Speaker 1: This thing that was so rare and therefore valuable in
Speaker 1: Europe is here in abundance, and I want to claim
Speaker 1: and tame the wilderness as the advance of using that
Speaker 1: loaded terminology civilization. That's how that's how we civilized Europe,
Speaker 1: and that's what we're going to do here.
Speaker 2: Who knew that American wilderness was such a contested, loaded
Speaker 2: and difficult term to define? In this second episode, I'm
Speaker 2: still in search of understanding American ideals on wilderness and
Speaker 2: if in fact America's handling of wild lands is globally unique.
Speaker 2: But really, I'm on a personal journey to understand the
Speaker 2: genesis of my own ideas on wilderness. I thought they
Speaker 2: were my own, self generated, but as I learn about
Speaker 2: America's peculiar history, I'm seeing more and more that I'm
Speaker 2: a product of a culture. I've got the same crew
Speaker 2: plus one new guy on this episode. We've got authors
Speaker 2: doctor Sarah Dant, doctor Dan Flores, and Hal Herring, also
Speaker 2: author and Thorreau critic Stephen Ranella. But new to the
Speaker 2: crew is documentary filmmaker, Native Texan and mustang wrangler Ben Masters.
Speaker 2: The Bear Greece Academy of Backwoodsmanship Philosophy and Culture is
Speaker 2: back in session. I really doubt that you're gonna want
Speaker 2: to miss this one.
Speaker 3: The idea that American's energy was capable of literally taking
Speaker 3: the last barrel of ol out of the last piece
Speaker 3: of ground, well that was evident. This movement began to say,
Speaker 3: what if we didn't do that to every place?
Speaker 2: My name is Clay Knukem, and this is the Bear
Speaker 2: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
Speaker 2: for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
Speaker 2: story of Americans who lived their lives close to the
Speaker 2: land presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting
Speaker 2: and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as
Speaker 2: the places we explore.
Speaker 1: I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of
Speaker 1: the Spring, For instance, thinking that I have here the
Speaker 1: entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that
Speaker 1: it is but an imperfect copy that I possess, and
Speaker 1: have read that my ancestors have torn out many of
Speaker 1: the finest leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in
Speaker 1: many places. I should not like to think that some
Speaker 1: demigod had come before me and picked out some of
Speaker 1: the best of the stars. I wish to know an
Speaker 1: entire heaven and an entire earth.
Speaker 2: That was doctor Sarah Dant reading a quote from and
Speaker 2: I hate to bring him up so early, Henry David Thereaux.
Speaker 2: We're continuing on in our pursuit of defining what wilderness
Speaker 2: is and what it means to America.
Speaker 4: What is wilderness? And that's a loaded question. You know,
Speaker 4: there's the capital W wilderness, and then I think there's
Speaker 4: the the wilderness experience that a person can have, which
Speaker 4: is different, you know, for everybody, but wilderness to me.
Speaker 4: I think of my ideal wilderness, and that is the
Speaker 4: headwaters of the Yellowstone River in a tributary called the Thoroughfare,
Speaker 4: in a place that's called Hawkshrest. It's thirty miles from
Speaker 4: the nearest trailhead. The only way to get there is
Speaker 4: by foot or by horseback, and it's a place where
Speaker 4: there's no dams, there's no really sign of human civilization
Speaker 4: at all except for a handful of trail signs, and
Speaker 4: it embodies everything that I think of as wilderness. And
Speaker 4: that's where I get my wilderness experience, you know, very
Speaker 4: far from humanity, as far from humanity as you can
Speaker 4: get in the lower forty eight. And I feel that
Speaker 4: whenever I go to places like the Bob Marshall or
Speaker 4: the HeLa or the Teton Wilderness and the Thoroughfare and
Speaker 4: the Wilderness of No Return in Idaho, these classic big
Speaker 4: wilderness spots in the American West.
Speaker 2: This has been masters He's very well traveled in America's
Speaker 2: big Western wildernesses.
Speaker 4: So I think that the idea of what is wilderness
Speaker 4: and I've struggled with this what is that wilderness experience?
Speaker 4: But and I think every person is going to get
Speaker 4: that feeling in a different place. And for me, I
Speaker 4: get that experience when I do a two week pack
Speaker 4: trip into a deep wilderness. For other folks it could
Speaker 4: be something as simple as going for a weekend camping
Speaker 4: trip in a three thousand acre state park.
Speaker 2: Defining wilderness in terms of geography and defining the wilderness
Speaker 2: experience are very different things. We'll learn it gets even
Speaker 2: harder the further we go back in American history. Here's
Speaker 2: meat Eater Zone Stephen Ranella with some opening statements on
Speaker 2: defining wilderness.
Speaker 5: This is just how I use it, Okay.
