1
00:00:08,920 --> 00:00:12,760
Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,

2
00:00:12,800 --> 00:00:17,680
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten in my case underwear listening un podcast.

3
00:00:18,280 --> 00:00:23,360
Speaker 1: You can't protect anything presented by first, like creating proven

4
00:00:23,640 --> 00:00:27,880
Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear

5
00:00:27,960 --> 00:00:35,440
Speaker 1: for every hunt first like go farther, stay longer. Oh hey,

6
00:00:35,440 --> 00:00:39,640
Speaker 1: real quick, before we get started. I have sitting next

7
00:00:39,680 --> 00:00:44,840
Speaker 1: to me a what I thought to be an extremely

8
00:00:44,880 --> 00:00:50,159
Speaker 1: impressive moose shed, and Jana's kind of negged it. You

9
00:00:50,240 --> 00:00:54,200
Speaker 1: know what negging is? I don't know the exact definition, Like, uh,

10
00:00:55,360 --> 00:00:58,320
Speaker 1: how do you explain it? Phil? When you nag something,

11
00:00:58,520 --> 00:01:01,840
Speaker 1: it's a it's a strat feel smaller on purpose, it's

12
00:01:01,840 --> 00:01:04,959
Speaker 1: a straight It was it was popular state. It was

13
00:01:05,040 --> 00:01:08,680
Speaker 1: popularized as a strategy to pick up. Like let's say here,

14
00:01:08,720 --> 00:01:10,959
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna be me and Krant are gonna

15
00:01:11,000 --> 00:01:13,760
Speaker 1: role play. No, no, I don't want to do it

16
00:01:13,800 --> 00:01:17,400
Speaker 1: that way. Me and Krant are gonna role play? You

17
00:01:17,480 --> 00:01:19,400
Speaker 1: neg me? Like, like how you use it as a

18
00:01:19,400 --> 00:01:24,600
Speaker 1: pickup strategy as a hit on strategy, like I would

19
00:01:24,600 --> 00:01:27,160
Speaker 1: say to Krinn instead of being like, oh, let's say

20
00:01:27,280 --> 00:01:31,560
Speaker 1: let's say we're young or young single people okay, And

21
00:01:31,600 --> 00:01:34,720
Speaker 1: I would approach Krinn and I would say, um. I

22
00:01:34,760 --> 00:01:37,440
Speaker 1: could approach Krean and said, like, my goodness, you look

23
00:01:37,480 --> 00:01:41,720
Speaker 1: beautiful today, right, and that has one that's one approach.

24
00:01:42,240 --> 00:01:44,039
Speaker 1: Or I could come up and go like your shoesn't

25
00:01:44,040 --> 00:01:48,040
Speaker 1: look kind of funny, And that was popularized for a

26
00:01:48,080 --> 00:01:52,760
Speaker 1: time as a way too, as a subversive way to

27
00:01:53,120 --> 00:01:56,320
Speaker 1: hit on someone. If you don't come in with a compliment,

28
00:01:56,440 --> 00:01:58,480
Speaker 1: you come in with a with a like you know

29
00:01:58,560 --> 00:02:01,040
Speaker 1: you should get you should change your hair. I don't

30
00:02:01,080 --> 00:02:03,240
Speaker 1: like your haircut doesn't look great on you. And then

31
00:02:03,240 --> 00:02:05,640
Speaker 1: you leverage that. Then that's leveraged. This is there's a

32
00:02:05,680 --> 00:02:07,880
Speaker 1: whole book about how when people get all interested in

33
00:02:08,200 --> 00:02:11,360
Speaker 1: kind of responding to that, there's a whole book about

34
00:02:11,360 --> 00:02:14,000
Speaker 1: how to do it. Like Steve, I'm not sure your

35
00:02:14,000 --> 00:02:18,760
Speaker 1: glasses matcher today, and it's in instead of the expected

36
00:02:18,800 --> 00:02:22,480
Speaker 1: thing would be like, holy cow, you look amazing. Would

37
00:02:22,520 --> 00:02:24,760
Speaker 1: you like to have dinner? You come in and you're like, man,

38
00:02:25,160 --> 00:02:28,720
Speaker 1: you should think about your updating your wardrobe. Right, and

39
00:02:28,760 --> 00:02:32,480
Speaker 1: you've set this whole You set and play this dynamic. Right.

40
00:02:32,639 --> 00:02:35,240
Speaker 1: The tension starts from every woman in the world just

41
00:02:35,240 --> 00:02:37,600
Speaker 1: just can't help, but live the rest of her life

42
00:02:37,600 --> 00:02:41,720
Speaker 1: to impress that man got it and try. It's very subversive,

43
00:02:41,800 --> 00:02:46,040
Speaker 1: it's very manipulated, manipulated. Let's get back to nagging. Oh well,

44
00:02:46,080 --> 00:02:48,200
Speaker 1: I showed you my moose. I showed you my moose

45
00:02:48,200 --> 00:02:54,360
Speaker 1: antler and it's n e G. I showed you this

46
00:02:54,440 --> 00:02:57,680
Speaker 1: definition I would check the urban diction urban. It's like

47
00:02:57,720 --> 00:03:02,360
Speaker 1: a slang term point being. I walked in, like, uh,

48
00:03:02,560 --> 00:03:04,240
Speaker 1: you know, how do you have something impressive? You just

49
00:03:04,280 --> 00:03:06,520
Speaker 1: kind of walk in with it? He was so happy

50
00:03:06,560 --> 00:03:12,239
Speaker 1: about it. I'm sorry I didn't. I didn't mean to

51
00:03:12,280 --> 00:03:15,920
Speaker 1: pull your attention away. You noticed this this giant moose andler. Um,

52
00:03:16,600 --> 00:03:19,040
Speaker 1: I mean it's pretty huge. It's like as big as

53
00:03:19,040 --> 00:03:25,680
Speaker 1: like a baby's cradle. Yeah, I was. I was pointing

54
00:03:25,680 --> 00:03:27,919
Speaker 1: out to our guests, who who I'm about to introduce.

55
00:03:28,040 --> 00:03:30,560
Speaker 1: I was pointing out that I have a plan in

56
00:03:30,560 --> 00:03:32,679
Speaker 1: which I'm going to turn it into a chair for

57
00:03:32,760 --> 00:03:35,920
Speaker 1: my kids. It's that big. Well, I brought it in

58
00:03:35,880 --> 00:03:37,680
Speaker 1: and Yohn, He's like, why are you showing me that?

59
00:03:39,080 --> 00:03:45,680
Speaker 1: I don't know, is it big? Just right now? What's interesting?

60
00:03:46,640 --> 00:03:48,320
Speaker 1: Are you going to make it into a chair? After

61
00:03:48,360 --> 00:03:51,960
Speaker 1: you saw the pictures of the moose andler chairs that

62
00:03:51,960 --> 00:03:53,960
Speaker 1: I showed you from Latvie. No, no, no, it is

63
00:03:54,000 --> 00:03:57,160
Speaker 1: a chair. No, it doesn't need to be. It already

64
00:03:57,240 --> 00:04:01,520
Speaker 1: is a chair. Look at it huge. But that the

65
00:04:01,600 --> 00:04:06,800
Speaker 1: idea from we're gonna do a whole might be We're

66
00:04:06,800 --> 00:04:09,560
Speaker 1: gonna do a whole episode about Yi's Latvian trip. We

67
00:04:09,640 --> 00:04:14,160
Speaker 1: just decided, so we'll we'll save that. Uh no, point

68
00:04:14,160 --> 00:04:16,960
Speaker 1: being the only reason I'm bringing this thing up is,

69
00:04:17,960 --> 00:04:22,080
Speaker 1: uh we there's been a long thing like how to

70
00:04:22,120 --> 00:04:24,560
Speaker 1: bring this this, this is this is applicable to a

71
00:04:24,640 --> 00:04:28,840
Speaker 1: very small subset of of our audience. Is how to

72
00:04:28,960 --> 00:04:32,279
Speaker 1: get stuff from Alaska down to the lower forty eight.

73
00:04:32,720 --> 00:04:34,880
Speaker 1: So this year we're up hunting and Clay got a

74
00:04:34,920 --> 00:04:37,680
Speaker 1: moose and he had the moose rack. I had my

75
00:04:37,720 --> 00:04:40,160
Speaker 1: moose shed. We all the moose meat, and we used

76
00:04:40,240 --> 00:04:46,679
Speaker 1: a service called Alaska Trophy Express. It's a great job, dude.

77
00:04:48,360 --> 00:04:52,200
Speaker 1: We had like just frozen moose meat, the skull. I

78
00:04:52,240 --> 00:04:56,200
Speaker 1: had my shed antler. It's like it's cheaper than than

79
00:04:56,279 --> 00:04:58,320
Speaker 1: trying to get it all packaged and shipping it home

80
00:04:58,520 --> 00:05:01,359
Speaker 1: on a plane now with baggage for ease in lo

81
00:05:01,480 --> 00:05:05,200
Speaker 1: and behold, not too much long later there it all.

82
00:05:05,279 --> 00:05:08,760
Speaker 1: This was cheaper. I don't know the exact details on,

83
00:05:08,880 --> 00:05:11,440
Speaker 1: but we ran the numbers and it was cheaper, especially

84
00:05:11,480 --> 00:05:14,280
Speaker 1: like you know, especially if you wind up with the people.

85
00:05:14,320 --> 00:05:16,560
Speaker 1: Got a couple of moves and just showed up safe

86
00:05:16,560 --> 00:05:20,320
Speaker 1: and sound. Clay stuff got delivered down to He had

87
00:05:20,360 --> 00:05:22,000
Speaker 1: a drive. You know, he lives on the border but

88
00:05:22,120 --> 00:05:24,320
Speaker 1: Arkansas in Oklahoma, and he drove over to Oklahoma and

89
00:05:24,320 --> 00:05:26,480
Speaker 1: picked it up. My my antlers sitting right here in

90
00:05:26,520 --> 00:05:32,760
Speaker 1: the damn office the Laska Trophy Express with some attention

91
00:05:32,800 --> 00:05:35,560
Speaker 1: to it as well. Look look at the duct tape

92
00:05:35,640 --> 00:05:39,640
Speaker 1: to make sure that that that lower prong doesn't get

93
00:05:39,680 --> 00:05:43,520
Speaker 1: broken off. Right. They did a wonderful job. Um, and

94
00:05:43,560 --> 00:05:45,200
Speaker 1: I was holding off on standex I wanted to see

95
00:05:45,240 --> 00:05:48,400
Speaker 1: how it went. But they did a wonderful job. Uh.

96
00:05:48,520 --> 00:05:51,200
Speaker 1: Our Steve guest Dan Flores, who we did an event

97
00:05:51,279 --> 00:05:54,039
Speaker 1: with at the bookstore last night, who's out promoting his

98
00:05:54,120 --> 00:05:59,159
Speaker 1: new book, Wild New World. I'm gonna have you explained

99
00:05:59,160 --> 00:06:00,800
Speaker 1: the book real quick. But first I want to point

100
00:06:00,839 --> 00:06:06,240
Speaker 1: out there's something you might not know. You when we

101
00:06:06,240 --> 00:06:09,040
Speaker 1: were first starting the show out, you were in one

102
00:06:09,160 --> 00:06:11,560
Speaker 1: not first starting the show off, but in the infancy

103
00:06:11,600 --> 00:06:14,599
Speaker 1: of the show. I can't remember what episode number it was.

104
00:06:14,720 --> 00:06:18,400
Speaker 1: The episode we did with you was our first episode

105
00:06:18,440 --> 00:06:25,280
Speaker 1: that ever like really got traction. Hm. That was shared

106
00:06:26,080 --> 00:06:28,920
Speaker 1: you know, that that had a life that lived, They

107
00:06:28,920 --> 00:06:31,960
Speaker 1: had a life at the time that kind of lived

108
00:06:31,960 --> 00:06:38,360
Speaker 1: beyond the normal subscriber base. Well, yeah, okay, it was

109
00:06:38,440 --> 00:06:40,840
Speaker 1: kind of one of our first, like real serious shows

110
00:06:40,880 --> 00:06:44,120
Speaker 1: that really just became a thing for us. This was

111
00:06:44,200 --> 00:06:47,560
Speaker 1: the one we did in Seattle, that's correct. It looks

112
00:06:47,600 --> 00:06:52,960
Speaker 1: like that might be episode three three. Was it that early?

113
00:06:53,440 --> 00:06:55,320
Speaker 1: It may have been that early, but it looks like

114
00:06:55,400 --> 00:07:03,560
Speaker 1: Dan's been on episode thirty three in we went We

115
00:07:03,560 --> 00:07:06,720
Speaker 1: went back to the well, didn't we m hm. Tell

116
00:07:06,760 --> 00:07:12,560
Speaker 1: folks about your new book. Damn um okay, I want

117
00:07:12,560 --> 00:07:14,680
Speaker 1: to set it up for you though. Yes, I read

118
00:07:14,720 --> 00:07:18,760
Speaker 1: the entirety of that book, probably within about seventy yards

119
00:07:18,800 --> 00:07:22,160
Speaker 1: of that moose antler without knowing it was there, Without

120
00:07:22,240 --> 00:07:25,280
Speaker 1: knowing that antler was there. Yeah, Well, finished the book

121
00:07:25,440 --> 00:07:27,960
Speaker 1: and then realized it was there, and realized it was

122
00:07:27,960 --> 00:07:31,280
Speaker 1: an antler sitting right beside you in the grass. It's

123
00:07:31,320 --> 00:07:33,120
Speaker 1: kind of tucked into some willows. But yeah, I read

124
00:07:33,120 --> 00:07:34,640
Speaker 1: the whole damn book, not knowing it was there, but

125
00:07:34,640 --> 00:07:37,400
Speaker 1: it was there the whole time. Well, I suppose that

126
00:07:37,440 --> 00:07:40,280
Speaker 1: says something about either your power of concentration or the

127
00:07:40,280 --> 00:07:46,040
Speaker 1: ability of the book to hold you. Uh. Well, first

128
00:07:46,040 --> 00:07:49,120
Speaker 1: of all, Steve, thanks for having me on again. It's

129
00:07:49,360 --> 00:07:51,800
Speaker 1: great to be back with you guys, and hang out

130
00:07:51,880 --> 00:07:57,560
Speaker 1: with with you as well. Um. This new book, while

131
00:07:57,640 --> 00:08:01,280
Speaker 1: New World is the title and the subtitle is an

132
00:08:01,280 --> 00:08:05,920
Speaker 1: epic story of animals and people in America, is an

133
00:08:05,960 --> 00:08:10,600
Speaker 1: attempt to try to, uh to write in a single

134
00:08:10,840 --> 00:08:17,120
Speaker 1: volume of a little short of four hundred pages, um,

135
00:08:17,200 --> 00:08:21,400
Speaker 1: the whole story or at least a whole story of

136
00:08:21,840 --> 00:08:30,680
Speaker 1: the North American human, wildlife, wild animal experience. And um

137
00:08:30,720 --> 00:08:35,439
Speaker 1: it's what is known in the trade as a big history.

138
00:08:35,480 --> 00:08:37,760
Speaker 1: It was kind of inspired when I began working on

139
00:08:37,800 --> 00:08:42,760
Speaker 1: it by you've all Harari Sapiens, which I know almost

140
00:08:42,800 --> 00:08:46,280
Speaker 1: all of us have read, which of course was a

141
00:08:46,320 --> 00:08:50,680
Speaker 1: big history book about the origin of humans. Um. But

142
00:08:50,760 --> 00:08:53,400
Speaker 1: I wanted to focus specifically on North America. It's where

143
00:08:53,400 --> 00:08:56,040
Speaker 1: I live, It's the country that the United States is

144
00:08:56,080 --> 00:08:59,080
Speaker 1: the place that I know best and where I know

145
00:08:59,240 --> 00:09:03,120
Speaker 1: the amal's best in the history best. But I wanted

146
00:09:03,280 --> 00:09:07,120
Speaker 1: uh to do justice to it. And so I've started

147
00:09:07,160 --> 00:09:11,600
Speaker 1: the story sixty six million years ago. This is a

148
00:09:11,640 --> 00:09:16,959
Speaker 1: book that in three pages goes from sixty six million

149
00:09:17,040 --> 00:09:23,640
Speaker 1: years ago down basically two events earlier in two so,

150
00:09:23,679 --> 00:09:27,680
Speaker 1: in other words, up to yesterday. Um. And I wanted

151
00:09:27,720 --> 00:09:31,800
Speaker 1: to start it that early because the only way to

152
00:09:31,840 --> 00:09:36,959
Speaker 1: really explain how North America acquired its beast sherry of animals, uh,

153
00:09:37,160 --> 00:09:40,320
Speaker 1: is to look at what happened on the continent in

154
00:09:40,400 --> 00:09:45,040
Speaker 1: the wake of the great asteroid impact that wiped out

155
00:09:45,160 --> 00:09:49,480
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs and created the age of mammals. Of course,

156
00:09:49,720 --> 00:09:55,640
Speaker 1: we oh that asteroid which which is called, by the way,

157
00:09:55,679 --> 00:09:58,760
Speaker 1: the chick Salube impact or I didn't know, Yeah, I

158
00:09:58,840 --> 00:10:01,280
Speaker 1: never heard that. We're you point out that it's a

159
00:10:01,320 --> 00:10:03,760
Speaker 1: great word. It's a great word. It's a great word.

160
00:10:04,200 --> 00:10:09,080
Speaker 1: Uh uh and it's uh it's coming into more common

161
00:10:09,320 --> 00:10:12,360
Speaker 1: use and recognition. I think it's named after a little

162
00:10:12,400 --> 00:10:16,280
Speaker 1: Mayan town on the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula,

163
00:10:16,440 --> 00:10:22,840
Speaker 1: which is where this uh, this asteroid hit um And,

164
00:10:22,920 --> 00:10:25,880
Speaker 1: as I said, the purpose of talking about it to

165
00:10:26,000 --> 00:10:31,400
Speaker 1: begin with and describing the the effect of of the

166
00:10:31,480 --> 00:10:36,040
Speaker 1: impact on on the continent and on Earth. It was

167
00:10:36,080 --> 00:10:39,520
Speaker 1: really to set up the age that follows, which is

168
00:10:39,559 --> 00:10:43,120
Speaker 1: called the paleo scene, which is when North America began

169
00:10:43,200 --> 00:10:47,920
Speaker 1: to acquire its animals, and that acquisition took place as

170
00:10:47,920 --> 00:10:53,280
Speaker 1: a result of evolution of species that emerged in the

171
00:10:53,320 --> 00:10:56,640
Speaker 1: wake of the demise of the of the dinosaurs. Uh,

172
00:10:56,679 --> 00:10:59,960
Speaker 1: and also as a result of the migration of animals

173
00:11:00,120 --> 00:11:03,720
Speaker 1: from other parts of the world, the most spectacular and

174
00:11:03,800 --> 00:11:08,880
Speaker 1: charismatic of which animals like mammoths and massdons, for example,

175
00:11:09,120 --> 00:11:13,320
Speaker 1: and bison came out of Asia. Hey. Uh, I want

176
00:11:13,320 --> 00:11:15,760
Speaker 1: to pause from it to ask a couple of questions

177
00:11:15,800 --> 00:11:22,160
Speaker 1: about that strike had there If that strike happened right now, Uh,

178
00:11:22,200 --> 00:11:27,880
Speaker 1: there's no way humans had survived or is that not true? Well,

179
00:11:29,120 --> 00:11:33,079
Speaker 1: it would be. So that strike wiped out seventy of

180
00:11:33,080 --> 00:11:37,719
Speaker 1: of life on Earth. It didn't take out everything. Um,

181
00:11:37,720 --> 00:11:42,120
Speaker 1: it took out most terrestrial life, though. I mean we

182
00:11:42,280 --> 00:11:45,000
Speaker 1: ended up in terms of vertebrates in North America with

183
00:11:45,120 --> 00:11:50,880
Speaker 1: only a couple of percent of creatures surviving it. I

184
00:11:50,920 --> 00:11:57,959
Speaker 1: mean alligators survived it, crocodiles did, mostly reptiles and amphibians.

185
00:11:58,000 --> 00:12:01,480
Speaker 1: And what enable things to survived was that they tended

186
00:12:01,520 --> 00:12:06,800
Speaker 1: to be uh. Hidden back behind the mountain ranges on

187
00:12:06,920 --> 00:12:09,840
Speaker 1: the opposite side of where the impact took place, and

188
00:12:09,880 --> 00:12:12,840
Speaker 1: so it was possible for a few creatures that were

189
00:12:12,880 --> 00:12:17,920
Speaker 1: isolated to survive. And I suppose, uh that's probably what

190
00:12:18,040 --> 00:12:22,440
Speaker 1: would happen with people if we had an impact like

191
00:12:22,559 --> 00:12:25,400
Speaker 1: this one. I mean, this was a solar system wide impact.

192
00:12:25,440 --> 00:12:29,440
Speaker 1: It was a gigantic asteroid more than seven miles uh

193
00:12:29,480 --> 00:12:35,240
Speaker 1: in diameter, and I was traveling at two so it

194
00:12:35,360 --> 00:12:38,120
Speaker 1: was the huge impact. We did it. We did this

195
00:12:38,160 --> 00:12:41,360
Speaker 1: conversation last night at the local bookstore. I was talking

196
00:12:41,360 --> 00:12:45,000
Speaker 1: about I never and the two things never occurred to

197
00:12:45,000 --> 00:12:47,720
Speaker 1: me until I read Dan's book, is that it wasn't

198
00:12:47,760 --> 00:12:52,559
Speaker 1: the first time that thing passed by. No, right, humans

199
00:12:52,600 --> 00:12:55,040
Speaker 1: would be like, oh there it is again. Yeah, I

200
00:12:55,120 --> 00:12:57,240
Speaker 1: got a little closer. And every thing is that hit

201
00:12:57,320 --> 00:13:02,160
Speaker 1: at a shallow angle? Yeah, like almost maximized for just

202
00:13:02,360 --> 00:13:06,280
Speaker 1: blasting stuff right straight down out of the sky. Yeah,

203
00:13:06,280 --> 00:13:08,960
Speaker 1: it did not hit from straight down. It hit at

204
00:13:09,000 --> 00:13:13,079
Speaker 1: an angle, and it hit at an angle that uh

205
00:13:13,600 --> 00:13:17,720
Speaker 1: was really severe on North America because it was it

206
00:13:17,800 --> 00:13:20,560
Speaker 1: hit basically in the what would today be the Gulf

207
00:13:20,600 --> 00:13:24,679
Speaker 1: of Mexico. Uh So North America a lot of it

208
00:13:24,760 --> 00:13:27,719
Speaker 1: got fried. I mean, creatures just really got wiped out.

