The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 667: The Prairie Preacher and a Rant By Steve

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Dwayne Estes (aka "The Prairie Preacher") of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, Brody Henderson, Randall Williams, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics discussed: How parts of Pennsylvania are the South; Steve's thoughts on recent executive orders, DOGE, and cuts to the Forest Service, National Park Service, and more; the double meaning of apophysis; how it wasn't all forest and the myth of the squirrel; the impact of bison on vast prairies and grasslands; lacking the natural predisposition to move easily; the great challenge of getting rid of invasive weeds; how our previous podcast episode on quail stirred feelings; the impact of habitat erosion on the bobwhite quail; "Make America Grassy Again"; donate to the Southern Grasslands Institute; and more. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey American history buffs, hunting history buffs, listen up, we're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition titled The Mountain Men, 1806-1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions. We explain what started the Mountain Man era and what ended it.

We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white-tailed deer skin trade, which is titled The Long Hunters, 1761-1775. So again, you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History, The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840 by Stephen Rinella. 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. The Meat Eater podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com.

All right, everybody, we're joined today by the Prairie preacher. He's in from Tennessee. I was excited about him coming on as a guest, but I'm not anymore because he was just trying to explain to me that Pennsylvania is the South. I told him parts of pencil. I told him that's not true because I because of my own maxim if you can ice fish It's not the south honestly. It's a nice sitting here. He tried to lay some bullshit ecological argument on me It didn't even try to tackle the ice fishing question. I'll lay a bullshit sociological

Reason on you. It's true man parts of southern Pennsylvania are the, man. We'll get into this in a minute. I wish we were talking about Ohio, because I have such a great Ohio story I'd want to tell. And I associate it with Pennsylvania because I had driven out of there into Ohio, and then the story happened, so it doesn't really fit. Follow me. You're always starting stories and never finishing them. But this is all on hold because there's all this stuff.

Corinne's just got a root canal. She's got she's all novocaine up. Indisposed. Say something. Does it sound slurred? I don't know. It's like in the front. I feel I feel weird. I feel like a fat. I have a fat lip in the front. Left side? Right side. You don't look fat lipped. Okay. It's all in your head. Okay. So if Chris is not as chatty as normal. If she's slurring her words a bit. If she's slurring her words and not as chatty as normal. Quick, I gotta get into some stuff. I gotta, we got like a bucket of just terror, like really people real fed up about last week's episode, which I'm going to try to address for a while in a minute here, why they're right and wrong, to be mad. But back to our, the Prairie Preacher, Duane Estes, Dr. Duane Estes, he's poor on geography, but strong on ecology.

Dwayne Essis serves as the executive director at the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, full professor of biology, director of the APSU herbarium. Where's that? What is that, Appalach? That's like a plant museum. But what is APSU? Oh yeah, Ostepe State University just outside Nashville. Okay The herbarium, principal investigator for the Center of Excellence for Field Biography, biology, sorry

January 2017 he co-founded the Southeastern Grasslands Institute with colleague Theo Witzel the Southeastern Grasslands Institute with colleague Theo Witzel. And we're going to talk about a lot of his work with grasslands. And I got a boatload of questions for you. We got to do something, but then we're going to talk about the questions and just to key you up on the questions. One of my many questions is, one I already brought up, I'm going to allow you to retort about why Brody's a southerner. No, I'm not. I'm a northerner.

Brody's like, ha, Brody's a southerner. Pennsylvania needs to be divided into several different states. Okay, why Brody's a southerner? Clay and I are all upset now. How Clay should call in, cause he's going to be like just distraught that now Brody's, that to dare call Brody aoutherner are all upset now. How Clay should call in, because he's going to be like, just distraught that now Brody's that to dare call Brody a southerner.

Yeah, I'm liking this now. I got another question about this and I want to get into this with you is like when reading about the colonial American period, so late colonial American period, mid 1700s, that these long hunters would go into present-day Kentucky, and you see similar things from southern Indiana, where they're like, can't see a tree! Like how in the hell is that true? Don't answer me now, but just noodle on that. And then when they talk about going into cane breaks that are so big, you can get lost in cane breaks. How the hell is that true? So noodle on that.

You know, how could that be true? How long does he have? He's got, I don't know, five minutes, 10 minutes. You cool? Very much. Alright. Make sure you're on that mic, Dwayne, when you're talking. Got it. Thank you.

He is, just for you to feel, didn't hear him, he is cool with that. There's, I got so many questions about this stuff. Why things are different and then like, is there any possibility of getting southeastern grasslands fixed back up again? Good question. Noodle on that. Okay, so lots of consternation about an episode we did last week where we do a State of the Union with, we did a State of the Union, sort of a State of the Conservation Union with Joel Peterson, who is the president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. And people just upset about how that conversation went and I feel

like I want to like without Joel in the room not that I would have said anything different with him in the room I want to contextualize a couple things and offer a few observations to people who really feel like the way that the way that we've discussed the incoming administration's actions around conservation issues has been inadequate but first allow me to like explain a couple things from my position. One, Joel Peterson. Joel Peterson is the president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, and for people that weren't listening carefully, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership is, they are a DC

organization that works on federal policy. All right? This is not like, they're not like grassroots protest movements. They work on federal policy, meaning engaging with lawmakers about federal policy. As I tried to explain, this administration is here for four years. This administration might likely have a round two, depending on how things go, they might have a round two where someone such as JD Vance carries the MAGA mantle into another four years. If you worked in federal policy, ask yourself this, if you worked in federal conservation policy

and you have a high likelihood, the way things look right now, I would say a high likelihood that you will need to be engaging with this administration for the next eight years. Are you telling me that it's unfair to say that you're trying to get the lay of the land, trying to look at who's coming in,

trying to look at how the decision making is going, and trying to take a somewhat slow gradual process to engaging with the administration around conservation issues? Does that really strike you as that irrational? That you're waiting a second and watching and assessing how decisions are being made, what they care about, what they don't care about, in order to engage in a potentially eight-year-long dialogue about conservation. Now, Joel Peterson laid out, when we sat down to talk with Joel Peterson, prior to Joel Peterson coming on the episode, Joel was already concerned. He's like, anything I say is going to become outdated by the time you

post the episode. And before he came on, he wanted to clarify, when is it coming out? I need to choose my words carefully about when it's coming out. I talked to Corinne. Corinne said, we'll be able to put it out the following Monday. We made a joke about how anything that happens today is already going to be obsolete by the time the episode releases on Monday. We release episodes on Monday. It's always driven me kind of crazy, but that's how we do it. There's a bunch of reasons I'll explain some other day about why we keep a certain cadence and don't just drop instantly.

Trust me, it makes 60%. It's 60% makes sense. So Joel Peterson comes on already concerned. Then between Joel Peterson's appearance on the show and the release of his episode, the Doge boys, the administration, however you want to put it, access thousands of forest service positions.

And then somehow we get a lot of emails from people, again, not listening carefully, being like, well, how could you not bring that up? That's why that didn't come up. That hadn't happened yet. In fact, this is the first time I've sat in front of a microphone since that did happen. But hold that thought for a minute and think about this

before you get, like, before you start talking about who really has the back of public lands people and who don't. Ask yourself this, like, like Trump ran on the promise of having Elon Musk form a group called Doge and that Doge was gonna go in and look for federal efficiencies and reduce the federal efficiencies

and reduce the federal workforce. He ran on this and won on this. People that are running around saying it's a coup. It's like, that's an odd coup that you win in a, that you win a landslide election campaigning on the fact that you're going to have a specific individual do a specific thing if you win. Then you win, the specific individual does a specific thing if you win. Then you win, the specific individual does a specific thing, and somehow people are mistaking what this is really all about. This isn't me saying what I think about it, but come on. Like, like, don't just start reading the news one day and not go read the news from the other days and start thinking you understand what's going on. Also ask yourself this, and I'm going to get around to what I think about this in a minute,

but ask yourself this. Do you think Elon Musk gives a shit about the environment? I mean, this guy has already set sail for Mars. He's interested in Mars, which is a lifeless planet. So if you think appealing to Doge on the fact of conservation and land access and biodiversity, he's interested in the least biodiverse place you can possibly think of, which is a place where life is inhospitable. That's where he'd like to go.

He wears a colonized Mars shirt. So you think that coming to Doge and talking about access and biodiversity, they don't care. Like they don't care. They don't care. Like they don't care. They don't care. As Trump pointed out, Don Jr. is a hunter, okay? Don Jr. has at times, like Don Jr. has at times in the past,

not sure about currently, has at times in the past supported different conservation groups, holds lifetime memberships with conservation groups. The guy likes wildlife, okay? He's not driving this. So for people to think that you might go that like, that for someone in federal policy to take on like a complaining tonality at this point right now might make Elon Musk and Doge reconsider cutting forest service jobs, it's like

get real. That is not how you're to shape any kind of action within this, within this administration. You're so naive to think that, that that's what you're going to do here. Randall, butt in at any time. I, I don't disagree with you. I mean, I think like, do you want me to butt in? Whenever you're ready. I just want you to know that you have the right to butt in. And Dwayne, Dwayne's probably sitting over there wondering what the hell we're talking about because you didn't listen to the thing we're talking about and you can comment on it too, or you can just stick to what you want. Just something I have to do.

I'm not speaking for Dwayne at all. So here's the other part about this. Other agencies, like to understand these forest service cuts, I'm going to read a letter from a forest service guy in a minute, but let's back up. Other agencies are being axed, okay? USAID is being dismantled, enrolled in under the state department. Now ask yourself this question to be honest. When you answer this, just promise me you're gonna be honest with yourself.

Did you know, did you know that USAID was not under the State Department? Like answer that in all honesty, okay? However, USAID is being dismantled to be put under the State Department. The administration ran on the idea of dismantling the Department of Education. They are closing doors, turning off email addresses, and axing the place. The Justice Department is making huge cuts.

The FBI is making huge cuts. The military is probably going to be making big cuts. They're already outlining cuts they're going to make within the military. So point being, I don't applaud any of this, these are areas that I'm not even an expert in, but I see this going on. So to see that the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management is going to make a bunch of cuts, I can't look at this, I can look at that and say that really sucks and I personally think that really sucks because they're cutting things that I care about. But I can't look at it and see that the administration is targeting land management agencies because they're dismantling non-land management agencies.

So in looking at the cuts to Forest Service and the cuts to BLM, which are our big land management agencies, look at it in the context of a broader conversation about what is happening right now look at it in the context of a broader conversation about what is happening right now, writ large across the federal government. Meaning, if you're gonna understand these cuts and talk about these cuts, look at them in the context. This is not meant to be, at this point in time, this is not meant to be an assault on the Forest Service,

it's meant to be an assault on the federal workforce of which the Forest Service is part. If I had somehow like Fiat power as some kind of dictator to come in and say like, what ones are okay and what ones are not okay, believe me, I would probably wind up saying, I don't get USAID. A lot of it seems kind of ridiculous. Go ahead, Forest Service, don't touch it.

In fact, take USAID's money and give it to the Forest Service. That would be my perspective, but that's not the position I'm in. And I don't really know that pointing out aspects that people are pointing out is going to reverse the situation. A lot of other people wrote in about this national debt question, like me having the audacity to talk about the impacts of the national debt. Now, this is a kind of a little bit of situation where you can choose to play chess or you can choose to play checkers around spending. The national debt,

like I'm gonna keep this within a conversation of natural resources management, just to give you some perspective. Every year, this country, we spend $800 billion to pay interest, to pay our interest on the national debt. Take a stab at what the BLM's annual budget is, which I bet you, like I'm guessing most people don't know. I had to look it up. Take a guess, Randall. Oh.

The national interest on the national debt is 800 billion. The BLM, let's say 30 million. Way low. 100 billion. 100 million. Billion. Way low, way low. 100 billion is low?

Oh no, way high. Okay. We're getting somewhere now. 500 million. million billion way low way low hundred billion is low oh no way okay we're getting somewhere now 500 million well you know it's a problem you creating for me right now is you know like if you saying like like this block was huge guess how big he was and then you guess bigger 200 we've run an eye problem I mean countless times over the last six years. Then I got to go, well, no, it was 180. And then it sounds like, but let's back up. 800 billion in interest.

And then the BLM. This is not paying down the debt. Servicing the debt is $800 billion. The BLM's annual budget is $.7 billion dollars. So in any conversation about the long-term, like way long-term health of natural resources in this country and where we're spending our money, I'm just saying, I'm saying and I'm asking you to consider this, if we didn't have to factor in in our budget, in our federal budget, if we weren't factoring in $800 billion

in interest payments that don't pay down the debt, I have to think, I have to think that there would be more room than 1.7 billion for the BLM. I can't sit here and guarantee you that that's where it would go, but I think that the health of the country, and by meaning the health of the country, the parts I like about this country, the natural resources, the public lands, the wildlife, those things are going to continue to sacrifice if we have to continue to

do this. So if I bring up, like even friends of mine get mad if I bring up the idea of the national debt, meaning like, or you would sell our prime, our main global, our national treasures in order to pay down the debt. I never said that, ever. I'm pointing out that if you're going to, like a lot of times we keep conservation conversations like very- In a bubble. Yeah.

