Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten in my case underwear listening un podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't protect anything presented by first, like creating proven
Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear
Speaker 1: for every hunt first like go farther, stay longer. Oh hey,
Speaker 1: real quick, before we get started. I have sitting next
Speaker 1: to me a what I thought to be an extremely
Speaker 1: impressive moose shed, and Jana's kind of negged it. You
Speaker 1: know what negging is? I don't know the exact definition, Like, uh,
Speaker 1: how do you explain it? Phil? When you nag something,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a strat feel smaller on purpose, it's
Speaker 1: a straight It was it was popular state. It was
Speaker 1: popularized as a strategy to pick up. Like let's say here,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna be me and Krant are gonna
Speaker 1: role play. No, no, I don't want to do it
Speaker 1: that way. Me and Krant are gonna role play? You
Speaker 1: neg me? Like, like how you use it as a
Speaker 1: pickup strategy as a hit on strategy, like I would
Speaker 1: say to Krinn instead of being like, oh, let's say
Speaker 1: let's say we're young or young single people okay, And
Speaker 1: I would approach Krinn and I would say, um. I
Speaker 1: could approach Krean and said, like, my goodness, you look
Speaker 1: beautiful today, right, and that has one that's one approach.
Speaker 1: Or I could come up and go like your shoesn't
Speaker 1: look kind of funny, And that was popularized for a
Speaker 1: time as a way too, as a subversive way to
Speaker 1: hit on someone. If you don't come in with a compliment,
Speaker 1: you come in with a with a like you know
Speaker 1: you should get you should change your hair. I don't
Speaker 1: like your haircut doesn't look great on you. And then
Speaker 1: you leverage that. Then that's leveraged. This is there's a
Speaker 1: whole book about how when people get all interested in
Speaker 1: kind of responding to that, there's a whole book about
Speaker 1: how to do it. Like Steve, I'm not sure your
Speaker 1: glasses matcher today, and it's in instead of the expected
Speaker 1: thing would be like, holy cow, you look amazing. Would
Speaker 1: you like to have dinner? You come in and you're like, man,
Speaker 1: you should think about your updating your wardrobe. Right, and
Speaker 1: you've set this whole You set and play this dynamic. Right.
Speaker 1: The tension starts from every woman in the world just
Speaker 1: just can't help, but live the rest of her life
Speaker 1: to impress that man got it and try. It's very subversive,
Speaker 1: it's very manipulated, manipulated. Let's get back to nagging. Oh well,
Speaker 1: I showed you my moose. I showed you my moose
Speaker 1: antler and it's n e G. I showed you this
Speaker 1: definition I would check the urban diction urban. It's like
Speaker 1: a slang term point being. I walked in, like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, how do you have something impressive? You just
Speaker 1: kind of walk in with it? He was so happy
Speaker 1: about it. I'm sorry I didn't. I didn't mean to
Speaker 1: pull your attention away. You noticed this this giant moose andler. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean it's pretty huge. It's like as big as
Speaker 1: like a baby's cradle. Yeah, I was. I was pointing
Speaker 1: out to our guests, who who I'm about to introduce.
Speaker 1: I was pointing out that I have a plan in
Speaker 1: which I'm going to turn it into a chair for
Speaker 1: my kids. It's that big. Well, I brought it in
Speaker 1: and Yohn, He's like, why are you showing me that?
Speaker 1: I don't know, is it big? Just right now? What's interesting?
Speaker 1: Are you going to make it into a chair? After
Speaker 1: you saw the pictures of the moose andler chairs that
Speaker 1: I showed you from Latvie. No, no, no, it is
Speaker 1: a chair. No, it doesn't need to be. It already
Speaker 1: is a chair. Look at it huge. But that the
Speaker 1: idea from we're gonna do a whole might be We're
Speaker 1: gonna do a whole episode about Yi's Latvian trip. We
Speaker 1: just decided, so we'll we'll save that. Uh no, point
Speaker 1: being the only reason I'm bringing this thing up is,
Speaker 1: uh we there's been a long thing like how to
Speaker 1: bring this this, this is this is applicable to a
Speaker 1: very small subset of of our audience. Is how to
Speaker 1: get stuff from Alaska down to the lower forty eight.
Speaker 1: So this year we're up hunting and Clay got a
Speaker 1: moose and he had the moose rack. I had my
Speaker 1: moose shed. We all the moose meat, and we used
Speaker 1: a service called Alaska Trophy Express. It's a great job, dude.
Speaker 1: We had like just frozen moose meat, the skull. I
Speaker 1: had my shed antler. It's like it's cheaper than than
Speaker 1: trying to get it all packaged and shipping it home
Speaker 1: on a plane now with baggage for ease in lo
Speaker 1: and behold, not too much long later there it all.
Speaker 1: This was cheaper. I don't know the exact details on,
Speaker 1: but we ran the numbers and it was cheaper, especially
Speaker 1: like you know, especially if you wind up with the people.
Speaker 1: Got a couple of moves and just showed up safe
Speaker 1: and sound. Clay stuff got delivered down to He had
Speaker 1: a drive. You know, he lives on the border but
Speaker 1: Arkansas in Oklahoma, and he drove over to Oklahoma and
Speaker 1: picked it up. My my antlers sitting right here in
Speaker 1: the damn office the Laska Trophy Express with some attention
Speaker 1: to it as well. Look look at the duct tape
Speaker 1: to make sure that that that lower prong doesn't get
Speaker 1: broken off. Right. They did a wonderful job. Um, and
Speaker 1: I was holding off on standex I wanted to see
Speaker 1: how it went. But they did a wonderful job. Uh.
Speaker 1: Our Steve guest Dan Flores, who we did an event
Speaker 1: with at the bookstore last night, who's out promoting his
Speaker 1: new book, Wild New World. I'm gonna have you explained
Speaker 1: the book real quick. But first I want to point
Speaker 1: out there's something you might not know. You when we
Speaker 1: were first starting the show out, you were in one
Speaker 1: not first starting the show off, but in the infancy
Speaker 1: of the show. I can't remember what episode number it was.
Speaker 1: The episode we did with you was our first episode
Speaker 1: that ever like really got traction. Hm. That was shared
Speaker 1: you know, that that had a life that lived, They
Speaker 1: had a life at the time that kind of lived
Speaker 1: beyond the normal subscriber base. Well, yeah, okay, it was
Speaker 1: kind of one of our first, like real serious shows
Speaker 1: that really just became a thing for us. This was
Speaker 1: the one we did in Seattle, that's correct. It looks
Speaker 1: like that might be episode three three. Was it that early?
Speaker 1: It may have been that early, but it looks like
Speaker 1: Dan's been on episode thirty three in we went We
Speaker 1: went back to the well, didn't we m hm. Tell
Speaker 1: folks about your new book. Damn um okay, I want
Speaker 1: to set it up for you though. Yes, I read
Speaker 1: the entirety of that book, probably within about seventy yards
Speaker 1: of that moose antler without knowing it was there, Without
Speaker 1: knowing that antler was there. Yeah, Well, finished the book
Speaker 1: and then realized it was there, and realized it was
Speaker 1: an antler sitting right beside you in the grass. It's
Speaker 1: kind of tucked into some willows. But yeah, I read
Speaker 1: the whole damn book, not knowing it was there, but
Speaker 1: it was there the whole time. Well, I suppose that
Speaker 1: says something about either your power of concentration or the
Speaker 1: ability of the book to hold you. Uh. Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, Steve, thanks for having me on again. It's
Speaker 1: great to be back with you guys, and hang out
Speaker 1: with with you as well. Um. This new book, while
Speaker 1: New World is the title and the subtitle is an
Speaker 1: epic story of animals and people in America, is an
Speaker 1: attempt to try to, uh to write in a single
Speaker 1: volume of a little short of four hundred pages, um,
Speaker 1: the whole story or at least a whole story of
Speaker 1: the North American human, wildlife, wild animal experience. And um
Speaker 1: it's what is known in the trade as a big history.
Speaker 1: It was kind of inspired when I began working on
Speaker 1: it by you've all Harari Sapiens, which I know almost
Speaker 1: all of us have read, which of course was a
Speaker 1: big history book about the origin of humans. Um. But
Speaker 1: I wanted to focus specifically on North America. It's where
Speaker 1: I live, It's the country that the United States is
Speaker 1: the place that I know best and where I know
Speaker 1: the amal's best in the history best. But I wanted
Speaker 1: uh to do justice to it. And so I've started
Speaker 1: the story sixty six million years ago. This is a
Speaker 1: book that in three pages goes from sixty six million
Speaker 1: years ago down basically two events earlier in two so,
Speaker 1: in other words, up to yesterday. Um. And I wanted
Speaker 1: to start it that early because the only way to
Speaker 1: really explain how North America acquired its beast sherry of animals, uh,
Speaker 1: is to look at what happened on the continent in
Speaker 1: the wake of the great asteroid impact that wiped out
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs and created the age of mammals. Of course,
Speaker 1: we oh that asteroid which which is called, by the way,
Speaker 1: the chick Salube impact or I didn't know, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: never heard that. We're you point out that it's a
Speaker 1: great word. It's a great word. It's a great word.
Speaker 1: Uh uh and it's uh it's coming into more common
Speaker 1: use and recognition. I think it's named after a little
Speaker 1: Mayan town on the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula,
Speaker 1: which is where this uh, this asteroid hit um And,
Speaker 1: as I said, the purpose of talking about it to
Speaker 1: begin with and describing the the effect of of the
Speaker 1: impact on on the continent and on Earth. It was
Speaker 1: really to set up the age that follows, which is
Speaker 1: called the paleo scene, which is when North America began
Speaker 1: to acquire its animals, and that acquisition took place as
Speaker 1: a result of evolution of species that emerged in the
Speaker 1: wake of the demise of the of the dinosaurs. Uh,
Speaker 1: and also as a result of the migration of animals
Speaker 1: from other parts of the world, the most spectacular and
Speaker 1: charismatic of which animals like mammoths and massdons, for example,
Speaker 1: and bison came out of Asia. Hey. Uh, I want
Speaker 1: to pause from it to ask a couple of questions
Speaker 1: about that strike had there If that strike happened right now, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's no way humans had survived or is that not true? Well,
Speaker 1: it would be. So that strike wiped out seventy of
Speaker 1: of life on Earth. It didn't take out everything. Um,
Speaker 1: it took out most terrestrial life, though. I mean we
Speaker 1: ended up in terms of vertebrates in North America with
Speaker 1: only a couple of percent of creatures surviving it. I
Speaker 1: mean alligators survived it, crocodiles did, mostly reptiles and amphibians.
Speaker 1: And what enable things to survived was that they tended
Speaker 1: to be uh. Hidden back behind the mountain ranges on
Speaker 1: the opposite side of where the impact took place, and
Speaker 1: so it was possible for a few creatures that were
Speaker 1: isolated to survive. And I suppose, uh that's probably what
Speaker 1: would happen with people if we had an impact like
Speaker 1: this one. I mean, this was a solar system wide impact.
Speaker 1: It was a gigantic asteroid more than seven miles uh
Speaker 1: in diameter, and I was traveling at two so it
Speaker 1: was the huge impact. We did it. We did this
Speaker 1: conversation last night at the local bookstore. I was talking
Speaker 1: about I never and the two things never occurred to
Speaker 1: me until I read Dan's book, is that it wasn't
Speaker 1: the first time that thing passed by. No, right, humans
Speaker 1: would be like, oh there it is again. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: got a little closer. And every thing is that hit
Speaker 1: at a shallow angle? Yeah, like almost maximized for just
Speaker 1: blasting stuff right straight down out of the sky. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it did not hit from straight down. It hit at
Speaker 1: an angle, and it hit at an angle that uh
Speaker 1: was really severe on North America because it was it
Speaker 1: hit basically in the what would today be the Gulf
Speaker 1: of Mexico. Uh So North America a lot of it
Speaker 1: got fried. I mean, creatures just really got wiped out.
