Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening un podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything presented by first light. Go farther,
Speaker 1: stay longer. UM. All right, So right now we're sitting
Speaker 1: in uh in what do you call this place? We're
Speaker 1: in Albuquerque Regional Headquarters. Yeah, this is the Southwestern Regional Office,
Speaker 1: the Southwestern Regional Office of the US for US Service.
Speaker 1: Do you guys mind going around and saying like what
Speaker 1: you do and what like what your job titles are.
Speaker 1: So I'm Jerry Monzingo. UM, I'm Wildlife Fishing and rare
Speaker 1: plant program manager on the Healand National Forest which is
Speaker 1: in southwest New Mexico. And you grew up doing a
Speaker 1: little fur trapping. I did? I did? Yeah? Um. When
Speaker 1: growing up, I lived along the HeLa River, which is
Speaker 1: headwaters are in the HeLa Wilderness. And my grandpa started
Speaker 1: me out, um probably when I was ten eleven years old.
Speaker 1: UM gave me three old number two Victor long springs
Speaker 1: that were the springs were just about warring out um,
Speaker 1: and that and that started me. I walked to the
Speaker 1: river from the house, set out a few traps um.
Speaker 1: And then of course for what muskrats, no coons, raccoons,
Speaker 1: gray fox, the occasional bobcat, lots of skunks. Um. Occasionally
Speaker 1: you're saying ring ring tales. Yeah, what was like, what
Speaker 1: what's the market like for those bads? You know, that
Speaker 1: was back when fur prices were good. Fur prices were
Speaker 1: good then, Um, you know ring tales were twelve bucks
Speaker 1: a little gray fox was worth Yeah. I started trappling
Speaker 1: right at the tail end of the super good fur prices.
Speaker 1: And it was the same single spring number one, single spring,
Speaker 1: single long spring victors that that launched me into the biz.
Speaker 1: But then you also came out like, ah, you came
Speaker 1: out of a mining family. I did. Yeah. Um, my
Speaker 1: dad worked at the local copper mine. Um, all my life,
Speaker 1: that's you know, that's all he knew was the copper mine.
Speaker 1: I think he ended up when he retired. It was
Speaker 1: thirty six years at the copper mine. I spent a
Speaker 1: three and a half year stint at the copper mine.
Speaker 1: In about a year into that, I figured that wasn't
Speaker 1: for me. Um, it was shift work. I had grown
Speaker 1: up with that my whole life, and a graveyard shift
Speaker 1: around my house me and my sister is always left
Speaker 1: because you know, when somebody's trying to sleep during the
Speaker 1: middle of the day and a bunch of kids running
Speaker 1: around the house. Um, and even if it even if
Speaker 1: it wasn't us that woke him up, um, we got blamed.
Speaker 1: So we just it away from the house. I stayed
Speaker 1: at the river, fishing, trapping, whatever, just to be clear
Speaker 1: of home, just to be clear of home. And then
Speaker 1: you didn't you mind for you did mining for three years.
Speaker 1: I did three and a half years UM and then
Speaker 1: when up going from that into school and came up
Speaker 1: through wildlife mild right. Yeah, when I got out of
Speaker 1: UM high school, what I wanted to do was get
Speaker 1: a degree in wildlife management for sua a career with
Speaker 1: a state agency. At that time, about the time when
Speaker 1: I graduated, the mind shut down. My family was always
Speaker 1: very serious about not being in debt, so really the
Speaker 1: only place that they could afford for me to go
Speaker 1: to school was the local university, which was thirty miles away.
Speaker 1: That university didn't offer a degree in wildlife management, nothing
Speaker 1: really even close. So it is a typical seventeen year
Speaker 1: old that thinks they know best. Um, I decided I
Speaker 1: wasn't going to go to college, and my mom decided
Speaker 1: for me that I was. So I went to the
Speaker 1: local college got a associate's degree in welding technology. And
Speaker 1: prior to that, during high school, um the summers and
Speaker 1: during and during the college, I had worked for a
Speaker 1: local ranch um in hayfields, working cattle. I got out
Speaker 1: of college with that degree, I went back to the
Speaker 1: ranch for two two years, a little over two years,
Speaker 1: making twenty five bucks a day, fourteen sixteen hour days,
Speaker 1: sometimes seven days a week, like around what time, what
Speaker 1: year was at oh eighty. I worked at the ranch
Speaker 1: in the summers from about eighty one until eighty four
Speaker 1: when I graduated, and then I went back to work
Speaker 1: for a little over two years solid about eighty five
Speaker 1: eighty six. So now when you like, as a as
Speaker 1: a biology is now working, how far from where you
Speaker 1: grew up are you now that you work for the
Speaker 1: Forest Service? Like how close and what proximity to all
Speaker 1: where you were trapping and growing up and and mining
Speaker 1: is your work now? Like right there? Yeah, it's right there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I grew up in a Do you work now
Speaker 1: in places you were familiar with as a kid? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I didn't do a whole lot of hunting
Speaker 1: and all on the National Forest growing up, um, and
Speaker 1: we gathered fuelwood there to heat our house. I grew
Speaker 1: up hunting with my my grandfather, um on my mom's side,
Speaker 1: because my dad just my dad wasn't an outdoorsman, and
Speaker 1: my grandfather's family had settled in the cliff La Valley,
Speaker 1: you know, in the late eighteen hundreds, um, along the river,
Speaker 1: and so he he knew all the local folks that
Speaker 1: had been there a long time. He you know, it
Speaker 1: was friends with the large land owners, the ranchers. So
Speaker 1: my early time was hunting private property. I mean I
Speaker 1: fished some on the National Forest, um, because it was
Speaker 1: you know, an hour's drive and hike basically into the
Speaker 1: heel of wilderness from my house where I grew up. UM.
Speaker 1: So I did spend a lot of time along the
Speaker 1: river in the forest, but most of my early hunt
Speaker 1: and all was done um on private land. Yeah. How
Speaker 1: long you've been with the Forest Service now? Twenty two years?
Speaker 1: I was twenty two years. Yeah, long time and on
Speaker 1: the same forest for twenty two years, which is very
Speaker 1: you don't see that very often people stay in that long.
Speaker 1: But it's I love the country, I love my job, um,
Speaker 1: and I really have no desires to go somewhere else.
Speaker 1: If you're doing good work, I leave. Yeah, now, Beyord,
Speaker 1: you're from far off. Yeah, I grew up in Seattle. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Where How did you come to be here and do
Speaker 1: what you're doing? I was a long, long journey. I
Speaker 1: you know, I grew up playing on public lands in
Speaker 1: the Northwest. You know, my dad was before he had
Speaker 1: me and my my brother and sister, was an alpine climber.
Speaker 1: Climbed all over the world. Yeah, so a guy. I
Speaker 1: think he was like on the on the cusp of
Speaker 1: doing some pretty big things. And you know, as as
Speaker 1: things go in the mountains, never never quite pulled off
Speaker 1: some of these big climbs. But so he instill in
Speaker 1: that's really early, this kind of ethic of or passion
Speaker 1: for the outdoors, and was dragging us all over the
Speaker 1: Cascades growing up. And so have many a fond memory
Speaker 1: of camping trips and backpacking all over the place growing up.
Speaker 1: And so left Seattle when I was eighteen after after
Speaker 1: get out of high school, went to school on the
Speaker 1: East Coast. Um had an interest in environmental issues due
Speaker 1: to that upbringing and and you know, growing up in
Speaker 1: Seattle and just hearing a lot about Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of interest that part of the world, as I'm
Speaker 1: sure you know about environmental issues and sustainability and it's
Speaker 1: kind of a weird, like I'm not a climber, but
Speaker 1: it's it's a real next is for the climbing world.
Speaker 1: It is, it is. I mean there's some some really
Speaker 1: famous folks who uh yeah, who who grew up there,
Speaker 1: um lived there today in the in the climbing world,
Speaker 1: alpine climbing in particular. You think you talked about rock
Speaker 1: it's them down in Yosemite. And he spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time down there too. But yeah, well international, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. So Um anyway, went to school, studied, uh
Speaker 1: studied environmental studies as an undergrad had a kind of
Speaker 1: interest in international applications of that that sort of feel
Speaker 1: to study. And so along the way, I spent about
Speaker 1: a year in China. I went to grad school and
Speaker 1: and uh did an environmental science degree, And based on
Speaker 1: my experience in China, wanted to get some other exposure
Speaker 1: in India being another huge kind of developing country. You
Speaker 1: know that's going to be um amazingly significant on the
Speaker 1: world stage and in the context of environmental issues. And UM,
Speaker 1: during my time abroad, you know, what I really missed
Speaker 1: was was the outdoors, you know, in our public lands.
Speaker 1: And and so I did a lot of reflecting. I
Speaker 1: missed my family and friends too, of course, and I
Speaker 1: was meeting experts who had spent their whole lives abroad,
Speaker 1: their whole adult lives anyway, and UM, it just kind
Speaker 1: of concluded, this is not the lifestyle that I want
Speaker 1: to live. And UM, I think, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of good, important work that we can be doing
Speaker 1: at home. So I kind of did this mental ship
Speaker 1: in terms of where I thought I was going to
Speaker 1: be taking my career. Came back and had an opportunity
Speaker 1: to to start up with the Forest Service in Washington
Speaker 1: d C. I was joked, that's like a backwards career path. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, looks like Jerry started in the field on
Speaker 1: a national forest and UM, you know those who aspire, um,
Speaker 1: worked their way up to d C towards the end
Speaker 1: of their careers and had the chance to start out
Speaker 1: there and fascinating experience. Met a lot of really great
Speaker 1: people who had rich careers and turned around after two
Speaker 1: years there and went um did a brieft in eastern
Speaker 1: Washington on the Calville National Forest, and then went down
Speaker 1: to the Cleveland National Force in southern California for about
Speaker 1: four or five years before coming out to Albuquerque. And
Speaker 1: part of your deal like just say caves, caves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I'm I'm the regional program manager for a wilderness,
Speaker 1: wild sink, rivers and caves and and it's kind of
Speaker 1: an odd, odd grouping of programs at face value, but
Speaker 1: the rationale behind it is that we have um federal
Speaker 1: law that protects each of these resources. And so I'm,
Speaker 1: in essence the specialist um protect our special places within
Speaker 1: the region. That's that's my job. In a nutshell, what
Speaker 1: does the law that protects caves? Like, I know, like
Speaker 1: when you say, when you say wilderness, so as we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna as we're gonna be discussing it today
Speaker 1: when we say wilderness, like we're talking about wilderns of
Speaker 1: the Capital w like federally designated wilderness. We'll get into
Speaker 1: what that is. But and wild and scenic rivers that's
Speaker 1: its own piece of legislation. Right when we when we
Speaker 1: designate generally a stretch of river, right, explain it and
Speaker 1: explain the cave thing, and how like what kind of
Speaker 1: administration occurs around caves. I I had no idea there
Speaker 1: was anything like that. Yeah. So so, yeah, wilderness is
Speaker 1: actually kind of the odd odd one out in that bunch,
Speaker 1: in the sense that it's just a broader landscape that's
Speaker 1: gets protected where you have rivers and caves that are
Speaker 1: discrete resources. And so wild Rivers um So that Wild
Speaker 1: Rivers Act passed in nine, basically allows Congress to designate
Speaker 1: stretches of free flowing so you know, rivers that are
Speaker 1: free of dams and other impoundments and diversions, rivers that
Speaker 1: have um hy degree of water quality, and what we
Speaker 1: call outstandingly remarkable values. Um So, these really, when you
Speaker 1: look at a regional or national context, these really special values.