That's a great way to put it. I have over the years and talking about conservation, I have oftentimes looked at it in a bubble. Certain things in a bubble. And these, in this conversation, as the administration goes along, we will wind up, I promise you, we will wind up with plenty of bubbles. So when I sat there and said, waiting for the, people are like, oh, I can't believe

you would say you're going to wait for the dust to settle or whatever the hell I said. Let me rephrase what I said, because you're right, I would be disappointed to hear someone say that too. What I'm waiting for is parts of hard to bubble it because I can't take like the four service cuts. Those can't be bubbleized because they're rolled into like a wholesale reorganization of all of these federal agencies. So you're not going to be able to call your politician right now. Like I'm telling you, like it doesn't work. You're not going to call your politician right now and say, hey, hey, I understand like the thousands, the tens of thousands of federal employees

are getting cut across all of these administrations or organizations. That's all fine. What I would like you to do is put the Forest Service people back. Yeah, you can't. It ain't going to happen. Like what's like top of mind and most concerning for us is not,

it doesn't translate to the entirety of the federal government or like the people who voted for the people who are running the federal government, right? Like they're not necessarily their top concern is not conservation and land access and things like that. Yeah, because they're not looking at because they're not looking at any bubbles. Yep. They're not looking at, at this point, no one is talking about any particulars. It will come, like starting already,

it'll start to take some clarity, but like right now there's a little bit of like waiting to see what happened. And with the forest service cuts, like, yeah, I think it's, I think it's like catastrophic. I'm going to read a letter where someone puts it really well. But I'm inviting people to stop and like expand outside of the way that we've historically framed conservation questions and try to get a look at like where the national mood is at right now with people in power. There is this thing called the national debt

and know what, like the debt's not going anywhere, but they're gonna make a budget. And within this budget, they're gonna try to find a way of how do you find the money to facilitate the interest payments on the debt and how do you fund some tax cuts, which they ran on, okay, and still balance the budget in some way or another. All of these questions about what we're gonna do

on real specific conservation issues outside of, like how we're gonna fight to keep mining interests out of the headwaters of the boundary waters, okay? Or sorry, on the borders of the boundary waters. How are you gonna work on that? What are you gonna do about Ambler Road? What are you gonna do about Anwar? What are you gonna do about Pebble Mine?

Like all of these things are gonna get specific with specific players doing specific things. And like these little battles are gonna play out nonstop for a bunch of years. But right now, on the employee thing, it's part of such a broader conversation that it gets really hard to explain how to be tactful at this moment.

It's dizzying, it's dizzying. I try to follow politics very closely. It's dizzying right now. And it's intentionally dizzying. That's a point people keep bringing up. It's meant to be, it almost appears without any kind of broader goal in mind. Yeah, and I think that's,

I mean, I don't know that people who want to shrink the federal government want to shrink it in the way that it's being done, right? Correct. I think lost in all this is that these are just completely arbitrary decisions and that they've had to, you know, I saw the other day that they'd cut security people at nuclear facilities and then they realized they didn't have any more and so they're trying to get in touch with those people

to bring them back. And the same for bird flu. I saw just the other day the USDA cut all the people working on the bird flu outbreak that's driving up the price of eggs and now they need to figure out how to get in touch with those people to bring them back. So I think regardless of like where you stand I think like we can acknowledge that this is a very arbitrary and destructive way of doing it. It is. Yeah. It is. It's emerging that, and it's like,

and parts of this are hitting at things I care about deeply, but I'm not succumbing to the temptation to look at it as being an assault on the things I care about deeply, rather than an assault on like, like a kind of ham handed assault on the idea of the federal role in American lives. When I'm scrolling through the news and it's cuts here, cuts there, cuts there, cuts in the forest service or wherever, I've had to force myself not to like,

focus just on that one thing, right? Because it's kind of unfair. It's like unfair to think about it. Yeah, it's thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And any person, I have a neighbor who's a school teacher. He's like, he could go on for a long time about what the Department of Education dismantling means for him. Meanwhile, I look at the Department of Education thing and I'm like, man, as long as it don't mess with the Forest Service, the BLM, I'm cool. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like, it's a very hard, like, for the conservation space right now,

for the conservation movement right now, for the environmental movement right now, it's like a, this is going to require a radical reorientation of how we talk about things. They're using a playbook on the federal workforce that was used on Twitter. Like breaking Twitter. Move fast and break things.

Yeah, breaking Twitter is like, okay, I mean, it's already broken. And mean, it's already broken. And they, it's already broken. It'll always be broken. But they, they did break it. It became a wildly less, wildly less effective company and lost a bunch of advertising and kind of took a dump. Yes.

So I'm saying, like breaking the government, taking the same approach to break the government. Like, I hope it goes better than it did when he broke Twitter. Yeah. Hey, American history buffs, hunting history buffs, listen up. We're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition titled The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellas like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary

fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions. We explain what started the mountain man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly.

It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white-tailed deer skin trade which is titled The Long Hunters, 1761-1775. So again, you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History, The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840 by Stephen Rinella. To return to my main point, to somehow pin it on a person, to somehow suggest that an individual that works in federal policy and is needing to figure out who am I talking to, federal policy and is needing to figure out who am I talking to? What are we talking about?

Where are some areas we can succeed in the next four years or eight years, rather than saying, you know what? I don't like the way this is looking. I'm going home. They have to work with who they have to work with, right? They don't have a choice. Yes. They've got to do what they can do. Imagine if he says, you know what?

Okay, I'm not going to talk to anybody about federal conservation policy for the next four years. That'll stick them. That'll show them. And I think too, there's like a, when you think about how a group like TRCP works, there are other groups out there that are going to be throwing bombs at the administration. there are other groups out there that are going to be throwing bombs

at the administration. There are other groups out there that are going to be like rallying the troops and taking shots, right? But like, if you're in DC and you're serious about trying to make change or trying to protect what we like, you know, you got to go to work every day. There's different groups with different roles. And you're not gonna... The biggest advantage that you can have in DC is that someone takes your calls, or that someone has a meeting with you. Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, but TRCP has like a very good working relationship with politicians on both sides of the aisle, right? Like right? That's their program. Yeah. Yeah, that is what that is what they are. Yeah

Yeah, that's how they get shit done. Yeah, and and and I mean that's that's how the how that's how it works You know whether you like it or not like it's I mean, I Think it's incredible that we have a group like that who's using the power, you know, like they're using the system in place because that's where the rubber hits the road in DC. And it's, it's as somebody going to take your, so you can't, you have to be the adult in the room sometimes and, and not throw bombs and not name call. So yeah, and I, like, I've even, like as a board member at TRCP, you know, I have, you know, I don't know,

like I have a voice in the room. And the part about having a board is you try to assemble a board with a bunch of disparate voices. So sure, I have, you know, I have perspective on things where I talk to someone privately about what I think. When Utah was trying to figure out a way to declare that public lands were effectively unconstitutional, I'm on the phone with TRCP, knowing that other people are on the phone

with TRCP and I'm giving my take on it. Then they're in the role of taking these different takes, shaping them, asking who they can speak with, and then making some progress. But if you're just going to throw Molotov cocktails in for them, I'm not talking about me, for them, if they're going to throw Molotov cocktails and then one day call up and be like, but seriously, the farm bill. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, how are we going to keep the CRP programs alive? Like that still has to happen. Oh yeah. And, and you need a seat at the table. You're like, and it's very easy to lose your

seat at the table if you, if you come out and start throwing punches. Yeah. If you want to be like, ask yourself, someone else said, oh, pretty rich that Steve said get involved in the conservation movement after saying blah, blah, blah, whatever he said. To everyone else, I'll say this, if you want to get involved in the conservation movement and you want to do it in a way where you have a voice,

you have a voice in a seat at the highest level of table, right? The top table, you want a voice there, get on board with an organization like TRCP. That doesn't mean that people going out and protesting at their state capitol isn't effective. It's a way to show force. If that's where you're at, TRCP is not your group. If you like, if you are willing to be like patient and somewhat intellectual and strategic and play in Washington, DC, that's different. It's just different. And there's room for both and you can support both at the same time, right? Like, I mean, there's certainly it's effective to go and let your elected officials know where you stand and and strongly worded calls to your elected officials do work but that that there's also another model that's having like high stakes meetings with

people who have the power and you're not going to get very far with them by calling them up and leaving a strongly worded voicemail. I'm gonna try to give a little bit to explain myself a little bit with a parallel thing that occurred to me one time. Like picture that you picture you're a kid growing up in America and movies come out and you just in the movies come out and you become aware of movies you see movies and then there's books that are in the bookstore there's books in the library and they just are there because they're there and the movies that get made get made because they get made

that's how i grew up i don't know just like movies came out and you went saw me never gave any thought to what happened right then as my career went along and i got into my 30s and i started going and having meetings with people that make TV shows and people that make books and people that make movies and I understood like why they do what they do how they do what they do how it's financed how the whole bigger project works all of a sudden you go all of a sudden it's like you know I never use like the whole like stupid red pill thing you get red-pilled you're like like, oh shit, that's how all this works?

Do you know what I mean? And then you're like, oh, I get it now. That's why the books that are out are out, and that's why this, that's how this whole thing functions. And all of a sudden, you understand the world in a different way. I, over time, being someone involved in wildlife conservation, have had, I've like undergone a sort of evolution. What's the opposite of evolution? Do you know a word opposite of evolution? What is it? It's a de-evolution. Okay, some might say, oh, he went through a de-evolution. I don't know. To me it feels like it evolved. Yeah, I devolved No, no, cuz I don't want to seem my I my picture of how things have regression Okay, thanks doc

Point I'm trying to take a little while point. I'm trying to make here just a coffee my understanding of how things happen and why the world looks like it does in wildlife conservation has changed as much as my understanding of why, what shows get made and what books come out in print. It's like, it's changed, with education, it has changed. I have come to see more of the value of like backroom, high-level conversations. There are other people who've come away

with a very different opinion. If you really want to get into this, you could go read about what happened with, why did the 60s fizzle? You could dig into Joan Didion, you can start watching things about the efficacy and evolution of Vietnam protesters. I don't know, there's different ways to engage in policy discussions.

The civil rights movement was disruptive and very effective. Other movements have been disruptive and they faltered and haven't worked. What else? Oh, my Forest Service Letter. I personally, personally, I'm going to say a couple more personal things here. I've always had a thing where I have a, I've tried to keep a brand promise where we stay out of issues that aren't directly relevant to hunters and anglers. So at times, this is where I'm in a little bit of a bind, at times I have expressed appreciation for some things, half, some number of things that the current administration ran on and is doing, I have expressed appreciation for it because it's just true. It's just true. I appreciate a bunch of the things. I

would have to violate my pact with the audience to start talking about the things I appreciate. There's a thing called an apophysis. Randall knows what it is. I do. An apophysis is when you bring something up by saying you're not gonna bring it up. So my example would be you're fighting with your wife, your wife says, well I'm not even gonna bring up what you did on Friday. That's an apophysis. She's bringing it up, but not bringing it up. So I'm going to do an apophysis when I'm talking about this administration. I'm not going to bring up that I think that the country should have borders. Okay? I'm not going to bring that up. I'm not going to bring up that I don't think people should have their livelihoods and careers destroyed because they fail to get on

board with whatever new sloganism emerges in a given day. Like, I'm not going to bring that up. should have their livelihoods and careers destroyed because they fail to get on board with whatever new sloganism emerges in a given day. Like, I'm not going to bring that up, okay? I'm not going to bring up things I think about with human biology and distinctions between males and females. Not going to bring it up. But when I've talked about things the administration has done, I'm talking about some things I'm not going to bring up that I think are pretty good. Do I then think that what they're threatening to do, what it seems like they're going to do to American wildlife and American wild places and public lands, do I think that that's acceptable? No, I don't. But I can hold two things in my hands at the same

time. That like, there's things I like about the administration, there also seems to be like some things that are going to be doing and are doing that are going to be catastrophic for public lands and wildlife. And it's part of my personal thing to sort out these two issues and find out where I'm going to land on it. But I can't sit here and tell you that every single thing Donald Trump does pisses me off, because that's not true. Like it doesn't. Some of this stuff is absolutely going to, but I'm not going to look at it like that. I'm going to look at it like I'm going to find the areas and weigh in on the areas that I think they're screwing up. And it's starting to look like there's gonna be quite a pile of them.

