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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to

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Speaker 1: the White Tail Woods, presented by First Light, creating proven

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Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First

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Speaker 1: Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon.

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Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on

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Speaker 2: the show, I am joined by a renowned historian, a

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Speaker 2: best selling author, and now podcaster, Dan Flores, to discuss

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Speaker 2: the big picture history of wildlife and people in America

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Speaker 2: and what that past can teach us as we head

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Speaker 2: into the future as hunters, anglers, and folks who simply

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Speaker 2: love wildlife and wild places. All right, Welcome back to

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Speaker 2: the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First

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Speaker 2: Light and their Camo for Conservation Initiative. And today is

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Speaker 2: an episode I've wanted to do for a very long time.

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Speaker 2: This is a guest who I have admired from Afar

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Speaker 2: for many years. I've read his books, I've listened to

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Speaker 2: his words. I have considered and pondered and and and

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Speaker 2: likely ingested a whole lot of his ideas about wildlife,

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Speaker 2: about the history of our nation and our people, and

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Speaker 2: our relationship with wildlife and wild places. All this kind

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Speaker 2: of stuff that that kind of forms the groundwork, the

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Speaker 2: foundation for who we are as hunters and anglers. Uh

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Speaker 2: Dan has has spent his lifetime teaching about, and writing

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Speaker 2: about and speaking about. As I mentioned in the intro,

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Speaker 2: he is a historian. He has been a best selling author,

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Speaker 2: focusing and specializing in natural history. He's written a number

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Speaker 2: of books, most recently. Most recently be Wild New World,

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Speaker 2: which is about the very topic we're discussing today, which

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Speaker 2: is this history of wildlife and people in America. Another book,

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Speaker 2: another favorite of mine, is American Serengetti, which it looks

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Speaker 2: to a similar topic but just kind of within the

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Speaker 2: Great Plains landscape. Another great book is Coyote America and

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Speaker 2: has got a whole slew of others, but really terrific.

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Speaker 2: I mean, Wild New World and American Serengetti are two

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Speaker 2: of my absolute top recommendations for anyone that's interested in

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Speaker 2: this kind of stuff. He is also now the newest

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Speaker 2: member of the Meat Eater podcast network. He's got a

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Speaker 2: brand new podcast which just came out a few weeks ago,

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Speaker 2: called The American West, in which he explores this kind

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Speaker 2: of deep history of people and culture and wildlife in

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Speaker 2: the American West. It's fascinating, it's really well done. It

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Speaker 2: involves a kind of a deep dive from Dan into

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Speaker 2: a specific topic and then a conversation between himself and

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Speaker 2: Steve and Randall, Steve Arnella, Randa Williams there or mediator

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Speaker 2: kind of rounding it out with some questions to kind

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Speaker 2: of better understand the topic. So great new show from Dan.

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Speaker 2: We're really excited to have him on the team, which

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Speaker 2: is why you know, I'm super excited we can have

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Speaker 2: this conversation today, which is about some of the big

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Speaker 2: picture ideas that I mentioned kind of form the basis

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Speaker 2: of how we got to this point. Because if you

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Speaker 2: hunt and fish in America, if you want to make

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Speaker 2: sure we can keep hunting and fishing in America, if

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Speaker 2: you want to make sure we have wildlife and wild

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Speaker 2: places well into the future in this place we call home,

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Speaker 2: we need to understand how we got here. We need

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Speaker 2: to understand the past mistakes and the past successes, and

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Speaker 2: the stories and the lessons learned, and the foibles and

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Speaker 2: the speed bumps and everything that got us to this point.

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Speaker 2: If you don't know where he came from, you can't

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Speaker 2: figure out where to go. And Dan today is going

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Speaker 2: to help us understand that we have a really interesting

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Speaker 2: conversation that explores everything from the Ice Age and the

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Speaker 2: Pleistocene period and what was going on with people here

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Speaker 2: in America and wildlife right on down through what happened

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Speaker 2: over the next ten thousand years with Native Americans and wildlife,

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Speaker 2: how they managed a somewhat sustainable relationship with the wildlife

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Speaker 2: while their predecessors nearly wiped out all the big critters

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Speaker 2: here in America. And then we're going to fast forward

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Speaker 2: to the last five hundred years or so and take

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Speaker 2: a look at how folks in somewhat more modern America

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Speaker 2: nearly wiped everything out, and then in the early twentieth century,

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Speaker 2: how we stop that and saved the day at the

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Speaker 2: last moment. And that kind of sets the stage for

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Speaker 2: the second part of the conversation, which is, what can

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Speaker 2: we learn from that? What should we learn from that?

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Speaker 2: What do we need to take from that past and

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Speaker 2: bring forward into the future to make sure that we

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Speaker 2: can keep doing this stuff, that we can keep having

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Speaker 2: these wild critters out there and fish and clean rivers

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Speaker 2: and healthy habitats and open spaces. What do we need

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Speaker 2: to do to make sure that you and I aren't

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Speaker 2: the last generation that gets to have incredible hunting and

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Speaker 2: fishing experiences, but to ensure that our kids do, and

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Speaker 2: their kids do, and many generations in the future. So, man,

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Speaker 2: this is what I'm very excited about. I'm very thankful

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Speaker 2: that we were able to do it, and I can't

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Speaker 2: wait for you to listen. Now, I do have one

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Speaker 2: piece of bad news. The bad news is that we

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Speaker 2: had a technical issue in the recording of this conversation,

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Speaker 2: which is tragic given how much I enjoyed it. But

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Speaker 2: the audio and video quality on Dan's side are not

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Speaker 2: what we wish they could be, especially the video. The

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Speaker 2: video is very poor, so if you are watching on YouTube,

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Speaker 2: I apologize in advance. The first nine minutes or so

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Speaker 2: are good, I believe, but then after that it's going

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Speaker 2: to be very low resolution. Sorry, please bear with us

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Speaker 2: on it. The content that the audio, what we talk about,

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Speaker 2: is so important so good. I beg you to please

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Speaker 2: ignore the fuzziness, taking the sounds and the words and

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Speaker 2: the wisdom of Dan, because it's good stuff. But that

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Speaker 2: all said, without any further Ado, let's get to my

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Speaker 2: chat with Dan about the parable of America's wildlife past

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Speaker 2: and future. All right joining me now is Dan Flores. Dan,

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Speaker 2: thank you so much for joining me.

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Speaker 3: Oh, it's a great pleasure. Mark. Thanks for having me on.

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Speaker 2: As I was just saying before we started recording, I

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Speaker 2: have been a big fan of your work for many years.

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Speaker 2: Steve has introduced me and so many other people to

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Speaker 2: what you do. And it's a pretty fun gig that

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Speaker 2: I have here, that I've had for more than a decade,

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Speaker 2: getting to speak to a lot of interesting people. But

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Speaker 2: you are right at the very top of the list, Dan,

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Speaker 2: as far as writers who have influenced me and my

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Speaker 2: understanding of my place in this wild world and how

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Speaker 2: we got here and what all that means for the future.

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Speaker 2: Your books, in particular American Serengeti and then more recently

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Speaker 2: A Wild New World are you know, maybe two of

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Speaker 2: the top ten books I recommend to people over and

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Speaker 2: over and over again. So just from the outset, thank

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Speaker 2: you for your contribution with those books and all of

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Speaker 2: your work today.

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Speaker 3: Man, thanks for saying that. I appreciate it.

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Speaker 2: It's well deserved, and all that being the case, I

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Speaker 2: apologize in advance. I'm going to run you through the

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Speaker 2: ringer talking about many of those topics because They're endlessly

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Speaker 2: fascinating to me and so many other people, And I

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Speaker 2: guess I want to start by setting the stage around

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Speaker 2: why this stuff is so important to you and maybe

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Speaker 2: for the rest of us. You wrote in one of

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Speaker 2: your books that, at least in the context of your

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Speaker 2: life and kind of your experience as an outdoor person,

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Speaker 2: you wrote that the prescription for you has been knowing

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Speaker 2: the heaven and earth that was, while experiencing the world

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Speaker 2: that is. And I took that to kind of mean,

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Speaker 2: you know, you want to deeply understand our past with

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Speaker 2: wildlife and wild places while also still you know, experiencing

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Speaker 2: them fully today. But I was hoping you could expand

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Speaker 2: on that for me a little bit and help me understanding,

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Speaker 2: you know, why is that important for you in your

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Speaker 2: own life, and why might that idea of understanding our

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Speaker 2: past and our relationship with wildlife and wild places, why

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Speaker 2: is that important for many of us still today.

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Speaker 3: That's a great question, obviously, like relevant question to all

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Speaker 3: the things we're trying to accomplish in modern America and

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Speaker 3: figuring out how we go forward with a healthy world

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Speaker 3: around us, one that we get to enjoy and experience

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Speaker 3: and thrill to and not have to confront a kind

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Speaker 3: of a diminishing return in our lives. And the quote

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Speaker 3: you use, of course, that's how I end Wild New World,

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Speaker 3: which is a book that spends three hundred and ninety

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Speaker 3: seven pages trying to get us up to the present moment,

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Speaker 3: and that's pretty much how I come to the conclusion

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Speaker 3: of it. I think it's important that we know the past,

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Speaker 3: but we use that knowledge in order to experience what's

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Speaker 3: here now our own lives. I think the reason it's

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Speaker 3: struck me for a lot of my writing career that

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Speaker 3: that's a critical thing for us to do. I mean,

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Speaker 3: not just personally myself, but really all of us.

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Speaker 4: Is because it's fairly evident that we come out of

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Speaker 4: a historical past and an evolutionary past, and even deeper

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Speaker 4: evolutionary past that extends much much farther back in time.

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Speaker 3: Than what we've recorded as history. I mean, I trained

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Speaker 3: as a graduate school as an environmental historian, but what

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Speaker 3: historians do generally focuses on documents and things that you

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Speaker 3: can read and put together and as symbol kind of

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Speaker 3: a functioning past. But I've always been interested in the

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Speaker 3: past that extends beyond the documentary record, back into archaeological

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Speaker 3: time and back really into evolutionary time. And when I

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Speaker 3: look back at that big story, that deep time story

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Speaker 3: of humans, I mean, it's sort of unavoidable to recognize

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Speaker 3: that we come out of the same evolutionary river that

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Speaker 3: all the rest of life does, and that we have

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Speaker 3: been intricately involved with other creatures, all the life around

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Speaker 3: us for millions of years. Really, for probably at least

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Speaker 3: two and a half to three million years, humans have

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Speaker 3: been an early human species, have been really involved with

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Speaker 3: the other creatures around us, and so it's part of

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Speaker 3: our To me, it's part of our legacy. It's one

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Speaker 3: that I fear a lot of people have lost sight

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Speaker 3: of in the modern world. I mean, we're so caught

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Speaker 3: up in what's on our phones, what's on social media,

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Speaker 3: that we tend to lose sight of this bigger picture

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Speaker 3: of who we are. But I think in that big

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Speaker 3: question of who we are, this is a way of

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Speaker 3: getting at it, of looking at this deep time story.

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Speaker 3: And when you look at it and you realize what

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Speaker 3: role humans have played in the world and what role

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Speaker 3: other creatures that played for us, I think it brings

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Speaker 3: you to this present moment in time where obviously the

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Speaker 3: thing to do if you want to honor that tradition

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Speaker 3: in that history, is to spend as much time as

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Speaker 3: possible with the wild world and with other creatures that

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Speaker 3: are around us, and try to take advantage of the

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Speaker 3: possibilities that we still have. We don't have the possibilities

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Speaker 3: anymore of seeing mammoths, for example, or sabertoothed cats, or

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Speaker 3: indeed of more recent creatures like Carolina parakeets or passenger

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Speaker 3: pigeons are bisoned by the millions. We can't experience that,

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Speaker 3: but we can experience what's available to us, and that

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Speaker 3: long story is so important. I think that that's the

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Speaker 3: reason why I and I think a lot of other

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Speaker 3: people just intuitively want to spend a lot of time

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Speaker 3: in that real world and natural world that's around us.

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Speaker 2: I want to I want to kind of ask you

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Speaker 2: to walk us through a little bit of that story

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Speaker 2: that you spend a lot of time covering in your podcast,

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Speaker 2: most recently in those books that we mentioned, but before that,

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Speaker 2: I want to do I guess do this again because

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Speaker 2: I already asked you a skip to the ending on

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Speaker 2: your book, and I'm going to ask you a skip

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Speaker 2: to the end of this store too. You mentioned that

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Speaker 2: by understanding this past, it can tell us who we are.

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Speaker 2: It can help us understand who we are when you

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Speaker 2: look at this past that that I know you understand

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Speaker 2: as well as almost anyone nowadays. What's the answer to

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Speaker 2: that question? Who are we?

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Speaker 3: Well? Where?

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Speaker 5: Uh?

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Speaker 3: The animal that's dominating the world that doesn't recognize that

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Speaker 3: it's an animal. I mean, that's one of the ironies

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Speaker 3: of our our situation. Uh, we have a or the

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Speaker 3: notion of human exceptionalism to such a degree that we

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Speaker 3: don't really think of ourselves as being kin and close

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Speaker 3: to the other life that's around us. We through various

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Speaker 3: sorts of training, really religious training is one of the

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Speaker 3: ways we've done it. But I think the humanities are

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Speaker 3: probably equally guilty and convincing us that we're something completely

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Speaker 3: different from everything else on earth. And I think that's

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Speaker 3: put us in something of a precarious situation really, And

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Speaker 3: to me, understanding this big story, this big picture that

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Speaker 3: I tried to sort of outline a couple of minutes ago,

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Speaker 3: is one of the keys to getting back to understanding

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Speaker 3: that who we are is we're animals. We're another one

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Speaker 3: one of the life forms that evolution created on this planet,

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Speaker 3: and evolution never particularly selected us out to be the

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Speaker 3: dominant life form of the planet. It just happened through

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Speaker 3: a series of contingencies that we've ended up in that situation.

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Speaker 3: But there's no question that we have ended up as

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Speaker 3: the dominant species. And I think that's probably one of

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Speaker 3: the critical points in our story, is that we've reached

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Speaker 3: the stage and we have every ability, of course to

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Speaker 3: recognize who we are as animals out of the evolutionary river,

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Speaker 3: because of course, Charles Darwin published on the Orizona species

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Speaker 3: in eighteen fifty nine, so we've had the evolutionary story

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Speaker 3: available to us for at least that life. And one

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Speaker 3: of the things I discovered in doing Wild New World

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Speaker 3: in particular is that I think the understanding of who

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Speaker 3: we are has been a part of the insights of

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Speaker 3: previous cultures for a very long time. I think humans,

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Speaker 3: for example, Native people here in America have seemed to

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Speaker 3: have long known, and it's philosophies and their religions and

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Speaker 3: their respect for other creatures that humans were a part

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Speaker 3: of the natural world, that we and other creatures were can.