209
00:13:27,760 --> 00:13:31,040
Speaker 1: Of course, the aftermath of it, it goes for several weeks,

210
00:13:31,080 --> 00:13:35,640
Speaker 1: producing tsunamis that are a mile tall, that bounce off

211
00:13:36,480 --> 00:13:41,280
Speaker 1: of land all over the globe. Uh and if still left,

212
00:13:41,760 --> 00:13:46,280
Speaker 1: uh these big piled up remnants of mud and debris

213
00:13:46,960 --> 00:13:50,280
Speaker 1: five and six stories high on the ocean floor. I

214
00:13:50,320 --> 00:13:54,959
Speaker 1: mean those things still exist and U and also hold

215
00:13:55,440 --> 00:13:58,480
Speaker 1: do they have chunks of that thing? Yeah? Yeah, that

216
00:13:58,600 --> 00:14:02,360
Speaker 1: the asteroid itself basically was obliterated, But what we have

217
00:14:02,920 --> 00:14:08,719
Speaker 1: are the remnants of the shocked geology from where it

218
00:14:08,840 --> 00:14:11,000
Speaker 1: where it hit. But you can't there's no there's no

219
00:14:11,320 --> 00:14:14,760
Speaker 1: known piece of the thing. I'm not aware of there

220
00:14:14,840 --> 00:14:21,239
Speaker 1: being any known pieces of the thing still there, although uh,

221
00:14:21,280 --> 00:14:23,520
Speaker 1: I may be wrong about that. Because we do know

222
00:14:23,720 --> 00:14:26,200
Speaker 1: that it was we do know what the substance of

223
00:14:26,240 --> 00:14:31,000
Speaker 1: the asteroid was. It was a chondrite, which is the

224
00:14:31,040 --> 00:14:34,000
Speaker 1: most one of the most common forms of meteorites today

225
00:14:34,080 --> 00:14:37,400
Speaker 1: that fly through the sky and and produce those beautiful

226
00:14:38,040 --> 00:14:43,920
Speaker 1: uh night sky uh comment like like appearances. But so

227
00:14:44,280 --> 00:14:46,720
Speaker 1: we know that it was a condrite, that may imply

228
00:14:46,920 --> 00:14:50,480
Speaker 1: that there was some some residue of it that that

229
00:14:50,720 --> 00:14:54,480
Speaker 1: enabled people to identify what it was. But I was

230
00:14:54,880 --> 00:14:57,160
Speaker 1: really intrigued when I was doing the research on this,

231
00:14:57,200 --> 00:14:59,680
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of new work on it which

232
00:14:59,720 --> 00:15:02,320
Speaker 1: I ride to. I tried to incorporate in the book

233
00:15:03,200 --> 00:15:06,880
Speaker 1: by the fact that it was such a blast that

234
00:15:08,040 --> 00:15:16,760
Speaker 1: the ojecta uh from the impact exited Earth's gravity and

235
00:15:17,480 --> 00:15:21,480
Speaker 1: essentially spread across the entire Solar System. And there are

236
00:15:21,640 --> 00:15:26,240
Speaker 1: paleobiologists out there who argue that there is a good

237
00:15:26,320 --> 00:15:29,520
Speaker 1: chance with an impact on a planet like Earth that

238
00:15:29,680 --> 00:15:34,320
Speaker 1: was filled with life, that although it nearly destroyed life

239
00:15:34,320 --> 00:15:39,800
Speaker 1: on Earth, it very likely spread microbial life across the

240
00:15:39,840 --> 00:15:44,320
Speaker 1: Solar System two places like Mars to Jupiter's moons to

241
00:15:44,440 --> 00:15:47,160
Speaker 1: Saturn's moons. We're not gonna know any of this until

242
00:15:47,160 --> 00:15:50,120
Speaker 1: we definitively find out whether or not there is life

243
00:15:50,120 --> 00:15:54,200
Speaker 1: on places like Enceladus or Europa or uh some of

244
00:15:54,240 --> 00:15:57,240
Speaker 1: the moons of the outer Solar System. But this impact

245
00:15:57,320 --> 00:16:00,160
Speaker 1: was was large enough that it may have done that

246
00:16:00,280 --> 00:16:01,800
Speaker 1: very thing. It may have been a kind of a

247
00:16:01,840 --> 00:16:05,640
Speaker 1: genesis effect for life in the Solar System. Did you

248
00:16:05,720 --> 00:16:09,160
Speaker 1: research at all, um, when you're looking at the impact

249
00:16:09,280 --> 00:16:12,680
Speaker 1: of such a great thing that has such mass and speed,

250
00:16:13,440 --> 00:16:16,600
Speaker 1: could it or did it affect at all like the

251
00:16:16,600 --> 00:16:22,680
Speaker 1: Earth's rotation, it's orbit, its path, and if not, if

252
00:16:22,720 --> 00:16:25,400
Speaker 1: it was still super so small, like what would it take,

253
00:16:25,480 --> 00:16:27,440
Speaker 1: did you like look into what would it take to

254
00:16:27,560 --> 00:16:31,120
Speaker 1: actually move the Earth out of its orbit or to

255
00:16:31,200 --> 00:16:35,560
Speaker 1: pause its rotation for a second? Yeah? I uh, well,

256
00:16:35,600 --> 00:16:38,600
Speaker 1: you know, as a as a writer who is not

257
00:16:39,240 --> 00:16:43,560
Speaker 1: you know, a scholar of this um, I was able

258
00:16:43,560 --> 00:16:47,000
Speaker 1: to use only the the articles that I found, and

259
00:16:47,040 --> 00:16:51,760
Speaker 1: I haven't found anyone yet who has actually investigated whether

260
00:16:51,840 --> 00:16:56,000
Speaker 1: or not this this nudge the Earth in its orbit

261
00:16:56,120 --> 00:17:00,200
Speaker 1: or slowed its rotation or anything like that. I mean, uh,

262
00:17:00,320 --> 00:17:03,200
Speaker 1: you know, we think that the impact that created the Moon,

263
00:17:03,280 --> 00:17:05,840
Speaker 1: I mean very early in in Earth's formation, there was

264
00:17:05,880 --> 00:17:09,840
Speaker 1: a gigantic impact that probably produced the moon, blew the

265
00:17:09,880 --> 00:17:13,320
Speaker 1: Moon off the Earth to create the Moon that orbits

266
00:17:13,320 --> 00:17:17,440
Speaker 1: around our planet today. That that one probably did affect

267
00:17:18,080 --> 00:17:21,320
Speaker 1: the orbit and probably the rotation, But that would have

268
00:17:21,400 --> 00:17:24,800
Speaker 1: been one many times larger than even this chick slube

269
00:17:25,440 --> 00:17:28,840
Speaker 1: impact or uh and the chicks alube impactor seems you know,

270
00:17:28,960 --> 00:17:32,240
Speaker 1: that seems plenty big enough that it can produce a

271
00:17:32,280 --> 00:17:35,359
Speaker 1: mass extinction. It's hard to imagine one that would be

272
00:17:35,400 --> 00:17:37,000
Speaker 1: even larger. But I mean, you know, you look at

273
00:17:37,720 --> 00:17:41,120
Speaker 1: the Moon through a telescope, or look at Mars sometimes

274
00:17:41,119 --> 00:17:44,960
Speaker 1: photographs of Mars. I mean, and it's fairly clear that

275
00:17:45,560 --> 00:17:51,560
Speaker 1: planets are constantly being bombarded, particularly by asteroids that formed

276
00:17:51,640 --> 00:17:55,879
Speaker 1: from the planet that wasn't created between the orbits of

277
00:17:55,960 --> 00:17:59,240
Speaker 1: Mars and Jupiter. That's the asteroid belt, and that was

278
00:17:59,280 --> 00:18:01,760
Speaker 1: a place where a planet was trying to form and

279
00:18:01,800 --> 00:18:04,600
Speaker 1: never quite did so. And so it's the spot that

280
00:18:05,000 --> 00:18:08,720
Speaker 1: shoots all these projectiles out through the through the Solar System,

281
00:18:08,880 --> 00:18:12,840
Speaker 1: especially to the inner planets of the of the system.

282
00:18:13,000 --> 00:18:16,320
Speaker 1: So I mean, I include a photograph uh in the

283
00:18:16,400 --> 00:18:22,040
Speaker 1: book of UH this gigantic to me, gigantic meteor crater

284
00:18:22,320 --> 00:18:26,880
Speaker 1: in Arizona, because when I was right, yeah, no, there's

285
00:18:26,920 --> 00:18:29,560
Speaker 1: no looking at that one, and what happened? No, you

286
00:18:29,600 --> 00:18:31,639
Speaker 1: don't look at it and wonder I mean, when I

287
00:18:31,680 --> 00:18:33,360
Speaker 1: was writing about this, I thought, well, you know, hell,

288
00:18:33,400 --> 00:18:35,399
Speaker 1: I've got I mean, I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

289
00:18:35,440 --> 00:18:38,440
Speaker 1: I've got there's a meteor crater. I know, that's only

290
00:18:38,440 --> 00:18:41,240
Speaker 1: about a five hour drive from here. So I hopped

291
00:18:41,240 --> 00:18:43,880
Speaker 1: in my jeep and drove over there to look at

292
00:18:43,920 --> 00:18:46,840
Speaker 1: this thing. And uh, I mean it is worth. It's

293
00:18:47,320 --> 00:18:51,840
Speaker 1: very far off Interstate forty east of Flagstaff, just a

294
00:18:51,880 --> 00:18:54,240
Speaker 1: little south on a dirt road. I mean, it's well

295
00:18:54,240 --> 00:18:57,000
Speaker 1: worth going out and having a look at. But I

296
00:18:57,000 --> 00:18:59,040
Speaker 1: wanted to shoot a photograph I've had in order to

297
00:18:59,080 --> 00:19:02,280
Speaker 1: sort of give readers of the book some sense of, Oh, no,

298
00:19:02,359 --> 00:19:04,080
Speaker 1: it does a great job of it. I don't I

299
00:19:04,119 --> 00:19:06,479
Speaker 1: don't want to dwell too long on this whole, Like,

300
00:19:06,520 --> 00:19:09,880
Speaker 1: we gotta get from there. We gotta get from there yesterday.

301
00:19:10,400 --> 00:19:14,280
Speaker 1: But got to two things. Have you, um you saw

302
00:19:14,320 --> 00:19:18,160
Speaker 1: in the news that that NASA just was toying around

303
00:19:18,200 --> 00:19:22,240
Speaker 1: with how to nudge, nudging an asteroid to alter its

304
00:19:22,240 --> 00:19:25,240
Speaker 1: trajectory as like a sort of, you know, a potential

305
00:19:25,480 --> 00:19:29,159
Speaker 1: future defense mechanism from such thing happening in the future.

306
00:19:29,520 --> 00:19:32,520
Speaker 1: And have you seen the movie Melancholia. I have not

307
00:19:32,560 --> 00:19:36,680
Speaker 1: seen Melancholia. No, it's dark one through most of the movie.

308
00:19:36,680 --> 00:19:38,560
Speaker 1: You can't everybody, it's just a movie about people going

309
00:19:38,600 --> 00:19:42,120
Speaker 1: about their lives, and you can't tell. It's just everything's off.

310
00:19:42,760 --> 00:19:45,240
Speaker 1: Everything's frantic and off, and it takes you long time

311
00:19:45,240 --> 00:19:49,080
Speaker 1: to realize that it's it's counting down to a strike

312
00:19:50,000 --> 00:19:54,560
Speaker 1: mm hmm. And everyone's known for a long time. Yeah,

313
00:19:54,600 --> 00:19:57,200
Speaker 1: and just everything's gonna end. And so it's a it's

314
00:19:57,200 --> 00:20:00,560
Speaker 1: a it's not society is an unraveling, like in a

315
00:20:00,600 --> 00:20:04,800
Speaker 1: way that you know, the people who traffic in zombie

316
00:20:04,800 --> 00:20:10,439
Speaker 1: movies would have it unroll. It's just unraveling socially in

317
00:20:10,520 --> 00:20:13,080
Speaker 1: strange ways, and an eventus you put together what the

318
00:20:13,160 --> 00:20:15,600
Speaker 1: issue is. This is what's looming over and you're you're

319
00:20:15,640 --> 00:20:21,480
Speaker 1: experiencing you're experiencing life, um toward its end. But it's

320
00:20:21,480 --> 00:20:25,080
Speaker 1: been known for quite some time. Well I think that's

321
00:20:25,920 --> 00:20:29,119
Speaker 1: that's precisely what would happen, because we do have the

322
00:20:29,160 --> 00:20:34,040
Speaker 1: ability now to uh figure out when an asteroid is

323
00:20:34,119 --> 00:20:38,240
Speaker 1: coming close enough to hit or to pass very very

324
00:20:38,280 --> 00:20:42,600
Speaker 1: near us. Um. So yeah, I mean NASA obviously takes

325
00:20:42,800 --> 00:20:45,840
Speaker 1: all of this seriously enough that it's developed and it's

326
00:20:45,920 --> 00:20:50,159
Speaker 1: working on a technology to try to deflect asteroids that

327
00:20:50,200 --> 00:20:53,480
Speaker 1: could possibly strike Earth. And you know, as you just said,

328
00:20:53,520 --> 00:20:57,159
Speaker 1: we had about ten days ago an example of what

329
00:20:57,320 --> 00:21:01,879
Speaker 1: appeared to be certainly a successful hit it and uh

330
00:21:02,400 --> 00:21:06,199
Speaker 1: working out the movements of that body through space. It

331
00:21:06,200 --> 00:21:09,280
Speaker 1: looks like it wasn't nudged out of the direction it

332
00:21:09,359 --> 00:21:15,520
Speaker 1: was it was going previously. Uh. In that moment as you,

333
00:21:15,560 --> 00:21:19,199
Speaker 1: as you explained, sets up where you've basically wiped the

334
00:21:19,240 --> 00:21:22,440
Speaker 1: slate clean, and it gives you a great starting point

335
00:21:22,480 --> 00:21:28,880
Speaker 1: to explain how things came to be here when humans

336
00:21:30,960 --> 00:21:34,480
Speaker 1: discovered the place. Yes, that's what I try to do

337
00:21:35,160 --> 00:21:42,120
Speaker 1: with this opening chapter. Um. And so after the chick

338
00:21:42,200 --> 00:21:48,159
Speaker 1: slue impact, I mean, I'm able to cover millions of

339
00:21:48,280 --> 00:21:55,080
Speaker 1: years uh in pretty rapid fashion by in effect describing

340
00:21:55,200 --> 00:22:00,840
Speaker 1: the evolution of the North American species that come to

341
00:22:01,000 --> 00:22:06,240
Speaker 1: be kind of the icons of continental evolution. And they're

342
00:22:06,280 --> 00:22:11,800
Speaker 1: not quite the animals that most people assume, because two

343
00:22:11,840 --> 00:22:15,360
Speaker 1: of the most iconic creatures that emerge from North American

344
00:22:15,400 --> 00:22:19,360
Speaker 1: evolution we don't many of us don't even think of

345
00:22:19,480 --> 00:22:23,000
Speaker 1: as being American animals. And one of those is that

346
00:22:23,080 --> 00:22:27,800
Speaker 1: the camel, which evolved some forty five million years ago

347
00:22:27,920 --> 00:22:31,919
Speaker 1: in North America, eventually spread to other parts of the

348
00:22:31,960 --> 00:22:35,880
Speaker 1: world where it survived, but by about ten thousand years ago,

349
00:22:36,040 --> 00:22:39,320
Speaker 1: Camel's the most recent camel that we had in North

350
00:22:39,320 --> 00:22:43,480
Speaker 1: America was called Yesterday's camel. It was a single humped

351
00:22:43,520 --> 00:22:47,159
Speaker 1: camel that would look very familiar UH to those of

352
00:22:47,240 --> 00:22:49,320
Speaker 1: us who have the image of a camel in our heads,

353
00:22:49,440 --> 00:22:52,679
Speaker 1: and it became extinct about ten thousand years ago. And

354
00:22:52,720 --> 00:22:56,600
Speaker 1: the other animal, which of course UH has produced a

355
00:22:56,640 --> 00:23:03,080
Speaker 1: modern day dilemma is the whore, which is a distinctively

356
00:23:03,119 --> 00:23:08,440
Speaker 1: evolved North American UH group of animals that emerge fifty

357
00:23:08,520 --> 00:23:12,600
Speaker 1: six million years ago, fairly quickly after the the chicks

358
00:23:12,600 --> 00:23:18,240
Speaker 1: alop impact. And UH they also work here down to

359
00:23:18,400 --> 00:23:22,600
Speaker 1: about eight thousand years ago we think, when once again

360
00:23:22,640 --> 00:23:25,639
Speaker 1: they became extinct in North and South America and somehow

361
00:23:25,680 --> 00:23:28,959
Speaker 1: survived in the rest of the world. But in addition

362
00:23:29,040 --> 00:23:33,920
Speaker 1: to those, I mean we we evolved UH wolves and coyotes.

363
00:23:34,000 --> 00:23:38,120
Speaker 1: Those are the family of canads are North American creatures

364
00:23:38,160 --> 00:23:41,080
Speaker 1: from about five and a half million years ago. So

365
00:23:41,160 --> 00:23:44,520
Speaker 1: they've been around singing what I call in another book

366
00:23:44,520 --> 00:23:49,080
Speaker 1: of mine, the original national anthem in America for for

367
00:23:49,119 --> 00:23:55,760
Speaker 1: a very long time. UH. Jaguars are North American evolved cat.

368
00:23:57,040 --> 00:24:00,879
Speaker 1: We have a whole host of species that that we

369
00:24:01,080 --> 00:24:05,719
Speaker 1: know are distinctively American evolved animals, but many of the

370
00:24:05,720 --> 00:24:09,840
Speaker 1: ones that UM that Europeans from the last five hundred

371
00:24:09,920 --> 00:24:14,320
Speaker 1: years have thought of and and that wildlife departments still

372
00:24:14,400 --> 00:24:17,120
Speaker 1: kind of think of as the classic North American animals

373
00:24:17,560 --> 00:24:22,440
Speaker 1: are actually migrants from other parts of the world, from

374
00:24:22,480 --> 00:24:26,240
Speaker 1: places like Asia. So newbies too, Yeah, newbies. I mean,

375
00:24:26,880 --> 00:24:29,240
Speaker 1: as I was saying last night at the bookstore, I

376
00:24:29,240 --> 00:24:31,600
Speaker 1: mean one of the ones that we have now realized

377
00:24:31,640 --> 00:24:34,560
Speaker 1: here just in the last why you why I had

378
00:24:34,560 --> 00:24:38,280
Speaker 1: you talked about that? Yeah? Yeah, is the buffalo? Yeah?

379
00:24:38,320 --> 00:24:42,280
Speaker 1: So we were we were discussing. I was discussing one

380
00:24:42,320 --> 00:24:44,439
Speaker 1: place where I think where I was challenging Dan. I

381
00:24:44,440 --> 00:24:48,040
Speaker 1: think I said, you're out of your mind, is um?

382
00:24:48,080 --> 00:24:53,360
Speaker 1: I was putting to Dan, how uh, considering the debate

383
00:24:53,400 --> 00:24:58,440
Speaker 1: around wild horses, feral horses or wild depending on your sentiments,

384
00:24:59,040 --> 00:25:04,080
Speaker 1: the debate around areas where you have conflict between feral

385
00:25:04,119 --> 00:25:07,920
Speaker 1: horses and native you know what people would call native wildlife,

386
00:25:07,960 --> 00:25:10,800
Speaker 1: like desert big horns and mule deer. Um, how could

387
00:25:10,800 --> 00:25:15,800
Speaker 1: you be a wild horse advocate considering that they're in

388
00:25:15,800 --> 00:25:19,720
Speaker 1: some ways detrimental to native wildlife? And and I was

389
00:25:19,840 --> 00:25:24,600
Speaker 1: teeing Dan up to explain his viewpoint, which which I

390
00:25:24,640 --> 00:25:29,200
Speaker 1: know from reading the book about you know, the need

391
00:25:29,280 --> 00:25:32,199
Speaker 1: to be precise and careful around throwing around like native

392
00:25:32,800 --> 00:25:36,120
Speaker 1: wildlife when you look at it from a deep history perspective. Yeah,

393
00:25:36,200 --> 00:25:39,720
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. And so I mean the horses probably

394
00:25:40,400 --> 00:25:43,080
Speaker 1: our classic example of that very thing that you teat

395
00:25:43,160 --> 00:25:46,000
Speaker 1: up for me, because it's an animal that has been

396
00:25:46,040 --> 00:25:49,000
Speaker 1: around for fifty six million years in North America, with

397
00:25:49,119 --> 00:25:54,199
Speaker 1: the single exception of the eight nine thousand years prior

398
00:25:54,320 --> 00:25:59,240
Speaker 1: to fifteen hundred or so when Europeans reintroduced these animals

399
00:25:59,520 --> 00:26:02,880
Speaker 1: to nor America. So they were just gone for a

400
00:26:03,000 --> 00:26:07,320
Speaker 1: very small amount of time, which is one of the reasons.

401
00:26:07,760 --> 00:26:10,399
Speaker 1: As a result of their adaptation in North America and

402
00:26:10,400 --> 00:26:14,200
Speaker 1: their evolution here, they've done so well when we when

403
00:26:14,200 --> 00:26:17,560
Speaker 1: we brought them back, I mean they were completely preadapted,

404
00:26:17,840 --> 00:26:22,879
Speaker 1: having evolved here two conditions in North America. Um. But

405
00:26:24,000 --> 00:26:29,719
Speaker 1: the point of that chapter two describe what happened in

406
00:26:29,720 --> 00:26:34,160
Speaker 1: North America after the the impact is to set up

407
00:26:34,800 --> 00:26:38,480
Speaker 1: the beast shary that was here when humans arrived. And

408
00:26:38,560 --> 00:26:42,560
Speaker 1: the last about eight or nine pages of chapter one

409
00:26:43,440 --> 00:26:47,080
Speaker 1: is actually about the turn to Africa then and describe

410
00:26:47,119 --> 00:26:53,280
Speaker 1: the evolution of of humans there and eventually they're spread

411
00:26:53,640 --> 00:26:57,880
Speaker 1: humanity spread out of Africa around the rest of the world.

412
00:26:58,680 --> 00:27:02,199
Speaker 1: And so what I'm trying trying to to create. Obviously,

413
00:27:02,560 --> 00:27:08,600
Speaker 1: is the possibility of humans ultimately finding these sort of

414
00:27:08,680 --> 00:27:12,720
Speaker 1: lost continents North and South America, which are uh the

415
00:27:12,960 --> 00:27:17,800
Speaker 1: farthest away from Africa on the planet. They're the last

416
00:27:17,880 --> 00:27:23,160
Speaker 1: continents that humans migrating out of Africa find. And what

417
00:27:23,280 --> 00:27:28,160
Speaker 1: they find there is this unique beastary that's composed of

418
00:27:29,000 --> 00:27:32,439
Speaker 1: all these animals that evolved in America and a whole

419
00:27:32,560 --> 00:27:36,560
Speaker 1: host of others that ended up over time traveling the

420
00:27:36,680 --> 00:27:41,879
Speaker 1: land bridges between Eurasia and America and becoming part of

421
00:27:41,920 --> 00:27:46,240
Speaker 1: our our native beast here animals like mastodons and mammoths

422
00:27:46,320 --> 00:27:49,359
Speaker 1: and sabertooth cats and all the bears that we have,

423
00:27:49,920 --> 00:27:56,240
Speaker 1: all the deer, all the sheep, um, the mountain goats uh,

424
00:27:56,280 --> 00:27:59,920
Speaker 1: and of course the bison, which is I was about

425
00:28:00,080 --> 00:28:02,639
Speaker 1: say a minute ago, is one of the last ones

426
00:28:02,680 --> 00:28:05,880
Speaker 1: to arrive. We think bison only arrived in North America

427
00:28:06,240 --> 00:28:11,080
Speaker 1: about two hundred fifty thousand years ago. Uh. Passenger pigeons,

428
00:28:11,119 --> 00:28:15,159
Speaker 1: for example, had come or the progenitors of passenger pigeons

429
00:28:15,240 --> 00:28:20,600
Speaker 1: we think fifteen million years ago, and mammoth's seventeen million

430
00:28:20,680 --> 00:28:23,840
Speaker 1: years ago. So we had animals that had come to

431
00:28:23,880 --> 00:28:27,359
Speaker 1: North America and become part of the native bastry far

432
00:28:27,520 --> 00:28:30,840
Speaker 1: far longer ago in the past than than bison did.

433
00:28:31,480 --> 00:28:34,320
Speaker 1: And yet we think of bison, you know, I'm not

434
00:28:34,400 --> 00:28:36,479
Speaker 1: arguing against this, but we do think of them as

435
00:28:36,520 --> 00:28:43,400
Speaker 1: being our classic North American iconic animal, distinctly American, distribute American. Yeah.

436
00:28:44,040 --> 00:28:47,520
Speaker 1: You there's something that surprise when you're describing the how

437
00:28:47,600 --> 00:28:50,840
Speaker 1: things shook out with our bast areas that and I

438
00:28:50,960 --> 00:28:54,040
Speaker 1: might be getting this a little bit wrong. Is you

439
00:28:54,040 --> 00:28:56,560
Speaker 1: can talk about imagining the western half of the country

440
00:28:56,640 --> 00:29:01,080
Speaker 1: is being easy attic. Yeah, in the eastern half of

441
00:29:01,080 --> 00:29:04,600
Speaker 1: the country was it? Is it more of a European

442
00:29:06,880 --> 00:29:09,440
Speaker 1: And my message is up, no, no, you're not. Uh no.

443
00:29:09,600 --> 00:29:12,880
Speaker 1: I I do make that point and in several places

444
00:29:12,920 --> 00:29:19,000
Speaker 1: in the book, um and sort of start with that

445
00:29:19,240 --> 00:29:23,719
Speaker 1: as a essential premise of the book by describing what

446
00:29:23,840 --> 00:29:26,360
Speaker 1: North America was like at the time of that that

447
00:29:26,520 --> 00:29:31,560
Speaker 1: asteroid impact. It was not actually a single continent yet

448
00:29:31,640 --> 00:29:37,400
Speaker 1: it consisted of two pieces. Appalachia is the eastern Peace

449
00:29:37,520 --> 00:29:40,800
Speaker 1: and it's basically from the Mississippi Valley eastward to the

450
00:29:41,000 --> 00:29:45,040
Speaker 1: today's Atlantic coast, and of course the Appalachian Mountains are

451
00:29:45,080 --> 00:29:49,000
Speaker 1: already in place, a very very old mountain range, and

452
00:29:49,040 --> 00:29:52,880
Speaker 1: the connectivity through land bridges to that piece of North

453
00:29:52,920 --> 00:29:59,360
Speaker 1: America was to Europe through UH today's Greenland and Iceland,

454
00:29:59,480 --> 00:30:03,760
Speaker 1: and UH down through the British Isles into Europe. The

455
00:30:03,880 --> 00:30:07,040
Speaker 1: western piece, which was in the two pieces were separated

456
00:30:07,120 --> 00:30:10,680
Speaker 1: by what's called the Inland the Great Inland Sea, and

457
00:30:10,760 --> 00:30:14,640
Speaker 1: the Western Peace, which is known as Lara Media is

458
00:30:14,760 --> 00:30:19,320
Speaker 1: basically a piece that would be from the Rocky Mountains,

459
00:30:19,440 --> 00:30:22,280
Speaker 1: which didn't exist yet at the time of the impact

460
00:30:22,960 --> 00:30:27,240
Speaker 1: westward to the Pacific coast and it's it's connections. Land

461
00:30:27,240 --> 00:30:32,280
Speaker 1: bridge connections were to Eurasia on the on the western side,

462
00:30:32,440 --> 00:30:37,880
Speaker 1: primarily to Asia itself, and so the exchanges of animals

463
00:30:37,920 --> 00:30:40,600
Speaker 1: to those two different parts of America tended to come

464
00:30:40,680 --> 00:30:44,880
Speaker 1: from two different directions. I mean, even some of the

465
00:30:44,920 --> 00:30:48,840
Speaker 1: European naturalists who got to North America UH in the

466
00:30:49,280 --> 00:30:53,920
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds. For example, Mark Catesby, a famous UH British

467
00:30:54,000 --> 00:30:57,640
Speaker 1: nationalists who who works in the American South, was far

468
00:30:57,720 --> 00:31:02,880
Speaker 1: more interested in America's birds and reptiles because he thought

469
00:31:03,280 --> 00:31:06,920
Speaker 1: the mammals in the eastern part of North America that

470
00:31:07,000 --> 00:31:10,560
Speaker 1: he was himself studying were too much like the mammals

471
00:31:10,640 --> 00:31:13,840
Speaker 1: of of Western Europe for him to spend much time

472
00:31:13,880 --> 00:31:16,680
Speaker 1: on them, So he sort of ignored the mammals because

473
00:31:16,720 --> 00:31:20,080
Speaker 1: they were familiar and focused on on these other groups.

