened there this is something that i've i've explained a number of times but i'd like to hear it from you because i know that you were involved in it from from the the ground up and i think it's something that would would help listeners sort of understand how you can, you know, how someone in your position who's thinking about these things can help sort of shape a conversation around a conservation issue. I'd love to. You know, it's recent and very relevant. So the Sabinosso is an area in northeastern New Mexico. It's Bureau of Land Management land.

It was a wilderness study area for a long time, and the BLM recommended against it because it was too hard to get to. Try to wrap your head around that. Recommended against? Against it being wilderness because it was too hard to get to. Yeah. Now, the reality was we had lost access to it. So it's an area of canyons and mesas, really kind of almost Red Rock, Utah,

mountain lion kind of country, really steep. And canyons and mesa tops all jumbled together. At one point, I'm sure you could get into it legally, but at some point, private property changed hands and there was no legal access to it anymore. Not by trail, not by road, not any way, shape or form. And in 2009, it was elevated to an actual wilderness area in the Omnibus Public Lands Act of 2009. I had been working for a number of years trying to identify access into it by purchasing an easement or purchasing land, trying to figure out a way to get the public in there because I had had a chance to go horseback riding in there with then Congressman Udall, now Senator Udall. And it's just an amazing piece of ground. And it's public land, so it should be open to the public.

We hadn't had a lot of success in that. And this would be something that you would look into using private or public funds. When I first started, I was, I think, access chair for the New Mexico Wildlife Federation. So we were just looking for a way to do that. We were talking to Game and Fish. We were looking at various programs that might be able to provide funding for easements, talking to landowners, trying to identify a way to get in there, found some property. It turned out some of the easements didn't actually vet

through the legal process. And so there were lots of tries over the years and the Wilderness Land Trust stepped up when there was a opportunity for one of the surrounding properties to change hands. And it's one of the most rugged properties. It's about 4,000 acres of largely one big, deep canyon. But it had a legitimate easement to a graded public road, had a place where people could actually park, and then get into all of the rest of this Bureau of Land Management area. And how many acres, roughly, is the chunk of land that was marooned? I think it's 17 000 maybe okay i'd

have to vet that but that's the number that sticks in my head uh yeah you'll pull it up yeah it's that's what the google is for right yes sir um so the wilderness land trust actually bought a property there and offered it up to the Bureau of Land Management with enormous encouragement from myself, Senator Udall, Congressman Lujan of Northern New Mexico. I mean, the sportsmen and public land enthusiasts in that part of the state had wanted to get in there forever and ever. So we were very enthusiastically supportive. All of that moved forward, but it kind of ran out the clock at the end of the last administration. And so it rolled over into a new administration.

But I don't want to spend too much time on it, but why does that take work? Sometimes I scratch my head on that too. This was a gift to the American people. So it was like a willing seller and a willing private buyer. And the willing private buyer says, I'm a gift to the american people so it's like a willing seller uh-huh absolutely willing private buyer right and the willing private buyer says i'm giving it to the federal government yes but the secretary of interior at the end of the day has to accept

that gift do we got we have acreage 16 000 16 16 000 you're close close um and and so you know i met with secretary zinke before a hearing he was not sold on the idea um can you he he didn't want to add wilderness acreage i think is the perspective i mean to be fair you should ask him to his perspective on that but he was concerned that uh you know you wouldn't want to that this had been a quote unquote ranch and that it was going to be wilderness now and you wouldn't want a ranch to become wilderness and i'm purely projecting now i don't want to speak for secretary zinke at all but i i think maybe he had a picture in his mind of montana where wilderness is something up in

the mountains and ranch front country is sort of grassland down below and more developed and roaded and all those kinds of things. We had a back and forth in committee. It was not going well. It was pretty sort of head to head. And I just took a step back and said, wait a minute, you know, we're arguing about this in Washington, DC. What might help is if you and I go out there and we ride a couple of horses and we go into this country and look at it together. Then we can figure it out. And that was kind of a turning point. The secretary ended up coming out to New Mexico, heard there were lots of enthusiastic sportsmen there for his visit who were like, we are chomping at the bit. We'd really like to see this place