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Speaker 3: I mean, in many native cultures there's even a possibility

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Speaker 3: for humans to enter marry with animals like bisoner elker wolves,

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Speaker 3: and so there's that metaphorical probably certainly not necessarily literal,

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Speaker 3: but in a metaphorical and allegorical way. Native people understood

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Speaker 3: those connections. But I think in the Western world, and

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Speaker 3: I don't know how far back it goes, I tracked

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Speaker 3: it back at least to the Greeks. While the world

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Speaker 3: we've had this sense that we stand separate from everything else,

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Speaker 3: and we gave it a kind of a religious veneer

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Speaker 3: that we're the only creatures created in the image of God,

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Speaker 3: We're the only ones with everlasting souls and all that.

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Speaker 3: So I think we kind of have to come to

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Speaker 3: an understanding of the reality of the human condition, and

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Speaker 3: that's one of the one of the issues we face

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Speaker 3: as we go forward.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and I guess as you, as you alluded to earlier,

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Speaker 2: this understanding of both who we are and what we

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Speaker 2: have done is important, not just because it's fascinating and

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Speaker 2: inherently intuitively interesting, but it's also important because of how

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Speaker 2: it informs our future right and how we might be

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Speaker 2: able to make better decisions. You know, I don't I

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Speaker 2: think this was a sign to Mark Twain I'm not

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Speaker 2: sure if he actually said it or not, but supposedly

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Speaker 2: he said that history doesn't always repeat itself, but it

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Speaker 2: usually rhymes, and uh, I think there's there's probably some

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Speaker 2: truth to that. But in the case of many of

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Speaker 2: the examples from our past with Wildlife, I don't think

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Speaker 2: we want to repeat or even rhyme with some of

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Speaker 2: these things. So it's important to understand where we came from, though,

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Speaker 2: to ensure we don't go there again in the In

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Speaker 2: the scope of what we can cover today, there's way, way, way,

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Speaker 2: way too much of the history to cover. I would

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Speaker 2: ask everyone to go and listen to your new podcast

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Speaker 2: and to read your books, which, as I already mentioned,

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Speaker 2: are terrific. So so check out those other resources for

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Speaker 2: the full story of this history. But I do want

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Speaker 2: to provide a little bit of context for people, just

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Speaker 2: in case they haven't, you know, seen your previous work

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Speaker 2: and understand this larger story. But I'd like to spend

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Speaker 2: most of our time exploring how all this pertains to

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Speaker 2: our future. But all that said, we've had this roller

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Speaker 2: coaster ride with wildlife here in North America. There's maybe

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Speaker 2: been three big drops on that roller coaster ride. The

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Speaker 2: first of which being around the Pleistocene period the Ice Age.

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Speaker 2: There was another big drop off again when European Americans

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Speaker 2: spread across the country. We're probably in the midst of

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Speaker 2: one of those dives right now. So could you lay

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Speaker 2: a kind of a cliff notes of that first drop

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Speaker 2: for us, just to set the stage a little bit more,

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Speaker 2: What was that first act of the story when people's

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Speaker 2: first came to North America and they entered this incredible

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Speaker 2: swath of wilderness with wild dinosaur like creatures. Can you

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Speaker 2: can you just briefly set the stage there and what

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Speaker 2: happened to end that period before we move into the

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Speaker 2: next act of this kind of stage setting.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I and you know, there's certainly are a

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Speaker 3: rhyming element to the story that that we're about to

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Speaker 3: take on here. And I think the reason there there

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Speaker 3: is a rhyme is because of human nature, because of

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Speaker 3: who we are. I mean, we are compelled. We're a

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Speaker 3: social species. We evolved as a social social species. We're

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Speaker 3: much concerned with staffs within our groups. Uh. And of

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Speaker 3: course we have biological needs. Clearly, we have to exist,

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Speaker 3: we have to and our evolution with big brains and

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Speaker 3: very capable abilities physically produced an effect where we became

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Speaker 3: consumers of protein. That's how, of course we grew our

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Speaker 3: big brains, and that that protein that desire for status

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Speaker 3: and probably a desire for adventure. There's no question that

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Speaker 3: humans have something of that. You know, that kind of

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Speaker 3: genetic background propelled us out of our evolutionary homeland, which

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Speaker 3: was in Africa, and into first the Middle East and

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Speaker 3: finally into Europe on a northward movement, and then we

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Speaker 3: began moving eastward across the Eurasian land mass, ultimately into Siberia,

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Speaker 3: where humans confronted probably about twenty five to thirty thousand

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Speaker 3: years ago, maybe as far back as forty thousand years ago.

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Speaker 3: In fact, humans confronted obstacles to our ability to continue

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Speaker 3: to move farther east. And those obstacles primarily consisted of

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Speaker 3: giant masses of ice beyond which we we could penetrate.

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Speaker 3: And so it took a while to make this next

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Speaker 3: step into North America. And I should point out to

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Speaker 3: those who are following your podcasts here that North and

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Speaker 3: South America are the last big land masses on Earth

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Speaker 3: that humans are going to find. I mean, we have

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Speaker 3: spread across Africa, through the Middle East, through all of

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Speaker 3: Western Europe through Eurasia, and the only big land mass

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Speaker 3: is left, of course, other than islands like Australia, New

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Speaker 3: Zealand and the islands in the Pacific are North and

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Speaker 3: South America, and those are the last places we gin to.

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Speaker 3: One of the things I argue in while in the

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Speaker 3: world is the reasons were propelled in these vast journeys

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Speaker 3: to populate the earth is that we're looking for places

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Speaker 3: that other humans haven't found yet. And one of the

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Speaker 3: reasons we're looking for places like that is because the

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Speaker 3: creatures there are unfamiliar with humans as predators. If animals

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Speaker 3: have emerged in a landscape or habitat where humans are

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Speaker 3: not present, they don't automatically react to us, since we

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Speaker 3: tend to kind of instinctively think, well, sure, any animals

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Speaker 3: sees humans and they're going to run because they know

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Speaker 3: who we are. Well, that's not, in fact what happened

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Speaker 3: when people got to North America, when finally we waited

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Speaker 3: out the melting of the Lend map, the ice masses

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Speaker 3: in Alaska and present day Canada and the called Mackenzie

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Speaker 3: Corridor open. To be sure, there have been some humans

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Speaker 3: who probably in boats, had gone along the coasts and

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Speaker 3: gone inland. In America, we have a pretty good site

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Speaker 3: in the presence state of New Mexico and southern New

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Speaker 3: Mexico of humans having arrived in North America by before

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Speaker 3: the last glacial, the height of the last Wisconsin Glacial

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Speaker 3: two to twenty three thousand years ago. Well, we don't

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Speaker 3: really get here in numbers until about fifteen thousand years ago,

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Speaker 3: when the ice sheets finally open. And when that happens,

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Speaker 3: the group that comes, who we now know as the

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Speaker 3: Clovis people, are going to arrive in a continent and

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Speaker 3: two continents in fact, because they spread into South America

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Speaker 3: as well, where none of the creatures here has ever

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Speaker 3: confronted humans as predators before, and particularly those that have

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Speaker 3: evolved specifically in North America have had no exposure to humans,

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Speaker 3: and so this is called a biological first contact. By

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Speaker 3: the way, there's actually a paleum logical term of art

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Speaker 3: to describe this. And the result is that quite a

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Speaker 3: number of animals are going to be fairly easy for

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Speaker 3: these people, who also have come from forty five thousand

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Speaker 3: generations of hunting backgrounds and who are extremely good at

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Speaker 3: it and have an extremely effective toolkit in the form

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Speaker 3: of clothes points. So pretty much just some way the

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Speaker 3: wildlife of North and South America, and for several of

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Speaker 3: those species, the ones that are so called k species

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Speaker 3: that take a long time to produce young and to

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Speaker 3: repopulate their numbers, those animals are going to fairly quickly,

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Speaker 3: it seems, began to decrease of this new predator. And

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Speaker 3: so we know, for example, that probably the various mammoth

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Speaker 3: species in North America of which we have a pretty

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Speaker 3: strong record, pretty much faded away in the face of

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Speaker 3: this kind of predation. Some of the other species are

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Speaker 3: not so sure about. Horses were really numerous courses became

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Speaker 3: extinct in the American Pleistocene while surviving elsewhere in the world.

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Speaker 3: We don't really have an answer to that yet. We

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Speaker 3: don't really have an answers to win. Camels, which were

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Speaker 3: also an animal that evolved in North America, somehow became

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Speaker 3: extinct here, survived in South America but not in North America,

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Speaker 3: and also survived in other parts of the world. But

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Speaker 3: it really looks as if quite a number of species

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Speaker 3: were pushed to extinction, or at least to a point

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Speaker 3: where their populations were so separated from one another, that

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Speaker 3: they couldn't exchange their genes, and they may have faded

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Speaker 3: as a result of a lack of genetic So that's

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Speaker 3: kind of the Pleistocene story. We lose thirty two genera,

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Speaker 3: not just species, but thirty two genera of our largest

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Speaker 3: and most charismatic animals in North America. All the ones

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Speaker 3: that may North America look like a version of Africa

404
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Speaker 3: pretty much are going to disappearls the same by about

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Speaker 3: nine thousand years ago.

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Speaker 2: If you were writing the children's version of that story,

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Speaker 2: Let's say I've got a five year old and a

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Speaker 2: seven year old son, and let's say you had compiled

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Speaker 2: an elementary version of that story, just this segment. We'll

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Speaker 2: call it a story on its own. What would the

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Speaker 2: moral of that story be. What's the takeaway from this

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Speaker 2: first act of the larger story?

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Speaker 3: I think probably the takeaway of this first act. This

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Speaker 3: obviously requires so some speculation to understand it, but my

415
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Speaker 3: guess is that while these early Americans, the Clovis people,

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Speaker 3: and later the fulsome people who follow them who probably

417
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Speaker 3: eradicate our large species of Iso, those people, I think

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Speaker 3: probably didn't quite understand the consequences of their actions. I

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Speaker 3: think they too. In fact, I'm pretty certain of this

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Speaker 3: judging from their descendants, from all of us who have

421
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Speaker 3: interpreted the world until the advent of modern science, primarily

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Speaker 3: through religion, that they use religion as their cause effect

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Speaker 3: explanation for why things happen, and religion may not be

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Speaker 3: so good at understanding how ecology and environments work. And

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Speaker 3: I think the truth is they probably didn't quite understand

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Speaker 3: what the consequences of their actions were until it likely

427
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Speaker 3: was too late. I have also a sneaking suspicion, and

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Speaker 3: this would be I think a part of a sort

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Speaker 3: of a short version answer here is that in the

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Speaker 3: wake of the Pleistocene extinctions, because my research indicated that

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Speaker 3: we got a ten thousand year period following the Pleistiscene

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Speaker 3: where Native people seem to have learned the lesson of

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Speaker 3: what happened in the Pleistocene, applied it liberally in North America,

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Speaker 3: and ended up over that ten thousand year period that

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00:29:41,320 --> 00:29:44,560
Speaker 3: followed down to the time Europeans come, I could find

436
00:29:44,640 --> 00:29:50,680
Speaker 3: evidence only one extinction in what is now North America

437
00:29:50,800 --> 00:29:54,400
Speaker 3: during that time period. At some point they understood what

438
00:29:55,200 --> 00:29:58,120
Speaker 3: had happened and what role they may have played in it,

439
00:29:58,960 --> 00:30:02,479
Speaker 3: but I think it was a realization too late, and

440
00:30:02,520 --> 00:30:05,960
Speaker 3: so that may be one of the takeaways is that

441
00:30:06,960 --> 00:30:09,280
Speaker 3: you have to figure out, you have to come up

442
00:30:09,320 --> 00:30:12,920
Speaker 3: with a good explanation of how the world works around you,

443
00:30:13,800 --> 00:30:17,040
Speaker 3: and you can't let things proceed too far to the

444
00:30:17,080 --> 00:30:20,600
Speaker 3: point where it gets away from it runs away and

445
00:30:20,680 --> 00:30:24,120
Speaker 3: you can't stop it. I mean, at the end of

446
00:30:24,160 --> 00:30:29,320
Speaker 3: the process of the Prices, I think people did understand, Wow,

447
00:30:30,440 --> 00:30:33,480
Speaker 3: you know, there's a reason why we don't have mammoths

448
00:30:33,520 --> 00:30:37,360
Speaker 3: and all these other creatures around us, and our own

449
00:30:37,480 --> 00:30:42,280
Speaker 3: role may have made us culpable. And so what followed

450
00:30:42,520 --> 00:30:50,400
Speaker 3: was a period of rather benevolent ten thousand years that

451
00:30:51,600 --> 00:30:52,960
Speaker 3: came after the pricescene.

452
00:30:53,200 --> 00:30:56,840
Speaker 2: I was going to ask you what the moral of

453
00:30:56,880 --> 00:30:59,640
Speaker 2: the story of the next act would be, but maybe

454
00:30:59,720 --> 00:31:01,440
Speaker 2: you just told me what it was right there, because

455
00:31:01,480 --> 00:31:03,719
Speaker 2: I would I would describe that next act being this

456
00:31:04,160 --> 00:31:08,760
Speaker 2: ten thousand or so years of relative equilibrium, And at

457
00:31:08,840 --> 00:31:11,280
Speaker 2: least what stands out to me now when you frame

458
00:31:11,320 --> 00:31:13,400
Speaker 2: it that way, is maybe the greatest lesson of the

459
00:31:13,400 --> 00:31:16,480
Speaker 2: next ten thousand years with only one extinction and relative

460
00:31:16,520 --> 00:31:20,720
Speaker 2: equilibrium and sustainability, Maybe that at least The takeaway I

461
00:31:20,760 --> 00:31:22,600
Speaker 2: have when I think about that now is simply that

462
00:31:23,440 --> 00:31:28,080
Speaker 2: we can learn from our mistakes, We can recognize how

463
00:31:28,080 --> 00:31:32,720
Speaker 2: we have aired in the past and adjust course. Is

464
00:31:32,760 --> 00:31:35,160
Speaker 2: that a fair takeaway when looking at that ten thousand

465
00:31:35,200 --> 00:31:38,560
Speaker 2: year period before year Pear in contact? Is there anything

466
00:31:38,560 --> 00:31:40,040
Speaker 2: else when you look at that and try to put

467
00:31:40,040 --> 00:31:43,240
Speaker 2: a why behind it or how behind it that stands

468
00:31:43,240 --> 00:31:43,600
Speaker 2: out to you?

469
00:31:45,800 --> 00:31:48,360
Speaker 3: Well? It was. It was a bit daunting to take

470
00:31:48,440 --> 00:31:52,959
Speaker 3: on the task of writing that story, because, to be honest,

471
00:31:52,960 --> 00:31:55,320
Speaker 3: when I started working on Walney World and knew I

472
00:31:55,360 --> 00:31:57,400
Speaker 3: was going to do that, I couldn't find anyone else.