474
00:31:20,640 --> 00:31:25,760
Speaker 1: Whereas when people like Lewis and Clark, for example, crossed

475
00:31:25,760 --> 00:31:30,040
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River and began to approach the Great Plains,

476
00:31:30,200 --> 00:31:34,520
Speaker 1: the Rockies, the Pacific Coast, I mean, they their journals

477
00:31:34,560 --> 00:31:39,040
Speaker 1: are full of these very distinct impressions of being in

478
00:31:39,080 --> 00:31:43,120
Speaker 1: a whole new world with animals that, having grown up

479
00:31:43,160 --> 00:31:46,040
Speaker 1: in places like Virginia and Tennessee, none of them had

480
00:31:46,120 --> 00:31:49,080
Speaker 1: ever seen before, they had never been exposed to. They

481
00:31:49,080 --> 00:31:53,000
Speaker 1: were all brand new to Western science. I mean, from

482
00:31:53,040 --> 00:31:56,640
Speaker 1: prong horns to prairie dogs to mule deer to grizzlies.

483
00:31:57,200 --> 00:32:00,440
Speaker 1: It was a completely different world. And it's a world

484
00:32:00,520 --> 00:32:05,320
Speaker 1: that was much more influenced by Asia and migration out

485
00:32:05,320 --> 00:32:08,840
Speaker 1: of Asia than the eastern side of the continent that

486
00:32:08,920 --> 00:32:21,480
Speaker 1: was more influenced by by Western Europe. I'd love to

487
00:32:21,560 --> 00:32:23,920
Speaker 1: cover it again, but we've covered so many times with

488
00:32:24,080 --> 00:32:32,680
Speaker 1: um archaeologists and different paleontologists. The the blitz Creeg hypothesis

489
00:32:32,720 --> 00:32:37,000
Speaker 1: in the in the in the correlations between UM the

490
00:32:37,120 --> 00:32:41,000
Speaker 1: arrival of humans in the New World and the extinctions

491
00:32:41,000 --> 00:32:43,240
Speaker 1: of the man with the Masodon, and all the debates

492
00:32:43,280 --> 00:32:47,239
Speaker 1: about who is to blame. UM. So I don't want

493
00:32:47,280 --> 00:32:49,320
Speaker 1: to I don't I'd love to you, but I don't

494
00:32:49,320 --> 00:32:53,160
Speaker 1: want to rehash it. How but you get a new

495
00:32:53,200 --> 00:32:55,200
Speaker 1: thing I haven't thought of for a long time. So

496
00:32:55,720 --> 00:32:59,320
Speaker 1: you you cover the Clovis period UM, and the chapter

497
00:32:59,480 --> 00:33:03,880
Speaker 1: is via the Beautiful And I learned a bunch of

498
00:33:03,880 --> 00:33:07,840
Speaker 1: stuff about Clovis that I had never known. UM. I

499
00:33:07,880 --> 00:33:12,560
Speaker 1: had never known an accounting of how many Clovis points

500
00:33:12,680 --> 00:33:15,120
Speaker 1: archaeologists have recovered in the continent and where they came from,

501
00:33:15,120 --> 00:33:17,640
Speaker 1: which was fascinating. And I learned all kinds of suff

502
00:33:17,640 --> 00:33:19,480
Speaker 1: about Clovis. And anyone that reads a book is gonna

503
00:33:19,760 --> 00:33:21,880
Speaker 1: I guarantee you, I don't care how checked out you

504
00:33:21,920 --> 00:33:24,000
Speaker 1: are on ice AH hunters, You're gonna learn more about

505
00:33:24,000 --> 00:33:27,000
Speaker 1: ice A hunters. And you cover the extinctions and the

506
00:33:27,040 --> 00:33:30,040
Speaker 1: mysteries and different explanations for the extinctions, and in some

507
00:33:30,080 --> 00:33:35,320
Speaker 1: of the smoking guns that did attribute human cause to

508
00:33:35,800 --> 00:33:40,320
Speaker 1: those extinctions, and other stuff beautifully. Well. Then you then

509
00:33:40,320 --> 00:33:42,560
Speaker 1: you get into a period in the book, which you

510
00:33:42,640 --> 00:33:46,040
Speaker 1: I think you called the Native period, and we go

511
00:33:46,160 --> 00:33:50,560
Speaker 1: through all these extinctions when humans arrive, but then you

512
00:33:50,640 --> 00:33:57,280
Speaker 1: focus in on what doesn't happen for ten thousand years

513
00:33:59,520 --> 00:34:04,480
Speaker 1: extinct and stop for ten thousand years you have people here,

514
00:34:04,520 --> 00:34:08,359
Speaker 1: extinctions stop and then holy ship, do they start back

515
00:34:08,440 --> 00:34:13,120
Speaker 1: up again when Europeans arrive. But but can you talk

516
00:34:13,160 --> 00:34:17,520
Speaker 1: a little bit about why they stopped, what went on

517
00:34:17,719 --> 00:34:22,879
Speaker 1: that where you had some semblance of of stasis with

518
00:34:23,160 --> 00:34:27,080
Speaker 1: North American wildlife. Yeah, it's a it's a fascinating period

519
00:34:27,160 --> 00:34:35,560
Speaker 1: because it speaks to this, uh, this almost romantic hope

520
00:34:35,600 --> 00:34:40,759
Speaker 1: we have that at some point in time humans uh

521
00:34:40,960 --> 00:34:45,960
Speaker 1: were a benevolent force in nature and that somehow we

522
00:34:45,960 --> 00:34:49,720
Speaker 1: were able to go in the past, we hope, looking

523
00:34:49,719 --> 00:34:51,520
Speaker 1: back on it as a kind of a lesson for

524
00:34:51,640 --> 00:34:55,160
Speaker 1: us now, we were able to go for many thousands

525
00:34:55,160 --> 00:34:58,040
Speaker 1: of years, in the case of North America, ten thousand

526
00:34:58,120 --> 00:35:04,160
Speaker 1: years after the Poli Sustine extinction with almost no extinctions.

527
00:35:04,280 --> 00:35:08,120
Speaker 1: Uh you know you're talking about. Yeah, there's there's one.

528
00:35:08,320 --> 00:35:12,480
Speaker 1: It's not it's not quite a complete success story. There

529
00:35:12,600 --> 00:35:16,640
Speaker 1: is one. There is a flightless sea duck on the

530
00:35:16,680 --> 00:35:22,120
Speaker 1: Pacific coast of North America basically from the Channel Islands

531
00:35:22,160 --> 00:35:27,560
Speaker 1: in California along the California coast up into Oregon. Um

532
00:35:27,600 --> 00:35:32,040
Speaker 1: that was present when this period, which I refer to

533
00:35:32,120 --> 00:35:37,640
Speaker 1: as Native America. Yeah, I call the chapter Ravens and

534
00:35:37,719 --> 00:35:42,680
Speaker 1: Coyotes America after these deity figures. But it's basically ten

535
00:35:42,760 --> 00:35:46,640
Speaker 1: thousand years of Native North America after the end of

536
00:35:46,680 --> 00:35:51,439
Speaker 1: the Palistocene. And we know that those sea ducks were

537
00:35:51,760 --> 00:35:57,960
Speaker 1: hunted um as soon as this period begins, and they

538
00:35:58,080 --> 00:36:02,400
Speaker 1: do finally become extinct, but it takes seventy five hundred

539
00:36:02,480 --> 00:36:06,400
Speaker 1: years for this to happen. They don't become extinct according

540
00:36:06,440 --> 00:36:10,560
Speaker 1: to the archaeological sites of about eight or ten different

541
00:36:11,080 --> 00:36:14,879
Speaker 1: uh kills of these sea ducks until about twenty years ago.

542
00:36:15,400 --> 00:36:18,840
Speaker 1: So even with hunting, the sea ducks themselves last a

543
00:36:18,880 --> 00:36:22,719
Speaker 1: long time. I will also say that flightless birds all

544
00:36:22,840 --> 00:36:26,480
Speaker 1: over the world. As humans spread out of Africa and

545
00:36:26,560 --> 00:36:29,759
Speaker 1: settle other parts of the world, flightless birds are usually

546
00:36:29,840 --> 00:36:34,240
Speaker 1: the first things to go. They're the low hanging fruit.

547
00:36:34,719 --> 00:36:38,719
Speaker 1: That's what people can get at easily. Uh when we

548
00:36:38,800 --> 00:36:41,799
Speaker 1: have dogs, the dogs can get at them two and

549
00:36:41,880 --> 00:36:45,640
Speaker 1: so flightless birds of all kinds all over the world

550
00:36:45,880 --> 00:36:48,759
Speaker 1: are going to go pretty quickly after humans arrived. It

551
00:36:48,880 --> 00:36:51,799
Speaker 1: was the Dodo flightless, it was yeah, and then the

552
00:36:51,840 --> 00:36:55,680
Speaker 1: MOA's and the MOA's the Great Hawk, which was our

553
00:36:55,760 --> 00:37:01,760
Speaker 1: northern hemisphere penguin, which became extinct during the eighteen forties.

554
00:37:01,800 --> 00:37:04,319
Speaker 1: It was one of those that became extinct as a

555
00:37:04,360 --> 00:37:08,240
Speaker 1: result of the UH, the sort of mayhem you mentioned

556
00:37:08,280 --> 00:37:12,600
Speaker 1: after Europeans arrived. But this ten thousand year period is

557
00:37:12,760 --> 00:37:19,919
Speaker 1: really fascinating for the relative lack of extinctions UM. And

558
00:37:20,320 --> 00:37:23,400
Speaker 1: we've also made it into this kind of UH, this

559
00:37:23,480 --> 00:37:27,800
Speaker 1: kind of baseline model, because Europeans preserved when they arrived

560
00:37:27,800 --> 00:37:33,960
Speaker 1: five hundred years ago this image of UH, this feconed wonderful,

561
00:37:34,080 --> 00:37:37,839
Speaker 1: kind of virgin continent that was just brimming with wildlife

562
00:37:38,160 --> 00:37:41,719
Speaker 1: of all kinds. And so at the very end of

563
00:37:41,760 --> 00:37:46,040
Speaker 1: that ten thousand years you have this this European UH

564
00:37:46,440 --> 00:37:50,480
Speaker 1: journaling that describes a continent that was really rich in life.

565
00:37:50,680 --> 00:37:54,640
Speaker 1: So the question obviously is how did this happen? How

566
00:37:54,719 --> 00:37:57,839
Speaker 1: was it possible for people to live here for ten

567
00:37:57,880 --> 00:38:02,880
Speaker 1: thousand years and inflict almost no extinctions in contrast to

568
00:38:02,920 --> 00:38:07,319
Speaker 1: the earlier period and the later period, And so it

569
00:38:07,400 --> 00:38:10,680
Speaker 1: was it was something of a puzzle to figure out

570
00:38:10,760 --> 00:38:14,680
Speaker 1: because not frankly, hardly anybody has tried to work on this,

571
00:38:15,280 --> 00:38:20,160
Speaker 1: and in contemporary like in Europe during that ten thousand years,

572
00:38:20,160 --> 00:38:23,279
Speaker 1: they never slowed down. I mean they continued to like,

573
00:38:23,360 --> 00:38:26,600
Speaker 1: they continued to extirpate, you know, from Great Britain and

574
00:38:27,120 --> 00:38:30,080
Speaker 1: just on on and on like species. Maybe maybe it

575
00:38:30,440 --> 00:38:33,680
Speaker 1: hit a crescendo with the Plcesne extinctions, but they continued

576
00:38:33,680 --> 00:38:36,160
Speaker 1: to whittle away at the place. They whittled away at

577
00:38:36,200 --> 00:38:40,640
Speaker 1: it to the point where the only reason in Western

578
00:38:40,760 --> 00:38:46,319
Speaker 1: Europe in particular, that we still had horses, and we

579
00:38:46,400 --> 00:38:51,760
Speaker 1: still had wild cattle rocks, uh, and we still had sheep,

580
00:38:51,800 --> 00:38:55,080
Speaker 1: and goats were numerous enough that they were more difficult.

581
00:38:55,120 --> 00:38:59,120
Speaker 1: But cattle and horses in particular survived only because we

582
00:38:59,239 --> 00:39:03,520
Speaker 1: domesticated them. Had we not domesticated them, we would have

583
00:39:03,560 --> 00:39:07,000
Speaker 1: simply in Western Europe followed the trajectory of the earlier

584
00:39:07,040 --> 00:39:09,480
Speaker 1: period where I mean there's a there's a side in

585
00:39:09,600 --> 00:39:14,200
Speaker 1: France where the remains of twenty thousand horses have been

586
00:39:14,239 --> 00:39:20,440
Speaker 1: excavated from being corralled and slaughtered by these these late hunters.

587
00:39:20,520 --> 00:39:23,279
Speaker 1: So yes, the that was over a period of time

588
00:39:23,440 --> 00:39:25,480
Speaker 1: that was over time, it was Yeah, it wasn't a

589
00:39:25,560 --> 00:39:31,080
Speaker 1: single event would have been quite a rodeo, but uh no,

590
00:39:31,239 --> 00:39:34,640
Speaker 1: and horses obviously were you know, they were really hard

591
00:39:34,880 --> 00:39:38,400
Speaker 1: to kill. I mean, you know, I I have information

592
00:39:38,440 --> 00:39:41,359
Speaker 1: in the earlier parts of the book about the Neanderthal

593
00:39:41,440 --> 00:39:44,279
Speaker 1: hunters who very clearly were hunting horses, and I mean

594
00:39:44,320 --> 00:39:50,320
Speaker 1: these guys ended up being beaten to death by close

595
00:39:50,400 --> 00:39:55,359
Speaker 1: in encounters with these really powerful, aggressive animals, I mean

596
00:39:55,800 --> 00:40:00,840
Speaker 1: broken thigh bones and fractured faces and gall dout eyes

597
00:40:01,000 --> 00:40:04,520
Speaker 1: and and so it was not easy to do that,

598
00:40:04,640 --> 00:40:07,480
Speaker 1: but Europeans managed to reach to get horses to the

599
00:40:07,480 --> 00:40:11,560
Speaker 1: point where we had to domesticate them, essentially to save them.

600
00:40:11,600 --> 00:40:15,920
Speaker 1: In North America, though, here's this ten thousand year period

601
00:40:16,520 --> 00:40:22,319
Speaker 1: where hardly anything like that really happens. And what I

602
00:40:22,480 --> 00:40:26,400
Speaker 1: came to uh and I start that chapter out by

603
00:40:26,400 --> 00:40:29,800
Speaker 1: the way by uh by climbing up on the cliff

604
00:40:29,800 --> 00:40:33,400
Speaker 1: at the Madison Buffalo Jump one morning and walking back

605
00:40:33,400 --> 00:40:36,080
Speaker 1: to the spot where I had read that the herds

606
00:40:36,120 --> 00:40:38,800
Speaker 1: were often started running towards the edge of the cliff

607
00:40:39,200 --> 00:40:43,120
Speaker 1: and running it myself down to the point where the

608
00:40:43,160 --> 00:40:47,440
Speaker 1: animals were falling off the cliff into this huge bone

609
00:40:47,480 --> 00:40:50,120
Speaker 1: bed five six seven ft deep at the bottom of

610
00:40:50,120 --> 00:40:54,560
Speaker 1: the cliff, and sort of speculating with that sort of strategy,

611
00:40:54,680 --> 00:40:58,480
Speaker 1: which happened all over wherever buffalo were found, I mean

612
00:40:58,520 --> 00:41:02,240
Speaker 1: the buffalo jump. At one point down in West Texas

613
00:41:02,280 --> 00:41:05,600
Speaker 1: a place place called Bonfire Shelter. So many animals were

614
00:41:05,680 --> 00:41:07,799
Speaker 1: driven off that cliff that the reason it has that

615
00:41:07,920 --> 00:41:12,840
Speaker 1: name today is because they spontaneously combusted a huge massive

616
00:41:12,880 --> 00:41:16,640
Speaker 1: animals at the foot of the cliff spontaneously combusted and

617
00:41:16,800 --> 00:41:22,480
Speaker 1: burned this cliff for hundreds of feet up towards its rim.

618
00:41:22,640 --> 00:41:26,520
Speaker 1: How then with those kind of techniques were people able

619
00:41:26,560 --> 00:41:30,880
Speaker 1: to do this ten thousand things? I got to interrupt you.

620
00:41:31,040 --> 00:41:34,279
Speaker 1: I was my boy was mowing the lawn and I

621
00:41:34,320 --> 00:41:36,640
Speaker 1: was trying to save up leaf clippings, you know, for

622
00:41:36,680 --> 00:41:39,840
Speaker 1: the garden and stuff. And he left, so he like

623
00:41:40,000 --> 00:41:44,680
Speaker 1: parks the lawnmower over a can of gas, leaving all

624
00:41:44,719 --> 00:41:49,480
Speaker 1: the leaf clippings in the leaf bag. Oh boy, I'm

625
00:41:49,520 --> 00:41:51,799
Speaker 1: trying to explain him when he like does not believe me,

626
00:41:51,840 --> 00:41:54,600
Speaker 1: I'm like, listen, man, you can't like that stuff, you know,

627
00:41:54,719 --> 00:41:58,040
Speaker 1: can spontaneously combust. How could that be true? I'm like,

628
00:41:58,080 --> 00:42:01,000
Speaker 1: I can't explain it, dude. Look at but I'm telling you, man,

629
00:42:01,120 --> 00:42:03,480
Speaker 1: you can't leave big bags of leaf clipp It's like,

630
00:42:04,840 --> 00:42:07,879
Speaker 1: no kidding. Yeah, well he could have created his own

631
00:42:07,880 --> 00:42:13,560
Speaker 1: bonfire shelter then. Yeah. So so this, you know, is

632
00:42:13,680 --> 00:42:16,759
Speaker 1: sort of how i'd set this up to start the

633
00:42:16,880 --> 00:42:20,920
Speaker 1: chapter with with accounts like this, and so here's what

634
00:42:21,000 --> 00:42:25,200
Speaker 1: I think. Here's what the various explanations are. There is

635
00:42:25,239 --> 00:42:31,600
Speaker 1: a map in that chapter that provides readers with the

636
00:42:31,800 --> 00:42:38,040
Speaker 1: regional populations of Native people at just before the arrival

637
00:42:38,560 --> 00:42:44,360
Speaker 1: of Europeans. And that map goes from the northeast to

638
00:42:44,440 --> 00:42:48,239
Speaker 1: the southeast, to the midwest, to the southwest, to California,

639
00:42:48,320 --> 00:42:54,479
Speaker 1: the Pacific, Northwest, the Great Plains, the Arctic, and all

640
00:42:54,640 --> 00:43:00,879
Speaker 1: together north of Mexico and this includes Canada. Were convinced

641
00:43:01,000 --> 00:43:05,520
Speaker 1: that five hundred years ago, the total population of North

642
00:43:05,560 --> 00:43:09,600
Speaker 1: America north of the Rio Grand River in north of

643
00:43:09,640 --> 00:43:16,880
Speaker 1: Mexico was a little less than five million people. In

644
00:43:16,960 --> 00:43:21,160
Speaker 1: order to keep your population at that level, you have

645
00:43:21,400 --> 00:43:27,840
Speaker 1: to actively try to control population. And so one of

646
00:43:27,840 --> 00:43:32,480
Speaker 1: the arguments in this chapter is that because Native people

647
00:43:32,760 --> 00:43:37,560
Speaker 1: understood the relationship between their population size and their use

648
00:43:37,600 --> 00:43:41,600
Speaker 1: of nature and the the ability of nature as hunters

649
00:43:41,600 --> 00:43:49,040
Speaker 1: and gathers to sustain them. They deliberately kept their populations small,

650
00:43:49,480 --> 00:43:54,120
Speaker 1: small enough that they didn't stress uh, the animals that

651
00:43:54,160 --> 00:43:57,920
Speaker 1: they depended on. Now, there were some animals like buffalo.

652
00:43:59,239 --> 00:44:03,279
Speaker 1: After the play su seeing extinctions removed all the grazing competition,

653
00:44:03,840 --> 00:44:07,600
Speaker 1: buffalo become the only major grazers left on the Great Plains.

654
00:44:07,640 --> 00:44:11,080
Speaker 1: The horses are gone, the mastada are the mamis are gone,

655
00:44:11,360 --> 00:44:16,239
Speaker 1: the camels are gone. There's almost nothing left out there. Uh.

656
00:44:16,280 --> 00:44:21,239
Speaker 1: And so buffalo, like passenger pigeons, are going to multiply

657
00:44:21,360 --> 00:44:27,239
Speaker 1: to such numbers that they basically are adapted better to

658
00:44:27,320 --> 00:44:31,319
Speaker 1: the continent than humans are. Humans acting as predators on

659
00:44:31,360 --> 00:44:34,280
Speaker 1: the populations of both of those animals. Buffalo and passenger

660
00:44:34,320 --> 00:44:39,840
Speaker 1: pigeons are not sufficiently large to ever really lower their numbers.

661
00:44:39,880 --> 00:44:43,000
Speaker 1: But there are plenty of other animals like elk, for example,

662
00:44:43,400 --> 00:44:47,919
Speaker 1: that could have been hunted down to very low populations,

663
00:44:47,960 --> 00:44:51,720
Speaker 1: and in some areas there's archaeological evidence they probably were

664
00:44:52,320 --> 00:44:55,360
Speaker 1: hunted down. I mean, I try to in the following chapter,

665
00:44:55,440 --> 00:44:57,640
Speaker 1: when I get Europeans in North America, I try to

666
00:44:57,680 --> 00:45:00,839
Speaker 1: start out with us the story of a h Spaniard

667
00:45:00,920 --> 00:45:04,880
Speaker 1: has shipwrecked on the Gulf coast in the fifteen twenties.

668
00:45:05,440 --> 00:45:09,040
Speaker 1: And this is before the effect of the Great Disease

669
00:45:09,120 --> 00:45:11,840
Speaker 1: die offs for native people can have any kind of effect.

670
00:45:12,400 --> 00:45:16,400
Speaker 1: And this guy describes a North America that's not brimming

671
00:45:16,440 --> 00:45:20,279
Speaker 1: with wild animals. Uh. He describes a North America that,

672
00:45:20,920 --> 00:45:24,359
Speaker 1: uh where the animal populations are fairly low. I mean,

673
00:45:24,360 --> 00:45:27,840
Speaker 1: at one point he says it was almost an accident

674
00:45:27,880 --> 00:45:31,440
Speaker 1: if anybody had a deer skin in there, uh, in

675
00:45:31,520 --> 00:45:38,319
Speaker 1: their village. But mostly what people do over that ten

676
00:45:38,400 --> 00:45:43,200
Speaker 1: thousand year period is to keep their populations low. There's

677
00:45:43,320 --> 00:45:46,879
Speaker 1: also the effect of a delayed movement to the so

678
00:45:46,920 --> 00:45:51,200
Speaker 1: called Neolithic revolution, which is the spread of agriculture. Uh.

679
00:45:51,360 --> 00:45:54,480
Speaker 1: That had happened in Europe and Asia and even in

680
00:45:54,520 --> 00:46:00,239
Speaker 1: Africa much earlier because of population pressures on wild life,

681
00:46:00,320 --> 00:46:05,000
Speaker 1: people turned to domesticating plants and moved to domesticating animals

682
00:46:05,040 --> 00:46:08,440
Speaker 1: and agriculture. That happened about five or six thousand years

683
00:46:08,520 --> 00:46:12,160
Speaker 1: later in North America because the population pressures weren't so

684
00:46:12,160 --> 00:46:15,319
Speaker 1: severe here. So we have a much later movement to

685
00:46:15,840 --> 00:46:19,840
Speaker 1: an agricultural revolution that can produce larger populations of people.