Speaker 1: Of course, the aftermath of it, it goes for several weeks,
Speaker 1: producing tsunamis that are a mile tall, that bounce off
Speaker 1: of land all over the globe. Uh and if still left,
Speaker 1: uh these big piled up remnants of mud and debris
Speaker 1: five and six stories high on the ocean floor. I
Speaker 1: mean those things still exist and U and also hold
Speaker 1: do they have chunks of that thing? Yeah? Yeah, that
Speaker 1: the asteroid itself basically was obliterated, But what we have
Speaker 1: are the remnants of the shocked geology from where it
Speaker 1: where it hit. But you can't there's no there's no
Speaker 1: known piece of the thing. I'm not aware of there
Speaker 1: being any known pieces of the thing still there, although uh,
Speaker 1: I may be wrong about that. Because we do know
Speaker 1: that it was we do know what the substance of
Speaker 1: the asteroid was. It was a chondrite, which is the
Speaker 1: most one of the most common forms of meteorites today
Speaker 1: that fly through the sky and and produce those beautiful
Speaker 1: uh night sky uh comment like like appearances. But so
Speaker 1: we know that it was a condrite, that may imply
Speaker 1: that there was some some residue of it that that
Speaker 1: enabled people to identify what it was. But I was
Speaker 1: really intrigued when I was doing the research on this,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of new work on it which
Speaker 1: I ride to. I tried to incorporate in the book
Speaker 1: by the fact that it was such a blast that
Speaker 1: the ojecta uh from the impact exited Earth's gravity and
Speaker 1: essentially spread across the entire Solar System. And there are
Speaker 1: paleobiologists out there who argue that there is a good
Speaker 1: chance with an impact on a planet like Earth that
Speaker 1: was filled with life, that although it nearly destroyed life
Speaker 1: on Earth, it very likely spread microbial life across the
Speaker 1: Solar System two places like Mars to Jupiter's moons to
Speaker 1: Saturn's moons. We're not gonna know any of this until
Speaker 1: we definitively find out whether or not there is life
Speaker 1: on places like Enceladus or Europa or uh some of
Speaker 1: the moons of the outer Solar System. But this impact
Speaker 1: was was large enough that it may have done that
Speaker 1: very thing. It may have been a kind of a
Speaker 1: genesis effect for life in the Solar System. Did you
Speaker 1: research at all, um, when you're looking at the impact
Speaker 1: of such a great thing that has such mass and speed,
Speaker 1: could it or did it affect at all like the
Speaker 1: Earth's rotation, it's orbit, its path, and if not, if
Speaker 1: it was still super so small, like what would it take,
Speaker 1: did you like look into what would it take to
Speaker 1: actually move the Earth out of its orbit or to
Speaker 1: pause its rotation for a second? Yeah? I uh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, as a as a writer who is not
Speaker 1: you know, a scholar of this um, I was able
Speaker 1: to use only the the articles that I found, and
Speaker 1: I haven't found anyone yet who has actually investigated whether
Speaker 1: or not this this nudge the Earth in its orbit
Speaker 1: or slowed its rotation or anything like that. I mean, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we think that the impact that created the Moon,
Speaker 1: I mean very early in in Earth's formation, there was
Speaker 1: a gigantic impact that probably produced the moon, blew the
Speaker 1: Moon off the Earth to create the Moon that orbits
Speaker 1: around our planet today. That that one probably did affect
Speaker 1: the orbit and probably the rotation, But that would have
Speaker 1: been one many times larger than even this chick slube
Speaker 1: impact or uh and the chicks alube impactor seems you know,
Speaker 1: that seems plenty big enough that it can produce a
Speaker 1: mass extinction. It's hard to imagine one that would be
Speaker 1: even larger. But I mean, you know, you look at
Speaker 1: the Moon through a telescope, or look at Mars sometimes
Speaker 1: photographs of Mars. I mean, and it's fairly clear that
Speaker 1: planets are constantly being bombarded, particularly by asteroids that formed
Speaker 1: from the planet that wasn't created between the orbits of
Speaker 1: Mars and Jupiter. That's the asteroid belt, and that was
Speaker 1: a place where a planet was trying to form and
Speaker 1: never quite did so. And so it's the spot that
Speaker 1: shoots all these projectiles out through the through the Solar System,
Speaker 1: especially to the inner planets of the of the system.
Speaker 1: So I mean, I include a photograph uh in the
Speaker 1: book of UH this gigantic to me, gigantic meteor crater
Speaker 1: in Arizona, because when I was right, yeah, no, there's
Speaker 1: no looking at that one, and what happened? No, you
Speaker 1: don't look at it and wonder I mean, when I
Speaker 1: was writing about this, I thought, well, you know, hell,
Speaker 1: I've got I mean, I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Speaker 1: I've got there's a meteor crater. I know, that's only
Speaker 1: about a five hour drive from here. So I hopped
Speaker 1: in my jeep and drove over there to look at
Speaker 1: this thing. And uh, I mean it is worth. It's
Speaker 1: very far off Interstate forty east of Flagstaff, just a
Speaker 1: little south on a dirt road. I mean, it's well
Speaker 1: worth going out and having a look at. But I
Speaker 1: wanted to shoot a photograph I've had in order to
Speaker 1: sort of give readers of the book some sense of, Oh, no,
Speaker 1: it does a great job of it. I don't I
Speaker 1: don't want to dwell too long on this whole, Like,
Speaker 1: we gotta get from there. We gotta get from there yesterday.
Speaker 1: But got to two things. Have you, um you saw
Speaker 1: in the news that that NASA just was toying around
Speaker 1: with how to nudge, nudging an asteroid to alter its
Speaker 1: trajectory as like a sort of, you know, a potential
Speaker 1: future defense mechanism from such thing happening in the future.
Speaker 1: And have you seen the movie Melancholia. I have not
Speaker 1: seen Melancholia. No, it's dark one through most of the movie.
Speaker 1: You can't everybody, it's just a movie about people going
Speaker 1: about their lives, and you can't tell. It's just everything's off.
Speaker 1: Everything's frantic and off, and it takes you long time
Speaker 1: to realize that it's it's counting down to a strike
Speaker 1: mm hmm. And everyone's known for a long time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just everything's gonna end. And so it's a it's
Speaker 1: a it's not society is an unraveling, like in a
Speaker 1: way that you know, the people who traffic in zombie
Speaker 1: movies would have it unroll. It's just unraveling socially in
Speaker 1: strange ways, and an eventus you put together what the
Speaker 1: issue is. This is what's looming over and you're you're
Speaker 1: experiencing you're experiencing life, um toward its end. But it's
Speaker 1: been known for quite some time. Well I think that's
Speaker 1: that's precisely what would happen, because we do have the
Speaker 1: ability now to uh figure out when an asteroid is
Speaker 1: coming close enough to hit or to pass very very
Speaker 1: near us. Um. So yeah, I mean NASA obviously takes
Speaker 1: all of this seriously enough that it's developed and it's
Speaker 1: working on a technology to try to deflect asteroids that
Speaker 1: could possibly strike Earth. And you know, as you just said,
Speaker 1: we had about ten days ago an example of what
Speaker 1: appeared to be certainly a successful hit it and uh
Speaker 1: working out the movements of that body through space. It
Speaker 1: looks like it wasn't nudged out of the direction it
Speaker 1: was it was going previously. Uh. In that moment as you,
Speaker 1: as you explained, sets up where you've basically wiped the
Speaker 1: slate clean, and it gives you a great starting point
Speaker 1: to explain how things came to be here when humans
Speaker 1: discovered the place. Yes, that's what I try to do
Speaker 1: with this opening chapter. Um. And so after the chick
Speaker 1: slue impact, I mean, I'm able to cover millions of
Speaker 1: years uh in pretty rapid fashion by in effect describing
Speaker 1: the evolution of the North American species that come to
Speaker 1: be kind of the icons of continental evolution. And they're
Speaker 1: not quite the animals that most people assume, because two
Speaker 1: of the most iconic creatures that emerge from North American
Speaker 1: evolution we don't many of us don't even think of
Speaker 1: as being American animals. And one of those is that
Speaker 1: the camel, which evolved some forty five million years ago
Speaker 1: in North America, eventually spread to other parts of the
Speaker 1: world where it survived, but by about ten thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: Camel's the most recent camel that we had in North
Speaker 1: America was called Yesterday's camel. It was a single humped
Speaker 1: camel that would look very familiar UH to those of
Speaker 1: us who have the image of a camel in our heads,
Speaker 1: and it became extinct about ten thousand years ago. And
Speaker 1: the other animal, which of course UH has produced a
Speaker 1: modern day dilemma is the whore, which is a distinctively
Speaker 1: evolved North American UH group of animals that emerge fifty
Speaker 1: six million years ago, fairly quickly after the the chicks
Speaker 1: alop impact. And UH they also work here down to
Speaker 1: about eight thousand years ago we think, when once again
Speaker 1: they became extinct in North and South America and somehow
Speaker 1: survived in the rest of the world. But in addition
Speaker 1: to those, I mean we we evolved UH wolves and coyotes.
Speaker 1: Those are the family of canads are North American creatures
Speaker 1: from about five and a half million years ago. So
Speaker 1: they've been around singing what I call in another book
Speaker 1: of mine, the original national anthem in America for for
Speaker 1: a very long time. UH. Jaguars are North American evolved cat.
Speaker 1: We have a whole host of species that that we
Speaker 1: know are distinctively American evolved animals, but many of the
Speaker 1: ones that UM that Europeans from the last five hundred
Speaker 1: years have thought of and and that wildlife departments still
Speaker 1: kind of think of as the classic North American animals
Speaker 1: are actually migrants from other parts of the world, from
Speaker 1: places like Asia. So newbies too, Yeah, newbies. I mean,
Speaker 1: as I was saying last night at the bookstore, I
Speaker 1: mean one of the ones that we have now realized
Speaker 1: here just in the last why you why I had
Speaker 1: you talked about that? Yeah? Yeah, is the buffalo? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So we were we were discussing. I was discussing one
Speaker 1: place where I think where I was challenging Dan. I
Speaker 1: think I said, you're out of your mind, is um?
Speaker 1: I was putting to Dan, how uh, considering the debate
Speaker 1: around wild horses, feral horses or wild depending on your sentiments,
Speaker 1: the debate around areas where you have conflict between feral
Speaker 1: horses and native you know what people would call native wildlife,
Speaker 1: like desert big horns and mule deer. Um, how could
Speaker 1: you be a wild horse advocate considering that they're in
Speaker 1: some ways detrimental to native wildlife? And and I was
Speaker 1: teeing Dan up to explain his viewpoint, which which I
Speaker 1: know from reading the book about you know, the need
Speaker 1: to be precise and careful around throwing around like native
Speaker 1: wildlife when you look at it from a deep history perspective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. And so I mean the horses probably
Speaker 1: our classic example of that very thing that you teat
Speaker 1: up for me, because it's an animal that has been
Speaker 1: around for fifty six million years in North America, with
Speaker 1: the single exception of the eight nine thousand years prior
Speaker 1: to fifteen hundred or so when Europeans reintroduced these animals
Speaker 1: to nor America. So they were just gone for a
Speaker 1: very small amount of time, which is one of the reasons.
Speaker 1: As a result of their adaptation in North America and
Speaker 1: their evolution here, they've done so well when we when
Speaker 1: we brought them back, I mean they were completely preadapted,
Speaker 1: having evolved here two conditions in North America. Um. But
Speaker 1: the point of that chapter two describe what happened in
Speaker 1: North America after the the impact is to set up
Speaker 1: the beast shary that was here when humans arrived. And
Speaker 1: the last about eight or nine pages of chapter one
Speaker 1: is actually about the turn to Africa then and describe
Speaker 1: the evolution of of humans there and eventually they're spread
Speaker 1: humanity spread out of Africa around the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: And so what I'm trying trying to to create. Obviously,
Speaker 1: is the possibility of humans ultimately finding these sort of
Speaker 1: lost continents North and South America, which are uh the
Speaker 1: farthest away from Africa on the planet. They're the last
Speaker 1: continents that humans migrating out of Africa find. And what
Speaker 1: they find there is this unique beastary that's composed of
Speaker 1: all these animals that evolved in America and a whole
Speaker 1: host of others that ended up over time traveling the
Speaker 1: land bridges between Eurasia and America and becoming part of
Speaker 1: our our native beast here animals like mastodons and mammoths
Speaker 1: and sabertooth cats and all the bears that we have,
Speaker 1: all the deer, all the sheep, um, the mountain goats uh,
Speaker 1: and of course the bison, which is I was about
Speaker 1: say a minute ago, is one of the last ones
Speaker 1: to arrive. We think bison only arrived in North America
Speaker 1: about two hundred fifty thousand years ago. Uh. Passenger pigeons,
Speaker 1: for example, had come or the progenitors of passenger pigeons
Speaker 1: we think fifteen million years ago, and mammoth's seventeen million
Speaker 1: years ago. So we had animals that had come to
Speaker 1: North America and become part of the native bastry far
Speaker 1: far longer ago in the past than than bison did.
Speaker 1: And yet we think of bison, you know, I'm not
Speaker 1: arguing against this, but we do think of them as
Speaker 1: being our classic North American iconic animal, distinctly American, distribute American. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You there's something that surprise when you're describing the how
Speaker 1: things shook out with our bast areas that and I
Speaker 1: might be getting this a little bit wrong. Is you
Speaker 1: can talk about imagining the western half of the country
Speaker 1: is being easy attic. Yeah, in the eastern half of
Speaker 1: the country was it? Is it more of a European
Speaker 1: And my message is up, no, no, you're not. Uh no.
Speaker 1: I I do make that point and in several places
Speaker 1: in the book, um and sort of start with that
Speaker 1: as a essential premise of the book by describing what
Speaker 1: North America was like at the time of that that
Speaker 1: asteroid impact. It was not actually a single continent yet
Speaker 1: it consisted of two pieces. Appalachia is the eastern Peace
Speaker 1: and it's basically from the Mississippi Valley eastward to the
Speaker 1: today's Atlantic coast, and of course the Appalachian Mountains are
Speaker 1: already in place, a very very old mountain range, and
Speaker 1: the connectivity through land bridges to that piece of North
Speaker 1: America was to Europe through UH today's Greenland and Iceland,
Speaker 1: and UH down through the British Isles into Europe. The
Speaker 1: western piece, which was in the two pieces were separated
Speaker 1: by what's called the Inland the Great Inland Sea, and
Speaker 1: the Western Peace, which is known as Lara Media is
Speaker 1: basically a piece that would be from the Rocky Mountains,
Speaker 1: which didn't exist yet at the time of the impact
Speaker 1: westward to the Pacific coast and it's it's connections. Land
Speaker 1: bridge connections were to Eurasia on the on the western side,
Speaker 1: primarily to Asia itself, and so the exchanges of animals
Speaker 1: to those two different parts of America tended to come
Speaker 1: from two different directions. I mean, even some of the
Speaker 1: European naturalists who got to North America UH in the
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds. For example, Mark Catesby, a famous UH British
Speaker 1: nationalists who who works in the American South, was far
Speaker 1: more interested in America's birds and reptiles because he thought
Speaker 1: the mammals in the eastern part of North America that
Speaker 1: he was himself studying were too much like the mammals
Speaker 1: of of Western Europe for him to spend much time
Speaker 1: on them, So he sort of ignored the mammals because
Speaker 1: they were familiar and focused on on these other groups.