open by mule deer season. Um, so, uh, after that, uh, he changed his position, said this is a great conservation opportunity and accepted. Uh, we put together a deal where, you know, they made sure that you could get motorized access to a parking area and that if they had to get something in to fight fires, you can do that under the Wilderness Act. And they ended up accepting the gift. And it's, you know, there are some very enthusiastic sportsmen in New Mexico who've enjoyed their access to the Sabinoso as a result. Yeah. So now with the easement and the actual wilderness area, you can add 20,000 acres. Yeah. 20,000 acres. People could not hunt, camp, birdwatch, whatever you like to do, you know, you couldn't do it on your land

up until that moment. And it's a special place. There's some permanent water in there, which in New Mexico, you pour three gallons of water on the ground. If it doesn't soak away, you're going to have wildlife, right? You're going to have ducks in places you'd never think to have ducks. When we were in there, there was a big flock of turkeys. There's mule deer that use that area. There are a handful of Barbary sheep, I think, still in the area. I mean, they're not native, but they're also not, they're exotic more than they are invasive. So they are definitely sort of on the game menu in New Mexico.

Some people have, I think, particularly in the east or wetter areas, have a hard time picturing that thirst for water. Yeah. And Giannis, you know, the guys he used to guide elk hunters with, they would sometimes take a water jug. This was down in Arizona. This was in Arizona. Yeah, they would dump a water jug. On the muggy, yeah. You saw it.

Yeah, we got it there and south of the rim, too. But I think this was in – where this story takes place was in unit nine but uh yeah the fellow was just driving down a dirt road and was just like crossing kind of a wet muddy spot that might have had water in a few days earlier and noticed that possibly an elk had rolled in there and so he just happened everybody's packing around whatever 50 gallons of water in the back of their truck right so he he dumped out like whatever five ten gallons and basically created a wallow stuck a trail cam up in the tree branch above it came back two days later and there's all kinds of elk hitting it sure just smelled that little yeah right you get that dirt wet and they can smell it a long way away yeah it's kind of amazing

like how dry some of those places are can you feel like the story we just talked about leads into the Hunt Act. Yeah, absolutely. Can you talk about that a little bit? You bet. And this, you know, Sabinosa was really the impetus for the Hunt Act. Okay. I was concerned that there are places in this country now, and I've seen this, you this, Randy Newberg's done some great episodes where he's had to take a helicopter and airplane and hunt on public land in Montana, right? We have this in New Mexico with Sabinoso, some other places like the Alamo Wacos

that were completely landlocked. And I realized that the agencies, especially- I just want to interrupt you one sec just so people understand. When we talk about landlocked, just back me up anytime I'm like- No, no, roll that into it. Because I just want to make sure people understand what we're talking about.

We're talking about landlocked land. So you think about you got a little tiny mountain chain in the middle of the desert that comes up off the desert floor. And that mountain chain is public land. It's Bureau of Land Management land. But it is surrounded by private land and there is no road or trail that has a legal easement that actually gets into it. So that's your land. And if you could get there, you could do all kinds of things on it, but you can't. You can't legally get into it. And I started to realize that this was not a one-off. It was not that there are millions of acres spread across the West that are our public birthright that we can't use. And how can we

change that? And so I wrote a bill to make the agencies do a review and figure out like, where are these places? How much do we have? And start to prioritize and do something about it. So let's spend some of those land and water conservation fund dollars on purely on being able to get the easements to be able to get in and utilize those places again. And for me, that's access. Now for Chairman Bishop, I think it means being able to drive anywhere. And that's a problem if you like to hunt big elk, because elk don't like to live on a road. My experience is if you want the big, gnarly, old bull elk, you look for the blank spot on the map, not the place with lots of motorized access. Yeah, there are the exceptions.

And I'm just going to bring this up to play devil's advocate a little bit. But where we just were talking about in Arizona, Unit 9, it's a very roaded up place. It's also a very heavily managed for trophy potential elk zone. And it takes how many years? You've got good management and habitat. 20 years. Yeah, they were guiding hunters who'd been waiting 20-

Buying preference points every year. 20 years of preference points. Wow. Yeah. And God bless those hunters for putting all that. That costs a lot of money over time and that gets plowed back into habitat. So that's a great thing.

But for me... I do understand what you mean about the conversation, and we spoke with Chairman Bishop about this, is people, I think sportsmen hear the word access, and it just has very... Everyone agrees. No one would agree that we no one would say like there should be less access everyone's like yes i agree with more access but i think that people

take the idea that that that the idea of access is popular and enjoys widespread support and then you could kind of take what your particular vision is and make it seem like access. Sure. So if your particular vision is increasing vehicular access and opening up more stuff for OHV use, and you build that as a definition of access, you find that you're going to pick up some support that may be coming from people who, if they knew the details of what your vision was, their enthusiasms would dampen a little bit if they knew that you wanted to turn it into a quad runner raceway. Right. Or access for mineral development or something else that's going to impact that habitat long-term. Yeah. So I've now become, when I hear in certain quarters, when I hear like increased access, I find myself saying, well, okay, what kind of access are we talking about?