686
00:46:20,400 --> 00:46:23,239
Speaker 1: And then the last thing I talked about in that

687
00:46:23,320 --> 00:46:28,280
Speaker 1: chapter is this ideological difference. And I tend to argue

688
00:46:28,400 --> 00:46:32,200
Speaker 1: I think that this is accurate that Native people in

689
00:46:32,239 --> 00:46:37,719
Speaker 1: America preserved a very old way of thinking about the

690
00:46:37,760 --> 00:46:42,920
Speaker 1: relationship between themselves and other animals, and that old way

691
00:46:43,640 --> 00:46:50,080
Speaker 1: was that humans are simply another part of the animal world.

692
00:46:50,600 --> 00:46:55,160
Speaker 1: That yeah, okay, we'll tell I'll tell a story of

693
00:46:55,160 --> 00:46:59,080
Speaker 1: the ticket for sure. You remember that one. Oh it

694
00:46:59,120 --> 00:47:01,640
Speaker 1: was great because I to get into what you're going

695
00:47:01,680 --> 00:47:03,799
Speaker 1: to get into it, you need to tell the chicken. Yeah, okay,

696
00:47:03,800 --> 00:47:06,440
Speaker 1: I'll tell the chicken story for sure. But let me say,

697
00:47:06,719 --> 00:47:09,720
Speaker 1: in order to set the chicken story up properly, Native

698
00:47:09,800 --> 00:47:14,279
Speaker 1: people tended to think of other species as as kin

699
00:47:14,480 --> 00:47:17,239
Speaker 1: to humans. And I mean their stories are full of

700
00:47:17,280 --> 00:47:22,759
Speaker 1: examples of people being able to pass from human societies

701
00:47:22,800 --> 00:47:28,920
Speaker 1: to animal societies, to joining buffalo herds and intermarrying with

702
00:47:29,040 --> 00:47:31,799
Speaker 1: other animals. It's an old idea, and the reason I

703
00:47:31,840 --> 00:47:35,439
Speaker 1: think it's old and it got preserved is because much

704
00:47:35,480 --> 00:47:40,360
Speaker 1: of our early um the art, for example of Chauvet

705
00:47:40,360 --> 00:47:45,479
Speaker 1: Cave in France, includes what archaeologists call therian thropes, where

706
00:47:45,520 --> 00:47:49,320
Speaker 1: you have a figure painted on the walls that's half

707
00:47:49,440 --> 00:47:54,160
Speaker 1: human and half animal, half human and half buffalo, for example.

708
00:47:54,680 --> 00:47:58,799
Speaker 1: And so this kind of lingering sense of humans as

709
00:47:58,880 --> 00:48:03,400
Speaker 1: part of the connection a kinship with other other creatures

710
00:48:03,880 --> 00:48:08,640
Speaker 1: informs the way Native people think about wild animals. I mean,

711
00:48:08,680 --> 00:48:11,040
Speaker 1: I mentioned at the bookstore last night. You know this

712
00:48:11,760 --> 00:48:15,320
Speaker 1: wonderful these wonderful accounts of the ceremonies that they created

713
00:48:15,360 --> 00:48:18,880
Speaker 1: to do whenever animals were difficult to find the purpose

714
00:48:18,920 --> 00:48:23,319
Speaker 1: of the ceremonies were was to convince the animals that no,

715
00:48:23,480 --> 00:48:26,560
Speaker 1: we're not engaging in any hubris. We don't think we're exceptional.

716
00:48:26,920 --> 00:48:29,560
Speaker 1: We think that you and we are are just the same,

717
00:48:29,640 --> 00:48:32,600
Speaker 1: and we want you to return and will engage in

718
00:48:33,000 --> 00:48:37,040
Speaker 1: in these marriages, these faux marriages. So people will dress

719
00:48:37,120 --> 00:48:39,799
Speaker 1: up in the skins of animals and they'll do these

720
00:48:39,880 --> 00:48:45,160
Speaker 1: kind of uh simulated coital uh things in the ceremony.

721
00:48:45,440 --> 00:48:48,400
Speaker 1: And one of the wonderful descriptions of this is that

722
00:48:48,480 --> 00:48:53,040
Speaker 1: when these ceremonies were successful, the animals came dancing. They

723
00:48:53,120 --> 00:48:56,200
Speaker 1: came dancing out of the buttes where they were hiding,

724
00:48:56,200 --> 00:48:58,000
Speaker 1: out of the ground where they were hiding, out of

725
00:48:58,000 --> 00:49:01,600
Speaker 1: the waterfalls, where they were hiding and turned to humanity,

726
00:49:01,880 --> 00:49:05,200
Speaker 1: this idea that when they weren't, when you weren't finding animals,

727
00:49:05,480 --> 00:49:08,880
Speaker 1: it was on people, like like the way you'd approach

728
00:49:08,920 --> 00:49:12,520
Speaker 1: a friend that you offended, You have to come and

729
00:49:12,560 --> 00:49:14,759
Speaker 1: make it right. Yes, you can make it right. What's

730
00:49:14,800 --> 00:49:18,480
Speaker 1: the problem, something got askew. We'd like to make it right.

731
00:49:19,280 --> 00:49:22,000
Speaker 1: You please come back. That's exactly it. And they would,

732
00:49:22,560 --> 00:49:25,760
Speaker 1: and the you know, I'm not prepared to say whether

733
00:49:25,800 --> 00:49:29,080
Speaker 1: the ceremonies themselves produced new herds of bison, But what

734
00:49:29,160 --> 00:49:32,799
Speaker 1: I am prepared to say about that is that the

735
00:49:33,080 --> 00:49:36,600
Speaker 1: ceremonies in cullocated a belief in the people who did

736
00:49:36,680 --> 00:49:43,279
Speaker 1: them that we've renewed our relationship, our kinship with these

737
00:49:43,280 --> 00:49:47,600
Speaker 1: other creatures. We're not separate. We humans are not exceptional.

738
00:49:47,800 --> 00:49:50,920
Speaker 1: We're the same as you are. And we have, uh,

739
00:49:51,200 --> 00:49:53,960
Speaker 1: we broke your trust, and so we're coming to you

740
00:49:54,000 --> 00:49:58,600
Speaker 1: to try to make things right. That became a very

741
00:49:58,880 --> 00:50:04,800
Speaker 1: different kind of ideology than the one that Europeans brought

742
00:50:04,800 --> 00:50:07,840
Speaker 1: Your chicken as evidenced by my chicken. And I I

743
00:50:07,960 --> 00:50:11,480
Speaker 1: tell I'm glad you like that story because this is

744
00:50:11,560 --> 00:50:16,080
Speaker 1: my my oldest memory. Um, this is from when I'm

745
00:50:16,120 --> 00:50:21,080
Speaker 1: four years old, and um, I went to dinner last night,

746
00:50:21,280 --> 00:50:26,800
Speaker 1: uh with a woman who is uh, she's a psychologist,

747
00:50:27,320 --> 00:50:32,360
Speaker 1: and she was confirming my idea that one's oldest memories

748
00:50:32,440 --> 00:50:37,040
Speaker 1: usually or from about four years and uh, and the

749
00:50:37,080 --> 00:50:40,359
Speaker 1: ones you remember those four year old memories obviously don't

750
00:50:40,360 --> 00:50:42,200
Speaker 1: remember everything that happened a four years old, but you

751
00:50:42,239 --> 00:50:45,560
Speaker 1: remember the ones that imprint as a result of an

752
00:50:45,560 --> 00:50:48,920
Speaker 1: emotional response. And this was a very emotional one. And

753
00:50:49,080 --> 00:50:55,760
Speaker 1: it's probably set me uh in motion to ultimately writing

754
00:50:55,800 --> 00:50:58,400
Speaker 1: a book like this, because I was haunted by this

755
00:50:58,560 --> 00:51:02,799
Speaker 1: my entire life and what it involved was being four

756
00:51:02,880 --> 00:51:08,239
Speaker 1: years old and uh having a pet chicken. I had

757
00:51:08,239 --> 00:51:12,040
Speaker 1: a little little yellow chicken that my parents had bought

758
00:51:12,080 --> 00:51:15,000
Speaker 1: for me, and it was only a few weeks old,

759
00:51:15,239 --> 00:51:17,799
Speaker 1: and uh it was. It lived in the house with me,

760
00:51:17,840 --> 00:51:20,000
Speaker 1: and I fed it and I gave it water, and

761
00:51:20,040 --> 00:51:22,960
Speaker 1: we also engaged in these games have chased through the house,

762
00:51:22,960 --> 00:51:27,360
Speaker 1: and so we would chase underneath through the kitchen, underneath

763
00:51:27,360 --> 00:51:32,200
Speaker 1: the furniture, around the sofa in the living room, around

764
00:51:32,520 --> 00:51:35,440
Speaker 1: my mom's sewing machine. For some reason, I still remember

765
00:51:35,680 --> 00:51:38,120
Speaker 1: the legs of the sewing machine as my chicken would

766
00:51:38,160 --> 00:51:40,000
Speaker 1: run through. It was a way the chicken get away

767
00:51:40,040 --> 00:51:43,439
Speaker 1: from me. But one day I'm chasing the chicken and

768
00:51:43,560 --> 00:51:47,200
Speaker 1: I miscalculate. I'm four years old, probably pretty clumsy, and

769
00:51:47,760 --> 00:51:51,239
Speaker 1: I stepped on my chicken and kill it. And so

770
00:51:52,920 --> 00:51:55,960
Speaker 1: my mom and I go out in the backyard and

771
00:51:56,000 --> 00:51:59,120
Speaker 1: we have a little box and we dig a hole

772
00:51:59,360 --> 00:52:06,359
Speaker 1: and we berry my chicken. And so the question that

773
00:52:06,640 --> 00:52:12,480
Speaker 1: I asked her, and more specifically her response to the question,

774
00:52:13,280 --> 00:52:16,000
Speaker 1: is the thing that haunted me my whole life and

775
00:52:16,280 --> 00:52:19,719
Speaker 1: probably led me towards ultimately writing a book like this.

776
00:52:19,920 --> 00:52:24,680
Speaker 1: I said to my mother, So Mom, I'm going to

777
00:52:24,800 --> 00:52:32,080
Speaker 1: get to have chicken again in heaven, right. And what

778
00:52:32,160 --> 00:52:39,320
Speaker 1: my mom said in response sort of encapsulated the whole

779
00:52:40,320 --> 00:52:47,080
Speaker 1: European perspective on the relationship between human beings and other animals.

780
00:52:47,640 --> 00:52:52,040
Speaker 1: I mean, she essentially went right to the heart of

781
00:52:52,480 --> 00:52:58,799
Speaker 1: what Europeans brought to North America with their religion, their

782
00:52:59,360 --> 00:53:05,719
Speaker 1: market at economy, and their ideology about how animals were

783
00:53:06,360 --> 00:53:12,240
Speaker 1: in a completely subservient position with respect to the human beings.

784
00:53:12,920 --> 00:53:18,879
Speaker 1: And at four years old, somehow that didn't seem right.

785
00:53:19,800 --> 00:53:23,319
Speaker 1: That didn't seem right to me, and through most of

786
00:53:23,360 --> 00:53:26,360
Speaker 1: my life, it hasn't seemed right, and so I go

787
00:53:26,480 --> 00:53:30,240
Speaker 1: to some links in this book to explain the origins,

788
00:53:30,800 --> 00:53:34,480
Speaker 1: particularly the religious origins, of this idea, where humans are

789
00:53:35,120 --> 00:53:38,319
Speaker 1: the only creatures made in the image of God, the

790
00:53:38,400 --> 00:53:43,319
Speaker 1: only creatures that have an immortal soul. Everything else, all

791
00:53:43,480 --> 00:53:46,560
Speaker 1: other living beings are not made in the image of

792
00:53:46,560 --> 00:53:50,520
Speaker 1: a deity. Of course, Native people would have completely insisted

793
00:53:50,560 --> 00:53:52,920
Speaker 1: that that was wrong, because they had all sorts of

794
00:53:52,960 --> 00:53:56,840
Speaker 1: animal deities. But Europeans had the idea that there was

795
00:53:56,880 --> 00:53:59,319
Speaker 1: a God in the sky, that humans were the only

796
00:53:59,360 --> 00:54:01,919
Speaker 1: ones made in that image. We were the only ones

797
00:54:02,000 --> 00:54:06,640
Speaker 1: with souls, and so everything else was completely subservient to us.

798
00:54:07,440 --> 00:54:12,560
Speaker 1: And UH was there, as the Bible says, for our

799
00:54:12,719 --> 00:54:17,480
Speaker 1: use unto your hand, I will deliver them, is the

800
00:54:17,560 --> 00:54:23,160
Speaker 1: line in Genesis, And so that sort of thinking led

801
00:54:23,280 --> 00:54:29,840
Speaker 1: to UH. What I argue in the book is four

802
00:54:29,960 --> 00:54:34,440
Speaker 1: hundred years from fifteen hundred to nineteen hundred of the

803
00:54:34,480 --> 00:54:43,600
Speaker 1: most widespread and complete destruction of UH populations of wildlife

804
00:54:44,440 --> 00:54:49,640
Speaker 1: of millions of years of evolved ecological diversity on the

805
00:54:49,680 --> 00:54:53,839
Speaker 1: continent White wiped out much of it over a mere

806
00:54:53,960 --> 00:55:00,120
Speaker 1: four hundred year period, and it's not comparable to any

807
00:55:00,120 --> 00:55:03,360
Speaker 1: thing else you can find anywhere else in modern history.

808
00:55:03,600 --> 00:55:05,880
Speaker 1: I mean, I looked around for other examples, and there

809
00:55:05,880 --> 00:55:10,760
Speaker 1: are certainly places where people will take out a particular species. Uh,

810
00:55:10,880 --> 00:55:16,480
Speaker 1: they'll they'll focus on a particular region that they want

811
00:55:16,480 --> 00:55:18,680
Speaker 1: to convert the farming and try to wipe out all

812
00:55:18,680 --> 00:55:23,080
Speaker 1: the predators or something. But nothing that looks like what

813
00:55:23,200 --> 00:55:27,000
Speaker 1: we did between fifteen hundred and nineteen hundred in North America,

814
00:55:27,440 --> 00:55:32,839
Speaker 1: where one species after another we either pushed to complete oblivion,

815
00:55:33,360 --> 00:55:36,000
Speaker 1: are reduced to the point that we have to go

816
00:55:36,080 --> 00:55:40,759
Speaker 1: to these heroic, herculean efforts to save the last few

817
00:55:40,840 --> 00:55:42,839
Speaker 1: of them so that those of us who are alive

818
00:55:42,920 --> 00:55:47,239
Speaker 1: now still have a few animals to look at. I mean,

819
00:55:47,280 --> 00:55:49,480
Speaker 1: and it's a you know, it's a kind of a

820
00:55:50,640 --> 00:55:54,520
Speaker 1: it's a bummer of a story. I try to interleave

821
00:55:54,760 --> 00:55:59,759
Speaker 1: in that story accounts of naturalists who are studying all

822
00:55:59,760 --> 00:56:02,439
Speaker 1: these animals that Europeans thought, you know, the Bible doesn't

823
00:56:02,440 --> 00:56:05,560
Speaker 1: say anything about America, so Europeans think, hell, how can

824
00:56:05,600 --> 00:56:08,880
Speaker 1: this place even exist? And how can these animals even exist?

825
00:56:09,000 --> 00:56:12,040
Speaker 1: Whoever heard of a prong horn antelope or a grizzly

826
00:56:12,080 --> 00:56:15,720
Speaker 1: bear that's not in the Great Chain of Being that uh,

827
00:56:15,719 --> 00:56:21,759
Speaker 1: that Aristotle put together. Uh, so it becomes this, uh,

828
00:56:21,920 --> 00:56:28,279
Speaker 1: the prelude to this kind of enormous destruction that in

829
00:56:28,320 --> 00:56:30,759
Speaker 1: the twentieth century we have to kind of move heaven

830
00:56:30,760 --> 00:56:33,760
Speaker 1: and Earth to recover from. But of that four hundred

831
00:56:33,840 --> 00:56:37,680
Speaker 1: year period, for three hundred years of it there was

832
00:56:37,719 --> 00:56:39,799
Speaker 1: I was surprised learners. For three hundred years of it,

833
00:56:39,840 --> 00:56:43,719
Speaker 1: there was an honest debate, a debate I don't evenally

834
00:56:43,800 --> 00:56:47,320
Speaker 1: understand it. It It was debated whether extinction could even be possible,

835
00:56:48,080 --> 00:56:54,440
Speaker 1: whether extinction was was is it theoretically possible? I was

836
00:56:54,520 --> 00:56:56,239
Speaker 1: very surprised to hear that's the thing that people used

837
00:56:56,239 --> 00:57:00,959
Speaker 1: to argue about. Yeah, they did, indeed, And the explanation

838
00:57:01,080 --> 00:57:04,799
Speaker 1: for that is part of this religious ideology. And I

839
00:57:04,920 --> 00:57:07,839
Speaker 1: mentioned something called the Great Chain of Being a few

840
00:57:07,880 --> 00:57:11,520
Speaker 1: minutes ago. It comes from Aristotle, but it was wholly

841
00:57:11,560 --> 00:57:17,800
Speaker 1: adopted by Europeans who came to the America's five hundred

842
00:57:17,880 --> 00:57:21,240
Speaker 1: years ago. And it was an idea that goes back

843
00:57:21,280 --> 00:57:28,280
Speaker 1: two thousand years in Western civilization that everything, every living

844
00:57:28,360 --> 00:57:32,680
Speaker 1: thing on earth was created at a moment of creation

845
00:57:34,040 --> 00:57:38,880
Speaker 1: by a deity, and so everything that was created was

846
00:57:39,480 --> 00:57:47,840
Speaker 1: perfect everlasting, immutable, which means that no animal ever changed.

847
00:57:48,040 --> 00:57:52,280
Speaker 1: Everything stayed exactly the same, and there was no possibility

848
00:57:52,360 --> 00:57:55,960
Speaker 1: because it was part of a divine creation. There was

849
00:57:56,040 --> 00:57:59,959
Speaker 1: no possibility for what we today call extinction, for something

850
00:58:00,160 --> 00:58:04,600
Speaker 1: to ultimately go away, because the world was perfect as

851
00:58:04,680 --> 00:58:10,280
Speaker 1: created by a divine being. And so Europeans bring that

852
00:58:11,160 --> 00:58:16,240
Speaker 1: without even questioning, this great chain of being idea to America.

853
00:58:16,440 --> 00:58:21,560
Speaker 1: And it's only in the late eighteenth century when workmen

854
00:58:21,960 --> 00:58:27,040
Speaker 1: digging for rock and gravel in Europe and then people

855
00:58:27,240 --> 00:58:35,160
Speaker 1: investigating UH these old hot spring sites and salt licks

856
00:58:35,200 --> 00:58:40,680
Speaker 1: in North America began discovering the bones of creatures that

857
00:58:41,040 --> 00:58:45,520
Speaker 1: nobody can identify as being living creatures that anyone begins

858
00:58:45,560 --> 00:58:50,720
Speaker 1: to wonder, well, so if there are these gigantic bones,

859
00:58:51,360 --> 00:58:54,400
Speaker 1: why is there not an animal out there with bones

860
00:58:54,480 --> 00:58:57,400
Speaker 1: like this? It's there. If there is a creature here

861
00:58:57,440 --> 00:59:00,880
Speaker 1: with what appears in North America to be l elephant tusks,

862
00:59:01,480 --> 00:59:04,120
Speaker 1: we don't have any elephants in North America. How could

863
00:59:04,640 --> 00:59:08,600
Speaker 1: that be a possibility. And so it's the discovery of

864
00:59:08,640 --> 00:59:13,120
Speaker 1: all these extinct animals out of the Pleistocene UH that

865
00:59:13,800 --> 00:59:17,439
Speaker 1: sets this debate in motion. And only in the very

866
00:59:17,480 --> 00:59:22,760
Speaker 1: beginning years of the eight hundreds, does Western science began

867
00:59:23,000 --> 00:59:27,640
Speaker 1: to say, well, wow, it looks like so things don't

868
00:59:27,760 --> 00:59:31,280
Speaker 1: last forever. It looks like there have been animals that

869
00:59:31,360 --> 00:59:35,040
Speaker 1: were once on the earth and are now gone. And

870
00:59:35,080 --> 00:59:37,680
Speaker 1: of course that ultimately begins to raise the question of

871
00:59:38,240 --> 00:59:42,840
Speaker 1: so why are they gone? And the next thought that

872
00:59:42,920 --> 00:59:45,600
Speaker 1: occurs to you, in a logical chain from that one,

873
00:59:45,760 --> 00:59:52,200
Speaker 1: is what would cause an animal to go extinct? What

874
00:59:52,320 --> 00:59:57,160
Speaker 1: factors out there in the world would produce something like

875
00:59:57,320 --> 01:00:00,880
Speaker 1: the complete loss of an animal. This is a whole

876
01:00:01,000 --> 01:00:04,560
Speaker 1: new area, as as I think you gathered when you

877
01:00:04,880 --> 01:00:09,320
Speaker 1: read this, of thinking about how the world works. And

878
01:00:09,560 --> 01:00:14,400
Speaker 1: it's what finally began by about the eighteen twenties and

879
01:00:14,440 --> 01:00:18,720
Speaker 1: eighteen thirties to have people wondering what in the world

880
01:00:19,800 --> 01:00:23,800
Speaker 1: cause the extinction of mammoths and mastodons and a whole

881
01:00:23,800 --> 01:00:29,600
Speaker 1: host of other creatures, and can we somehow, can something,

882
01:00:29,720 --> 01:00:33,240
Speaker 1: somehow do this to existing animals? And meanwhile they were

883
01:00:33,240 --> 01:00:36,600
Speaker 1: busily doing it, being they were busily doing it, and

884
01:00:37,000 --> 01:00:39,520
Speaker 1: they didn't have to wait very long to find out

885
01:00:39,560 --> 01:00:43,800
Speaker 1: whether it was possible, because by the eighteen forties, this

886
01:00:44,000 --> 01:00:49,200
Speaker 1: northern hemisphere penguin. These giant, heavy beaked birds called great

887
01:00:49,240 --> 01:00:54,200
Speaker 1: auks which nested. Uh, they nested all over the North Atlantic,

888
01:00:54,320 --> 01:00:57,520
Speaker 1: but from Newfoundland all the way down to Florida, all

889
01:00:57,600 --> 01:01:02,640
Speaker 1: along the the Atlantic. These great hawks were a feature

890
01:01:02,680 --> 01:01:06,240
Speaker 1: of coastal life. Had a penguin. We had a penguin

891
01:01:06,240 --> 01:01:10,240
Speaker 1: in the northern hemisphere, and we completely wiped it out

892
01:01:10,320 --> 01:01:14,959
Speaker 1: by the eighteen forties. I was surprised. Uh, egg picking, Yeah,

893
01:01:15,080 --> 01:01:20,160
Speaker 1: egg picking people, they're cooking for breakfast. They went after eggs, yeah,

894
01:01:20,400 --> 01:01:22,600
Speaker 1: And and it was kind of a tragic thing because

895
01:01:22,640 --> 01:01:25,720
Speaker 1: these were birds that only laid one egg. I mean

896
01:01:25,720 --> 01:01:29,200
Speaker 1: they had a nest with one egg in it and year,

897
01:01:29,360 --> 01:01:32,520
Speaker 1: one egg a year, and so you you take away

898
01:01:32,560 --> 01:01:34,960
Speaker 1: their eggs. I mean this happened to you know, we

899
01:01:35,040 --> 01:01:38,320
Speaker 1: think that things like this happened to animals like masks

900
01:01:38,400 --> 01:01:44,000
Speaker 1: or mammoths, because mammoths don't These giant elephants, they didn't.

901
01:01:44,880 --> 01:01:47,520
Speaker 1: They weren't able to give birth until the cows were

902
01:01:48,000 --> 01:01:52,000
Speaker 1: ten years old or so, and they would only give birth.