Speaker 1: Whereas when people like Lewis and Clark, for example, crossed
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River and began to approach the Great Plains,
Speaker 1: the Rockies, the Pacific Coast, I mean, they their journals
Speaker 1: are full of these very distinct impressions of being in
Speaker 1: a whole new world with animals that, having grown up
Speaker 1: in places like Virginia and Tennessee, none of them had
Speaker 1: ever seen before, they had never been exposed to. They
Speaker 1: were all brand new to Western science. I mean, from
Speaker 1: prong horns to prairie dogs to mule deer to grizzlies.
Speaker 1: It was a completely different world. And it's a world
Speaker 1: that was much more influenced by Asia and migration out
Speaker 1: of Asia than the eastern side of the continent that
Speaker 1: was more influenced by by Western Europe. I'd love to
Speaker 1: cover it again, but we've covered so many times with
Speaker 1: um archaeologists and different paleontologists. The the blitz Creeg hypothesis
Speaker 1: in the in the in the correlations between UM the
Speaker 1: arrival of humans in the New World and the extinctions
Speaker 1: of the man with the Masodon, and all the debates
Speaker 1: about who is to blame. UM. So I don't want
Speaker 1: to I don't I'd love to you, but I don't
Speaker 1: want to rehash it. How but you get a new
Speaker 1: thing I haven't thought of for a long time. So
Speaker 1: you you cover the Clovis period UM, and the chapter
Speaker 1: is via the Beautiful And I learned a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff about Clovis that I had never known. UM. I
Speaker 1: had never known an accounting of how many Clovis points
Speaker 1: archaeologists have recovered in the continent and where they came from,
Speaker 1: which was fascinating. And I learned all kinds of suff
Speaker 1: about Clovis. And anyone that reads a book is gonna
Speaker 1: I guarantee you, I don't care how checked out you
Speaker 1: are on ice AH hunters, You're gonna learn more about
Speaker 1: ice A hunters. And you cover the extinctions and the
Speaker 1: mysteries and different explanations for the extinctions, and in some
Speaker 1: of the smoking guns that did attribute human cause to
Speaker 1: those extinctions, and other stuff beautifully. Well. Then you then
Speaker 1: you get into a period in the book, which you
Speaker 1: I think you called the Native period, and we go
Speaker 1: through all these extinctions when humans arrive, but then you
Speaker 1: focus in on what doesn't happen for ten thousand years
Speaker 1: extinct and stop for ten thousand years you have people here,
Speaker 1: extinctions stop and then holy ship, do they start back
Speaker 1: up again when Europeans arrive. But but can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about why they stopped, what went on
Speaker 1: that where you had some semblance of of stasis with
Speaker 1: North American wildlife. Yeah, it's a it's a fascinating period
Speaker 1: because it speaks to this, uh, this almost romantic hope
Speaker 1: we have that at some point in time humans uh
Speaker 1: were a benevolent force in nature and that somehow we
Speaker 1: were able to go in the past, we hope, looking
Speaker 1: back on it as a kind of a lesson for
Speaker 1: us now, we were able to go for many thousands
Speaker 1: of years, in the case of North America, ten thousand
Speaker 1: years after the Poli Sustine extinction with almost no extinctions.
Speaker 1: Uh you know you're talking about. Yeah, there's there's one.
Speaker 1: It's not it's not quite a complete success story. There
Speaker 1: is one. There is a flightless sea duck on the
Speaker 1: Pacific coast of North America basically from the Channel Islands
Speaker 1: in California along the California coast up into Oregon. Um
Speaker 1: that was present when this period, which I refer to
Speaker 1: as Native America. Yeah, I call the chapter Ravens and
Speaker 1: Coyotes America after these deity figures. But it's basically ten
Speaker 1: thousand years of Native North America after the end of
Speaker 1: the Palistocene. And we know that those sea ducks were
Speaker 1: hunted um as soon as this period begins, and they
Speaker 1: do finally become extinct, but it takes seventy five hundred
Speaker 1: years for this to happen. They don't become extinct according
Speaker 1: to the archaeological sites of about eight or ten different
Speaker 1: uh kills of these sea ducks until about twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: So even with hunting, the sea ducks themselves last a
Speaker 1: long time. I will also say that flightless birds all
Speaker 1: over the world. As humans spread out of Africa and
Speaker 1: settle other parts of the world, flightless birds are usually
Speaker 1: the first things to go. They're the low hanging fruit.
Speaker 1: That's what people can get at easily. Uh when we
Speaker 1: have dogs, the dogs can get at them two and
Speaker 1: so flightless birds of all kinds all over the world
Speaker 1: are going to go pretty quickly after humans arrived. It
Speaker 1: was the Dodo flightless, it was yeah, and then the
Speaker 1: MOA's and the MOA's the Great Hawk, which was our
Speaker 1: northern hemisphere penguin, which became extinct during the eighteen forties.
Speaker 1: It was one of those that became extinct as a
Speaker 1: result of the UH, the sort of mayhem you mentioned
Speaker 1: after Europeans arrived. But this ten thousand year period is
Speaker 1: really fascinating for the relative lack of extinctions UM. And
Speaker 1: we've also made it into this kind of UH, this
Speaker 1: kind of baseline model, because Europeans preserved when they arrived
Speaker 1: five hundred years ago this image of UH, this feconed wonderful,
Speaker 1: kind of virgin continent that was just brimming with wildlife
Speaker 1: of all kinds. And so at the very end of
Speaker 1: that ten thousand years you have this this European UH
Speaker 1: journaling that describes a continent that was really rich in life.
Speaker 1: So the question obviously is how did this happen? How
Speaker 1: was it possible for people to live here for ten
Speaker 1: thousand years and inflict almost no extinctions in contrast to
Speaker 1: the earlier period and the later period, And so it
Speaker 1: was it was something of a puzzle to figure out
Speaker 1: because not frankly, hardly anybody has tried to work on this,
Speaker 1: and in contemporary like in Europe during that ten thousand years,
Speaker 1: they never slowed down. I mean they continued to like,
Speaker 1: they continued to extirpate, you know, from Great Britain and
Speaker 1: just on on and on like species. Maybe maybe it
Speaker 1: hit a crescendo with the Plcesne extinctions, but they continued
Speaker 1: to whittle away at the place. They whittled away at
Speaker 1: it to the point where the only reason in Western
Speaker 1: Europe in particular, that we still had horses, and we
Speaker 1: still had wild cattle rocks, uh, and we still had sheep,
Speaker 1: and goats were numerous enough that they were more difficult.
Speaker 1: But cattle and horses in particular survived only because we
Speaker 1: domesticated them. Had we not domesticated them, we would have
Speaker 1: simply in Western Europe followed the trajectory of the earlier
Speaker 1: period where I mean there's a there's a side in
Speaker 1: France where the remains of twenty thousand horses have been
Speaker 1: excavated from being corralled and slaughtered by these these late hunters.
Speaker 1: So yes, the that was over a period of time
Speaker 1: that was over time, it was Yeah, it wasn't a
Speaker 1: single event would have been quite a rodeo, but uh no,
Speaker 1: and horses obviously were you know, they were really hard
Speaker 1: to kill. I mean, you know, I I have information
Speaker 1: in the earlier parts of the book about the Neanderthal
Speaker 1: hunters who very clearly were hunting horses, and I mean
Speaker 1: these guys ended up being beaten to death by close
Speaker 1: in encounters with these really powerful, aggressive animals, I mean
Speaker 1: broken thigh bones and fractured faces and gall dout eyes
Speaker 1: and and so it was not easy to do that,
Speaker 1: but Europeans managed to reach to get horses to the
Speaker 1: point where we had to domesticate them, essentially to save them.
Speaker 1: In North America, though, here's this ten thousand year period
Speaker 1: where hardly anything like that really happens. And what I
Speaker 1: came to uh and I start that chapter out by
Speaker 1: the way by uh by climbing up on the cliff
Speaker 1: at the Madison Buffalo Jump one morning and walking back
Speaker 1: to the spot where I had read that the herds
Speaker 1: were often started running towards the edge of the cliff
Speaker 1: and running it myself down to the point where the
Speaker 1: animals were falling off the cliff into this huge bone
Speaker 1: bed five six seven ft deep at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the cliff, and sort of speculating with that sort of strategy,
Speaker 1: which happened all over wherever buffalo were found, I mean
Speaker 1: the buffalo jump. At one point down in West Texas
Speaker 1: a place place called Bonfire Shelter. So many animals were
Speaker 1: driven off that cliff that the reason it has that
Speaker 1: name today is because they spontaneously combusted a huge massive
Speaker 1: animals at the foot of the cliff spontaneously combusted and
Speaker 1: burned this cliff for hundreds of feet up towards its rim.
Speaker 1: How then with those kind of techniques were people able
Speaker 1: to do this ten thousand things? I got to interrupt you.
Speaker 1: I was my boy was mowing the lawn and I
Speaker 1: was trying to save up leaf clippings, you know, for
Speaker 1: the garden and stuff. And he left, so he like
Speaker 1: parks the lawnmower over a can of gas, leaving all
Speaker 1: the leaf clippings in the leaf bag. Oh boy, I'm
Speaker 1: trying to explain him when he like does not believe me,
Speaker 1: I'm like, listen, man, you can't like that stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: can spontaneously combust. How could that be true? I'm like,
Speaker 1: I can't explain it, dude. Look at but I'm telling you, man,
Speaker 1: you can't leave big bags of leaf clipp It's like,
Speaker 1: no kidding. Yeah, well he could have created his own
Speaker 1: bonfire shelter then. Yeah. So so this, you know, is
Speaker 1: sort of how i'd set this up to start the
Speaker 1: chapter with with accounts like this, and so here's what
Speaker 1: I think. Here's what the various explanations are. There is
Speaker 1: a map in that chapter that provides readers with the
Speaker 1: regional populations of Native people at just before the arrival
Speaker 1: of Europeans. And that map goes from the northeast to
Speaker 1: the southeast, to the midwest, to the southwest, to California,
Speaker 1: the Pacific, Northwest, the Great Plains, the Arctic, and all
Speaker 1: together north of Mexico and this includes Canada. Were convinced
Speaker 1: that five hundred years ago, the total population of North
Speaker 1: America north of the Rio Grand River in north of
Speaker 1: Mexico was a little less than five million people. In
Speaker 1: order to keep your population at that level, you have
Speaker 1: to actively try to control population. And so one of
Speaker 1: the arguments in this chapter is that because Native people
Speaker 1: understood the relationship between their population size and their use
Speaker 1: of nature and the the ability of nature as hunters
Speaker 1: and gathers to sustain them. They deliberately kept their populations small,
Speaker 1: small enough that they didn't stress uh, the animals that
Speaker 1: they depended on. Now, there were some animals like buffalo.
Speaker 1: After the play su seeing extinctions removed all the grazing competition,
Speaker 1: buffalo become the only major grazers left on the Great Plains.
Speaker 1: The horses are gone, the mastada are the mamis are gone,
Speaker 1: the camels are gone. There's almost nothing left out there. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so buffalo, like passenger pigeons, are going to multiply
Speaker 1: to such numbers that they basically are adapted better to
Speaker 1: the continent than humans are. Humans acting as predators on
Speaker 1: the populations of both of those animals. Buffalo and passenger
Speaker 1: pigeons are not sufficiently large to ever really lower their numbers.
Speaker 1: But there are plenty of other animals like elk, for example,
Speaker 1: that could have been hunted down to very low populations,
Speaker 1: and in some areas there's archaeological evidence they probably were
Speaker 1: hunted down. I mean, I try to in the following chapter,
Speaker 1: when I get Europeans in North America, I try to
Speaker 1: start out with us the story of a h Spaniard
Speaker 1: has shipwrecked on the Gulf coast in the fifteen twenties.
Speaker 1: And this is before the effect of the Great Disease
Speaker 1: die offs for native people can have any kind of effect.
Speaker 1: And this guy describes a North America that's not brimming
Speaker 1: with wild animals. Uh. He describes a North America that,
Speaker 1: uh where the animal populations are fairly low. I mean,
Speaker 1: at one point he says it was almost an accident
Speaker 1: if anybody had a deer skin in there, uh, in
Speaker 1: their village. But mostly what people do over that ten
Speaker 1: thousand year period is to keep their populations low. There's
Speaker 1: also the effect of a delayed movement to the so
Speaker 1: called Neolithic revolution, which is the spread of agriculture. Uh.