Speaker 6: The Lee Metcalf Wilderness Area in Montana, the frank Church
Speaker 6: Wilderness Area in Idaho, the north slope of the Brooks
Speaker 6: Range in Alaska, portions of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, portions of
Speaker 6: the Mississippi Delta, some of the Sky Island mountain ranges
Speaker 6: of New Mexico and Arizona, portions of the San Juans
Speaker 6: in Colorado, the boundary waters of Minnesota. I could go
Speaker 6: on our wilderness landscapes in my mind because relative to
Speaker 6: everything else, they most closely resemble, relative to everything else,
Speaker 6: what this landscape looked like upon European contact. So it's
Speaker 6: the wildest stuff relative to everything else, it's the stuff
Speaker 6: that most closely resembles what it did at the time
Speaker 6: of European contact, considering my caveat that then it was inhabited, however,
Speaker 6: sparsely by Native people. And now it's not, and it's
Speaker 6: vulnerable because once you mess with it, it ceases to
Speaker 6: be wilderness anymore, and it becomes some other thing. And
Speaker 6: I worry about running out of itness.
Speaker 2: And what it means to America is an important endeavor,
Speaker 2: why you may ask, partly because of a little word
Speaker 2: often used in economics, it's used in farming, it's used
Speaker 2: in life, called scarcity. In our current times, wilderness is
Speaker 2: one of the Earth's scarcest resources, and scarcity dictates value.
Speaker 2: It's ironic, but scarcity is often a more powerful force
Speaker 2: than overflowing bushel baskets of plenty. Here's doctor dant on
Speaker 2: where some of our big wildernesses are.
Speaker 1: The big ones are, of course up in Alaska. The
Speaker 1: biggest one in the continental United States is in Death Valley,
Speaker 1: so it's not like we're all going to go camp there.
Speaker 1: And the second biggest one is the Frank Church River
Speaker 1: of No Return in Idaho. So there are lots of
Speaker 1: big wilderness places, but there are also a lot of
Speaker 1: small wilderness places. And there are wilderness places in the
Speaker 1: East as well as in the West. And that was
Speaker 1: again something Frank Church really worked hard on because he said,
Speaker 1: we should have these rare and valuable places, rare.
Speaker 2: And valuable, rare and valuable, large and small in the
Speaker 2: West and in the East. The largest wilderness in the
Speaker 2: lower forty eight is in Death Valley in California, in Nevada,
Speaker 2: and it spans over three point one million acres.
Speaker 5: That's news to me.
Speaker 2: In the last episode, doctor Dan Flores told us wilderness
Speaker 2: is an idea and a reality. It's these two things,
Speaker 2: the idea part being the abstract way we talk about
Speaker 2: places where humans don't live in natural ecosystems dominate how
Speaker 2: Herring told us that wilderness was a feeling the reality
Speaker 2: of wilderness. The second part is one hundred and eleven
Speaker 2: million acres designated as federal wilderness with the capitol W.
Speaker 2: That's roughly five percent of American soil, which is governed
Speaker 2: by the strictest land designation in America, only open to
Speaker 2: human foot in equine traffic. You can't use anything with wheels.
Speaker 2: You can't even use a hang glider. True story, it's
Speaker 2: on the little signs, and you can't use anything with
Speaker 2: a motor. But to understand modern wilderness, we've got to
Speaker 2: understand the macro scale journey of mankind. For this series,
Speaker 2: I've leaned heavily into a book written in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: seven by Roderick Nash called Wilderness in the American Mind.
Speaker 2: I nerded out hard on this book and loved it.
Speaker 2: Here's Doctor Flores with a critique on this past era
Speaker 2: of American ideals on wilderness. Remember the Wilderness Act was
Speaker 2: signed in the law in nineteen sixty four, so there
Speaker 2: was a lot of activity around this stuff in the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties when this book was written.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so, I mean, that's a fantastic book. It's also
Speaker 7: fifty years old. I mean. One of the things that
Speaker 7: we began to cope with about twenty five or thirty
Speaker 7: years ago was an emerging critique of not just Nash's
Speaker 7: story of wilderness, but a critique of what misperceptions lay
Speaker 7: at the foundation of what wilderness was in the American
Speaker 7: cultural story. Because the idea of wilderness in America, which
Speaker 7: begins very early with people coming out of Europe, who
Speaker 7: of course have lived in towns and villages and have
Speaker 7: done so for a thousand years, and in a part
Speaker 7: of the world in Western Europe where all the charismatic
Speaker 7: animals have long since been wiped out. I mean, they're
Speaker 7: hunting partridges and things. And of course ordinary people are
Speaker 7: kept out of the kings and the nobleman's forests because
Speaker 7: they preserve stags and deer hunting and so forth for
Speaker 7: the wealthy. So being introduced to a continent that struck
Speaker 7: them as being a wilderness continent, Virgin America was the
Speaker 7: term that was used so often. You know, the name
Speaker 7: given to Virginia for the Virgin Queen, and was also
Speaker 7: carried on to the continent itself as a virgin place.
Speaker 7: It was a misperception of what America was, because America
Speaker 7: was actually an anciently occupied place. There had been people
Speaker 7: here for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And
Speaker 7: I mean, as one of the geographers, William Denovan, who
Speaker 7: wrote a fantastic article in nineteen ninety one, put it.