Because when I think of access, I'm thinking about opening up places that were previously literally not accessible. Exactly right. That's what the Hunt Act was written to do. and it's been popular enough that we've been able to get it into the sportsman's package, which is something we've negotiated sort of with both Lisa Murkowski, Senator from Alaska and myself. You guys have done work on a handful of projects.

We work well together. We have our differences, but man, she's a pro and we've put a sportsman's package together that is very bipartisan and that's just one of the pieces in it um what will happen there with something like that like how do you picture something like that like how is it received how do you get it where it gets the proper attention

that it doesn't get drowned out by all the other things you have to deal with like do you have to kind of have a calendar reminder the constant twitter yeah do you have to have a daily calendar reminder that tells you what it was you were wanting to do in the first place as you as you kind of gosh sometimes i wonder about that uh there is a dynamic in this town of you have to be paying attention to so many different issues that your attention spans becomes a very short-term attention span. And for me, if I had my druthers, I would love to do this job from Taos, New Mexico or Albuquerque or someplace at home where I was, is more my natural habitat and that feeds my soul on a daily basis.

So it is focusing on these things long-term, which gives me sort of long-term vision and cuts through the constant social media and television media circus around here. But it's probably my personal passion for these things that allows me to keep that thread going when it would be very easy for it to get lost in the clutter. And for another member who doesn't have that personal connection, it probably does get lost in the clutter. Oh, I mean, it has to. And I'm saying that only because it's not, like you're saying,

if you're watching the news cycle, you're not, I don't use mainstream news cycle in a derogatory way, but when you're watching sort of the national news cycle, you're just not being bombarded by conservation stories.

That's exactly right. So it's almost like you, I imagine politically you could run the risk of seeing like sort of a fringe person or a person who's like wondering and thinking about things that are maybe kind of long-term or, or kind of like, uh, you know,

maybe provincial or something. I mean, do you ever get that sense when you're speaking about conservation on the national level that people that that that colleagues or other people in the political sphere would feel like it was like a fringe issue or not of yeah no i i get what you're saying now uh yeah that it's you're saying no i want a lower tier issue yeah i want to open up access to federal lands people like what you want to what you're saying now. Yeah, that it's a lower tier issue. Yeah, I want to open up access to federal lands. People are like, well, you want to what? You know, it's funny. And it's like, if you just talk about sportsmen

and their impact on conservation and wildlife habitat, we are not a huge percentage of the population anymore, right? So I'm sure there are members who look at it that way. But I also think it's a way to connect with people that you're not necessarily politically aligned with on a whole series of other issues. You get two members of Congress in a duck blind, they'll actually talk to each other and learn about each other. So there are huge advantages to it as well. And there is a desire among a lot of members

to still keep this as bipartisan as we possibly can, which is a hard thing to do in a very divided country these days. Speaking about divisions, can you talk a little bit about your thoughts on public land divestiture, public land seizure? Yeah, you bet. Like what that movement looks like,

whether it is a movement. It's not a, I don't think it's a legitimate movement. It's not a grassroots. What worries me about the current dynamic is that it's not, that it's got a lot of money behind it. And we've seen that in the last few years. And you can't really track. It's so easy to have dark money in politics now that it's very hard to see who is financing what.

But you look back at earlier iterations of the quote-unquote sagebrush rebellion and other efforts to say, let's either give these public lands to the states or let's sell them off or what's, you know, which are basically two speeds of doing the same thing because most Western states have sold off huge amounts of their state land. We have millions of acres in New Mexico that used to be open to the public that is not today because a land commissioner chose to sell them off at some point yeah some states have sold off well many states have sold off the majority of the state lands they originally had yeah and so you can go back to those places now and see a no trespassing

sign i think it's worth noting that like in new mexico you can't camp on state land. So there are- At all. They've now made a few little places where you can camp, designated areas. But if you have a place like the Lueta Mountains that are really remote, where you would have to go in and backpack in and bivvy out to be able to hunt effectively in the middle of that range, you can't do that because you have to ask the permittee whether you can do that. A few years ago, I think the permittee was from Texas maybe. Just functionally, you're never going to be able to hunt most of that because it's so hard and you can't just camp in those areas.