Anything else? No, where do I begin? The letter. Put my spectacles on. My name is blank and I am a Forest Service meal packer. As I write to you, February 14th, I am still an employee of the US Forest Service. Today I lost many coworkers that I call friends

to the new administration's recent cutbacks on federal employees. For valid and invalid reasons, the new administration has decided to pick on the US Forest Service. I'm gonna step in and editorialize here. I'm outside of the letter for a minute. People don't want to hear this but I don't think the word choice is right. I don't think they've decided to pick on. They're picking on a lot of people. If I went into a class, if I was a bully and went into a class

and beat up all the kids in the class, they wouldn't say, he was picking on Bobby. Right? Is that a good enough? Yeah. Yeah. Throughout my career, I'm back to the letter. Throughout my career in the recreation and range departments, I have witnessed decrease in budgets every year,

forcing us to do more with less. Last year, all seasonal non-fire field workers were fired. That was last year, under Biden. They left us field going permanent employees feeling overwhelmed to say the least for the upcoming field season. But today the new administration fired over 30 employees on the Beaverhead Deer Lodge National Forest. All but one of the wilderness rangers were let go on the Crassel Ranger District of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, and all the trail crews of the Spotted Bear Ranger District in the Bob Marshall Wilderness were let go. The Wisdom Ranger District no longer has any trail crew

to maintain the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness either. A dear friend was days away from graduating from probationary status. He was fired from the NRCS in Alaska, along with her entire tribal relations team. Out of all the wasteful spending in government for this administration to pick on the hardest-working, lowest-paid, and most dedicated workers makes me ill. This may be an honest, uneducated attempt to cut wasteful spending in government.

Now this is like why this particular letter resonated with me Because of this line this may be an honest uneducated attempt to cut wasteful spending in government He says in my offseason. I work for different outfitters guiding elk hunts in multiple states We rely on these trail systems do our job and earn a modest living doing what we love These layoffs are taking away access to our public lands. Over 120 years of blood and sweat by the American working class maintaining these trail systems will be lost. Those that make a living in these areas will suffer, but most importantly the American people will lose their access to the last place they can escape the modernities we call progress in this world."

And he ends with a plea, use your voice to let the American public know what these government cutbacks are costing us. A lot. All across the board. Yeah, I mean, I think like, just on the subject of people who are working in these jobs, like beyond the end, and there's lots of people wondering how they're gonna pay their mortgage this month

or how they're gonna pay their rent. And beyond that like immediate individual tragedy, there's a larger, I think, tragedy. And there's probably some talented young kids right now in college who are studying. They're trying to figure out what they're going to study and what career they're going to pursue. And if I was graduating from college right now,

I probably wouldn't be thinking about trying to go work for the Forest Service, you know, or try and try to go work for the National Park Service. And those jobs require a ton of sacrifice, year after year after year, to get your foot in the door, and then the pay is not great. And then you're probably transferring around to, you know, if you're in the Park service bouncing from park to park or wherever you are, like, I think we're going to see generational consequences from the past few weeks just on the types of people we can attract to those jobs. And that for me, I think is like a pretty profound, like even if they hired all these people back next week, like there's a chink in the armor that is hard to polish out at this point,

and it's just like, yeah I don't know. I mean when I was finishing college, I tried really hard to get my foot in the door at a public land management agency and couldn't do it. You had to settle for me either. I did, you know, and I'm lucky that things went the way they did. But yeah, it's just like these people love the resource, and I never go out on our public lands and think, I wish there were fewer... I wish there were fewer guys working on roads. You know, I wish there were fewer interpretive rangers telling people what's great about this landscape or telling people about these animals we're looking at. Like, I just, yeah, that, obviously I'm having a hard time like putting my finger on it, but it's really hard to not sort of have your

thoughts spiral when you think about the compounding consequences of this stuff that's being done by 20 year old kids that don't know anything about the government. And the impact, like the real world impact to hunters and anglers and all kinds of outdoor recreation people, like it's gonna take a while to see what actually happens, you know, with like trail access and boat ramps and like,

who knows? Like, we don't know necessarily what we're going to be facing when the fall rolls around for hunting season. No, you don't. And to return to my analogy about the bully coming in and beating up everybody in the class, like the, like, like it's kind of not a great analogy, but I'm not trying to equate it. Same thing. But you might look and be like, well, yeah, I mean, a lot of those kids had it coming, but little Billy, why is the nicest kid in the world?

And so, yeah, like, I don't think you're going to find, like, you're not going to look at the forest service and the Rocky mountain West and, and, and Doge and Musk aren't going to be like, and look at all the embarrassing, look at all the embarrassing crazy expenditures they were making. It's not going to happen. Yeah. But here's where, here's where a thing I do predict happening as this goes on. And again, this is all new news, but I can picture this. Do you remember when, Dwayne, I'm sorry. We're almost done.

You could cause that bad moment. Do you want to come back? Do you remember when Trump floated the idea, and I talked about this the other day, like I was, the other day I was explaining, if I get really mad at my kids about iPads and phones I'll say something like I'm about ready to take all those iPads out and run them over with my truck I've used that one. Yep. Now they know I'm not going to run the iPads over the truck But they also know he's going to do something

He's fed up I was saying how I was just joking around saying how when Trump said I got half of mine to empty out Gaza and make a big resort, he was kind of saying I'm going to put all the iPads in the driveway and run them over my truck. Meaning people are like, he's not gonna do that, but he's pissed. He's going to do something. Well, who's the guy? Who's the libertarian from Kentucky? Oh, Paul. Rand Paul. Rand Paul. Right away. He, now that Twitter's not Twitter, it's called X.

When you tweet, what are you doing? Xing? He asked. They still say tweeting. Okay, it's just a horrible business decision. Yeah. He tweets. Good thing he's running the government. Rand Paul tweets, I thought we voted for America first. Right. Yeah. Now, just to capture that sentiment, here's the thing that I do picture happening much of this conversation about the right and the left in this country has been framed over the previous years as a, as a rural people, interior people battling for the soul of the country against the coastal elites. Remember this?

Mm hmm. Okay. As Doge, if they do take a wrecking ball to the interests of rural people, to the people that were supporting Trump. He won overwhelmingly in this state. When you run for office in this state, you have to, I'm talking about Montana. If you're running for office in Montana, I don't care what you're doing. You have to pay lip service, at least to being pro public lands. You have to say public lands in public hands. You have to do it, or else you can't win. You have to do it. Just like you can't say at the federal level, I'm gonna cut Social Security, you lose. If here you say, I want to sell off public lands, you lose. Now, so that's true of Montana. Montana,

Trump the first time won Montana by 14 points. Right? They don't even need to campaign here. He's going to win. But what happens when, what happens when you start seeing an erosion of these things that the people in this state care a lot about, which is their public lands and public land access, you risk alienating your own support network. You risk the pendulum swinging the other way. Yeah, and people in a couple years when the midterms come up. And just like Rand Paul, was it Rand Paul? Yeah, said, I thought we were voting for America first.

Someone might say, I thought I was voting for guys like me. This isn't serving my interest. No, excuse yourself Randall. I thought I was voting for guys like me. This isn't serving my interest. No, excuse yourself, Randall. I'm really sorry. I'm keeping that in. That was incredible. I was wondering where you can't tell where it's coming from. Excuse me. That was only supposed to be fine. My mind was elsewhere at the moment. Is everyone good? Can I start interviewing Dwayne about what's up? Yes, let's. We should reintroduce him

because everyone probably forgot who he is by now. It's terrible. Joining us today, Dr. Dwayne Estes, who I have heard about from a ton of people and has been and Crim was very eager to have him on the Prairie Preacher, co-founder and executive director of Southeastern Grasslands Institute. I first have to say that everything I just said is me talking, not Dwayne talking, but I would

like to invite if Dwayne, if you have any comments about anything about what what we just said, because you're sort of now like, like you're sort of affiliated with the conversation, you could either sit it out or you could give your some of your thoughts. You'd say whatever the hell you want. I don't care. Yeah, yeah, let's talk about it. Well, number one, there's a double meaning to apophysis. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's the broad portion of a pine cone scale. What? Just FYI from a little bit botanical. Can I have one more time? Yeah, like you had a pine cone, right? You got the little, the prickle there. It's that broad triangular face that you see. That's the apophysis. You're shitting me. That's wild. Yeah. I love that.

Thanks for joining today. Yeah, yeah. dropped a little botanical dollar January. On next week's show? No, I find it fascinating man, because we're all in this limbo right now. And as a founder and executive director of a conservation organization, we're like everybody else. I talked to a good friend of mine who was a former senator, and he reminded me, he said, you know, this, I hear you. He says, it's not about you. There's worldwide ramifications of what's happening. And I think that helped to frame it in a context that made me kind of just sit back and try to chill and get through it and just say, you know, it's going to take a little while for us to kind of figure out what the road ahead looks like.

You know, we're trying to go through planning right now and to think about what are our options, you know, it could be that we get by unscathed, it could be that our organization fails in four weeks because of what we're currently faced with. So yeah, it's scary, man. People's livelihoods are at stake. Good people, good hardworking people doing habitat restoration work, planting seeds, planting prairies, doing prescribed fire, people with babies and kids and elderly parents, farmers that we work with, seed producers, they're all uncertain

right now and they're, you know, a little bit scared about what's coming. So to me, I found the conversation to be very fascinating. I just was enjoying it. Really? I wouldn't call it a conversation. It was more like a... Monologue, but it's okay. Monologue verging on rant, but that's okay. Yeah, I wasn't a rant I know cuz a rant you're pushing a thing I was pushing a question mark your face wasn't red and there wasn't like a blood vessel sticking out of your forehead Thank you, yeah

Let's let's set stage for grasslands. Yeah. No, no, can we tackle this first? No, explain how Brody's a sovereign again? Okay So Brody and anybody in southern Ohio, southern Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey? Imagine that. You're in the south, man. Yeah, you're in the south. I'll draw you the south. I'm gonna tell that to you. Imagine that. You're in the south, man. Yeah, you're in the south. I'll draw you the south. I'm gonna tell you. I'm familiar with two ways of drawing this line. I'm familiar with the Mason-Dixon line. Yeah. And I'm familiar with my thing about where it's a line of where you ice fish or not. Yeah, and the Mason-Dixon line ain't got nothing to do with what I'm about to show you. So I do like geography. I do like geography, by the way, by the way. You gotta put the Chesapeake Bay in there.

You gotta put the New Jersey in. There's your Long Island right there. That's the northern extent of the south right there. Long Island? Yeah, no shit man, Long Island. Absolutely. They need to change how they talk. That is hilarious to have all this so much.

No, seriously man, we could even make a case for southern Nova Scotia and Cape Cod. I'm telling you. All right, so then what we do is we draw that line coming across the Southern two-thirds of Pennsylvania. Okay. Is that catch brody or not? Nope.

No, no. So he is a Yankee. Yeah, here he's out. You're in those glaciated plains. Is Seth a Yankee? Yes. Okay. Very close.

All right. Now what you're going to do is bring it down. He's an infiltrator. Yeah. You're going to pull in the edge of Appalachia country of Ohio. down. He's an infiltrator. Yeah. You're gonna pull in the edge of Appalachia, country of Ohio. You do bring in Cincinnati, yeah. Southern third of Indiana, southern Illinois, cut right across south of the Columbia River.

This is a hell of a US map. Steve, this needs to be a shirt. The south. Yeah. So you're drawing a map of basically what wasn't covered by ice sheets. Down through the middle of Texas. You wanna hold that up for the camera when you come, Dwayne?

I can't believe you just did that without having a reference. Man, I've been studying maps since I was wearing a diaper, bro. Yeah. That's the South right there. The SGI focal region. I'm still Yankee. 24 states. It all gets down to biogeography, Steve.

So you're a Johnny Reb now there, random? Yep. Just south of the hills there. Look away Dixieland. Explain that to me. What's going on within that map? Yeah, so pretty much when you look at this region, again, this is not the cultural south, right? No, I'm following.

That kind of stuff. We're talking ecology. Yeah, if you're talking about plants and animals, you know, there is a high level of endemism here. So lots of species that occur within this region that don't occur anywhere else on Earth. Okay. And so there's lots of these clusters of endemic species, and they all are really clustered, like in the southern Appalachians or in the, we call the interior plateau or parts of Florida, East Texas. And many of those species are really narrowly distributed, you know, but then you also have wide ranging species. That's the ones we look at, like look at post oak trees, for example. Post oaks grow all the way out to the cross timbers of Texas, they grow up into southern Illinois, they go all the way up to Long Island or so, they don't

go any farther north. So what you have then is this perpetual pattern of species that reach the northern range limits and their western range limits because of climatic barriers. So here you get into boreal northeast, you get into the true, you know, the tall grass prairie of the Midwest and the Great Plains, and then the arid basically Chihuahua Desert margin right here in South Texas. So that means then everything in this region is kind of temperate. It's got seasonality, with the exception of South Florida, which is subtropical. It's mostly, you know, people think of it as a deciduous forest region. That drives

me bonkers. You don't like that term. No, I don't. Actually, it's a huge mis and it's, it's not based in science or history. Can you tell what it means and why you don't like it? Yeah, because what it does is it extrapolates, you know, all parts of the East as, as being, you know, people think, well, it all used to be forest, right? There's this, what we call the myth of the squirrel. That, uh, I was raised myth of the squirrel. That- Can I tell you the squirrel myth? Yeah, tell me.

I was raised on this. Good, okay, what tells us about it? That a squirrel could go from blank to blank and never touch the ground. A squirrel could go from Kentucky to Michigan, from Florida to New Jersey, whatever, and never touch the ground. Yeah, I heard it as my sixth grade teacher,

Tommy Johns, who also paddled me 13 times for talking too much. Did he invent the surgery? He told me, no, I don't know. Tommy Johns surgery. No, this is probably smarter than his teacher. I call it, I call it Tommy Johns and the fabled squirrel. You know, we still got woofed when I was a kid.

