WEBVTT - Ep. 190: American Wilderness - Rock and Ice (Part 2) 0:00:05.480 --> 0:00:10.040 This thing that was so rare and therefore valuable in 0:00:10.160 --> 0:00:14.640 Europe is here in abundance, and I want to claim 0:00:14.800 --> 0:00:19.200 and tame the wilderness as the advance of using that 0:00:19.320 --> 0:00:24.200 loaded terminology civilization. That's how that's how we civilized Europe, 0:00:24.600 --> 0:00:26.400 and that's what we're going to do here. 0:00:27.600 --> 0:00:31.400 Who knew that American wilderness was such a contested, loaded 0:00:31.560 --> 0:00:35.440 and difficult term to define? In this second episode, I'm 0:00:35.479 --> 0:00:39.760 still in search of understanding American ideals on wilderness and 0:00:39.840 --> 0:00:44.519 if in fact America's handling of wild lands is globally unique. 0:00:45.000 --> 0:00:47.920 But really, I'm on a personal journey to understand the 0:00:48.040 --> 0:00:51.800 genesis of my own ideas on wilderness. I thought they 0:00:51.800 --> 0:00:55.640 were my own, self generated, but as I learn about 0:00:55.680 --> 0:01:00.520 America's peculiar history, I'm seeing more and more that I'm 0:01:00.560 --> 0:01:04.080 a product of a culture. I've got the same crew 0:01:04.200 --> 0:01:08.039 plus one new guy on this episode. We've got authors 0:01:08.120 --> 0:01:12.600 doctor Sarah Dant, doctor Dan Flores, and Hal Herring, also 0:01:12.920 --> 0:01:16.880 author and Thorreau critic Stephen Ranella. But new to the 0:01:16.959 --> 0:01:21.880 crew is documentary filmmaker, Native Texan and mustang wrangler Ben Masters. 0:01:22.640 --> 0:01:26.800 The Bear Greece Academy of Backwoodsmanship Philosophy and Culture is 0:01:26.880 --> 0:01:30.360 back in session. I really doubt that you're gonna want 0:01:30.360 --> 0:01:31.080 to miss this one. 0:01:31.760 --> 0:01:37.760 The idea that American's energy was capable of literally taking 0:01:37.800 --> 0:01:40.960 the last barrel of ol out of the last piece 0:01:40.959 --> 0:01:46.680 of ground, well that was evident. This movement began to say, 0:01:46.760 --> 0:01:49.280 what if we didn't do that to every place? 0:01:58.200 --> 0:02:00.880 My name is Clay Knukem, and this is the Bear 0:02:00.960 --> 0:02:05.880 Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search 0:02:05.960 --> 0:02:09.639 for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the 0:02:09.680 --> 0:02:13.400 story of Americans who lived their lives close to the 0:02:13.480 --> 0:02:20.040 land presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting 0:02:20.080 --> 0:02:23.600 and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as 0:02:23.639 --> 0:02:26.200 the places we explore. 0:02:32.840 --> 0:02:35.840 I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of 0:02:35.880 --> 0:02:38.880 the Spring, For instance, thinking that I have here the 0:02:39.040 --> 0:02:42.000 entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that 0:02:42.080 --> 0:02:44.640 it is but an imperfect copy that I possess, and 0:02:44.720 --> 0:02:48.360 have read that my ancestors have torn out many of 0:02:48.400 --> 0:02:52.360 the finest leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in 0:02:52.400 --> 0:02:55.640 many places. I should not like to think that some 0:02:55.800 --> 0:02:58.920 demigod had come before me and picked out some of 0:02:58.960 --> 0:03:01.880 the best of the stars. I wish to know an 0:03:02.160 --> 0:03:04.280 entire heaven and an entire earth. 0:03:06.680 --> 0:03:10.440 That was doctor Sarah Dant reading a quote from and 0:03:10.440 --> 0:03:13.400 I hate to bring him up so early, Henry David Thereaux. 0:03:14.200 --> 0:03:17.960 We're continuing on in our pursuit of defining what wilderness 0:03:18.120 --> 0:03:20.200 is and what it means to America. 