Speaker 1: They might be fisher widlife species, that might be a recreation,
Speaker 1: They might be scenery or geologic resources. And so there's
Speaker 1: got to be something about that free flowing river that
Speaker 1: has really kind of really specially unique qualities. And so
Speaker 1: we placed that protection over it. Wild sc Rivers Act
Speaker 1: really in a in a nutshell, um it prohibits damn
Speaker 1: building is the biggest, most direct thing any kind of
Speaker 1: any kind of firk hydroelectric type of project is outright prohibited.
Speaker 1: And then we have this mandate as managers to protect
Speaker 1: that free flowing condition, to protect water quality and protect
Speaker 1: those outstandingly remarkable values. That was next. So that was
Speaker 1: kind of they're both in that era of really significant
Speaker 1: major environmental legislation being passed in this country, and you
Speaker 1: get into the seventies and you have you know, the
Speaker 1: Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act,
Speaker 1: and so I was really the heyday of these big
Speaker 1: and Nixon that's right, yeah, SA, of course, yep, yep.
Speaker 1: And then right down the caves, you because I didn't
Speaker 1: know there's any kind of special there's like a there's
Speaker 1: like a protective designation for caves, that's right. So there's
Speaker 1: a Federal Cave Resources Protection Act, kind of like the
Speaker 1: Wild Stink Rivers Act, and it basically says that or
Speaker 1: Congress has the ability. Actually actually in this case, Congress
Speaker 1: doesn't have the ability. They differ. They delegate that to
Speaker 1: the agency to to identify and protect significant caves. And
Speaker 1: so it's similar to wild sink rivers. It's these caves
Speaker 1: that have some special unique value to them again recreation, wildlife, um,
Speaker 1: scientific values. And so that law, once we designate as
Speaker 1: an agency these caves is significant. We have to protect.
Speaker 1: We're required by a lot of protective special values. Got you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how many stretches of river have our wild scenic rivers
Speaker 1: because that's all over the country. Yeah, Like I used
Speaker 1: to fish small mouth on one a stretch of the
Speaker 1: Delaware River, Yeah, which is like very you know, I
Speaker 1: mean it's houses, cottages, right, So it's not like wilderness
Speaker 1: is so wilderness designations Like a criticism is that they're
Speaker 1: all high country in the not a criticism, but like
Speaker 1: when someone looks at the scope and it feels like
Speaker 1: a very Western issue because they're in these like very
Speaker 1: remote areas in the mountains generally at higher altitude. But
Speaker 1: in the wild scenic rivers, man, I mean they're all
Speaker 1: over the plaster or the east, you know. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: shake with wilderness. It's like the rock and ice, you know,
Speaker 1: back in the day where there were no other you know,
Speaker 1: really immediately accessible economic values, and so they were remote, undeveloped,
Speaker 1: and it's a lot of the early wilderness where these
Speaker 1: kind of rock and ice type of places, and there
Speaker 1: are people doing good work to try to diversify the system.
Speaker 1: So we have representative set of ecosystems that you know,
Speaker 1: are are protected as wilderness. And like you said, rivers
Speaker 1: um a little different all over the country. Off the
Speaker 1: top of my head, you know, because it's spent all
Speaker 1: my time thinking about the southwest UM. I don't know
Speaker 1: the number of rivers designated UM, you know, but it's
Speaker 1: not even it's not whole rivers, so it's segments. So
Speaker 1: we have one here in New Mexico and the Rio
Speaker 1: Chama that designate wild Stink River and it's right between
Speaker 1: two dams. Yeah. But but again in that stretch, you know,
Speaker 1: there are no effects to the free flow, so the
Speaker 1: river is free to do its thing, meander across the landscape.
Speaker 1: You know, you go through those channel formation processes and
Speaker 1: UM has a whole slew of outstanding they remarkable values.
Speaker 1: And so that's kind of a unique thing people always
Speaker 1: talk about, like that's kind of weird. It's you know,
Speaker 1: it's a river that's damn controlled, but you call it
Speaker 1: free flowing and it's not about UM. You're looking at
Speaker 1: the entirety of the river. Itself. I mean, there are
Speaker 1: very few rivers in the West that would be free
Speaker 1: flowing for their full duration, the HeLa maybe being one
Speaker 1: of them. Is there a river that is protected from
Speaker 1: its headwaters all the way down to the mouth or confluence,
Speaker 1: not in the Southwest? Um? I would? I would? I
Speaker 1: would say, I mean, I can let me typ step
Speaker 1: back in The reason the Wild Sink Rivers Act passed
Speaker 1: was really a response to this this heyday of damn
Speaker 1: building and kind of the early and middle part of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, the exactly the Floyd Domini area. And
Speaker 1: so there have been a lot of damns built by
Speaker 1: the time the Act passed. And so I again, that's
Speaker 1: a question. I I you know, stuff I should probably know,
Speaker 1: but I would. I would hazard a guess that we
Speaker 1: might have something in Alaska, But I'm not aware of
Speaker 1: anything in the lower forty eight because there was so
Speaker 1: much river development. And that's not to say it doesn't exist,
Speaker 1: just not off the top of my head. But we
Speaker 1: went through so much river development before we got to
Speaker 1: that point in sixty eight when Congress passed that act that, um,
Speaker 1: you know, it was about protecting some of these really
Speaker 1: high value segments that we had left at that we're
Speaker 1: not yet developed. Yeah, I want to get into I
Speaker 1: want to move on and introduce Carl, but reintroduced Carl.
Speaker 1: But I want to get into like what was going
Speaker 1: on why so much of this stuff came out of
Speaker 1: the sixties. Yeah, and like what was happening culturally at
Speaker 1: the time. But Carl. Yeah, Now, Carl joined us before.
Speaker 1: He's been on the show a couple of times and
Speaker 1: then joined us before and told the fascinating story of
Speaker 1: the Wisconsin supersow. That's right? Is that what it's called?
Speaker 1: Wisconsin super Soo, Wisconsin super sow and um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: just revive people's memories on what what your story is. Yes,
Speaker 1: I work here in the Southwestern Regional Office. I'm the
Speaker 1: regional wildlife Ecologist. Um. The cliff Notes version of my
Speaker 1: journey to this agency is growing up in northwest Lower Peninsula, Michigan,
Speaker 1: for getting a little fur trapping, a little bit, getting
Speaker 1: really good at doing chores for private landowners. Um. And
Speaker 1: I had a a platte book that I pasted pages
Speaker 1: of on the wall and took a highlighter and drew
Speaker 1: outlines around the properties where I had obtained permission to
Speaker 1: hunt fish camp trap and really didn't have easy access
Speaker 1: to public land. So I was bailing hay, doing chores,
Speaker 1: um splitting wood, and over time I accumulated what in
Speaker 1: hindsight now looks a lot to me like a map
Speaker 1: of a national forest where have little in holdings where
Speaker 1: you don't have access, especially those eastern nationally crazy on
Speaker 1: maps right. Um. And then I went to college for
Speaker 1: natural resources program. I too spent some time working overseas
Speaker 1: in China as I was working on my PhD, and
Speaker 1: through that experience realized that we are way luckier here
Speaker 1: in this country than I had acknowledged growing up. And
Speaker 1: as I was finishing up grad school and considering different
Speaker 1: career tracks, UM, I became increasingly interested in getting involved
Speaker 1: with our public land system. So once I wrapped up
Speaker 1: my my degree at the University of Wisconsin and Madison,
Speaker 1: UM I looked west of the Mississippi, really zeroed in
Speaker 1: on states that had a very high ratio of public
Speaker 1: land to population. And uh, my wife, who also grew
Speaker 1: up in Michigan, was interested in states where the winners
Speaker 1: weren't quite as long and gray and rugged. And so
Speaker 1: those two key criteria helped us really zero in on
Speaker 1: the Southwest and on New Mexico in particular. So we
Speaker 1: moved down here in late and started working for the U.
Speaker 1: S d A. Forest Service on the Lincoln National Forest.
Speaker 1: And during my relatively short tenure with the organization, I've
Speaker 1: had a chance to work at our Washington office headquarters,
Speaker 1: um work at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, and now
Speaker 1: I'm based here out of the regional office. And the
Speaker 1: position covers eleven National forests between Arizona and New Mexico,
Speaker 1: and then there are also four National Grasslands administered by
Speaker 1: the CIBOLA, and those also fall under the purview of
Speaker 1: the position. I have. So anything related to wildlife monitoring
Speaker 1: on a scale that expands beyond a single forest would
Speaker 1: be something I would work on. As an example. And
Speaker 1: you drew a bull moose tag in Idaho, man, I
Speaker 1: got I gotta say so. One of the things, aside
Speaker 1: from a lot of public land, one of the things
Speaker 1: that drew me to New Mexico was the ability to
Speaker 1: hunt elk, mule, deer, and pronghorn. Growing up in Michigan
Speaker 1: all about white tails. I love white sales. White tail
Speaker 1: hunting is amazing, don't get me wrong, But you know,
Speaker 1: reading all the Western hunting magazines growing up, I was like, God,
Speaker 1: I would love to be able to chase this diversity
Speaker 1: of big game. So I moved to New Mexico. And
Speaker 1: my strategy with applying for big game tags here. You know,
Speaker 1: you get three choices in New Mexico. I put choices
Speaker 1: that are great for first and second, and then my
Speaker 1: third choice is always just please give me a tag.
Speaker 1: So my third choice elk tag is the tag I've
Speaker 1: drawn every year. I've had an archery elk hunt every
Speaker 1: year I've been here. And then this year I failed
Speaker 1: to draw an elk hunt, and I was so sour.