Yeah. Uh, I'm 46. Yeah. I got, I got 13 of them in 1990. Yeah, Mr. Brickin. Yeah, man. He called me down and whipped me one time. But he told me he said, look, a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground. That's what I heard. That's it. I was screwing the whole thing up. That's what my dad would like to tell me. Yeah. And you know, it really...

You're not buying it. No, I don't buy it at all. And it has its origins. The origin is kind of complex. I wrote to the pretty well-known author Stephen J. Pined and said, you know, do you know where that originated? And we both have been sort of scratching our heads over. The true origins of that myth are a little bit hard to put to nail down. But what's easily provable is that it's not true. All you gotta do is go back into the annals of American history, the days of Boone and

his contemporaries, or you can look at multiple lines of scientific evidence at many different places across that and say, oh, there were vast prairies there. There were cane breaks there, there non forested ecosystems. Mm-hmm So for us to take this this mantra that it was all forested has had a deleterious effect For biodiversity and conservation think about it We've invested billions of dollars in the eastern United States into forests when we go by land for protection We create public new state parks or new national parks It's all the mountainous forested or big swampy bottomlands that get all the attention. Nobody thinks about the open spaces. When you do prioritization

for you know conservation action, all the places that get the conservation focus, and I'm talking about terrestrial ecosystems not streams and rivers at this point But you know it's it's big river flood plains. It's big swampy intact forest. It's big mountain systems that are still forested Nobody gives a shit about pasture lands and crop fields, but those are the areas that used to be grassland and And they know they no longer are in most places is Is it safe to say that those went first because you could grow a crop of corn on them without needing to girdle all the trees and so everything got gobbled up?

Yeah, absolutely. And we're beginning to sort of lay a fact trail of evidentiary information that proves that exact point. You got people in the 1870s who are writing back about conditions in say the 1840s in Tennessee. They'll say the earliest waves of settlers, for example, who went from Middle Tennessee into West Tennessee, when that land was purchased by Andrew Jackson from the Chickasaw Nation, they settled in the already open lands first because, quote, it opened, you

know, a crop of corn and cotton very quickly. And so you can look again and again in places throughout the East. And what we have begun to advance is what we call this push-pull hypothesis. You know, it's the same thing that was driving Boone to, Daniel Boone, to want to kind of move around. And he didn't like the pressure of a neighbor being 10 miles away from him, right? So this, he was being sort of pushed

by this ever-increasing population density factor. What we like to say, though, is look at the pool. Sure. Right? Why was Boone being attracted to the Kentucky bluegrass What we like to say though is look at the pool. Sure. Right? Why was Boone being attracted to the Kentucky bluegrass or the Nashville Basin, the Cumberland River Valley? He certainly wasn't going to hunt in a big, vast, extensive forest. He was going to hunt the meadowlands, the cane break margins, the savannas.

That's what people were attracted by, like these early land surveyors and land speculators. They wanted good land that was going to open up settlement opportunities for incoming westward migrating settlers and colonists. So that's what was pulling America's migration patterns in the 1600s and 1700s. It was the availability of open space. That story has never been told in American history, but we're telling it. Speaking of history, you know the, I don't know if you know Randall's specialty? Tell me about it Randall. Well he doesn't know either. Yeah I was waiting to hear you. Randall has been formally

trained to, your thing about where did that squirrel thing come from he's been formally trained to find that kind of stuff he's a PhD in history dude that's what we need man we need that we need to figure it out there's his first time ever he's busy right now we need more PhDs but if you put Randall on that he'd probably come in after a couple of weeks. He'd come tell you where that first appeared. Okay. Well, I don't know about that. I mean, that stuff's so hard to pin down, but yeah, like, nevermind. Well, it's a great compliment. I really, I feel like I'm sitting up straighter in my chair now, but yeah, I think you're probably

doing the Stephen Pine as well, doing the as much as can be done on that. What I wish I had, I wish I had compiled more specific examples, but places, Randall, this will jog your memory. Places where I don't, I don't necessarily from Boone's descriptions, but places where guys around 1770, whatever, are describing, could be north of the Ohio in some places, mostly south the Ohio River, are saying that like, not a tree in sight. Yeah, I mean, where in the world is that happening? I thought that was, when you're reading all those accounts, I mean they're describing savannas and the barrens. The barrens is this region that they talk about all the time. And in my mind, having grown up in Ohio and driven

interstates, you know, up and down to the, you know, to the south and, and throughout sort of Tennessee, Kentucky, all this. I picture every, it's trees on the hills and farms in the bottom. And you read these descriptions from that time period of all this open country. And for me, it was just like, I didn't have a visual reference in my imagination for what that looks like. I kind of think about the land is, I told a friend this recently and she kind of looked at me like she didn't believe me. I said, imagine if you were to go into like the I-81

corridor, which takes you from Pennsylvania down, you know, into Tennessee, the great valley as it's called. You know, it's the bottom of the valley is relatively open today. I think the vast majority of Americans would look at that valley and say, oh, at some point in our past, it's been cleared. You know, it's been deforested. Yeah, I would think it was open anthropogenically.

Yeah, exactly. You know, and I would maintain that many sections of eastern United States are relatively about the same in terms of the approximate closure of the landscape versus openness as it was to pre-settlement times. So that those open cattle pastures you see down in there in western Virginia today, or corn fields or valley bottom hay meadows, those were probably mostly always open. Sure, there are blocks that were deforested, yes, but the relative balance of land open to close I think is relatively the same. It's just what happened to the land. The forest went through, the mountainsides, some of them were cleared and logged and grew back

up into secondary and tertiary forests. Those valley lands though, those were part of that pull factor, that attractant for people moving out of Chesapeake Bay and stuff and Tidewater, Virginia. And when they moved into that, they moved and stayed forever. They converted those meadow lands and those savannas into the first cornfields and crop lands and plantations. And when those got exhausted, then sometimes they let them go back and go fallow into pasture lands, or they went into pasture lands from the beginning. And many of our grasslands too, especially the savanna types, they've always had trees. And that's one of the big hallmarks of what we call southern grasslands, is not all of them had trees. And that's one of the big hallmarks of what we call southern grasslands is not all of them had trees. There are certainly many examples that were

essentially treeless that we can point to and we can talk about where they were and why. But 80% at least of southern grasslands had somewhere between probably 10 and 50% tree cover. And so many of our friends say well hell why don't you just call out a forest and be done with it? Well, you could. You could call it an open forest. You can call it a woodland. We don't really give a shit what you call it. The fact of the matter is we need to understand what its structure needs to be, right? What does it need to be to be healthy and flourishing for both native plants and native wildlife, it needs to be

something other than what it is today. We have deviated from the natural condition so profoundly that people in the East are just unaware of that deviation. Go ahead. Well, this is a non-sequitur. I don't even know what that means. It's not going to follow what you just said. I wasn't sure what we were walking into today, and I love profanity, but you've said the word shit a few times, which is not something that I expected from the prairie

preacher. Now I'm understanding sort of the- Well, I heard it from you guys first. The gospel? Oh, please. I mean, I thought he was a preacher from the prairie. Yeah, I was, no, I mean, I read the, I was like, I wonder sort of where the preacher comes from. And now I'm getting, you know, you've got your own Gospel here of what the East used to look like. But yeah, I don't know. That's just my thought. I don't really have a question. Thank you, Randall. Back to you.

Yeah. really have a question. Thank you. Back to you. How much of your work is about where do you split your work and your worldview from trying to capture what things look like? I'll add a little bit on that because Randall and I have experienced this as well, is in some of our research about market hunting that we've been doing lately, where we're sort of taking the first far west, meaning Appalachia, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Ohio River and looking at the source material that explains what that looked like, who was there, what it looked like, what are the first experiences that Euro Americans had there, the source material for that versus the source material for

the Rocky Mountains. The source material for the Rocky Mountains is just relatively vast. I mean you can't in lifetime, you can't get through all the firsthand accounts of what a quote unquote untouched West looked like. Like the, what it looked like in the Native America state. You can't read it all. If you're trying to find accounts of what this, what we're talking about, looked like an untouched state, there's like a paucity of material. The people that were talking and describing

weren't describing that. So, like, how much of your focus is understanding what that was, because it's so mysterious, what it looked like, how it functioned, what it did, that was, because it's so mysterious what it looked like, how it functioned, what it did, and how much of your work is about, well, what do we do now? Like knowing that, what do we do now? Yeah, yeah. I would say we're equally split. It took us, you know, for our first eight years, we've been around since 2017, you know, we really kind of grew first out of this desire to know what it was and document and substantiate how we know what it was, right?

Getting back to that original source material. Educate the public and the masses to the extent we could about, you know, what it looked like, giving someone a visual reference for, you reference for ecosystems that are nearly extinct. So we really were heavily research-based and sort of into the documentation up until now, and we still are. That's one big branch of what we do as an organization. And then the other thing that we've grown into, really in the past three to four years, is the restoration. It's like, what do we do about it?

So we have these remnant grasslands, or we have these areas that a private landowner wants to restore, or the National Park Service wants to restore. We've been rapidly building our team up until the big freeze, I have to say. We've been rapidly building our team up, and we were just poised to really begin to do some really impactful on-the-ground habitat restoration work. Those are the two equal halves of our organization. And yeah, I'm excited by, you know, one is I listen to the audible version of the Long Hunter book that you... It's the only version there is.

I love it, man. I love the complementarity, is that a word, between your and Clay's southern accent. Got it. Yeah, I thought that played off real well. One of these guys is obviously a man of the people. But I love the book and you know what I found is that you found, you talk about the paucity of those records, you found some of them. You found some of the few, you know, like you mentioned the Casper Mansker and the Bledsoe, I always forget if it's Isaac or Anthony, you know, they were brothers.

There's two, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry, yeah. Yeah, and I can't remember which one was with Mansker when they encountered the lick in what is modern-day Sumner County, Tennessee and you know the first time they came as you you alluded to in your book They were on horseback and they shot a deer it was in the middle of this giant herd of bison, right? Mm-hmm, and they couldn't get off their horses for fear of being trampled to death But as long as they stayed on their horses, they were good. You know, there were hundreds, possibly a few thousand buffalo in that particular lick

that they were in. And you found that reference to that. There's a couple more to that exact same place, though, that has always stuck with me. For example, when they came back the following year, and I think you may have referenced this too, all those bison had been exterminated. But French. Yeah, the French hunters like Timothy de Munbrin and his cronies were all kind of hunting around in that area. So you know, you've stumbled upon like one of the very few references to what I would say is a reference that alludes

to the savannas around the Nashville area. Some regions have really well-documented grasslands, like the Black Belt Prairie region of Mississippi and Alabama. It goes all the way back to 1701. When that was French territory, you had French generals and stuff like they were based in New Orleans. They and their armies were crisscrossing northern Mississippi. Those are all recorded in the French archives, and I've got a colleague, Dr. John Barone, who's published and pulled that stuff out.

But part of the challenge of the South and the East in general is that many of these areas were settled so rapidly and hecticly and chaotically that the original landscape, we always say they were gone before the camera was invented. They were gone before people who could write about them visited in some cases. They were transformed before they could be recorded. And oftentimes they were gone

before the first artist came through. So the record has to be sort of pieced back together like Humpty Dumpty. And that's one of the things that we're actively doing is piecing back where they were, what they look like. One of our great friends, and you gotta have him on your show, he's amazing. He's the best oil painter you'll ever meet.

Careful now, because my wife's taking oil painting lessons. But he goes back and he tours like when William Bartram was an explorer in the South in the 1770s. He goes back to where William Bartram was in Montgomery, Alabama. And he uses Bartram's words and his ability to look at the modern landscape to put back the scene that Bartram would have seen. And it's a vast prairie that looks like the Flint Hills of East Kansas. You were talking about bison.

Do you guys suspect that they played a role in maintaining these, these grasslands? Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, now Bison in the East, as you guys, I'm sure, know, is very complicated. I've read Ted Ballou's book. I love it. It's one of my favorite of all time.

Yeah, it's great. This whole thing is a great story. Got it in my backpack. But there's some new evidence emerging on Bison in the East. There's some archaeology and paleontology work that's been done. You know, we thought that bison had kind of re-emerged in the South in like the middle 1500s, early 1500s, after the depopulation of Native Americans from some of the different pandemic diseases, that they came back in from the Great Plains.

I think that the supporting evidence suggests that is true, right? But if you'd ask most people, okay, so bison came back into the South because, you know, they were definitely here in the South in Ice Age times. We had multiple species of bison. But most people kind of considered that in states like North Carolina, Georgia, you know, Tennessee, that bison had essentially been gone for, you know, since 15,000 years ago up until about the year 1550 or so. And so then you get into saying, well, wait a minute, does that mean there were no big animals grazing southern grasslands 3 years ago, 5000, 9000 years ago. That was kind of the, I think the consensus. But this, this, Can I wedge in if you? Yeah, wedge in please.