473
00:31:57,760 --> 00:32:00,360
Speaker 3: Really I attempted to take that on, and there were

474
00:32:00,400 --> 00:32:04,560
Speaker 3: plenty of people who had studied various specific groups, but

475
00:32:05,200 --> 00:32:09,400
Speaker 3: that big story I think no one had tried to

476
00:32:09,480 --> 00:32:12,880
Speaker 3: do before, because it is a pretty daunting thing to

477
00:32:13,040 --> 00:32:16,840
Speaker 3: answer that question of First of all, you've got to

478
00:32:16,840 --> 00:32:20,000
Speaker 3: look at an awful lot of different cultures in different

479
00:32:20,040 --> 00:32:23,560
Speaker 3: ways of seeing the world. I mean, native people. There

480
00:32:23,560 --> 00:32:28,440
Speaker 3: were at least a dozen great large language families akin

481
00:32:28,560 --> 00:32:35,560
Speaker 3: to like the Germanic family of languages the Latin family

482
00:32:35,640 --> 00:32:38,920
Speaker 3: of languages in Europe. There were twelve different ones in

483
00:32:38,960 --> 00:32:42,800
Speaker 3: North America, so these were very different people, but I

484
00:32:42,960 --> 00:32:47,280
Speaker 3: think they did come to some sort of understanding about

485
00:32:47,760 --> 00:32:54,000
Speaker 3: what had gone before and recognition of the kind of

486
00:32:54,120 --> 00:32:57,200
Speaker 3: change that was wire in order to make things work

487
00:32:57,240 --> 00:32:59,360
Speaker 3: in the future. And I found that in a couple

488
00:32:59,400 --> 00:33:03,280
Speaker 3: of other specific instances in the historic period as well,

489
00:33:03,600 --> 00:33:08,600
Speaker 3: among native people, among the people who abandoned an empire,

490
00:33:08,640 --> 00:33:11,200
Speaker 3: for example, a thousand years ago, they seem to have

491
00:33:11,360 --> 00:33:16,840
Speaker 3: learned from the experience of hang Choko collapsed. So the

492
00:33:17,040 --> 00:33:19,800
Speaker 3: task was to try to figure out how they did it,

493
00:33:20,200 --> 00:33:24,000
Speaker 3: and I came up with about two or three explanations

494
00:33:24,040 --> 00:33:26,400
Speaker 3: for how I think it worked. I mean, one of

495
00:33:26,440 --> 00:33:30,040
Speaker 3: them was the fact that because the Americas ended up

496
00:33:30,040 --> 00:33:33,800
Speaker 3: getting settled by humans a lot later than Eurasia did

497
00:33:34,640 --> 00:33:38,720
Speaker 3: the procession of history to the point of what we

498
00:33:38,800 --> 00:33:42,640
Speaker 3: call the Neolithic Revolution, which is the time and history

499
00:33:42,640 --> 00:33:47,560
Speaker 3: when humans have usually reduced the numbers of huntable animals

500
00:33:47,560 --> 00:33:51,240
Speaker 3: to the point where we start looking for other ways

501
00:33:51,320 --> 00:33:55,880
Speaker 3: other economic pro coaches and pros usually is to domesticate

502
00:33:56,360 --> 00:34:00,680
Speaker 3: some animals and domesticate plants. So the Neolithic Revolution is

503
00:34:00,760 --> 00:34:04,320
Speaker 3: through the advent of agriculture and domestication that had happened

504
00:34:04,360 --> 00:34:09,160
Speaker 3: in Europe a lot longer, a lot earlier, but you

505
00:34:09,200 --> 00:34:12,719
Speaker 3: aready been settled by humans a lot more distantly in

506
00:34:12,760 --> 00:34:15,160
Speaker 3: the past. So in the America is we don't start

507
00:34:15,200 --> 00:34:18,799
Speaker 3: doing that sort of thing until about four thousand years

508
00:34:18,840 --> 00:34:21,960
Speaker 3: ago in what is now the United States and Canada.

509
00:34:22,719 --> 00:34:25,480
Speaker 3: And the reason that's important is because when you do

510
00:34:25,640 --> 00:34:30,640
Speaker 3: proceed to the Neolithic revolution and agriculture and domestication of animals,

511
00:34:30,719 --> 00:34:35,680
Speaker 3: you began to grow the human population at a fairly

512
00:34:35,800 --> 00:34:40,520
Speaker 3: rapid grade. And I think the lower human population is

513
00:34:40,560 --> 00:34:45,040
Speaker 3: a second explanation for why Native people were able to

514
00:34:45,080 --> 00:34:48,160
Speaker 3: do so well over that ten thousand years after licensing,

515
00:34:49,280 --> 00:34:53,920
Speaker 3: the human population never gets above five million people north

516
00:34:53,960 --> 00:34:57,080
Speaker 3: of the Rio Grand by the time Europeans come, and

517
00:34:57,200 --> 00:35:02,320
Speaker 3: so a population that means that it's possible to keep

518
00:35:02,640 --> 00:35:06,240
Speaker 3: North America in a fairly healthy situation. But I also

519
00:35:06,320 --> 00:35:09,480
Speaker 3: think the religion and the philosophy that Native people bring

520
00:35:09,480 --> 00:35:12,320
Speaker 3: to the game is important, and as I mentioned earlier,

521
00:35:12,760 --> 00:35:15,600
Speaker 3: it centers around this idea that humans are a part

522
00:35:15,640 --> 00:35:18,560
Speaker 3: of the natural world, that other creatures are our kin,

523
00:35:19,560 --> 00:35:24,920
Speaker 3: They're the same as we are, and this is not

524
00:35:25,040 --> 00:35:28,759
Speaker 3: a story where humans are somehow exceptional and everything else

525
00:35:28,840 --> 00:35:31,120
Speaker 3: is just out there for us to use, and that

526
00:35:31,200 --> 00:35:35,680
Speaker 3: kind of philosophy and that respect which was expressed in ceremonies,

527
00:35:35,719 --> 00:35:39,960
Speaker 3: annual ceremonies in order to renew the connections between humans

528
00:35:39,960 --> 00:35:43,040
Speaker 3: and other animals. I think that played a role in

529
00:35:43,120 --> 00:35:47,960
Speaker 3: this story too, and so it produces as we're describing,

530
00:35:48,160 --> 00:35:51,400
Speaker 3: a ten thousand year period, that's an extraordinarily long period

531
00:35:51,440 --> 00:35:56,440
Speaker 3: of time where native people are here fully occupying North America.

532
00:35:57,640 --> 00:36:00,480
Speaker 3: I mean, there are instances where animal popular as are

533
00:36:00,600 --> 00:36:04,560
Speaker 3: drawing down to some extent as the population begins July

534
00:36:04,719 --> 00:36:08,839
Speaker 3: is after the at ent of agriculture. Nonetheless, the biological

535
00:36:08,880 --> 00:36:11,720
Speaker 3: diversity is still here with you repeated.

536
00:36:12,960 --> 00:36:15,600
Speaker 2: It's interesting to me when you think about this, this

537
00:36:15,719 --> 00:36:20,840
Speaker 2: idea that there was this recalibrating or this adjusting of course,

538
00:36:20,880 --> 00:36:24,520
Speaker 2: or this this learning of the lessons from the past

539
00:36:24,560 --> 00:36:28,799
Speaker 2: that led to this ten thousand year period. And then

540
00:36:28,840 --> 00:36:30,920
Speaker 2: you look at what happened on the other side of

541
00:36:30,960 --> 00:36:34,879
Speaker 2: the ocean, and when Europeans came across and entered North

542
00:36:34,880 --> 00:36:38,399
Speaker 2: America for the first time, things changed drastically. They brought

543
00:36:38,400 --> 00:36:40,960
Speaker 2: a whole new set of values into different philosophy to

544
00:36:41,960 --> 00:36:46,000
Speaker 2: you know, resource extraction and relationship with the natural world,

545
00:36:46,160 --> 00:36:50,279
Speaker 2: and you would think, well, they experienced the same thing

546
00:36:50,280 --> 00:36:54,200
Speaker 2: that happened here many many years earlier, right They the

547
00:36:54,239 --> 00:36:57,560
Speaker 2: folks on the European continent and across Asia, they wiped

548
00:36:57,600 --> 00:37:00,000
Speaker 2: out their large mammals and large species too. You would

549
00:37:00,160 --> 00:37:02,840
Speaker 2: thought that they would have learned from that and recalibrated

550
00:37:02,880 --> 00:37:06,600
Speaker 2: and have found some sense of equilibrium themselves. But I

551
00:37:06,600 --> 00:37:10,600
Speaker 2: wonder if there was like a shifting baseline syndrome that

552
00:37:10,840 --> 00:37:13,560
Speaker 2: happened that after so many tens of thousands of years,

553
00:37:13,640 --> 00:37:17,120
Speaker 2: they lost track of that history, and by the time

554
00:37:17,160 --> 00:37:20,920
Speaker 2: we get to the fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred, seventeen hundreds,

555
00:37:21,120 --> 00:37:27,160
Speaker 2: you have a European philosophy of the natural world that

556
00:37:27,200 --> 00:37:31,360
Speaker 2: has lost that deeper connection that here in North America

557
00:37:31,520 --> 00:37:35,360
Speaker 2: was still fresh. Does anything that ring true?

558
00:37:35,440 --> 00:37:35,719
Speaker 3: Is that?

559
00:37:36,160 --> 00:37:37,280
Speaker 2: Is that track?

560
00:37:40,800 --> 00:37:43,400
Speaker 3: Yes? I think it does track, And I think maybe

561
00:37:43,480 --> 00:37:50,040
Speaker 3: the critical element of it is the small time frame

562
00:37:50,200 --> 00:37:56,400
Speaker 3: between the demise of large creatures of the Pleiscescene creatures

563
00:37:56,600 --> 00:38:01,440
Speaker 3: of Western Europe and the advent of the Neolithic Revolution

564
00:38:01,760 --> 00:38:06,760
Speaker 3: in the Old World in Eurasia. Those two events follow

565
00:38:06,840 --> 00:38:11,560
Speaker 3: one another in fairly rapid succession. So you have the

566
00:38:11,640 --> 00:38:15,440
Speaker 3: demise of the large creatures there by about twelve thousand

567
00:38:15,520 --> 00:38:19,520
Speaker 3: years ago, and the beginnings of the Neolithic Revolution by

568
00:38:20,000 --> 00:38:23,239
Speaker 3: ten thousand, nine thousand years ago, so it's a much

569
00:38:23,480 --> 00:38:27,240
Speaker 3: narrower window of time. And as I said, the critical

570
00:38:27,280 --> 00:38:30,160
Speaker 3: thing about the Neolithic Revolution is that when people begin

571
00:38:30,640 --> 00:38:35,320
Speaker 3: settling down and farming and depending on domesticated animals. In

572
00:38:35,400 --> 00:38:40,759
Speaker 3: the case of Europe, it's cattle, it's horses, it's camels,

573
00:38:41,239 --> 00:38:46,000
Speaker 3: it's hogs, its sheep, it's goats, chickens, I mean. And

574
00:38:46,080 --> 00:38:50,480
Speaker 3: of course Eurasia is a connected land mass, so everybody

575
00:38:50,480 --> 00:38:55,600
Speaker 3: who domesticates a creature like the chickens, for example, and

576
00:38:55,800 --> 00:38:59,920
Speaker 3: ducks and hogs are first domesticated in Asia. But because

577
00:39:00,040 --> 00:39:02,800
Speaker 3: Asia is connected to Europe, it's not very long before

578
00:39:02,840 --> 00:39:05,560
Speaker 3: those ideas are going to find their way into Western

579
00:39:05,560 --> 00:39:09,359
Speaker 3: Europe along with the animals. So you have this kind

580
00:39:09,400 --> 00:39:12,720
Speaker 3: of Neolithic Revolution that happens very much on the heels

581
00:39:12,719 --> 00:39:18,240
Speaker 3: of the demise of the Paleolithic hunt, and that puts

582
00:39:18,280 --> 00:39:22,399
Speaker 3: it really far back in time, so that I think

583
00:39:22,440 --> 00:39:27,960
Speaker 3: you're probably right mark any of the lessons perhaps that

584
00:39:28,040 --> 00:39:30,680
Speaker 3: were learned seem to have been learned in North America

585
00:39:31,400 --> 00:39:35,640
Speaker 3: had receded into the past for people from the Old World,

586
00:39:36,120 --> 00:39:40,200
Speaker 3: and they had depended on not only a larger human

587
00:39:40,239 --> 00:39:44,719
Speaker 3: population based around agriculture and domesticated animals for a much

588
00:39:44,760 --> 00:39:48,160
Speaker 3: longer period of time, but that period of time put

589
00:39:48,239 --> 00:39:51,960
Speaker 3: their stories farther back in the past, and so they

590
00:39:52,200 --> 00:39:56,839
Speaker 3: came out of a completely different sort of mindset as

591
00:39:56,840 --> 00:40:00,879
Speaker 3: a result of domesticating animals like sheet and goats. A

592
00:40:00,880 --> 00:40:04,000
Speaker 3: at they very early Old World is very aroun developed

593
00:40:04,000 --> 00:40:07,200
Speaker 3: the idea that predators were an enemy. I mean here

594
00:40:07,200 --> 00:40:12,160
Speaker 3: in America, the animals that got domesticated were essentially things

595
00:40:12,200 --> 00:40:16,239
Speaker 3: like wild turkeys and muscovie ducks and things like that,

596
00:40:16,400 --> 00:40:23,960
Speaker 3: and so native people never evolved the idea that wolves, cougars, bears,

597
00:40:24,080 --> 00:40:28,360
Speaker 3: coyotes are enemies that you make war on in the

598
00:40:28,440 --> 00:40:32,840
Speaker 3: natural world. In fact, they use those animals as teachers,

599
00:40:33,480 --> 00:40:36,560
Speaker 3: and when you went out and did a vision quest,

600
00:40:36,600 --> 00:40:40,160
Speaker 3: those were the animals who became your totem animals sometimes

601
00:40:40,200 --> 00:40:44,080
Speaker 3: because they were fellow hunters. And the Old World predators

602
00:40:44,200 --> 00:40:47,520
Speaker 3: very early on, probably by six seven thousand years ago,

603
00:40:47,640 --> 00:40:51,520
Speaker 3: had become the enemy of the agricultural world. So that's

604
00:40:51,560 --> 00:40:53,800
Speaker 3: one of the things that develops. The other thing, of course,

605
00:40:54,560 --> 00:40:57,120
Speaker 3: the other two things that developed that Europeans are going

606
00:40:57,160 --> 00:41:00,000
Speaker 3: to bring that I think changes the whole point of view.