0:03:21.200 --> 0:03:25.560 What is wilderness? And that's a loaded question. You know, 0:03:25.600 --> 0:03:29.360 there's the capital W wilderness, and then I think there's 0:03:29.480 --> 0:03:34.080 the the wilderness experience that a person can have, which 0:03:34.160 --> 0:03:38.880 is different, you know, for everybody, but wilderness to me. 0:03:39.080 --> 0:03:43.480 I think of my ideal wilderness, and that is the 0:03:43.480 --> 0:03:48.960 headwaters of the Yellowstone River in a tributary called the Thoroughfare, 0:03:49.680 --> 0:03:53.680 in a place that's called Hawkshrest. It's thirty miles from 0:03:53.720 --> 0:03:57.440 the nearest trailhead. The only way to get there is 0:03:57.920 --> 0:04:02.840 by foot or by horseback, and it's a place where 0:04:03.680 --> 0:04:08.400 there's no dams, there's no really sign of human civilization 0:04:08.520 --> 0:04:12.880 at all except for a handful of trail signs, and 0:04:13.120 --> 0:04:18.880 it embodies everything that I think of as wilderness. And 0:04:18.920 --> 0:04:22.880 that's where I get my wilderness experience, you know, very 0:04:22.920 --> 0:04:26.120 far from humanity, as far from humanity as you can 0:04:26.160 --> 0:04:29.040 get in the lower forty eight. And I feel that 0:04:29.080 --> 0:04:32.679 whenever I go to places like the Bob Marshall or 0:04:32.800 --> 0:04:37.479 the HeLa or the Teton Wilderness and the Thoroughfare and 0:04:37.880 --> 0:04:41.160 the Wilderness of No Return in Idaho, these classic big 0:04:41.160 --> 0:04:43.599 wilderness spots in the American West. 0:04:44.880 --> 0:04:49.159 This has been masters He's very well traveled in America's 0:04:49.360 --> 0:04:51.039 big Western wildernesses. 0:04:51.839 --> 0:04:55.160 So I think that the idea of what is wilderness 0:04:55.200 --> 0:04:59.240 and I've struggled with this what is that wilderness experience? 0:04:59.440 --> 0:05:02.240 But and I think every person is going to get 0:05:02.240 --> 0:05:06.560 that feeling in a different place. And for me, I 0:05:06.640 --> 0:05:09.000 get that experience when I do a two week pack 0:05:09.120 --> 0:05:14.440 trip into a deep wilderness. For other folks it could 0:05:14.440 --> 0:05:18.240 be something as simple as going for a weekend camping 0:05:18.279 --> 0:05:21.000 trip in a three thousand acre state park. 0:05:22.360 --> 0:05:26.760 Defining wilderness in terms of geography and defining the wilderness 0:05:26.880 --> 0:05:30.760 experience are very different things. We'll learn it gets even 0:05:30.839 --> 0:05:34.880 harder the further we go back in American history. Here's 0:05:35.000 --> 0:05:38.400 meat Eater Zone Stephen Ranella with some opening statements on 0:05:38.480 --> 0:05:40.000 defining wilderness. 0:05:40.640 --> 0:05:42.880 This is just how I use it, Okay. 0:05:43.520 --> 0:05:50.000 The Lee Metcalf Wilderness Area in Montana, the frank Church 0:05:50.080 --> 0:05:54.480 Wilderness Area in Idaho, the north slope of the Brooks 0:05:54.600 --> 0:06:01.160 Range in Alaska, portions of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, portions of 0:06:01.279 --> 0:06:06.080 the Mississippi Delta, some of the Sky Island mountain ranges 0:06:06.279 --> 0:06:11.480 of New Mexico and Arizona, portions of the San Juans 0:06:11.520 --> 0:06:17.479 in Colorado, the boundary waters of Minnesota. I could go 0:06:17.520 --> 0:06:21.960 on our wilderness landscapes in my mind because relative to 0:06:22.040 --> 0:06:26.480 everything else, they most closely resemble, relative to everything else, 0:06:26.640 --> 0:06:31.680 what this landscape looked like upon European contact. So it's 0:06:32.279 --> 0:06:37.080 the wildest stuff relative to everything else, it's the stuff 0:06:37.120 --> 0:06:39.840 that most closely resembles what it did at the time 0:06:39.839 --> 0:06:44.520 of European contact, considering my caveat that then it was inhabited, however, 0:06:44.600 --> 0:06:48.120 sparsely by Native people. And now it's not, and it's 0:06:48.400 --> 0:06:52.280 vulnerable because once you mess with it, it ceases to 0:06:52.320 --> 0:06:56.200 be wilderness anymore, and it becomes some other thing. And 0:06:56.240 --> 0:07:00.920 I worry about running out of itness. 0:07:00.920 --> 0:07:04.159 And what it means to America is an important endeavor, 0:07:05.000 --> 0:07:09.080 why you may ask, partly because of a little word 0:07:09.320 --> 0:07:13.600 often used in economics, it's used in farming, it's used 0:07:13.600 --> 0:07:18.680 in life, called scarcity. In our current times, wilderness is 0:07:18.720 --> 0:07:24.160 one of the Earth's scarcest resources, and scarcity dictates value. 