Speaker 1: You know, It's like I moved west to hunt elk
Speaker 1: and now I do not have an elk tag. And
Speaker 1: it turns out there is no better cure for not
Speaker 1: drawing an elk tag than to draw moose tag. You know. Uh,
Speaker 1: just quick thing I'll add man here about like the
Speaker 1: Platt books. When I was a kid, I worked like
Speaker 1: I I hunted a trap Mosqueton County, Ottawa County, nue
Speaker 1: Ego County, and and there they have township um and
Speaker 1: townships or six miles by six miles, And Plat books
Speaker 1: would come in township plat books or no, you get
Speaker 1: a county, but to be broken down. And I remember
Speaker 1: going around like I would identify. I would go through
Speaker 1: plat books, identify every place I wanted to where I
Speaker 1: wanted my trap lines, and I would make a list
Speaker 1: on a legal pad. And my old man would, you know,
Speaker 1: late summer every year, just as a favor, would get
Speaker 1: on the phone and he grew up doing sales, you know,
Speaker 1: because he was an insurance salesman. He would get on
Speaker 1: the phone and just work that list. And I mean
Speaker 1: he would score, Like if I put a name down,
Speaker 1: he would get on the phone and right away would
Speaker 1: be like some he'd find some connection to church whatever,
Speaker 1: fraternal organizations ain't something, you'd find some connection. He would
Speaker 1: just check them off. And I had yeah, and I
Speaker 1: would put that up in my little trapper area, had
Speaker 1: all those plat maps, all my property circle, and it
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, you'd build out a thing. And that
Speaker 1: One of the things that drew me to public land
Speaker 1: was the amount of sort of administrative duties surrounding maintaining
Speaker 1: like a network of properties. And then when you would
Speaker 1: look at these states that had like a bunch of
Speaker 1: public landing realized, Oh my god, what a shortcut did
Speaker 1: you just have? Like this? This? Uh, you know this
Speaker 1: is right to go out there and be out there,
Speaker 1: and that's it. No one, no one can tell you know,
Speaker 1: as long as you're a law abiding person, no one
Speaker 1: can tell you no. Um. But yeah, So back to
Speaker 1: have a quick question, Carl. Have you stepped foot on
Speaker 1: all those forests and grasslands that you oversee? Now, No,
Speaker 1: I have not nearly all of them, um, But I
Speaker 1: have not yet visited the Black Kettle National Grassland, which
Speaker 1: is the farthest east most of our grasslands. But I'm
Speaker 1: tempted because reports are the Bob White numbers are like
Speaker 1: through the over there. Um. Yeah. And in phenomenal turkey
Speaker 1: hunting too. So if you look at the you know,
Speaker 1: the expanse of country um that include Southwestern regional administrative units,
Speaker 1: it's a ton of land, um and the diversity is incredible.
Speaker 1: But you know, we haven't worked out of this office
Speaker 1: for a few years. It's still a pretty good feat
Speaker 1: that I've been to each of the forests. And then
Speaker 1: remember within each of those forests, you have another level
Speaker 1: of administrative unit, the district, and I'm nowhere near having
Speaker 1: visited every district. So, for example, on the Lincoln National Forest,
Speaker 1: there are three different districts, and I've I've been involved
Speaker 1: with projects on each of those districts. But um, how
Speaker 1: many districts on the HeLa six districts, And I've visited
Speaker 1: a couple of the districts on the HeLa, mostly the
Speaker 1: Wilderness Ranger District because that's one of my favorite chunks
Speaker 1: of ground in the whole region. Yeah, was it that
Speaker 1: the first? Like that is it the carl you can
Speaker 1: tell a story? Is it the first wilderness? The first
Speaker 1: thing we now recognize is federally designated willness was an
Speaker 1: idea put forward by Aldo Leopold. Yeah, is that true?
Speaker 1: It is true? And you know these he wasn't calling
Speaker 1: it that then. Well, so there was an essay that
Speaker 1: he published with the title A Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds.
Speaker 1: And Leopold was in this mode of authorship where he
Speaker 1: was pleaing for a lot of different things. During this
Speaker 1: kind of he was he was like throwing that word around.
Speaker 1: He had a number of them. Another one was there's
Speaker 1: a place in northern New Mexico, if I remember right,
Speaker 1: called Stinking Lake, And he had a plea for a
Speaker 1: special designation of this stinking lake as a as a
Speaker 1: wildlife refuge for waterfowl. But this plea for wilderness hunting grounds. Um,
Speaker 1: would you guys agree? That's kind of seen as one
Speaker 1: of the key kernels that ultimately grew into the Heila.
Speaker 1: So you read that, um, And that was he wrote
Speaker 1: that night for outdoor Life. Actually that that's right of here. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and what's funny though it actually, at least by
Speaker 1: what I've found out, it wasn't published until after four
Speaker 1: when administratively the HeLa Wilderness had already been set aside,
Speaker 1: So it wasn't designated yet, but all those early wildernesses
Speaker 1: were administratively set aside by the agency. UM. And you
Speaker 1: know in there he compares, you know, he lists all
Speaker 1: of these areas that in the Southwest that he thinks
Speaker 1: should be wilderness, and he talks about losing them, and
Speaker 1: he compares that to the city block in town somewhere,
Speaker 1: and there's five city blocks left and they start building
Speaker 1: and those blocks are disappearing, and he talks about, shouldn't
Speaker 1: we have one left that has nothing on it that
Speaker 1: the kids can go play in and the weeds can
Speaker 1: grow on UM, so that that's what he's laici Pality's
Speaker 1: all called green space now, spent a ton of time
Speaker 1: talking about it and trying to hang on to it
Speaker 1: in that plea. That's what he's That's what he's comparing
Speaker 1: it to um and in the Southwest. You know, I
Speaker 1: don't know at the time, there was five or six
Speaker 1: areas that he was talking about and they were just
Speaker 1: getting chewed up. Um Rhodes pushed him too. Him and
Speaker 1: here's a guy coming out of he was born in
Speaker 1: what state? Karl doesn't like when I point out that
Speaker 1: he married his cousin, but he was born in what state? No,
Speaker 1: First of all, you don't have that right. That is
Speaker 1: that is not a fact. Let me let me let
Speaker 1: me correct a little history for you. He actually married
Speaker 1: a New Mexican woman, and that's a really kind of
Speaker 1: unique twist on this story. His parents were, that's what
Speaker 1: it was. So you don't like when I point that
Speaker 1: out because it's not correct. I don't like him. You
Speaker 1: point to false facts for sure. So yeah, he was
Speaker 1: he was born in Burlington, Iowa or in Iowa. Midwestern
Speaker 1: He's claimed by He's claimed by three plays. He's probably
Speaker 1: claimed he's claimed by by more than three plays claimed
Speaker 1: by New Mexico because it was kind of he like
Speaker 1: came of age here, he had he had an epiphany here.
Speaker 1: He had a number of epiphanies here for sure, and
Speaker 1: then later went to Wisconsin where he wrote much of
Speaker 1: wrote about the epiphanies he had in New Mexico. Um
Speaker 1: in Arizona, and he came out to New Mexico in
Speaker 1: Arizona before the even states yep. His first position was
Speaker 1: on the Apache National kind of settled into being in
Speaker 1: the old man in a public intellectual in Wisconsin and
Speaker 1: had his property where he much of Sand County Almanac,
Speaker 1: which is sort of his seminal work, San Countie Almanac
Speaker 1: he wrote there, and that was collected and published after
Speaker 1: his death. Yeah. Yeah, his his son had a big
Speaker 1: stake in helping to see that through to publication. Um.
Speaker 1: And there was a lot of back and forth with
Speaker 1: various publishers leading up to his his death at a
Speaker 1: fairly young age fighting a wildfire there and there is
Speaker 1: no Sand County. Um the county fighting a wildfire on
Speaker 1: his own property, neighbor's property, yep, and uh. The county
Speaker 1: is called Sauk County, and the shack is in auh
Speaker 1: It's it's close to a little town called Baraboo, right
Speaker 1: on the banks the Wisconsin River. Um. And if you
Speaker 1: spend any time in that country, you can see where
Speaker 1: this poetic name of Sand County comes from, because it
Speaker 1: is really sandy, poor soil. And he obtained that farm
Speaker 1: in a state of very poor ecological health. It had
Speaker 1: been essentially pillaged by the previous owners turned back over
Speaker 1: the bank um, the prior owner forfeited it um and
Speaker 1: then Leopold and his family. You know, an important point
Speaker 1: about Leopold's legacy is that his children, I think, in
Speaker 1: large part due to their experiences on that piece of ground,
Speaker 1: all have been very involved conservationists in their own right
Speaker 1: and contributed very importantly UM to various fields of of
Speaker 1: study related to ecology. His son became a hydrologist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Luna has a quote. You probably know the quote better mean,
Speaker 1: but I think that he said, um, rivers are the
Speaker 1: gutters through which run the ruins of continents. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: something longer there. The poetry that that family have collectively
Speaker 1: been responsible for is amazing. You talked about the words smithing,
Speaker 1: and another one of his children in the wildlife Arena
Speaker 1: um Starker Leopold was one of his sons, and he
Speaker 1: was a phenomenal biologist um in his own right as well.
Speaker 1: So the family, you know, you could go on Nina.
Speaker 1: Leopold practiced a certain poetics with his children's names. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh absolutely, Yeah, that's because he named his kids things
Speaker 1: you'd expect someone like if you met someone in Hollywood. Well,
Speaker 1: there's there's reason for it. So let's talk about Luna.
Speaker 1: And my Spanish is not gray. But when I first
Speaker 1: moved here, just south Albuquerque, there's a town called Los Lunas. Okay,
Speaker 1: when I looked at Los Lunas, I thought to myself,
Speaker 1: isn't that bad Spanish? Because Lunas is a feminine word,
Speaker 1: so shouldn't it be Lost Lunas. And this is the
Speaker 1: town that Leopold's wife, she had, she had deep roots
Speaker 1: in that town. And the reason it's masculine as opposed
Speaker 1: to feminine is they're referring to the family the Lunas
Speaker 1: as opposed to the feminine moon in Spanish. So yeah,
Speaker 1: he certainly put some thought into naming his kids. But um,
Speaker 1: he has claimed absolutely by the Southwest, absolutely, by Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: absolutely by Iowa, and then a number of lesser known
Speaker 1: uh points along the way that he visited. He's on
Speaker 1: a lum of the Yale School of Forestry. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: first School of Forestry. Yeah, so he's claimed by them. Um,
Speaker 1: you've spent some time in Michigan's Upper Peninsula as a
Speaker 1: boy growing up, Leopold spent a lot of time in
Speaker 1: the Latianou Islands eastern up around Cedarville Um, catching perch
Speaker 1: and um. If you're really interested in the history of
Speaker 1: Aldo Leopold Um, there's a writer by the name of
Speaker 1: Kurt Mine who did like the in disputed Ultimate Leopold Biography.
Speaker 1: So check out Kurt Mine's book if you really want
Speaker 1: to know the ins and out. I believe it's all
Speaker 1: the Leopold, his life and work something along those lines. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but don't read that he read San Connie all oh no,
Speaker 1: no, no no no. I mean Mine's treatment is phenomenal as
Speaker 1: a biography. Leopold's work in a Sand County Almanac is
Speaker 1: poetry and poetry with an ecological twist that every hunter
Speaker 1: angular conservationist can resonate with. And so he I want
Speaker 1: to get back like when he first comes up this
Speaker 1: idea of wild rose because he was trying to sell
Speaker 1: it and you guys pre mos better. He was selling
Speaker 1: it being like, up, hey, listen, this the piece of
Speaker 1: ground I'm talking about here. The best value it could
Speaker 1: bring us is as itself. And so now we talk
Speaker 1: about like wilderness, like when we have federally protected wilderness
Speaker 1: or federally designated wilderness, it's like everybody's like rock and ice.