607
00:41:00,719 --> 00:41:05,040
Speaker 3: Is first of all, a religious tradition, the Judeo Christian

608
00:41:05,040 --> 00:41:08,319
Speaker 3: tradition that spreads over Europe in the last couple of

609
00:41:08,360 --> 00:41:13,400
Speaker 3: thousand years, that replaces many of the old pagan religions

610
00:41:13,440 --> 00:41:16,200
Speaker 3: like that of the Druids for instances in the British Isles,

611
00:41:16,960 --> 00:41:22,080
Speaker 3: and Judaeo Christianity is the religion that teaches Western Europeans

612
00:41:22,160 --> 00:41:28,280
Speaker 3: or all people in Europe, they are exceptional, the only

613
00:41:28,440 --> 00:41:31,600
Speaker 3: preachers made in the image of God, and all other

614
00:41:32,040 --> 00:41:35,719
Speaker 3: creatures are made for humans to use. And so that's

615
00:41:35,920 --> 00:41:39,600
Speaker 3: one element of a difference. And then the next element,

616
00:41:39,640 --> 00:41:41,960
Speaker 3: of course, comes about as a result of the colonial

617
00:41:42,000 --> 00:41:45,759
Speaker 3: age and the emergence of the global market economy, where

618
00:41:45,800 --> 00:41:50,399
Speaker 3: you take that philosophy of human exceptionalism and other things

619
00:41:50,440 --> 00:41:53,520
Speaker 3: are made for our use, and then you plug them

620
00:41:53,560 --> 00:41:58,960
Speaker 3: into a market capitalist system where new world animals like

621
00:41:59,000 --> 00:42:01,520
Speaker 3: beavers and vice and then otters and on and on

622
00:42:01,600 --> 00:42:06,239
Speaker 3: and on are just resources in the global market. And

623
00:42:06,320 --> 00:42:11,239
Speaker 3: suddenly the whole thing is set up for this extractive, exploitive,

624
00:42:11,840 --> 00:42:15,480
Speaker 3: kind of destructive approach to wild creatures.

625
00:42:16,800 --> 00:42:19,920
Speaker 2: You know, one of the angles of this story that

626
00:42:19,960 --> 00:42:23,359
Speaker 2: I personally don't know as much about is how all

627
00:42:23,440 --> 00:42:27,839
Speaker 2: this translated to the east of Europe. We we kind

628
00:42:27,840 --> 00:42:30,880
Speaker 2: of oftentimes, or at least maybe I have in my understandings,

629
00:42:30,880 --> 00:42:37,400
Speaker 2: have skipped over. We see, like the the initial migration

630
00:42:37,480 --> 00:42:40,680
Speaker 2: of humans out of Africa, and then we kind of

631
00:42:40,719 --> 00:42:44,320
Speaker 2: skipped to and then Europeans developed and industrialized, and then

632
00:42:44,640 --> 00:42:46,800
Speaker 2: there was this whole thing going on over in North America,

633
00:42:46,880 --> 00:42:49,160
Speaker 2: and then Europeans arrived in North America and it all

634
00:42:49,200 --> 00:42:54,279
Speaker 2: went to hell. But what happened in Asia or the

635
00:42:54,320 --> 00:42:58,360
Speaker 2: Far East? Did they? Did they? You know? What was

636
00:42:58,400 --> 00:43:00,799
Speaker 2: that story like for them over that ten thousand year

637
00:43:00,840 --> 00:43:05,480
Speaker 2: period after their first you know, moment of their own

638
00:43:05,560 --> 00:43:07,920
Speaker 2: version of the Plaistocene moment that we had twelve thousand

639
00:43:08,000 --> 00:43:10,920
Speaker 2: years ago. What was that like as it moved across

640
00:43:11,080 --> 00:43:16,799
Speaker 2: Asia or Russia? Was it just the slow burn that

641
00:43:16,840 --> 00:43:19,520
Speaker 2: you were describing earlier, or it seems like it's a

642
00:43:19,520 --> 00:43:21,399
Speaker 2: little bit unique because like in India they held onto

643
00:43:21,400 --> 00:43:23,680
Speaker 2: some of these large creatures and whatnot.

644
00:43:25,080 --> 00:43:32,840
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it's yeah, it's a variable story as you

645
00:43:32,920 --> 00:43:38,520
Speaker 3: go eastward from say western Europe as far east as

646
00:43:38,520 --> 00:43:43,320
Speaker 3: the Caucasus Mountain Sewitch in the you know, seventeenth eighteen

647
00:43:43,400 --> 00:43:47,120
Speaker 3: nineteenth centuries. Sale today is often sort of regarded as

648
00:43:47,560 --> 00:43:52,960
Speaker 3: the most eastwardly reach of the Russian the Slavic peoples

649
00:43:54,200 --> 00:43:59,600
Speaker 3: I mean, Russia sort of mirrors the story of Western Europe.

650
00:44:00,680 --> 00:44:05,120
Speaker 3: Russia is it's Greek Orthodox in religion, but it's still

651
00:44:05,160 --> 00:44:09,280
Speaker 3: nonetheless a Christian religion with many of the same tenets

652
00:44:09,320 --> 00:44:15,000
Speaker 3: of belief, and so Russia well, and for the discovery

653
00:44:15,040 --> 00:44:21,000
Speaker 3: of North America, the primary fur bearing region of the

654
00:44:21,040 --> 00:44:25,799
Speaker 3: world that supplied this desire for furs and leather, and

655
00:44:26,080 --> 00:44:30,160
Speaker 3: fur and leather two different things from animals. Fur often

656
00:44:30,320 --> 00:44:35,160
Speaker 3: used to designate status I mean, just think of, for example,

657
00:44:35,160 --> 00:44:39,799
Speaker 3: in our own time, a mink coat, a particular kind

658
00:44:39,880 --> 00:44:45,320
Speaker 3: of fur, can be regarded as an emblem of high

659
00:44:45,320 --> 00:44:49,560
Speaker 3: status among humans. Leather, of course, serves another purpose, a

660
00:44:49,640 --> 00:44:54,400
Speaker 3: more practically utilitarian purpose, but animals provide both those things,

661
00:44:54,440 --> 00:44:58,520
Speaker 3: and Russia was the locust of much of the search

662
00:44:59,160 --> 00:45:06,560
Speaker 3: for fur and leather before the discovery of the Americas.

663
00:45:06,600 --> 00:45:12,040
Speaker 3: When America's, particularly North America, came into the global market,

664
00:45:12,600 --> 00:45:15,800
Speaker 3: then the focus on fur and leather sort of squish.

665
00:45:15,880 --> 00:45:21,280
Speaker 3: North America so the h story prep Orthodox still Christian

666
00:45:21,400 --> 00:45:24,319
Speaker 3: as far as the Caucasus Mountains is very similar. When

667
00:45:24,360 --> 00:45:28,080
Speaker 3: you get beyond the Caucasus Mountains and you get to Asia,

668
00:45:28,120 --> 00:45:31,080
Speaker 3: of course, what you enter the world with a variety

669
00:45:31,120 --> 00:45:35,000
Speaker 3: of different religious traditions, many of which don't have that

670
00:45:35,320 --> 00:45:40,239
Speaker 3: same kind of focus on tumas as exceptional to everything

671
00:45:40,280 --> 00:45:54,719
Speaker 3: else in the world. Well hasten to add, however, that

672
00:45:55,320 --> 00:46:00,640
Speaker 3: we don't have really great evidence that that, say, the

673
00:46:00,920 --> 00:46:07,440
Speaker 3: wild creatures of Asia to any great extent, and places

674
00:46:07,520 --> 00:46:11,080
Speaker 3: like India, for example, where cattle, for instance, are regarded

675
00:46:11,160 --> 00:46:15,839
Speaker 3: as gods and deities, you do get a difference, as

676
00:46:15,840 --> 00:46:18,080
Speaker 3: you mentioned. But I mean, there was a sort of

677
00:46:18,120 --> 00:46:20,520
Speaker 3: a famous book back I was in graduate school and

678
00:46:20,640 --> 00:46:26,319
Speaker 3: studying environmental history called Religion and environment in History, and

679
00:46:27,000 --> 00:46:29,680
Speaker 3: many of the scholars who worked on that book were

680
00:46:29,760 --> 00:46:33,280
Speaker 3: attempting to demonstrate that a different kind of religious tradition

681
00:46:33,719 --> 00:46:37,240
Speaker 3: in the Far East could produce a different outcome. Without

682
00:46:37,280 --> 00:46:39,839
Speaker 3: a great deal of success, there still was a lot

683
00:46:39,840 --> 00:46:43,719
Speaker 3: of exploitation of animal life, and a lot of it

684
00:46:43,800 --> 00:46:46,640
Speaker 3: based on kind of religious notions that we all still

685
00:46:46,920 --> 00:46:50,719
Speaker 3: realize today. Where people in Asia would regard, for example,

686
00:46:51,120 --> 00:46:55,560
Speaker 3: the horn of a particular animal, a particular analoge or

687
00:46:55,800 --> 00:46:59,160
Speaker 3: the rhino, if it came out of Africa as having

688
00:47:00,080 --> 00:47:05,040
Speaker 3: and all our special magical sort of uses. So there's

689
00:47:05,080 --> 00:47:09,160
Speaker 3: still exploitation of wildlife even with these other religions, but

690
00:47:09,960 --> 00:47:13,400
Speaker 3: it doesn't take the sort of form it does in

691
00:47:13,440 --> 00:47:16,400
Speaker 3: North America. In fact, I mean, I say, in Wild

692
00:47:16,400 --> 00:47:22,400
Speaker 3: New World, I said this also in America. Dren getting

693
00:47:22,560 --> 00:47:26,520
Speaker 3: working on those two books, I really could find an

694
00:47:26,560 --> 00:47:32,200
Speaker 3: example anywhere else in the world that rivaled the widespread

695
00:47:32,360 --> 00:47:37,480
Speaker 3: destruction of wild life that was the case in North America.

696
00:47:37,880 --> 00:47:40,600
Speaker 3: I mean, we seem to have done it in a

697
00:47:40,640 --> 00:47:45,239
Speaker 3: way that nobody else was able to do. I mean,

698
00:47:45,320 --> 00:47:49,320
Speaker 3: the largest destruction of wild animals in the colonial age

699
00:47:49,560 --> 00:47:53,160
Speaker 3: anywhere on the planet took place in North America. And

700
00:47:53,600 --> 00:47:56,520
Speaker 3: that's a story that we need to understand and know about,

701
00:47:56,920 --> 00:47:59,120
Speaker 3: particularly as a result of the future.

702
00:48:00,200 --> 00:48:02,520
Speaker 2: And that's a perfect segue to the next act of

703
00:48:02,600 --> 00:48:04,719
Speaker 2: the story here in North America at least, which is

704
00:48:04,960 --> 00:48:09,719
Speaker 2: after that ten thousand year period of relative equilibrium, we

705
00:48:09,840 --> 00:48:14,200
Speaker 2: have the settling of the continent, European Americans spreading across

706
00:48:14,880 --> 00:48:17,759
Speaker 2: America and across the North American continent, and as you

707
00:48:17,800 --> 00:48:20,919
Speaker 2: write in a recent article in Time magazine, you said,

708
00:48:21,239 --> 00:48:25,839
Speaker 2: here's an inconvenient truth. Our forebears use the unrestrained free

709
00:48:25,880 --> 00:48:30,400
Speaker 2: market to affect a staggering destruction of continental wildlife, an

710
00:48:30,520 --> 00:48:35,680
Speaker 2: unforgivable crime against evolution in America. And as you just described,

711
00:48:36,640 --> 00:48:39,640
Speaker 2: you know, the greatest example of such destruction in the

712
00:48:39,680 --> 00:48:48,120
Speaker 2: history of the world, possibly I think the biggest. Yeah,

713
00:48:48,320 --> 00:48:51,080
Speaker 2: I think most folks know the broad strokes of that story.

714
00:48:51,400 --> 00:48:55,640
Speaker 2: Maybe Buffalo stand out as the premier example, but at

715
00:48:55,719 --> 00:48:58,080
Speaker 2: least I hope most people in the hunting and fishing

716
00:48:58,120 --> 00:49:02,439
Speaker 2: world know the odd theme of that story, the fact

717
00:49:02,440 --> 00:49:05,800
Speaker 2: that we nearly wiped out our wildlife in this content,

718
00:49:05,840 --> 00:49:10,279
Speaker 2: but the last moment saved, saved the day to some degree.

719
00:49:11,080 --> 00:49:15,880
Speaker 2: Could you, could you, I guess, very briefly flesh that

720
00:49:15,960 --> 00:49:18,600
Speaker 2: out just a little bit beyond what maybe the average

721
00:49:18,640 --> 00:49:21,479
Speaker 2: person understands, just enough so that we can speak about

722
00:49:21,480 --> 00:49:25,000
Speaker 2: a few specifics. Because what I am particularly interested in,

723
00:49:25,440 --> 00:49:27,359
Speaker 2: and that we'll get to here in a moment, is

724
00:49:28,000 --> 00:49:30,719
Speaker 2: is how we stopped it. Because we reached a n

725
00:49:30,719 --> 00:49:36,240
Speaker 2: a deer. We we nearly destroyed this heaven on earth

726
00:49:36,239 --> 00:49:40,319
Speaker 2: here in America, and then we didn't just barely. We

727
00:49:40,400 --> 00:49:43,920
Speaker 2: caught ourselves. And that's the part that intrigues and excites

728
00:49:43,960 --> 00:49:45,799
Speaker 2: me the most because I think there's a hope there's

729
00:49:45,840 --> 00:49:48,880
Speaker 2: something we can learn from that there. But but before

730
00:49:48,880 --> 00:49:50,160
Speaker 2: we get to that, I just want to make sure

731
00:49:50,160 --> 00:49:53,880
Speaker 2: that people who aren't fully familiar with this story that

732
00:49:53,920 --> 00:49:55,840
Speaker 2: they get just a little bit more context. Can you

733
00:49:55,880 --> 00:49:57,759
Speaker 2: can you just set the stage a little bit and

734
00:49:57,840 --> 00:50:02,520
Speaker 2: explain this massive crime against evolution in America, and then

735
00:50:02,520 --> 00:50:04,799
Speaker 2: we can get to what happened at the end of that.

736
00:50:06,200 --> 00:50:09,120
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I'll try to do it briefly because I

737
00:50:09,160 --> 00:50:12,120
Speaker 3: agree with you. I think quite a number of people,

738
00:50:12,640 --> 00:50:17,160
Speaker 3: particularly people who are interested in wildlife, from whatever background

739
00:50:17,160 --> 00:50:23,799
Speaker 3: they come from, no thing about this. They probably know

740
00:50:24,520 --> 00:50:27,120
Speaker 3: the Shorthand version, the cocktail party version of the short

741
00:50:27,200 --> 00:50:31,440
Speaker 3: course centers on the buffalo. I mean in the Shorthand

742
00:50:31,560 --> 00:50:33,520
Speaker 3: version is once there were many millions out of them,

743
00:50:33,600 --> 00:50:36,960
Speaker 3: and suddenly, within the space of a century there are

744
00:50:37,040 --> 00:50:42,360
Speaker 3: fewer that thousand of them left somehow. And another story,

745
00:50:42,400 --> 00:50:44,279
Speaker 3: of course that's out there that people I think know

746
00:50:44,400 --> 00:50:50,840
Speaker 3: the fundamental elements of, is the beaver story. The beaver

747
00:50:51,280 --> 00:50:56,520
Speaker 3: supplied one of the first targets for the global market

748
00:50:56,560 --> 00:51:00,840
Speaker 3: economy in North America as a result of richness of

749
00:51:00,920 --> 00:51:05,920
Speaker 3: its fur. And that animal has a really unique story

750
00:51:06,040 --> 00:51:10,080
Speaker 3: because it provides the first example. It's not the only one.