Well, I just want some of the things people have looked at and described that, that I've read about is like that the, the Spanish and the French would come through places in the early 1600s and they describe everything right down to possums no mention of Buffalo yeah you go to the effigy mounds like the mound builders the Mississippian cultures on the Ohio Mississippi River they carve and have things, every snake, turtle, deer, bear, they don't have buffalo effigies. And I think that that, like that kind, when we're talking about evidence, like that kind of evidence, it's almost like a omission, omission equals absence. I'm familiar with that kind of evidence.

Like, well if they were there, they would have talked about them. So they must not have been there. I've encountered a lot of that logic, right? Yeah, and I think that's generally... it seems like there's wide agreement that there generally were few to no bison in the East and Southeast before the early 1500s. You know, when you get to the French explorers of the 1680s through, you know, the 1720s, ample discussion of bison. Just, it's everywhere. You know, when you get to the 1760s and 1770s, everybody who goes out is talking about bison in every valley in West Virginia and every big, you know, whatever

Isn't that crazy? It's crazy, you know, but and and so many place names too, but here's the challenge We thought they essentially had disappeared at the end of the ice age, but I think his name is dr. Gary Moore he's an archaeologist from East Carolina State University, it was doing some work at a archaeological site in the Piedmont of South Carolina. And using a technique where they looked at these spear points, these stone projectile tools, right? They were able to go into, you know, you guys have seen those flint knappers, right? You're sitting there making a projectile point. They sat in that chair you're in. Yeah, there you go.

Well, those stone tools have little microfractures in them that through capillary action, you know, draws in blood and other types of material when you kill an animal. And what Dr. Moore's work has shown is that they can actually extract not the DNA, but they can extract the protein residues of animals that were killed with these stone tools.

Is that reliable? Well, I know. I keep hearing about this and I keep being like, really? I've heard mixed opinions on it too. But if it's true, let's just say if it is. And you know, it's gone through peer review publication and that kind of stuff. But what his work shows is that there's a continuous record

of bison in South Carolina from the late ice age, so probably 15,000 years ago, all the way up until 7,000 years ago. So that's a totally different story. If you got bison in South Carolina at 7,000 years ago, you probably had them in Tennessee, Kentucky. You may have had them even farther to the west and south. So then that means that the window without bison is actually much narrower than we suspected. So it's that kind of emerging evidence which adds to and somewhat clouds the whole picture of southeastern grassland ecosystems. Can you speak to the impact of Native American burning? I can't remember what year it was, but this became a very fashionable idea that open country,

that all this open lands was a result of slash and burn agriculture. Yeah. Or there are accounts, I believe there's French accounts where they were using fire and game drives. Yeah. I mean, they would encircle big areas, French accounts where they were using fire and game drives. Um, yeah. I mean, they would encircle big areas, get some hunters staked up and just burned a place to push out deer. And so for a while, it seemed like everybody was really hip on this idea that all that open country was, was that was anthropogenic and not natural,

you know, like, like not whatever the hell the opposite of anthropogenic is. Yeah, I think I'm reading the book Forgotten Fires right now, right, and they talk about, you know, it's written by an anthropologist, so it relies heavily on that perspective in sort of the science of anthropology. There's no question when you go back into the earliest 1700s and 1600s and maybe slightly beyond that there are just ample documentary evidences and observations of Native Americans burning the landscape for setting large circular fires on the land. That's really well documented.

I think though there's a slippery slope and it's just too far to go. It's too big of an extrapolation to say with surety that Native Americans created open ecosystems of the South. And I think what that does is it makes a bunch of assumptions. One of the ways I think, and my colleague who's our chief science advisor, Dr. Reid Noss, he wrote a book in 2013 called Forgotten Grasslands of the South. And it really was a game changer in terms of messaging around southern ecosystems. There's one very clear line of evidence as to why it doesn't make sense that Native Americans created these landscapes. They probably moved into them and found them already largely open.

They may have expanded some of the smaller ones to make them larger. But the clear line of evidence that they did not create most of them is in the presence of endemic species. When you have plants and animals that have, through the process of evolution, it just takes time. Most of the species that evolve on this planet, they require tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. Some of them require millions of years to evolve. If we have conclusively had people in the South

for say 13, 14,000 years, most of these modern species likely originated prior to the arrival of man into the southeastern United States. Grassland species. They're grassland obligate species. That's the biggest testament to that longevity factor. Now here's the other one. Very rich fossil evidence for grasslands and grassland endemic species in the south. And so if you know, you say, okay, well, you know, what if it's true that Native Americans came into and created these? Again, I am not in any way trying to take away the importance of indigenous management.

I think that is an exceptionally important component to this. But you can go back to the fossil record in Florida and East Tennessee and various places and find a rich wealth of some of the biggest grassland dependent, you know, megafauna and carnivores you can imagine. You know, it was a recent discovery of the American cheetah in the Appalachians of Southwest Virginia. Seriously? Yeah, no joke. I was reading there was caribou in Alabama, Georgia. Yeah, you know, big longhorn bison. And by the way, that cheetah was found within the county adjacent to Cumberland Gap. No kidding. Yeah, I know you love Cumberland Gap. Huh. So there's a wealth, I mean the endemic species alone, man, that is the biggest piece of evidence.

I remember when I was a little kid, man, do you remember, do you guys remember what the, I don't know if it's still around, the Epcot Center? What the hell was that? Oh yeah. Like Disney land? It's very much still around. Dwarf ball, giant golf ball thing. Yeah.

Isn't it the giant golf ball thing? Perfect time for me, I'll have that. I love Epcot Center. It's a big glass, it's like a big glass. Looks like a giant golf ball. It's a big glass. It's like a big glass. It's like a giant golf ball. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they did this thing where you were like cruising at very low altitude Like it's like a planetarium experience where it's like you're cruising very fast at very low altitude over the country I Know there's like some budget problems

Has have you guys tried like any kind of wide scale visual representation of, of what a flyover like, you know, I mean like what a flyover of the area you mapped out looked like in 1492. That sounds like a good collaboration with meat eater if you want me to tell you about it. But no, what we have embarked on is the creation of a web platform we call Grasslandia. Okay. You know, it sounds kind of fanciful, right? Come with me to the... Grasslandia.

The world of Grasslandia. And no, I think that needs to happen. We need to have that sort of visual, you know, flyover reenactment so people can see it, because nobody can see it and understand it today. And if you can't see it, you can't visualize it, or the largest remnant you have left is the footprint of this building, you know, or a quarter of an acre, how are you going to inspire people to go back in and care about those landscapes and rebuild them and reconstruct them so we can prevent the continued

collapse of our wildlife and biodiversity, which is all around us. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us about some of those patches you found. Yeah, well, like native patches of like historic grassland. And how small they are.

Yeah. Well, probably the best patch that we have left in Tennessee, where I'm from, is called May Prairie. And the story is back in the 60s, a couple of professors from the University of Tennessee were sitting in a cafe across the street on Highway 41, which goes from Chicago to Florida. And they're sitting at this restaurant, it's called the Prairie Cafe. And they look over to the lady and said,

Miss, ma'am, why is this called the Prairie Cafe? She said, you see that line of trees over there across the highway? Well, look through there. You see how it kind of looks open and sunny? There's a prairie in there. And these were two botanists, right? Like I am. So they get, they finish up their meal and they go out across the road and walk in and they find May Prairie, which is 11 acres.

And it's still to this day is 11 acres. May Prairie is the most biodiverse single 11 acres in the Eastern interior of the United States. No way, really? Could you not? That's so crazy. Totally separate side story. In 2008, I was part of the Natural Areas Conference that came to Tennessee.

It was in Nashville. And they asked me, they said, will you lead a grass identification hike down to May Prairie for the conference? I said, sure, I will. I got down there, and I'm walking through this prairie. It's October of 2008. and I see this plant, and I look down and I say, man, this is weird.

This is the type of little member of the sunflower family. I said, this is not anything currently known from Tennessee. And a buddy of mine says, how do you know? I said, just trust me, I know. I know the floor of Tennessee, there's nothing else like it. I don't know what it is. So I get back and later that email, I send an email to the national, the international expert on that particular group of plants who happen to be in Waterloo, Canada.

And he wrote back and he said, congratulations, you have discovered a completely new species. And not only did it prove to be new, but it's endemic to that single prairie nowhere else on earth. You're kidding me. Did you get to name it? He actually named it for me. So by new, he named it for you?

I thought you couldn't do that anymore. No, I can't, I can't name it for myself. So by new, it was actually old. Like, is that what you're saying? Like it was endemic to... Probably all over the damn place once upon a time. Endemic in the sense that it, it, um the sense that it probably was more widely distributed because that area had about a million acres of grass historically. That's one of the last fragments

left. But yeah, and old in the sense it probably took tens of thousands of years to evolve as a species. Right. Yeah, the name is Sympheotricum estesia, not the sexiest name around. Like, we've got prairie out here and it's, you know, obviously it's diverse and there's different kinds of plants and animals and stuff. But like what would like a patch of that prairie that size of this table look like that you're talking like, is it a bunch of different flowers and plants and grass and. Yeah. I mean, it's going to look like your tall grass prairie and like parts of Missouri

or Iowa, very similar. It's just oftentimes it is going to have a bit more tree cover. Would those be conifers or hardwoods or... Both, mostly hardwoods. So like in lots of the upper south, you'll have post oak, blackjack oak, or bur oak. Those in my way of thinking, especially for our region, are essentially grassland trees, which is kind of a weird concept for people. Like blackjack oak won't even reproduce anymore. Like its acorns just never germinate because most blackjack oaks today are shrouded in forest that is unnaturally forested where the forest is overtaken grassland.

So you've got an oak that essentially can no longer germinate and reproduce itself. Like he's dropping his acorn in a place that, yeah, or excuse me, his acorn. That's right. And he's a place where it doesn't do any good. And he's on his way out, you know, in another generation or two, those oaks will die and they will never replace themselves without things like fire and Buffalo and those kinds of things. But, um, but you know, yeah, or two those oaks will die and they will never replace themselves without things like fire and buffalo and those kind of things. But you know, yeah, visually very similar to what you'd see with the eastern tallgrass prairie. That's essentially what ours were. They were

sort of eastern outliers of, but they were very different in terms of the plants. They had their own species, their own composition. They were unique and now they're mostly gone. What's it look like subsurface and that May Prairie? Yeah, that particular prairie does have, you know, it's, it's an intact system. So it's, it's, um, the underground is intact too. And it's prairie soils and stuff, but that's, that's a big misnomer, big misconception. A lot of people have is that prairie is always associated with a given soil type. You know, in the Midwest, a lot of your prairies are these black prairie soils. They're called

molasauls. But in the South, we get prairies on every soil type imaginable. So that really doesn't hold much water for us with the actual soil type. Got it. Yeah. What is the history of how that May prairie, how did it stay intact? Just because something didn't happen? Well, that's the sort of the case that we see with a lot of our eastern grasslands is the thing that caused them to survive 400 years of, you know, Euro-American settlement was oftentimes they're too wet or too rocky or maybe they're on the natural edge. So in this case it has it's a hard pan prairie. So if you dig down about a foot it actually has a clay hard pan that restricts tree growth and actually favors grasses and wildflowers

and those kind of things. So it's naturally predisposed to being being grassy but it's also really really wet in the wintertime. You can't really develop there, it's not a good good for cropping. Soils are highly acidic. So that's one of the reasons why it's kind of you know persisted to the modern day. But a lot of these other sites, you know, if they're rocky that will preclude development or if they're in a like a power line corridor. We see a lot of our best grasslands in power lines and on roadsides. Really? Yeah, but strangely, or not strangely, I guess,

but especially in the past 25 years, those are the hardest hit from the usage of herbicides to kind of manage those environments. So they were the last to remain, and now those little last scraps are being devastated. And those remnants are key to rebuilding efforts. You know, if you want to rebuild Prairie, if you want to rebuild savannas, it's important to know where those remnants are.

Can those remnants grow, if you rate the right conditions, do those remnants want to grow or do they want to shrink based on what's on the edge of them? Yeah, they do not grow. They don't have a natural predisposition to being able to move easily as a vegetation type. So it's not like a blackberry patch? No. In fact, that's one of the things that's really hard for a lot of people to understand. You know, in the wildlife biology arena, the term early successional habitat is like rampant, right? That's actually one of the terms that's least helpful to us.