Right. So that's a very different experience than Bureau of Land Management land, BLM land, or Forest Service land. So I think it's a beautiful thing to have that land that the federal government manages, but the public owns, that the public can go and fight over how it should be managed and fight for it and camp on it and hunt and fish on it. And what worries me about this movement is that it seems to be better funded than in the past. And you see the American Lands Council

and you see groups like ALEC that have huge corporate funders that are usually not transparent. And if they're involved, then you know you have to take it seriously. And to their credit, I think the sportsman community has gotten much more serious about meeting this challenge in the last five years. When you say that the funding seems, the money available seems outside of the public sentiment do you mean that that they that the groups will still that have money will still try to have their like their

goals sort of masquerade as a grassroots exactly astroturf is one way to put it right what's the term astroturf like rather than grassroots. I got you, I got you. So you can look at it and say that there's money coming from somewhere that's not particularly clear. And it's pretty clear it's not coming in $15 member checks of some little local group. Yeah.

Yeah. That must be tough, sorry, because it sounds like they have more money now and the federal government has less money to manage that and that's like a constant uh well that's something that really bothers me is that this dynamic of starving the federal land management agencies of any sort of budget to be able to manage lands and then condemning them for not managing those lands and saying we have to give them to someone else. I mean, that dynamic I think is just dark. Yeah, I spent a lot of time dwelling on that issue.

And if you're serious about them doing a better job, we need to fund them to do that. We need to fund law enforcement for those agencies to be able to make sure that those places are secure. And we need to be able to fund the thinning projects, the habitat management, all the other things that a good land manager can do. Yeah. And I think, too, that they've recently taken some steps right to sort of address the the fire the wildfire issue which is huge progress yeah i will say you know so you're feeling optimistic about that that was you know a lot of us who were engaged in that have been working on it for six seven years um and it was truly bipartisan. You had people like Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mike

Crapo of Idaho working together. Having that fixed in the recently passed omnibus spending bill is a huge step forward because what we were doing is not managing our forests effectively and spending all the money we should have been doing on forest restoration and stewardship contracts it was all getting sucked into the fire budget and so we were never able to get ahead of those fires and create the kind of forest that's more resilient where it can burn you know ponderosa pine is supposed to burn every five ten years that's its fire cycle um but you don't want it so overstocked that when that fire happens you lose 99.9 of your trees and you can't get ahead of that without fixing the fire borrowing that was going on and the entire budget of the forest

surface was just getting swallowed by fighting fires, and not having any funds to do anything proactive to prevent future catastrophic fires. And we have seen these stewardship contracts. I've done a lot of work with Jeff Flake of Arizona on Forest Service stewardship contracts that sort of combine habitat management with small scale timber management all together with travel and at the end of these projects you have something that's good for turkey habitat you have something that's good for elk habitat you have something that is providing jobs at the local level and you know those we should be putting money into those kinds of projects but it was all getting sucked into the fire budget for years. You mentioned Jeff Flake.

What's been your experience when you sort of, as people say, working across the aisle, right? What's been your experience on conservation issues? You worked with Lisa Murkowski. You got to find people you can trust. Trust is bigger than anything else. And Jeff and I did that crazy reality TV show a few years ago where they dropped us off

in the South Pacific together. And we proved that when death is the alternative, Republicans and Democrats work together. But because of that experience of spending a week together, we trust each other. So we're worlds apart politically on a lot of issues, but we can pick up the phone and figure out very quickly if a particular project is something we want to work on together. And if we're going to work on it, neither one of us is trying to

pull a political fast one on the other. I got you. So that's what trust is. Yeah. You got to find people you can trust and then figure out where the overlap is where you agree and just go all in. And are you able to have candid conversations about that kind of stuff? You can only have candid conversations if you have trust. And so much of the breakdown around here

is that people don't know their colleagues well. They don't spend enough time with their colleagues. Jeff and I really tried to get the two sides to start having bipartisan lunches we forced the issue enough that it happened for a while and then you know people fall back into their old ways of all the Democrats meet for a lunch and all the Republicans meet for a lunch so if you're dedicated to those ideas you can you can find space and and push forward and get some things done.

And that's what keeps me going. As challenging as it is to get things done around here, I had a conservation bill called FLIPFA. It's the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act. It's a mouthful. I can imagine that becoming a real public buzzword. I've been working on that for 10 years and we got it done this year.