751
00:51:10,280 --> 00:51:13,200
Speaker 3: Bison provide this too, and some others do as well,

752
00:51:13,600 --> 00:51:16,759
Speaker 3: but it provides the first example of how it was

753
00:51:16,840 --> 00:51:22,480
Speaker 3: possible for the Old World, which had, as I've mentioned before,

754
00:51:22,960 --> 00:51:26,200
Speaker 3: sort of preceded by a few thousand years along in

755
00:51:26,239 --> 00:51:31,440
Speaker 3: its historical trajectory. The arc of the Americas arrived in

756
00:51:31,520 --> 00:51:38,200
Speaker 3: North America with a transformative technology of iron and steel products,

757
00:51:39,040 --> 00:51:44,600
Speaker 3: and the existence of that technology enabled them to seduce

758
00:51:44,719 --> 00:51:52,120
Speaker 3: the native people into participating in this market economy for animals.

759
00:51:52,480 --> 00:51:56,000
Speaker 3: It was a kind of transformative technology that gave native people,

760
00:51:56,360 --> 00:52:00,000
Speaker 3: for example, iron arrowheads instead of flat ones, and iron

761
00:52:00,520 --> 00:52:06,759
Speaker 3: blades for their spears, and other war and hunting implements,

762
00:52:06,800 --> 00:52:12,279
Speaker 3: and iron hoes and rakes for agriculture and firearms ultimately,

763
00:52:12,680 --> 00:52:15,080
Speaker 3: and what it meant was that if you were a

764
00:52:15,160 --> 00:52:20,680
Speaker 3: native group that didn't participate in this while your neighbors did,

765
00:52:22,000 --> 00:52:25,640
Speaker 3: do we disadvantage she probably going to disappear from the

766
00:52:25,680 --> 00:52:30,279
Speaker 3: story of history. So by incorporating many people into the

767
00:52:30,400 --> 00:52:33,280
Speaker 3: hunt for some of these animals. I mean, the beaver

768
00:52:33,440 --> 00:52:38,360
Speaker 3: story proceeds across the continent in an astonishingly rapid way

769
00:52:38,800 --> 00:52:43,520
Speaker 3: which transforms the whole continent because it destroys the ecologies,

770
00:52:43,840 --> 00:52:48,600
Speaker 3: this wetland ecology that beaver had established across North America.

771
00:52:49,000 --> 00:52:51,799
Speaker 3: We do the same thing with sea otters on the

772
00:52:51,840 --> 00:52:58,279
Speaker 3: west coast, which had this extensive coastal ecology that depended

773
00:52:58,480 --> 00:53:02,879
Speaker 3: on eating sea earthens that kept help forest down. And

774
00:53:02,920 --> 00:53:06,440
Speaker 3: when se otters were gone in the market economy of

775
00:53:07,800 --> 00:53:12,200
Speaker 3: beds began to really soak along the coastline. So that's

776
00:53:12,320 --> 00:53:14,600
Speaker 3: just an example of how it happened. There are many

777
00:53:14,640 --> 00:53:18,360
Speaker 3: other species that it happens with, but it proceeds like

778
00:53:18,440 --> 00:53:21,480
Speaker 3: this to sort of sum it up animals that had

779
00:53:21,480 --> 00:53:27,279
Speaker 3: been able to survive here in undiminished numbers for millions

780
00:53:27,320 --> 00:53:30,360
Speaker 3: of years. And one of the species I mentioned in

781
00:53:30,400 --> 00:53:33,920
Speaker 3: that time article you reference is the passenger pision. We

782
00:53:34,000 --> 00:53:38,480
Speaker 3: know now passenger pigeons had been here for fifteen million years,

783
00:53:39,200 --> 00:53:42,560
Speaker 3: and for the last fifty thousand years they were in

784
00:53:42,800 --> 00:53:47,600
Speaker 3: billions of numbers. The most numerous bird on Earth. Could

785
00:53:47,640 --> 00:53:52,759
Speaker 3: not survive this global market hunt for more than three

786
00:53:52,840 --> 00:53:57,720
Speaker 3: hundred years until they were completely wiped out. The last

787
00:53:57,719 --> 00:54:01,880
Speaker 3: passenger visions became extinct in nineteen four. We lost the

788
00:54:01,920 --> 00:54:06,880
Speaker 3: Northern Hemisphere version of the penguin by the eighteen forties.

789
00:54:07,239 --> 00:54:10,920
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just one species after another until we

790
00:54:11,000 --> 00:54:14,520
Speaker 3: reach the beginning of the twentieth century, and as people

791
00:54:14,640 --> 00:54:19,080
Speaker 3: look around us, we realize, those who were sensitive to say,

792
00:54:19,080 --> 00:54:23,120
Speaker 3: the George Bird Grenelles and the Teddy Roosevelts of the world,

793
00:54:23,680 --> 00:54:28,720
Speaker 3: that holy shit, we are going to destroy everything here

794
00:54:29,080 --> 00:54:32,400
Speaker 3: if we don't somehow get a grip on ourselves. And that,

795
00:54:32,520 --> 00:54:35,799
Speaker 3: of course, is the moment that you reference a minute ago,

796
00:54:35,920 --> 00:54:39,160
Speaker 3: when we finally start to wake up a little bit

797
00:54:39,560 --> 00:54:44,960
Speaker 3: and try to begin at least to protect in the

798
00:54:45,080 --> 00:54:50,160
Speaker 3: early stages, at least the animals we wanted to continue

799
00:54:50,239 --> 00:54:52,319
Speaker 3: to be able to hunt. And that's sort of what

800
00:54:52,400 --> 00:54:57,160
Speaker 3: Teddy Roosevelt, Barnelle, the Boon and Crocotbob and all these

801
00:54:57,520 --> 00:55:01,240
Speaker 3: new state agencies were folk folks on, We've got stop

802
00:55:01,320 --> 00:55:04,960
Speaker 3: the market hunt and let's at least protect the animals

803
00:55:04,960 --> 00:55:06,839
Speaker 3: out there that we want to continue to be able

804
00:55:06,840 --> 00:55:07,200
Speaker 3: to hunt.

805
00:55:08,960 --> 00:55:15,000
Speaker 2: You know, after a big football game, oftentimes the coaches

806
00:55:15,440 --> 00:55:18,480
Speaker 2: and the team will review film from the game and

807
00:55:18,520 --> 00:55:21,000
Speaker 2: they'll walk through each quarter and talk about what they

808
00:55:21,000 --> 00:55:23,480
Speaker 2: did right, what they did wrong, what they can learn from,

809
00:55:23,760 --> 00:55:25,799
Speaker 2: what they need to do better next game to make

810
00:55:25,840 --> 00:55:29,160
Speaker 2: sure that they, you know, get better and have better results.

811
00:55:29,239 --> 00:55:31,040
Speaker 2: Or what did we do right in this moment that

812
00:55:31,239 --> 00:55:35,759
Speaker 2: won us the game? And if you would reply that

813
00:55:36,000 --> 00:55:39,319
Speaker 2: to this element, to this part of the story, and

814
00:55:39,360 --> 00:55:42,720
Speaker 2: you look at this moment where we reached the Nader

815
00:55:43,000 --> 00:55:45,960
Speaker 2: and there was this wake up moment with the Roosevelts

816
00:55:45,960 --> 00:55:49,359
Speaker 2: and the pin shows and the birds and horned days

817
00:55:49,400 --> 00:55:52,720
Speaker 2: and all these folks, if you were reviewing the film

818
00:55:53,000 --> 00:55:56,080
Speaker 2: of that game and trying to identify what won us

819
00:55:56,120 --> 00:55:59,200
Speaker 2: the game, or at least won us this battle this moment,

820
00:55:59,600 --> 00:56:01,719
Speaker 2: what are the key takeaways? What are the things that

821
00:56:01,880 --> 00:56:04,920
Speaker 2: led to us stopping the bleeding in that moment and

822
00:56:05,360 --> 00:56:08,560
Speaker 2: resetting the stage a little bit, because, as I mentioned earlier,

823
00:56:09,400 --> 00:56:12,200
Speaker 2: as we are now amidst this next wave of the

824
00:56:12,320 --> 00:56:16,960
Speaker 2: sixth extinction that folks talk about, many of us, I

825
00:56:16,960 --> 00:56:21,799
Speaker 2: think are are are searching for answers, searching for a

826
00:56:21,840 --> 00:56:25,640
Speaker 2: way forward. And you can look back and see one

827
00:56:25,680 --> 00:56:29,560
Speaker 2: moment where we did face a similar perilous moment and

828
00:56:29,840 --> 00:56:32,759
Speaker 2: we righted the ship. So what I'm trying to say,

829
00:56:32,840 --> 00:56:34,040
Speaker 2: Dan is how did they do it?

830
00:56:34,120 --> 00:56:40,719
Speaker 3: We did, Yeah, we we righted the ship part way.

831
00:56:41,680 --> 00:56:45,680
Speaker 3: And as I said, I mean and I remain, particularly

832
00:56:45,680 --> 00:56:49,320
Speaker 3: in a wild in the world, a bit critical of

833
00:56:49,360 --> 00:56:54,160
Speaker 3: the heroes of the conservation progress conservation back at the

834
00:56:54,600 --> 00:56:58,680
Speaker 3: beginning of the tenth century. You also have to be

835
00:56:59,120 --> 00:57:04,480
Speaker 3: sympathetic to them in a way, because evolution is still new.

836
00:57:04,760 --> 00:57:07,680
Speaker 3: Darwin had just published On the Origin of Species, as

837
00:57:07,719 --> 00:57:10,319
Speaker 3: I mentioned earlier, in eighteen fifty nine, and this is

838
00:57:10,600 --> 00:57:13,960
Speaker 3: only about forty years thirty five or forty years later.

839
00:57:14,960 --> 00:57:20,160
Speaker 3: Some of these people horn to Day I think probably

840
00:57:20,400 --> 00:57:23,960
Speaker 3: is guilty of this. Tady Roosevelt, I think maybe is

841
00:57:23,960 --> 00:57:28,680
Speaker 3: guilty of this. They don't quite have a really good

842
00:57:28,880 --> 00:57:36,040
Speaker 3: understanding of evolution yet. I've guess some reasons that I

843
00:57:36,120 --> 00:57:38,960
Speaker 3: outline in the section in Wild the World out why

844
00:57:39,080 --> 00:57:43,080
Speaker 3: I think that. But what they did, and I think

845
00:57:43,200 --> 00:57:47,160
Speaker 3: how they did it remarkably enough, and using probably George

846
00:57:47,160 --> 00:57:51,240
Speaker 3: Bird Grunell as the primary example, they did it through

847
00:57:52,200 --> 00:57:57,080
Speaker 3: the written media. George Bird Grunelle was the editor of

848
00:57:57,320 --> 00:58:02,680
Speaker 3: a famous magazine of the day, Forrest and Strength, and

849
00:58:03,040 --> 00:58:07,480
Speaker 3: Bell also wrote for a wide variety of newspapers and

850
00:58:07,680 --> 00:58:12,760
Speaker 3: other magazines scriblers in particular, and what they were attempting

851
00:58:12,800 --> 00:58:15,520
Speaker 3: to do, of course, was to alert the public to

852
00:58:15,600 --> 00:58:18,640
Speaker 3: the dangers of what was happening, and they were using

853
00:58:18,680 --> 00:58:23,160
Speaker 3: the media. They were using the kinds of voices that

854
00:58:23,320 --> 00:58:27,320
Speaker 3: I think we're doing ay podcasts as an example, to

855
00:58:27,400 --> 00:58:31,040
Speaker 3: reach a larger and larger audience of people. The ready

856
00:58:31,120 --> 00:58:34,720
Speaker 3: group that they find that's willing to listen, of course,

857
00:58:34,800 --> 00:58:41,640
Speaker 3: are the people who are person hunters, who very readily

858
00:58:41,760 --> 00:58:46,400
Speaker 3: joined the conservation movement as laid out by the Boone

859
00:58:46,440 --> 00:58:52,400
Speaker 3: and Crockett Club and Teddy Roosevelt because they recognize that

860
00:58:52,640 --> 00:58:56,320
Speaker 3: we don't do now, we're going to lose me of

861
00:58:56,440 --> 00:59:00,160
Speaker 3: all animals, big tail deer. We're done to fewer then

862
00:59:00,200 --> 00:59:05,360
Speaker 3: twenty five individuals. At the beginning of the twentieth century,

863
00:59:05,560 --> 00:59:09,720
Speaker 3: we reduced prong horns from fifteen million to seven thousand,

864
00:59:10,200 --> 00:59:12,440
Speaker 3: I mean, And that story just goes on and on

865
00:59:12,520 --> 00:59:17,520
Speaker 3: and on. And so the sportsman led by Roosevelt and

866
00:59:18,240 --> 00:59:21,640
Speaker 3: George berg Grenelle and the Booney Crocket Club and Hornity

867
00:59:21,760 --> 00:59:27,800
Speaker 3: too understand that we've got to continue just kind of

868
00:59:27,840 --> 00:59:31,200
Speaker 3: engage with the world that we think is importa where

869
00:59:31,240 --> 00:59:35,360
Speaker 3: I think they didn't quite get the ship upright. And

870
00:59:35,920 --> 00:59:39,920
Speaker 3: in some ways it's not their fault because the science

871
00:59:40,000 --> 00:59:46,120
Speaker 3: of ecology doesn't begin meeting formally the American Ecological Society

872
00:59:46,120 --> 00:59:50,600
Speaker 3: doesn't begin meeting until nineteen fifteen, is that they didn't

873
00:59:50,720 --> 00:59:55,920
Speaker 3: understand that it's ecologies that you have to protect and

874
00:59:56,160 --> 01:00:01,840
Speaker 3: not just individual animals. And of course what they didn't recognize,

875
01:00:01,880 --> 01:00:06,480
Speaker 3: primarily following this folklore tradition from the Old World, were

876
01:00:06,520 --> 01:00:12,480
Speaker 3: the role of predators in the world, especially in North America, where,

877
01:00:13,840 --> 01:00:17,720
Speaker 3: for examples and various secies at present, for a billion years,

878
01:00:18,120 --> 01:00:22,680
Speaker 3: all the prey animals had long since co evolved alongside

879
01:00:23,120 --> 01:00:26,600
Speaker 3: the predation of animals like that, And so without doing

880
01:00:26,640 --> 01:00:31,000
Speaker 3: any science at all, we just loved to this program

881
01:00:31,000 --> 01:00:33,080
Speaker 3: of we're going to say to elk and prong horns

882
01:00:33,120 --> 01:00:37,080
Speaker 3: and whitehails and mule deer and upland birds, and we're

883
01:00:37,080 --> 01:00:40,680
Speaker 3: going to introduce all kinds of new species from elsewhere

884
01:00:40,720 --> 01:00:43,320
Speaker 3: in the world to be able to hunt. But meanwhile,

885
01:00:43,320 --> 01:00:46,600
Speaker 3: we're also going to wipe out mountain lions and gray wolves,

886
01:00:46,920 --> 01:00:49,760
Speaker 3: and we're going to try to wipe coyotes off the continent,

887
01:00:50,200 --> 01:00:53,600
Speaker 3: and we're i mean, so it's not until really about

888
01:00:53,680 --> 01:00:59,800
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty when the ecologists, led by Aldo Leopold are

889
01:00:59,880 --> 01:01:03,920
Speaker 3: able to show the world what we have to protect.