Because I think people have always looked at grasslands as early successional habitat. That's true of some types. But what we're talking about are grasslands in some cases that have survived hundreds or thousands of years. They are old growth ecosystems. So you know, a lot of effort to recognize old growth forests, almost no effort to recognize old growth grasslands. That's what May Prairie is. And if people could visualize them like that, I think that would maybe add to the appreciation that people have for them, but it's really hard for people to get by, you know, seeing it just a

grassy patch or just an old field. It's hard to, it's not like an old growth forest where it's immediately clear to all why it's old growth. What is, I mean you're going to get to this, but what would restoration look like? Is it cutting down trees and replanting stuff or is it, because you said it won't grow on its own, right? So you've got to step in at some point. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's first important to kind of understand what type of grassland you're dealing with, right? So like in our work for this entire southeastern geography, we've identified 118 major types of grasslands. Those can be further subdivided into probably 600 types. So you're dealing with a vast number, first of all, you know, coastal dune grasslands versus longleaf pine savanna grasslands versus tall grass prairie type grasslands versus the meadow in West Virginia, they all are going to require different starting points for healing and restoring and rebuilding those landscapes. That's kind of the first thing. So you know if we go into let's say an area that used to be prairie in central Kentucky, let's say an area that used to be prairie in central Kentucky,

we first want to know, is there any remnant potential left? Most times it's no. We have a landowner says, yeah, I want to build prairie out here. Tell me if it's a good site. You know, we don't want to necessarily rebuild a prairie that naturally should be in a forested landscape. You're fighting a losing battle there. So we try to use our knowledge of the local history. We try to use our knowledge of biodiversity to, uh, can, you know, constructively and very thoughtfully suggest what should be there to begin

with. That's all based in science. Real quick. Let's say you had a, this hypothetical landowner in central Kentucky on what you, let's say we're in a spot where you know, categorically, like you know that this was prairie. Is it possible that a guy comes forward and he's got a thousand acres and you go look and there's none. Oh yeah, absolutely. Okay. Yeah. It's just gone. Yeah. We're working on a 5,000 acre farm right now just south of the Kentucky line. It was founded by, uh, George Washington's cousin.

And it was the second largest tobacco plantation on earth in the decades before the Civil War. There's nothing left. There's no prairie. There are bison trails. And you know that it was prairie, and now there's none. Right, yeah. And there's none left.

And so, you know, the three states essentially you can think of is that those areas with really fertile, agriculturally productive soils, in all cases in the East, all of them have been decimated by 99.99%. That's not hyperbole, that's demonstrated loss. The second group is what were formerly like less fertile, but they were meadowlands. Shenandoah Valley of Northern Virginia comes to mind. The New River Settlements that I know you and I have read a lot about. The New River Valley, all these areas, they were really fertile, but not like good for planting crops. They were fertile for grazing lands. Well, those got overgrazed in the early periods of American history. Then they got

improved by planting tall fescue and Scottish grass and all these other kinds of invasive species. And today, they're like 99.99% pasture lands dominated by Eurasian grasses. And then the third category, like your more rolling, sandy, sort of rocky grasslands with trees, those are savannas. Those really depended on fire. You know, places like Tall Timbers in South Georgia, for example. You take fire out of the equation, you take big animals out of the equation,

those grow up and become forests. Got it. So the vast swaths of our public lands today in the south, Piney Woods of East Texas, big game lands in central Virginia in the Piedmont, big lands in the Florida Panhandle that are today densely, densely forested and dry used to be open savannas. Got it. And we've lost it. But that's actually the greatest potential for recovery. And so, you know, back to your question, Brody, how do you rebuild these?

Well, again, starting with knowing what they were. But, you know, what you do to recover a savanna is very different from what you do to plant a prairie. So savannas are probably the trickiest, they're the easiest to restore. They have the most potential right now, as a nation, to restore millions of acres of savanna that are just suppressed under artificially forested conditions it's not gonna be

popular because you're gonna have to cut trees that's what I was kind of getting that people don't like that you and unfortunately the biggest it comes from a good place yeah it comes from reading Lorax and all that like it comes from a good well to circle back to the earlier point, I mean when I, growing up, when if someone said they're going to restore something, I thought oh you're going to plant trees there, just more trees is restoration. I found myself trying to explain to someone the other day that we're talking about conservation and I was talking about, it's so region-specific like what that means, and I'm saying that there's a perception among the general populace of well-meaning people that conservation means

not doing anything. Yeah. And I was trying to explain the concept of active land management. That if not doing anything doesn't give you what, in some places, not doing anything doesn't give you what in some places not doing anything doesn't deliver what you want Oh, absolutely it and in the case of grasslands, which they either require most grasslands Not all but most require either some combination of big animals bison elk especially Fire again, not all types the blue grasses of, the bluegrass of Kentucky for example was probably a bison elk dependent ecosystem, not a fire dependent ecosystem. Is that right?

Yeah. But you take those two combinations of factors out and you then interject conversion to crop land or overgrazing. That's how you lose what we had. But if they're done well, they almost always require people to be involved in the process. I think that's part of the success story, is the people who love land and conservation and hunting, there's a great opportunity and it's enjoyable. I mean I think about the the farms that we work with One of the best is this 11,000 acre farm in Alabama. This farms nine miles wide and

This family has been in their farm since 1918 They've never needed the federal government or the state government or anybody To tell them what to do with it. And they just, they've managed it perfectly in a hundred years. And it's like stepping back into a time capsule to about the 18 teens in West Central Alabama. It's amazing. You mentioned herbicides having a big impact on killing all this stuff. In order to combat all those Eurasian invasive grass species, do you have to hold hands with the devil and use that stuff also?

Absolutely. Yeah. And boy, that's a big hot button issue for us. Because right now, the technology and the know-how to take something from a field of Johnson grass, which is this nasty invasive from Africa, for us to do something better than Johnson grass, we have to nuke it. Yep. Like six times. You know?

And we don't want to do that, but guess what? Once we take care of the Johnson grass problem, like we're doing a project right now with Google and you know, we are treating a site and preparing it, but once we get it planted with the most diverse species mix that's ever been planted in central Tennessee, you know, except for coming back in and just with our volunteers and spot treating a couple of problem areas, we'll never again have to use that stuff there. And you know, we got American bumblebees coming back, we got grasshopper sparrows, got northern harriers, we got otters coming in from the creek bank. So hopefully, yeah, that's a big problem here. I mean, I have some really high profile clients that say, no, this is

a certified organic farm and we don't want to give up on doing it organically. It's just really right now very challenging to do it at scale. You could do it at one to two acres, but how are you going to do it at 100 acres? Or even 10 acres is very challenging right now. That's got to take a lot because you're throwing off the balance in the soil as well. So you probably need to go a lot of layers deep. It's very complicated. I mean, we've had to turn away some, you know, high profile clients that said, hey this is a certified organic farm, you won't be using that stuff on my place.

And there's just nothing you can do then? No, and then they actually did plant before we came in. They tried to plant and it fails because if you don't take care of the invasives, all it takes is about three years to get on top of it. I know that's a lot, but if you can manage the invasives well for three years to make sure that you are planting into something that is very, you know, receptable to all these, you know, species of grasses and wildflowers that you need for healthy wildlife habitat, it's just a three-year quick sacrifice.

And once it's established, it can kind of hold that stuff at bay. Yeah, it can. And now, it may, depending on the severity of the infestation, again, what we're trying to do is build a team of young men and women who come in and we stay on top of it, right? And that's the thing is that you can't just build a prairie and walk away. That's one of the reasons why it's exceptionally

hard to get a lot of people on board with this idea of eastern grasslands is because it does require perpetual management. How many years of management? Or do you mean perpetual, perpetual? Yeah, I think perpetual. And most of them are going to need fire. Some of them would benefit from grazing. So where we have the greatest success is working on, nothing's guaranteed, but right now we're having the greatest success. There's probably some of the private lands where people are still young

and active and they're like, my kids are into this. It's all hands on deck. Otherwise, it takes a fairly steep monetary investment to get into some of this. And right now, what we're trying to basically inform the American public on is that we can't afford not to. Because so much of our eastern biodiversity, northern Bobwhite, countless songbirds, pollinators, they're in free fall collapse in the eastern part of the United

States, we would argue largely in part because we're not doing what we need for our habitat. Do you think that's what is ultimately has happened to the Bobwhite quail? A thousand percent. Okay. Yeah. And I, you know, I enjoy the episode that you guys had on quail recently. Not everyone did. Well, you know, I enjoy the episode that you guys had on quail recently not everyone You know, I enjoyed it but and and I learned a lot about eye parasites, you know

Yeah, but but I was thinking the time the whole time I watched it. Well When you take an ecosystem or a collection of open brushy grassy ecosystems That offered quail everything they needed and then you take away 95% of that what the hell do you expect? What do you expect? And even, I'm not even just talking about pre-settlement landscapes. As a boy growing up in southern middle Tennessee, in the 80s and 90s, every hillside for miles around was just broom sage fields.

You know, golden broom sage, antropogon, virginicus standing through the winter. What is that? It's a, it's a type of bluestem native bluestem grass. It's, it's, it's shit for forage. So farmers don't really like it. Got it.

And it's often a sign of beat up pastures and stuff, but you know what? Quail, Quail loved it. And we had Blackberry patches everywhere. I mean, this is, this is not your ideal, pristine, high quality habitat. It was a very much an agricultural beat up brushy pasture land on somewhat poor farms

that I grew up on. But the thing is it was everywhere. And, um, but then by the latest nineties, everybody, everybody and their mama started mowing religiously. And roadside started getting sprayed and fence rows started getting taken out. And I think what we hear a lot of times is, I've heard some colleagues push back and say, well, yeah, but, you know, Quail, they really made a big spike in this sort of era of land disturbance and clearance and this agricultural revolution.

I think that most people saying that don't really have a grasp on what we just lost. They're working from this 1950s mindset that it was all eastern deciduous forest. They got opened up into brushy, scrubby, great quail habitat. They're not even stopping to consider the 3.7 million acres of prairie lost from central Kentucky, the Barrens, the big Barrens as it was called, that today, less than one hundredth of a percent remains. And that was quail country. That's quail country.

Yeah. You know, it's kind of funny, my buddy, Kevin Murphy, I was down hunting with him in Kentucky. Where's he? Is he Paducah? Yeah, I think he's Paducah. Anyways, he gets permission on an Amish farm. Gets real exciting because that's where the game's at. And he was right. Only quail I've ever seen walking around. Kevin Murphy, they grew up on quail. The only quail I've ever seen walking around with Kevin Murphy is one day he got permission on Amish farm. And I'm like, why is that? Just different. He's like different practices. He has the fence rows, right? But again, highly disturbed, highly disturbed landscape. But he had, he had said a couple things, hell on predators,

not cutting fence rows, dirtier areas, meaning like, you know, like big areas full of old equipment that kind of grew up and cover. So you start to associate quail today, you associate quail with manmade ecosystems that somehow give them what they need. But then you gotta try to remember that, but that's not what they came from.

They use it as refugia, but it wasn't like the main thing. The main thing was like grasslands. You know, as white-tailed deer, you just think they came from tract homes in suburbia. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, exactly right. Like you drive around the neighborhood.

Exactly what they need. Yeah. You see a big buck in a neighborhood. What did they do before all this? Yeah, what did they do before that neighborhood? Well, you know. Where did that big buck live? And in the archeological record, we've got,

you know, we've got records of quail going back, you know, 10,000 years ago in North Alabama, there's a cave called Dust Cave near Florence, Alabama. And Dust Cave is one of these sites where these academics that study these sites basically detailed all that the Native Americans were utilizing from the landscape that they could find in the remains of those cave sediments, right? They put together like a list of a hundred animal species. It's crazy, at least dozens.

Every kind of duck and waterfowl and thing you could imagine being in the backwaters of the Tennessee River, they were utilizing it. Every kind of turtle, every kind of major fish species, they had fragments of it. Rattlesnakes, boom, they got it. But they also had quail and greater prayer chickens, you know, and we see greater prayer chickens, which is often thought of as this classic sort of Midwestern

species, but you know, um, John James Audubon, when he painted in his original paintings of the species, Hardin County, Kentucky, you know, just south of Louisville. Greater prayer chickens, greater prayer chickens. God, it's hard in county. And before we end today, I don't hope it's not right now, but, you know, just south of Louisville. Greater Prairie Chickens. Greater Prairie Chickens. God. It's Hardin County, yes. And before we end today, and I hope it's not right now, but when it is, I need to tell you one of my favorite quotes. I'll tell you right now.

Tell me. I need you guys close your eyes. OK, lay it out there. We're going to do a little prayer preaching right here, OK? Mm-hmm. Bow your heads. I hope my eyes just laugh.

OK, I'm ready. We're going to ask Wanda to come up and play on the organ. We're going to have an altar call. Bill, where's the music drop? It would be difficult to imagine anything more beautiful. For as far as the eye could reach, they seemed one vast deep green meadow, adorned with countless numbers of bright flowers springing up in all directions. Only a solitary tree, now and then a scattered post oak, were to be seen.

It was here where the wild strawberries grew in such profusion as to stain the horse's hooves a deep red color. It was here that I afterwards met with the prairie bird or the barren hen, as we called it, which I afterward met with in such vast numbers on the great prairies of Illinois. Ruben Ross, 1812. Amen. Hallelujah. Where was he? This is right on the Kentucky-Tennessee line. God, man. Just. Where was he? This is right on the Kentucky, Tennessee line.