Speaker 1: But I think that he kind of knew that that
Speaker 1: was how it was going to have to work. Where
Speaker 1: he couldn't take some area that had been identified as
Speaker 1: being rich and easily extractable natural resources or premier gate
Speaker 1: grazing land and be like, hey, I got an idea,
Speaker 1: how about we designate this as wilderness. Like he had
Speaker 1: to go and find something where he could say it
Speaker 1: just isn't a value for anything, but being wilderness, like
Speaker 1: that's its most apparent, readily available worth. Is it just
Speaker 1: as it is? And I think that want to be
Speaker 1: like like a a good strategic move probably if you
Speaker 1: look at what is long term goal was. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: this discussion about the various uses of a piece of
Speaker 1: ground I think played a lot into the lead up
Speaker 1: to the passage of the Wilderness Act in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: and Boring would be a phenomenal person to speak to
Speaker 1: the the kind of wrangling that went into finally getting
Speaker 1: that law passed, and also what some of the trade
Speaker 1: offs were in terms of the language that ultimately was
Speaker 1: encapsulated in the Wilderness Act. Yeah. And when we talk
Speaker 1: about that, talk about whether people were annoyed by this
Speaker 1: at the time. Oh yeah, I mean originally there was
Speaker 1: pretty strong push back to the idea. And and so
Speaker 1: I mean, just for a context, that Act was passed
Speaker 1: in sixty four, but Congress had been debating it for
Speaker 1: eight years by that point, so since the mid fifties,
Speaker 1: and they wrote sixty six drafts. Literally, Yeah, what would
Speaker 1: be an equivalent of that today? Man, I know, the
Speaker 1: like I'll defer to you, I I you know, in
Speaker 1: the context of my my job right now, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: reluctant to hazard a guess at that. But um, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean just self like I'm trying to think of
Speaker 1: selfing that like, because even like like the Affordable Care Act,
Speaker 1: which was criticized about how slowly it moved, that'll that
Speaker 1: went through in a year? In a year, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So they kicked it around for eight years. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so what happened is the first draft, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: look at you look at the main part of the
Speaker 1: Act and it talks about you know, wilderness is untrammeled
Speaker 1: and which is a you know word for free willed
Speaker 1: um um, you know, free of restraint from from mankind
Speaker 1: or humankind. Um. It's natural. So it has these functioning,
Speaker 1: intact ecosystems in the full suite of indigenous biota. It's undeveloped.
Speaker 1: And so these sort of developments of of humankind are
Speaker 1: are few and far between president all their outstanding opportunities
Speaker 1: for solitude or primitive and unconfined recreation. And then lastly
Speaker 1: there are these other features of values at times. And
Speaker 1: so that was basically it in the original act. Um.
Speaker 1: It was this very purist sort of sense of wilderness.
Speaker 1: And again, just given the political landscape at that time, um,
Speaker 1: you know, you have you know, again, the context in
Speaker 1: the middle part of the twentieth century was we were
Speaker 1: chewing up natural resources at a pretty alarming and efficient rate,
Speaker 1: and public lands were really seen as a source of
Speaker 1: natural resources. So we're we're mining, we're cutting. Timber grazing
Speaker 1: was a big deal. We're developing water resources all over
Speaker 1: the place. And so in order to get support from
Speaker 1: all of these, um, these extractive industries and and the
Speaker 1: broader public and and you know Congress the congressman at
Speaker 1: the time, UM, they had to put in some pretty
Speaker 1: significant compromised compromises by this sixty six draft that ultimately passed.
Speaker 1: And so you have this list of of what are
Speaker 1: called special provisions in the Act, and those include grazing
Speaker 1: where it was pre established, can continue. Um it included. Um.
Speaker 1: So so back up with that one. So someone holds
Speaker 1: so if someone held a grazing lease, the grazing permit,
Speaker 1: it would be it would be grandfather exactly exactly. UM.
Speaker 1: Mining was another thing. I mean, mining's kind of interesting because, um,
Speaker 1: there's a provision in the Act that says any valid
Speaker 1: existing right and that's a term for in essence of
Speaker 1: property right. So someone who has an established mining claim
Speaker 1: is that's basically a property right. And so though that
Speaker 1: can still be grandfathered in with new designations. But the
Speaker 1: Willerness Act allowed until December four, so full twenty years,
Speaker 1: you know, a few months after its passage, new mining
Speaker 1: claims to be established in wilderness as another compromise. UM,
Speaker 1: motor boats where that use existed, and that's mainly in
Speaker 1: the boundary waters up in northern Minnesota, was allowed to
Speaker 1: that kind of use was allowed to continue. But but
Speaker 1: let me stop in sixty four. Yeah, when they're getting
Speaker 1: ready to do it, were they actually throwing around specifics
Speaker 1: about what places they're thinking about? It was that part
Speaker 1: of the bill. It was just like allowing them these
Speaker 1: uses where they existed prior to you know, the passage
Speaker 1: of the Act or subsequent designations. But did the Act
Speaker 1: carry with it, um, spots that would become wilderness? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely so. Um it was it was fifty some instant
Speaker 1: I think it's fifty four instant wildernesses, all managed by
Speaker 1: the Fourth Service. So it wasn't just like giving the
Speaker 1: right to create eight them, but was also saying, and
Speaker 1: here's a list. We had this initial list, and then
Speaker 1: the Act directed it was kind of it's actually an
Speaker 1: interesting history. It directed the agencies um and at that
Speaker 1: time it was for service. All the instant wellnesses were
Speaker 1: National Force System lands, but also directed the Department of
Speaker 1: the Interior for the National Park Service and fisher Wildlife
Speaker 1: Service for service as well. To to basically go out
Speaker 1: inventory and recommend additional designations to Congress within the next
Speaker 1: five years. And so they that Congress intended at that
Speaker 1: time that this would be a very agency driven process
Speaker 1: and and within i mean it was less than ten
Speaker 1: years where really the public took over in this very
Speaker 1: democratic sense and worked outside the channels of the federal
Speaker 1: government to advocate for additional designations. And that's really the
Speaker 1: way that it works today is these UM grassroots movements
Speaker 1: and and kind of on the ground collaboration among interest
Speaker 1: groups to hash out UM you know, support for designations
Speaker 1: and other other uses of UM specific federal lands for
Speaker 1: for designation. But it slowed greatly right in the last
Speaker 1: few years. Yeah, I mean, i'd say, you know, in
Speaker 1: the last in the last ten years or so, it's
Speaker 1: it's dramatically slowed. And we had the first Congress UM
Speaker 1: a handful of years ago that did not pass a
Speaker 1: single wilderness bill UM, you know, the two year Congress,
Speaker 1: and so that was, yeah, testament to things really slowing
Speaker 1: down recently. As far as new designation. New designations were
Speaker 1: the boundary waters in the initial round, they were what
Speaker 1: were some like when the bill went through, Yeah, what
Speaker 1: are there some examples of places that they identified as
Speaker 1: being like like the type sites of wilderness where they
Speaker 1: were saying, like, here is a thing that would be
Speaker 1: a great one to start with. They like the places
Speaker 1: that were like early like early on identified as eligible
Speaker 1: for federal wilderness designation. And most of these had already
Speaker 1: been identified by the Forest Service, you know as these
Speaker 1: you know, like the HeLa wilderness with a little w
Speaker 1: in the sense that it was administratively designated and the
Speaker 1: foresters had gone on after. And so that was put
Speaker 1: in place in full forty years before the Wilderness Act
Speaker 1: passed by the agency, and then they went on to
Speaker 1: develop these series of regulations that prompted the agency to
Speaker 1: identify other administrative wilderness designations and primitive areas. And so
Speaker 1: it was all these um agency identified wildernesses and primitive
Speaker 1: areas that that were designated in sixty four by the
Speaker 1: Act as the instant wildernesses. So the Helo is one
Speaker 1: UM we have. It's it's really these big, large, iconic
Speaker 1: wildernesses that we have today. So like in Arizona, the
Speaker 1: masts Hals were another um you know that the acts
Speaker 1: as wilderness should typically be five thousand acres or greater um.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of exceptions to that, but when
Speaker 1: we look at those original willernesses, it's these big vast
Speaker 1: landscapes um that we're protected. Ye, does it. I almost
Speaker 1: hesitate to bring this stuff because it's so like, it's
Speaker 1: so kind of out there when yeah, yeah, as you
Speaker 1: bring it up, tell them what we have a friend.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to name them, tell them what our
Speaker 1: friend thinks, because I'd like to talk about like tell
Speaker 1: them like sort of the whisperings around the campfire about
Speaker 1: what wilderness is, what will happen the wilderness, and I'd
Speaker 1: like to speak to the legality of this occurring. Yeah,
Speaker 1: his he has uh I don't know if it's conspiracy
Speaker 1: or now, but he has a worry. And I believe
Speaker 1: it's not just him obviously, Like he's Steve said, there's
Speaker 1: like these whisperings, and there's people that have this idea
Speaker 1: that whether it's just the people that manage the wilderness
Speaker 1: or the people that promoted uh, private organizations that you know,
Speaker 1: promote wilderness, that there is this hidden agenda that in
Speaker 1: the end, way down the line, that what they're really
Speaker 1: driving for yes, is going to be a place where
Speaker 1: humans are not allowed either, that we will just have
Speaker 1: these landscapes just for the landscape and the animals that
Speaker 1: live there. So I would debunk that right at way
Speaker 1: in the sense that Congress explicitly said in the original Act,
Speaker 1: one of the core values of wilderness is a human use.
Speaker 1: It's opportunity for solitude or primitive and unconfined recreations. So
Speaker 1: to get out of modern society for our you know,
Speaker 1: for for the public in the United States, to get
Speaker 1: away from modern society, get away from the masses, and
Speaker 1: engage in these kind of primitive activities, primitive travel, hunting,
Speaker 1: and angling, have freedom from all the rules and constraints
Speaker 1: of society. So I mean, that's a core value in
Speaker 1: the Act. And um, you know, as managers were beholden
Speaker 1: to the direction that Congress precisely, precisely. And then I
Speaker 1: can say from a personal level, I my job, um
Speaker 1: is managing I don't manage wilderness on the ground. We
Speaker 1: have folks, wonderful, wonderful people who do that. But you know,
Speaker 1: I provide program leadership in the region. And I can
Speaker 1: speak for myself and everybody I've ever known, literally a
Speaker 1: hundred percent of folks I've known who work on wilderness management,
Speaker 1: and we all love wilderness us in large part because
Speaker 1: of our personal experiences in wilderness. Um. You know, there's
Speaker 1: certainly a whole host of other values that it brings
Speaker 1: to the table. But um and I I it's it's
Speaker 1: pretty um, pretty out there kind of thinking in my view.
