The New Yorker Radio Hour - Into the Woods with Scott Carrier

Episode Date: September 25, 2018

After a thirty-year lobbying effort, Congress designated the Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail in 2009. Unlike the well-known Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail, the P.N.T. runs east-west, trekking twelve hundred miles across multiple mountain ranges and pristine wilderness to connect the Continental Divide with the Pacific Ocean. For hiking advocates, it’ provides a singular opportunity to commune with the unspoiled natural world. For critics, like the writer Rick Bass, the P.N.T. is a reckless intrusion of dangerous creatures—people—into an ecologically sensitive grizzly-bear habitat in the Yaak Valley of Montana. Grizzlies are often the losers in encounters with humans, and their population in the Yaak Valley is estimated to be twenty-five bears, or even fewer. For the trail’s chief advocate, Ron Strickland, the critics’ point of view is mere selfishness: if Bass himself can live in the Yaak Valley, writing about the glory of this extraordinary landscape, why shouldn’t others have the chance to walk through? The producer Scott Carrier, who reported on this conflict from Montana, sees a tragic dimension to it: when it comes to nature, we seem fated to kill that which we love.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In a secluded valley in Montana, a place of deep forests and few roads and a population of grizzly bears, there's a conflict over a hiking trail. Now, often in stories like this, we find the interests of loggers or developers

or ski resorts or dam builders at odds with the view of environmentalists. But in the Yack Valley, the Pacific Northwest Trail pits nature lovers against nature lovers. Scott Carrier, the producer of the podcast,

Home of the Brave, recently drove up to the Yack Valley to try to understand just what's going on. In America, we have 11 national scenic trails for long-distance hikes through areas of the highest scenic quality.

The Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail are the best known, both over 2,000 miles long. National Scenic Trails are like national parks in that they're designated by Congress and managed by the National Park Service and the National Forest Service.

Anybody in the country can go there for a short walk and a picnic or you can start walking and keep walking for four to six months until you get to the end of the trail. One of our newest National Scenic Trails designated by Congress in 2009, is the Pacific Northwest Trail, the PNT. It's 1,200 miles long, starting on the continental divide

in Glacier National Park, Montana, just a few miles south of Canada, and running west, roughly parallel with the Canadian border to the Pacific Ocean in Olympic National Park at the northwest corner of Washington. It's an arduous route, crossing 12 separate mountain ranges.

You go up over a mountain range and then down across a river Valley, then up over a mountain range and down across a river valley, over and over, like a theta wave, 1,000 miles long. It takes three to four months to complete, and much of that time, about 30 percent, you're walking through grizzly bear habitat. This year, the first hiker threw on the trail was Justin Smith, 22 years old. I met him at the end of June in the Yacht Valley, 180 miles into the hike. How would you summarize the trip so far?

Miserably exciting. Painstaking, guinea pigging. It can get pretty crazy out there, especially just right now. There's a lot of timber down, and there's a ton of snow, probably, you know, 12, 15 foot snow banks in some places. It can sink right through and twist an ankle pretty easy, I'd say. Are you worried about the grizzly bears? Well, I've done a lot of backpacking in bear areas before,

and I carried two cans of bear spray along the trail. I was in a heavily wooded area, and maybe 20 or 30 yards out, I heard a growl. I can't really specifically say if it was a grizzly bear, though. I wish I could, but it could have been a moose. It could have been a wolf. It could have been a cougar. It may seem kind of crazy to go hiking in a place where you can be mauled by a wolf or a mountain lion or be killed and eaten by a grizzly bear.

Grizzly bears are dangerous, but it turns out people are even more dangerous to them. You know, an uncontested fact of grizzly bear biology is that human beings are the number one threat to grizzly bears. And that could be through habituating them to food sources, where they then will come into a camp and potentially attack a hiker. Natalie Dawson is a wildlife biologist. If a bear gets in a conflict with a human, it usually means that that bear is removed. You know, people like to say, well, we can just relocate bears,

but the reality is when you relocate a bear, in many cases, you give it a death sentence because you put it into a new place where it doesn't have a home range and it doesn't know where any food resources are. And so what more often happens is the bears is killed. because of the interaction with humans. Grizzly bears used to occupy most of the western half of the lower 48, one continuous population from Nebraska to California, from Canada to Mexico.