Oh, man. Just about an hour southwest of Bowling Green near, well, my town, Clarksville, Tennessee, where we're based. That'd be sweet deer hunting permission. Those strawberries got me excited. Strawberries, yeah. And I butchered that quote a little bit. The strawberries actually come at the end, but. You you know if you use a term earlier tertiary what's that mean? Tertiary forest? Yeah it's like the the third you know it's you know secondary tertiary quaternary. Okay I've been so much more familiar with the West and my adult life, but like, let's say you have a, let's say you go 20 miles from here in the mountains, okay, and something burns. I mean,

it burns down to the rocks, let's say, like that kind of fire, right? It's like dirt and rocks are done. It's hard to picture, but I would say to my kids, like, it'll go through a bunch of steps. And if nothing happens from people or whatever, it'll, it's hard to picture. It'll wind up just like it was when it burnt. It'll, you know, a lot of these forests that will wind up being, that it winds up being like, it'll be big lodge poles and it'll be those little, can it, can it berries growing on the ground or whatever, you know, a lot of these forests that'll wind up being, that it winds up being like, it'll be big lodge poles, and it'll be those little, knick, knick, berries growing on the ground, or whatever. You know what I mean?

It'll like find its way back to that. Is that not, does that wind up not being true in the East because of non-native plants? Meaning, if you had gone in 1400, and you had put roundup on a patch of this prairie, you put roundup on it, till it, put roundup on it, till it, put roundup on it, till it, and just till it's good and dead,

and left, by 1500, whatever the hell, it probably would have been back to being, right? Yeah, yeah, what you're describing is- It would have been back to being, right? Yeah, yeah. What you're describing. It would have been back to being prairie. Yeah, I mean, well, there's a couple of things there.

One is you're describing that pioneer process, right? That's a primary succession. So when you take something back to, you know, just bare subsoil, right? The things that are first gonna colonize that are the weeds, you know? So broomsedge, which I mentioned earlier, is a type of native grass, but it's a weedy native grass. It has a very low, what we call conservatism value.

It's like a one or a two on a scale of one to ten. Something that's a one, two, three can just move right on in. It tends to persist for a little while as other things then invade and stabilize that ecosystem over time. And some natural communities are really adapted to long-term stability, meaning like not just complete disruption. Prairies are pretty stable, you know, but then, but most of your native prairie grasses are not pioneer species. That's why I don't call

them early successional. You know, you go open up a new cornfield, you let it go fallow, and let's say you got a prairie next to it, you can hope and wish all damn day, but those prairie species are not going to move into your cornfield. They don't do that. They don't do that. They don't behave that way. It takes a long time for these natural communities to assemble what's called assembly time. And in the case of Dr. Joseph Veldman at Texas A&M has published a paper a few years ago, 2015 or so, that talked about old growth grasslands, they require thousands of years to assemble.

That's got it. Man, nobody's thinking about that stuff. Yeah, that's the term you're using is helpful assemble. Yeah, because it's not like how you're going to have fireweed. But then all of a sudden, immediately, you're going to have all these little lodgepole pine things. And then pretty soon lodgepole pine is going to win out. Yeah. And you're talking about two things coming together, right? Which would be like dwarf, wattle, Berry, lodgepole pine, whatever, two things you're talking about. How do you get these perhaps dozens? Yeah. Well, and you also were asking about invasive species.

Yeah. Now that's the factor that gets in the way, right? You've got a site that is going through this early phase of disturbance. Invasives are going to move in and sort of suspend that natural successional pathway. And that complicates things for us out there in the habitat restoration world big time. But you're always going to have weeds. Where you would have had this weedy flora in the east, let's say 3,000 years ago, would have been around a Mississippian, probably a thousand years ago, Mississippian Native

American village. A lot of corn fields and stuff where they were disturbing. You would have expected native weeds to be all in and around their settlements. Where you had a bison wallow 300 years ago, the weeds would have been around that bison wallow. But your more ecosystems that are not, especially when it comes to soil disturbance, that's the big thing that they like, the weeds like.

But your other forms of disturbance, like grazing pressure or fire, they don't have the same kind of detrimental resetting effect that like plowing till and wallowing half Is there like in your eyes? Is there an acceptable like? Approximation of the original as far as restoration you're where it's like that's good. It's not perfect But it's close enough that like it's pretty damn good. Yeah, what we do is we look to remnants where they exist You know, I mentioned Long Island earlier, right? There was 60,000 acres of prairie

up until about 1905, 1910. That prairie lasted longer than the prairies near my home at Fort Campbell Army Base or in middle Tennessee, Kentucky. Didn't they have that moor hen out there? Well, they had what they call the heath hen. That's our name. Yeah, right. Did they have that moor hen out there? They, well, they had the, uh, what they call the Heath hen. That, that's right. Right.

You're right. And it went extinct a decade or two later, but today out of that former 60,000 acre landscape, there's only 24 acres left adjacent to Nassau community college. What? Yeah. So if you want to rebuild a grassland on Long Island, one, you got to, where are you going to do it? Right.

But then you could go look at that last surviving remnant, harvest the seeds from it, learn how to then structurally attempt to rebuild it across the road. That's the approach we're using all across our region now. We go look at the last surviving remnants on army bases or someone's private ranch or farm. And then those we collect seeds from, and we work with seed farmers like Roundstone

Native Seed out of Kentucky or Ernst Native Seed out of Pennsylvania. We buy the seed from them and then we rebuild those ecosystems to the very best that we can. And what's like to Brody's point to put a finer answer on it, like what is, um, what's as close as we could get to good enough? I think 50%, 60% of the species biodiversity, like, like, when do you go like, sweet, let's go find a new spot. That's a great question. I think, um, I'll give you just, I'll just give you a real scatter shot of what people have been doing. Right?

So, you know, in the 90s and 2000s, we have a saying back where I'm from where native warm season grasses, everybody planted native warm season grasses like 20 years ago and they would use three species, big bluestem, Indian grass and little bluestem. Sometimes they'd add a fourth, switch grass. That's not cutting it. You're not adding. So three ain't enough. Three ain't enough. You're not adding what we call groceries on the ground.

You don't have the seeds, the nectar, the cover, the structural diversity needed to support a diverse array of wildlife, including pollinators and songbirds. You need the whole package. So then about 10 years ago, people were stepping up because a big limitation is where are you going to get the seeds? If you don't have farmers producing seed, you're shit out of luck. Yeah. So, you know- Because that little 11 acre patch isn't going to put off the-

Yeah, and you would exhaust those patches too. Sure. Right? They need their seeds to rain back down on that site to some extent. So you do need these native seed producers, these private companies mostly, to go and buy the seed from. And so 10 years ago, most people were just barely able to get like a mix of like 10, 15, 20 species. And it wasn't really that cost effective to be able to, you couldn't really afford to do a lot more, even if they did exist. But in the last 10 years, that's five years, those same companies

now are offering to 300 species. So what our project with Google, when we planted it in 2020, we used 77 species in our mix. That was the most at that time. We just planted a 89 species mix on a private farm in Tennessee So, you know, we're trying to get our mixes up 89 89. Yeah now that's not for everybody You know, but I would say you need to be somewhere a little rich for my blood But you need to be somewhere in that 20 to 40 range is is is a sweet spot Let's say someone has a whatever, 100 acre farm and they've got a 20 acre pasture,

it's like ideal for restoring, they restore it. Can they then use that as a pasture or is it like hands off now because the animals might graze somewhere else and then bring it invasive or it just can't handle the Yeah, you can it depends on the kind of grassland right some are really conducive to being great for grazing You do need to pay attention to like what you put in your forage mix, you know For example horses horses can't tolerate certain types of grasses that

Maybe cattle can for example. Oh like you might have a toxic plant. You could have a toxic plant or you could have a plant with bristles on the spikelets of the grass that get into the mouth parts. So those are all considerations and we try to be real mindful of those kind of things. But this same farm is called the Westington Plantation, north of Nashville. We're putting 89 species in that mix, but we're absolutely going to be lightly grazing that. That site's really cool. It's got two documented buffalo fords just down in the valley. And you can still go and see the impressions where the bison would have crossed the creek.

Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Hey, I got a tactics question for you. You, you were talking earlier, you use the expression nuke in the ground to get it ready. I appreciate the term. We hate to do it. I'm assuming you're talking about glyphosate. Glyphosate and a few others. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, that winds up, you know, earlier we were talking about political complexities to return to the beginning of the, to return to the rant, political complexity. Waiting back in there. Yeah. Nah, I political complaints back in there. Nah, I'm not going back in there. Just bringing up like, um,

we have a feller sitting in that seat one time that, uh, is, uh, very adversarial to, uh, roundup. Right. How do you like, is there another emerging technology that gives you what you need if the tide against Roundup turns with like the class action lawsuits and stuff? If Roundup becomes like, can't get it, can't put it on the ground. Do you then have to be like, oh shit, this whole thing's over? Or is there, is there a plan B? Well, yeah, that's a great thing to consider. And it is something we worry about, you know, because right now it's just the knowledge and the technology

and the cost, right, of doing other options. And people could say, well, it's about the cost. No, it's not about the cost. It's about some of the top experts that I've been able to talk to on this issue have not found a way to do it above one to two acres at a time and if we're tackling one or two acres a time, damn it, we're not doing enough. We have to think about scaling this and you know right now we've got six big anchor grasslands that were just been funded to begin restoring. And some of these are in very bad shape.

They're going to require two full years of getting on top of the weeds so that we can have something better. If we were presented with an option where you can't use it, it would completely derail conservation efforts for grasslands. Now, Randall, do you remember how many acres of Dan Flory's do by hand? Oh, I think that was 20 or 40 acres. It was like an arid grassland thing, but I think he did spotted napweed and. Spurge. And years. Years and years. Any spare moment. Yeah. Oh, now we just have to call.

So what is the current footprint of your organization look like in terms of on the ground, being here, done that, or underway? Let me just answer one last thing that Steve brought up, which is we are about to experiment with using a flame scorcher to do probably somewhere between five. It's a propane fueled flame scorcher. So, you know, hot, hot. And it, even for those, uh, you know,

then that gets into like fuel consumption and carbon emissions kind of territory. Um, either, either way you go, you don't have a good approach. Like you could get that shit so hot that you wind up with an equal. Yeah, you'd have to do it several times. I mean, otherwise you're looking at solarization. You'd have to put black plastic down. Can you imagine trying to cover black plastic on a hundred acres? It's just not feasible.

And everybody's all mad at plastic now. Right. You know, and that's just going to break down. Just can't win these days. Put solar panels. You could disc the hell out of it, but that don't work on a slope where you're subjected to erosion. And then the last one that comes to mind is you could graze the hell out of it for a long, long time. I hear a bunch of goats.

Put some barrel horses on it. All these come with complexities. The quickest and most efficient is the approach we use, but it does have its, you know, it comes with its drawbacks for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's a complicated world, man. Complicated, yeah.

The world, it's annoying, this world. Yeah, it's, and Randall, you asked me, what's our footprint? Yeah, like, how many acres are you working on now? How many acres have you worked on? What's the, how's the scaling been? Yeah. So the region is 24 States.

We're actively working in or contracted before the freeze to work in 17 States. Um, we just just this year with the funding that the projects that we've already started and what we've been funded to do we would be able to begin our first 10,000 acres of restoration. So that's that's a big accomplishment for us because just a year and a half ago we had sort of reached our first thousand acres. I mean you know as an organization where you're starting from scratch to build what is now a 50 person team, you know eight years ago first no one really knew about Southeastern Grasslands as a thing. So we had to

educate why they're here then you know we had to just build the team organically. You know, administrative assistance, communications team, on-the-ground representation, fundraising, all that stuff and it took us a good eight years to reach our first thousand acres. Yeah but you're using as inspiration ten acre patches. That's right. Yeah, when you put it in that, like when you consider that, that makes it it all the more extraordinary. And it's so difficult. So to go from a thousand acres in 2023

to now 10,000 acres. But our ability to do that is currently in limbo with the freeze that we're currently facing. We were super excited at the beginning of this year. We had just received major funding from a few major federal agencies to begin working on 40 U.S. national parks from Mississippi to Vermont.

To do a few thousand acres of much needed eastern grasslands focused representation. And I'm talking about some of the most iconic landscapes that we have, like Gettysburg Battlefield. People don't realize that southeast Pennsylvania was home to grasslands before 1720. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Cades Cove, you know. These are places that are really well known. What state's that in? It's Tennessee. These are all Republican states, they might still get it. Yeah, they might get it, you know, they might get it. Um, so, so we had that. Pennsylvania is a battleground state.

So they need to keep them happy. They might send some of that money over there, hopefully. Uh, and assuming they're going to use that money and strategically until like. I'm going to be positive. I'm going to hope it's going to clear up and go through. But, um, I think if it's gotta be nerve wracking, if things don't clear up in a three to four week, five, six week process, we risk losing 90% of our team.

Is there, um, seriously? Yeah. And there's no hope to like working directly with state agencies. There's just not the money's not there. We've been cultivating what we've built for eight years, you know, and I had a farmer, I don't want to say his name or get into his business, but when we got the agreements in place to work with the US National Park Service, and these were mostly funded through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, those took two and a half to three years of discussions to get in place.