Speaker 1: That had happened in Europe and Asia and even in
Speaker 1: Africa much earlier because of population pressures on wild life,
Speaker 1: people turned to domesticating plants and moved to domesticating animals
Speaker 1: and agriculture. That happened about five or six thousand years
Speaker 1: later in North America because the population pressures weren't so
Speaker 1: severe here. So we have a much later movement to
Speaker 1: an agricultural revolution that can produce larger populations of people.
Speaker 1: And then the last thing I talked about in that
Speaker 1: chapter is this ideological difference. And I tend to argue
Speaker 1: I think that this is accurate that Native people in
Speaker 1: America preserved a very old way of thinking about the
Speaker 1: relationship between themselves and other animals, and that old way
Speaker 1: was that humans are simply another part of the animal world.
Speaker 1: That yeah, okay, we'll tell I'll tell a story of
Speaker 1: the ticket for sure. You remember that one. Oh it
Speaker 1: was great because I to get into what you're going
Speaker 1: to get into it, you need to tell the chicken. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I'll tell the chicken story for sure. But let me say,
Speaker 1: in order to set the chicken story up properly, Native
Speaker 1: people tended to think of other species as as kin
Speaker 1: to humans. And I mean their stories are full of
Speaker 1: examples of people being able to pass from human societies
Speaker 1: to animal societies, to joining buffalo herds and intermarrying with
Speaker 1: other animals. It's an old idea, and the reason I
Speaker 1: think it's old and it got preserved is because much
Speaker 1: of our early um the art, for example of Chauvet
Speaker 1: Cave in France, includes what archaeologists call therian thropes, where
Speaker 1: you have a figure painted on the walls that's half
Speaker 1: human and half animal, half human and half buffalo, for example.
Speaker 1: And so this kind of lingering sense of humans as
Speaker 1: part of the connection a kinship with other other creatures
Speaker 1: informs the way Native people think about wild animals. I mean,
Speaker 1: I mentioned at the bookstore last night. You know this
Speaker 1: wonderful these wonderful accounts of the ceremonies that they created
Speaker 1: to do whenever animals were difficult to find the purpose
Speaker 1: of the ceremonies were was to convince the animals that no,
Speaker 1: we're not engaging in any hubris. We don't think we're exceptional.
Speaker 1: We think that you and we are are just the same,
Speaker 1: and we want you to return and will engage in
Speaker 1: in these marriages, these faux marriages. So people will dress
Speaker 1: up in the skins of animals and they'll do these
Speaker 1: kind of uh simulated coital uh things in the ceremony.
Speaker 1: And one of the wonderful descriptions of this is that
Speaker 1: when these ceremonies were successful, the animals came dancing. They
Speaker 1: came dancing out of the buttes where they were hiding,
Speaker 1: out of the ground where they were hiding, out of
Speaker 1: the waterfalls, where they were hiding and turned to humanity,
Speaker 1: this idea that when they weren't, when you weren't finding animals,
Speaker 1: it was on people, like like the way you'd approach
Speaker 1: a friend that you offended, You have to come and
Speaker 1: make it right. Yes, you can make it right. What's
Speaker 1: the problem, something got askew. We'd like to make it right.
Speaker 1: You please come back. That's exactly it. And they would,
Speaker 1: and the you know, I'm not prepared to say whether
Speaker 1: the ceremonies themselves produced new herds of bison, But what
Speaker 1: I am prepared to say about that is that the
Speaker 1: ceremonies in cullocated a belief in the people who did
Speaker 1: them that we've renewed our relationship, our kinship with these
Speaker 1: other creatures. We're not separate. We humans are not exceptional.
Speaker 1: We're the same as you are. And we have, uh,
Speaker 1: we broke your trust, and so we're coming to you
Speaker 1: to try to make things right. That became a very
Speaker 1: different kind of ideology than the one that Europeans brought
Speaker 1: Your chicken as evidenced by my chicken. And I I
Speaker 1: tell I'm glad you like that story because this is
Speaker 1: my my oldest memory. Um, this is from when I'm
Speaker 1: four years old, and um, I went to dinner last night,
Speaker 1: uh with a woman who is uh, she's a psychologist,
Speaker 1: and she was confirming my idea that one's oldest memories
Speaker 1: usually or from about four years and uh, and the
Speaker 1: ones you remember those four year old memories obviously don't
Speaker 1: remember everything that happened a four years old, but you
Speaker 1: remember the ones that imprint as a result of an
Speaker 1: emotional response. And this was a very emotional one. And
Speaker 1: it's probably set me uh in motion to ultimately writing
Speaker 1: a book like this, because I was haunted by this
Speaker 1: my entire life and what it involved was being four
Speaker 1: years old and uh having a pet chicken. I had
Speaker 1: a little little yellow chicken that my parents had bought
Speaker 1: for me, and it was only a few weeks old,
Speaker 1: and uh it was. It lived in the house with me,
Speaker 1: and I fed it and I gave it water, and
Speaker 1: we also engaged in these games have chased through the house,
Speaker 1: and so we would chase underneath through the kitchen, underneath
Speaker 1: the furniture, around the sofa in the living room, around
Speaker 1: my mom's sewing machine. For some reason, I still remember
Speaker 1: the legs of the sewing machine as my chicken would
Speaker 1: run through. It was a way the chicken get away
Speaker 1: from me. But one day I'm chasing the chicken and
Speaker 1: I miscalculate. I'm four years old, probably pretty clumsy, and
Speaker 1: I stepped on my chicken and kill it. And so
Speaker 1: my mom and I go out in the backyard and
Speaker 1: we have a little box and we dig a hole
Speaker 1: and we berry my chicken. And so the question that
Speaker 1: I asked her, and more specifically her response to the question,
Speaker 1: is the thing that haunted me my whole life and
Speaker 1: probably led me towards ultimately writing a book like this.
Speaker 1: I said to my mother, So Mom, I'm going to
Speaker 1: get to have chicken again in heaven, right. And what
Speaker 1: my mom said in response sort of encapsulated the whole
Speaker 1: European perspective on the relationship between human beings and other animals.
Speaker 1: I mean, she essentially went right to the heart of
Speaker 1: what Europeans brought to North America with their religion, their
Speaker 1: market at economy, and their ideology about how animals were
Speaker 1: in a completely subservient position with respect to the human beings.
Speaker 1: And at four years old, somehow that didn't seem right.
Speaker 1: That didn't seem right to me, and through most of
Speaker 1: my life, it hasn't seemed right, and so I go
Speaker 1: to some links in this book to explain the origins,
Speaker 1: particularly the religious origins, of this idea, where humans are
Speaker 1: the only creatures made in the image of God, the
Speaker 1: only creatures that have an immortal soul. Everything else, all
Speaker 1: other living beings are not made in the image of
Speaker 1: a deity. Of course, Native people would have completely insisted
Speaker 1: that that was wrong, because they had all sorts of
Speaker 1: animal deities. But Europeans had the idea that there was
Speaker 1: a God in the sky, that humans were the only
Speaker 1: ones made in that image. We were the only ones
Speaker 1: with souls, and so everything else was completely subservient to us.
Speaker 1: And UH was there, as the Bible says, for our
Speaker 1: use unto your hand, I will deliver them, is the
Speaker 1: line in Genesis, And so that sort of thinking led
Speaker 1: to UH. What I argue in the book is four
Speaker 1: hundred years from fifteen hundred to nineteen hundred of the
Speaker 1: most widespread and complete destruction of UH populations of wildlife
Speaker 1: of millions of years of evolved ecological diversity on the
Speaker 1: continent White wiped out much of it over a mere
Speaker 1: four hundred year period, and it's not comparable to any
Speaker 1: thing else you can find anywhere else in modern history.
Speaker 1: I mean, I looked around for other examples, and there
Speaker 1: are certainly places where people will take out a particular species. Uh,
Speaker 1: they'll they'll focus on a particular region that they want
Speaker 1: to convert the farming and try to wipe out all
Speaker 1: the predators or something. But nothing that looks like what
Speaker 1: we did between fifteen hundred and nineteen hundred in North America,
Speaker 1: where one species after another we either pushed to complete oblivion,
Speaker 1: are reduced to the point that we have to go
Speaker 1: to these heroic, herculean efforts to save the last few
Speaker 1: of them so that those of us who are alive
Speaker 1: now still have a few animals to look at. I mean,
Speaker 1: and it's a you know, it's a kind of a
Speaker 1: it's a bummer of a story. I try to interleave
Speaker 1: in that story accounts of naturalists who are studying all
Speaker 1: these animals that Europeans thought, you know, the Bible doesn't
Speaker 1: say anything about America, so Europeans think, hell, how can
Speaker 1: this place even exist? And how can these animals even exist?
Speaker 1: Whoever heard of a prong horn antelope or a grizzly
Speaker 1: bear that's not in the Great Chain of Being that uh,
Speaker 1: that Aristotle put together. Uh, so it becomes this, uh,
Speaker 1: the prelude to this kind of enormous destruction that in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century we have to kind of move heaven
Speaker 1: and Earth to recover from. But of that four hundred
Speaker 1: year period, for three hundred years of it there was
Speaker 1: I was surprised learners. For three hundred years of it,
Speaker 1: there was an honest debate, a debate I don't evenally
Speaker 1: understand it. It It was debated whether extinction could even be possible,
Speaker 1: whether extinction was was is it theoretically possible? I was
Speaker 1: very surprised to hear that's the thing that people used
Speaker 1: to argue about. Yeah, they did, indeed, And the explanation
Speaker 1: for that is part of this religious ideology. And I
Speaker 1: mentioned something called the Great Chain of Being a few
Speaker 1: minutes ago. It comes from Aristotle, but it was wholly
Speaker 1: adopted by Europeans who came to the America's five hundred
Speaker 1: years ago. And it was an idea that goes back
Speaker 1: two thousand years in Western civilization that everything, every living
Speaker 1: thing on earth was created at a moment of creation
Speaker 1: by a deity, and so everything that was created was
Speaker 1: perfect everlasting, immutable, which means that no animal ever changed.
Speaker 1: Everything stayed exactly the same, and there was no possibility
Speaker 1: because it was part of a divine creation. There was
Speaker 1: no possibility for what we today call extinction, for something
Speaker 1: to ultimately go away, because the world was perfect as
Speaker 1: created by a divine being. And so Europeans bring that
Speaker 1: without even questioning, this great chain of being idea to America.
Speaker 1: And it's only in the late eighteenth century when workmen
Speaker 1: digging for rock and gravel in Europe and then people
Speaker 1: investigating UH these old hot spring sites and salt licks
Speaker 1: in North America began discovering the bones of creatures that
Speaker 1: nobody can identify as being living creatures that anyone begins
Speaker 1: to wonder, well, so if there are these gigantic bones,
Speaker 1: why is there not an animal out there with bones
Speaker 1: like this? It's there. If there is a creature here
Speaker 1: with what appears in North America to be l elephant tusks,
Speaker 1: we don't have any elephants in North America. How could
Speaker 1: that be a possibility. And so it's the discovery of
Speaker 1: all these extinct animals out of the Pleistocene UH that
Speaker 1: sets this debate in motion. And only in the very
Speaker 1: beginning years of the eight hundreds, does Western science began
Speaker 1: to say, well, wow, it looks like so things don't
Speaker 1: last forever. It looks like there have been animals that
Speaker 1: were once on the earth and are now gone. And
Speaker 1: of course that ultimately begins to raise the question of
Speaker 1: so why are they gone? And the next thought that
Speaker 1: occurs to you, in a logical chain from that one,
Speaker 1: is what would cause an animal to go extinct? What
Speaker 1: factors out there in the world would produce something like
Speaker 1: the complete loss of an animal. This is a whole
Speaker 1: new area, as as I think you gathered when you
Speaker 1: read this, of thinking about how the world works. And
Speaker 1: it's what finally began by about the eighteen twenties and
Speaker 1: eighteen thirties to have people wondering what in the world
Speaker 1: cause the extinction of mammoths and mastodons and a whole
Speaker 1: host of other creatures, and can we somehow, can something,
Speaker 1: somehow do this to existing animals? And meanwhile they were
Speaker 1: busily doing it, being they were busily doing it, and
Speaker 1: they didn't have to wait very long to find out
Speaker 1: whether it was possible, because by the eighteen forties, this
Speaker 1: northern hemisphere penguin. These giant, heavy beaked birds called great
Speaker 1: auks which nested. Uh, they nested all over the North Atlantic,
Speaker 1: but from Newfoundland all the way down to Florida, all
Speaker 1: along the the Atlantic. These great hawks were a feature
Speaker 1: of coastal life. Had a penguin. We had a penguin
Speaker 1: in the northern hemisphere, and we completely wiped it out
Speaker 1: by the eighteen forties. I was surprised. Uh, egg picking, Yeah,
Speaker 1: egg picking people, they're cooking for breakfast. They went after eggs, yeah,
Speaker 1: And and it was kind of a tragic thing because
Speaker 1: these were birds that only laid one egg. I mean
Speaker 1: they had a nest with one egg in it and year,
Speaker 1: one egg a year, and so you you take away
Speaker 1: their eggs. I mean this happened to you know, we
Speaker 1: think that things like this happened to animals like masks
Speaker 1: or mammoths, because mammoths don't These giant elephants, they didn't.