So you have to be patient and you have to be dogged. And it's one of those places where even Chairman Bishop and I agree. And so I needed people on the house side who would push for that. Yeah. Tell me about stream access, sort of your vision on it in a handful of examples where it's being discussed and hashed out. Well, I think we've seen a lot of changes in New Mexico over the years on stream access. And I think it is not something that you've seen groups like background country hunters and anglers really step up on that issue. We've seen some great leadership at the local level in new mexico with the new mexico wildlife federation but it is it is not sort of created the national concert conservation conversation that we've seen around some other hot button issues and i would love to see more of that because i think we are losing stream access at a faster rate than we're losing access to public lands.

I want to just step in real quick and bring some people up to speed. You can add to this, but I just want to give people a general understanding of what we're talking about. We're talking about stream access. If you've ever gone, put a canoe or raft or inner tube into a river and floated down a stream or river and on either bank is private land, you're utilizing your state's stream access laws. It's what allows you to be on a river when it allows you to publicly access a river when the banks of the river are privately owned. And, you know, of course, these, you know, large main stem rivers in America are not contested. Like when you're floating down the Mississippi, no landowner is going to come out and yell at you that you're on their property.

But as streams and rivers get smaller and smaller, they enter into these contested areas. Being that, imagine that there's a drainage ditch flowing through someone's ag field, you're not going to be able to walk up that drainage ditch and say, well, I'm in the water, I'm not in your land. And so the battle gets fought over what constitutes a public stream. Some states have clarified it using great, very precise language. If it was used for commerce, if it has a historic If it was used for commerce, if it has a historic record of being used for commerce, it's a publicly accessible stream.

So if you can go back in the historic record, and states will do this, and they'll find that a guy floated a load of logs down the river in 1820 to a mill or ferried a bushel of wheat down that thing, that was open for commerce. It was historically used that thing. That was open for commerce. It was historically used for commerce. It's open for commerce and transport today.

Another issue on stream access would be that where if, let's say there's a drought and the river level goes down and you're walking on land that is generally covered by water but it's not covered by now are you legal so that you could be in the area where you have to be in the water you could be in an area in wyoming right or is it colorado where you can be in a boat on a river

but you can't set an anchor and you can't get out of your boat you can't put your foot on the bottom you know yeah i think both both those states are like that yeah so there they say and this is where it gets like confusing is they'll say oh the water is public but if you put your foot out and hit the gravel on the bottom of the river you're trespassing so there's all these you know there's all of these different variations on that you can be anywhere below the high water mark that um that you can be you can only be in areas that are above mean stream flow or average flow and it tends to be a state issue and that that's the legal fabric but there's also a historical fabric of it used to be that if you were respectful of private land there were a lot of streams that you could just wade up in New Mexico

that had historic access. Waters access is actually written into our state's constitution. Oh, it is? Okay. And yet we had a bill passed largely driven, I believe, by out-of-state interests who want to be able to come in and buy their chunk of the Chama River, their chunk of the Los Pinos River, their chunk of the Pecos River, and be able to control that in its entirety. And so you buy, and then here comes some Joe Blow wandering by fishing.

Right. Yep. And you're like, what? So that tension is very real today. The balance has shifted. And I think there's going to be a showdown eventually in the courts over which one of, whether that law is even constitutional

given New Mexico's history. So can you explain kind of, can you give me a little more detail about like what's being debated or what's at stake in New Mexico? Is it that new things might open up or things that are open now might become closed? Things that have been historically open are more and more closed.

So we're seeing just less access to some of these rivers. And what would the showdown look like? I think it will end up in court. But we're also seeing a lot of political spending by the same folks who are buying up those those trophy properties and saying i i want to be able to have guided clients come in and fish my stretch of river right and i don't want them to see other anglers um they are putting a lot of money into the political system and i think that's why part of why you saw a law passed in a state that historically has been more

on the access side of the equation. Is there any area where federal politics influence stream access? I think largely just in being able to utilize things like the Land and Water Conservation Fund, legislation like the Hunt Act, to be able to secure new access points to make sure those things can't happen. Yeah, river access points. River access points and spending those federal game and fish dollars too and the recreation dollars on things like boat ramps and other things that can sort of formalize that in partnership with local game and fish. I was very surprised to hear not long ago that every county in the United States has utilized land and water conservation funds. Isn't that amazing?