903
01:01:52,040 --> 01:01:55,080
Speaker 1: They had a really long gestation period, so you only

904
01:01:55,120 --> 01:01:57,960
Speaker 1: give birth every two or three years. And with a

905
01:01:58,080 --> 01:02:01,520
Speaker 1: low population turnover, like just like the auk with its

906
01:02:01,560 --> 01:02:06,160
Speaker 1: one egg. I mean that makes certain creatures more susceptible

907
01:02:06,240 --> 01:02:11,000
Speaker 1: to extinction than those like passenger pigeons, for example, are

908
01:02:11,080 --> 01:02:16,040
Speaker 1: like bison, which are exists in the millions, or creatures

909
01:02:16,480 --> 01:02:18,000
Speaker 1: are rats are? I mean, you know, there are a

910
01:02:18,000 --> 01:02:22,400
Speaker 1: whole host of other animals that uh certainly multiply into

911
01:02:22,520 --> 01:02:27,080
Speaker 1: large numbers. But yeah, these animals that humans were focused on,

912
01:02:27,160 --> 01:02:31,440
Speaker 1: not that they weren't focused on on rats, because they

913
01:02:31,440 --> 01:02:34,480
Speaker 1: were bringing Norway rats into America, and obviously we had

914
01:02:34,480 --> 01:02:38,040
Speaker 1: pack rats here already, but the animals that we were

915
01:02:38,040 --> 01:02:41,160
Speaker 1: focused on as part of our market economy. And I

916
01:02:41,200 --> 01:02:44,520
Speaker 1: want to make sure that I make this clear. It

917
01:02:44,680 --> 01:02:54,280
Speaker 1: was the idea of wild animals essentially functioning like trees

918
01:02:54,400 --> 01:02:57,720
Speaker 1: you could log, like coal, you could dig up out

919
01:02:57,760 --> 01:03:02,120
Speaker 1: of the ground as natural resourced commodities in a market

920
01:03:02,160 --> 01:03:07,720
Speaker 1: economy that produced this wholesale slaughter of so many creatures.

921
01:03:07,760 --> 01:03:14,000
Speaker 1: That's why the ox disappeared, is the birds became fair

922
01:03:14,080 --> 01:03:17,840
Speaker 1: for sailors in the Atlantic who found that you could

923
01:03:17,880 --> 01:03:20,600
Speaker 1: I mean, and this was true of so many species

924
01:03:20,600 --> 01:03:25,600
Speaker 1: in North America. They were naive of humans as predators,

925
01:03:26,560 --> 01:03:29,080
Speaker 1: and so they would let humans just walk up I

926
01:03:29,160 --> 01:03:32,680
Speaker 1: mean there's a horrible account of people hunting great ox

927
01:03:32,760 --> 01:03:34,320
Speaker 1: where they would say, we would just go up to

928
01:03:34,360 --> 01:03:37,640
Speaker 1: an island where where great ox were nesting, gather up

929
01:03:37,640 --> 01:03:40,360
Speaker 1: their eggs, and then we would set up a board

930
01:03:40,520 --> 01:03:44,480
Speaker 1: plank between the island and our boats and have a

931
01:03:44,520 --> 01:03:47,160
Speaker 1: couple of guys get off and just heard the ox

932
01:03:47,520 --> 01:03:50,560
Speaker 1: over the plank into the boats, where we killed them

933
01:03:50,560 --> 01:03:53,960
Speaker 1: as soon as they arrived. And the account goes on

934
01:03:54,080 --> 01:03:57,360
Speaker 1: to say, you know, thanks to the deity for creating

935
01:03:57,640 --> 01:04:01,720
Speaker 1: a creature so innocent that it comes sustenance for hungry

936
01:04:01,720 --> 01:04:06,920
Speaker 1: sailors on the seas. I mean that happened over and

937
01:04:07,040 --> 01:04:13,560
Speaker 1: over again with creatures that were innocent of human predation

938
01:04:14,200 --> 01:04:20,040
Speaker 1: and essentially sort of allowed themselves to be wiped out

939
01:04:20,080 --> 01:04:24,880
Speaker 1: by an economy that was based around turning animals into resources.

940
01:04:34,600 --> 01:04:41,520
Speaker 1: You covered so many um extinctions, new or extinctions, and

941
01:04:41,640 --> 01:04:46,560
Speaker 1: in some cases you can in some cases you can

942
01:04:46,600 --> 01:04:49,960
Speaker 1: imagine that that a lot of the players involved perhaps

943
01:04:50,040 --> 01:04:54,040
Speaker 1: weren't entirely clear on what they were doing. The human

944
01:04:54,080 --> 01:05:00,880
Speaker 1: players involved perhaps couldn't picture the old outcome of what

945
01:05:00,920 --> 01:05:04,680
Speaker 1: they were up to. But there are cases where people

946
01:05:04,880 --> 01:05:10,440
Speaker 1: damn sure knew you talk about that with the sea Otters.

947
01:05:11,040 --> 01:05:15,960
Speaker 1: I mean they knew in fur seals, they knew we

948
01:05:16,080 --> 01:05:20,080
Speaker 1: got them all. We heard there was another spot. Let's go,

949
01:05:20,240 --> 01:05:23,040
Speaker 1: let's go look and say and when they leave, they're gone.

950
01:05:23,120 --> 01:05:27,640
Speaker 1: And they were aware that they were They were the

951
01:05:27,680 --> 01:05:30,440
Speaker 1: masterminds behind it. The people really making the money behind it,

952
01:05:31,520 --> 01:05:35,800
Speaker 1: had all awareness that it was a race for a

953
01:05:35,880 --> 01:05:41,880
Speaker 1: vanishing resource. And there was no impetus to call it quits. No,

954
01:05:42,080 --> 01:05:45,800
Speaker 1: and you're you're competing against uh, you know, people from

955
01:05:45,880 --> 01:05:48,280
Speaker 1: other nations. I mean with the sea Otters and the

956
01:05:48,360 --> 01:05:51,400
Speaker 1: first Sales. I mean it's you know, the the Americans,

957
01:05:51,480 --> 01:05:55,720
Speaker 1: the Russians, the Spaniards, the I mean, the whole host

958
01:05:55,800 --> 01:06:00,440
Speaker 1: of of nationals are out killing these animals. And I

959
01:06:00,440 --> 01:06:03,480
Speaker 1: mean it actually reached the point between the Americans and

960
01:06:03,480 --> 01:06:06,440
Speaker 1: the Russians where there were so few of these animals

961
01:06:06,560 --> 01:06:10,280
Speaker 1: left that they began cooperating with one another to locate

962
01:06:10,680 --> 01:06:14,920
Speaker 1: and exploit the last last groups. And yeah, that that

963
01:06:14,960 --> 01:06:19,360
Speaker 1: Pacific Coast hunt for for for for fur seals, uh

964
01:06:19,400 --> 01:06:24,120
Speaker 1: and and sea otters. Man, that's an abysmal story. You know,

965
01:06:24,240 --> 01:06:27,120
Speaker 1: it's a particularly since I mean in the case of

966
01:06:27,160 --> 01:06:30,120
Speaker 1: sea Otters, I mean, these these animals are critical to

967
01:06:30,320 --> 01:06:35,320
Speaker 1: the ecologies of the Pacific coast because they keep the

968
01:06:35,400 --> 01:06:40,560
Speaker 1: kelp beds in check. And UH, once they're gone, I mean,

969
01:06:40,600 --> 01:06:46,840
Speaker 1: the whole Pacific Coast just becomes drowned in kelp uh

970
01:06:46,880 --> 01:06:49,160
Speaker 1: I mean, and it's just it's it's a story that

971
01:06:49,240 --> 01:06:54,600
Speaker 1: you can I mean. It even features the deliberate conscription

972
01:06:54,920 --> 01:06:59,919
Speaker 1: of native hunters, kidnapping them to make them go out

973
01:07:00,040 --> 01:07:03,840
Speaker 1: and and hunt these animals for these European fur companies

974
01:07:04,440 --> 01:07:07,920
Speaker 1: UH and American fur companies UH, down to the last

975
01:07:08,160 --> 01:07:11,480
Speaker 1: few colonies of them. And the only reason they're not gone,

976
01:07:12,000 --> 01:07:14,600
Speaker 1: particularly in the case of sea otters, which were regarded

977
01:07:14,640 --> 01:07:17,200
Speaker 1: as you know, I mean, I think I said last

978
01:07:17,280 --> 01:07:20,200
Speaker 1: night at the bookstore, there's an account of one of

979
01:07:20,240 --> 01:07:25,360
Speaker 1: these uh sea otter hunters where he says, why do

980
01:07:25,480 --> 01:07:29,560
Speaker 1: we go after these animals? You don't understand except for

981
01:07:30,160 --> 01:07:35,440
Speaker 1: a gorgeous woman and a newborn infant. The pelt of

982
01:07:35,480 --> 01:07:38,520
Speaker 1: the sea otter is the most beautiful object in the

983
01:07:38,720 --> 01:07:43,720
Speaker 1: entire world. And UH, you could get big money for

984
01:07:43,880 --> 01:07:47,240
Speaker 1: sea otter pelts in China, and so that's where most

985
01:07:47,320 --> 01:07:50,680
Speaker 1: of them went. Uh. They were harvested off the Pacific

986
01:07:50,760 --> 01:07:54,880
Speaker 1: coast of North America and then hauled by ship over

987
01:07:54,920 --> 01:07:57,320
Speaker 1: to China where you could sometimes. I mean there was

988
01:07:57,360 --> 01:07:59,880
Speaker 1: an account that really set the sea otter hunt in

989
01:08:00,080 --> 01:08:03,200
Speaker 1: motion where uh, and China people were willing to pay

990
01:08:03,240 --> 01:08:06,919
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty dollars per pelt. Most pelts didn't

991
01:08:06,960 --> 01:08:09,920
Speaker 1: bring that. Eventually they brought twenty or twenty five dollars though,

992
01:08:09,920 --> 01:08:13,320
Speaker 1: and that was a lot of money back in those days.

993
01:08:13,360 --> 01:08:15,080
Speaker 1: So yeah, they knew what they were doing. They knew

994
01:08:15,080 --> 01:08:17,280
Speaker 1: what they were doing with passenger pigeons too. I mean

995
01:08:17,360 --> 01:08:19,960
Speaker 1: that's one of the you know, bizarre ones in fact,

996
01:08:20,040 --> 01:08:23,880
Speaker 1: in fact, because the passenger pigeons story only happens like

997
01:08:23,920 --> 01:08:27,840
Speaker 1: about a hundred and thirty thirty five years ago. Uh,

998
01:08:27,840 --> 01:08:31,400
Speaker 1: my grandparents were still alive when they were passenger pigeons

999
01:08:31,439 --> 01:08:35,799
Speaker 1: flying in the skies in Louisiana. I mean I actually

1000
01:08:35,960 --> 01:08:39,280
Speaker 1: chart in the book how many years it was that

1001
01:08:39,360 --> 01:08:43,160
Speaker 1: I missed passenger pigeons in my home state of Louisiana,

1002
01:08:43,200 --> 01:08:48,200
Speaker 1: and it was about forty five years. Uh. Yeah, it's incredible,

1003
01:08:48,280 --> 01:08:51,679
Speaker 1: and there were, of course billions of them. I mean,

1004
01:08:51,720 --> 01:08:55,080
Speaker 1: in the last ones were the reason I know that

1005
01:08:55,120 --> 01:08:58,000
Speaker 1: people understood what the hell they were doing is that

1006
01:08:58,040 --> 01:09:02,559
Speaker 1: they were slaughtering them on the nests, not giving them

1007
01:09:02,600 --> 01:09:07,400
Speaker 1: an opportunity to raise the next generation of birds. You

1008
01:09:07,600 --> 01:09:09,919
Speaker 1: just went in and found out where they were nesting,

1009
01:09:10,200 --> 01:09:14,120
Speaker 1: and you killed them on the nests. So they understood

1010
01:09:14,400 --> 01:09:16,559
Speaker 1: that this was going to be the end of the

1011
01:09:16,600 --> 01:09:20,280
Speaker 1: most numerous bird uh in the world, the most numerous

1012
01:09:20,280 --> 01:09:24,920
Speaker 1: bird species in North America UH, and yet went ahead

1013
01:09:24,920 --> 01:09:28,439
Speaker 1: and pushed it, and nobody seemed to be worried when

1014
01:09:28,439 --> 01:09:32,680
Speaker 1: that last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in hardly any newspapers

1015
01:09:32,760 --> 01:09:35,840
Speaker 1: ran an obituary about her death, and one of the

1016
01:09:35,880 --> 01:09:39,639
Speaker 1: newspapers I found that did this is what it said, Well,

1017
01:09:39,680 --> 01:09:42,759
Speaker 1: you know, it's too bad about Martha, but we all

1018
01:09:42,760 --> 01:09:46,080
Speaker 1: ought to be happy that the passenger pigeon decided not

1019
01:09:46,160 --> 01:09:50,559
Speaker 1: to stick around with us the way grasshoppers have, I mean,

1020
01:09:50,640 --> 01:09:54,519
Speaker 1: so there was no remorse about it. There was a

1021
01:09:54,640 --> 01:09:59,480
Speaker 1: sense that animals like passenger pigeons, like bison, like wolves,

1022
01:10:00,040 --> 01:10:04,400
Speaker 1: ag wars, grizzly bears, these were just too wild to

1023
01:10:04,520 --> 01:10:08,280
Speaker 1: stay in a country that was modeling itself on Europe.

1024
01:10:09,400 --> 01:10:13,040
Speaker 1: England didn't have brizzly bears, England didn't have jaguars, England

1025
01:10:13,120 --> 01:10:16,799
Speaker 1: hadn't had wolves since the four Hell, we're just gonna

1026
01:10:17,160 --> 01:10:20,920
Speaker 1: We're gonna emulate England and wipe out all those things

1027
01:10:20,960 --> 01:10:25,080
Speaker 1: in North America. They're just too wild for civilization. Talk

1028
01:10:25,160 --> 01:10:31,599
Speaker 1: about when when the British used extra patient or try

1029
01:10:31,680 --> 01:10:36,120
Speaker 1: to use regional extinction as a weapon against America. Yeah,

1030
01:10:36,160 --> 01:10:40,120
Speaker 1: that's a fascinating story and it's it's uh. The shorthand

1031
01:10:40,240 --> 01:10:43,559
Speaker 1: version of it is the creation of the fur Desert

1032
01:10:44,200 --> 01:10:49,840
Speaker 1: in the American West, and it happened in the eighteen twenties,

1033
01:10:50,320 --> 01:10:53,519
Speaker 1: primarily over a period of about eight or nine years,

1034
01:10:53,800 --> 01:10:57,880
Speaker 1: when the Hudson's Bay Company, when England and the United

1035
01:10:57,880 --> 01:11:01,439
Speaker 1: States were still debating on who own the country west

1036
01:11:01,520 --> 01:11:05,280
Speaker 1: of the Continental Divide. You know, Thomas Jefferson had claimed

1037
01:11:05,280 --> 01:11:08,080
Speaker 1: and had sent Lewis and Clark to affirm America's claim

1038
01:11:08,160 --> 01:11:10,640
Speaker 1: to the country west of the divide all the way

1039
01:11:10,680 --> 01:11:15,280
Speaker 1: to the coast. But the Hudson's Bay Company and Great

1040
01:11:15,320 --> 01:11:18,799
Speaker 1: Britain we're still claiming that they owned much of that country.

1041
01:11:18,880 --> 01:11:23,600
Speaker 1: And we don't resolve that debate um actually until the

1042
01:11:23,720 --> 01:11:27,360
Speaker 1: eighteen forties when we finally draw the line between the

1043
01:11:27,439 --> 01:11:31,879
Speaker 1: United States and Canada. So the country in the Rockies,

1044
01:11:32,000 --> 01:11:36,040
Speaker 1: west of the divide was a disputed territory, but the

1045
01:11:36,080 --> 01:11:41,160
Speaker 1: British traders realized that in the Husson's Bay authority realizes

1046
01:11:41,240 --> 01:11:45,600
Speaker 1: that we can't keep these damned Americans out. They're crossing

1047
01:11:45,640 --> 01:11:48,719
Speaker 1: the divide no matter who claims it, and they're trapping

1048
01:11:48,760 --> 01:11:51,360
Speaker 1: beavers and all kinds of animals on the west side

1049
01:11:51,360 --> 01:11:53,840
Speaker 1: of divide. So here's the way to keep them out.

1050
01:11:54,640 --> 01:11:58,080
Speaker 1: Will just as they the term they used was, will

1051
01:11:58,200 --> 01:12:04,880
Speaker 1: ruin the country, will kill everything that's over there. I mean,

1052
01:12:04,920 --> 01:12:08,560
Speaker 1: this is when bison disappear from west to the divide too.

1053
01:12:08,840 --> 01:12:11,439
Speaker 1: But what they particularly focus on because it was the

1054
01:12:11,479 --> 01:12:15,519
Speaker 1: target of the American trappers, were beavers. And they worked

1055
01:12:15,520 --> 01:12:19,559
Speaker 1: out a strategy with these Hudson's Bay brigades, but led

1056
01:12:19,560 --> 01:12:23,120
Speaker 1: by people like Peter Skeen Ogden, for whom Ogden utah

1057
01:12:23,200 --> 01:12:28,400
Speaker 1: his name, that you send out these parties of trappers

1058
01:12:28,479 --> 01:12:31,640
Speaker 1: with their wives and girlfriends to sort of keep everything

1059
01:12:32,000 --> 01:12:37,639
Speaker 1: camp life going along well. And you go from stream

1060
01:12:37,760 --> 01:12:41,120
Speaker 1: to stream to stream. You do a bunch of trap

1061
01:12:41,200 --> 01:12:46,360
Speaker 1: sets uh one afternoon, you do another round of trap

1062
01:12:46,439 --> 01:12:50,200
Speaker 1: sets the next morning, and that's usually good enough to

1063
01:12:50,320 --> 01:12:53,560
Speaker 1: wipe out all the beavers on a particular stream in

1064
01:12:53,600 --> 01:12:56,479
Speaker 1: a place like the bitter Root Mountains. So over about

1065
01:12:56,520 --> 01:13:00,800
Speaker 1: eight years, these guys trapped west to the divide and

1066
01:13:00,840 --> 01:13:05,040
Speaker 1: what is mostly now Montana and Idaho and Utah. They

1067
01:13:05,120 --> 01:13:11,439
Speaker 1: trapped thirty five thousand beavers, and they liberate our ruin

1068
01:13:12,360 --> 01:13:17,200
Speaker 1: six thousand beaver ponds which had stored water, of course,

1069
01:13:17,280 --> 01:13:21,920
Speaker 1: all over that country, that water, providing camp sites for

1070
01:13:22,040 --> 01:13:26,160
Speaker 1: native people, water for wildlife. All those beaver dams now

1071
01:13:26,240 --> 01:13:30,479
Speaker 1: fall into disrepair and drain, and the streams began running

1072
01:13:30,479 --> 01:13:33,080
Speaker 1: through them and tear the dams up, so that they've

1073
01:13:33,120 --> 01:13:37,599
Speaker 1: affected a kind of an ecological transformation of the entire

1074
01:13:37,680 --> 01:13:41,800
Speaker 1: country by removing the beaver and it's dams both. So

1075
01:13:42,840 --> 01:13:45,719
Speaker 1: it's the story is and I write about a couple

1076
01:13:45,720 --> 01:13:47,960
Speaker 1: of other instances where this is the case too. I

1077
01:13:48,000 --> 01:13:50,679
Speaker 1: even argue that the American Revolution and part was set

1078
01:13:50,720 --> 01:13:54,479
Speaker 1: in motion by the anger that American colonists had for

1079
01:13:54,600 --> 01:13:57,760
Speaker 1: the British government trying to stop them from hunting white

1080
01:13:57,760 --> 01:14:00,840
Speaker 1: tailed deer, which they were wiping out and almost all

1081
01:14:00,840 --> 01:14:05,640
Speaker 1: the colonies, and also trying to prevent them from crossing

1082
01:14:05,680 --> 01:14:10,439
Speaker 1: the Appalachian Alleghany Divide to hunt the animals in the

1083
01:14:10,479 --> 01:14:14,040
Speaker 1: Mississippi Valley drainage. The British government had actually passed a law,

1084
01:14:14,120 --> 01:14:17,559
Speaker 1: the Proclamation of seventeen sixty three, to stop that movement

1085
01:14:17,840 --> 01:14:23,040
Speaker 1: to preserve the wildlife of that region. So the idea

1086
01:14:23,120 --> 01:14:26,280
Speaker 1: of killing animals actually becomes a kind of a geo

1087
01:14:26,439 --> 01:14:33,000
Speaker 1: political idea, as a contest among people's colonies and competing

1088
01:14:33,120 --> 01:14:39,640
Speaker 1: nations for territory. You uh try your best in the

1089
01:14:39,680 --> 01:14:46,240
Speaker 1: book to put to rest the idea that killing off

1090
01:14:46,320 --> 01:14:54,519
Speaker 1: the buffalo was actually a deliberate, articulated government play to

1091
01:14:54,640 --> 01:15:02,360
Speaker 1: subjugate the Native Americans. Yeah, I do, uh, it keeps

1092
01:15:02,479 --> 01:15:07,040
Speaker 1: explain that a little bit. Well, I think our Uh

1093
01:15:07,439 --> 01:15:10,640
Speaker 1: what I can say to sort of initiate that is

1094
01:15:10,680 --> 01:15:15,040
Speaker 1: that one of the most common explanations for what happened

1095
01:15:15,040 --> 01:15:19,120
Speaker 1: to the buffalo is what you just described is that

1096
01:15:19,800 --> 01:15:25,800
Speaker 1: the buffalo were wiped out by a conscious government policy,

1097
01:15:26,760 --> 01:15:33,080
Speaker 1: a conspiracy actually between particular players in government in the

1098
01:15:33,120 --> 01:15:37,360
Speaker 1: federal government and the American military and the post Civil

1099
01:15:37,360 --> 01:15:42,280
Speaker 1: war riors to wipe out buffalo in order to force

1100
01:15:42,439 --> 01:15:46,840
Speaker 1: Native people onto reservations in the Indian Wars and initiate

1101
01:15:46,960 --> 01:15:52,240
Speaker 1: the process of a culturation and assimilation for Native people.

1102
01:15:52,680 --> 01:15:55,719
Speaker 1: I mean, and that's a that's probably the most common

1103
01:15:55,760 --> 01:15:59,920
Speaker 1: explanation that people trot out. What I trying to do

1104
01:16:00,760 --> 01:16:03,320
Speaker 1: with this story was to figure out how did a

1105
01:16:03,360 --> 01:16:08,920
Speaker 1: story like that begin? And what I came to was

1106
01:16:08,960 --> 01:16:15,320
Speaker 1: a very interesting story. I didn't find really any references

1107
01:16:15,360 --> 01:16:20,600
Speaker 1: an occasional one to something like this being the explanation

1108
01:16:20,680 --> 01:16:23,439
Speaker 1: for the demise of buffalo. It's certainly not, for example,

1109
01:16:23,479 --> 01:16:28,280
Speaker 1: in William Hornaday's great book The Extermination of the American Bison,

1110
01:16:28,360 --> 01:16:34,840
Speaker 1: which is published in does anything like that. But by

1111
01:16:35,120 --> 01:16:40,040
Speaker 1: the early decades of the twentieth century, people were starting

1112
01:16:40,080 --> 01:16:43,320
Speaker 1: to talk about this as an explanation. And I tracked

1113
01:16:43,360 --> 01:16:47,320
Speaker 1: it back to the publication by a former buffalo hunter

1114
01:16:47,760 --> 01:16:53,240
Speaker 1: of a memoir called On the Border and the Buffalo,

1115
01:16:54,240 --> 01:16:57,679
Speaker 1: and it was published in nineteen o six, and this

1116
01:16:57,760 --> 01:17:11,719
Speaker 1: particular author essentially describes his comrades and himself as agents,

1117
01:17:11,720 --> 01:17:18,720
Speaker 1: sort of secret agents of this conspiratorial government program to

1118
01:17:18,960 --> 01:17:23,760
Speaker 1: wipe out the buffalo in order to force Indians to

1119
01:17:23,960 --> 01:17:28,040
Speaker 1: yield in the Indian Wars. And what he says is,

1120
01:17:29,240 --> 01:17:31,839
Speaker 1: we should be given and there are people in government

1121
01:17:31,880 --> 01:17:36,080
Speaker 1: who know this, we should be given medals of distinction

1122
01:17:36,560 --> 01:17:39,439
Speaker 1: for what we did for North America. And then the

1123
01:17:39,520 --> 01:17:42,400
Speaker 1: thing that really set me in motion looking at this

1124
01:17:42,840 --> 01:17:45,080
Speaker 1: because there was an easy way to check whether or

1125
01:17:45,120 --> 01:17:49,560
Speaker 1: not it was true, he says. And I even understand

1126
01:17:50,280 --> 01:17:56,200
Speaker 1: that when the State of Texas was considering a law

1127
01:17:56,960 --> 01:18:01,879
Speaker 1: to stop the hunting of buffalo in s Texas, General

1128
01:18:01,960 --> 01:18:06,759
Speaker 1: Philip Sheridan journey to Austin and made an impassioned plea

1129
01:18:07,240 --> 01:18:10,840
Speaker 1: to the Texas legislature not to do this. And the

1130
01:18:10,880 --> 01:18:17,639
Speaker 1: guy even goes on to recreate a speech that Sheridan

1131
01:18:18,240 --> 01:18:21,600
Speaker 1: was supposed to have said. Now, you know, as a historian,

1132
01:18:21,800 --> 01:18:25,559
Speaker 1: is fairly easy to go. Okay, let's look back at

1133
01:18:25,600 --> 01:18:29,439
Speaker 1: the records of the Texas Legislature at a bill that

1134
01:18:29,640 --> 01:18:32,280
Speaker 1: was designed to do this. Because what sort of caught

1135
01:18:32,320 --> 01:18:36,360
Speaker 1: my my attention was I had studied the attempts in

1136
01:18:36,439 --> 01:18:38,960
Speaker 1: the Federal Congress in the eighteen seventies to pass a

1137
01:18:38,960 --> 01:18:42,559
Speaker 1: couple of bills to protect Western animals, and the Texas

1138
01:18:42,600 --> 01:18:46,920
Speaker 1: Delegation had always been resolutely opposed to those bills. The

1139
01:18:46,960 --> 01:18:51,000
Speaker 1: Texas Delegation always referred to those bills as they would

1140
01:18:51,040 --> 01:18:53,760
Speaker 1: say to other members of Comngress, you're just being sentimental,

1141
01:18:54,840 --> 01:18:58,480
Speaker 1: and of course in the eighteen seventies calling another guy

1142
01:18:58,800 --> 01:19:03,800
Speaker 1: sentimental that was that was casting aspersions on your manhood

1143
01:19:04,280 --> 01:19:07,519
Speaker 1: because only women were supposed to be to have sentiment.