Speaker 1: They weren't able to give birth until the cows were
Speaker 1: ten years old or so, and they would only give birth.
Speaker 1: They had a really long gestation period, so you only
Speaker 1: give birth every two or three years. And with a
Speaker 1: low population turnover, like just like the auk with its
Speaker 1: one egg. I mean that makes certain creatures more susceptible
Speaker 1: to extinction than those like passenger pigeons, for example, are
Speaker 1: like bison, which are exists in the millions, or creatures
Speaker 1: are rats are? I mean, you know, there are a
Speaker 1: whole host of other animals that uh certainly multiply into
Speaker 1: large numbers. But yeah, these animals that humans were focused on,
Speaker 1: not that they weren't focused on on rats, because they
Speaker 1: were bringing Norway rats into America, and obviously we had
Speaker 1: pack rats here already, but the animals that we were
Speaker 1: focused on as part of our market economy. And I
Speaker 1: want to make sure that I make this clear. It
Speaker 1: was the idea of wild animals essentially functioning like trees
Speaker 1: you could log, like coal, you could dig up out
Speaker 1: of the ground as natural resourced commodities in a market
Speaker 1: economy that produced this wholesale slaughter of so many creatures.
Speaker 1: That's why the ox disappeared, is the birds became fair
Speaker 1: for sailors in the Atlantic who found that you could
Speaker 1: I mean, and this was true of so many species
Speaker 1: in North America. They were naive of humans as predators,
Speaker 1: and so they would let humans just walk up I
Speaker 1: mean there's a horrible account of people hunting great ox
Speaker 1: where they would say, we would just go up to
Speaker 1: an island where where great ox were nesting, gather up
Speaker 1: their eggs, and then we would set up a board
Speaker 1: plank between the island and our boats and have a
Speaker 1: couple of guys get off and just heard the ox
Speaker 1: over the plank into the boats, where we killed them
Speaker 1: as soon as they arrived. And the account goes on
Speaker 1: to say, you know, thanks to the deity for creating
Speaker 1: a creature so innocent that it comes sustenance for hungry
Speaker 1: sailors on the seas. I mean that happened over and
Speaker 1: over again with creatures that were innocent of human predation
Speaker 1: and essentially sort of allowed themselves to be wiped out
Speaker 1: by an economy that was based around turning animals into resources.
Speaker 1: You covered so many um extinctions, new or extinctions, and
Speaker 1: in some cases you can in some cases you can
Speaker 1: imagine that that a lot of the players involved perhaps
Speaker 1: weren't entirely clear on what they were doing. The human
Speaker 1: players involved perhaps couldn't picture the old outcome of what
Speaker 1: they were up to. But there are cases where people
Speaker 1: damn sure knew you talk about that with the sea Otters.
Speaker 1: I mean they knew in fur seals, they knew we
Speaker 1: got them all. We heard there was another spot. Let's go,
Speaker 1: let's go look and say and when they leave, they're gone.
Speaker 1: And they were aware that they were They were the
Speaker 1: masterminds behind it. The people really making the money behind it,
Speaker 1: had all awareness that it was a race for a
Speaker 1: vanishing resource. And there was no impetus to call it quits. No,
Speaker 1: and you're you're competing against uh, you know, people from
Speaker 1: other nations. I mean with the sea Otters and the
Speaker 1: first Sales. I mean it's you know, the the Americans,
Speaker 1: the Russians, the Spaniards, the I mean, the whole host
Speaker 1: of of nationals are out killing these animals. And I
Speaker 1: mean it actually reached the point between the Americans and
Speaker 1: the Russians where there were so few of these animals
Speaker 1: left that they began cooperating with one another to locate
Speaker 1: and exploit the last last groups. And yeah, that that
Speaker 1: Pacific Coast hunt for for for for fur seals, uh
Speaker 1: and and sea otters. Man, that's an abysmal story. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a particularly since I mean in the case of
Speaker 1: sea Otters, I mean, these these animals are critical to
Speaker 1: the ecologies of the Pacific coast because they keep the
Speaker 1: kelp beds in check. And UH, once they're gone, I mean,
Speaker 1: the whole Pacific Coast just becomes drowned in kelp uh
Speaker 1: I mean, and it's just it's it's a story that
Speaker 1: you can I mean. It even features the deliberate conscription
Speaker 1: of native hunters, kidnapping them to make them go out
Speaker 1: and and hunt these animals for these European fur companies
Speaker 1: UH and American fur companies UH, down to the last
Speaker 1: few colonies of them. And the only reason they're not gone,
Speaker 1: particularly in the case of sea otters, which were regarded
Speaker 1: as you know, I mean, I think I said last
Speaker 1: night at the bookstore, there's an account of one of
Speaker 1: these uh sea otter hunters where he says, why do
Speaker 1: we go after these animals? You don't understand except for
Speaker 1: a gorgeous woman and a newborn infant. The pelt of
Speaker 1: the sea otter is the most beautiful object in the
Speaker 1: entire world. And UH, you could get big money for
Speaker 1: sea otter pelts in China, and so that's where most
Speaker 1: of them went. Uh. They were harvested off the Pacific
Speaker 1: coast of North America and then hauled by ship over
Speaker 1: to China where you could sometimes. I mean there was
Speaker 1: an account that really set the sea otter hunt in
Speaker 1: motion where uh, and China people were willing to pay
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty dollars per pelt. Most pelts didn't
Speaker 1: bring that. Eventually they brought twenty or twenty five dollars though,
Speaker 1: and that was a lot of money back in those days.
Speaker 1: So yeah, they knew what they were doing. They knew
Speaker 1: what they were doing with passenger pigeons too. I mean
Speaker 1: that's one of the you know, bizarre ones in fact,
Speaker 1: in fact, because the passenger pigeons story only happens like
Speaker 1: about a hundred and thirty thirty five years ago. Uh,
Speaker 1: my grandparents were still alive when they were passenger pigeons
Speaker 1: flying in the skies in Louisiana. I mean I actually
Speaker 1: chart in the book how many years it was that
Speaker 1: I missed passenger pigeons in my home state of Louisiana,
Speaker 1: and it was about forty five years. Uh. Yeah, it's incredible,
Speaker 1: and there were, of course billions of them. I mean,
Speaker 1: in the last ones were the reason I know that
Speaker 1: people understood what the hell they were doing is that
Speaker 1: they were slaughtering them on the nests, not giving them
Speaker 1: an opportunity to raise the next generation of birds. You
Speaker 1: just went in and found out where they were nesting,
Speaker 1: and you killed them on the nests. So they understood
Speaker 1: that this was going to be the end of the
Speaker 1: most numerous bird uh in the world, the most numerous
Speaker 1: bird species in North America UH, and yet went ahead
Speaker 1: and pushed it, and nobody seemed to be worried when
Speaker 1: that last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in hardly any newspapers
Speaker 1: ran an obituary about her death, and one of the
Speaker 1: newspapers I found that did this is what it said, Well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's too bad about Martha, but we all
Speaker 1: ought to be happy that the passenger pigeon decided not
Speaker 1: to stick around with us the way grasshoppers have, I mean,
Speaker 1: so there was no remorse about it. There was a
Speaker 1: sense that animals like passenger pigeons, like bison, like wolves,
Speaker 1: ag wars, grizzly bears, these were just too wild to
Speaker 1: stay in a country that was modeling itself on Europe.
Speaker 1: England didn't have brizzly bears, England didn't have jaguars, England
Speaker 1: hadn't had wolves since the four Hell, we're just gonna
Speaker 1: We're gonna emulate England and wipe out all those things
Speaker 1: in North America. They're just too wild for civilization. Talk
Speaker 1: about when when the British used extra patient or try
Speaker 1: to use regional extinction as a weapon against America. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a fascinating story and it's it's uh. The shorthand
Speaker 1: version of it is the creation of the fur Desert
Speaker 1: in the American West, and it happened in the eighteen twenties,
Speaker 1: primarily over a period of about eight or nine years,
Speaker 1: when the Hudson's Bay Company, when England and the United
Speaker 1: States were still debating on who own the country west
Speaker 1: of the Continental Divide. You know, Thomas Jefferson had claimed
Speaker 1: and had sent Lewis and Clark to affirm America's claim
Speaker 1: to the country west of the divide all the way
Speaker 1: to the coast. But the Hudson's Bay Company and Great
Speaker 1: Britain we're still claiming that they owned much of that country.
Speaker 1: And we don't resolve that debate um actually until the
Speaker 1: eighteen forties when we finally draw the line between the
Speaker 1: United States and Canada. So the country in the Rockies,
Speaker 1: west of the divide was a disputed territory, but the
Speaker 1: British traders realized that in the Husson's Bay authority realizes
Speaker 1: that we can't keep these damned Americans out. They're crossing
Speaker 1: the divide no matter who claims it, and they're trapping
Speaker 1: beavers and all kinds of animals on the west side
Speaker 1: of divide. So here's the way to keep them out.
Speaker 1: Will just as they the term they used was, will
Speaker 1: ruin the country, will kill everything that's over there. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is when bison disappear from west to the divide too.
Speaker 1: But what they particularly focus on because it was the
Speaker 1: target of the American trappers, were beavers. And they worked
Speaker 1: out a strategy with these Hudson's Bay brigades, but led
Speaker 1: by people like Peter Skeen Ogden, for whom Ogden utah
Speaker 1: his name, that you send out these parties of trappers
Speaker 1: with their wives and girlfriends to sort of keep everything
Speaker 1: camp life going along well. And you go from stream
Speaker 1: to stream to stream. You do a bunch of trap
Speaker 1: sets uh one afternoon, you do another round of trap
Speaker 1: sets the next morning, and that's usually good enough to
Speaker 1: wipe out all the beavers on a particular stream in
Speaker 1: a place like the bitter Root Mountains. So over about
Speaker 1: eight years, these guys trapped west to the divide and
Speaker 1: what is mostly now Montana and Idaho and Utah. They
Speaker 1: trapped thirty five thousand beavers, and they liberate our ruin
Speaker 1: six thousand beaver ponds which had stored water, of course,
Speaker 1: all over that country, that water, providing camp sites for
Speaker 1: native people, water for wildlife. All those beaver dams now
Speaker 1: fall into disrepair and drain, and the streams began running
Speaker 1: through them and tear the dams up, so that they've
Speaker 1: affected a kind of an ecological transformation of the entire
Speaker 1: country by removing the beaver and it's dams both. So
Speaker 1: it's the story is and I write about a couple
Speaker 1: of other instances where this is the case too. I
Speaker 1: even argue that the American Revolution and part was set
Speaker 1: in motion by the anger that American colonists had for
Speaker 1: the British government trying to stop them from hunting white
Speaker 1: tailed deer, which they were wiping out and almost all
Speaker 1: the colonies, and also trying to prevent them from crossing
Speaker 1: the Appalachian Alleghany Divide to hunt the animals in the
Speaker 1: Mississippi Valley drainage. The British government had actually passed a law,
Speaker 1: the Proclamation of seventeen sixty three, to stop that movement
Speaker 1: to preserve the wildlife of that region. So the idea
Speaker 1: of killing animals actually becomes a kind of a geo
Speaker 1: political idea, as a contest among people's colonies and competing
Speaker 1: nations for territory. You uh try your best in the
Speaker 1: book to put to rest the idea that killing off
Speaker 1: the buffalo was actually a deliberate, articulated government play to
Speaker 1: subjugate the Native Americans. Yeah, I do, uh, it keeps
Speaker 1: explain that a little bit. Well, I think our Uh
Speaker 1: what I can say to sort of initiate that is
Speaker 1: that one of the most common explanations for what happened
Speaker 1: to the buffalo is what you just described is that
Speaker 1: the buffalo were wiped out by a conscious government policy,
Speaker 1: a conspiracy actually between particular players in government in the
Speaker 1: federal government and the American military and the post Civil
Speaker 1: war riors to wipe out buffalo in order to force
Speaker 1: Native people onto reservations in the Indian Wars and initiate
Speaker 1: the process of a culturation and assimilation for Native people.