I mean, this is a program that has created, opened up so much quality habitat in the West, but it's also created thousands of soccer fields and the little park that you know that neighborhood that didn't have a park suddenly has a neighborhood park well that's a huge quality of life issue for some you know if you have kids playing in a park they're going to be healthier yeah that's the thing that like until you have little kids you could give a shit less and then like all of a sudden you find yourself living in a neighborhood that the park's

either a half a block or 10 blocks away. And you realize. Yeah, it's a game changer. Because you're there all the time. For the next five years of your life. Having children definitely opened me up to that idea and awareness of green space and parks. Because as a grown-up with no kids,

you just jump in a car. You get in your truck and yeah you go to every one but when you're dealing with this like people need to take naps and have snacks all the time you start like you start becoming very aware of sort of like immediately available places to get your kids outside absolutely because they think from their perspective they are out in the wilderness right you know when you're two feet tall absolutely and and that's a that's a kids are healthier when they're when they're exposed to that, whether it's a neighborhood park

and then maybe the neighborhood park leads to other things. And we're in the process of creating an urban wildlife refuge very close to downtown Albuquerque. It's out of town, but it's in an area where there's lots of resident residential property as well along the Rio Grande where, you know, fourth graders can come and learn about, about nature and about riparian areas and about wildlife and about

flyways. And, um, you know, I've been working with Lamar Alexander on taking that every kid in the park thing that the Obama administration did for fourth graders, where they said you can come and you can get free access as a fourth grader to any of your public lands or any of your national parks. And we're trying to formalize that for all public lands, realizing that a lot of these families have never actually, in Albuquerque, have never maybe been to the top of the Sandias just a few miles away. And there's a story like that in every state

and every county around the country. And our kids are so plugged into these devices that we have got to find ways to get them in touch with reality. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated well if you're

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That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. yeah i've heard you mentioned a couple times to talk about that we can't expect people to get invested in conservation and wildlife habitat if they just don't even know what those things mean or that they don't know the treasures that are out there for them to utilize like they're not going to care about preserving them it's fantastic that you can can turn on PBS or watch BBC Nature and see amazing things,

but nothing gets people more engaged than personal experience. And that's why, I mean, we've got these hundreds of millions of acres of public land. We need to make sure that people know it's theirs and are out using it. That will create a whole new generation of conservationists. What do you think is going to happen with the land and water conservation fund? What needs to happen? What do you think will happen? Well, it expires again. The authorization for it expires in September of this year.

Why is it always expiring? Is it? Or is it just my perception of it that it's always imperiled somehow? No, you're right because there are many of us who have tried to say this is such a successful program. It's actually the poster child of a federal program that works. So let's just extend it in perpetuity because we always extend it, right? At the end of the day, people love this program. For some finite period of time.

But there has been, for those people who want to change that program, change its direction, move it away from habitat and public lands and say, you were talking with Chairman Bishop, and I think he represented that not much of this goes to the states. Well, about half of it goes to stateside. It is a good balance right now of state and federal priorities and of urban and rural. And I think we just need to extend it, do a permanent reauthorization rather than try and say, oh, this program, this is what we're going to use to fix the infrastructure problem that we have for all of these agencies. That's not why Land and Water was created. It was to say we were going to have a balance.

We lease offshore oil revenues, and some of that should go into habitat and balancing that out and it's worked amazingly well i mean i talked about the valles caldera that uh that we've is a national preserve in new mexico that all of us used to drive on this one little highway through and look out and just salivate at what a, it's New Mexico's Yellowstone. It's this high, high elevation meadows, reverse tree line surrounded by volcanic peaks covered in timber, huge herd of elk. And none of us, 30 years ago, it was private property. You know, everybody dreamed about being able to ski in there or hunt in there or fish in there. And today we can't because of the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

And that's what it was created for. So that's what we should do with it. We should extend it in perpetuity and we should figure out what the right dollar amount is, and make that permanent as well. Do you think that that will happen? I think it will be extended. I think whether or not it gets extended in perpetuity will kind of depend on who the chairmen are in the relevant committees. I don't think it would happen to a chairman and bishop in charge, no.

He's pretty skeptical of the program absolutely yeah and you know this idea that the thing that bothers me too is this idea that people are somehow out there making a living off the land and water conservation fund that there are special interests i'm using air quotes right now for our listeners that are uh spun up using this program for their own devices. Yeah, the accusation is that they- Who are these special interests? The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation? I mean, look at the projects in your state.