Now they live on just 3% of that land in discrete, isolated populations. For example, the PNT begins in Glacier National Park, where there's a population of 700 grizzlies, which is considered to be a healthy population for that area. But just 180 miles west of glacier in the Yak Mountains where I met the hiker Justin Schmidt, the population of grizzly bears is close to extinction. Grizzly bears are hanging on by a thread, as many people would say here in northwestern Montana. There's less than 25 bears most likely in this area if we consider bears on both the Montana and the Canada side.

It's not a lot of bears. The yak grizzlies are smaller and more secretive than other grizzly bears, preferring to live in the forest rather than up high out in the open above tree line. The forests in the yak were extensively logged up to the 1990s. Now the area feels remote beyond the reach of civilization. You get up high in a place and you look around and you see no roads, no towns, no lights, no infrastructure, no cell phone towers. and so it's spectacular in that sense. And then with my added lens of looking at things as a wildlife biologist,

what I see is a lot of forest with different species and big creek valleys and river valleys that allow for those animals to move from place to place. So it's a really special part of Montana that way. The things that make it good for bears are exactly what brings people to. the wilderness in our boots and our backpacks and our fleece, people like Ron Strickland, who thought up the Pacific Northwest Trail in the first place.

That's correct. I thought up the idea in 1970, almost 50 years ago. Strickland, now 75 years old, is tall and lean, young at heart. We went for a walk along a section of the P&T where it meets the Puget Sound, north of Seattle, and he still has some spring left in his knees. I graduated from Georgetown in 65 and I skipped my graduation to go with some buddies a Iranian fellow and a Japanese

classmate to go to Great Smoky Mountains National Park to through hike the AT in the park The Appalachian Trail. And oh God, I fell in love with that. Right out of college. Yeah. Even in college I was a member of the Potomacampalachian Trail Club

and they had a group called the Bushwackers and then go every weekend. You get a badge for Bushwack? No, there were no badges. It was just pleasure, kind of weird pleasure. Strickland kept hiking farther and farther distances. He went to graduate school and wrote his PhD dissertation on how Congress adds new areas to the national wilderness system.

At that time, America had two... famous long-distance trails, the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail. And I had the great desire to go east and west instead of north and south. And people basically didn't believe that we could do this, that we could have a long-distance Pacific Northwest Trail. So we had to prove it to people that we could do it. And we felt strongly that people seeing this would, oh look, here's some people now.

Here are all those people over there. Look at this nice family, little kids and their dog. This is what America should be, really. Not the news we hear every day about some kind of divisions. I'll tell you, this family doing this, that's my idea of America. And I have provided that for them. Not just me, too. I shouldn't say that.

me and all the volunteers of the Pacific Northwest Trail Association. So I think when I'm out here, it's romantic and something everybody should have an opportunity to share. And I think we need more romance in life. When Strickland said this, I thought maybe he was using the wrong word, because I usually think of romance as falling in love with another person, but Strickland meant it as falling in love with nature. or the beauty of nature. It's an idea that comes from philosophical romanticism,

Rousseau and Kant, William Blake, and here in America, Emerson, and Thoreau. It's the idea that civilization, industrialization, ultimately leads us astray and leaves us feeling lost and alone, and that the way to find meaning and purpose in our lives is to go out and have intense emotional experiences in nature, like maybe coming face to face with a grizzly bear. This philosophy was a large part of the impetus

behind the modern environmental movement that began in the 1960s. There was also another philosophy involved in the early environmental movement, one where nature does not exist for the purpose of our enlightenment. It's called the land ethic, first proposed by Aldo Leopold in 1949

in his San County Ammanac. And it says, human beings are but members of a greater biotic community, that the air, the water, the soil, and all the plants and animals have rights of their own. Therefore, we need to extend our system of ethics to include other species and whole ecosystems. That's why it's called the land ethic. Perhaps the best example of the land ethic in action is the Endangered Species Act, which passed nearly unanimously in 1973 and now protects over 1,600,000, species of animals and plants in the U.S., including the grizzly bear.

So there are some environmentalists who don't buy into Strickland's romantic notion of the PNT. They see the land from the perspective of the bear, and that perspective is that humans are dangerous. You could put Natalie Dawson in this camp. And so it's the question of do we use or not use what's called the precautionary principle, which is this idea that why do we have to illustrate that there is harm being done if we know that the potential for harm exists, wouldn't we want to take the least harmful path in the first place?