Speaker 1: Has anybody sitting here at this table ever heard this ever,
Speaker 1: ever even heard of a group of like even even
Speaker 1: organized group that somebody's even out there thinking that way? Well,
Speaker 1: and actually, I would say so, we're in the midst
Speaker 1: of our forest planning process right now in the Southwest,
Speaker 1: and that's an exercise I'm you know, per another law
Speaker 1: plan directs us develop these land management plans um and
Speaker 1: we need to update them every so often because the
Speaker 1: world changes are are are understanding the science changes, we
Speaker 1: have other pressures, like you know, we have a changing
Speaker 1: climate right now, so we update these plans periodically, and
Speaker 1: part of the legal framework and directing us to do
Speaker 1: that says we should be looking at identifying in essence
Speaker 1: lands that are suitable for wilderness designation to recommend to Congress.
Speaker 1: And there's all this uh going around owned in the
Speaker 1: context of these discussions these planning processes, which are very
Speaker 1: rooted in public process. You know, we want a lot
Speaker 1: of collaboration in public involvement. But people are going around
Speaker 1: saying you're trying to close the forest to all human use,
Speaker 1: you're locking it up, and that's fundamentally I'm not true.
Speaker 1: And so so it's a little bit illegal. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be. I would say, um, you know, we
Speaker 1: have provisions that allow us to implement discrete kind of closures,
Speaker 1: but you had to close you know, all of wilderness
Speaker 1: would be counter to that act absolutely. Like an example
Speaker 1: of a closure would be when like fire hazard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's even Yeah, so that's an example that occurs
Speaker 1: around here. You know, when I was in southern California,
Speaker 1: we put a closure in place because we had a
Speaker 1: super fund site due to um unmanaged target shooting for
Speaker 1: decades and decades, and so people were shooting up appliances
Speaker 1: and using you know, lead ammunition for long term and
Speaker 1: a concentrated place, and so we ended up with heavy
Speaker 1: metal uh levels and in the soil that we're dangerous.
Speaker 1: You know, you could kick up dust and breathing all
Speaker 1: kinds of gnarly stuff, and so we put a closure
Speaker 1: in place, um, so that we could get in there
Speaker 1: and clean it up and get the public back in
Speaker 1: there in the future. So, I mean those are the
Speaker 1: kind it's like these. Usually it's public health and safety.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's to protective very unique sensitive resource. But I
Speaker 1: mean it's been happening a lot lately that people are
Speaker 1: freaked out about it. I know personally people that have
Speaker 1: had gates put across road they used to use for access,
Speaker 1: they used to drive on, and because of limited budgets,
Speaker 1: that road hasn't been able to have been you know,
Speaker 1: kept up, and so now there's huge gully washers going
Speaker 1: right down through the middle of it. I'm guessing that
Speaker 1: they they're closing that access because the roads become dangerous.
Speaker 1: But that's not even a wilderness issue that no, no,
Speaker 1: it's not not at all, but as that feeds that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, the closing of the forest. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean part I mean, that's a that's a a fairly
Speaker 1: complicated question in the sense that some of it is
Speaker 1: um just inability to maintain our our massive, massive road system.
Speaker 1: You know, you think about most of our roads were
Speaker 1: built in the timber heyday, and we had receipts coming
Speaker 1: in from timber sales as an agency big time. So
Speaker 1: we had re sources UM coming from our timber program
Speaker 1: that have with the industry changing just due to global
Speaker 1: economic forces, are not available and so we not only
Speaker 1: can't continue building roads like we used to to to
Speaker 1: provide access to these timber stands that were being harvested,
Speaker 1: but to maintain these roads for public safety and also
Speaker 1: natural resource protection in terms of you know, erosion into
Speaker 1: salmon streams in the Northwest, for example, and so that's
Speaker 1: that's been a part of that UM is really just
Speaker 1: a change in in economics with regards to natural resources
Speaker 1: in this country which has driven a change in the
Speaker 1: kinds of resources that we have available to us as
Speaker 1: an agency, and that has uh that has affected our
Speaker 1: ability to maintain our road systems and places. And then
Speaker 1: again you think about these systems being put into place
Speaker 1: for timber harvest, we're managing the land for a much
Speaker 1: broader suite of values in many cases these days, UM
Speaker 1: for ecosystem health being a big driver. We're doing a
Speaker 1: lot of restoration work as an agency, and so sometimes
Speaker 1: it's determined that you know the presence of these you know,
Speaker 1: i'd call legacy UM timber era roads on the landscape.
Speaker 1: Our counter to some of these efforts to provide for restoration,
Speaker 1: to say, we want to defragment wildlife habitat for example.
Speaker 1: So there's there's that side of the story to you,
Speaker 1: I think, and then you get into the whole there's
Speaker 1: a whole private landowner access thing. You know, in the
Speaker 1: in the Bowsman areaf I'm not mistaken, their whole sections
Speaker 1: of the Gallatin that are really not even accessible to
Speaker 1: the public because they're surrounded by private lands. And that's
Speaker 1: another you know, as populations grow, we get more and
Speaker 1: more people interested in the outdoors. Landowners in some cases
Speaker 1: who used to sort of allow public access have have
Speaker 1: closed off access. And that's the agency. You know, we
Speaker 1: all I can say, I mean with a you know,
Speaker 1: a strong degree of confidence, value and love public access
Speaker 1: on public lands. I mean, we work for the public,
Speaker 1: the American public, and we manage these lands on their
Speaker 1: behalf for you know, whole slew of benefits that they provide.
Speaker 1: And so when we get um access being closed and
Speaker 1: I see that differently as our closed roads. At times
Speaker 1: we're still providing access to the national forest. When we
Speaker 1: entirely lose access to the public landowner decisions where we
Speaker 1: have really no you know, no right of way for example.
Speaker 1: We we hate to see that as much as the
Speaker 1: rest of the public not being said, you know, that's
Speaker 1: a private property owner sort of right and decision to make.
Speaker 1: You know, the thing I said when I'm having this
Speaker 1: conversation with people about road closures, the thing I often
Speaker 1: bring up is that even if you look at private
Speaker 1: timber companies or large like Native corporation lands in Alaska,
Speaker 1: they'll build roads for timber extractions. So they're cutting a
Speaker 1: road for a very specific purpose, like to let out
Speaker 1: a sale, a timber sale, and the road is its
Speaker 1: course and purpose are designed for timber extraction. The timber
Speaker 1: extraction happens, it takes how many ever, decades sometimes you're
Speaker 1: talking almost in terms of close to a century before
Speaker 1: you're going to go in and do before it's viable
Speaker 1: for another harvest. And so the road was there for
Speaker 1: that purpose, and it's closed because it's not serving the
Speaker 1: purpose that was built for. And there's no sense in
Speaker 1: maintaining that road during this passage of many decades that
Speaker 1: would occur before you cut it again. And private timber
Speaker 1: companies and tribal corporations do the same exact thing with
Speaker 1: their roads, but you oftentimes don't hear the criticisms there
Speaker 1: there are people just take it as like a matter
Speaker 1: of course that that's not the thing. But I have
Speaker 1: this conversation all the time with people who feel that
Speaker 1: when a road gets closed on national forests, it's like
Speaker 1: met as a personal affront to them or somehow is
Speaker 1: position in their mind as like a condemnation of their activities,
Speaker 1: rather than looking at like what like a like a
Speaker 1: very broad category of reasons for why this might be
Speaker 1: closed at this moment. Yeah, I mean, I can appreciate
Speaker 1: that in the sense that I mean, I think we
Speaker 1: can all around this table agree that we've had some
Speaker 1: really um formative experiences in our lives on public lands
Speaker 1: that we treasure, we hold dear to our hearts, and
Speaker 1: folks out there, you know, they may have they're special
Speaker 1: place that they really hold near and dear to them.
Speaker 1: UM closed to motorized travel UM for these reasons that
Speaker 1: we've talked about before and again in a nutshell, the
Speaker 1: agency is just trying to balance UM the amount of
Speaker 1: resources has available to maintain roads and these other purposes
Speaker 1: in terms of natural resource management or restoration. Um and
Speaker 1: make these decisions, UM you. Of course I'm not thinking
Speaker 1: about uh any particular person or place, but I can
Speaker 1: see how folks feel that it's uh it you know,
Speaker 1: hurts at a personal level because they may be not
Speaker 1: able to drive to where they used to the places.
Speaker 1: I love, you know, I have a follow up to
Speaker 1: just the restrictions around wilderness and people thinking that it
Speaker 1: could become more restricted than it is now. Right, I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's no bikes, horses, foot travel, a couple
Speaker 1: of air strips that you can land on. Steve you
Speaker 1: said eighteen church again you talked about like grandfathering in
Speaker 1: so when like the boundary waters motorized boat traffic where
Speaker 1: it was like some I'm sure argued like imperative to
Speaker 1: travel in the area, right, and it got Grandfather didn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it was just uh, I've I've traveled pretty
Speaker 1: far in the boundary wires in a canoe. I guess
Speaker 1: what I would say is that there was a stakeholder
Speaker 1: group of people who had a really high value on
Speaker 1: the motorized recreation or travel they were doing. And that's
Speaker 1: probably more why I got Grandfather that they held it
Speaker 1: really to be very important to that that group of
Speaker 1: folks as opposed to necessarily be an imperative. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so they made there was like flexibility within the Act
Speaker 1: to do that right and in the and in the
Speaker 1: Frank Church, they when it became a wilderness, they honored
Speaker 1: flights in eighteen airstrips. And that's the same I was
Speaker 1: talking about that list of exceptions that we call special
Speaker 1: provisions in the Act, and airstrips are one of them
Speaker 1: where aircraft landing predated wilderness designation. It could be allowed
Speaker 1: to can in you when again that's you look at
Speaker 1: the first part of the Act defines wilderness. You know,
Speaker 1: these activities that are really antithetical to wilderness, you know,
Speaker 1: from the pure standpoint of the way Congress defines it. Again,
Speaker 1: we have this list of exceptions, which was what it
Speaker 1: took to pass it. And I actually want to add
Speaker 1: what was really cool In six or four the Senate
Speaker 1: was unanimous voting for the Act. The House had one
Speaker 1: dissenting vote. And the rumor is, I mean, I haven't confirmed.
Speaker 1: That's like voting in to go to World War two. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. The rumor is the one dissenting vote was
Speaker 1: represented about of Texas and he felt that it it
Speaker 1: wasn't strong enough in terms of protection of the land.