Speaker 7: He called it the Pristine Myth was his. One of
Speaker 7: the things he said in that article was that it
Speaker 7: took Europeans and their presence in America three centuries before
Speaker 7: they had imposed the kind of landscape changes on the
Speaker 7: continent that they found from native people when they arrived.
Speaker 7: But for a couple of reasons, they just sort of
Speaker 7: ignored that. One of the reasons, of course, was that
Speaker 7: as soon as Europeans arrived, they're bringing these old World
Speaker 7: diseases with them to a population of people who have
Speaker 7: never been exposed to things like smallpox and influenza and
Speaker 7: cholera and so forth and so on. And almost immediately
Speaker 7: within the first fifty or seventy five years of European
Speaker 7: arrival in North America, the native population goes from nearly
Speaker 7: five million people in what is now the United States
Speaker 7: and Canada down to about nine hundred thousand people, and
Speaker 7: so suddenly the native population has shrunk by five hundred percent.
Speaker 7: And it not only allowed for an ecological release of
Speaker 7: wildlife all over America because there wasn't the same hunting
Speaker 7: pressure that had been imposed on animals that there had
Speaker 7: been for ten thousand years, but it also the relative
Speaker 7: scarcity of native people in many parts of North America
Speaker 7: sort of confused Europeans into thinking that they actually had
Speaker 7: inherited a place that didn't have any prior human history
Speaker 7: to it, and so it made them think from the
Speaker 7: very beginning. It made us think from the very beginning
Speaker 7: that we had snagged ourselves. You know, this original garden
Speaker 7: of Eden.
Speaker 5: Those are some deep waters.
Speaker 2: And I think that perspective is very important to consider
Speaker 2: when we think about wilderness and America. I've heard doctor
Speaker 2: Taylor Keene, a member of the Cherokee and Omaha tribes,
Speaker 2: say that upon first European contact with North America, there
Speaker 2: was no wilderness, but rather a great Native American civilization.
Speaker 2: And this is where this stuff in history gets contentious.
Speaker 2: I think every side looks back and wishes it could
Speaker 2: have been handled differently, but that's beyond the scope of
Speaker 2: this conversation. However, it's useful in framing the foundational definitions
Speaker 2: of wilderness because a fundamental tenet of our definition of
Speaker 2: wilderness is that people aren't on the landscape altering it
Speaker 2: in any way. That's kind of what wilderness is. And
Speaker 2: doctor Flores is saying that you'd have to go back
Speaker 2: so far in history to find this place humanless that
Speaker 2: it's almost pointless to think about it.
Speaker 5: I'll also say.
Speaker 2: That since the release of the first podcast, a friend
Speaker 2: of mine from the Chalktaw nation named Clay from Oklahoma,
Speaker 2: he told me that they do have a traditional word
Speaker 2: similar to the English word of wilderness. We had made
Speaker 2: the statement that there were no words in the Native
Speaker 2: American languages that were similar to the English word wilderness.
Speaker 2: I stand corrected. Here is Clay saying the word in
Speaker 2: his native chalk Taw language.
Speaker 3: You would say these canni hiaka wilderness.
Speaker 5: That is interesting.
Speaker 2: He also said that the central stories of the Chalktaw
Speaker 2: and Chickasaft people tell about how they came into an
Speaker 2: uninhabited land and settled there.
Speaker 5: In the southeast. Here's more from doctor.
Speaker 1: Dant, this idea that when people first come from somewhere else,
Speaker 1: not so we're not talking about indigenous people, we're talking
Speaker 1: about people coming from somewhere else. When they get to America.
Speaker 1: Part of what they see is all the things that
Speaker 1: are gone from where they've been in England, in France,
Speaker 1: in Germany, and they come to America and here are trees,
Speaker 1: and here wild deer, and here are here's this wealth
Speaker 1: of nature, and they think of it in those terms
Speaker 1: that this thing that was so rare and therefore valuable
Speaker 1: in Europe is here in abundance. And I want to
Speaker 1: claim and tame the wilderness as the advance of you know,
Speaker 1: using that loaded terminology civilization. That's how that's how we
Speaker 1: civilize Europe. And that's what we're going to do here.
Speaker 1: And the way you do that is to get big
Speaker 1: on nature. You cut down the trees, you drain the swamps,
Speaker 1: she harvest the animals. And that's a way of creating value,
Speaker 1: both because those things are rare in Europe and also
Speaker 1: because then you're converting these wild, chaotic landscapes into something
Speaker 1: that's ordered and knowable. But again, it has to do
Speaker 1: with those those ideas of value, what has value as
Speaker 1: what is rare, and once those wild places become rare,
Speaker 1: then we have that shift where romantics are thinking, you know,
Speaker 1: has some demigod come before me and harvested the best
Speaker 1: of the stars. I want to know an entire heaven
Speaker 1: and an entire.