I mean, these are, I don't consider Rocky Mountain Elk to be a special interest. There are these groups that do this work, which is hard, where you're interfacing with a private landowner who maybe has an inholding in some really important habitat, where you're interfacing with a private landowner who maybe has an inholding in some really important habitat, and you're able to use land and water conservation fund monies to secure an easement or fee simple acquisition of that to protect an elk herd's wintering range or their calving grounds, that's not special interest anything. That's good conservation. Yeah, yeah. Chairman, we didn't have time to get into the details of this,

but you don't even need to respond to this, but Chairman Rob Bishop had explained, or his view was that people, special interests, will buy land and then turn profits by then getting it absorbed through land and water conservation fund monies. All I can say from New Mexico's perspective is that that's not been our perspective

and that's not been our experience. And that's why we have appraisals, right? Like you have to have guardrails on any program and we do. our perspective and that's not been our experience and that's why we have appraisals right like you should you have to have guardrails on any program and we do um you know land gets appraised and you figure out what the actual value is we have this place this place called ute mountain that's in rio grande del norte national monument that used to uh be private. And it is now not only in the public hands, but it's one of the most important chunks of habitat up there and in an area that is absolutely critical

for herds of elk and mule deer that we share with Colorado. And we could have never done that project without the Land and Water Conservation Fund. And nobody made money off of it. Yeah. Do you have, you've already been very generous with your time. Do you have time for one more?

Yeah, I do. Can you talk a little bit about your perspective on the Antiquities Act, particularly with how it's related to some of the debates, the national debates you've been having about monuments? You bet. New Mexico has a long history with the Antiquities Act because we have this historical figure. I think his name is Edgar Lee Hewitt, who was sort of in the ear of Congressman Lacey, who drafted it. Lacey of the Lacey.

Exactly right. Yeah, Congressman Lacey of Iowa, as well as President Roosevelt. And he was really interested in protecting some areas in New Mexico that now you would think of as Bandelier National Monument and Chaco Canyon. And he helped draft the Antiquities Act. And I think some of the misinformation you hear is things like, oh, this was only designed to protect a postage stamp

around a particular archaeological site. Well, I think the first thing out of the gate that it was used for was Devil's Tower, which is not a postage stamp and it has huge cultural significance, but is a large geologic feature. And it has language written right into it that says scientific features can be protected with this.

TR used it to protect Roosevelt elk as an object under the Antiquities Act when he created the Mount Olympus National Monument. So there's this long history that right out of the gate by the people who created and signed this into law counters the language you hear today that is really more about catering to specific vested financial interests. And you see that in Bears Ears. You know, Congressman Bishop was very much against the two monuments in New Mexico. Well, if he'd gone and done a public hearing the way that Secretary Salazar did, he'd know that in Taos,

not a single person stood up and opposed the creation of that monument. You think about anything you could find today where you actually have unanimity of thought, that is unheard of in our political context. And yet it existed there. And to have to fight for this stuff that really grew out of the grassroots community level that was supported by mayors and city councilors and land grant heirs and hunters and fishermen and guides.

And like, it bothers me that that is under attack when we have these incredible examples of why it's so important. And personally, I used to guide up in what is today Bears Ears. I used to run an outdoor education nonprofit called Cottonwood Gulch Expeditions. And I can tell you that country, there's a reason why it's so important to the tribes. And I've represented a number of those tribes and they've been very explicit with me about that connection. But it's also a world-class resource and an amazing place to hunt. I mean, the elk herd up there today, I was up there with my family

a little over a year ago during spring break. And the deer, the turkey, the bear resource on Cedar Mesa is absolutely incredible. And so we need to realize that those things come under threat when you unprotect a big swath of this as well. I think that the argument you started out with is something that would be helpful as we engage with this and as you have to debate points of it that idea like tackling it from the originalism perspective because i think oftentimes people will take things like the land and water conservation fund they'll take things like

the antiquities act and they'll people who are generally opposed to how those things are used will generally go back to well this is what it was supposed to do. Let's debate what it was supposed to do originally and sort of pull it out of its contemporary context. Even though things change all the time and our needs change and our desires change, right? And we're always kind of trying to interpret old pieces of legislation or older ideas and interpret like, what is the meaning of it? How can we apply it to today? But it's really interesting

that you brought up those points about that you're comfortable talking about the original intent of the Antiquities Act because you don't think that it's inconsistent with how it's being used now. And our state was right at the heart of that. And we've got these amazing examples of how it's been used over time,

whether that's White Sands or Bandelier. The thing here is like the landscape scale use, but it's interesting that some of those early places were, in fact, bigger than one little antiquity. The Grand Canyon. Like that was not one little antiquity. If you've ever seen a picture of it or you've been at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, you know. I mean, that was one of the earliest uses of the Antiquities Act.