You'd think this question would have been asked before Congress designated the PNT in 2009, and in fact it was way back in 1978. Ron Strickland officially proposed the idea to Congress in that year, and Congress thought it was a good idea. But according to law, they had to study the environmental effects of the trail. So they did an environmental impact statement, and this took two years to complete, and in the end the conclusion was that the trail was unnecessary, too costly,

and would pose a serious threat to the survivability of the yak grizzlies. Congress said no to Ron Strickland's romantic dream. But Strickland did not stop trying to get the trail approved. He'd learned from hiking how to suffer through hardship and defeat. Ron Strickland was a man who thrived on bushwhacking. So he kept going, working with local groups and lobbying members of Congress year after year, until 2009 when he was able to get a proposal attached to an omnibus land bill, and this time it passed, except it passed without any further environmental review.

Nobody stopped to ask if the trail was still a thrifted. threat to the yak grizzlies, and this, according to Rick Bass, was illegal. You can't make those kinds of decisions without an environmental analysis and an environmental impact statement. That's just a code of law. That's the law. And it's legal to have midnight riders on last-minute pieces of legislation. What's done is done, but that doesn't make it right ecologically. It doesn't mean that it's not violating the Endangered Species Act. Rick Bass is a prolific writer and environmental activist who lives in the Yak Mountains. He has a house deep in the woods where he's produced four novels, four novellas,

five collections of short stories, 16 non-fiction books, and maybe a thousand letters to Congress asking for protection of the yak grizzlies. First, protection from logging encroachments in the 80s and 90s, and lately protection from the number of hikers that may be coming through the Yak Mountains on the P&T. We are standing knee-deep in the midst of an explosion of industrial recreation. I don't judge industrial recreationalist. I am one.

We all are. You know, we have gear. We have boots. We walk in the woods. But we have to be responsible. We have to be accountable. You can't maximize outdoor recreation potential without costing something else. America is no longer about maxim.

We need to learn humility. We need to learn accountability. We need to learn responsibility. We need to know that there is more to life than maximizing outdoor recreation potential. My dog in the fight is grizzly bears. We have maybe 20 left in the valley. Between 19 and 25 is the most accurate estimate.

A very small population. And any conservation biologist will tell you when a population gets that low, it's really, really, really hard to recover it. Why do you care about grizzly bears? Why are you putting so much on the line for them? They make me feel alive, you know, in a world of increasing detachment and distraction and benumbedness.

When you go out in the woods where there are grizzly bears, you're humbled, you're respectful, you're engaged, all of which to say you're the best part of being alive. Ron Strickland believes Rick Bass is just being selfish. We're not harming the bears, and I'm very much in favor of grizzly bears and wildlife in general, but the trouble always had to do with Rick Bass, and Rick Bass didn't come into the country until 87. You can see that in his book, Winter. It's in the beginning. He says he had been in Mississippi, in Texas.

He was from Texas, and he came into the country with his girlfriend, and I think the autumn of 87. And I think the feeling of anybody who goes there is, whoa, I've discovered something really great. And I'd like to keep this the way it always was when I first arrived. And he always says that there was this guy back east who drew a line on a map,

and he'd never been in the area, and that he's responsible for this. disastrous proposed trail. Meaning you. He always says that. That's always his. Does that hurt your feelings? At first I thought it was funny

because it's so not true. I was there work on this project well before he came. And I think my project is less nimbie. my pride is not nimbie at all I don't even live there you know I think of him