0:07:24.720 --> 0:07:29.200 It's ironic, but scarcity is often a more powerful force 0:07:29.400 --> 0:07:34.280 than overflowing bushel baskets of plenty. Here's doctor dant on 0:07:34.320 --> 0:07:36.560 where some of our big wildernesses are. 0:07:38.160 --> 0:07:41.400 The big ones are, of course up in Alaska. The 0:07:41.400 --> 0:07:45.480 biggest one in the continental United States is in Death Valley, 0:07:45.680 --> 0:07:47.560 so it's not like we're all going to go camp there. 0:07:47.960 --> 0:07:50.120 And the second biggest one is the Frank Church River 0:07:50.160 --> 0:07:53.400 of No Return in Idaho. So there are lots of 0:07:53.960 --> 0:07:56.520 big wilderness places, but there are also a lot of 0:07:56.880 --> 0:07:59.760 small wilderness places. And there are wilderness places in the 0:07:59.760 --> 0:08:02.560 East as well as in the West. And that was 0:08:02.640 --> 0:08:05.240 again something Frank Church really worked hard on because he said, 0:08:05.280 --> 0:08:09.200 we should have these rare and valuable places, rare. 0:08:09.080 --> 0:08:15.920 And valuable, rare and valuable, large and small in the 0:08:15.960 --> 0:08:19.560 West and in the East. The largest wilderness in the 0:08:19.560 --> 0:08:23.320 lower forty eight is in Death Valley in California, in Nevada, 0:08:23.600 --> 0:08:26.160 and it spans over three point one million acres. 0:08:26.760 --> 0:08:27.600 That's news to me. 0:08:28.480 --> 0:08:31.920 In the last episode, doctor Dan Flores told us wilderness 0:08:32.000 --> 0:08:35.679 is an idea and a reality. It's these two things, 0:08:36.520 --> 0:08:39.840 the idea part being the abstract way we talk about 0:08:39.880 --> 0:08:44.959 places where humans don't live in natural ecosystems dominate how 0:08:45.000 --> 0:08:49.000 Herring told us that wilderness was a feeling the reality 0:08:49.080 --> 0:08:52.360 of wilderness. The second part is one hundred and eleven 0:08:52.440 --> 0:08:56.240 million acres designated as federal wilderness with the capitol W. 0:08:56.760 --> 0:09:00.240 That's roughly five percent of American soil, which is governed 0:09:00.280 --> 0:09:04.760 by the strictest land designation in America, only open to 0:09:04.920 --> 0:09:09.000 human foot in equine traffic. You can't use anything with wheels. 0:09:09.480 --> 0:09:12.560 You can't even use a hang glider. True story, it's 0:09:12.600 --> 0:09:15.200 on the little signs, and you can't use anything with 0:09:15.240 --> 0:09:19.080 a motor. But to understand modern wilderness, we've got to 0:09:19.160 --> 0:09:24.079 understand the macro scale journey of mankind. For this series, 0:09:24.200 --> 0:09:27.760 I've leaned heavily into a book written in nineteen sixty 0:09:27.800 --> 0:09:31.679 seven by Roderick Nash called Wilderness in the American Mind. 0:09:32.160 --> 0:09:35.080 I nerded out hard on this book and loved it. 0:09:36.160 --> 0:09:39.280 Here's Doctor Flores with a critique on this past era 0:09:39.480 --> 0:09:43.440 of American ideals on wilderness. Remember the Wilderness Act was 0:09:43.480 --> 0:09:46.200 signed in the law in nineteen sixty four, so there 0:09:46.280 --> 0:09:48.400 was a lot of activity around this stuff in the 0:09:48.480 --> 0:09:50.520 nineteen sixties when this book was written. 0:09:51.320 --> 0:09:55.679 Yeah, so, I mean, that's a fantastic book. It's also 0:09:55.720 --> 0:09:58.160 fifty years old. I mean. One of the things that 0:09:58.240 --> 0:10:01.880 we began to cope with about twenty five or thirty 0:10:01.960 --> 0:10:07.839 years ago was an emerging critique of not just Nash's 0:10:07.880 --> 0:10:14.280 story of wilderness, but a critique of what misperceptions lay 0:10:14.559 --> 0:10:18.200 at the foundation of what wilderness was in the American 0:10:18.280 --> 0:10:24.360 cultural story. Because the idea of wilderness in America, which 0:10:24.480 --> 0:10:27.960 begins very early