1144
01:19:08,120 --> 01:19:11,240
Speaker 1: And so that this whole story made me kind of

1145
01:19:11,680 --> 01:19:16,920
Speaker 1: really wonder And so I I had a graduate student

1146
01:19:16,960 --> 01:19:21,040
Speaker 1: who I sent to Austin who was he was very

1147
01:19:21,160 --> 01:19:27,080
Speaker 1: into the whole Buffalo story, and he spent his spring

1148
01:19:27,200 --> 01:19:31,920
Speaker 1: break there combing through the records of the Texas legislature

1149
01:19:32,560 --> 01:19:34,960
Speaker 1: and came back and I said, because he had gone

1150
01:19:34,960 --> 01:19:36,599
Speaker 1: down with the idea, I'm going to write the full

1151
01:19:36,640 --> 01:19:39,280
Speaker 1: story of this, all the texts of the bill they

1152
01:19:39,280 --> 01:19:43,479
Speaker 1: were proposing, exactly what else Sheardon might have said. He

1153
01:19:43,560 --> 01:19:47,679
Speaker 1: came back and said, Man, I gotta tell you, Texas

1154
01:19:47,760 --> 01:19:52,439
Speaker 1: never proposed a bill two do what this story says.

1155
01:19:52,680 --> 01:19:56,959
Speaker 1: And not only that, I can't find any record anywhere

1156
01:19:57,000 --> 01:20:01,400
Speaker 1: that Philip Sheridan ever addressed the Texas legislature about any topic,

1157
01:20:01,680 --> 01:20:04,479
Speaker 1: and certainly not about a Buffalo topic. And so I

1158
01:20:04,520 --> 01:20:08,120
Speaker 1: looked back at this story and realized the entry to

1159
01:20:08,320 --> 01:20:12,400
Speaker 1: it was it is said, so this guy in his

1160
01:20:12,479 --> 01:20:16,800
Speaker 1: book was basically just providing a hearsay account anyway that

1161
01:20:16,920 --> 01:20:20,679
Speaker 1: strategy is still us today. A lot of people are

1162
01:20:20,760 --> 01:20:25,840
Speaker 1: saying yeah. A lot of people people say yeah, yeah,

1163
01:20:25,920 --> 01:20:28,840
Speaker 1: it's that great passive voice thing. You know. I can't

1164
01:20:28,880 --> 01:20:31,559
Speaker 1: say exactly who it was, but a lot of people

1165
01:20:31,560 --> 01:20:36,200
Speaker 1: are saying, yeah, he's corrupt. Yeah. Yeah. So that's how

1166
01:20:36,240 --> 01:20:39,400
Speaker 1: the story started. And when I began looking at the

1167
01:20:39,479 --> 01:20:42,200
Speaker 1: actual evidence for all of this, I couldn't find any

1168
01:20:42,240 --> 01:20:45,080
Speaker 1: other evidence that there was ever. I mean, Philip Sheridan,

1169
01:20:45,520 --> 01:20:47,559
Speaker 1: you know, who has been the villain in this story

1170
01:20:47,640 --> 01:20:50,720
Speaker 1: for a century. I mean that guy was actually a

1171
01:20:50,800 --> 01:20:53,560
Speaker 1: kind of a nationalist who spent his last year's protecting

1172
01:20:53,840 --> 01:20:59,320
Speaker 1: at wildlife in Yellowstone National Park. And uh So, anyway,

1173
01:20:59,520 --> 01:21:02,360
Speaker 1: what is fairly clear is that this is a story

1174
01:21:02,479 --> 01:21:05,240
Speaker 1: sort of like the story we were telling ourselves in

1175
01:21:05,240 --> 01:21:08,240
Speaker 1: the early twentieth century about the Civil War, that the

1176
01:21:08,320 --> 01:21:11,400
Speaker 1: Civil War wasn't really about slavery. It didn't have any

1177
01:21:11,479 --> 01:21:14,280
Speaker 1: the South wasn't trying to defend slavery. Civil War was

1178
01:21:14,320 --> 01:21:17,839
Speaker 1: actually about states rights. Well that makes you know, everybody

1179
01:21:17,880 --> 01:21:20,879
Speaker 1: feel a little bit better about things. Okay, so Southerners

1180
01:21:21,000 --> 01:21:24,280
Speaker 1: weren't actually fighting to defend slavery. Uh they were fighting

1181
01:21:24,320 --> 01:21:27,000
Speaker 1: just to defend states rights. And and that's all there

1182
01:21:27,120 --> 01:21:29,679
Speaker 1: was to it. A Southern way of life. This wasn't

1183
01:21:29,720 --> 01:21:34,080
Speaker 1: about slavery at all. This story about Buffalo is one

1184
01:21:34,080 --> 01:21:36,759
Speaker 1: of those stories that kind of makes everybody feel better. Okay,

1185
01:21:36,800 --> 01:21:39,800
Speaker 1: it was the government that did it. It wasn't the

1186
01:21:39,840 --> 01:21:43,720
Speaker 1: fault of anybody else. The government, you know, the dastardly

1187
01:21:43,840 --> 01:21:48,920
Speaker 1: federal government once again had this plan to to wipe

1188
01:21:48,920 --> 01:21:52,000
Speaker 1: out one of our great iconic animals. The truth is,

1189
01:21:52,040 --> 01:21:56,360
Speaker 1: the federal government had never entered into the whole wildlife

1190
01:21:56,400 --> 01:21:59,240
Speaker 1: story at all, and wouldn't do so until the year

1191
01:21:59,320 --> 01:22:03,400
Speaker 1: nineteen when it finally started acting to stop the market hunt.

1192
01:22:03,800 --> 01:22:06,880
Speaker 1: But the federal government had just sort of stood back

1193
01:22:06,960 --> 01:22:10,320
Speaker 1: and been paralyzed and not been able to do anything.

1194
01:22:10,400 --> 01:22:14,800
Speaker 1: And so they just let market capitalism do its thing.

1195
01:22:15,080 --> 01:22:20,280
Speaker 1: And what market capitalism did was it wiped almost every

1196
01:22:20,360 --> 01:22:24,080
Speaker 1: single buffalo off the continent. They just let these guys

1197
01:22:24,120 --> 01:22:27,080
Speaker 1: go out and shoot them down and strip their hides

1198
01:22:27,120 --> 01:22:29,200
Speaker 1: off and cut their tongues out and ship them back.

1199
01:22:29,240 --> 01:22:32,120
Speaker 1: And I mean, it was an industrial It was very

1200
01:22:32,200 --> 01:22:35,800
Speaker 1: much like the Industrial revolution elsewhere in America. The whole

1201
01:22:35,800 --> 01:22:40,280
Speaker 1: thing was kind of an industrial process of wiping out

1202
01:22:40,360 --> 01:22:46,760
Speaker 1: these these animals talk about the talk about the I

1203
01:22:47,400 --> 01:22:51,120
Speaker 1: rebuild Woodpecker, which is something we covered off on last night.

1204
01:22:51,479 --> 01:22:55,599
Speaker 1: But I'll I'll tee it up right now the same

1205
01:22:55,600 --> 01:22:58,800
Speaker 1: way I teach it up last night. Is Uh, after

1206
01:22:58,840 --> 01:23:02,400
Speaker 1: reading the story about the ivybuild Woodpecker, um, which I

1207
01:23:02,479 --> 01:23:04,719
Speaker 1: wasn't I knew, I knew it roughly, but I I didn't

1208
01:23:04,720 --> 01:23:12,559
Speaker 1: really put together how intact and recognizable America was at

1209
01:23:12,560 --> 01:23:16,160
Speaker 1: the time, at the time we lost ivorybuild Woodpecker, where

1210
01:23:16,200 --> 01:23:22,120
Speaker 1: Americans were having a unified common experience. We were in

1211
01:23:22,200 --> 01:23:25,519
Speaker 1: the A. We were in the age of being able

1212
01:23:25,560 --> 01:23:30,679
Speaker 1: to immediately distribute news and ideas all around the country.

1213
01:23:30,760 --> 01:23:38,000
Speaker 1: We had suburbia, we had a middle class. Uh, it

1214
01:23:38,080 --> 01:23:42,080
Speaker 1: was like we were America and we and it wasn't

1215
01:23:42,120 --> 01:23:48,720
Speaker 1: a case of only realizing later what we'd done. It

1216
01:23:48,880 --> 01:23:53,559
Speaker 1: was a case of, um. It was a case of

1217
01:23:53,720 --> 01:23:57,280
Speaker 1: we just watched it happened, like like like if someone said,

1218
01:23:57,280 --> 01:24:01,920
Speaker 1: these two cars are gonna collide, um, but we're just

1219
01:24:01,960 --> 01:24:06,840
Speaker 1: gonna let them quide to see what happens. Yeah. There

1220
01:24:06,920 --> 01:24:11,200
Speaker 1: was no sort of mystery about who was to blame

1221
01:24:11,360 --> 01:24:15,040
Speaker 1: or what went on. It was just we just I mean,

1222
01:24:15,040 --> 01:24:20,240
Speaker 1: we culturally we we kind of signed off on it. Yeah,

1223
01:24:20,360 --> 01:24:24,280
Speaker 1: I'm afraid that you you described that very very accurately.

1224
01:24:24,320 --> 01:24:27,599
Speaker 1: I mean, this this happened at a time when modern

1225
01:24:27,680 --> 01:24:32,479
Speaker 1: America existed. I mean everybody was driving cars. Uh, they

1226
01:24:32,479 --> 01:24:37,240
Speaker 1: had phones, they had the country had been electrified. People

1227
01:24:37,240 --> 01:24:39,760
Speaker 1: had electricity in their homes, they had washing machines, and

1228
01:24:39,800 --> 01:24:43,360
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's modern America. I mean, and the

1229
01:24:43,800 --> 01:24:47,040
Speaker 1: story kind of comes to its conclusion. Uh, it doesn't

1230
01:24:47,080 --> 01:24:49,720
Speaker 1: come to its conclusion actually until last year, when the

1231
01:24:49,720 --> 01:24:52,640
Speaker 1: Fish and Wildlife Service declares that the ivory bill woodpeckers

1232
01:24:53,120 --> 01:25:00,759
Speaker 1: officially extinct. But this last hurrah of uh what's probably

1233
01:25:00,760 --> 01:25:04,559
Speaker 1: the second largest woodpecker in the world and another one

1234
01:25:04,600 --> 01:25:09,080
Speaker 1: of our charismatic creatures from America from millions of years

1235
01:25:09,080 --> 01:25:17,720
Speaker 1: of of American ecology gets just think I and I

1236
01:25:17,760 --> 01:25:20,400
Speaker 1: think the explanation for the way you you did tee

1237
01:25:20,479 --> 01:25:23,240
Speaker 1: it up is that we were so used to just

1238
01:25:23,520 --> 01:25:28,840
Speaker 1: letting these things happen because people adopted the position, well,

1239
01:25:28,880 --> 01:25:34,599
Speaker 1: this is just inevitable. This is the inevitable consequence of civilization. Uh,

1240
01:25:34,640 --> 01:25:38,320
Speaker 1: it's the it's this is just collateral damage in creating

1241
01:25:38,320 --> 01:25:40,840
Speaker 1: a modern country. There's not anything you can do with it.

1242
01:25:41,080 --> 01:25:45,120
Speaker 1: Sure we're gonna wipe out, you know, ten billion passenger pigeons.

1243
01:25:45,320 --> 01:25:48,800
Speaker 1: Sure we're gonna wipe out thirty million buffalo. Of course

1244
01:25:48,840 --> 01:25:52,080
Speaker 1: we're gonna wipe out you know, our only native parents,

1245
01:25:52,120 --> 01:25:56,920
Speaker 1: the Carolina parakeets, these beautiful tropical birds that uh, that

1246
01:25:57,040 --> 01:25:59,080
Speaker 1: existed all the way up in the New York State.

1247
01:26:00,200 --> 01:26:04,080
Speaker 1: Of course we're going to do that. And so people

1248
01:26:04,160 --> 01:26:07,479
Speaker 1: acted as if this is just collateral damage and what

1249
01:26:07,479 --> 01:26:10,880
Speaker 1: what can you do? Uh, you know, and making our fortunes.

1250
01:26:11,000 --> 01:26:14,439
Speaker 1: This is uh, this is what happens. So the story

1251
01:26:14,600 --> 01:26:19,559
Speaker 1: kind of unfolds this way. It's the nineteen thirties. We

1252
01:26:19,640 --> 01:26:24,479
Speaker 1: have just lost the eastern prairie chicken, the heath hen

1253
01:26:24,600 --> 01:26:26,960
Speaker 1: I mean, and this is you know, a kind of

1254
01:26:29,000 --> 01:26:35,479
Speaker 1: almost allurid peeping Tom's story of uh. New Englanders were

1255
01:26:35,520 --> 01:26:41,800
Speaker 1: observing these birds go one by one, uh in the

1256
01:26:41,920 --> 01:26:45,400
Speaker 1: late nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties, until finally there

1257
01:26:45,479 --> 01:26:48,040
Speaker 1: was just one last heath and a male, booming ben

1258
01:26:48,479 --> 01:26:51,840
Speaker 1: they called him, who survived about three years by himself

1259
01:26:52,320 --> 01:26:55,400
Speaker 1: booming every spring to try to call a female and

1260
01:26:55,479 --> 01:26:58,599
Speaker 1: having no luck because there were none. So we've lost

1261
01:26:58,720 --> 01:27:02,240
Speaker 1: this bird. Did you know about did you know about that?

1262
01:27:02,320 --> 01:27:06,000
Speaker 1: There was a like a prairie chicken on the East coast.

1263
01:27:06,560 --> 01:27:11,200
Speaker 1: I'd maybe heard without thinking about what a heathen was.

1264
01:27:12,360 --> 01:27:15,719
Speaker 1: It was a prairie chicken. Yeah, you've everybody's heard about

1265
01:27:15,720 --> 01:27:17,720
Speaker 1: a heathen. But no we didn't. I didn't know the

1266
01:27:17,760 --> 01:27:20,960
Speaker 1: in and outs of this like a cool little prey

1267
01:27:21,040 --> 01:27:24,640
Speaker 1: chicken that people would go hunt for it. And yeah,

1268
01:27:25,000 --> 01:27:27,679
Speaker 1: it sounds like they who did, just like the dusky

1269
01:27:27,760 --> 01:27:31,360
Speaker 1: on the coast, Yes, very much like that. And so

1270
01:27:31,560 --> 01:27:37,360
Speaker 1: that bird was gone by one We had discovered that

1271
01:27:37,800 --> 01:27:41,120
Speaker 1: the Biological Survey, which is the forerunner of the Fishing

1272
01:27:41,120 --> 01:27:45,120
Speaker 1: Wildife Service, had discovered in the nineteen thirties that we

1273
01:27:45,120 --> 01:27:50,480
Speaker 1: were down to the last sixteen whooping cranes, that trumpeter

1274
01:27:50,640 --> 01:27:58,280
Speaker 1: swans were almost gone, that the bald eagle was in

1275
01:27:58,439 --> 01:28:02,640
Speaker 1: danger of extinction. In fact, one of our sort of

1276
01:28:02,680 --> 01:28:05,639
Speaker 1: the first endangered species kind of act that we pass

1277
01:28:05,800 --> 01:28:08,680
Speaker 1: is the ball Eagle Protection Act in Y. And the

1278
01:28:08,680 --> 01:28:10,960
Speaker 1: only reason it gets passed because well, the balleagle, after

1279
01:28:11,000 --> 01:28:13,400
Speaker 1: all is our damn national symbol. So what do we

1280
01:28:13,439 --> 01:28:16,519
Speaker 1: do with all that money with him on there? So?

1281
01:28:17,040 --> 01:28:20,840
Speaker 1: What are how are we not going to save this bird.

1282
01:28:20,920 --> 01:28:24,719
Speaker 1: That's our national symbol. But in the midst of all this,

1283
01:28:25,280 --> 01:28:29,000
Speaker 1: of all four of these birds going, this is when

1284
01:28:29,040 --> 01:28:32,760
Speaker 1: the Carolina parakeets the last. There are two subspecies. In

1285
01:28:32,800 --> 01:28:36,559
Speaker 1: the second subspecies, the Atlantic Coast version, goes extinct in

1286
01:28:36,600 --> 01:28:39,880
Speaker 1: that same stretch in the n thirties. So it's kind

1287
01:28:39,880 --> 01:28:43,280
Speaker 1: of a come up, this come up, this period, and

1288
01:28:44,280 --> 01:28:53,479
Speaker 1: right in the middle of it, the incredible beautiful ivory

1289
01:28:53,479 --> 01:28:59,880
Speaker 1: bill woodpecker is pronounced by the Biological Survey to also

1290
01:29:00,080 --> 01:29:04,160
Speaker 1: be extinct, same year that the heathen was was announced

1291
01:29:04,160 --> 01:29:08,799
Speaker 1: to be extinct. And then three years later a group

1292
01:29:08,880 --> 01:29:15,240
Speaker 1: of ornithologists from Cornell are in Louisiana and one of

1293
01:29:15,240 --> 01:29:18,840
Speaker 1: the last pieces of old growth forests left along the

1294
01:29:18,880 --> 01:29:22,360
Speaker 1: Mississippi River, and only by the way, about a hundred

1295
01:29:22,360 --> 01:29:24,320
Speaker 1: and twenty five miles from where I grew up. And

1296
01:29:24,439 --> 01:29:27,719
Speaker 1: that place has been the center of cool bird ship

1297
01:29:27,760 --> 01:29:30,680
Speaker 1: for a long time. It has, indeed. Yeah, it's the

1298
01:29:30,720 --> 01:29:34,200
Speaker 1: Mississippi and all this, all these great forests. I'm sorry,

1299
01:29:34,200 --> 01:29:36,120
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, you're right. When I was out speaking of

1300
01:29:36,560 --> 01:29:41,360
Speaker 1: the cornellogy Lab, they've been leading to charge on bird

1301
01:29:41,400 --> 01:29:44,320
Speaker 1: stuff for a long time. They have for sure, yeah,

1302
01:29:44,479 --> 01:29:48,160
Speaker 1: and they were, they were on top of this. And

1303
01:29:48,240 --> 01:29:53,240
Speaker 1: so a couple of their people, including of a videographer

1304
01:29:53,320 --> 01:29:56,160
Speaker 1: guy with a video camera or a motion picture camera

1305
01:29:57,200 --> 01:30:01,240
Speaker 1: UM is on the scene when they discover in this

1306
01:30:01,360 --> 01:30:04,920
Speaker 1: patch of old growth forest that they find along the Mississippi,

1307
01:30:06,479 --> 01:30:12,040
Speaker 1: seven pairs of ivory bill woodpeckers still alive in this

1308
01:30:12,280 --> 01:30:18,519
Speaker 1: patch of forest. The forest is called the Singer Tract

1309
01:30:19,520 --> 01:30:24,439
Speaker 1: because it belongs to the Singer Sewing Machine Company. And

1310
01:30:24,520 --> 01:30:28,760
Speaker 1: so when the Cornell folks make this discovery, and and

1311
01:30:28,800 --> 01:30:31,560
Speaker 1: I've got, by the way, a screen grab from the

1312
01:30:32,200 --> 01:30:35,760
Speaker 1: motion picture imagery they shot of the ivory bills there

1313
01:30:35,800 --> 01:30:39,760
Speaker 1: in the book. It's one of the few still photographs

1314
01:30:39,800 --> 01:30:44,120
Speaker 1: that anyone has of an ivory bill woodpecker. You know what,

1315
01:30:44,400 --> 01:30:46,960
Speaker 1: I somehow didn't know that existed. You didn't know what existed.

1316
01:30:47,000 --> 01:30:49,080
Speaker 1: I didn't know you could look at a picture one, yeah,

1317
01:30:49,160 --> 01:30:50,759
Speaker 1: because usually all the ship you got to look at paintings.

1318
01:30:50,800 --> 01:30:52,320
Speaker 1: You gotta look at paintings. You have to look at

1319
01:30:52,320 --> 01:30:54,760
Speaker 1: Autubun and Wilson in people like that. I want to

1320
01:30:54,760 --> 01:30:58,439
Speaker 1: I want to let me interject for one sec. People

1321
01:30:58,479 --> 01:31:02,360
Speaker 1: need to pay attention to fact here that uh they

1322
01:31:02,439 --> 01:31:05,720
Speaker 1: thought they were gone. Yeah, you know what, someone has

1323
01:31:05,880 --> 01:31:07,479
Speaker 1: We talked about this with a friend of ours last night.

1324
01:31:07,479 --> 01:31:11,040
Speaker 1: When someone has a sort of near death experience, it

1325
01:31:11,160 --> 01:31:16,120
Speaker 1: readjusts their priorities. So at this point that you're getting

1326
01:31:16,160 --> 01:31:19,800
Speaker 1: at where they find these, it was assumed they were gone.

1327
01:31:21,200 --> 01:31:24,280
Speaker 1: Imagine what what what? What? How Is it not just

1328
01:31:24,560 --> 01:31:29,960
Speaker 1: national elation that that you'd be like, oh my god,

1329
01:31:30,800 --> 01:31:35,760
Speaker 1: we thought we had destroyed the species. But look we've

1330
01:31:35,760 --> 01:31:39,400
Speaker 1: been given a second chance. It's like, you know, and uh, well,

1331
01:31:39,400 --> 01:31:42,559
Speaker 1: what's the Jay the Jimmy Stewart movie. Everybody watches every

1332
01:31:42,640 --> 01:31:48,120
Speaker 1: Christmas Wonderful Life, Right, you know, he gives us a

1333
01:31:48,120 --> 01:31:52,760
Speaker 1: second chance. He's good, everything's gonna be better. Here we

1334
01:31:52,800 --> 01:31:55,960
Speaker 1: are like we killed them all. Then some time goes

1335
01:31:55,960 --> 01:31:59,240
Speaker 1: by and it's like, no, you know, by the grace

1336
01:31:59,320 --> 01:32:06,120
Speaker 1: of God, we have a we can start afresh, exactly

1337
01:32:07,120 --> 01:32:11,000
Speaker 1: the one would think, because yeah, they had been pronounced

1338
01:32:11,080 --> 01:32:17,320
Speaker 1: extinct in nine now we have found seven pairs of them.

1339
01:32:17,400 --> 01:32:20,760
Speaker 1: So the story proceeds like this. Cornell sends a young

1340
01:32:20,800 --> 01:32:24,920
Speaker 1: graduate student, a guy named James Tanner, down to do

1341
01:32:25,160 --> 01:32:29,840
Speaker 1: what amounts to kind of salvage natural history on the

1342
01:32:29,880 --> 01:32:32,240
Speaker 1: Ivory Bill woodpecker. I mean, the only natural history we

1343
01:32:32,320 --> 01:32:34,639
Speaker 1: really had done on ivory bills was done by people

1344
01:32:34,680 --> 01:32:39,280
Speaker 1: like Audubon and Alexander Wilson. Nobody in the late nineteenth

1345
01:32:39,320 --> 01:32:44,679
Speaker 1: century had really studied them. Um, and so Tanner, with

1346
01:32:45,360 --> 01:32:48,840
Speaker 1: all the modern expertise that an ornithologist can bring to

1347
01:32:48,880 --> 01:32:51,360
Speaker 1: the game, puts together and writes a book about it,

1348
01:32:51,800 --> 01:32:57,559
Speaker 1: this wonderful study of ivory bills, of their nesting habits,

1349
01:32:57,600 --> 01:33:02,439
Speaker 1: of their mating habits. Uh, how they're young, react, what

1350
01:33:02,560 --> 01:33:05,960
Speaker 1: sort of predators they have, how they respond to people,

1351
01:33:06,200 --> 01:33:08,479
Speaker 1: he said. For one thing, they're not really shy around people.