Speaker 2: Earth, converting wild, chaotic landscapes into something ordered and knowable. Now,
Speaker 2: that's interesting. What's hard to debate is that as a species, globally,
Speaker 2: we've worked extremely hard to get away from the instability
Speaker 2: of wild lands. You remember the etymology of wilderness right
Speaker 2: self willed or uncontrollable land of wild beasts. Here's Stephen
Speaker 2: Ranella with an interesting observation about human nature.
Speaker 6: People who inhabit wilderness and again acknowledging that it's a
Speaker 6: somewhat squishy definition. People who historically have inhabited wilderness have
Speaker 6: jumped at every chance they could get to chip away
Speaker 6: at that wilderness. There are some exceptions, there are some
Speaker 6: rare exceptions, but for the most part, they've jumped at
Speaker 6: any chance. Our own Western European ancestors obviously jumped at
Speaker 6: it in a big way ten thousand years ago on
Speaker 6: this continent, native Americans were very receptive to firearms, were
Speaker 6: very receptive to steal axes. We're very receptive to different
Speaker 6: building materials, to different modes of transportation, to things that
Speaker 6: just would strike us as development, strike us as having
Speaker 6: the means to make a greater, faster, more profound impact
Speaker 6: on their environment. So yes, people that have. When I
Speaker 6: say people, I just mean like us, humans outside of
Speaker 6: our outside of all these differentiations we create, like Western Europeans,
Speaker 6: Native Americans, just people across the globe have marched willfully
Speaker 6: and readily in the direction of civilization. Very few except so,
Speaker 6: if I didn't have this civilized veneer, if I didn't
Speaker 6: have this this thing that I've just was born into,
Speaker 6: raised in civilization, and came out of that respecting wilderness. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I think it's fair to say that had I just
Speaker 6: been born of wilderness, I probably would be just like
Speaker 6: everybody else, and that I would grab at any chance
Speaker 6: to make it a little.
Speaker 5: Less hard to be there.
Speaker 6: I'll tell you this, Clay, if you and me were
Speaker 6: in that situation where we were indigenous hunter gatherers who
Speaker 6: for thousands of generations had been on the same patch
Speaker 6: of ground, and all of our implements All of our
Speaker 6: building tools, building equipment were just made of natural, naturally
Speaker 6: occurring things that we could find in a landscape, stone, bone, hide.
Speaker 6: And someone showed up and gave us a palette of
Speaker 6: ready mixed concrete, we would have laid that ready mixed
Speaker 6: concrete down in some fashion or another. We would have said,
Speaker 6: this stuff is amazing. Look at that made me a
Speaker 6: big old paved area, and here's where I'm gonna start cooking.
Speaker 6: It's hard, doesn't wash away, doesn't get muddy, and we
Speaker 6: would wish we had more. We would want another palette.
Speaker 6: We would quickly want another palette of ready mixed concrete.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I guarantee it, dude.
Speaker 6: But knowing what we know right now, me and you,
Speaker 6: knowing what we now know, we might say, uh oh, man,
Speaker 6: you get to touch it.
Speaker 7: You get that ready mixed.
Speaker 5: Concrete out of my face. I know we're.
Speaker 2: That's an interesting point and it's hard to argue with.
Speaker 2: There are exceptions, but in general, mankind has been moving
Speaker 2: away from wilderness lifestyles and to go back. In the
Speaker 2: Bear Grease Academy, the Shawnee leader to Kumsa also in
Speaker 2: the Bear Grease Hall of Fame, and his brother Tinsquadawa.
Speaker 2: The prophet preached that going back to the traditional Indian
Speaker 2: ways of life and getting rid of all influence of Europeans,
Speaker 2: that would be their salvation.
Speaker 5: That's what he preached.
Speaker 2: However, they were met with stiff resistance from within their
Speaker 2: own tribe and the majority of other tribes. And in
Speaker 2: modern times us trying to imagine ourselves not leaning into
Speaker 2: modernization is kind of a stretch. It would be like
Speaker 2: in modern times someone who chooses not to have a
Speaker 2: cell phone. I mean, it's almost unimaginable. Ninety nine percent
Speaker 2: of people can't pull that off. Nor could our ancestors
Speaker 2: resist modernization. That's not a perfect analogy, but I think
Speaker 2: it's helpful. We've covered some ground already, and if you remember,
Speaker 2: doctor Flores talked about the peculiarity of American history that
Speaker 2: gave us a union perspective on wilderness, which we've covered
Speaker 2: the first part, which was the European perception of the
Speaker 2: North American continent upon arrival. However, things shifted once wild
Speaker 2: lands became scarce, and this is one of the most
Speaker 2: interesting parts of this conversation. This will be on the
Speaker 2: Bar Greece Academy Quiz at the end of the series,
Speaker 2: we've got to learn about a census in eighteen ninety
Speaker 2: that shook the nation into an identity crisis. Doctor Dant
Speaker 2: is about to tell us about a pivotal moment in
Speaker 2: America's development of our modern wilderness doctrine.
Speaker 1: There was a census in eighteen ninety that no longer
Speaker 1: said there was a you know, and they used the
Speaker 1: word frontier, which is the I mean, it's the census
Speaker 1: says that frontier is two or fewer people per square mile.