with people coming out of Europe, who 0:10:28.040 --> 0:10:31.040 of course have lived in towns and villages and have 0:10:31.160 --> 0:10:34.080 done so for a thousand years, and in a part 0:10:34.080 --> 0:10:37.240 of the world in Western Europe where all the charismatic 0:10:37.320 --> 0:10:41.160 animals have long since been wiped out. I mean, they're 0:10:41.280 --> 0:10:45.640 hunting partridges and things. And of course ordinary people are 0:10:46.000 --> 0:10:50.320 kept out of the kings and the nobleman's forests because 0:10:50.360 --> 0:10:54.120 they preserve stags and deer hunting and so forth for 0:10:54.200 --> 0:10:59.400 the wealthy. So being introduced to a continent that struck 0:10:59.480 --> 0:11:04.480 them as being a wilderness continent, Virgin America was the 0:11:04.600 --> 0:11:07.640 term that was used so often. You know, the name 0:11:07.760 --> 0:11:11.400 given to Virginia for the Virgin Queen, and was also 0:11:12.000 --> 0:11:15.120 carried on to the continent itself as a virgin place. 0:11:15.520 --> 0:11:19.400 It was a misperception of what America was, because America 0:11:19.559 --> 0:11:25.320 was actually an anciently occupied place. There had been people 0:11:25.400 --> 0:11:30.040 here for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And 0:11:30.080 --> 0:11:34.120 I mean, as one of the geographers, William Denovan, who 0:11:34.120 --> 0:11:38.440 wrote a fantastic article in nineteen ninety one, put it. 0:11:38.520 --> 0:11:42.360 He called it the Pristine Myth was his. One of 0:11:42.360 --> 0:11:44.640 the things he said in that article was that it 0:11:44.880 --> 0:11:51.360 took Europeans and their presence in America three centuries before 0:11:51.480 --> 0:11:55.440 they had imposed the kind of landscape changes on the 0:11:55.480 --> 0:11:59.359 continent that they found from native people when they arrived. 0:11:59.559 --> 0:12:02.920 But for a couple of reasons, they just sort of 0:12:02.960 --> 0:12:06.200 ignored that. One of the reasons, of course, was that 0:12:06.280 --> 0:12:09.400 as soon as Europeans arrived, they're bringing these old World 0:12:09.480 --> 0:12:12.480 diseases with them to a population of people who have 0:12:12.600 --> 0:12:16.000 never been exposed to things like smallpox and influenza and 0:12:16.120 --> 0:12:20.160 cholera and so forth and so on. And almost immediately 0:12:20.280 --> 0:12:23.960 within the first fifty or seventy five years of European 0:12:24.040 --> 0:12:28.920 arrival in North America, the native population goes from nearly 0:12:29.000 --> 0:12:31.360 five million people in what is now the United States 0:12:31.360 --> 0:12:35.200 and Canada down to about nine hundred thousand people, and 0:12:35.320 --> 0:12:40.840 so suddenly the native population has shrunk by five hundred percent. 0:12:41.400 --> 0:12:45.920 And it not only allowed for an ecological release of 0:12:46.120 --> 0:12:49.240 wildlife all over America because there wasn't the same hunting 0:12:49.280 --> 0:12:52.800 pressure that had been imposed on animals that there had 0:12:52.840 --> 0:12:57.160 been for ten thousand years, but it also the relative 0:12:57.320 --> 0:13:01.079 scarcity of native people in many parts of North America 0:13:01.640 --> 0:13:05.679 sort of confused Europeans into thinking that they actually had 0:13:05.720 --> 0:13:10.319 inherited a place that didn't have any prior human history 0:13:10.400 --> 0:13:13.480 to it, and so it made them think from the 0:13:13.559 --> 0:13:16.360 very beginning. It made us think from the very beginning 0:13:16.440 --> 0:13:21.439 that we had snagged ourselves. You know, this original garden 0:13:21.480 --> 0:13:21.960 of Eden. 0:13:23.520 --> 0:13:25.080 Those are some deep waters. 0:13:25.679 --> 0:13:28.559 And I think that perspective is very important to consider 0:13:28.800 --> 0:13:32.720 when we think about wilderness and America. I've heard doctor 0:13:32.760 --> 0:13:36.040 Taylor Keene, a member of the Cherokee and Omaha tribes, 0:13:36.360 --> 0:13:40.000 say that upon first European contact with North America, there 0:13:40.160 --> 0:13:44.199 was no wilderness, but rather a great Native American civilization. 