Speaker 1: I mean, and that's a that's probably the most common
Speaker 1: explanation that people trot out. What I trying to do
Speaker 1: with this story was to figure out how did a
Speaker 1: story like that begin? And what I came to was
Speaker 1: a very interesting story. I didn't find really any references
Speaker 1: an occasional one to something like this being the explanation
Speaker 1: for the demise of buffalo. It's certainly not, for example,
Speaker 1: in William Hornaday's great book The Extermination of the American Bison,
Speaker 1: which is published in does anything like that. But by
Speaker 1: the early decades of the twentieth century, people were starting
Speaker 1: to talk about this as an explanation. And I tracked
Speaker 1: it back to the publication by a former buffalo hunter
Speaker 1: of a memoir called On the Border and the Buffalo,
Speaker 1: and it was published in nineteen o six, and this
Speaker 1: particular author essentially describes his comrades and himself as agents,
Speaker 1: sort of secret agents of this conspiratorial government program to
Speaker 1: wipe out the buffalo in order to force Indians to
Speaker 1: yield in the Indian Wars. And what he says is,
Speaker 1: we should be given and there are people in government
Speaker 1: who know this, we should be given medals of distinction
Speaker 1: for what we did for North America. And then the
Speaker 1: thing that really set me in motion looking at this
Speaker 1: because there was an easy way to check whether or
Speaker 1: not it was true, he says. And I even understand
Speaker 1: that when the State of Texas was considering a law
Speaker 1: to stop the hunting of buffalo in s Texas, General
Speaker 1: Philip Sheridan journey to Austin and made an impassioned plea
Speaker 1: to the Texas legislature not to do this. And the
Speaker 1: guy even goes on to recreate a speech that Sheridan
Speaker 1: was supposed to have said. Now, you know, as a historian,
Speaker 1: is fairly easy to go. Okay, let's look back at
Speaker 1: the records of the Texas Legislature at a bill that
Speaker 1: was designed to do this. Because what sort of caught
Speaker 1: my my attention was I had studied the attempts in
Speaker 1: the Federal Congress in the eighteen seventies to pass a
Speaker 1: couple of bills to protect Western animals, and the Texas
Speaker 1: Delegation had always been resolutely opposed to those bills. The
Speaker 1: Texas Delegation always referred to those bills as they would
Speaker 1: say to other members of Comngress, you're just being sentimental,
Speaker 1: and of course in the eighteen seventies calling another guy
Speaker 1: sentimental that was that was casting aspersions on your manhood
Speaker 1: because only women were supposed to be to have sentiment.
Speaker 1: And so that this whole story made me kind of
Speaker 1: really wonder And so I I had a graduate student
Speaker 1: who I sent to Austin who was he was very
Speaker 1: into the whole Buffalo story, and he spent his spring
Speaker 1: break there combing through the records of the Texas legislature
Speaker 1: and came back and I said, because he had gone
Speaker 1: down with the idea, I'm going to write the full
Speaker 1: story of this, all the texts of the bill they
Speaker 1: were proposing, exactly what else Sheardon might have said. He
Speaker 1: came back and said, Man, I gotta tell you, Texas
Speaker 1: never proposed a bill two do what this story says.
Speaker 1: And not only that, I can't find any record anywhere
Speaker 1: that Philip Sheridan ever addressed the Texas legislature about any topic,
Speaker 1: and certainly not about a Buffalo topic. And so I
Speaker 1: looked back at this story and realized the entry to
Speaker 1: it was it is said, so this guy in his
Speaker 1: book was basically just providing a hearsay account anyway that
Speaker 1: strategy is still us today. A lot of people are
Speaker 1: saying yeah. A lot of people people say yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that great passive voice thing. You know. I can't
Speaker 1: say exactly who it was, but a lot of people
Speaker 1: are saying, yeah, he's corrupt. Yeah. Yeah. So that's how
Speaker 1: the story started. And when I began looking at the
Speaker 1: actual evidence for all of this, I couldn't find any
Speaker 1: other evidence that there was ever. I mean, Philip Sheridan,
Speaker 1: you know, who has been the villain in this story
Speaker 1: for a century. I mean that guy was actually a
Speaker 1: kind of a nationalist who spent his last year's protecting
Speaker 1: at wildlife in Yellowstone National Park. And uh So, anyway,
Speaker 1: what is fairly clear is that this is a story
Speaker 1: sort of like the story we were telling ourselves in
Speaker 1: the early twentieth century about the Civil War, that the
Speaker 1: Civil War wasn't really about slavery. It didn't have any
Speaker 1: the South wasn't trying to defend slavery. Civil War was
Speaker 1: actually about states rights. Well that makes you know, everybody
Speaker 1: feel a little bit better about things. Okay, so Southerners
Speaker 1: weren't actually fighting to defend slavery. Uh they were fighting
Speaker 1: just to defend states rights. And and that's all there
Speaker 1: was to it. A Southern way of life. This wasn't
Speaker 1: about slavery at all. This story about Buffalo is one
Speaker 1: of those stories that kind of makes everybody feel better. Okay,
Speaker 1: it was the government that did it. It wasn't the
Speaker 1: fault of anybody else. The government, you know, the dastardly
Speaker 1: federal government once again had this plan to to wipe
Speaker 1: out one of our great iconic animals. The truth is,
Speaker 1: the federal government had never entered into the whole wildlife
Speaker 1: story at all, and wouldn't do so until the year
Speaker 1: nineteen when it finally started acting to stop the market hunt.
Speaker 1: But the federal government had just sort of stood back
Speaker 1: and been paralyzed and not been able to do anything.
Speaker 1: And so they just let market capitalism do its thing.
Speaker 1: And what market capitalism did was it wiped almost every
Speaker 1: single buffalo off the continent. They just let these guys
Speaker 1: go out and shoot them down and strip their hides
Speaker 1: off and cut their tongues out and ship them back.
Speaker 1: And I mean, it was an industrial It was very
Speaker 1: much like the Industrial revolution elsewhere in America. The whole
Speaker 1: thing was kind of an industrial process of wiping out
Speaker 1: these these animals talk about the talk about the I
Speaker 1: rebuild Woodpecker, which is something we covered off on last night.
Speaker 1: But I'll I'll tee it up right now the same
Speaker 1: way I teach it up last night. Is Uh, after
Speaker 1: reading the story about the ivybuild Woodpecker, um, which I
Speaker 1: wasn't I knew, I knew it roughly, but I I didn't
Speaker 1: really put together how intact and recognizable America was at
Speaker 1: the time, at the time we lost ivorybuild Woodpecker, where
Speaker 1: Americans were having a unified common experience. We were in
Speaker 1: the A. We were in the age of being able
Speaker 1: to immediately distribute news and ideas all around the country.
Speaker 1: We had suburbia, we had a middle class. Uh, it
Speaker 1: was like we were America and we and it wasn't
Speaker 1: a case of only realizing later what we'd done. It
Speaker 1: was a case of, um. It was a case of
Speaker 1: we just watched it happened, like like like if someone said,
Speaker 1: these two cars are gonna collide, um, but we're just
Speaker 1: gonna let them quide to see what happens. Yeah. There
Speaker 1: was no sort of mystery about who was to blame
Speaker 1: or what went on. It was just we just I mean,
Speaker 1: we culturally we we kind of signed off on it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm afraid that you you described that very very accurately.
Speaker 1: I mean, this this happened at a time when modern
Speaker 1: America existed. I mean everybody was driving cars. Uh, they
Speaker 1: had phones, they had the country had been electrified. People
Speaker 1: had electricity in their homes, they had washing machines, and
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's modern America. I mean, and the
Speaker 1: story kind of comes to its conclusion. Uh, it doesn't
Speaker 1: come to its conclusion actually until last year, when the
Speaker 1: Fish and Wildlife Service declares that the ivory bill woodpeckers
Speaker 1: officially extinct. But this last hurrah of uh what's probably
Speaker 1: the second largest woodpecker in the world and another one
Speaker 1: of our charismatic creatures from America from millions of years
Speaker 1: of of American ecology gets just think I and I
Speaker 1: think the explanation for the way you you did tee
Speaker 1: it up is that we were so used to just
Speaker 1: letting these things happen because people adopted the position, well,
Speaker 1: this is just inevitable. This is the inevitable consequence of civilization. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's the it's this is just collateral damage in creating
Speaker 1: a modern country. There's not anything you can do with it.
Speaker 1: Sure we're gonna wipe out, you know, ten billion passenger pigeons.
Speaker 1: Sure we're gonna wipe out thirty million buffalo. Of course
Speaker 1: we're gonna wipe out you know, our only native parents,
Speaker 1: the Carolina parakeets, these beautiful tropical birds that uh, that
Speaker 1: existed all the way up in the New York State.
Speaker 1: Of course we're going to do that. And so people
Speaker 1: acted as if this is just collateral damage and what
Speaker 1: what can you do? Uh, you know, and making our fortunes.
Speaker 1: This is uh, this is what happens. So the story
Speaker 1: kind of unfolds this way. It's the nineteen thirties. We
Speaker 1: have just lost the eastern prairie chicken, the heath hen
Speaker 1: I mean, and this is you know, a kind of
Speaker 1: almost allurid peeping Tom's story of uh. New Englanders were
Speaker 1: observing these birds go one by one, uh in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties, until finally there
Speaker 1: was just one last heath and a male, booming ben
Speaker 1: they called him, who survived about three years by himself
Speaker 1: booming every spring to try to call a female and
Speaker 1: having no luck because there were none. So we've lost
Speaker 1: this bird. Did you know about did you know about that?
Speaker 1: There was a like a prairie chicken on the East coast.
Speaker 1: I'd maybe heard without thinking about what a heathen was.
Speaker 1: It was a prairie chicken. Yeah, you've everybody's heard about
Speaker 1: a heathen. But no we didn't. I didn't know the
Speaker 1: in and outs of this like a cool little prey
Speaker 1: chicken that people would go hunt for it. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds like they who did, just like the dusky
Speaker 1: on the coast, Yes, very much like that. And so
Speaker 1: that bird was gone by one We had discovered that
Speaker 1: the Biological Survey, which is the forerunner of the Fishing
Speaker 1: Wildife Service, had discovered in the nineteen thirties that we
Speaker 1: were down to the last sixteen whooping cranes, that trumpeter
Speaker 1: swans were almost gone, that the bald eagle was in
Speaker 1: danger of extinction. In fact, one of our sort of
Speaker 1: the first endangered species kind of act that we pass
Speaker 1: is the ball Eagle Protection Act in Y. And the
Speaker 1: only reason it gets passed because well, the balleagle, after
Speaker 1: all is our damn national symbol. So what do we
Speaker 1: do with all that money with him on there? So?
Speaker 1: What are how are we not going to save this bird.
Speaker 1: That's our national symbol. But in the midst of all this,
Speaker 1: of all four of these birds going, this is when
Speaker 1: the Carolina parakeets the last. There are two subspecies. In
Speaker 1: the second subspecies, the Atlantic Coast version, goes extinct in
Speaker 1: that same stretch in the n thirties. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of a come up, this come up, this period, and
Speaker 1: right in the middle of it, the incredible beautiful ivory
Speaker 1: bill woodpecker is pronounced by the Biological Survey to also
Speaker 1: be extinct, same year that the heathen was was announced
Speaker 1: to be extinct. And then three years later a group
Speaker 1: of ornithologists from Cornell are in Louisiana and one of
Speaker 1: the last pieces of old growth forests left along the
Speaker 1: Mississippi River, and only by the way, about a hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty five miles from where I grew up. And
Speaker 1: that place has been the center of cool bird ship
Speaker 1: for a long time. It has, indeed. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: Mississippi and all this, all these great forests. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, you're right. When I was out speaking of
Speaker 1: the cornellogy Lab, they've been leading to charge on bird
Speaker 1: stuff for a long time. They have for sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: and they were, they were on top of this. And
Speaker 1: so a couple of their people, including of a videographer
Speaker 1: guy with a video camera or a motion picture camera
Speaker 1: UM is on the scene when they discover in this
Speaker 1: patch of old growth forest that they find along the Mississippi,
Speaker 1: seven pairs of ivory bill woodpeckers still alive in this
Speaker 1: patch of forest. The forest is called the Singer Tract
Speaker 1: because it belongs to the Singer Sewing Machine Company. And
Speaker 1: so when the Cornell folks make this discovery, and and
Speaker 1: I've got, by the way, a screen grab from the
Speaker 1: motion picture imagery they shot of the ivory bills there
Speaker 1: in the book. It's one of the few still photographs
Speaker 1: that anyone has of an ivory bill woodpecker. You know what,
Speaker 1: I somehow didn't know that existed. You didn't know what existed.
Speaker 1: I didn't know you could look at a picture one, yeah,
Speaker 1: because usually all the ship you got to look at paintings.
Speaker 1: You gotta look at paintings. You have to look at
Speaker 1: Autubun and Wilson in people like that. I want to
Speaker 1: I want to let me interject for one sec. People
Speaker 1: need to pay attention to fact here that uh they
Speaker 1: thought they were gone. Yeah, you know what, someone has
Speaker 1: We talked about this with a friend of ours last night.
Speaker 1: When someone has a sort of near death experience, it
Speaker 1: readjusts their priorities. So at this point that you're getting
Speaker 1: at where they find these, it was assumed they were gone.
Speaker 1: Imagine what what what? What? How Is it not just
Speaker 1: national elation that that you'd be like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: we thought we had destroyed the species. But look we've
Speaker 1: been given a second chance. It's like, you know, and uh, well,
Speaker 1: what's the Jay the Jimmy Stewart movie. Everybody watches every
Speaker 1: Christmas Wonderful Life, Right, you know, he gives us a
Speaker 1: second chance. He's good, everything's gonna be better. Here we
Speaker 1: are like we killed them all. Then some time goes
Speaker 1: by and it's like, no, you know, by the grace
Speaker 1: of God, we have a we can start afresh, exactly
Speaker 1: the one would think, because yeah, they had been pronounced
Speaker 1: extinct in nine now we have found seven pairs of them.