I think of him as a nimbie person you know I actually like Rick Bass I've known him for you so I actually like him but the irony of his situation is I doubt if he admits it is that he writes books

articles all the time always new books and articles about the act this attracts a lot of people. People who read his books. People who read his books and articles. Yeah, no, I mean, for sure my writing has, I know a handful of individuals who've moved here, having learned about this place because of my writing, and I feel like they're pretty good neighbors. And so I accept that charge, you know, and own responsibility for that handful of people,

and for more than a handful of people who come and visit, you know, get a burger or a beer and then head on. And that was a calculated risk. I was aware of the risk when I started naming this place and writing about it and celebrating it and defending it. Being quiet about this place is what had led to it being so savagely mismanaged in the past decades during the Timber Wars. And being quiet about it sure was not helping. So this is not about me and my backyard or my front. front yard or my side yard, you know, my million acre side yard. This is about a population of an incredibly endangered species. It's second slowest reproductive rate in North America, of which we have roughly 20 left. I mean, it's like Noah's Ark. It's biblical. Like, I want somebody to tell me,

how many more can we lose. I want to hear somebody say, we can lose one, we can lose two, we can lose three, we can lose four, we can lose five, and the Pacific Northwest Trail is worth it. I want to hear somebody tell me that, and I haven't heard anybody tell me. Rick Bass's solution to the problem is a compromise. Instead of getting rid of the trail altogether, why not make a detour around the Yak Mountains? There's a route first proposed in 1978 during the initial environmental study, a route that bypasses the Yak by following the Kootenai River to the south. Unfortunately, there's a highway running along the river and a busy railroad track pretty much the whole way.

And National Scenic Trails, by definition, do not follow highways and railroad tracks. Charlie Carpenter is president of the Pacific Northwest Trail Association. In our view, the proposed route doesn't meet the standards for a National Scenic Trail. If it's not on the road, it's close enough to the road that you, are hearing the road. In northern Montana, a wilderness or near wilderness experience is going to put you in grizzly habitat.

The trail starts in Glacier National Park. It's absolutely grizzly habitat. Grizzlies live in the mountains here. When you go in the mountains, you're going in grizzly habitat. This is true. Grizzly bears live on public land. Anybody in the country can go there anytime. The question is,

How many people are too many people? Last year, 65 people through hike the PNT, which is not that many compared to the thousand that completed the Appalachian Trail. But then all it takes is one hiker with Oreo cookies or a picnic basket. I'm not saying hikers carry picnic baskets, but let's say patte or a tin of caviar. Seriously, you just never know how a grizzly bear will react.

Perhaps the person who best understands these questions is the wildlife biologist who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Libby, Montana. His job is to make sure the grizzly bears in the yak and neighboring cabinet mountains don't become extinct. My name is Wayne Kaysworm. I work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and I've been here since 1983 working on grizzly bears. As the fishing wildlife expert on this, the job is to recover the bears,

what do you think about the Pacific Northwest Trail going through that area? Well, you know, it's not so much the trail. It is largely the people and the numbers of people associated with the trail. And, you know, I don't have a good way of predicting exactly how many people are going to use the trail. But where we have large numbers of people, We have experienced problems in the past related to conflicts with bears. What do you think is too many people? I can't even put a number on it.

It's not a simple issue here, but that's another part of the puzzle. Unfortunately, the big picture to me is there are no easy choices in this particular case. I mean, there are going to be impacts from the location of this trail wherever it goes. If you get that many people walking through grizzly bear habitat, there are going to be some downsides to it. Do you have an idea that you think might work? Well, actually, I don't. You know, and I suppose if it were up to me and I only had bears to consider in the situation, I might choose not to have the trail at all, but I'm not sure that that's a possibility in this particular case.

Congress has already designated it. Yeah. And so what do I do? I can't, unless Congress changes its mind, I think in a way we're kind of stuck with it. It's up to Congress to decide the fate of the Pacific Northwest Trail. Either keep it as it is or reroute the trail around the Yak Mountains or just get rid of it altogether.

But I think Congress is busy with other issues these days. So it's likely the argument will end up in federal court where it'll be a fight between the National Trails Act of 1968, which creates long-distance scenic trails like the PNT, versus the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which demands the highest protection for grizzly bears. This is the new face or fate of environmentalism. We create and protect public lands where we can go fall in love

with the beauty of nature and wildness, but then just by being there, we end up killing it. We kill the thing we love. Maybe not everywhere. Maybe not yet. We still have wild and beautiful places. Just maybe sometimes it's better not to go there at all. That was Scott Carrier, and he reported from the Yak Valley of Montana.

That's our show for the week. I hope you enjoyed it. Keep in touch with us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. I'm David Remnick. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a good thing. co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards

with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Corby, Jill Duboff, Calalia, Karen Fralman, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Emily Mann. Scott Carrier's story was produced with help from Anne Milliken. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.

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