890
01:01:03,960 --> 01:01:09,520
Speaker 3: Are these old American ecologies, not just select animals out

891
01:01:09,560 --> 01:01:12,640
Speaker 3: of the past that we want to continue to haunt

892
01:01:12,680 --> 01:01:16,680
Speaker 3: and exploit. And so by that point we start getting

893
01:01:16,880 --> 01:01:20,120
Speaker 3: into a period of history when we can finally get

894
01:01:20,160 --> 01:01:25,040
Speaker 3: to something like the endangered species deack of nineteen seventy three,

895
01:01:25,600 --> 01:01:28,880
Speaker 3: where we began to realize that it's a whole set

896
01:01:28,920 --> 01:01:32,400
Speaker 3: of other creatures too that we have to be concerned with.

897
01:01:35,400 --> 01:01:40,880
Speaker 2: So this story with that ending, and that leads us

898
01:01:40,920 --> 01:01:44,440
Speaker 2: into where we are now, which you know, as I've

899
01:01:44,440 --> 01:01:46,880
Speaker 2: talked about in previous podcasts, I know you've talked about

900
01:01:46,880 --> 01:01:49,040
Speaker 2: in other places we are and you speak on your book,

901
01:01:49,360 --> 01:01:51,760
Speaker 2: we are now in the anthropist scene. We are in

902
01:01:51,800 --> 01:01:55,480
Speaker 2: this new epoch defined by the impact that humans have

903
01:01:55,600 --> 01:02:00,600
Speaker 2: on the world, and we are seeing this next wave

904
01:02:00,760 --> 01:02:05,280
Speaker 2: of wildlife declines I've described in the past as a

905
01:02:05,520 --> 01:02:10,160
Speaker 2: clear cutting of our wildlife populations, and you write about

906
01:02:10,200 --> 01:02:12,400
Speaker 2: that in this piece I mentioned earlier in the Time magazine,

907
01:02:12,840 --> 01:02:14,880
Speaker 2: and I want to read one last excerpt because I

908
01:02:14,920 --> 01:02:18,280
Speaker 2: think it informs this final set of questions I have,

909
01:02:18,480 --> 01:02:20,560
Speaker 2: And you say here in the piece, you said, is

910
01:02:20,600 --> 01:02:24,280
Speaker 2: this story ideological? I don't think so. It calls on

911
01:02:24,400 --> 01:02:27,720
Speaker 2: an undeniable history to point out how nature will fare

912
01:02:27,840 --> 01:02:32,040
Speaker 2: when governments are missing in action with respect to environmental regulation.

913
01:02:32,840 --> 01:02:35,520
Speaker 2: It's an American story that urges us to be very

914
01:02:35,560 --> 01:02:40,600
Speaker 2: suspicious of a future of unregulated capitalism. The purpose of history,

915
01:02:40,680 --> 01:02:43,080
Speaker 2: after all, is not to make some look good in

916
01:02:43,160 --> 01:02:47,160
Speaker 2: others bad. Its purpose is or should be, to let

917
01:02:47,240 --> 01:02:50,360
Speaker 2: us consult the past so we can create the future

918
01:02:50,920 --> 01:02:55,840
Speaker 2: we want. So, given this story of this past, that

919
01:02:55,880 --> 01:03:01,120
Speaker 2: we are trying to understand what are the very most

920
01:03:01,280 --> 01:03:10,960
Speaker 2: important morals, takeaways, key tenants of a philosophy that will

921
01:03:11,000 --> 01:03:14,000
Speaker 2: allow us to create a future that we want and

922
01:03:14,080 --> 01:03:16,240
Speaker 2: not a repeat of the past.

923
01:03:20,880 --> 01:03:23,680
Speaker 3: Well, I wrote that piece for time.

924
01:03:25,280 --> 01:03:31,040
Speaker 5: Because of of a current fear that I have, and

925
01:03:31,080 --> 01:03:34,120
Speaker 5: I'm certainly not the only I think many of us

926
01:03:35,160 --> 01:03:42,040
Speaker 5: who share avidity for nature and for wild places and

927
01:03:42,160 --> 01:03:43,240
Speaker 5: wild creatures.

928
01:03:43,680 --> 01:03:49,200
Speaker 3: We share this fear that there is an inclination in

929
01:03:50,200 --> 01:03:53,880
Speaker 3: the American story, and it seems to be very prevalent

930
01:03:54,280 --> 01:04:04,240
Speaker 3: at the moment to economic growth, making money as the

931
01:04:04,640 --> 01:04:11,000
Speaker 3: ultimate value above every other kind of value out And

932
01:04:12,000 --> 01:04:15,240
Speaker 3: what I attempted to point out in that piece is

933
01:04:15,280 --> 01:04:21,600
Speaker 3: that when we do this, and there is a history

934
01:04:21,680 --> 01:04:24,560
Speaker 3: one that we've been talking about in this podcast of

935
01:04:24,600 --> 01:04:30,200
Speaker 3: when we've done this very thing, it really is almost

936
01:04:30,240 --> 01:04:34,560
Speaker 3: certain to produce a crisis for the natural world. Because

937
01:04:34,600 --> 01:04:40,240
Speaker 3: when you make money and the pursuit of economic growth

938
01:04:41,800 --> 01:04:48,240
Speaker 3: the sole value of your society, that the rest of

939
01:04:48,280 --> 01:04:53,160
Speaker 3: the world is going to suffer. And the idea of deregulation,

940
01:04:53,600 --> 01:04:58,400
Speaker 3: of turning the environ Protection Agency, for example, into an

941
01:04:58,440 --> 01:05:02,440
Speaker 3: agency that's going to engage and the biggest deregulation in

942
01:05:02,520 --> 01:05:05,160
Speaker 3: the history of the United States, as Liezel and the

943
01:05:05,800 --> 01:05:08,680
Speaker 3: but the President director of the EPA has put it

944
01:05:09,040 --> 01:05:11,720
Speaker 3: here in the last couple of months. I mean, that's

945
01:05:11,760 --> 01:05:16,000
Speaker 3: pretty scary because the reason we've managed to turn the

946
01:05:16,040 --> 01:05:22,240
Speaker 3: story around is by regulating human nature. I think we

947
01:05:22,400 --> 01:05:27,600
Speaker 3: all understand from the history struggle, you let human nature

948
01:05:28,320 --> 01:05:31,880
Speaker 3: run up and you create that what we often referred

949
01:05:31,920 --> 01:05:35,560
Speaker 3: to as is just like a wild wet We mean

950
01:05:35,600 --> 01:05:37,760
Speaker 3: when we say this, it's a place where there are

951
01:05:37,760 --> 01:05:43,880
Speaker 3: no regulations whatsoever. I mean that sounds great, it's free. Well,

952
01:05:43,920 --> 01:05:47,480
Speaker 3: when you do let every body be fielt is the

953
01:05:47,640 --> 01:05:53,960
Speaker 3: selfishness greed tends to overwhelm uh the natural world one

954
01:05:54,000 --> 01:05:56,640
Speaker 3: example after another. Is to call it, as I said

955
01:05:56,640 --> 01:05:59,800
Speaker 3: in that piece, this is not an ideological story. This

956
01:05:59,920 --> 01:06:02,120
Speaker 3: is it's just a story based on looking back at

957
01:06:02,120 --> 01:06:05,400
Speaker 3: the past and realizing what we did. So I think

958
01:06:06,400 --> 01:06:10,960
Speaker 3: we have to be smart about our brothers and our future,

959
01:06:10,960 --> 01:06:16,200
Speaker 3: and we have to understand that we've got to have

960
01:06:16,360 --> 01:06:19,919
Speaker 3: some sort of regulation in order to bring the rest

961
01:06:20,000 --> 01:06:22,520
Speaker 3: of the world. And that regulation is based around a

962
01:06:22,560 --> 01:06:25,960
Speaker 3: whole other set of values. Some of us have the

963
01:06:26,080 --> 01:06:31,360
Speaker 3: value of appreciating wild creatures and getting to experience nature.

964
01:06:31,800 --> 01:06:35,240
Speaker 3: Some of us have the value of appreciating literature or

965
01:06:35,560 --> 01:06:38,840
Speaker 3: art or film, and those are all things that create

966
01:06:38,960 --> 01:06:45,840
Speaker 3: to me a really rich experience of life. And it's

967
01:06:45,920 --> 01:06:48,120
Speaker 3: certainly I think it's one of the things we celebrat

968
01:06:48,200 --> 01:06:52,680
Speaker 3: in the American story, not the only thing. There are

969
01:06:52,680 --> 01:06:55,160
Speaker 3: a lot of things out there that are important, and

970
01:06:55,200 --> 01:06:56,280
Speaker 3: I think we have to keep it.

971
01:07:07,440 --> 01:07:12,640
Speaker 2: As someone like you who has these values, who cares

972
01:07:12,800 --> 01:07:15,600
Speaker 2: deeply about the natural world and wildlife and wild places.

973
01:07:16,080 --> 01:07:20,320
Speaker 2: I frequently find myself looking back again, looking back to

974
01:07:20,480 --> 01:07:24,160
Speaker 2: the Roosevelts or the Leopolds or the Rachel Carson's or

975
01:07:24,200 --> 01:07:27,240
Speaker 2: whoever it might be, looking for some kind of clue,

976
01:07:27,840 --> 01:07:31,480
Speaker 2: looking for some kind of blueprint or a template for

977
01:07:31,720 --> 01:07:35,840
Speaker 2: how I can be that kind of person today. How

978
01:07:35,880 --> 01:07:39,040
Speaker 2: do I do what they did then to stop this bleeding?

979
01:07:39,400 --> 01:07:43,280
Speaker 2: How can we be that next great generation that can

980
01:07:43,320 --> 01:07:47,480
Speaker 2: somehow change the trajectory that we're on. So, as individuals,

981
01:07:48,840 --> 01:07:54,479
Speaker 2: what takeaways have you found from the story of these

982
01:07:54,800 --> 01:07:58,680
Speaker 2: iconic people who did these things that change the world

983
01:07:58,720 --> 01:08:01,000
Speaker 2: that we now live in. What have you taken from

984
01:08:01,080 --> 01:08:03,760
Speaker 2: them that you've been able to apply as an individual yourself,

985
01:08:03,760 --> 01:08:06,320
Speaker 2: and that we too might be able to put into

986
01:08:06,480 --> 01:08:09,200
Speaker 2: action in our own lives to try to create this

987
01:08:09,320 --> 01:08:10,200
Speaker 2: future that we want.

988
01:08:14,680 --> 01:08:19,760
Speaker 3: Well, I think that most of the people that we

989
01:08:19,960 --> 01:08:26,840
Speaker 3: referred to in the course of this discussion conversation we've had,

990
01:08:28,520 --> 01:08:35,519
Speaker 3: have been people who attempted to evangelize and spread the

991
01:08:35,560 --> 01:08:40,080
Speaker 3: word in one form or another. As I mentioned, George

992
01:08:40,080 --> 01:08:44,240
Speaker 3: burg Renelle was an editor of famous magazine at his day,

993
01:08:44,360 --> 01:08:49,200
Speaker 3: but he also of course founded the Autuburn Society and

994
01:08:49,880 --> 01:08:53,160
Speaker 3: was prominent in the creation of an organization like a

995
01:08:53,240 --> 01:09:02,080
Speaker 3: Boon and Crocket Club. So it's not just evangelizing as

996
01:09:02,120 --> 01:09:06,600
Speaker 3: into itself. People we've referred to Rachel Carson for example.

997
01:09:06,880 --> 01:09:10,280
Speaker 3: I mean again, what Rachel Carson did was she wrote

998
01:09:10,479 --> 01:09:13,400
Speaker 3: one of the most important books anyone has written about

999
01:09:13,400 --> 01:09:19,559
Speaker 3: American nature, and she was able to use that sort

1000
01:09:19,600 --> 01:09:23,960
Speaker 3: of bullyhole pit in her voice in Silence Spring to

1001
01:09:25,040 --> 01:09:29,759
Speaker 3: get Congress actually to pay attention to that. Many people,

1002
01:09:29,760 --> 01:09:34,360
Speaker 3: of course detrated her, people who call her a hysterical woman,

1003
01:09:34,520 --> 01:09:38,880
Speaker 3: and she was overreaching by attacking the chemical companies and

1004
01:09:38,920 --> 01:09:42,080
Speaker 3: so forth. So chemistry was going to be the wave

1005
01:09:42,160 --> 01:09:44,840
Speaker 3: of the future in providing us with the good life,

1006
01:09:44,840 --> 01:09:48,840
Speaker 3: and she was pointing out the malevolent effects of it.

1007
01:09:49,479 --> 01:09:56,720
Speaker 3: But I think it's probably in order to create this generation,

1008
01:09:57,760 --> 01:10:01,840
Speaker 3: one of the ways of doing it is to to

1009
01:10:02,160 --> 01:10:06,719
Speaker 3: use the the pullpits that we have that have arek

1010
01:10:07,040 --> 01:10:11,040
Speaker 3: you do and in the talks that you do that

1011
01:10:11,880 --> 01:10:16,080
Speaker 3: I suppose I probably have in the books that I write,

1012
01:10:16,600 --> 01:10:21,559
Speaker 3: to try to take our insights to as many people

1013
01:10:21,600 --> 01:10:23,160
Speaker 3: as possible. I mean, you know, one of the great

1014
01:10:23,200 --> 01:10:28,439
Speaker 3: things about watching a terrific film or reading a really

1015
01:10:28,720 --> 01:10:33,439
Speaker 3: good book is that those experiences have the ability to

1016
01:10:33,520 --> 01:10:39,040
Speaker 3: kind of rearrange the furniture in your head. And that's

1017
01:10:39,080 --> 01:10:42,559
Speaker 3: only important thing to do, I think, in confronting the

1018
01:10:42,600 --> 01:10:47,080
Speaker 3: future that we're facing, and we've really got to rearrange

1019
01:10:47,120 --> 01:10:51,000
Speaker 3: the furniture in as many heads as possible to make

1020
01:10:51,120 --> 01:10:58,960
Speaker 3: us understand what the possibility if we don't act and

1021
01:10:59,000 --> 01:11:02,240
Speaker 3: we're not smart, and what the possibilities are we are.

1022
01:11:02,560 --> 01:11:05,200
Speaker 3: And really it's about that, It's about being. I mean,

1023
01:11:05,240 --> 01:11:10,600
Speaker 3: we pride ourselves on being this intelligent species. Well let's demonstrate.

1024
01:11:10,720 --> 01:11:11,679
Speaker 3: Let's show how smart.