Speaker 1: That's the definition of frontier. And there was no obvious
Speaker 1: demarcation between those lightly settled places and the more heavily
Speaker 1: settled places by the eighteen ninety censes. And for a
Speaker 1: lot of Americans in particular, that sort of provoked this
Speaker 1: crisis of identity. If that had been what had made
Speaker 1: us uniquely Americans. That's what Frederick Jackson, Turner and some
Speaker 1: others argue. You can hear the Darwinian idea in there,
Speaker 1: that we're evolving from Europeans into this unique American species,
Speaker 1: Homo americanas I like to call it. If that's gone,
Speaker 1: then how do we retain our uniqueness and our specialness.
Speaker 7: So it all gets amplified then at the end of
Speaker 7: the nineteenth century when Frederi Jackson Turner writes that famous
Speaker 7: essay of his The Frontier, the significant the Frontier in
Speaker 7: American History, where he argues that it's the interaction with
Speaker 7: wild lands that turn Europeans into to Americans, right, And
Speaker 7: that of course leads to when we get to the
Speaker 7: twentieth century and it looks like, you know, the census
Speaker 7: in eighteen ninety announces that the frontier is over. I mean,
Speaker 7: it throws some Americans into a kind of a crisis
Speaker 7: of identity that historians sometimes refer to as you know,
Speaker 7: a wilderness angsed our frontier anxiety because we didn't have it,
Speaker 7: because you don't have it anymore, and so how are
Speaker 7: we going to create more Americans if you don't have it?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: I mean, in an American had to have a frontier,
Speaker 2: had to have it. That's what I made us Americans
Speaker 2: that we had this frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner was like,
Speaker 2: the frontiers dead.
Speaker 7: The Frontier, well, he doesn't say necessarily it's dead, but
Speaker 7: he publishes this essay in the early eighteen nineties, and
Speaker 7: it happens to come at the same time that the
Speaker 7: US Census announces in the Census of eighteen ninety that
Speaker 7: the frontier has been so broken up by bodies of
Speaker 7: settlement that it's no longer possible to say that there
Speaker 7: is a frontier line in America. And that's what throws
Speaker 7: people into this frontier anxiety notion, and you know, I mean,
Speaker 7: out of it emerges things like the Boy Scouts, for example,
Speaker 7: where okay, we've got to go out and teach kids
Speaker 7: something about living in nature before they lose it an at.
Speaker 2: Well, when we've got to have this formulated organization to
Speaker 2: do this, because before Americans would have just intrinsically had
Speaker 2: these opportunities and known these things absolutely.
Speaker 7: Now we have to be a lot more proactive about
Speaker 7: setting up the possibility for kids in particular to be
Speaker 7: able to experience the wild.
Speaker 5: And it's one of the.
Speaker 7: Reasons that hunting the Booming Crucket Club at the time
Speaker 7: becomes most very important in conservation for example. In fact,
Speaker 7: in the lead up to the passage of the Wilderness
Speaker 7: Act of nineteen sixty four and the debate on it
Speaker 7: started in the late nineteen fifties, supposedly Frederick Jackson Turner's
Speaker 7: essay The Significance of the frontier in American history was
Speaker 7: mentioned in testimony more than two hundred times. So the
Speaker 7: people who passed the Wilderness.
Speaker 5: Act were reaching back that far.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and they were. What they were saying is that
Speaker 7: we need wilderness because this is how America and Americans
Speaker 7: are created.
Speaker 2: Americans were created by interaction with wild lands. Now, that's interesting.
Speaker 2: Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis is important.
Speaker 5: It's kind of wild.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure that it's true, but this is how
Speaker 2: national identity is formed. This pioneering spirit, independent self reliance
Speaker 2: are all very American things applied in modern times in
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of areas of life outside of land management.
Speaker 2: Hanging in my home for the last fifteen years is
Speaker 2: a framed quote from Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac. It says, quote,
Speaker 2: to the laborer in the sweat of his labor, the
Speaker 2: raw stuff on his anvil is an adversary to be conquered.
Speaker 2: So was wilderness and adversary to the pioneer. But to
Speaker 2: the laborer, in repose able for the moment to cast
Speaker 2: a philosophical eye on his world, that same raw stuff
Speaker 2: is something to be loved and cherished because it gives
Speaker 2: definition and meaning to his life.
Speaker 5: End of quote.
Speaker 2: Do y'all remember the infamous question I asked Steve Ranella
Speaker 2: about how much being an American impacted his way of
Speaker 2: thinking about wilderness. As I learned this deep history, It's
Speaker 2: as clear as a bell to me that I've been
Speaker 2: influenced by my culture. What the things hanging on your
Speaker 2: walls celebrate is a window into your culture. And I
Speaker 2: didn't even know about Fjt's frontier thesis when.
Speaker 5: I hung Aldo's quote on my wall.
Speaker 2: I'm sure y'all remember Alabama's son wild Land's author Hal Herring.
Speaker 2: Here's how on the wimpification of America and FJ.