0:13:45.040 --> 0:13:48.040 And this is where this stuff in history gets contentious. 0:13:48.559 --> 0:13:51.320 I think every side looks back and wishes it could 0:13:51.320 --> 0:13:54.760 have been handled differently, but that's beyond the scope of 0:13:54.760 --> 0:13:59.840 this conversation. However, it's useful in framing the foundational definitions 0:13:59.880 --> 0:14:03.640 of wilderness because a fundamental tenet of our definition of 0:14:03.679 --> 0:14:08.200 wilderness is that people aren't on the landscape altering it 0:14:08.320 --> 0:14:11.400 in any way. That's kind of what wilderness is. And 0:14:11.480 --> 0:14:14.080 doctor Flores is saying that you'd have to go back 0:14:14.120 --> 0:14:17.960 so far in history to find this place humanless that 0:14:18.000 --> 0:14:19.920 it's almost pointless to think about it. 0:14:20.760 --> 0:14:22.200 I'll also say. 0:14:22.240 --> 0:14:25.800 That since the release of the first podcast, a friend 0:14:25.800 --> 0:14:30.080 of mine from the Chalktaw nation named Clay from Oklahoma, 0:14:30.480 --> 0:14:34.240 he told me that they do have a traditional word 0:14:34.760 --> 0:14:38.680 similar to the English word of wilderness. We had made 0:14:38.720 --> 0:14:42.120 the statement that there were no words in the Native 0:14:42.160 --> 0:14:46.880 American languages that were similar to the English word wilderness. 0:14:47.320 --> 0:14:51.920 I stand corrected. Here is Clay saying the word in 0:14:51.960 --> 0:14:53.920 his native chalk Taw language. 0:14:54.240 --> 0:14:58.280 You would say these canni hiaka wilderness. 0:14:59.680 --> 0:15:01.320 That is interesting. 0:15:02.160 --> 0:15:04.720 He also said that the central stories of the Chalktaw 0:15:04.720 --> 0:15:08.160 and Chickasaft people tell about how they came into an 0:15:08.280 --> 0:15:10.760 uninhabited land and settled there. 0:15:10.880 --> 0:15:14.600 In the southeast. Here's more from doctor. 0:15:14.360 --> 0:15:20.560 Dant, this idea that when people first come from somewhere else, 0:15:21.080 --> 0:15:23.520 not so we're not talking about indigenous people, we're talking 0:15:23.520 --> 0:15:28.000 about people coming from somewhere else. When they get to America. 0:15:28.160 --> 0:15:31.720 Part of what they see is all the things that 0:15:31.800 --> 0:15:36.960 are gone from where they've been in England, in France, 0:15:37.080 --> 0:15:40.040 in Germany, and they come to America and here are trees, 0:15:40.080 --> 0:15:43.640 and here wild deer, and here are here's this wealth 0:15:43.680 --> 0:15:48.360 of nature, and they think of it in those terms 0:15:48.640 --> 0:15:53.240 that this thing that was so rare and therefore valuable 0:15:53.400 --> 0:15:57.480 in Europe is here in abundance. And I want to 0:15:57.720 --> 0:16:02.160 claim and tame the wilderness as the advance of you know, 0:16:02.320 --> 0:16:06.400 using that loaded terminology civilization. That's how that's how we 0:16:06.520 --> 0:16:09.920 civilize Europe. And that's what we're going to do here. 0:16:09.960 --> 0:16:13.240 And the way you do that is to get big 0:16:13.400 --> 0:16:17.080 on nature. You cut down the trees, you drain the swamps, 0:16:17.080 --> 0:16:21.640 she harvest the animals. And that's a way of creating value, 0:16:21.800 --> 0:16:24.960 both because those things are rare in Europe and also 0:16:25.080 --> 0:16:31.120 because then you're converting these wild, chaotic landscapes into something 0:16:31.160 --> 0:16:36.800 that's ordered and knowable. But again, it has to do 0:16:36.920 --> 0:16:40.800 with those those ideas of value, what has value as 0:16:40.880 --> 0:16:45.280 what is rare, and once those wild places become rare, 0:16:46.360 --> 0:16:51.760 then we have that shift where romantics are thinking, you know, 0:16:52.480 --> 0:16:55.360 has some demigod come before me and harvested the best 0:16:55.440 --> 0:16:58.320 of the stars. I want to know an entire heaven 0:16:58.440 --> 0:16:59.560 and an entire. 