Speaker 1: That's the rumor. So it's pretty amazing. You think about
Speaker 1: unanimous support in the Senate. Yeah, it's amazing bipartisanship work
Speaker 1: to get this legislation passed. Who are the people that
Speaker 1: stuck with it through the eight years, like Lee Metcalf
Speaker 1: was involved in it. The man at the center of it.
Speaker 1: You want to jump on this, Jerry Well, I you
Speaker 1: know the answer for sure? Who's that? Howard zon Eiser?
Speaker 1: He was. He was not in this in the Senator house.
Speaker 1: I mean he was. He was the primary advocate. He's
Speaker 1: the one really well we can credit for making it happen. Though,
Speaker 1: I know you heard of this guy, so you need
Speaker 1: to check him out. One of the stories about Zion Eiser?
Speaker 1: Who where? Who was he? Whoere? Did he work? He
Speaker 1: Wilderness Society? He was that point. I mean at that
Speaker 1: point early in his career he worked for what is
Speaker 1: now the Fishing Wildlife Service UM, but he he ended
Speaker 1: up being the kind of primary advocate for the act.
Speaker 1: He wrote it, UM. He was the one rewriting and rewriting,
Speaker 1: and rewrote it and rewrote it, and rewrote it. It
Speaker 1: wasn't it okay? But wasn't it um the writer the
Speaker 1: gay wrote hard rock cany like big rock, Candy Mountain
Speaker 1: um Man, now I know you're talking about now. It
Speaker 1: was it was this this um, this guy Howard zon Eiser,
Speaker 1: and so he you know, he had experience in the
Speaker 1: federal government. He knew the way the system worked. And
Speaker 1: then he just was this um unstoppable passionate advocate. And
Speaker 1: unfortunately he passed away months before. Yeah, oh you know,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of his uh, Wallace Stegner. I mean he
Speaker 1: was an a like Stegner was an advocate, and there
Speaker 1: were town of people advocating. I mean, of course, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know Leopold, I mean, there's a whole whole long
Speaker 1: list of folks. I mean, Bob Marshall, another, Frank Church,
Speaker 1: Edward Abbey, I mean, and then uh and then uh,
Speaker 1: because a lot of these guys wind up with four
Speaker 1: like these guys want up with wilderness areas named after him,
Speaker 1: Frank Church, Bob Marshall, Lee Metcalf, although Leopold all the
Speaker 1: label yeah so so, but the main I don't I
Speaker 1: never heard of this guy. Yeah, I know, he was,
Speaker 1: and he didn't live to see its passage. Unfortunately he
Speaker 1: did not. But I don't get how how could it
Speaker 1: be written sixty four times and take eight years to
Speaker 1: get through and then get your get through with the
Speaker 1: unanimous vote. It reached like some level of perfection. I
Speaker 1: think it was all those compromises, you know, I talked
Speaker 1: about like that early. They've done so much yep. So
Speaker 1: they're like, we need to get the grazing industry on board,
Speaker 1: we need to get the mining industry on board, we
Speaker 1: need to get the sort of recreational you know, um
Speaker 1: aircraft community on board. And so that's what you know,
Speaker 1: like I said early on it someone had to be pissed.
Speaker 1: I guess they were. They were were they were, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were rallying together, you know, pretty nearly unanimously across
Speaker 1: the board. So knowing that it would designate fifty some
Speaker 1: wilderness areas, right, and it was at nine point one
Speaker 1: million acres nationally at that time. So, but Willards only
Speaker 1: Willards is less than two percent of the country. That's
Speaker 1: not true. Um, so it's five percent about for the
Speaker 1: full country including Alaska, it's about two point seven percent
Speaker 1: of the lower And I can speak on behalf of
Speaker 1: the four Service you know, I'm not I don't know
Speaker 1: the stats for the other three federal agencies that managed wilderness,
Speaker 1: but it's a it's about just about ninetent of National
Speaker 1: Force System lands our designated wilderness. So you know, uh,
Speaker 1: it's a small proportion of the country. You know, when
Speaker 1: you look at the actual um land mass, you know
Speaker 1: that that the four Service manages, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: decent chunk, you know, just shy thirty six thirty six million. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so total in in the nation, there's seven d sixty
Speaker 1: five wilderness areas. Nineteen sixty four, you had nine point
Speaker 1: one million acres designated. Since nineteen sixty four, it's gone
Speaker 1: from nine point one million to a hundred nine million,
Speaker 1: So a hundred million of the hundred and nine million
Speaker 1: have come through subsequent legislation, and uh, fairly recently, our
Speaker 1: home state of Michigan gained one Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes
Speaker 1: designation coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Wilderness Wilderness
Speaker 1: Act in Yeah, sever sand that's my backyard, that's where
Speaker 1: I grew up, thirty two thousand, five hundred fifty six acres,
Speaker 1: So that wasen and you talk about the slowdown since then,
Speaker 1: UM there were three designated together in Idaho and twenty
Speaker 1: and nothing since then. New Mexico UM gained a wilderness.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's interesting the legal wrangling now that
Speaker 1: goes into designations. So the most recent addition for our
Speaker 1: region came through basically a rider in the National Defense
Speaker 1: Authorization Act that designated Columbine Honda Well. And actually in
Speaker 1: addition to that, it modified the boundary of Wheeler Peak,
Speaker 1: which was one of the original sixty four willderness is
Speaker 1: because the mountain biking community placed such a high value
Speaker 1: on this trail opportunity in Wheeler Peaked out. Part of
Speaker 1: the compromise and getting calum Mine Hondo pushed through was
Speaker 1: to make this minor boundary modification so they could could ride.
Speaker 1: They had this loop ride opportunity. So that's what Carlson,
Speaker 1: this kind of like this this wrangling and high level
Speaker 1: of compromise and we're working through a whole host issues. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I definitely appreciate the flexibility and being able to look
Speaker 1: at individual places. But if you guys, like when you
Speaker 1: guys think, now, what are the biggest challenges in UM
Speaker 1: sort of the biggest social challenges in managing wilderness. Talking
Speaker 1: about wilderness my fundamental belief, and I want to hear
Speaker 1: from Jerry and Carl, but it's really just a lack
Speaker 1: of public awareness about about what it is and the
Speaker 1: value that it holds for for people, for all Americans
Speaker 1: and for you know, whether it be you know, through
Speaker 1: personal experience visiting wilderness or providing wildlife habitat, fish habitat,
Speaker 1: clean air, clean water, um. And and so it's just
Speaker 1: a lack of awareness and understanding of how how really
Speaker 1: essential it is UM to our well being as a nation.
Speaker 1: And really, if you look at the deep history, I
Speaker 1: don't want to spend a lot of time on this
Speaker 1: necessarily and unless you guys want to talk about it.
Speaker 1: But as we were as we were, as you know,
Speaker 1: kind of the European Americans that that came came over
Speaker 1: and started spreading across North America, developing and taming the frontier. UM,
Speaker 1: people started to look around and say like, hey, we've
Speaker 1: been pretty effective. And this notion of wilderness and wild
Speaker 1: places UM is really unique. You know when we we
Speaker 1: we all came from Europe. UM. Is that this European
Speaker 1: American community, UM, this doesn't exist in Europe. This is
Speaker 1: something that's unique. It's gritty, frontier kind of wild places
Speaker 1: is unique to the American identity and um so I
Speaker 1: think that's something part of our national history that we
Speaker 1: don't talk about as much anymore. And again you look
Speaker 1: at the contemporary social and ecological values wilderness, people don't
Speaker 1: perceive that as as as well as I personally wish
Speaker 1: they would, you know, just because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: demands on our attention and it's something that slips under
Speaker 1: the radar a little bit. So I think that's our
Speaker 1: biggest challenge long term personally. It's funny, like the patriotism
Speaker 1: element of wilderness is something that I think it's lost.
Speaker 1: But if you go back to the US Census um
Speaker 1: after they conducted the U s Census, they realized that
Speaker 1: there was no frontier left. Like before that they've always
Speaker 1: looked at population levels and they had a sort of
Speaker 1: a line and they looked at population. Of course, we
Speaker 1: settled in the east and settled the west coast and
Speaker 1: still had a chunker ground in the middle that didn't
Speaker 1: meet the basic threshold to pull it out of the frontier.
Speaker 1: In the census turned up that there was no discernible
Speaker 1: line of settlement in the country anymore, and a prominent
Speaker 1: historian at the time, Frederick Jackson Turner, came out with
Speaker 1: this this influential paper and and speech he gave, which
Speaker 1: was about a thing that quickly became known as frontier anxiety,
Speaker 1: where he had argued that the American culture and American spirit,
Speaker 1: and American institutions, we're all built around the idea of
Speaker 1: of a frontier of of conflict with an engagement with wilderness,
Speaker 1: right that we'd come out of that that, like frontier spirit,
Speaker 1: was integral and like shaping who we are. And he
Speaker 1: pointed out that it made us different than the genteel Europeans,
Speaker 1: where there was no availability of land and resources for people.
Speaker 1: And he pointed out that our sense of rugged individualism
Speaker 1: was built around our interactions with wilderness, and like at
Speaker 1: that moment, we were in this interesting spot because we
Speaker 1: were at that moment where we had within our grasp
Speaker 1: to completely destroy all vestiges of wilderness, like it was
Speaker 1: wilderness existed at first in spite of our best efforts
Speaker 1: to get rid of it, and then we had to
Speaker 1: very quickly transition into this idea that we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to have it because of our best efforts to preserve it,
Speaker 1: and that would have been like a really important moment,
Speaker 1: and figures like like early figures like Theodore Roosevelt were
Speaker 1: impacted in a dramatic way by that that shift in
Speaker 1: American history there. And at the time, it was like
Speaker 1: it was described as sort of a thing you would
Speaker 1: like to preserve wilderness, to have a forest system was
Speaker 1: the thing you were doing to preserve like American integrity.