Speaker 1: So the story proceeds like this. Cornell sends a young
Speaker 1: graduate student, a guy named James Tanner, down to do
Speaker 1: what amounts to kind of salvage natural history on the
Speaker 1: Ivory Bill woodpecker. I mean, the only natural history we
Speaker 1: really had done on ivory bills was done by people
Speaker 1: like Audubon and Alexander Wilson. Nobody in the late nineteenth
Speaker 1: century had really studied them. Um, and so Tanner, with
Speaker 1: all the modern expertise that an ornithologist can bring to
Speaker 1: the game, puts together and writes a book about it,
Speaker 1: this wonderful study of ivory bills, of their nesting habits,
Speaker 1: of their mating habits. Uh, how they're young, react, what
Speaker 1: sort of predators they have, how they respond to people,
Speaker 1: he said. For one thing, they're not really shy around people.
Speaker 1: I mean, they don't really go duck and hide when
Speaker 1: I show up. They just kind of exposed themselves out
Speaker 1: in the open, he describes. And we actually have recordings
Speaker 1: with that, uh, with that motion picture film that was
Speaker 1: shot of them off their cries. They made several different
Speaker 1: uh sounds, including a sound that people way back in
Speaker 1: colonial history had referred to as the toy trumpet in
Speaker 1: the woods. The ivory bill sounds like it makes a
Speaker 1: cry like a toy trumpet, they said. And he described
Speaker 1: how ivory bills flew through this beautiful old growth forest,
Speaker 1: you know, and as I say in my description of
Speaker 1: all this, John James Ottoman had always said, whenever he
Speaker 1: saw an ivory bill fly through the forest, it reminded
Speaker 1: him of a Van Dyke painting. It was just this gorge,
Speaker 1: just image. And so Tanner studies these birds for about
Speaker 1: four or five years, and Cornell sends him out meanwhile
Speaker 1: on this reconnaissance all over the South everywhere there is
Speaker 1: remaining old growth to see if there are others, And
Speaker 1: everywhere he goes he can't find them anywhere else. So
Speaker 1: they know by about nineteen thirty eight or ninety nine,
Speaker 1: these are the only seven left. These are the only ones,
Speaker 1: and they're sometimes they're getting a chick up, occasionally a
Speaker 1: chick is getting snagged by an owl or something. Their
Speaker 1: population is growing a little bit. And at this point
Speaker 1: the Singer Sewing Machine Company announces to the world that
Speaker 1: it has sold the logging rights to this piece of
Speaker 1: ground It owns to a Chicago logging company which plans
Speaker 1: on commencing logging the area in nineteen forty. And so
Speaker 1: there's a couple of more years as the logging is
Speaker 1: actually taking place, of people dashing out uh trying to
Speaker 1: get one last glimpse of the birds. Roger Tory Peterson,
Speaker 1: for example, goes down in n gets one one glimpse
Speaker 1: of the birds. But the last bird anybody ever sees
Speaker 1: is a female nesting in a tree that the loggers
Speaker 1: actually cut down, and as the tree is falling, she
Speaker 1: flies out of it and goes doing this this sort
Speaker 1: of rollicking, sweeping flying motion that these woodpeckers made over
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River. And it's the last time anybody ever
Speaker 1: sees one in North America. It's the if you put
Speaker 1: that in the movie, I would roll my eyes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, I'm like, oh, brother, yeah, it's unreal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it actually happened though. Yeah, And so you can roll
Speaker 1: your eyes at the fact that we let this happen,
Speaker 1: as we had done so many freaking times. It's just
Speaker 1: somehow that one, I don't know, that one just feels different. Well,
Speaker 1: it happens in the modern age, as I think, part
Speaker 1: of the difference. And you know what, one of the
Speaker 1: ways it feels different is if you look at look
Speaker 1: at what damning, Damning is in the Columbia base and whatever,
Speaker 1: what damning has done to salmon. You know, you can
Speaker 1: point and be you can point look like okay. But
Speaker 1: one way to understand World War two was that, um,
Speaker 1: we beat the Germans by out out smelting them. We
Speaker 1: produced more aluminum. Therefore we produce more aircraft. Producing aluminum
Speaker 1: is extremely energy dependent, right, you know, we beat this,
Speaker 1: this this global threat. Um, we had a nation to feed.
Speaker 1: We produced all this agriculture and so all shipping, big
Speaker 1: all this stuff, and so a casualty's salmon and one
Speaker 1: could come in, one could come in and present a
Speaker 1: trade we made and you look and be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, when you put it that way, I guess
Speaker 1: that was a trade we made. But in this case,
Speaker 1: it's just like it's what, it's a logging tract. It's
Speaker 1: a logging tract, a single log like an amount of
Speaker 1: money that will sort of wind up in a very
Speaker 1: it's like a sort of money. It's not a nation's history.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a chunk of money that will wind
Speaker 1: up in a very few people's bank accounts. You know.
Speaker 1: It's so it's just very it becomes very personal. You
Speaker 1: can almost go and find you could go and be like,
Speaker 1: oh no, it was kind of like this guy and
Speaker 1: this guy and those are the two people that like
Speaker 1: that that it came down. Yeah, it's like those are
Speaker 1: the two people that said, Okay, who they were, Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know who they were either. And although I
Speaker 1: have not seen that the Singer company ever made this
Speaker 1: this argument, the timing of this is in ninety right
Speaker 1: before the year before the United States enters the war.
Speaker 1: And of course there was the argument that the Olympic
Speaker 1: Peninsula got logged Olympic National Park got logged because we
Speaker 1: needed the lumber for the war effort. So I think,
Speaker 1: as I said, I haven't seen that this they could patriotic,
Speaker 1: they could make it as a patriotic act. We had
Speaker 1: to do this in order to win the war, so
Speaker 1: we had to sacrifice those last seven pairs of ivory bills,
Speaker 1: you know. And that's in in historical terms. I haven't
Speaker 1: seen that. Though I haven't seen it in historical terms
Speaker 1: of one of the family. Yeah, it is a hot
Speaker 1: tip for the family. I mean, Alan nevins the Great
Speaker 1: American History and one of his arguments about capitalism, you know, capitalism, Okay,
Speaker 1: it did all these things. Uh you know that, Uh,
Speaker 1: we're not so pretty. And he didn't really know about
Speaker 1: this story, I tell, but I would add you know,
Speaker 1: this destruction of so many, so many animals. But then
Speaker 1: he argued that, but what capitalism enables us to do
Speaker 1: was to win World War Two, to defend, to defeat
Speaker 1: the Germans, uh, to defeat the fascist menace to the
Speaker 1: world in World War two, and so that kind of argument.
Speaker 1: Then ultimately you could say almost we've used it to
Speaker 1: trump everything else, anything that got sacrificed, the collateral damage
Speaker 1: is too bad, but it enables us to do this.
Speaker 1: Did you you ever read Kurt Vonnegut? Oh, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: Kurt Vonnegut I was talking about he had two great
Speaker 1: observations about military uniforms. He said of the Nazis that
Speaker 1: it was almost like they knew when they chose their uniforms.
Speaker 1: It's almost like they knew that they would always be
Speaker 1: bad guys in the movies. That's a great line. And
Speaker 1: he also talked about when it came out with Desert Camo.
Speaker 1: He said that apparently they're preparing to fight the next
Speaker 1: war on top of a Denver omelet. Yeah. Man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: those Nazi helmets in particular, you look at it was like,
Speaker 1: we need to come up with something that nobody else
Speaker 1: has a helmet like that. Yeah. No, kidding. Oh man,
Speaker 1: you got any follow ups? Johnny, I got too much,
Speaker 1: too many follow ups. It's such a good book. I
Speaker 1: want to point out a little bit um to our
Speaker 1: readers who are have you know, tend to be heavily
Speaker 1: involved in hunting and fishing. It's um. It will challenge
Speaker 1: a lot. It'll challenge a lot of your notions about uh,
Speaker 1: your It will challenge a lot of your notions about
Speaker 1: your heroes and icons and idols. Um. I didn't get
Speaker 1: it in all that today, but uh we did last night.
Speaker 1: Something make makes quick work of the mountain men. Well,
Speaker 1: if I can squeeze one in before we get he's
Speaker 1: like edging towards it. He doesn't want to let it.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna do it.
Speaker 1: I was telling people that be prepared for be prepared
Speaker 1: for some of your your hunting, your your iconic hunting heroes,
Speaker 1: including some of the early players in the in the
Speaker 1: wildlife conservation movement. Be prepared for a perspective that will
Speaker 1: challenge some of your assumptions about um. There their heroic deeds,
Speaker 1: which is good, it's good for your brain. Sure. Well,
Speaker 1: here's one that I've been tangling with lately just in
Speaker 1: my head, and so I'm glad we're here and I
Speaker 1: can pose this to you and just kind of get
Speaker 1: your thoughts on it after you've exhaustively been thinking about it.
Speaker 1: But I always I'm a proponent that we all think
Speaker 1: of ourselves as part of nature and as hunters. I
Speaker 1: think that you know, we we play that out to
Speaker 1: a maximum as much as we can write. But what
Speaker 1: is it to say that all this destruction that we've
Speaker 1: done and these changes over the last couple of hundred years,
Speaker 1: four hundred years, that that isn't natural and that's not
Speaker 1: the way that it should be. And I want you
Speaker 1: to understand that I'm all for, Like I wish I
Speaker 1: could see the pilliated woodpecker and had seen the great
Speaker 1: penguin of the East coast, right, But when I really
Speaker 1: try to step back and look at it from like
Speaker 1: a really really big viewpoint, it's like, well, if we
Speaker 1: really are as part of it, we're being animals that yeah,
Speaker 1: there's been other animals that have They don't show remorse
Speaker 1: when if they wipe out a certain you know, species
Speaker 1: that they used to feed on and they adapt and
Speaker 1: start feeding on another gets a weird freeze and they
Speaker 1: can cross out to an island ever been to before,
Speaker 1: and they go out there and kill every damn thing
Speaker 1: on the island. Are they evil? So? I mean, I
Speaker 1: can kind of keep going on that, but you can
Speaker 1: you understand my sort of question and just sort of
Speaker 1: this idea that I grapple with right that, even though
Speaker 1: it is terrible and it makes me sad to think
Speaker 1: that we as a human species are gonna what looks
Speaker 1: like just you know, eat ourselves out of house and home,
Speaker 1: But in the end, is it is it just as
Speaker 1: natural as an ice age. So it's a great question. Uh, yeahnny.
Speaker 1: And I'll also say, and Steve can back me up
Speaker 1: on this that the listeners who uh are convinced that
Speaker 1: hunting is uh a lifestyle that has characterized human beings
Speaker 1: from the beginning and all through time, are not going
Speaker 1: to be disappointed in reading this because this story with
Speaker 1: in terms of humans, starts at the point when we
Speaker 1: become upright predators in Africa and develop a strategy for
Speaker 1: a whole new, whole new approach to living, and it
Speaker 1: produces who we are. It enables us to grow big brains,
Speaker 1: It fosters a language that increases the connections the neural
Speaker 1: network and our brains so that we are able to
Speaker 1: take culture, which I argue in the book every single
Speaker 1: animal just about we now know is cultured and transmits
Speaker 1: culture down through time. But as a result of the
Speaker 1: hunting impress on us, we are able to put together
Speaker 1: a language that allows a very rich culture for human beings.
Speaker 1: And I mean I tracked that story through the point
Speaker 1: where I mean, as I said last night in referring
Speaker 1: to the Neanderthals who are our ancestors, all of our ancestors,
Speaker 1: we all have Neanderthal genes in us. These people who
Speaker 1: were present down to forty thousand years ago had a
Speaker 1: lifestyle that was more carnivorous than wolf packs. And we
Speaker 1: know this from nitrogen isotopes in their bones. They ate
Speaker 1: more meat than wolves of the time. Yeah, it would,
Speaker 1: no kidding, and they and they also rested when when
Speaker 1: humans finally got to North America and began hunting the
Speaker 1: wildlife they found here. They represented forty thousand generations of
Speaker 1: previous hunters, which is one of the reasons they were
Speaker 1: so good at it. I mean, I tell a story
Speaker 1: and the like I think about getting into hunting, no
Speaker 1: they didn't wake up and think about that man. They
Speaker 1: then there was nothing like that. I tell a story
Speaker 1: in the book about a mammoth hunt that took place
Speaker 1: in southern Arizona, president southern Ariza, near Tucson, where there
Speaker 1: was a herd of mammoths. This group of Clovis hunters approached.
Speaker 1: Thirteen of the fifteen animals were adolescents and calves, And
Speaker 1: when archaeologists did the excavation of the three sites associated
Speaker 1: with this particular kill episode, all thirteen calves and adolescents
Speaker 1: were found in one spot, each of them with one
Speaker 1: Clovis point in them. Thirteen Clovis points for thirteen adolescents
Speaker 1: and calves. Then they found the bull about out eight
Speaker 1: miles away with two Clovis points in it, And five
Speaker 1: miles away they found the cow, who had obviously fought
Speaker 1: to the end to try to protect those calves. She
Speaker 1: had eight Clovis points in her. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: a record of people who were damn good at this.
Speaker 1: So you're not gonna be listeners out there. You're not
Speaker 1: gonna be disappointed at this long term story of the
Speaker 1: role of hunting in the human experience. You may be
Speaker 1: disappointed when you encounter humans who are motivated by an
Speaker 1: idea that they're exceptional from all other creatures and that
Speaker 1: they have an economy called the global market, who will
Speaker 1: go out and slaughter animals by the thousands in order
Speaker 1: to provide pelts, are leather or some other part for
Speaker 1: a global market economy. Now, can you give the can
Speaker 1: you quit give the This is this helps to respond
Speaker 1: to the honest uh the quote by the buffalo hunter
Speaker 1: who's like, well, you could say we were whatever, or
Speaker 1: you could say we were I can't remember what it was.