0:16:59.360 --> 0:17:07.160 Earth, converting wild, chaotic landscapes into something ordered and knowable. Now, 0:17:07.200 --> 0:17:12.600 that's interesting. What's hard to debate is that as a species, globally, 0:17:13.080 --> 0:17:16.600 we've worked extremely hard to get away from the instability 0:17:16.600 --> 0:17:20.720 of wild lands. You remember the etymology of wilderness right 0:17:21.480 --> 0:17:27.080 self willed or uncontrollable land of wild beasts. Here's Stephen 0:17:27.160 --> 0:17:31.680 Ranella with an interesting observation about human nature. 0:17:32.960 --> 0:17:37.399 People who inhabit wilderness and again acknowledging that it's a 0:17:37.440 --> 0:17:43.320 somewhat squishy definition. People who historically have inhabited wilderness have 0:17:43.960 --> 0:17:49.399 jumped at every chance they could get to chip away 0:17:50.240 --> 0:17:54.320 at that wilderness. There are some exceptions, there are some 0:17:54.600 --> 0:17:58.119 rare exceptions, but for the most part, they've jumped at 0:17:58.160 --> 0:18:04.440 any chance. Our own Western European ancestors obviously jumped at 0:18:04.480 --> 0:18:07.760 it in a big way ten thousand years ago on 0:18:07.880 --> 0:18:14.680 this continent, native Americans were very receptive to firearms, were 0:18:14.800 --> 0:18:20.240 very receptive to steal axes. We're very receptive to different 0:18:20.359 --> 0:18:25.480 building materials, to different modes of transportation, to things that 0:18:25.720 --> 0:18:30.760 just would strike us as development, strike us as having 0:18:30.840 --> 0:18:35.800 the means to make a greater, faster, more profound impact 0:18:35.880 --> 0:18:40.399 on their environment. So yes, people that have. When I 0:18:40.440 --> 0:18:43.919 say people, I just mean like us, humans outside of 0:18:43.920 --> 0:18:48.680 our outside of all these differentiations we create, like Western Europeans, 0:18:48.760 --> 0:18:54.520 Native Americans, just people across the globe have marched willfully 0:18:55.119 --> 0:19:01.520 and readily in the direction of civilization. Very few except so, 0:19:01.680 --> 0:19:05.000 if I didn't have this civilized veneer, if I didn't 0:19:05.000 --> 0:19:08.919 have this this thing that I've just was born into, 0:19:09.240 --> 0:19:13.760 raised in civilization, and came out of that respecting wilderness. Yeah, 0:19:13.760 --> 0:19:15.280 I think it's fair to say that had I just 0:19:15.320 --> 0:19:18.480 been born of wilderness, I probably would be just like 0:19:18.520 --> 0:19:23.240 everybody else, and that I would grab at any chance 0:19:24.080 --> 0:19:25.640 to make it a little. 0:19:25.400 --> 0:19:27.000 Less hard to be there. 0:19:27.880 --> 0:19:29.920 I'll tell you this, Clay, if you and me were 0:19:29.920 --> 0:19:34.320 in that situation where we were indigenous hunter gatherers who 0:19:34.400 --> 0:19:36.920 for thousands of generations had been on the same patch 0:19:36.920 --> 0:19:41.120 of ground, and all of our implements All of our 0:19:41.400 --> 0:19:45.600 building tools, building equipment were just made of natural, naturally 0:19:45.600 --> 0:19:48.800 occurring things that we could find in a landscape, stone, bone, hide. 0:19:49.440 --> 0:19:51.720 And someone showed up and gave us a palette of 0:19:51.800 --> 0:19:55.440 ready mixed concrete, we would have laid that ready mixed 0:19:55.440 --> 0:19:58.400 concrete down in some fashion or another. We would have said, 0:19:58.400 --> 0:20:01.280 this stuff is amazing. Look at that made me a 0:20:01.280 --> 0:20:04.399 big old paved area, and here's where I'm gonna start cooking. 0:20:04.800 --> 0:20:08.960 It's hard, doesn't wash away, doesn't get muddy, and we 0:20:08.960 --> 0:20:11.840 would wish we had more. We would want another palette. 0:20:11.840 --> 0:20:14.879 We would quickly want another palette of ready mixed concrete. 0:20:15.760 --> 0:20:18.840 Yeah, yeah, I guarantee it, dude. 0:20:18.960 --> 0:20:21.920 But knowing what we know right now, me and you, 0:20:21.960 --> 0:20:25.680 knowing what we now know, we might say, uh oh, man, 0:20:25.880 --> 0:20:27.119 you get to touch it. 0:20:27.359 --> 0:20:28.960 You get that ready mixed. 