1025
01:11:13,520 --> 01:11:17,400
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I'm going to ask you to participate in

1026
01:11:17,439 --> 01:11:22,160
Speaker 2: an exercise that might be uncomfortable given your history as

1027
01:11:22,200 --> 01:11:24,920
Speaker 2: a nonfiction writer, But I'm going to ask you to

1028
01:11:26,000 --> 01:11:30,720
Speaker 2: write for me a fictional story, an imagined story of

1029
01:11:30,800 --> 01:11:35,040
Speaker 2: the future. You've specialized on telling the story of our

1030
01:11:35,120 --> 01:11:38,240
Speaker 2: past with wildlife and wild places, but I'd love for

1031
01:11:38,280 --> 01:11:41,960
Speaker 2: you to imagine a future with wildlife and wild places

1032
01:11:41,960 --> 01:11:46,799
Speaker 2: that anticipates a new relationship between us and our wild neighbors.

1033
01:11:47,320 --> 01:11:50,040
Speaker 2: If there were to be a future, let's say, fifty

1034
01:11:50,120 --> 01:11:52,720
Speaker 2: years from now or one hundred years from now, in

1035
01:11:52,760 --> 01:11:57,840
Speaker 2: which we in America still have thriving populations of wildlife,

1036
01:11:57,880 --> 01:12:00,880
Speaker 2: that we have grizzly bears roaming the continent, that we

1037
01:12:00,920 --> 01:12:04,720
Speaker 2: can hunt deer and elk, that buffalo are maybe even

1038
01:12:04,800 --> 01:12:07,200
Speaker 2: more prevalent than they are now, That we still have

1039
01:12:08,680 --> 01:12:13,599
Speaker 2: incredible wild places where we can seek solace, or fill

1040
01:12:13,640 --> 01:12:16,439
Speaker 2: our freezers or just go for a hike. If all

1041
01:12:16,520 --> 01:12:20,360
Speaker 2: that we're still present and possible fifty or one hundred

1042
01:12:20,439 --> 01:12:24,400
Speaker 2: years from now, what would have to be true for

1043
01:12:24,479 --> 01:12:28,920
Speaker 2: that to come into existence? What changes or actions would

1044
01:12:29,000 --> 01:12:32,320
Speaker 2: need to be taken in those subsequent decades for that

1045
01:12:32,520 --> 01:12:33,800
Speaker 2: story to come to life?

1046
01:12:39,720 --> 01:12:43,920
Speaker 3: You know, maybe predictable In order of someone who thinks

1047
01:12:43,920 --> 01:12:47,080
Speaker 3: that understanding the past is the key to the future,

1048
01:12:47,560 --> 01:12:50,000
Speaker 3: based on the idea that the truth is the past

1049
01:12:50,040 --> 01:12:53,880
Speaker 3: doesn't stay in the past, its how we live in

1050
01:12:53,920 --> 01:12:58,120
Speaker 3: the present, I think I would have to argue that

1051
01:13:00,120 --> 01:13:07,400
Speaker 3: standing we are in for a way, understanding that we

1052
01:13:08,000 --> 01:13:15,200
Speaker 3: are animals out of Earth's evolutionary river, and that we

1053
01:13:15,600 --> 01:13:20,280
Speaker 3: and other creatures can coosist side by side as a

1054
01:13:20,320 --> 01:13:25,640
Speaker 3: result of that, that's probably key step to this imagine

1055
01:13:25,680 --> 01:13:27,720
Speaker 3: the future that you lay out. I mean, I can

1056
01:13:28,320 --> 01:13:32,320
Speaker 3: certainly imagine a future like that. I think it would

1057
01:13:32,760 --> 01:13:40,439
Speaker 3: center around, for example, a good bit of rewilding where

1058
01:13:40,640 --> 01:13:45,680
Speaker 3: people living in for example, the rural parts of America

1059
01:13:46,000 --> 01:13:51,599
Speaker 3: these days, actually, rather than trying to turn a piece

1060
01:13:51,640 --> 01:13:56,559
Speaker 3: of ground that they're living on into a money making project,

1061
01:13:57,800 --> 01:14:01,960
Speaker 3: sort of subsistence project with pigs and cows and horses

1062
01:14:02,040 --> 01:14:07,320
Speaker 3: and chickens, actually attempts to live on a piece of

1063
01:14:07,360 --> 01:14:12,240
Speaker 3: ground that they try to restore to the way Europeans

1064
01:14:13,120 --> 01:14:17,320
Speaker 3: found it, the way maybe people had for ten thousand years.

1065
01:14:18,080 --> 01:14:20,760
Speaker 3: That that might be a eap to actually living in

1066
01:14:20,800 --> 01:14:26,040
Speaker 3: a work where you can coexist with features. I mean,

1067
01:14:26,120 --> 01:14:31,240
Speaker 3: that's kind of, in a way a far fetched trajectory

1068
01:14:31,320 --> 01:14:34,400
Speaker 3: that we haven't really talked about, but I think it's

1069
01:14:34,439 --> 01:14:38,880
Speaker 3: a possible future. And I think what that also means

1070
01:14:39,360 --> 01:14:46,240
Speaker 3: is that people living in living lives in urban settings

1071
01:14:46,640 --> 01:14:50,840
Speaker 3: going to have to probably consciously try to it's the

1072
01:14:51,000 --> 01:14:56,639
Speaker 3: natural world, either through more urban parks, like a sort

1073
01:14:56,680 --> 01:15:01,439
Speaker 3: of a wilder Central Park in Manhattan, for example, and

1074
01:15:01,640 --> 01:15:07,360
Speaker 3: wilder urban parks in cities like Denver or San Diego,

1075
01:15:07,680 --> 01:15:10,479
Speaker 3: where you freely accept the fact that there may be

1076
01:15:10,840 --> 01:15:13,559
Speaker 3: coyote packs roaming through the park, there may be an

1077
01:15:13,600 --> 01:15:17,360
Speaker 3: occasional mountain lion coming through that's taking down a deer.

1078
01:15:17,880 --> 01:15:21,920
Speaker 3: I think getting back to something of the wild world

1079
01:15:22,040 --> 01:15:26,440
Speaker 3: that we seem to have been so committed to escaping

1080
01:15:27,200 --> 01:15:29,960
Speaker 3: is going to be the key to a future like that.

1081
01:15:30,439 --> 01:15:32,320
Speaker 3: I mean, I sort of railed a little bit in

1082
01:15:32,360 --> 01:15:36,320
Speaker 3: a wild new world that America had this chance to

1083
01:15:36,400 --> 01:15:40,840
Speaker 3: create a whole new kind of civilization based on living

1084
01:15:40,880 --> 01:15:44,360
Speaker 3: in natural conditions, and instead what we did was we

1085
01:15:44,520 --> 01:15:47,760
Speaker 3: tried to turn America, the United States into a clone

1086
01:15:47,800 --> 01:15:52,759
Speaker 3: of England, un plants of the countries of Western Europe,

1087
01:15:52,920 --> 01:15:57,080
Speaker 3: which had long since destroyed most of its natural world.

1088
01:15:57,439 --> 01:16:00,240
Speaker 3: And here we had this wonderful opportunity to do it

1089
01:16:00,360 --> 01:16:03,880
Speaker 3: all over again, and somehow we just tried to emulate

1090
01:16:03,960 --> 01:16:06,600
Speaker 3: what was your Europe was. But I still think we

1091
01:16:06,800 --> 01:16:10,559
Speaker 3: have have the opportunity to do in the future. So

1092
01:16:11,439 --> 01:16:14,200
Speaker 3: that's the kind of ecotoy. Yeah, I think I would

1093
01:16:14,960 --> 01:16:19,280
Speaker 3: imagine as a fictional, hopefully a non fiction future.

1094
01:16:21,600 --> 01:16:28,560
Speaker 2: Could you describe for me or hypothesize maybe two tangible

1095
01:16:28,720 --> 01:16:33,320
Speaker 2: actions someone could take today that might lead us closer

1096
01:16:33,360 --> 01:16:36,000
Speaker 2: to that future. If there were two things that maybe

1097
01:16:36,040 --> 01:16:38,559
Speaker 2: you yourself are trying to do now, or that that

1098
01:16:38,640 --> 01:16:41,640
Speaker 2: I could consider trying to add to my life in

1099
01:16:41,680 --> 01:16:44,320
Speaker 2: some kind of way, because because so many of these things,

1100
01:16:44,400 --> 01:16:47,439
Speaker 2: when I think about them, can be abstract can seem

1101
01:16:48,280 --> 01:16:52,800
Speaker 2: you know, these larger philosophical shifts. But then I wonder, okay,

1102
01:16:52,840 --> 01:16:55,280
Speaker 2: what does that look like in daily life? And you

1103
01:16:55,360 --> 01:16:57,040
Speaker 2: described a few things that are like that I guess

1104
01:16:57,120 --> 01:16:59,200
Speaker 2: could be applied. But could you give us a couple

1105
01:16:59,240 --> 01:17:03,280
Speaker 2: examples of clear, tangible things that we could do in

1106
01:17:03,320 --> 01:17:08,519
Speaker 2: our lives today or tomorrow that might send us if

1107
01:17:08,560 --> 01:17:12,040
Speaker 2: even with these individual actions might collectively lead to what

1108
01:17:12,040 --> 01:17:12,839
Speaker 2: we've been discussing.

1109
01:17:18,200 --> 01:17:24,920
Speaker 3: Well, for full disclosure, I should admit that what I

1110
01:17:25,240 --> 01:17:31,240
Speaker 3: just said about rewilding personal spaces is the theme of

1111
01:17:32,280 --> 01:17:35,960
Speaker 3: a book I just sold to my publisher in New

1112
01:17:36,040 --> 01:17:39,200
Speaker 3: York a few months ago, where what I am going

1113
01:17:39,240 --> 01:17:45,880
Speaker 3: to be writing about are three big places adult where

1114
01:17:45,960 --> 01:17:49,840
Speaker 3: I attended, and one of them was in West Texas

1115
01:17:50,360 --> 01:17:54,120
Speaker 3: back in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. The second

1116
01:17:54,120 --> 01:17:58,880
Speaker 3: one was in the Bittery Valley in Montana in the

1117
01:17:59,000 --> 01:18:02,919
Speaker 3: nineties through about twenty fifteen, and the thirdies here outside

1118
01:18:02,920 --> 01:18:05,559
Speaker 3: Santa Fe, New Mexico. And all three of those that

1119
01:18:05,600 --> 01:18:09,880
Speaker 3: I lived pieces of ground fifteen twenty miles outside town.

1120
01:18:10,960 --> 01:18:14,720
Speaker 3: The pieces weren't large, twelve to twenty five acres, but

1121
01:18:14,880 --> 01:18:17,800
Speaker 3: what I did with them and what I describe in

1122
01:18:17,880 --> 01:18:22,600
Speaker 3: the book, what I call it is reverse homesteading. I

1123
01:18:22,640 --> 01:18:26,200
Speaker 3: mean when the homestead acts in America were designed to

1124
01:18:26,280 --> 01:18:30,760
Speaker 3: take pieces of ground that native people had managed for

1125
01:18:30,800 --> 01:18:33,400
Speaker 3: ten thousand years and turn them into any matcheck in

1126
01:18:33,479 --> 01:18:37,920
Speaker 3: the global market economy. And so we transformed them into

1127
01:18:38,320 --> 01:18:43,360
Speaker 3: with the technological infrastructure fences and plowing and so forth,

1128
01:18:44,439 --> 01:18:47,160
Speaker 3: into pieces of the ground they would produce money. And

1129
01:18:47,200 --> 01:18:49,120
Speaker 3: what I've tried to do with these three places is

1130
01:18:49,160 --> 01:18:52,000
Speaker 3: to turn them around and take them back the other direction,

1131
01:18:52,360 --> 01:18:57,000
Speaker 3: to remove and eradicate all the evidence that previous people

1132
01:18:57,800 --> 01:19:01,080
Speaker 3: had done with respect to taking money off these pieces

1133
01:19:01,080 --> 01:19:03,240
Speaker 3: of ground and trying to restore them to kind of

1134
01:19:03,320 --> 01:19:08,439
Speaker 3: healthy original ecosystem, so rewild them. In effect. I think

1135
01:19:09,520 --> 01:19:12,160
Speaker 3: that's you know, four picturely live out and on pieces

1136
01:19:12,160 --> 01:19:14,000
Speaker 3: of ground. That's one of the things you can think

1137
01:19:14,040 --> 01:19:20,240
Speaker 3: about about doing. Another thing that I'm kind of intrigued by.

1138
01:19:20,400 --> 01:19:25,200
Speaker 3: And again full disclosure, I'm doing. My Coyote America book

1139
01:19:25,240 --> 01:19:30,920
Speaker 3: will be out ten years next summer, and its publisher

1140
01:19:31,400 --> 01:19:35,360
Speaker 3: is having me do a tenth anniversary edition of it,

1141
01:19:36,160 --> 01:19:40,040
Speaker 3: so I'm providing a new preface to it, which I'm

1142
01:19:40,120 --> 01:19:43,679
Speaker 3: working on in fact right now, And in that preface,

1143
01:19:43,800 --> 01:19:45,760
Speaker 3: I'm not only talking about some of the things that

1144
01:19:45,800 --> 01:19:49,799
Speaker 3: have happened with the coyote story since, for example twenty

1145
01:19:49,800 --> 01:19:52,759
Speaker 3: sixteen when that book came out, on which his coyotes

1146
01:19:52,760 --> 01:19:56,439
Speaker 3: are now expanding in the South America. They're the first

1147
01:19:56,479 --> 01:19:59,800
Speaker 3: animal to do this in three million years. But another

1148
01:19:59,800 --> 01:20:02,240
Speaker 3: thing talking about it, and I think this answers to

1149
01:20:02,320 --> 01:20:07,479
Speaker 3: your request about things people can do, is I'm talking

1150
01:20:07,520 --> 01:20:11,160
Speaker 3: about something that I again have sort of done personally,

1151
01:20:11,320 --> 01:20:21,280
Speaker 3: where I have kind of adopted an individual animal that

1152
01:20:21,560 --> 01:20:27,360
Speaker 3: I have, first of all located because of their physical characteristics.