1352
01:33:08,720 --> 01:33:11,719
Speaker 1: I mean, they don't really go duck and hide when

1353
01:33:11,760 --> 01:33:15,200
Speaker 1: I show up. They just kind of exposed themselves out

1354
01:33:15,240 --> 01:33:19,440
Speaker 1: in the open, he describes. And we actually have recordings

1355
01:33:20,200 --> 01:33:23,880
Speaker 1: with that, uh, with that motion picture film that was

1356
01:33:23,920 --> 01:33:28,639
Speaker 1: shot of them off their cries. They made several different

1357
01:33:29,040 --> 01:33:33,200
Speaker 1: uh sounds, including a sound that people way back in

1358
01:33:33,320 --> 01:33:37,559
Speaker 1: colonial history had referred to as the toy trumpet in

1359
01:33:37,600 --> 01:33:40,040
Speaker 1: the woods. The ivory bill sounds like it makes a

1360
01:33:40,080 --> 01:33:43,520
Speaker 1: cry like a toy trumpet, they said. And he described

1361
01:33:43,560 --> 01:33:47,479
Speaker 1: how ivory bills flew through this beautiful old growth forest,

1362
01:33:48,000 --> 01:33:50,640
Speaker 1: you know, and as I say in my description of

1363
01:33:50,640 --> 01:33:53,720
Speaker 1: all this, John James Ottoman had always said, whenever he

1364
01:33:53,800 --> 01:33:56,639
Speaker 1: saw an ivory bill fly through the forest, it reminded

1365
01:33:56,720 --> 01:33:59,920
Speaker 1: him of a Van Dyke painting. It was just this gorge,

1366
01:34:00,080 --> 01:34:05,920
Speaker 1: just image. And so Tanner studies these birds for about

1367
01:34:06,479 --> 01:34:10,879
Speaker 1: four or five years, and Cornell sends him out meanwhile

1368
01:34:11,040 --> 01:34:15,080
Speaker 1: on this reconnaissance all over the South everywhere there is

1369
01:34:15,200 --> 01:34:19,240
Speaker 1: remaining old growth to see if there are others, And

1370
01:34:19,320 --> 01:34:22,040
Speaker 1: everywhere he goes he can't find them anywhere else. So

1371
01:34:22,160 --> 01:34:25,720
Speaker 1: they know by about nineteen thirty eight or ninety nine,

1372
01:34:25,960 --> 01:34:29,920
Speaker 1: these are the only seven left. These are the only ones,

1373
01:34:30,000 --> 01:34:33,080
Speaker 1: and they're sometimes they're getting a chick up, occasionally a

1374
01:34:33,160 --> 01:34:36,320
Speaker 1: chick is getting snagged by an owl or something. Their

1375
01:34:36,360 --> 01:34:41,320
Speaker 1: population is growing a little bit. And at this point

1376
01:34:41,360 --> 01:34:46,040
Speaker 1: the Singer Sewing Machine Company announces to the world that

1377
01:34:46,560 --> 01:34:50,160
Speaker 1: it has sold the logging rights to this piece of

1378
01:34:50,280 --> 01:34:55,040
Speaker 1: ground It owns to a Chicago logging company which plans

1379
01:34:55,200 --> 01:35:01,040
Speaker 1: on commencing logging the area in nineteen forty. And so

1380
01:35:01,560 --> 01:35:05,080
Speaker 1: there's a couple of more years as the logging is

1381
01:35:05,120 --> 01:35:10,160
Speaker 1: actually taking place, of people dashing out uh trying to

1382
01:35:10,200 --> 01:35:14,680
Speaker 1: get one last glimpse of the birds. Roger Tory Peterson,

1383
01:35:14,880 --> 01:35:19,759
Speaker 1: for example, goes down in n gets one one glimpse

1384
01:35:19,800 --> 01:35:23,320
Speaker 1: of the birds. But the last bird anybody ever sees

1385
01:35:23,800 --> 01:35:27,280
Speaker 1: is a female nesting in a tree that the loggers

1386
01:35:27,360 --> 01:35:30,519
Speaker 1: actually cut down, and as the tree is falling, she

1387
01:35:30,680 --> 01:35:34,080
Speaker 1: flies out of it and goes doing this this sort

1388
01:35:34,080 --> 01:35:39,280
Speaker 1: of rollicking, sweeping flying motion that these woodpeckers made over

1389
01:35:39,320 --> 01:35:42,800
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River. And it's the last time anybody ever

1390
01:35:43,200 --> 01:35:47,559
Speaker 1: sees one in North America. It's the if you put

1391
01:35:47,600 --> 01:35:50,840
Speaker 1: that in the movie, I would roll my eyes. Yeah,

1392
01:35:50,920 --> 01:35:57,599
Speaker 1: I know, I'm like, oh, brother, yeah, it's unreal. Yeah,

1393
01:35:57,680 --> 01:36:01,640
Speaker 1: it actually happened though. Yeah, And so you can roll

1394
01:36:01,720 --> 01:36:05,320
Speaker 1: your eyes at the fact that we let this happen,

1395
01:36:05,479 --> 01:36:10,720
Speaker 1: as we had done so many freaking times. It's just

1396
01:36:10,960 --> 01:36:18,400
Speaker 1: somehow that one, I don't know, that one just feels different. Well,

1397
01:36:18,439 --> 01:36:21,479
Speaker 1: it happens in the modern age, as I think, part

1398
01:36:21,520 --> 01:36:24,600
Speaker 1: of the difference. And you know what, one of the

1399
01:36:24,640 --> 01:36:30,639
Speaker 1: ways it feels different is if you look at look

1400
01:36:30,640 --> 01:36:35,880
Speaker 1: at what damning, Damning is in the Columbia base and whatever,

1401
01:36:36,040 --> 01:36:38,640
Speaker 1: what damning has done to salmon. You know, you can

1402
01:36:38,720 --> 01:36:42,360
Speaker 1: point and be you can point look like okay. But

1403
01:36:42,560 --> 01:36:46,360
Speaker 1: one way to understand World War two was that, um,

1404
01:36:46,400 --> 01:36:51,000
Speaker 1: we beat the Germans by out out smelting them. We

1405
01:36:51,160 --> 01:36:57,759
Speaker 1: produced more aluminum. Therefore we produce more aircraft. Producing aluminum

1406
01:36:57,800 --> 01:37:05,560
Speaker 1: is extremely energy dependent, right, you know, we beat this,

1407
01:37:05,560 --> 01:37:09,360
Speaker 1: this this global threat. Um, we had a nation to feed.

1408
01:37:10,400 --> 01:37:14,639
Speaker 1: We produced all this agriculture and so all shipping, big

1409
01:37:14,680 --> 01:37:20,280
Speaker 1: all this stuff, and so a casualty's salmon and one

1410
01:37:20,439 --> 01:37:23,720
Speaker 1: could come in, one could come in and present a

1411
01:37:23,760 --> 01:37:27,439
Speaker 1: trade we made and you look and be like, yeah,

1412
01:37:27,520 --> 01:37:29,679
Speaker 1: you know, when you put it that way, I guess

1413
01:37:29,720 --> 01:37:32,719
Speaker 1: that was a trade we made. But in this case,

1414
01:37:33,560 --> 01:37:37,960
Speaker 1: it's just like it's what, it's a logging tract. It's

1415
01:37:37,960 --> 01:37:41,280
Speaker 1: a logging tract, a single log like an amount of

1416
01:37:41,280 --> 01:37:43,800
Speaker 1: money that will sort of wind up in a very

1417
01:37:44,640 --> 01:37:46,760
Speaker 1: it's like a sort of money. It's not a nation's history.

1418
01:37:46,760 --> 01:37:48,320
Speaker 1: It's a it's a chunk of money that will wind

1419
01:37:48,360 --> 01:37:51,720
Speaker 1: up in a very few people's bank accounts. You know.

1420
01:37:52,280 --> 01:37:54,439
Speaker 1: It's so it's just very it becomes very personal. You

1421
01:37:54,439 --> 01:37:56,720
Speaker 1: can almost go and find you could go and be like,

1422
01:37:56,800 --> 01:37:59,439
Speaker 1: oh no, it was kind of like this guy and

1423
01:37:59,760 --> 01:38:04,080
Speaker 1: this guy and those are the two people that like

1424
01:38:04,560 --> 01:38:07,360
Speaker 1: that that it came down. Yeah, it's like those are

1425
01:38:07,360 --> 01:38:10,920
Speaker 1: the two people that said, Okay, who they were, Well,

1426
01:38:10,960 --> 01:38:13,240
Speaker 1: I don't know who they were either. And although I

1427
01:38:13,320 --> 01:38:17,720
Speaker 1: have not seen that the Singer company ever made this

1428
01:38:17,720 --> 01:38:24,920
Speaker 1: this argument, the timing of this is in ninety right

1429
01:38:25,000 --> 01:38:28,960
Speaker 1: before the year before the United States enters the war.

1430
01:38:29,560 --> 01:38:33,680
Speaker 1: And of course there was the argument that the Olympic

1431
01:38:33,800 --> 01:38:39,920
Speaker 1: Peninsula got logged Olympic National Park got logged because we

1432
01:38:40,040 --> 01:38:43,760
Speaker 1: needed the lumber for the war effort. So I think,

1433
01:38:43,760 --> 01:38:46,960
Speaker 1: as I said, I haven't seen that this they could patriotic,

1434
01:38:47,040 --> 01:38:49,439
Speaker 1: they could make it as a patriotic act. We had

1435
01:38:49,479 --> 01:38:51,800
Speaker 1: to do this in order to win the war, so

1436
01:38:51,880 --> 01:38:55,799
Speaker 1: we had to sacrifice those last seven pairs of ivory bills,

1437
01:38:56,439 --> 01:38:59,320
Speaker 1: you know. And that's in in historical terms. I haven't

1438
01:38:59,360 --> 01:39:01,960
Speaker 1: seen that. Though I haven't seen it in historical terms

1439
01:39:02,000 --> 01:39:06,840
Speaker 1: of one of the family. Yeah, it is a hot

1440
01:39:06,840 --> 01:39:09,800
Speaker 1: tip for the family. I mean, Alan nevins the Great

1441
01:39:10,000 --> 01:39:14,679
Speaker 1: American History and one of his arguments about capitalism, you know, capitalism, Okay,

1442
01:39:14,680 --> 01:39:17,880
Speaker 1: it did all these things. Uh you know that, Uh,

1443
01:39:18,320 --> 01:39:21,400
Speaker 1: we're not so pretty. And he didn't really know about

1444
01:39:21,400 --> 01:39:23,280
Speaker 1: this story, I tell, but I would add you know,

1445
01:39:23,439 --> 01:39:27,000
Speaker 1: this destruction of so many, so many animals. But then

1446
01:39:27,040 --> 01:39:29,519
Speaker 1: he argued that, but what capitalism enables us to do

1447
01:39:29,640 --> 01:39:32,240
Speaker 1: was to win World War Two, to defend, to defeat

1448
01:39:32,280 --> 01:39:35,960
Speaker 1: the Germans, uh, to defeat the fascist menace to the

1449
01:39:36,000 --> 01:39:41,160
Speaker 1: world in World War two, and so that kind of argument.

1450
01:39:41,240 --> 01:39:45,000
Speaker 1: Then ultimately you could say almost we've used it to

1451
01:39:45,080 --> 01:39:52,120
Speaker 1: trump everything else, anything that got sacrificed, the collateral damage

1452
01:39:52,360 --> 01:39:55,400
Speaker 1: is too bad, but it enables us to do this.

1453
01:39:55,720 --> 01:39:58,559
Speaker 1: Did you you ever read Kurt Vonnegut? Oh, yeah, sure,

1454
01:39:58,800 --> 01:40:03,280
Speaker 1: Kurt Vonnegut I was talking about he had two great

1455
01:40:03,320 --> 01:40:06,479
Speaker 1: observations about military uniforms. He said of the Nazis that

1456
01:40:06,520 --> 01:40:10,520
Speaker 1: it was almost like they knew when they chose their uniforms.

1457
01:40:10,560 --> 01:40:12,400
Speaker 1: It's almost like they knew that they would always be

1458
01:40:12,439 --> 01:40:17,800
Speaker 1: bad guys in the movies. That's a great line. And

1459
01:40:17,840 --> 01:40:20,639
Speaker 1: he also talked about when it came out with Desert Camo.

1460
01:40:21,640 --> 01:40:25,200
Speaker 1: He said that apparently they're preparing to fight the next

1461
01:40:25,200 --> 01:40:31,519
Speaker 1: war on top of a Denver omelet. Yeah. Man, Yeah,

1462
01:40:31,560 --> 01:40:34,840
Speaker 1: those Nazi helmets in particular, you look at it was like,

1463
01:40:35,240 --> 01:40:37,840
Speaker 1: we need to come up with something that nobody else

1464
01:40:37,880 --> 01:40:51,400
Speaker 1: has a helmet like that. Yeah. No, kidding. Oh man,

1465
01:40:52,360 --> 01:40:56,320
Speaker 1: you got any follow ups? Johnny, I got too much,

1466
01:40:57,200 --> 01:41:00,560
Speaker 1: too many follow ups. It's such a good book. I

1467
01:41:00,600 --> 01:41:03,240
Speaker 1: want to point out a little bit um to our

1468
01:41:03,280 --> 01:41:08,040
Speaker 1: readers who are have you know, tend to be heavily

1469
01:41:08,080 --> 01:41:12,799
Speaker 1: involved in hunting and fishing. It's um. It will challenge

1470
01:41:12,840 --> 01:41:18,360
Speaker 1: a lot. It'll challenge a lot of your notions about uh,

1471
01:41:18,439 --> 01:41:20,880
Speaker 1: your It will challenge a lot of your notions about

1472
01:41:20,920 --> 01:41:26,000
Speaker 1: your heroes and icons and idols. Um. I didn't get

1473
01:41:26,000 --> 01:41:28,559
Speaker 1: it in all that today, but uh we did last night.

1474
01:41:28,680 --> 01:41:34,200
Speaker 1: Something make makes quick work of the mountain men. Well,

1475
01:41:34,360 --> 01:41:39,280
Speaker 1: if I can squeeze one in before we get he's

1476
01:41:39,360 --> 01:41:41,080
Speaker 1: like edging towards it. He doesn't want to let it.

1477
01:41:41,160 --> 01:41:43,200
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna do it.

1478
01:41:42,520 --> 01:41:46,639
Speaker 1: I was telling people that be prepared for be prepared

1479
01:41:46,720 --> 01:41:50,639
Speaker 1: for some of your your hunting, your your iconic hunting heroes,

1480
01:41:50,640 --> 01:41:52,840
Speaker 1: including some of the early players in the in the

1481
01:41:52,880 --> 01:41:56,680
Speaker 1: wildlife conservation movement. Be prepared for a perspective that will

1482
01:41:56,760 --> 01:42:01,799
Speaker 1: challenge some of your assumptions about um. There their heroic deeds,

1483
01:42:02,240 --> 01:42:04,599
Speaker 1: which is good, it's good for your brain. Sure. Well,

1484
01:42:04,680 --> 01:42:08,280
Speaker 1: here's one that I've been tangling with lately just in

1485
01:42:08,360 --> 01:42:10,000
Speaker 1: my head, and so I'm glad we're here and I

1486
01:42:10,000 --> 01:42:11,439
Speaker 1: can pose this to you and just kind of get

1487
01:42:11,439 --> 01:42:14,960
Speaker 1: your thoughts on it after you've exhaustively been thinking about it.

1488
01:42:15,560 --> 01:42:19,080
Speaker 1: But I always I'm a proponent that we all think

1489
01:42:19,120 --> 01:42:23,519
Speaker 1: of ourselves as part of nature and as hunters. I

1490
01:42:23,520 --> 01:42:25,519
Speaker 1: think that you know, we we play that out to

1491
01:42:26,320 --> 01:42:31,400
Speaker 1: a maximum as much as we can write. But what

1492
01:42:31,560 --> 01:42:34,599
Speaker 1: is it to say that all this destruction that we've

1493
01:42:34,640 --> 01:42:38,880
Speaker 1: done and these changes over the last couple of hundred years,

1494
01:42:38,920 --> 01:42:42,559
Speaker 1: four hundred years, that that isn't natural and that's not

1495
01:42:42,720 --> 01:42:45,840
Speaker 1: the way that it should be. And I want you

1496
01:42:45,880 --> 01:42:48,640
Speaker 1: to understand that I'm all for, Like I wish I

1497
01:42:48,640 --> 01:42:52,200
Speaker 1: could see the pilliated woodpecker and had seen the great

1498
01:42:52,200 --> 01:42:56,040
Speaker 1: penguin of the East coast, right, But when I really

1499
01:42:56,040 --> 01:42:59,439
Speaker 1: try to step back and look at it from like

1500
01:42:59,479 --> 01:43:02,640
Speaker 1: a really really big viewpoint, it's like, well, if we

1501
01:43:02,800 --> 01:43:06,920
Speaker 1: really are as part of it, we're being animals that yeah,

1502
01:43:07,080 --> 01:43:10,240
Speaker 1: there's been other animals that have They don't show remorse

1503
01:43:10,439 --> 01:43:13,680
Speaker 1: when if they wipe out a certain you know, species

1504
01:43:13,680 --> 01:43:15,519
Speaker 1: that they used to feed on and they adapt and

1505
01:43:15,520 --> 01:43:19,040
Speaker 1: start feeding on another gets a weird freeze and they

1506
01:43:19,040 --> 01:43:21,040
Speaker 1: can cross out to an island ever been to before,

1507
01:43:21,040 --> 01:43:22,519
Speaker 1: and they go out there and kill every damn thing

1508
01:43:22,560 --> 01:43:25,400
Speaker 1: on the island. Are they evil? So? I mean, I

1509
01:43:25,400 --> 01:43:27,280
Speaker 1: can kind of keep going on that, but you can

1510
01:43:27,320 --> 01:43:29,800
Speaker 1: you understand my sort of question and just sort of

1511
01:43:29,840 --> 01:43:32,559
Speaker 1: this idea that I grapple with right that, even though

1512
01:43:32,640 --> 01:43:35,360
Speaker 1: it is terrible and it makes me sad to think

1513
01:43:35,360 --> 01:43:37,960
Speaker 1: that we as a human species are gonna what looks

1514
01:43:38,000 --> 01:43:40,400
Speaker 1: like just you know, eat ourselves out of house and home,

1515
01:43:41,680 --> 01:43:44,120
Speaker 1: But in the end, is it is it just as

1516
01:43:44,240 --> 01:43:51,879
Speaker 1: natural as an ice age. So it's a great question. Uh, yeahnny.

1517
01:43:51,960 --> 01:43:55,640
Speaker 1: And I'll also say, and Steve can back me up

1518
01:43:55,680 --> 01:44:03,120
Speaker 1: on this that the listeners who uh are convinced that

1519
01:44:03,880 --> 01:44:10,599
Speaker 1: hunting is uh a lifestyle that has characterized human beings

1520
01:44:10,760 --> 01:44:13,599
Speaker 1: from the beginning and all through time, are not going

1521
01:44:13,640 --> 01:44:19,360
Speaker 1: to be disappointed in reading this because this story with

1522
01:44:19,479 --> 01:44:23,599
Speaker 1: in terms of humans, starts at the point when we

1523
01:44:23,960 --> 01:44:30,960
Speaker 1: become upright predators in Africa and develop a strategy for

1524
01:44:31,040 --> 01:44:35,120
Speaker 1: a whole new, whole new approach to living, and it

1525
01:44:35,160 --> 01:44:38,839
Speaker 1: produces who we are. It enables us to grow big brains,

1526
01:44:39,040 --> 01:44:45,759
Speaker 1: It fosters a language that increases the connections the neural

1527
01:44:45,800 --> 01:44:48,840
Speaker 1: network and our brains so that we are able to

1528
01:44:49,280 --> 01:44:52,880
Speaker 1: take culture, which I argue in the book every single

1529
01:44:52,960 --> 01:44:57,320
Speaker 1: animal just about we now know is cultured and transmits

1530
01:44:57,360 --> 01:45:00,920
Speaker 1: culture down through time. But as a result of the

1531
01:45:01,000 --> 01:45:04,320
Speaker 1: hunting impress on us, we are able to put together

1532
01:45:04,680 --> 01:45:10,160
Speaker 1: a language that allows a very rich culture for human beings.

1533
01:45:10,240 --> 01:45:14,040
Speaker 1: And I mean I tracked that story through the point

1534
01:45:14,080 --> 01:45:16,759
Speaker 1: where I mean, as I said last night in referring

1535
01:45:16,800 --> 01:45:20,840
Speaker 1: to the Neanderthals who are our ancestors, all of our ancestors,

1536
01:45:20,880 --> 01:45:25,679
Speaker 1: we all have Neanderthal genes in us. These people who

1537
01:45:25,680 --> 01:45:29,639
Speaker 1: were present down to forty thousand years ago had a

1538
01:45:29,680 --> 01:45:35,120
Speaker 1: lifestyle that was more carnivorous than wolf packs. And we

1539
01:45:35,200 --> 01:45:40,439
Speaker 1: know this from nitrogen isotopes in their bones. They ate

1540
01:45:40,520 --> 01:45:45,519
Speaker 1: more meat than wolves of the time. Yeah, it would,

1541
01:45:45,960 --> 01:45:50,920
Speaker 1: no kidding, and they and they also rested when when

1542
01:45:51,000 --> 01:45:54,120
Speaker 1: humans finally got to North America and began hunting the

1543
01:45:54,320 --> 01:46:01,519
Speaker 1: wildlife they found here. They represented forty thousand generations of

1544
01:46:01,600 --> 01:46:05,000
Speaker 1: previous hunters, which is one of the reasons they were

1545
01:46:05,080 --> 01:46:07,439
Speaker 1: so good at it. I mean, I tell a story

1546
01:46:07,479 --> 01:46:09,760
Speaker 1: and the like I think about getting into hunting, no

1547
01:46:09,960 --> 01:46:11,960
Speaker 1: they didn't wake up and think about that man. They

1548
01:46:14,000 --> 01:46:17,120
Speaker 1: then there was nothing like that. I tell a story

1549
01:46:17,160 --> 01:46:20,320
Speaker 1: in the book about a mammoth hunt that took place

1550
01:46:20,320 --> 01:46:25,639
Speaker 1: in southern Arizona, president southern Ariza, near Tucson, where there

1551
01:46:25,720 --> 01:46:29,960
Speaker 1: was a herd of mammoths. This group of Clovis hunters approached.

1552
01:46:30,640 --> 01:46:35,439
Speaker 1: Thirteen of the fifteen animals were adolescents and calves, And

1553
01:46:35,520 --> 01:46:41,480
Speaker 1: when archaeologists did the excavation of the three sites associated

1554
01:46:41,520 --> 01:46:48,040
Speaker 1: with this particular kill episode, all thirteen calves and adolescents

1555
01:46:48,120 --> 01:46:51,800
Speaker 1: were found in one spot, each of them with one

1556
01:46:51,920 --> 01:46:57,000
Speaker 1: Clovis point in them. Thirteen Clovis points for thirteen adolescents

1557
01:46:57,000 --> 01:47:00,559
Speaker 1: and calves. Then they found the bull about out eight

1558
01:47:00,600 --> 01:47:03,920
Speaker 1: miles away with two Clovis points in it, And five

1559
01:47:03,960 --> 01:47:09,560
Speaker 1: miles away they found the cow, who had obviously fought

1560
01:47:09,600 --> 01:47:12,640
Speaker 1: to the end to try to protect those calves. She

1561
01:47:12,720 --> 01:47:17,080
Speaker 1: had eight Clovis points in her. I mean, this is

1562
01:47:17,120 --> 01:47:21,760
Speaker 1: a record of people who were damn good at this.

1563
01:47:23,800 --> 01:47:28,200
Speaker 1: So you're not gonna be listeners out there. You're not

1564
01:47:28,240 --> 01:47:31,640
Speaker 1: gonna be disappointed at this long term story of the

1565
01:47:31,760 --> 01:47:35,960
Speaker 1: role of hunting in the human experience. You may be

1566
01:47:36,200 --> 01:47:43,280
Speaker 1: disappointed when you encounter humans who are motivated by an

1567
01:47:43,360 --> 01:47:46,920
Speaker 1: idea that they're exceptional from all other creatures and that

1568
01:47:47,080 --> 01:47:51,960
Speaker 1: they have an economy called the global market, who will

1569
01:47:52,040 --> 01:47:58,400
Speaker 1: go out and slaughter animals by the thousands in order

1570
01:47:58,439 --> 01:48:02,519
Speaker 1: to provide pelts, are leather or some other part for

1571
01:48:02,560 --> 01:48:05,280
Speaker 1: a global market economy. Now, can you give the can

1572
01:48:05,280 --> 01:48:10,320
Speaker 1: you quit give the This is this helps to respond

1573
01:48:10,360 --> 01:48:14,400
Speaker 1: to the honest uh the quote by the buffalo hunter

1574
01:48:15,680 --> 01:48:19,600
Speaker 1: who's like, well, you could say we were whatever, or

1575
01:48:19,680 --> 01:48:21,840
Speaker 1: you could say we were I can't remember what it was.