Speaker 3: Turner, Some of the arguments made for conserving the last
Speaker 3: of the wilderness were coming from Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier
Speaker 3: hypothesis or frontier theory that what defined the American spirit
Speaker 3: was the adversity and the self reliance required by the
Speaker 3: frontier or the wilderness, and people like Teddy Roosevelt particularly
Speaker 3: wrote about this. They were worried about kind of the
Speaker 3: wimplification of Americans, you know, coddled by civilization, and they
Speaker 3: wanted to make sure that there were places where people
Speaker 3: could still test themselves against nature, you know, raw and unaltered,
Speaker 3: and so there's a lot of currents here.
Speaker 2: I want to say wimpification one more time. Maybe the
Speaker 2: algorithm will pick it up and direct people here who
Speaker 2: are looking for a cure. I asked, how for more
Speaker 2: about American identity being wrapped around wilderness.
Speaker 5: Here's an interesting sequence.
Speaker 3: In the United States. The reason that we kind of
Speaker 3: have this designated wilderness. How we got to that came
Speaker 3: from the earliest days of the frontier, when say, the
Speaker 3: buffalo were gone eighteen seventy six seventy seven in Miles City, Montana.
Speaker 3: People were looking for the last of the commercially huntable buffalo,
Speaker 3: right and the Civil War had shown Americans the true
Speaker 3: bloodiness of our national experiment. So eighteen sixty seven, you're
Speaker 3: seeing like a lot of the plains Indian wars starting,
Speaker 3: and you're having all these people back east. And I
Speaker 3: don't want to say this in a derogatory way, but
Speaker 3: people back east are realizing that the frontier is being
Speaker 3: pushed so hard, so fast, that there may be absolutely
Speaker 3: nothing left of that if we don't make some choices.
Speaker 3: And these are people who are more insulated from it.
Speaker 3: Although they may might make expeditions. But one of the
Speaker 3: things so you're listening to I always talk about John
Speaker 3: Muir and Gifford Pinchot as these two dynamos that are
Speaker 3: working against each other and mirror. John Muir was completely
Speaker 3: immersed in the beauty of solitude and the grandeur of
Speaker 3: untrammeled spaces in wilderness, whereas Gifford Pinchot was a man
Speaker 3: who believed in managing landscapes and getting the most out
Speaker 3: of them with sustainable yield. Right, And those two dynamos
Speaker 3: are kind of like that a picture of America. We
Speaker 3: have these hugely contradictory notions at all times, and I
Speaker 3: always like to talk about it like two turbines. It's
Speaker 3: two magnets and a turbine, and they're spinning, and they're
Speaker 3: making this electricity through their contradictions. And it's part of
Speaker 3: what I love about our country the most is there's
Speaker 3: all these contradictory ideas that are spinning at the same time.
Speaker 3: In our case here, it was the kind of preservation
Speaker 3: of the wilderness versus the absolute exploitation that people were
Speaker 3: witnessing at that time. Right the eastern forests were going
Speaker 3: down like wheat in front of a combine. The white
Speaker 3: Pines were going down and cleared to Michigan at that point,
Speaker 3: I think even into Minnesota. And so the idea that
Speaker 3: American's energy was capable of literally taking the last barrel
Speaker 3: of oil out of the last piece of ground, well,
Speaker 3: that was evident. This movement began to say, what if
Speaker 3: we didn't do that to every place?
Speaker 2: What if we didn't do that to every place? Sometimes
Speaker 2: it's shocking to me that we slowed down enough to
Speaker 2: ask that question. I really like How's talk of America's contradictions.
Speaker 2: We wiped out the wilderness, and then right at the end,
Speaker 2: right when we were about to lose it all, we
Speaker 2: decided to save some of them. I'm going to dig
Speaker 2: in with how and I'm still trying to quantify if
Speaker 2: America's wilderness doctrine is unique.
Speaker 5: Here he brings up a unique point.
Speaker 3: What we have in America with our system of wilderness land.
Speaker 3: It's unique in the world because it was a choice
Speaker 3: that the American people, through Congress and everything made So
Speaker 3: if you go, I've been in places in Mexico that
Speaker 3: I would be wilderness. They are wilderness quality lands, as
Speaker 3: they say, but a lot of the things that are
Speaker 3: left in the world. I think of parts of the Amazon,
Speaker 3: and I've been in the Amazon, but I've been not
Speaker 3: into the farthest backcountry. Those are only there because people
Speaker 3: lacked the means to get at them. You'd think of
Speaker 3: some of the Himalayas or Kazakhstan. You know, those are
Speaker 3: places you couldn't build roads into, right. They weren't looking
Speaker 3: for anything there, Whereas in the United States after the Frontier,
Speaker 3: we found ourselves capable of getting everywhere, right, Like you
Speaker 3: look at the system of roads in the say Shoshone
Speaker 3: National Forest, or you look at how people were using
Speaker 3: the Sierras of California. We could get everywhere, and we
Speaker 3: were getting everywhere, and so the American system. And I
Speaker 3: don't know about the largeness of it, the size of it,
Speaker 3: say Vsavis what's in Russia and Siberian and the Taiga.