Speaker 1: I think since then there's some some element of that
Speaker 1: history has been lost to people where they look at
Speaker 1: it now that we've come to see it different than
Speaker 1: this thing that we're gonna do to salvage our you know,
Speaker 1: to save our somewhat feral wild some some aspect of
Speaker 1: what made us feral and wild and American in the
Speaker 1: first place, where now people look at it some people
Speaker 1: are guilty of somehow having kind of lost sight of
Speaker 1: the factors that went into our decisions to have federally
Speaker 1: managed public lands. Yeah, and I mean that's a a
Speaker 1: very complex problem, but I think it goes back. A
Speaker 1: big part of that is lack of exposure. And so
Speaker 1: there are a couple of films out there UM. One
Speaker 1: is it's I think it's called American Values American Wilderness
Speaker 1: and it's this film put together that just talks to
Speaker 1: ordinary citizens about they get them out in wilderness and
Speaker 1: what what does it mean to you? What's it's importance
Speaker 1: to you? And UM a second one called Untrammeled that
Speaker 1: are northern region about a Missoula put together a few
Speaker 1: years ago for the fiftieth anniversary where they took a
Speaker 1: group of kids UM out into I think it was
Speaker 1: the Bob um Or or one of the big Montana
Speaker 1: wildernesses for the first time ever. And in both films,
Speaker 1: these people who are being exposed to a wilderness, uh
Speaker 1: for the first time are just they're astounded. It like
Speaker 1: the vastness of the places and the fact that they're
Speaker 1: set aside uh for you know, to to to have
Speaker 1: ecological systems run their course free of human intervention. And
Speaker 1: it's pretty moving. Um. But it just it really resonated
Speaker 1: with me in the sense that it's like these folks,
Speaker 1: you know, and again, you know, just a small handful
Speaker 1: in these films. You know, it's not necessarily representative of
Speaker 1: all of the United States, but first time visitors and
Speaker 1: and and just have these amazing emotional reactions, um about
Speaker 1: how special these places are. And so it says to
Speaker 1: me that I think, uh again, as a broader community
Speaker 1: of people who are interested in conservation in public lands
Speaker 1: at working to provide access and exposure, is it? Is
Speaker 1: it really important priority? In my opinion? What about cultural engagement,
Speaker 1: um with with people who don't realize sort of what
Speaker 1: we have. The other thing you guys worry about. Do
Speaker 1: you have people in the East who live away from
Speaker 1: large tracts of federally managed public land who might not
Speaker 1: view it as pertinent to their lives. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: you know, I I think public land in the East
Speaker 1: is is people look at it as at least hunters
Speaker 1: as a scourge because that's where all the you know,
Speaker 1: you can't fight your way through the people. Um. And
Speaker 1: but I don't. I don't think they realized that you
Speaker 1: come west and and that public land is in such
Speaker 1: big swaths that that is that isn't an issue. Um.
Speaker 1: You know. I I think the whole wilderness concept and
Speaker 1: where we're seeing people not realizing what's out there is
Speaker 1: I think it started a long time ago. And if
Speaker 1: you look at the late eighteen hundreds and all when
Speaker 1: all these folks that were fighting for it early nineteen hundreds. Um.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the settling of the west
Speaker 1: and when that line disappeared, there is no more frontier. Um.
Speaker 1: It wasn't long after that that the demographics change of
Speaker 1: where people were living. People moved to the city. They
Speaker 1: weren't in the wilderness anymore. Um. And I think it
Speaker 1: started way back there with people losing that touch with
Speaker 1: the land um. And and it's just grown from there,
Speaker 1: a lack of engagement. I sometimes feel that that that's
Speaker 1: like one of the more that's one of the bigger
Speaker 1: things is is getting people to realize that they sort
Speaker 1: of have a steak and this and they have an ownership.
Speaker 1: Because I think that even even you hear people say
Speaker 1: like you always hee like federally owned, right, and other
Speaker 1: people would be like, well, no, like federally managed. It's
Speaker 1: owned by the US people. And I feel like people
Speaker 1: don't have that steak. And it's hard because it's like
Speaker 1: a learned activity. When I was growing up, I grew
Speaker 1: up near the Manastee National it was now the Manastee
Speaker 1: here on National Forest. We had no comprehension of how
Speaker 1: it came to be you know, I told people before,
Speaker 1: we just viewed it like it fell from the sky.
Speaker 1: There was no idea that it was like a thing
Speaker 1: there because people fought to have it be there, So
Speaker 1: there was no like you you, We used it all
Speaker 1: the time, we were always out there, but never put
Speaker 1: never made this connection in your head, that that that
Speaker 1: public lands were sort of a system that we worked
Speaker 1: for and there's people who have dedicated their their lives
Speaker 1: and careers to maintaining and that it was like a
Speaker 1: thing that required some public involvement, in public awareness, because
Speaker 1: until someone goes to take something away from you, you
Speaker 1: just don't realize. And so I hear from all kinds
Speaker 1: of people all the time. I have friends who are
Speaker 1: always like expressing some skepticism about public lands management, but
Speaker 1: all of their activities occur on public land. They're not
Speaker 1: even making the connection within their own lives, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: And that's one of the things that's most alarming to
Speaker 1: me about That's just like ongoing conversation wherese engaged in
Speaker 1: about the validity of federal land management. Is his like uh,
Speaker 1: historic amnesia and then also certain like personal hypocrisy about
Speaker 1: utilizing things without having any sort of sense of maintaining
Speaker 1: their well being, Carl, So we think about all of this,
Speaker 1: I want to go back to that question you post
Speaker 1: about the the challenges that we face in terms of
Speaker 1: wilderness stewardship, and I agree wholeheartedly these cultural issues and
Speaker 1: the lack of awareness about wilderness, and I think furthermore
Speaker 1: it applies to public lands in general, as you've described,
Speaker 1: is really relevant. But a couple of things more specific
Speaker 1: to wilderness stewardship that I view as really pressing challenges
Speaker 1: right now are the trade offs between these different elements
Speaker 1: of wilderness character. I'll give you a couple of specifics.
Speaker 1: So one of them is the trade off between providing
Speaker 1: for an opportunity for people to experience solitude versus people
Speaker 1: having an opportunity to experience freedom from regulation or unconfined recreation.
Speaker 1: So we've talked about the boundary waters a little bit already.
Speaker 1: Is that as freedom from regulation articulated anywhere? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: one of the one of the elements of wilderness character.
Speaker 1: And help me out if I'm wrong here, but it's
Speaker 1: outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type
Speaker 1: of recreation. And by primitive and un like you're building
Speaker 1: your only almost purposefully creating your contradiction. Well, in some
Speaker 1: cases you are so. For example, in the Boundary Waters,
Speaker 1: you have if you want to go on a trip
Speaker 1: in the Boundary Waters, they have a permit process. The
Speaker 1: fact you have to apply for a permit and get
Speaker 1: approval to go in there. That dampens your ability to
Speaker 1: experience unconfined recreation because they have this whole system to
Speaker 1: get a permit. If you look out the window over here,
Speaker 1: we've got the Sandy A Mountains and it's adjacent to
Speaker 1: an urban center, Albuquerque, and there are trails here. If
Speaker 1: you were to hike up, for example, the Lalos Trail
Speaker 1: right now, especially on a weekend, you might pass literally
Speaker 1: a hundred or more other hikers on that trail in wilderness.
Speaker 1: So this, you know, the I don't want to overstate
Speaker 1: the disconnect between people are culture and wilderness areas because
Speaker 1: the fact is we have a number of wilderness areas
Speaker 1: that are essentially getting loved to death, and that trade
Speaker 1: off between outstanding opportunities for solitude and this primitive and
Speaker 1: unconfined recreation. That's one big challenge, especially for wildernesses that
Speaker 1: are adjacent to major metropolitan areas. So that's one and
Speaker 1: the other one that I think is a little bit
Speaker 1: more interesting and where I have a lot of mixed
Speaker 1: emotions personally as somebody who values wild places but also
Speaker 1: really values the indigenous biota of the landscape. Is this
Speaker 1: notion that you have a tradeoff between the untrammeled element
Speaker 1: of wilderness character how free the landscape is from active
Speaker 1: management and and natural nous. Okay, So one of the
Speaker 1: things that Jerry can speak really well too, are the
Speaker 1: tradeoffs associate with trying to conserve native species in wilderness
Speaker 1: through active management, and you're conserving those native species in
Speaker 1: the interest of protecting the naturalness of the landscape. He's
Speaker 1: done a lot of great work with HeLa Trout as
Speaker 1: an example. But by simply engaging in the mettling of
Speaker 1: the system, you are by default, ah impinging on the
Speaker 1: untrammeled character. So some examples of this, you know, I'll
Speaker 1: Royal up in Lake Superior, right that had that that
Speaker 1: island is virtually all wilderness, and historically there have been
Speaker 1: predator prey dynamics between the wolf pack there and the
Speaker 1: moose population on the island. Had had wolf had wolf
Speaker 1: moose for a long time, and then during a severe winter,
Speaker 1: wolves were able to cross a large expanse of ice
Speaker 1: on Lake Superior not only once, and landed in paradise. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was food galore um. But not only did that
Speaker 1: happen once, it happened fairly often, to the point where
Speaker 1: the wolf pack was sustained by this regular infusion of
Speaker 1: genetic diversity from the mainland. So there's been much debate,
Speaker 1: including people like like Howard zon Eiser's relatives have weighed in,
Speaker 1: like descendants of Howard zon Isiser, on what the right
Speaker 1: answer is. And if you ask different people who share
Speaker 1: a lot of our values, you'll get different perspectives on this.
Speaker 1: But the question has arisen in light of the fact
Speaker 1: that Lake Superior has not frozen to the banks of
Speaker 1: Ile Royal in however many years, should we be taking
Speaker 1: wolves from the mainland and releasing them. Two support the
Speaker 1: genetic diversity of the wolf pack, which is suffering as
Speaker 1: a result of low genetic diversity. So in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: when this Act was passed, and during the decades leading
Speaker 1: up to it, there was this mindset that you could
Speaker 1: draw a line around a chunk of ground set it
Speaker 1: aside and have it be preserved and free from human manipulation.
Speaker 1: Over the course of the last fifty years, we have
Speaker 1: come to understand that there's no place on the face
Speaker 1: of this planet that has not been altered as a
Speaker 1: result of human activity. Even the very most remote place
Speaker 1: and the most remote wilderness up in Alaska has experienced
Speaker 1: change as a result of human beings existing on the
Speaker 1: face of the earth. I mean the last fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: years of human history on the landscape. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: mean particularly last couple hundred years as we're burning fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: So if you think about the fact that every every
Speaker 1: square inch of the planet is somehow affected by human activity,
Speaker 1: this notion that you can draw a polygon on the
Speaker 1: map and then protect it as free from human influence
Speaker 1: is a fundamental fallacy. So the question is what's the
Speaker 1: appropriate amount of meddling in the system we should do
Speaker 1: to respond to exogenous outside factors that are human induced.
Speaker 1: What should we be doing, for example, to protect cold
Speaker 1: water bowl trout fisheries in the High Country in the
Speaker 1: face of global change. So that conundrum, that trade off
Speaker 1: is a really fascinating question, and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: active debate right now in the wilderness community around that
Speaker 1: question without weight, I'm gonna ask you to weigh in
Speaker 1: on it, But can you explain as well, um some
Speaker 1: issues about some some issues that come up surrounding the
Speaker 1: use of aircraft UM by state agencies doing management duties,
Speaker 1: and how even those cases bring people up against the intent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a perfect content and lettering of the wildern.
Speaker 1: That's that's exactly what exactly what I'm getting at here.
Speaker 1: So let's take, for example, helicopter used to manage bighorn sheep.
Speaker 1: Okay state agencies oftentimes want to take management activities to
Speaker 1: move big horns around on the landscape. Helicopters are the
Speaker 1: easiest way to do that in ru good remote country.