1576
01:48:21,880 --> 01:48:24,439
Speaker 1: And he goes and I guess that's probably more true. Yeah,

1577
01:48:25,000 --> 01:48:27,280
Speaker 1: it's a sentence that we're talking about, how are we

1578
01:48:27,320 --> 01:48:30,000
Speaker 1: different than animals whatever. It's a sentence that an animal

1579
01:48:30,080 --> 01:48:34,639
Speaker 1: isn't gonna say. No, It's a sentence that an animal

1580
01:48:34,720 --> 01:48:39,800
Speaker 1: isn't going to say, uh, that's true. An animal besides us,

1581
01:48:39,880 --> 01:48:43,920
Speaker 1: isn't gonna conjure up this this sce hell. And it

1582
01:48:44,040 --> 01:48:47,760
Speaker 1: rests on you know, hundreds of thousands of years of

1583
01:48:47,800 --> 01:48:52,240
Speaker 1: accumulated culture that enables Frank Mayor to say this. But

1584
01:48:52,439 --> 01:48:55,080
Speaker 1: and it follows by the way I I sort of

1585
01:48:55,320 --> 01:48:57,519
Speaker 1: look at about four or five of the buffalo hunters

1586
01:48:57,520 --> 01:49:01,439
Speaker 1: and how they react to what they've done. And some

1587
01:49:01,680 --> 01:49:05,120
Speaker 1: of them are completely defensive. I mean, there's a guy

1588
01:49:05,240 --> 01:49:09,479
Speaker 1: named Jay Wright Moore who basically says, you know, all

1589
01:49:09,600 --> 01:49:14,320
Speaker 1: this bullshit here with these conservationists about what we did

1590
01:49:14,320 --> 01:49:17,120
Speaker 1: to the buffalo, there was not a buffalo out there

1591
01:49:17,160 --> 01:49:22,599
Speaker 1: between the Arkansas River and the Canadian border that was

1592
01:49:22,880 --> 01:49:26,000
Speaker 1: worth a grain assault compared to any one of the

1593
01:49:26,040 --> 01:49:31,200
Speaker 1: settler families that got killed or died in the migration westward.

1594
01:49:31,479 --> 01:49:34,840
Speaker 1: These animals just weren't worth anything. And of course what

1595
01:49:34,920 --> 01:49:38,400
Speaker 1: he's expressing is the classic we're creating civilization here, and

1596
01:49:38,439 --> 01:49:42,400
Speaker 1: these were all the collateral damage, uh, animals, of of

1597
01:49:42,439 --> 01:49:46,960
Speaker 1: doing that. But Frank Mayer was kind of more thoughtful

1598
01:49:47,280 --> 01:49:50,599
Speaker 1: about it, and he was a buffalo hunter in Kansas

1599
01:49:50,640 --> 01:49:52,760
Speaker 1: in the eighteen seventies and he wrote a memoir, a

1600
01:49:52,840 --> 01:49:56,360
Speaker 1: really good memoir of of doing all this and he

1601
01:49:56,520 --> 01:50:00,599
Speaker 1: kind of reaches the end of his memoir and he says,

1602
01:50:00,640 --> 01:50:03,240
Speaker 1: and I can't remember the exact quote, but it goes

1603
01:50:03,280 --> 01:50:11,000
Speaker 1: something like this. You know, some people say that we

1604
01:50:11,800 --> 01:50:19,200
Speaker 1: just did this for the country, and others say, hell,

1605
01:50:19,360 --> 01:50:23,599
Speaker 1: we just did it for ourselves, and we didn't really

1606
01:50:23,680 --> 01:50:28,960
Speaker 1: give a crap about the buffaloes or what anybody else

1607
01:50:29,000 --> 01:50:30,760
Speaker 1: who comes later and is not going to get to

1608
01:50:30,760 --> 01:50:35,080
Speaker 1: see a buffalo ever thinks. And he says, when I

1609
01:50:35,120 --> 01:50:38,040
Speaker 1: reflect on it, I think that's the way it was.

1610
01:50:40,680 --> 01:50:43,600
Speaker 1: We just didn't give a crap about either the animals

1611
01:50:43,960 --> 01:50:46,760
Speaker 1: or what anybody else who came later was gonna kind

1612
01:50:46,760 --> 01:50:50,320
Speaker 1: of thing. Uh. So there's a range of opinions, as

1613
01:50:50,360 --> 01:50:53,720
Speaker 1: you would expect from all these guys. But yeah, it

1614
01:50:53,800 --> 01:50:57,599
Speaker 1: goes like that. And while I said last night, when

1615
01:50:57,640 --> 01:51:00,880
Speaker 1: when Steve was sort of holding my feet to the

1616
01:51:00,920 --> 01:51:04,000
Speaker 1: fire on this particular one, that I was breaking his heart,

1617
01:51:04,840 --> 01:51:08,599
Speaker 1: uh by talking the way I was about buffalo hunters

1618
01:51:08,600 --> 01:51:11,759
Speaker 1: and about beaver trade, I was saying that you denied

1619
01:51:11,880 --> 01:51:14,840
Speaker 1: them their lived experiences in humanity. I think he said

1620
01:51:14,880 --> 01:51:20,240
Speaker 1: something like that, very thoughtful. But what I said, sort

1621
01:51:20,280 --> 01:51:25,280
Speaker 1: of in defense is that actually throughout the book, and

1622
01:51:25,320 --> 01:51:27,800
Speaker 1: I do this at least four different times, including with

1623
01:51:27,840 --> 01:51:31,280
Speaker 1: buffalo hunter, including with Jay Wright Moore and his brother,

1624
01:51:32,200 --> 01:51:39,639
Speaker 1: including with a wolf bounty hunter in Colorado, including with

1625
01:51:39,880 --> 01:51:46,240
Speaker 1: a plume hunter, these guys who kill snowy egrets and

1626
01:51:46,360 --> 01:51:50,440
Speaker 1: roseate spoonbills and all for the plume trade to decorate

1627
01:51:50,439 --> 01:51:55,759
Speaker 1: women's hats, uh, and a couple of other instances. What

1628
01:51:55,880 --> 01:52:01,120
Speaker 1: this market hunt for animals did do is it enabled

1629
01:52:01,960 --> 01:52:06,400
Speaker 1: people who were rural who had really no access to

1630
01:52:07,000 --> 01:52:11,800
Speaker 1: an economy where you can make money. It allowed them

1631
01:52:11,840 --> 01:52:16,360
Speaker 1: to make money, and it allowed them entry into the

1632
01:52:16,400 --> 01:52:19,960
Speaker 1: middle class. So Jay Wright More and his brother, after

1633
01:52:20,000 --> 01:52:22,400
Speaker 1: they stopped hunting buffalo, they're able to buy a ranch

1634
01:52:22,479 --> 01:52:27,920
Speaker 1: and stock it with cattle in Texas. The wolf bounty

1635
01:52:27,960 --> 01:52:31,599
Speaker 1: hunter in Colorado is able to do the same thing.

1636
01:52:31,800 --> 01:52:36,240
Speaker 1: He kills UH. He makes seven thousand dollars on a

1637
01:52:36,320 --> 01:52:39,439
Speaker 1: hundred and forty wolves he bounties in one year, and

1638
01:52:39,520 --> 01:52:43,120
Speaker 1: he buys a ranch in Colorado and stocks it with

1639
01:52:43,120 --> 01:52:47,160
Speaker 1: with Herford's one of the guys who is the plume

1640
01:52:47,240 --> 01:52:52,000
Speaker 1: hunter in Florida and who is almost wiping out UH

1641
01:52:52,040 --> 01:52:57,160
Speaker 1: snowy egrets in Florida and driving flamingos basically out of

1642
01:52:57,160 --> 01:53:00,639
Speaker 1: the country. This guy ends up making how much money

1643
01:53:00,640 --> 01:53:03,960
Speaker 1: doing it that he buys himself an island a yacht,

1644
01:53:04,320 --> 01:53:07,840
Speaker 1: builds a house, and puts all this great furniture, brand

1645
01:53:07,840 --> 01:53:11,080
Speaker 1: new furniture in his house. So it's a way of

1646
01:53:11,320 --> 01:53:17,360
Speaker 1: getting into the American middle class. But for somebody like

1647
01:53:17,479 --> 01:53:20,439
Speaker 1: me looking back on that which happened in my home

1648
01:53:20,479 --> 01:53:24,240
Speaker 1: state in Louisiana. I mean, who I identify most with

1649
01:53:24,439 --> 01:53:27,760
Speaker 1: is somebody like Henry David Thureau, who, looking back on

1650
01:53:27,880 --> 01:53:32,479
Speaker 1: what happened in Massachusetts before he ever came along, penned

1651
01:53:32,520 --> 01:53:37,679
Speaker 1: this incredible journal entry in eighteen fifty six where he says,

1652
01:53:37,800 --> 01:53:41,000
Speaker 1: you know, I just I don't want to look up

1653
01:53:41,200 --> 01:53:45,280
Speaker 1: at the night sky and think that before I came along,

1654
01:53:45,800 --> 01:53:48,600
Speaker 1: some demigod came along and plucked all the best of

1655
01:53:48,640 --> 01:53:51,960
Speaker 1: the constellations out of the sky, so I don't get

1656
01:53:52,000 --> 01:53:54,880
Speaker 1: to see them. He said, It's like listening to a

1657
01:53:54,960 --> 01:54:00,400
Speaker 1: symphony where hell the French horns are gone, and the

1658
01:54:00,520 --> 01:54:04,840
Speaker 1: strings are gone and the drums are gone. And he

1659
01:54:05,000 --> 01:54:10,519
Speaker 1: ends this with this classic line, I wish to know

1660
01:54:11,160 --> 01:54:16,600
Speaker 1: an entire heaven and an entire earth, not one that

1661
01:54:16,760 --> 01:54:22,040
Speaker 1: somebody has come along and defiled before I ever appear

1662
01:54:22,400 --> 01:54:26,600
Speaker 1: in my own life. And so I mean, that is

1663
01:54:26,960 --> 01:54:31,080
Speaker 1: the other side of the the story. You know. John

1664
01:54:31,120 --> 01:54:37,880
Speaker 1: mcfee's phenomenal trilogy on American geology, Uh from the Planes

1665
01:54:38,040 --> 01:54:41,080
Speaker 1: and Yeah, it was collected altogether as Annals of the

1666
01:54:41,120 --> 01:54:44,200
Speaker 1: Former World. At one point in the book he says,

1667
01:54:44,320 --> 01:54:47,400
Speaker 1: if I had to sum up this book, meaning his book,

1668
01:54:47,720 --> 01:54:50,000
Speaker 1: in one sentence, it would be that the top of

1669
01:54:50,040 --> 01:54:55,520
Speaker 1: Mount Everest is a marine limestone. Uh. Dan does the

1670
01:54:55,560 --> 01:54:59,560
Speaker 1: same thing, and he sums up this story in two

1671
01:54:59,600 --> 01:55:01,120
Speaker 1: words that he puts at the end of one of

1672
01:55:01,160 --> 01:55:12,760
Speaker 1: his chapters. And those two words are fucking pathetic. Yeah,

1673
01:55:13,080 --> 01:55:14,880
Speaker 1: all that ship you're talking about. Yeah, you know, I

1674
01:55:14,880 --> 01:55:16,960
Speaker 1: think about all the time. Man, Like if I wasn't

1675
01:55:17,000 --> 01:55:20,640
Speaker 1: to get into my own psychology, okay, which I guess

1676
01:55:20,640 --> 01:55:25,760
Speaker 1: I am, becaume there the story of the Clovis hunters

1677
01:55:25,880 --> 01:55:29,680
Speaker 1: killing everything off, it's seductive for a lot of reasons,

1678
01:55:29,720 --> 01:55:32,560
Speaker 1: like it tickles the imagination, but it's there's a seduction

1679
01:55:32,600 --> 01:55:39,320
Speaker 1: there um for this reason. And likewise, like oh, wolves

1680
01:55:39,400 --> 01:55:41,840
Speaker 1: will go to an island and kill all the moose

1681
01:55:41,920 --> 01:55:44,800
Speaker 1: or kill all the deer out an island, and and

1682
01:55:44,800 --> 01:55:49,920
Speaker 1: and you love them. You love them those stories because

1683
01:55:49,960 --> 01:55:54,680
Speaker 1: then you can sit back and go see it just happens, man,

1684
01:55:55,640 --> 01:55:59,440
Speaker 1: It just happens. Nothing to get worked up about. But

1685
01:55:59,480 --> 01:56:01,680
Speaker 1: in the bad year, in the deeper, deeper part of

1686
01:56:01,720 --> 01:56:09,680
Speaker 1: your brain, there's like there's this there's a inherited carried guilt,

1687
01:56:12,160 --> 01:56:13,720
Speaker 1: and you can be like, I don't know why dold

1688
01:56:13,760 --> 01:56:15,960
Speaker 1: wolves have it. I don't know, they don't. I don't

1689
01:56:15,960 --> 01:56:18,600
Speaker 1: think they have it. But that ain't gonna make years

1690
01:56:18,640 --> 01:56:22,080
Speaker 1: go away. No, and I don't I don't wish it

1691
01:56:22,120 --> 01:56:25,200
Speaker 1: to go away. How you wrote about that in your

1692
01:56:25,240 --> 01:56:28,840
Speaker 1: Buffalo book. I can't remember what specifically. Yeah, when you

1693
01:56:28,920 --> 01:56:32,120
Speaker 1: when you kill that buffalo, Yeah, you you wrote about

1694
01:56:32,200 --> 01:56:36,520
Speaker 1: you know you couldn't help feeling some guilt about it. Yeah,

1695
01:56:37,680 --> 01:56:41,720
Speaker 1: especially something is beleaguered and as complicated as that one.

1696
01:56:42,000 --> 01:56:43,680
Speaker 1: But now I realized that it's just a it's just

1697
01:56:43,720 --> 01:56:45,720
Speaker 1: a new be fake. It's a it's a new bee

1698
01:56:45,720 --> 01:56:48,440
Speaker 1: fake American animal. Anyways, I should have called it eight

1699
01:56:48,520 --> 01:56:50,560
Speaker 1: in seven American Buffalo. I should have called that book

1700
01:56:50,600 --> 01:56:55,680
Speaker 1: Asian Buffalo. It should have been about horses. Yeah, it

1701
01:56:55,680 --> 01:56:59,920
Speaker 1: should have been about horses. That's right, Steve well may

1702
01:57:00,040 --> 01:57:05,560
Speaker 1: In It's it's a um, it's a chance. It's a

1703
01:57:05,680 --> 01:57:09,440
Speaker 1: really challenging, uh in depth book. I don't know what

1704
01:57:09,480 --> 01:57:12,960
Speaker 1: will happen. I don't pay a super I don't know

1705
01:57:13,040 --> 01:57:15,120
Speaker 1: how it all works. But like for me to to

1706
01:57:15,240 --> 01:57:19,240
Speaker 1: see that book nominated for a National Book Award, or

1707
01:57:19,240 --> 01:57:22,160
Speaker 1: to see that book nominated for a Pulitzer prise, wouldn't

1708
01:57:22,160 --> 01:57:25,640
Speaker 1: even kind of surprise me. I don't know how you're

1709
01:57:25,640 --> 01:57:31,400
Speaker 1: gonna top it. Well, I may not be able to

1710
01:57:31,400 --> 01:57:34,680
Speaker 1: top it, that's right. I mean, I'm no doubt write

1711
01:57:34,680 --> 01:57:37,360
Speaker 1: more books, but yeah, this one is kind of a

1712
01:57:38,680 --> 01:57:43,200
Speaker 1: it's uh, it represents thinking about this since I was

1713
01:57:43,240 --> 01:57:45,360
Speaker 1: four years old, That's what. That's what I mean. I mean,

1714
01:57:45,520 --> 01:57:48,480
Speaker 1: there's so much in it. Reading I was like, how

1715
01:57:48,560 --> 01:57:50,560
Speaker 1: the hell do you know all this? There's so much

1716
01:57:50,560 --> 01:57:55,600
Speaker 1: in it, and so much note carding and and taking,

1717
01:57:56,680 --> 01:57:59,800
Speaker 1: like wildly disparate stories and sets of ideas and come

1718
01:57:59,840 --> 01:58:06,600
Speaker 1: by ironing them all, hunting everything down. Um. It's ah,

1719
01:58:07,640 --> 01:58:09,440
Speaker 1: if you had just been a historian and been an

1720
01:58:09,480 --> 01:58:15,040
Speaker 1: academic and in the end you you laid that book

1721
01:58:15,040 --> 01:58:19,280
Speaker 1: out and fell over dead, um, people will be like, oh,

1722
01:58:19,280 --> 01:58:22,960
Speaker 1: you know there, it is right what works are saying.

1723
01:58:25,040 --> 01:58:27,240
Speaker 1: But I don't know what you'll do. I don't I

1724
01:58:27,240 --> 01:58:29,600
Speaker 1: don't know how you'll I joked last night that your

1725
01:58:29,640 --> 01:58:32,640
Speaker 1: next one will have to be about the cosmos. Yeah

1726
01:58:32,760 --> 01:58:38,200
Speaker 1: you did, because I don't know where you go from here. Ah,

1727
01:58:38,600 --> 01:58:42,000
Speaker 1: unless you narrow back in. Yeah, well that's probably what

1728
01:58:42,120 --> 01:58:44,600
Speaker 1: one would do, is narrow back in so this this

1729
01:58:44,720 --> 01:58:50,200
Speaker 1: is very likely the the big story, the big narrative,

1730
01:58:50,360 --> 01:58:53,960
Speaker 1: like you might there's another. This last thing I'll point

1731
01:58:53,960 --> 01:58:56,840
Speaker 1: out about the book is, um, there's some incredible restraint there,

1732
01:58:56,880 --> 01:59:01,560
Speaker 1: because there are areas that I know, you know really

1733
01:59:01,560 --> 01:59:04,400
Speaker 1: well and that you spent years of work on and

1734
01:59:04,400 --> 01:59:08,200
Speaker 1: have written about widely, and you don't do them. Yeah,

1735
01:59:09,840 --> 01:59:12,280
Speaker 1: you know, And I was like, dude, man, that dude

1736
01:59:12,280 --> 01:59:14,360
Speaker 1: just he just he could have gotten just twenty three

1737
01:59:14,400 --> 01:59:18,200
Speaker 1: pages right there with his other ship. But you just

1738
01:59:18,640 --> 01:59:22,160
Speaker 1: the restraint, well, part of the restraint was trying to

1739
01:59:22,280 --> 01:59:25,720
Speaker 1: hold this thing to under four hundred pages, which I

1740
01:59:25,760 --> 01:59:28,720
Speaker 1: managed to do by only two pages. And so there

1741
01:59:28,760 --> 01:59:31,600
Speaker 1: were there were plenty of spots I have to say.

1742
01:59:31,600 --> 01:59:34,920
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it would be easy to write

1743
01:59:35,160 --> 01:59:38,120
Speaker 1: an eight out of this story because I'd be like,

1744
01:59:38,200 --> 01:59:41,640
Speaker 1: he damn sure knows a lot to flesh that story

1745
01:59:41,680 --> 01:59:44,080
Speaker 1: out that he didn't include the Yeah, well that just

1746
01:59:44,120 --> 01:59:47,000
Speaker 1: there were times when I said, Okay, I've already done

1747
01:59:47,080 --> 01:59:50,560
Speaker 1: something like this, so I'm not gonna go there. I mean,

1748
01:59:50,640 --> 01:59:54,960
Speaker 1: the coyote story probably yeah, sure that And then I

1749
01:59:55,000 --> 01:59:57,840
Speaker 1: mean just stuff about with when when the horse was

1750
01:59:57,920 --> 02:00:00,840
Speaker 1: reintroduced or you know, or or what might say and

1751
02:00:00,960 --> 02:00:04,800
Speaker 1: introduced to reintroduced, depending on your perspective, Like the implications

1752
02:00:04,800 --> 02:00:07,120
Speaker 1: of that, the fact that you resisted the urge just

1753
02:00:07,160 --> 02:00:11,080
Speaker 1: to lay that ship out all over you. Yeah, well

1754
02:00:11,120 --> 02:00:14,880
Speaker 1: I felt like I had done that. So and and

1755
02:00:14,920 --> 02:00:17,360
Speaker 1: as as I said, I mean a lot of it

1756
02:00:17,400 --> 02:00:21,320
Speaker 1: was trying to make this a book that that one

1757
02:00:21,480 --> 02:00:23,560
Speaker 1: could read, that you could sit out in three or

1758
02:00:23,560 --> 02:00:26,120
Speaker 1: four days and you could actually read it and not

1759
02:00:26,280 --> 02:00:28,840
Speaker 1: have to you know, I mean books that get too

1760
02:00:28,880 --> 02:00:32,080
Speaker 1: long to me. You know, you tend to after two

1761
02:00:32,160 --> 02:00:34,560
Speaker 1: hundred pages, you put them away and you may not

1762
02:00:34,720 --> 02:00:36,640
Speaker 1: go back for a month. And I was trying to

1763
02:00:36,680 --> 02:00:39,720
Speaker 1: make sure that I was writing a book that somebody

1764
02:00:39,720 --> 02:00:43,080
Speaker 1: would start and within about three or four days you

1765
02:00:43,080 --> 02:00:46,440
Speaker 1: would you would go through it. Man, I will send

1766
02:00:46,480 --> 02:00:48,360
Speaker 1: you a couple of men emails while I was reading it,

1767
02:00:48,400 --> 02:00:56,160
Speaker 1: but didn't. Well you should have. I'm I'm always up

1768
02:00:56,200 --> 02:00:59,800
Speaker 1: for main emails. Uh someday I'm gonna do uh some

1769
02:01:00,000 --> 02:01:01,360
Speaker 1: do I'm gonna take it, and I'm gonna do a

1770
02:01:01,440 --> 02:01:04,720
Speaker 1: footnoted version where where like I was, I was telling

1771
02:01:04,760 --> 02:01:06,640
Speaker 1: you last night, all my footnotes are going to begin

1772
02:01:06,680 --> 02:01:13,200
Speaker 1: with well, yeah, but stay commentary huh, well, yeah, but

1773
02:01:14,640 --> 02:01:19,800
Speaker 1: keep in mind they were super badass. Might be a

1774
02:01:21,000 --> 02:01:25,120
Speaker 1: little essay. Yeah, Steve should just take notes all over

1775
02:01:25,160 --> 02:01:27,720
Speaker 1: the book, and then we can reprint a copy of

1776
02:01:27,840 --> 02:01:31,520
Speaker 1: Dan's book with Steve notes better he reads the whole thing.

1777
02:01:31,800 --> 02:01:34,200
Speaker 1: And then I get to just pause and be like,

1778
02:01:34,520 --> 02:01:36,560
Speaker 1: what Dan's leaving out here that I think people should

1779
02:01:36,560 --> 02:01:38,880
Speaker 1: really pay attention to you, man, is like some of

1780
02:01:38,880 --> 02:01:43,320
Speaker 1: them that can be a new audio, yeah, version of

1781
02:01:43,320 --> 02:01:46,480
Speaker 1: the audio book, Like, for instance, on the Eldo Leopold stuff,

1782
02:01:46,520 --> 02:01:48,400
Speaker 1: I would pause and be like, I'd like to point

1783
02:01:48,400 --> 02:01:51,680
Speaker 1: out that Eldo Leopold was and remained throughout his entire

1784
02:01:51,760 --> 02:01:59,280
Speaker 1: life a very abada hunter play. It's like somehow that

1785
02:01:59,440 --> 02:02:04,360
Speaker 1: got left doubt age do this to you. But we

1786
02:02:04,480 --> 02:02:07,440
Speaker 1: gotta get to some trivia. Dan's gonna be Dan's gonna

1787
02:02:07,440 --> 02:02:10,120
Speaker 1: win trivia, I'm afraid. Okay, well, it looks like last

1788
02:02:10,160 --> 02:02:12,840
Speaker 1: time the trivia guess once that was my lovely wife

1789
02:02:12,840 --> 02:02:19,280
Speaker 1: Adrian say that congratulations to her. You're gonna say for trivia, right,

1790
02:02:19,000 --> 02:02:23,760
Speaker 1: all right? Stay two for trivia. Wild New World, The

1791
02:02:23,840 --> 02:02:29,600
Speaker 1: Epic Story of Animals and People in America by Dan Flores.

1792
02:02:29,640 --> 02:02:34,160
Speaker 1: Check it out and it'll it'll stretch your brain out

1793
02:02:34,880 --> 02:02:39,200
Speaker 1: and and sometimes uncomfortable ways, but ultimately your brain will

1794
02:02:39,200 --> 02:02:44,920
Speaker 1: just be bigger and in better So enjoy and for

1795
02:02:44,920 --> 02:02:51,480
Speaker 1: people listening now, it's actually available. It is available. Wild

1796
02:02:51,480 --> 02:02:58,560
Speaker 1: new world, it's a wild old world. Thanks Dan, Are

1797
02:02:58,560 --> 02:03:01,320
Speaker 1: you bad guys like you? Tw