Speaker 3: But I think what's the difference here is in Ameria
Speaker 3: was a choice to have it.
Speaker 2: The fact that we chose to designate and protect wilderness,
Speaker 2: especially in the early days, was unique globally, and I
Speaker 2: think that's really important. I'd say today though, more lands
Speaker 2: globally are being protected on purpose, but in many parts
Speaker 2: of the world, the remaining wilderness was a byproduct of
Speaker 2: not being able to get to it, and I do
Speaker 2: think that intent is important. It's also only fair to
Speaker 2: bring up that wilderness preservation is a direct result of
Speaker 2: financial prosperity. We had the luxury of being able to
Speaker 2: preserve wilderness. Sometimes in other parts of life, you wonder
Speaker 2: how somebody is able to do something so good, and
Speaker 2: often it's simply an issue of the financial ability to
Speaker 2: pull it off. If seventy percent of us didn't have
Speaker 2: jobs and we couldn't feed our families, perhaps our ideas
Speaker 2: on setting aside wilderness would be much different. Front here's
Speaker 2: how with an interesting thought about prosperity and wilderness as
Speaker 2: a status symbol.
Speaker 3: Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico was a leader
Speaker 3: of the conservation movement in the eighty eight Congress, and
Speaker 3: during the Wilderness hearings, he said, wilderness is an anchor
Speaker 3: to windward. Knowing it is there, we can also know
Speaker 3: that we are still a rich nation, tending our resources
Speaker 3: as we should. We're not a people in despair searching
Speaker 3: every last nook and cranny of our land for a
Speaker 3: board of lumber, a barrel of all a blade of
Speaker 3: grass or a tank of water. And so what I
Speaker 3: think that Senator Anderson meant right there was exactly what
Speaker 3: they were talking about in eighteen sixty seven sixty eight.
Speaker 3: He was talking about making a choice, that we were
Speaker 3: the kind of people who could make a choice. Yes,
Speaker 3: we could destroy this, but we choose not to because
Speaker 3: we don't have to sack every last corner for every
Speaker 3: last piece of grass.
Speaker 5: That was good.
Speaker 2: Here's Ben Masters on America's uniqueness with wilderness, and hey,
Speaker 2: my first intro to Ben was through his twenty fifteen
Speaker 2: film called Unbranded, where he and someboddies rode mustangs from
Speaker 2: Mexico to Canada through the Rocky Mountains. It was a
Speaker 2: really cool film. I'm sure he's done a bunch of
Speaker 2: other stuff since then that he's way more proud of.
Speaker 5: But here's Ben.
Speaker 4: I think that our American ideals of wilderness, of preserving
Speaker 4: places that should be untouched by humankind isn't unique to
Speaker 4: the United States. But I do think that it is
Speaker 4: truly remarkable that the United States was the first country
Speaker 4: to in policy and within government, value that. I think
Speaker 4: that that should be something that should be recognized and treasured.
Speaker 5: I feel like there's this.
Speaker 4: Sense within our modern day society that you know, the
Speaker 4: United States is a country that you know, is very materialistic,
Speaker 4: that is very consumer driven, that really only cares about
Speaker 4: the economy. But in reality, the fact is that we
Speaker 4: have we kind of set the stage and set the
Speaker 4: precedent for a lot of governments to emulate around the
Speaker 4: world of the value of conserving wilderness.
Speaker 2: To bring us further along on this reality of wilderness
Speaker 2: actual geography. On March first, eighteen seventy two, the federal
Speaker 2: government bought two million acres in northwest Wyoming for forty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars. It was America's and the world's first large
Speaker 2: scale preservation of wilderness, and they call the Little Track
Speaker 2: of Land Yellowstone National Park. I think this was a
Speaker 2: landmark moment in human history. The trajectory of Homo sapiens
Speaker 2: up until very near this point, had been fighting to
Speaker 2: get out of the wilderness, but at this tipping point
Speaker 2: we reached back to save some of it. Alanis Morset
Speaker 2: should have added a fourth verse to her nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: six hit song Ironic about the irony of the preservation
Speaker 2: of a wilderness.
Speaker 5: I can't believe I'm about to do this for.
Speaker 2: Twenty thousand years, he fought against the wild too many variables.
Speaker 2: To keep his family safe and fed, he cut down
Speaker 2: the trees, he planted grains with his wife. Then in
Speaker 2: eighteen seventy two, we bought two million acres out right,
Speaker 2: isn't it ironic?
Speaker 5: Don't you think?
Speaker 2: I can't believe that made final cut, cut that out,
Speaker 2: fill back on track and to understand more of the
Speaker 2: general timeline. And I really hate to do it, but
Speaker 2: we've got to bring back up Henry David Thereau again.