0:20:28.680 --> 0:20:31.160 Concrete out of my face. I know we're. 0:20:34.480 --> 0:20:37.399 That's an interesting point and it's hard to argue with. 0:20:38.240 --> 0:20:43.120 There are exceptions, but in general, mankind has been moving 0:20:43.280 --> 0:20:46.919 away from wilderness lifestyles and to go back. In the 0:20:46.960 --> 0:20:51.440 Bear Grease Academy, the Shawnee leader to Kumsa also in 0:20:51.480 --> 0:20:55.240 the Bear Grease Hall of Fame, and his brother Tinsquadawa. 0:20:55.400 --> 0:20:59.240 The prophet preached that going back to the traditional Indian 0:20:59.240 --> 0:21:04.760 ways of life and getting rid of all influence of Europeans, 0:21:05.240 --> 0:21:06.440 that would be their salvation. 0:21:06.840 --> 0:21:07.760 That's what he preached. 0:21:08.200 --> 0:21:11.360 However, they were met with stiff resistance from within their 0:21:11.400 --> 0:21:16.080 own tribe and the majority of other tribes. And in 0:21:16.119 --> 0:21:21.000 modern times us trying to imagine ourselves not leaning into 0:21:21.160 --> 0:21:26.159 modernization is kind of a stretch. It would be like 0:21:26.280 --> 0:21:29.919 in modern times someone who chooses not to have a 0:21:30.080 --> 0:21:35.119 cell phone. I mean, it's almost unimaginable. Ninety nine percent 0:21:35.160 --> 0:21:38.960 of people can't pull that off. Nor could our ancestors 0:21:39.200 --> 0:21:43.920 resist modernization. That's not a perfect analogy, but I think 0:21:43.960 --> 0:21:54.600 it's helpful. We've covered some ground already, and if you remember, 0:21:54.640 --> 0:21:59.320 doctor Flores talked about the peculiarity of American history that 0:21:59.359 --> 0:22:02.679 gave us a union perspective on wilderness, which we've covered 0:22:02.680 --> 0:22:05.119 the first part, which was the European perception of the 0:22:05.119 --> 0:22:10.040 North American continent upon arrival. However, things shifted once wild 0:22:10.160 --> 0:22:13.040 lands became scarce, and this is one of the most 0:22:13.119 --> 0:22:17.040 interesting parts of this conversation. This will be on the 0:22:17.080 --> 0:22:20.000 Bar Greece Academy Quiz at the end of the series, 0:22:20.680 --> 0:22:24.200 we've got to learn about a census in eighteen ninety 0:22:24.480 --> 0:22:29.000 that shook the nation into an identity crisis. Doctor Dant 0:22:29.040 --> 0:22:31.840 is about to tell us about a pivotal moment in 0:22:31.920 --> 0:22:37.040 America's development of our modern wilderness doctrine. 0:22:37.680 --> 0:22:42.480 There was a census in eighteen ninety that no longer 0:22:43.119 --> 0:22:45.159 said there was a you know, and they used the 0:22:45.720 --> 0:22:49.800 word frontier, which is the I mean, it's the census 0:22:49.840 --> 0:22:55.040 says that frontier is two or fewer people per square mile. 0:22:56.040 --> 0:23:00.119 That's the definition of frontier. And there was no obvious 0:23:00.160 --> 0:23:04.840 demarcation between those lightly settled places and the more heavily 0:23:04.920 --> 0:23:08.439 settled places by the eighteen ninety censes. And for a 0:23:08.480 --> 0:23:11.879 lot of Americans in particular, that sort of provoked this 0:23:12.000 --> 0:23:15.320 crisis of identity. If that had been what had made 0:23:15.400 --> 0:23:18.879 us uniquely Americans. That's what Frederick Jackson, Turner and some 0:23:18.920 --> 0:23:23.520 others argue. You can hear the Darwinian idea in there, 0:23:23.600 --> 0:23:28.560 that we're evolving from Europeans into this unique American species, 0:23:29.160 --> 0:23:32.479 Homo americanas I like to call it. If that's gone, 0:23:33.040 --> 0:23:37.680 then how do we retain our uniqueness and our specialness. 