1153
01:20:27,360 --> 01:20:29,600
Speaker 3: In the case of the coyotes. Three, there is a

1154
01:20:29,600 --> 01:20:34,080
Speaker 3: little female coyote who I have been watching for about

1155
01:20:34,160 --> 01:20:39,600
Speaker 3: six or seven years now, and she's distinctive enough to

1156
01:20:39,680 --> 01:20:43,040
Speaker 3: identify because under most coyotes that have a black tip

1157
01:20:43,080 --> 01:20:45,880
Speaker 3: on their tails, she has a white tip at the

1158
01:20:45,960 --> 01:20:48,880
Speaker 3: end of her tail. And so I've been watching her

1159
01:20:49,240 --> 01:20:53,320
Speaker 3: as an individual animal and trying to understand not just

1160
01:20:53,760 --> 01:21:00,560
Speaker 3: coyotes in general around me, but this particular animal, especially

1161
01:21:00,960 --> 01:21:04,320
Speaker 3: how she moves through the landscape, how she appears and

1162
01:21:04,400 --> 01:21:08,479
Speaker 3: doesn't appear, what she hunts, what kind of pups she has,

1163
01:21:08,600 --> 01:21:11,200
Speaker 3: and what she does with them. And I've been doing this,

1164
01:21:11,240 --> 01:21:14,040
Speaker 3: as I said, for about six or seven years. And Yep,

1165
01:21:14,960 --> 01:21:16,840
Speaker 3: another thing I've been doing. I talked about this on

1166
01:21:16,880 --> 01:21:19,360
Speaker 3: Adill Rogan episode a couple of years ago. I have

1167
01:21:19,439 --> 01:21:23,479
Speaker 3: a raven that has sort of become certainly not a pet,

1168
01:21:23,560 --> 01:21:28,000
Speaker 3: it's a wild raven, but it's a bird that I

1169
01:21:28,200 --> 01:21:31,320
Speaker 3: cultivating kind of a personal relationship with the last about

1170
01:21:31,360 --> 01:21:33,640
Speaker 3: three or four years. And this is a bird that

1171
01:21:34,000 --> 01:21:36,559
Speaker 3: comes down. I mean I've never touched it or handled it,

1172
01:21:36,760 --> 01:21:40,479
Speaker 3: but it comes down and lands within about three feet

1173
01:21:40,520 --> 01:21:43,479
Speaker 3: up me and waddles around while I talk to it,

1174
01:21:43,600 --> 01:21:46,599
Speaker 3: and it talks back. And it's the same kind of

1175
01:21:46,640 --> 01:21:49,599
Speaker 3: thing where I've taken on sort of an individual animal,

1176
01:21:49,720 --> 01:21:53,000
Speaker 3: not just ravens in particular, but an individual and try

1177
01:21:53,080 --> 01:21:57,439
Speaker 3: to establish some kind of report so or maybe getting

1178
01:21:57,520 --> 01:22:02,960
Speaker 3: into a little bit of a kind of different short

1179
01:22:02,960 --> 01:22:08,080
Speaker 3: of relationship to a wild world around us. It caused

1180
01:22:08,080 --> 01:22:11,120
Speaker 3: all these individuals just like us. It's one of the

1181
01:22:11,120 --> 01:22:14,200
Speaker 3: things that I think I can probably add Kate to

1182
01:22:14,240 --> 01:22:15,240
Speaker 3: be borning.

1183
01:22:18,160 --> 01:22:25,200
Speaker 2: That's a really paradigm shifting way to look at our

1184
01:22:25,240 --> 01:22:29,800
Speaker 2: relationship to wildlife for a lot of us, especially within

1185
01:22:30,600 --> 01:22:36,080
Speaker 2: you know, the community here mutator, and in which we

1186
01:22:35,520 --> 01:22:38,360
Speaker 2: we we have a relationship with wildlife, in which we

1187
01:22:38,400 --> 01:22:42,080
Speaker 2: consume it, in which we pursue it, in which we

1188
01:22:43,600 --> 01:22:47,200
Speaker 2: give a lot of credence to the biological and the

1189
01:22:47,240 --> 01:22:51,680
Speaker 2: scientific management of species, and looking at things from a

1190
01:22:51,720 --> 01:22:56,880
Speaker 2: species perspective. It's challenging to rethink that and to look

1191
01:22:56,920 --> 01:22:59,240
Speaker 2: at wildlife as an individual a little bit. And I

1192
01:22:59,240 --> 01:23:01,639
Speaker 2: think we've been We've been trained in a certain way

1193
01:23:01,760 --> 01:23:04,160
Speaker 2: not to do that. I think because of maybe some

1194
01:23:04,200 --> 01:23:10,400
Speaker 2: early some early tendencies to maybe overdo that sometimes with

1195
01:23:10,479 --> 01:23:14,640
Speaker 2: like the Bambi effect or the nature fakers that Roosevelt

1196
01:23:14,640 --> 01:23:18,400
Speaker 2: bemoaned in the early twentieth century. But I wonder if

1197
01:23:18,439 --> 01:23:22,519
Speaker 2: there is a place in between those that that is

1198
01:23:22,560 --> 01:23:25,160
Speaker 2: informative and useful for us to to kind of continue

1199
01:23:25,200 --> 01:23:30,519
Speaker 2: to evolve that. As for lack of better term relationship.

1200
01:23:32,840 --> 01:23:36,320
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is a different sort of approach than focusing

1201
01:23:36,360 --> 01:23:40,200
Speaker 3: on species. And that's of course what game and fish

1202
01:23:40,920 --> 01:23:44,920
Speaker 3: programs did from the very beginning, and it's what Roosevelt

1203
01:23:45,040 --> 01:23:49,920
Speaker 3: and Giffer pincho and one Today and the others. They

1204
01:23:49,960 --> 01:23:54,040
Speaker 3: focused on saving species and sort of really kind of

1205
01:23:54,040 --> 01:24:00,880
Speaker 3: ignored that animals, after all, are also individuals. But I

1206
01:24:00,960 --> 01:24:04,599
Speaker 3: noticed that, for example, in the last years of the

1207
01:24:04,600 --> 01:24:08,400
Speaker 3: destruction of wolves in the American West, one of the

1208
01:24:08,439 --> 01:24:15,120
Speaker 3: things that ranchers and those government wolf hunters were doing

1209
01:24:15,240 --> 01:24:20,000
Speaker 3: is that they were individualizing particular animals. They were even

1210
01:24:20,120 --> 01:24:24,479
Speaker 3: giving them names. I wrote it, several of them, I

1211
01:24:24,520 --> 01:24:28,919
Speaker 3: wrote wild New World, because they were identifying these animals

1212
01:24:28,960 --> 01:24:32,320
Speaker 3: as being very specific and very individualistic animals. And we

1213
01:24:32,720 --> 01:24:35,519
Speaker 3: tend to do that to a certain extent today. For example,

1214
01:24:35,560 --> 01:24:40,200
Speaker 3: in Yellowstone RK. Macnar, who has watt a whole series

1215
01:24:40,200 --> 01:24:43,120
Speaker 3: of books about the Wolves of Yellowstone, he is very

1216
01:24:43,120 --> 01:24:48,080
Speaker 3: definitely focusing on individual animals. And I think I probably

1217
01:24:48,200 --> 01:24:50,479
Speaker 3: got into a habit of trying to do that when

1218
01:24:50,520 --> 01:24:53,920
Speaker 3: I was working on Coyote America and I was talking

1219
01:24:53,960 --> 01:24:59,679
Speaker 3: to the people at the Predator Research in Utah. I mean, now,

1220
01:25:00,120 --> 01:25:05,080
Speaker 3: how individualistic the animals were that they were doing these

1221
01:25:05,160 --> 01:25:10,080
Speaker 3: experiments on, That the coyotes that they were working with

1222
01:25:10,200 --> 01:25:15,160
Speaker 3: were all very individualistic, And that sort of started me thinking.

1223
01:25:15,240 --> 01:25:20,759
Speaker 3: And it's what I think has telled me Sion, where

1224
01:25:21,240 --> 01:25:24,720
Speaker 3: I have been picking out individual wild animals around me

1225
01:25:25,720 --> 01:25:29,920
Speaker 3: here outside Santa Fe, Like this particular coyote with a

1226
01:25:29,960 --> 01:25:34,440
Speaker 3: white tipped tail, and this particular raven that I'm describing,

1227
01:25:34,479 --> 01:25:37,120
Speaker 3: I mean, so, okay, ravens tend to all look alike,

1228
01:25:37,200 --> 01:25:42,200
Speaker 3: to be sure, but this particular raven has a specific

1229
01:25:42,439 --> 01:25:47,720
Speaker 3: perch that he lands on near the house, so I

1230
01:25:47,720 --> 01:25:51,679
Speaker 3: think it's tempting to demonstrate his uniqueness from any other

1231
01:25:51,800 --> 01:25:55,200
Speaker 3: raven that would happened by. And the other thing that

1232
01:25:55,800 --> 01:25:59,400
Speaker 3: my wife and I have noticed it is the peculiar

1233
01:26:00,120 --> 01:26:03,160
Speaker 3: brig of feathers neck come out from under his neck

1234
01:26:03,520 --> 01:26:06,240
Speaker 3: that stick out sort of like a cow lick. And

1235
01:26:06,320 --> 01:26:10,200
Speaker 3: so by trying to pay close enough attention that you

1236
01:26:10,240 --> 01:26:14,680
Speaker 3: can identify something specific like that, you can begin to

1237
01:26:14,880 --> 01:26:19,240
Speaker 3: locate individual animals and start to watch them and see

1238
01:26:19,280 --> 01:26:21,840
Speaker 3: how they function in the world. And if you do that,

1239
01:26:22,080 --> 01:26:26,200
Speaker 3: you start noticing that these animals are different from the

1240
01:26:26,360 --> 01:26:30,240
Speaker 3: other ravens and the other coyotes that are around us.

1241
01:26:30,320 --> 01:26:36,040
Speaker 3: And that's You're right, that's a stept for a lot

1242
01:26:36,040 --> 01:26:38,639
Speaker 3: of people, but I think can be pretty valuable.

1243
01:26:39,760 --> 01:26:45,360
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I guess for anyone listening to this podcast

1244
01:26:45,439 --> 01:26:47,600
Speaker 2: at least, and anyone reading your books and listening to

1245
01:26:47,640 --> 01:26:50,280
Speaker 2: your podcast or Steve's podcast, I think all of us

1246
01:26:50,320 --> 01:26:54,840
Speaker 2: can agree that these wild animals, whether we look at

1247
01:26:54,880 --> 01:26:58,200
Speaker 2: them from an individual capacity or at a species level,

1248
01:26:58,360 --> 01:27:02,080
Speaker 2: or from a regional perspective, or as hunters or bird watchers,

1249
01:27:02,560 --> 01:27:07,439
Speaker 2: whatever it might be, they bring great value to our lives.

1250
01:27:07,640 --> 01:27:11,960
Speaker 2: They color our lives. They in fact allow for us

1251
01:27:12,000 --> 01:27:15,240
Speaker 2: to be alive through their services and being a part

1252
01:27:15,280 --> 01:27:18,320
Speaker 2: of the ecosystem that we all depend on. So I,

1253
01:27:18,479 --> 01:27:23,120
Speaker 2: for one, am very thankful that you are taking the

1254
01:27:23,160 --> 01:27:26,960
Speaker 2: time and and you know, giving your life to telling

1255
01:27:27,000 --> 01:27:29,880
Speaker 2: these stories and teaching all of us about where we

1256
01:27:29,920 --> 01:27:32,920
Speaker 2: came from and what that means to the future. It's

1257
01:27:33,040 --> 01:27:36,320
Speaker 2: very important and very appreciated. So Dan, thank you for that.

1258
01:27:37,000 --> 01:27:41,880
Speaker 2: And then I would also ask you to please tell

1259
01:27:41,960 --> 01:27:46,000
Speaker 2: our listeners where they can connect with you, where they

1260
01:27:46,000 --> 01:27:48,920
Speaker 2: can listen to your podcast, how they can find your books,

1261
01:27:48,920 --> 01:27:51,640
Speaker 2: because we're just scratching the surface here today. There's so

1262
01:27:51,760 --> 01:27:53,640
Speaker 2: much more that you've done that I would love for

1263
01:27:53,680 --> 01:27:56,560
Speaker 2: people to be reading, to be consuming, to be aware.

1264
01:27:56,280 --> 01:28:04,879
Speaker 3: Of easy way for the books, particularly for the last

1265
01:28:05,520 --> 01:28:10,240
Speaker 3: three that I've done a Wild New World, American, Serengeti

1266
01:28:10,320 --> 01:28:15,360
Speaker 3: and Coyote America is to go first to your local bookstore.

1267
01:28:15,400 --> 01:28:18,439
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm a champion of local bookstores. And these

1268
01:28:18,439 --> 01:28:21,720
Speaker 3: are books that have a big enough presence that I

1269
01:28:21,720 --> 01:28:25,360
Speaker 3: think most bookstores probably are carrying them. But if you

1270
01:28:25,400 --> 01:28:28,960
Speaker 3: can't find those books at local bookstore, of course, they're

1271
01:28:29,000 --> 01:28:33,320
Speaker 3: all available on Amazon and a whole host of different forms,

1272
01:28:33,520 --> 01:28:39,400
Speaker 3: kindle forms, digital forms, paperbacks for a couple of them.

1273
01:28:39,400 --> 01:28:44,840
Speaker 3: There's still cloth versions out there, and as I said,

1274
01:28:45,000 --> 01:28:48,280
Speaker 3: and audio books too of all three of those. And

1275
01:28:48,520 --> 01:28:52,559
Speaker 3: there's also going to be a new death anniversary edition

1276
01:28:52,680 --> 01:28:59,320
Speaker 3: of Coyote America as well coming out there. And as

1277
01:28:59,360 --> 01:29:02,720
Speaker 3: for the pod cast, I mean, obviously you can go

1278
01:29:02,800 --> 01:29:04,400
Speaker 3: to meat Eater and you can find it, but it's

1279
01:29:04,400 --> 01:29:11,880
Speaker 3: called the American West. Dan Flores uh uh, Steven and

1280
01:29:12,240 --> 01:29:19,800
Speaker 3: Randall and I discussing these scripts that I produce primarily

1281
01:29:19,840 --> 01:29:25,439
Speaker 3: from a work an Unbolished. They're going to be twenty

1282
01:29:25,439 --> 01:29:29,240
Speaker 3: six episodes. I believe three of them have appeared so far.

1283
01:29:29,680 --> 01:29:34,640
Speaker 3: There are on Tuesdays every other week. Uh. And you

1284
01:29:34,680 --> 01:29:42,280
Speaker 3: can find them as venues uh, their versions on YouTube,

1285
01:29:43,560 --> 01:29:48,400
Speaker 3: a couple of audio only versions. Basically, all you two

1286
01:29:48,479 --> 01:29:51,440
Speaker 3: is either to meat Eater or google me Dan Flores

1287
01:29:51,479 --> 01:29:54,200
Speaker 3: podcast and that will come out pretty readily.

1288
01:29:55,920 --> 01:29:58,400
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I've listened to the first three that are

1289
01:29:58,400 --> 01:30:01,880
Speaker 2: publicly available and thoroughly enjoyed them so far, so can't

1290
01:30:01,880 --> 01:30:04,400
Speaker 2: wait for the next twenty three to come out to

1291
01:30:04,439 --> 01:30:07,360
Speaker 2: the world for the rest of us. And and with that, Dan,

1292
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Speaker 2: I just want to echo what I said earlier. Thank

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01:30:09,680 --> 01:30:13,080
Speaker 2: you for this conversation today and for everything you've been doing.

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Speaker 3: That's my great pleasure to be with you. Mark, You're

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Speaker 3: dang great work.

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Speaker 2: And that's a wrap. Thank you for joining me today.

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Speaker 2: Please go and read Dan's books. Please go listen to

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Speaker 2: his new podcast on the Meat Eater Podcast Network the

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Speaker 2: American West. You won't regret it. You will enjoy it.

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Speaker 2: You will learn so much so that I'll say thank

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Speaker 2: you for being here and stay wired to Hunt