Speaker 2: But in the eighteen fifties he was credited as one
Speaker 2: of the first voices calling for practical action to preserve
Speaker 2: wilderness in America. He believed that each town should have
Speaker 2: a primitive forest from five hundred to one thousand acres
Speaker 2: where people could just go. He also believed in this
Speaker 2: larger scale preservation of wilderness and that that would be
Speaker 2: an intellectual reservoir and nourishment for civilized man. And as
Speaker 2: far as I can find, Arkansas's Hot Springs is the
Speaker 2: oldest land set aside in America as what they had
Speaker 2: originally called a national reserve, and that was done in
Speaker 2: eighteen thirty two. Later that would become a national park.
Speaker 2: So the first preservation of land started in eighteen thirty two.
Speaker 2: Was a recipient of this message in the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 2: and then it wasn't until eighteen seventy two that the
Speaker 2: first national park, Yellowstone, was actually preserved. But in case
Speaker 2: we're getting too proud of our American wilderness efforts, here's
Speaker 2: how bringing us back down to earth. Remember these two
Speaker 2: words rock and ice.
Speaker 3: I mean, American wilderness is similar to wilderness in other
Speaker 3: parts of the world because it's like, it's not the
Speaker 3: rich grasslands, you know, it's it was still lands that
Speaker 3: you could not make them pay like you couldn't. You
Speaker 3: couldn't if there's I tell you, Nevada would have all
Speaker 3: kinds of wilderness, but it has gold. Right, There would
Speaker 3: be all kinds of places in America that would be
Speaker 3: kind of wilderness, but there was something there that you
Speaker 3: could make pay. And so those are not wilderness, Like
Speaker 3: there's no wilderness in Iowa because it's all black dirt.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: Wilderness areas share something in common with the rest of
Speaker 3: the world in that they were the last places people
Speaker 3: could go and find something that would you know, that
Speaker 3: would pay early, like nineteen sixties fifties wilderness folks in
Speaker 3: the United States, they were kind of admitting that this
Speaker 3: every wilderness bill was a rock and ice bill. They
Speaker 3: were saying, well, all the wildernesses that we got are
Speaker 3: basically lands that you can't do anything with anyway, and
Speaker 3: so it was kind of like defacto wilderness because you'd
Speaker 3: have to get a climbing rope, you know, and hardware
Speaker 3: to get up there. That's not totally true, and especially
Speaker 3: not true like in the Bob Marshall, which encloses a
Speaker 3: large grassland system in the upper North Fork of the
Speaker 3: Sun River. So there is grass in there, and that
Speaker 3: was made it very controversial because people said, well, there's
Speaker 3: grass in there, I want to keep running the thousands
Speaker 3: and thousands of sheep in there. And so we have
Speaker 3: mostly set aside as wilderness the places we couldn't do
Speaker 3: anything else with.
Speaker 5: That's true.
Speaker 2: Shucks, man, that takes some of the nobility out of
Speaker 2: the story of preserving wilderness. But I guess that doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: Maybe nobility in matters like this is a myth. Anyway,
Speaker 2: here's another mic dropper pragmatism.
Speaker 3: So so the other thing here, I don't want to
Speaker 3: miss this because there is an enormous pragmatism in American
Speaker 3: wilderness that was not in other countries. Okay, So the
Speaker 3: Bob Marshall Wilderness, which is one I'm most familiar with,
Speaker 3: it was set aside very early because it is the
Speaker 3: headwaters of the Sun River, and the Sun River is
Speaker 3: the Gibson Dam project, which is a huge irrigation project
Speaker 3: on the Fairfield Greenfield Bench here where I live. And
Speaker 3: so the Bob Marshall Wilderness owes its exists things to
Speaker 3: the need for irrigation water down below, and if you
Speaker 3: go through the American West, the same thing applies in
Speaker 3: almost every wilderness area that I know of. Is was
Speaker 3: set aside. Originally the idea was to protect some kind
Speaker 3: of headwaters. Sixty two percent of all the available water
Speaker 3: in the American West originates on federal public land, and
Speaker 3: that is not a mistake.
Speaker 2: Pragmatism is a good word for taking the romance and
Speaker 2: fun right out of the story.
Speaker 5: Nah, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2: It actually makes American wilderness a tighter story and more understandable.
Speaker 2: There are multiple reasons these lands were preserved, and multiple
Speaker 2: reasons why people celebrate their preservation today. I think all
Speaker 2: of this stuff is fascinating and it's helping me unravel
Speaker 2: and dec who we are as Americans. And oh, did
Speaker 2: I just hear the three point thirty bell ring? Sounds
Speaker 2: like the Bear Grease Academy is out for this session,
Speaker 2: but we've got one more session on wilderness and it
Speaker 2: won't be easy. It turns out there are even more
Speaker 2: problems and challenges ahead. I can't thank you enough for
Speaker 2: listening to bear Grease at First Light. We just launched
Speaker 2: our new CIRCA Big Game Western Hunting pattern CAMO. I've
Speaker 2: worn it extensively out west and it's good stuff. Brent
Speaker 2: and I will be at the Black Bear Bonanza on
Speaker 2: March ninth in Bentonville, Arkansas. We hope to see you there,
Speaker 2: and I look forward to talking with everyone on the
Speaker 2: Bear Grease Render next week