0:23:40.160 --> 0:23:43.920 So it all gets amplified then at the end of 0:23:43.920 --> 0:23:48.159 the nineteenth century when Frederi Jackson Turner writes that famous 0:23:48.280 --> 0:23:51.520 essay of his The Frontier, the significant the Frontier in 0:23:51.520 --> 0:23:56.439 American History, where he argues that it's the interaction with 0:23:56.720 --> 0:24:01.760 wild lands that turn Europeans into to Americans, right, And 0:24:02.320 --> 0:24:04.479 that of course leads to when we get to the 0:24:04.520 --> 0:24:07.000 twentieth century and it looks like, you know, the census 0:24:07.280 --> 0:24:11.119 in eighteen ninety announces that the frontier is over. I mean, 0:24:11.160 --> 0:24:13.840 it throws some Americans into a kind of a crisis 0:24:13.880 --> 0:24:18.600 of identity that historians sometimes refer to as you know, 0:24:18.960 --> 0:24:24.280 a wilderness angsed our frontier anxiety because we didn't have it, 0:24:24.480 --> 0:24:26.520 because you don't have it anymore, and so how are 0:24:26.520 --> 0:24:30.280 we going to create more Americans if you don't have it? 0:24:30.480 --> 0:24:30.600 Right? 0:24:30.840 --> 0:24:33.840 I mean, in an American had to have a frontier, 0:24:34.000 --> 0:24:35.720 had to have it. That's what I made us Americans 0:24:35.760 --> 0:24:39.239 that we had this frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner was like, 0:24:39.400 --> 0:24:40.320 the frontiers dead. 0:24:40.480 --> 0:24:43.359 The Frontier, well, he doesn't say necessarily it's dead, but 0:24:43.640 --> 0:24:46.560 he publishes this essay in the early eighteen nineties, and 0:24:46.600 --> 0:24:49.560 it happens to come at the same time that the 0:24:49.720 --> 0:24:54.320 US Census announces in the Census of eighteen ninety that 0:24:54.720 --> 0:24:58.240 the frontier has been so broken up by bodies of 0:24:58.280 --> 0:25:01.120 settlement that it's no longer possible to say that there 0:25:01.160 --> 0:25:04.439 is a frontier line in America. And that's what throws 0:25:04.480 --> 0:25:08.960 people into this frontier anxiety notion, and you know, I mean, 0:25:09.040 --> 0:25:12.640 out of it emerges things like the Boy Scouts, for example, 0:25:12.680 --> 0:25:15.919 where okay, we've got to go out and teach kids 0:25:16.000 --> 0:25:20.840 something about living in nature before they lose it an at. 0:25:20.920 --> 0:25:23.359 Well, when we've got to have this formulated organization to 0:25:23.400 --> 0:25:27.200 do this, because before Americans would have just intrinsically had 0:25:27.240 --> 0:25:29.560 these opportunities and known these things absolutely. 0:25:29.800 --> 0:25:34.040 Now we have to be a lot more proactive about 0:25:34.240 --> 0:25:38.399 setting up the possibility for kids in particular to be 0:25:38.480 --> 0:25:40.280 able to experience the wild. 0:25:40.800 --> 0:25:42.359 And it's one of the. 0:25:42.000 --> 0:25:45.760 Reasons that hunting the Booming Crucket Club at the time 0:25:46.600 --> 0:25:50.879 becomes most very important in conservation for example. In fact, 0:25:50.880 --> 0:25:54.520 in the lead up to the passage of the Wilderness 0:25:54.520 --> 0:25:57.520 Act of nineteen sixty four and the debate on it 0:25:57.560 --> 0:26:02.200 started in the late nineteen fifties, supposedly Frederick Jackson Turner's 0:26:02.280 --> 0:26:04.919 essay The Significance of the frontier in American history was 0:26:05.080 --> 0:26:08.320 mentioned in testimony more than two hundred times. So the 0:26:08.359 --> 0:26:10.359 people who passed the Wilderness. 0:26:09.920 --> 0:26:12.000 Act were reaching back that far. 0:26:11.960 --> 0:26:14.560 Yeah, and they were. What they were saying is that 0:26:14.880 --> 0:26:21.200 we need wilderness because this is how America and Americans 0:26:21.440 --> 0:26:22.200 are created. 0:26:25.080 --> 0:26:30.639 Americans were created by interaction with wild lands. Now, that's interesting. 0:26:31.240 --> 0:26:34.320 Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis is important. 0:26:34.520 --> 0:26:35.440 It's kind of wild. 0:26:35.800 --> 0:26:38.160 I'm not sure that it's true, but this is how 0:26:38.280 --> 0:26:44.160 national identity is formed. This pioneering spirit, independent self reliance 0:26:44.480 --> 0:26:48.439 are all very American things applied in modern times in 0:26:48.480 --> 0:26:51.879 a whole bunch of areas of life outside of land management. 0:26:52.680 --> 0:26:55.320 Hanging in my home for the last fifteen years is 0:26:55.359 --> 0:27:01.760