We signed them all well ahead of the past several months. And those have been all obligated, right? Those are obligated funds. They've been congressionally approved. All congressionally approved. And so then we spent all of last year staffing up to get ready for that. So we hired almost 25 employees, endless rounds of going through searches and interviews, et cetera. We had them build up our partnership

base on the East Coast. And so we reached out to a couple of private companies and said, do you guys have the capacity to join us with this effort? One major seed producer said, you know, I need about two or three weeks to deliberate as this is a big, big opportunity for our small business. You know, they employ about 40 people. They said need some time to think about it. They came back two or three weeks later they said we're in we're gonna work with you to help make sure you got all the seeds that you need to better restore these lands, restore this wildlife habitat. And when the freeze took effect it now puts that farmer, that small business, those 40 people employed in that business at risk.

My friend had to go out and take a $1 million business loan to be able to have the staff up and have the capacity needed to meet this federally obligated project. And I'm not trying to bitch about our situation because again, everybody's in the same boat Yeah, but you said it when it starts coming back and biting people in the ass Who are just everyday Americans trying to have kids and babies and care for their? Elder aging parents and go out and hunt on some good lands. I Don't know You know and and so as the leader of our organization and the co-founder, I'm deeply worried about what the next three weeks.

I just talked to a good friend of mine and a philanthropist and a divisor. I mean, I'm looking at the reality of needing to go raise $30 million in six months. I got friends that tell me it's physically impossible. I got this mighty man attitude that says I can do it. I really don't know where to go. But I know I don't want to face the reality of letting my entire team go. And we were standing at the world's highest point three and a half weeks ago. It just feels like we got our damn teeth kicked in.

And so many of my friends are going through the same situation. Both sides of the aisle. It's a bipartisan effort. That feels pretty America first to me. It does. Getting to grasslands. It does. And we're telling an untold story, brother. Yeah, man, this is America. Put that first. Make America grassy again, man. I've heard that. Somebody's Put that first. Is there a mega make America grassy again man? I've heard that. Somebody's mentioned that before. Is there any way for like if

someone owned land and they wanted to like try to do some of this on their own like could they contact you and get advice or is there like a handbook for so to speak for doing this or is it something that needs to be done on such a larger scale that it's not? Yeah, I mean, there's definitely lots of people doing it, on their own properties and stuff. I think you guys are gonna talk to my good friend, Kyle Liebarger, coming up in a while,

with the Native Habitat Project. Kyle does this kind of work. He came up about five, six years ago, started this kind of work. Increasingly, we're beginning to see a lot more attention. All we ever wanted was to give Eastern grasslands an equal seat at the conservation table. I went to a conference recently and I got right with these people.

You ever been right with somebody, Steve? That's when you start throwing out a couple of by gods. You know, he's tries. So I went in this gathering of about 100 people, and I said, by God, it is past time for y'all to start having a damn conservation conference in the southeastern United States. There better not ever be another conservation conference where grasslands don't get an equal seat at the goddamn table. I said, you can have forests, and you talk about wetlands, and you talk about coastal ecosystems,

and you talk about climate change. Grasslands harbor half the biodiversity of temperate eastern North America. And their biodiversity's collapsing. You gotta do something about it. So I had a by God moment and I do apologize for getting a little bit... Did they hear you? Well, I don't know. I think they're hearing. I think we're witnessing the explosion of interest in this topic, but we ain't got it far enough yet, Steve. Well, I'll tell you, this is, I'm new to the whole conversation. You know, the whole thing, I

even started thinking about it. I would never even become aware of it had I not had such an interest in this particular era, in these early accounts of people rolling into these spots and describing them for the first time. If I hadn't encountered that, I would never even have thought about it. I would still tell everybody about the squirrel running from, you know, wherever. That's one of my, to the Mississippi and never hitting the ground. Yeah. The long hunters were one of my gateways into this.

And, uh, but I do need to apologize. I just committed blasphemy. Well, we can beat it out. No, no, I appreciated that. People know what was said. Well, not even that. I think you should bleep it out, Phil. Alright. Get that burp I had earlier.

No, I'm actually going to make that louder. That could be the new bleep we use. And my terrible guess at the BLM's annual budget. I'd like that one stricken from the record as well. Yeah, we'll see about that. Anytime Randall, yeah, he has something regrettable. He says just put his belt in there Hey, I keep meaning to ask what's up with that wedding ring you got on there, huh? Dude, I'll tell you what I've been married

Almost 25 years. What? Yeah, man. Yeah, you got married at five Or you're just a you know, you age gracefully. It's probably 22, 23. Yeah. My wife and I've been together since like, what? 2002. That's when we got married. Been together since 97. Yeah.

Long time. First girlfriend ever. Good for you. First girlfriend turned into my wife. Yeah. You guys got kids? We do get three kids. What's your wife's name?

Uh, Shawna. I got a 18 year old, 16 year old and a 10 year old named Boone. You guys got right to it. I'm right, bro. See, that was a good move. My buddy Clay did the same thing, got right to it. Young. Yeah. Like, I keep thinking about, you know, like the kind of being the kind of old dude where

you go get your grandkids because your kids don't want to hang out anymore. I'm so far away from that happening, man. Like picking up your grandkids, take them turkey on your back. You're right on the cusp. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. You'll still be able to walk around. I'll be rolling up in a wheelchair.

If at all. Give me a piece of marriage advice. Oh gosh man, my wife's always right. That's for one. Yeah. And you're not telling me that she is. You're just saying you pretend that's true. Yeah, pretending. I got lucky man. I got lucky. I'll tell you this. I will say this all credit to there. You know, there's a reasons why the Southeastern Grasslands Institute exists. Are we off marriage? No, no, no. I was going to say, this is going to roll. This is going to bring it. This is going to bring it. Come in full circle. I'm with you. It's strong. One, it wouldn't exist if a philanthropist from New York City hadn't discovered us and

said, I want you guys to dream big, think programmatically and create something special. But it also wouldn't exist without the relentless support of my wife. Because man, to grow in your organization from nothing to a team of 50, soon to be 65, man I had to have a strong woman in my life. And all credit to her. When I had to work sometimes 30 hours straight, got no sleep day in day out, she made sure I had what I needed to keep running. And I'm deeply appreciative to her for that. It's great. You know, to quote my friend told me, behind every successful man is a woman who thinks he's an idiot. You're right.

Because it pushes you. It does. It keeps you awake in the morning. I'm not that bad, come on. I'm going to get to it. DeWayne, are you guys like a nonprofit that people can donate money to? Yeah. So, you know, we are housed out of a university because I've been a professor for 18 years, right? We currently function in sort of two capacities.

We function as a nonprofit part of the university is our fiscal sponsors, what we call it. And then we function very much like an academic department out of our university. And that really gives us a lot of amplitude and flexibility. This year we are going to be creating our own non-profit still affiliated with the university. Will it run like a foundation? Yeah, yeah, right.

So we'll have our own board of directors. We're gonna be assembling that this year. And I think that's gonna help us get to a point where we need to be. It's part of our business plan already anyway. Tell me the university you're out of. Yeah, it's called Austin Peay. And our motto is let's go pee.

And... Austin P, P-E-A-Y, and our motto is let's go P. You guys are occasionally do well in the March madness. Yeah, yeah. That's how I know that name. And a lot of people say P-A or Paya or whatever you call it, but it's just Austin P, name for one of our former governors. Yeah. It's a good school. So at some point people will be able to jump on a website and donate some cash

to you. Yeah, I hope they do. Check it out at, uh, you know, our website, Southeastern Grasslands Institute, segrasslands.org. And of course we're on, you know, Facebook and Substack and you know, all that stuff. And if you're sitting there and you got a big property within yourself, the Dwayne self. Yeah. And you're just wading through piles of money and you're thinking about how you want to do something good for your land. Because as Doug Durin says, it's not ours,

it's just our turn. That's right. And you want to do something right by your land, maybe go check these guys out. Yeah, and I would like to there's there's three things in particular. I'd love for your listeners to kind of help us think through and you guys too. One is, we got so much existing public land and private land. It just needs to be managed in a better different direction, right? It just needs to be managed in a better, different direction. Our organization through this web portal that's been funded by the USDA called Grasslandia is designed, once we roll that out next year in partnership with ESRI, is designed to be that decision support tool that both public land managers and private landowners can come

to Grasslandia. And you better go into that world and see maps of where the Grasslands used to be. See the quotes from the early historians who followed the long hunters work or Native Americans. And have that at your fingertips, along with information, the photos, what they look like, and the information of how to restore, the seed mixes,

the fire regime that you need. So we need to do a lot better with the land we already have. But the second key points, one is that we have remnants left on the landscape that are clinging to existence. They need us to recognize them for what they are. They need our help. And that's a hard thing to do. But we can't forget those remnants of places like May Prairie.

They're critical as the building blocks to build back from. Seeds, or to protect them because they're oftentimes, they need to be protected and managed because they're the last of their kind. Just, it's the model, right? It's the model. And then the third is, I fear that people in the East especially have given up on this idea of big-scale conservation. And we're not giving up. So our vision is in my lifetime is to create two dozen large-scale grasslands

again in the East. Now large-scale is relative, you know, that's the eastern version of large, right? So there's no reason why we can't build an 11,000 acre prairie in parts of Alabama, Mississippi that connects to and integrates farms and, you know, just all the different kinds of efforts, grazing, etc., that needs to happen at a large scale. Now imagine if we did big scale grassland here in central North Carolina and western Kentucky. I think people have given up on that as a possibility. SGI, the Southeastern Grasslands Institute,

that's where we're heading. That's our future. That's our next big thing. And what we want is to attract people to come join us on that bold, big vision. That's the future of Eastern conservation right there. Amen. I'm a convert. Come on down. And I have been told to extend a...

I've been saved. A hunting invitation to have you guys come on down to... They'll bleep us all out. Some turkeys. There's going to be a long belt. Just one long belt. I tell you, I want you guys to come on down and see that bison trail at the at the Westington farm and I would love to see that. Come down to see the bison traces.

You can hunt in our newly restored grasslands down there. Really? That's an amazing turkey deer. Come on down. Love to have you. Like songs that yeah, you know what book you might like to read man? Tell me. I'm looking for some good ones. Have you read the Land Breakers? No. It's from the 60s? No. So the other day I had dinner with my editor and my publisher at Random House and I was talking about, they were asking if I'd seen something that's out

right now that everybody's watching and I was saying I they were asked me if I'd seen something that's out right now that everybody's watching And I was saying I have a hard time with stuff like that because I'll see something that wasn't Accurate Historically accurate and I'll forget all about what I'm watching and I'll just be real annoyed about that so I can't watch it Yeah, which led us to a conversation of who gets it right? and I was making the case that I Was making the case that Cormac McCarthy? and I was making the case that I was making the case that Cormac McCarthy gets his stuff right, like other writers, Alan Eckert gets his stuff right, they're just good.

Which led someone to say, have you read the Land Breakers from the six, I think it was from 64, and I hadn't, but the Land Breakers, as you can imagine, it's like 1780, right? And it's new people moving in to break the land. It's so well done. Is this kind of like the Lou Lamour's The Sacket series? Dude, I don't want to hack on Louie Lamour. How do I put this? I've read Louie Lamour, Dirt is big Louie the More, Dirt's always reading Louie the More. I don't know how to say this in a gentle way. Just go for it.

No. I mean, I think, I think that's a big volume. Just say he's not your cup of tea and move on. That's an hypothesis. That's an hypothesis. No, it is unbelievable. Wow. It is like, like how that dude knows what he knows. And I've gone and checked a little bit to be like, what? Yeah, including this. But I mean, the stuff about trees and plants is unbelievable. Like he's done a lot of work. He later got involved in politics as an advisor. I can't wait to read it, man.

The land breakers. I'll read it. Unbelievable. Anyhow, I learned in there and I went't wait to read it man. The Land Breakers. I'll read it. Unbelievable. Anyhow I learned in there and I went and looked and this is true when you make a leather wang for like leather stitching, groundhog. Whoa. Strongest shit out there. Wow. But no I think you'd really appreciate that novel, The Land Breakers. I'll check it out absolutely I got nothing to gain from this well in fact I take that back you should go check out meters American history thanks for coming on hey it's a tremendous honor to be here thank you for having me Is is how best to come find you if people want to find you?

Go to where yeah check us out on Social media and come to our website and there's an email link there Say the website. Yeah, se grasslands org se grasslands org and on social. What are you? on Facebook and Instagram at Instagram.'s SEgrassland without the S. Alright. Yeah. I like grasslandia. Grasslandia is going to be cool man.

Yeah. And it's going to be cool for any research that you need for your book projects. So hit us up. Excellent. We're kind of moving westward on our book projects but we'll come back. Come back. We'll double back around. Come back man. What goes so far west will wind up. Excellent. We're kind of moving westward on our book projects, but we'll come back. Come back. We'll double back around. Come back, man. We'll go so far west, we'll wind up back east.

Yeah, right. Just do a whole thing on the south. Yeah. All right. Thanks for coming on, dude. Appreciate it. Appreciate you guys. Thank you.

Great. Hey American History Buffs, Hunting History history buffs, listen up we're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition titled The Mountain Men 1806-1840 we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions. We explain what started the Mountain Man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what

gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white-tailed deer skin trade which is titled the Long Hunters 1761 to 1775. So again, you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History, The Mountain Men 1806 to 1840 by Stephen Rinella