Speaker 1: And he goes and I guess that's probably more true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a sentence that we're talking about, how are we
Speaker 1: different than animals whatever. It's a sentence that an animal
Speaker 1: isn't gonna say. No, It's a sentence that an animal
Speaker 1: isn't going to say, uh, that's true. An animal besides us,
Speaker 1: isn't gonna conjure up this this sce hell. And it
Speaker 1: rests on you know, hundreds of thousands of years of
Speaker 1: accumulated culture that enables Frank Mayor to say this. But
Speaker 1: and it follows by the way I I sort of
Speaker 1: look at about four or five of the buffalo hunters
Speaker 1: and how they react to what they've done. And some
Speaker 1: of them are completely defensive. I mean, there's a guy
Speaker 1: named Jay Wright Moore who basically says, you know, all
Speaker 1: this bullshit here with these conservationists about what we did
Speaker 1: to the buffalo, there was not a buffalo out there
Speaker 1: between the Arkansas River and the Canadian border that was
Speaker 1: worth a grain assault compared to any one of the
Speaker 1: settler families that got killed or died in the migration westward.
Speaker 1: These animals just weren't worth anything. And of course what
Speaker 1: he's expressing is the classic we're creating civilization here, and
Speaker 1: these were all the collateral damage, uh, animals, of of
Speaker 1: doing that. But Frank Mayer was kind of more thoughtful
Speaker 1: about it, and he was a buffalo hunter in Kansas
Speaker 1: in the eighteen seventies and he wrote a memoir, a
Speaker 1: really good memoir of of doing all this and he
Speaker 1: kind of reaches the end of his memoir and he says,
Speaker 1: and I can't remember the exact quote, but it goes
Speaker 1: something like this. You know, some people say that we
Speaker 1: just did this for the country, and others say, hell,
Speaker 1: we just did it for ourselves, and we didn't really
Speaker 1: give a crap about the buffaloes or what anybody else
Speaker 1: who comes later and is not going to get to
Speaker 1: see a buffalo ever thinks. And he says, when I
Speaker 1: reflect on it, I think that's the way it was.
Speaker 1: We just didn't give a crap about either the animals
Speaker 1: or what anybody else who came later was gonna kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Uh. So there's a range of opinions, as
Speaker 1: you would expect from all these guys. But yeah, it
Speaker 1: goes like that. And while I said last night, when
Speaker 1: when Steve was sort of holding my feet to the
Speaker 1: fire on this particular one, that I was breaking his heart,
Speaker 1: uh by talking the way I was about buffalo hunters
Speaker 1: and about beaver trade, I was saying that you denied
Speaker 1: them their lived experiences in humanity. I think he said
Speaker 1: something like that, very thoughtful. But what I said, sort
Speaker 1: of in defense is that actually throughout the book, and
Speaker 1: I do this at least four different times, including with
Speaker 1: buffalo hunter, including with Jay Wright Moore and his brother,
Speaker 1: including with a wolf bounty hunter in Colorado, including with
Speaker 1: a plume hunter, these guys who kill snowy egrets and
Speaker 1: roseate spoonbills and all for the plume trade to decorate
Speaker 1: women's hats, uh, and a couple of other instances. What
Speaker 1: this market hunt for animals did do is it enabled
Speaker 1: people who were rural who had really no access to
Speaker 1: an economy where you can make money. It allowed them
Speaker 1: to make money, and it allowed them entry into the
Speaker 1: middle class. So Jay Wright More and his brother, after
Speaker 1: they stopped hunting buffalo, they're able to buy a ranch
Speaker 1: and stock it with cattle in Texas. The wolf bounty
Speaker 1: hunter in Colorado is able to do the same thing.
Speaker 1: He kills UH. He makes seven thousand dollars on a
Speaker 1: hundred and forty wolves he bounties in one year, and
Speaker 1: he buys a ranch in Colorado and stocks it with
Speaker 1: with Herford's one of the guys who is the plume
Speaker 1: hunter in Florida and who is almost wiping out UH
Speaker 1: snowy egrets in Florida and driving flamingos basically out of
Speaker 1: the country. This guy ends up making how much money
Speaker 1: doing it that he buys himself an island a yacht,
Speaker 1: builds a house, and puts all this great furniture, brand
Speaker 1: new furniture in his house. So it's a way of
Speaker 1: getting into the American middle class. But for somebody like
Speaker 1: me looking back on that which happened in my home
Speaker 1: state in Louisiana. I mean, who I identify most with
Speaker 1: is somebody like Henry David Thureau, who, looking back on
Speaker 1: what happened in Massachusetts before he ever came along, penned
Speaker 1: this incredible journal entry in eighteen fifty six where he says,
Speaker 1: you know, I just I don't want to look up
Speaker 1: at the night sky and think that before I came along,
Speaker 1: some demigod came along and plucked all the best of
Speaker 1: the constellations out of the sky, so I don't get
Speaker 1: to see them. He said, It's like listening to a
Speaker 1: symphony where hell the French horns are gone, and the
Speaker 1: strings are gone and the drums are gone. And he
Speaker 1: ends this with this classic line, I wish to know
Speaker 1: an entire heaven and an entire earth, not one that
Speaker 1: somebody has come along and defiled before I ever appear
Speaker 1: in my own life. And so I mean, that is
Speaker 1: the other side of the the story. You know. John
Speaker 1: mcfee's phenomenal trilogy on American geology, Uh from the Planes
Speaker 1: and Yeah, it was collected altogether as Annals of the
Speaker 1: Former World. At one point in the book he says,
Speaker 1: if I had to sum up this book, meaning his book,
Speaker 1: in one sentence, it would be that the top of
Speaker 1: Mount Everest is a marine limestone. Uh. Dan does the
Speaker 1: same thing, and he sums up this story in two
Speaker 1: words that he puts at the end of one of
Speaker 1: his chapters. And those two words are fucking pathetic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all that ship you're talking about. Yeah, you know, I
Speaker 1: think about all the time. Man, Like if I wasn't
Speaker 1: to get into my own psychology, okay, which I guess
Speaker 1: I am, becaume there the story of the Clovis hunters
Speaker 1: killing everything off, it's seductive for a lot of reasons,
Speaker 1: like it tickles the imagination, but it's there's a seduction
Speaker 1: there um for this reason. And likewise, like oh, wolves
Speaker 1: will go to an island and kill all the moose
Speaker 1: or kill all the deer out an island, and and
Speaker 1: and you love them. You love them those stories because
Speaker 1: then you can sit back and go see it just happens, man,
Speaker 1: It just happens. Nothing to get worked up about. But
Speaker 1: in the bad year, in the deeper, deeper part of
Speaker 1: your brain, there's like there's this there's a inherited carried guilt,
Speaker 1: and you can be like, I don't know why dold
Speaker 1: wolves have it. I don't know, they don't. I don't
Speaker 1: think they have it. But that ain't gonna make years
Speaker 1: go away. No, and I don't I don't wish it
Speaker 1: to go away. How you wrote about that in your
Speaker 1: Buffalo book. I can't remember what specifically. Yeah, when you
Speaker 1: when you kill that buffalo, Yeah, you you wrote about
Speaker 1: you know you couldn't help feeling some guilt about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially something is beleaguered and as complicated as that one.
Speaker 1: But now I realized that it's just a it's just
Speaker 1: a new be fake. It's a it's a new bee
Speaker 1: fake American animal. Anyways, I should have called it eight
Speaker 1: in seven American Buffalo. I should have called that book
Speaker 1: Asian Buffalo. It should have been about horses. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: should have been about horses. That's right, Steve well may
Speaker 1: In It's it's a um, it's a chance. It's a
Speaker 1: really challenging, uh in depth book. I don't know what
Speaker 1: will happen. I don't pay a super I don't know
Speaker 1: how it all works. But like for me to to
Speaker 1: see that book nominated for a National Book Award, or
Speaker 1: to see that book nominated for a Pulitzer prise, wouldn't
Speaker 1: even kind of surprise me. I don't know how you're
Speaker 1: gonna top it. Well, I may not be able to
Speaker 1: top it, that's right. I mean, I'm no doubt write
Speaker 1: more books, but yeah, this one is kind of a
Speaker 1: it's uh, it represents thinking about this since I was
Speaker 1: four years old, That's what. That's what I mean. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's so much in it. Reading I was like, how
Speaker 1: the hell do you know all this? There's so much
Speaker 1: in it, and so much note carding and and taking,
Speaker 1: like wildly disparate stories and sets of ideas and come
Speaker 1: by ironing them all, hunting everything down. Um. It's ah,
Speaker 1: if you had just been a historian and been an
Speaker 1: academic and in the end you you laid that book
Speaker 1: out and fell over dead, um, people will be like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know there, it is right what works are saying.
Speaker 1: But I don't know what you'll do. I don't I
Speaker 1: don't know how you'll I joked last night that your
Speaker 1: next one will have to be about the cosmos. Yeah
Speaker 1: you did, because I don't know where you go from here. Ah,
Speaker 1: unless you narrow back in. Yeah, well that's probably what
Speaker 1: one would do, is narrow back in so this this
Speaker 1: is very likely the the big story, the big narrative,
Speaker 1: like you might there's another. This last thing I'll point
Speaker 1: out about the book is, um, there's some incredible restraint there,
Speaker 1: because there are areas that I know, you know really
Speaker 1: well and that you spent years of work on and
Speaker 1: have written about widely, and you don't do them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, And I was like, dude, man, that dude
Speaker 1: just he just he could have gotten just twenty three
Speaker 1: pages right there with his other ship. But you just
Speaker 1: the restraint, well, part of the restraint was trying to
Speaker 1: hold this thing to under four hundred pages, which I
Speaker 1: managed to do by only two pages. And so there
Speaker 1: were there were plenty of spots I have to say.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it would be easy to write
Speaker 1: an eight out of this story because I'd be like,
Speaker 1: he damn sure knows a lot to flesh that story
Speaker 1: out that he didn't include the Yeah, well that just
Speaker 1: there were times when I said, Okay, I've already done
Speaker 1: something like this, so I'm not gonna go there. I mean,
Speaker 1: the coyote story probably yeah, sure that And then I
Speaker 1: mean just stuff about with when when the horse was
Speaker 1: reintroduced or you know, or or what might say and
Speaker 1: introduced to reintroduced, depending on your perspective, Like the implications
Speaker 1: of that, the fact that you resisted the urge just
Speaker 1: to lay that ship out all over you. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: I felt like I had done that. So and and
Speaker 1: as as I said, I mean a lot of it
Speaker 1: was trying to make this a book that that one
Speaker 1: could read, that you could sit out in three or
Speaker 1: four days and you could actually read it and not
Speaker 1: have to you know, I mean books that get too
Speaker 1: long to me. You know, you tend to after two
Speaker 1: hundred pages, you put them away and you may not
Speaker 1: go back for a month. And I was trying to
Speaker 1: make sure that I was writing a book that somebody
Speaker 1: would start and within about three or four days you
Speaker 1: would you would go through it. Man, I will send
Speaker 1: you a couple of men emails while I was reading it,
Speaker 1: but didn't. Well you should have. I'm I'm always up
Speaker 1: for main emails. Uh someday I'm gonna do uh some
Speaker 1: do I'm gonna take it, and I'm gonna do a
Speaker 1: footnoted version where where like I was, I was telling
Speaker 1: you last night, all my footnotes are going to begin
Speaker 1: with well, yeah, but stay commentary huh, well, yeah, but
Speaker 1: keep in mind they were super badass. Might be a
Speaker 1: little essay. Yeah, Steve should just take notes all over
Speaker 1: the book, and then we can reprint a copy of
Speaker 1: Dan's book with Steve notes better he reads the whole thing.
Speaker 1: And then I get to just pause and be like,
Speaker 1: what Dan's leaving out here that I think people should
Speaker 1: really pay attention to you, man, is like some of
Speaker 1: them that can be a new audio, yeah, version of
Speaker 1: the audio book, Like, for instance, on the Eldo Leopold stuff,
Speaker 1: I would pause and be like, I'd like to point
Speaker 1: out that Eldo Leopold was and remained throughout his entire
Speaker 1: life a very abada hunter play. It's like somehow that
Speaker 1: got left doubt age do this to you. But we
Speaker 1: gotta get to some trivia. Dan's gonna be Dan's gonna
Speaker 1: win trivia, I'm afraid. Okay, well, it looks like last
Speaker 1: time the trivia guess once that was my lovely wife
Speaker 1: Adrian say that congratulations to her. You're gonna say for trivia, right,
Speaker 1: all right? Stay two for trivia. Wild New World, The
Speaker 1: Epic Story of Animals and People in America by Dan Flores.
Speaker 1: Check it out and it'll it'll stretch your brain out
Speaker 1: and and sometimes uncomfortable ways, but ultimately your brain will
Speaker 1: just be bigger and in better So enjoy and for
Speaker 1: people listening now, it's actually available. It is available. Wild
Speaker 1: new world, it's a wild old world. Thanks Dan, Are
Speaker 1: you bad guys like you? Tw