And no one probably feels comfortable debating those. No. No. I think a big question that comes up a lot is, if you can't explain it quickly, what's the main difference between when something's protected by the Antiquities Act, and let's just say if it's run by the BLM or if it's National Forest? With the Antiquities Act, typically what happens is the president writes a proclamation and you can have national monuments under any agency's designation, right? So you can have a monument that is Park Service, that is Bureau of Land Management, that is U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, that is Forest Service.

There's a way to sort of fit it to the agency. And we have Forest Service monuments. We have BLM monuments that are managed very differently than park service monuments, especially with respect to hunting and fishing. I'm sorry, Yanni, what were you saying? You were getting at it yeah but just the like the difference in how and how it's managed like from just the like a hunter or someone coming up to the resource so when we we wrote the proclamation for the president to sign for the oregon mountains desert peaks national monument in new mexico or the rio grande del norte national monument uh in new me. We wrote in to make sure

that we protected those things and you manage it in a certain way. You have a lot of control within the confines of that proclamation to say, here are the objects we are seeking to protect. And here's how we want you to now manage this. That is in contrast to full-scale multiple use where anything goes. And so you're going to have areas where the dominant land use on BLM land is producing oil and gas. There are places where the habitat values

or the cultural values or what you're seeking to protect should trump that kind of intensive development. And that's what you can write into a proclamation and keep from happening. So typically you do not have a new open pit mine or oil and gas development, a new highway, transmission lines being built on those monuments protected under the Antiquities Act. Got it. And all that sort of stuff could be a possibility under regular BLM or National Forest.

Yeah. People get the right lease. And sometimes, even under current law, you have pieces of public land which get spun off into private ownership through a planning process. So none of that can happen once a place is protected and reserved under the Antiquities Act. I think what you're getting at is an important thing I think that hunters and anglers need to realize about monuments

is not all monuments are created equal. And I think that people view them as a monument is a slippery slope to a park, to a national park where hunters and anglers aren't welcome. And it's really not the case. You really, when we're talking about monuments, you have to look at each individual place and look at what the mandate is and the intent is.

That's exactly right. Because these like BLM monuments, there's not a conversation on these about. And when you see like the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument has a bighorn sheep hunt now that did not exist when it was just BLM land. The trophy bighorns coming out of there. A buddy of mine's a guide up in Taos, a fishing guide. He got a great bull elk in the monument a couple years ago i've seen monster muleys harvested in that in that monument so because that community that sportsman's community there in taos county was in at the ground floor saying we want a monument but we want it to be

managed for wildlife and open to hunting and fishing. And got it written in. And they got it. Yeah. Do you have any, I'm going to just leave it open-ended, for you to add any kind of thoughts or anything you want to make sure people understand or whatever you want to do? Unless you feel like you've just said it all. Yeah, you know, I would just say this is,

this stuff may not get talked about on, uh, on CNN every night or pick your cable news show. Uh, but it's the stuff that makes America truly unique in the world. Um, so, you know, if you're passionate about it, find, uh, find like-minded people and make a difference for these things that we care about. Yeah, got any final thoughts? I was just thinking about access. And I hope we have to have a conversation. It might not be in our lifetimes. Maybe it will be but where we do have so many users and so many lovers of all this stuff that we might actually have to

talk about limiting it because you can love a place to death you know but yeah that would be like a good comment that'd be a good goal right is that you know so many people want to be in the mountains that we have to talk about you know drawing permits which we have a little bit across the country well there's places where you do. Smith River. Usually about three miles into a roadless area that gets a little thinner. Right. But come spend some time in New Mexico.

We don't have the crowded trails that other states have. And it's such an amazing, I mean, to be able to go out and backpack in a Gila. I did a 53 mile backpack in the Gila a few years ago. And gosh, I ran into almost no one on that handful of people. People use the term campaign trail. Do you ever campaign on the trail? That's where I decided to run for public office,

is the Gila wilderness on a backpack. Senator Martin Heinrich from New Mexico, I decided to run for public office is the Gila Wilderness on a backpack. Senator Martin Heinrich from New Mexico, thank you for joining us. Great to be here. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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