Speaker 1: And back up on that, because we're still um like,
Speaker 1: if you look at a map of historic Bighorn Range
Speaker 1: in current Bighorn Range, we haven't really scratched the surface
Speaker 1: on bighorn restoration, and I think probably we never will
Speaker 1: scratch the surface very deeply because frankly, a lot of
Speaker 1: the historic Bighorn Range has been so altered and compromised
Speaker 1: that will never support bighorns again. So I'm I'm very
Speaker 1: much in favor, and I think everybody here is very
Speaker 1: much in favor of doing everything we can to restore
Speaker 1: native bighorn populations on the landscape where they existed historically
Speaker 1: and where they've been extirpated as a result of human activity. Um.
Speaker 1: But this this issue hits at the heart of the
Speaker 1: trade offs between managing for naturalness with bighorns being a
Speaker 1: key element of the indigenous biota of a particular landscape,
Speaker 1: and a couple of the qualities of wilderness character, one
Speaker 1: certainly being untrammeled because you're taking a management action, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter what the management action is. If you're
Speaker 1: manipulating the system, you're degrading the untrammeled character, even if
Speaker 1: it's for the betterment of the naturalness of the landscape.
Speaker 1: And then also the undeveloped character, because when you start
Speaker 1: landing aircraft in a wilderness area, that degrades the undeveloped
Speaker 1: character of the wilderness. And so in order to justify
Speaker 1: UH an activity like that, you go through a process
Speaker 1: of analyzing these trade offs, and we use a minimum
Speaker 1: requirements analysis. And where that those words minimum requirement come
Speaker 1: from as the word of the act it talks about
Speaker 1: a variety of uses being expressly prohibited in wilderness unless
Speaker 1: they meet the minimum require, the minimum requirement for the
Speaker 1: administration of the area's wilderness, the minimum necessary. My brother
Speaker 1: is a he's an ecologist in Alaska and UH a
Speaker 1: long time ago, we were having a conversation about the
Speaker 1: nature of doing recovery and he was describing like he's
Speaker 1: like describing his job out there, and he's saying, Alaska
Speaker 1: is still relatively so pristine that we're not really engaged. Um,
Speaker 1: we're not really engaged in recovery work in Alaska. He
Speaker 1: described its like in places we're still just trying to
Speaker 1: describe what's there, and so you're you're afforded the luxury
Speaker 1: of of a much more hands off approach because you're
Speaker 1: not in the restorative phase yet you're still in the
Speaker 1: phase of like, what's here, what steps do we need
Speaker 1: to take to maintain it? And so natural systems can
Speaker 1: play out more. But in the lower forty eight we're
Speaker 1: really engaged in um saving things that are on the brink.
Speaker 1: And during recovery work, which has to be so much
Speaker 1: more complicated than just sitting back and trying to still
Speaker 1: get your arms around what we have, you know, they're
Speaker 1: still describing fisheries in Alaska. They're still describing and trying
Speaker 1: to quantify salmon runs in Alaska that are bigger than
Speaker 1: any runs that we have in the lower forty eight.
Speaker 1: And so it's like, you really like the borders here,
Speaker 1: like to what to what Carl was saying, you realize
Speaker 1: that you can pick these little spots like this little
Speaker 1: island and say it's wilderness and and sort of dream
Speaker 1: up this scenario where it's like protected from outside forces,
Speaker 1: but it has to be the borders are so porous
Speaker 1: just from factors that are way outside of your control,
Speaker 1: like the fact that we haven't maintained some of our fisheries.
Speaker 1: And now it turns up that like maybe an unintended
Speaker 1: concoct I guess it would be an intended consequence of
Speaker 1: wilderness designation is that you sort of created a place
Speaker 1: where this fish species can exist. And maybe at the
Speaker 1: time when we were articulating the benefits of wilderness, we
Speaker 1: didn't think that like include that, but it winds up
Speaker 1: being that, like not quite accidentally, but we saved something
Speaker 1: that would otherwise probably be gone. So an important point
Speaker 1: along those lines, Steve, You're you're spot on about the
Speaker 1: species benefits, uh, but it's important to recognize that human
Speaker 1: beings are on that list too. And the reason we
Speaker 1: have Helo trout in the Helo Wilderness is because it's
Speaker 1: these headwater cold water systems. And if you look at
Speaker 1: where our nation's water supply comes from, especially in the
Speaker 1: relatively dry western side of our country, a lot of
Speaker 1: our most our most important treasured drinking water supplies have
Speaker 1: their source in the high country. And I think one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that we still have some really great, clean,
Speaker 1: healthy water resources is the fact that we have these
Speaker 1: big chunks of uncompromised high country where that cold, clean
Speaker 1: waters bubbling forth and melting off every spring, and so
Speaker 1: you have cold water fisheries certainly benefiting, you have a
Speaker 1: whole host of of other fish and wildlife species protected.
Speaker 1: And this is where the conversation about the relevance of
Speaker 1: wilderness broadly to the American people, I think really gains
Speaker 1: a lot of traction to is the fact that there
Speaker 1: are direct benefits to people who will never go to
Speaker 1: the wilderness. There are direct benefits that people are experiencing
Speaker 1: right now, and they're completely ignorant of the fact that
Speaker 1: they have this linkage oftentimes through water, through clean air,
Speaker 1: these benefits of big chunks of of ecologically intact land. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the thing that troubled me is when people and
Speaker 1: people on my side of the argument do it too,
Speaker 1: is people try to draw to apply dollar figures to things.
Speaker 1: That's something go ahead well as Actually that's something I
Speaker 1: wanted to interject about to talk about because we haven't
Speaker 1: really spent any time talking about why would we forego
Speaker 1: the most efficient tool in wilderness, like a helicopter um
Speaker 1: in which we can authorize as Jerry was talking about,
Speaker 1: and we we did use helicopters, determined it was the
Speaker 1: minimum necessary to do that HeLa trout salvage following the fire,
Speaker 1: and we've done some follow up helicopter work to reintroduce
Speaker 1: them as conditions have improved. But the the reason um
Speaker 1: for we we we use these primitive skills. We emphasize
Speaker 1: these primitive skills. That's one thing in this untrammeled quality
Speaker 1: where we're trying to be hands off and let nature
Speaker 1: run its course. Or that's a pretty unique um approach
Speaker 1: for a federal land management agency to say, let the
Speaker 1: ecosystem manage itself ideally and and the reason I can.
Speaker 1: Can we talk about why that is? I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that's an important important context here, um to to
Speaker 1: to for the public who kind of wonders what we're
Speaker 1: doing with wilderness or thinks it's hands off. So that
Speaker 1: untraveled quality came about through these series of lessons where
Speaker 1: we as managers had the best of intentions. Um, I
Speaker 1: thought we were doing the right thing using the most
Speaker 1: up to date science we had available the time, and
Speaker 1: we we proved to ourselves later that we we really
Speaker 1: didn't know much about the system and in fact, our
Speaker 1: our work in the best of intentions was actually hugely
Speaker 1: detrimental to the ecosystem. So an early example that in
Speaker 1: Leopold's era is these efforts by the federal government, uh,
Speaker 1: in predator control, you know, to enhance game species and
Speaker 1: in provide for you know, improved grazing resources. And you know,
Speaker 1: we all know the stories. I mean, um, you know
Speaker 1: Leopold rights about in the Southwest, this extirpation of predators
Speaker 1: leading to booming deer populations and you know, vegetation being
Speaker 1: denuded and uh starvation events. Yeah, that was one of
Speaker 1: his tasks exactly. Yeah, yeah, he was, I mean he
Speaker 1: he has the story about the wolf with the green
Speaker 1: firing er eyes that occurred on the Apache Secrets National Forest.
Speaker 1: UM and it was a kind of a yeah, an
Speaker 1: aha moment for him and in his growing ecological awareness.
Speaker 1: And so again back in the day, we thought this
Speaker 1: was the right thing to be doing. UM and and
Speaker 1: and we and we had some pretty that was a
Speaker 1: case where we had some pretty rapid evident consequences from
Speaker 1: that that line of work where we had um, you know,
Speaker 1: a game animal game species UM starving. We've seen and
Speaker 1: follow up you know, as our our our our understanding
Speaker 1: of actually ecological systems as continue to improve, like with
Speaker 1: the reintroductional wolves and Yellowstone totally changed predator prey dynamics,
Speaker 1: you know, where he had an absence at this Keystone
Speaker 1: predator um and changed ecological conditions as a result as
Speaker 1: the wolves got re established. So so that's an example of, um,
Speaker 1: why we have this untrammeled quality of willness. You know
Speaker 1: why zeen Heiser and other thinkers, you know, Leopold's land
Speaker 1: ethic contributed to that. The intelligence or the sign of
Speaker 1: an intelligent tinker is to not throw away all the pieces. Right,
Speaker 1: So we you know, we we may not ever know
Speaker 1: at all, given the complexity these ecosystems, and so the
Speaker 1: untrembled quality, you know, I describe it as an essence
Speaker 1: a small insurance policy to have some of these landscapes left,
Speaker 1: you know, in North America, or at least United States,
Speaker 1: five of the United States, where we're trying to let
Speaker 1: nature run its course because we may not know at all. Right.
Speaker 1: Another good example here in the Southwest, as we're looking
Speaker 1: out the window at some smoke right now, too, is
Speaker 1: a hundred year history of suppressing wildfire from the landscape
Speaker 1: and thinking that that was the best thing we could
Speaker 1: be doing for the national forests, you know, from their inception,
Speaker 1: keeping fire off the ground. And now we're doing everything
Speaker 1: we can, like Jerry mentioned, to encourage these naturally ignited
Speaker 1: wildfires to burn. And we acknowledge the fact that fire
Speaker 1: is a key element of these systems. Some of our
Speaker 1: forest types here in the Southwest evolved in the face
Speaker 1: of fires that burned somewhere in the neighborhood of every
Speaker 1: five to thirty years or so. And we've got chunks
Speaker 1: of ground here, including that mountain out the window, that
Speaker 1: haven't burned for over a hundred years. So and when
Speaker 1: those places go, they tend to go in a catastrophic well,
Speaker 1: so you go from high high frequency fires that burn
Speaker 1: at a low severity, So fires that burn often but
Speaker 1: consume a lot of leaf litter um fine fuels, they
Speaker 1: burn across the surface of the forest um. In the
Speaker 1: absence of those fires, you get a lot of fuel
Speaker 1: building up, so that when there is a fire, it
Speaker 1: could be on the order of hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: acres burning at very high severity, where even mature trees
Speaker 1: are eliminated. So during is making a really important point
Speaker 1: here that you know, as an ecologist, I often contemplate
Speaker 1: what is it a hundred years from now that they're
Speaker 1: going to be looking back at our generation and going
Speaker 1: you idiots, Like what were you thinking? Because hindsight so like,
Speaker 1: what will be the putting cigarettes and people's see rations
Speaker 1: exactly of the future. Yeah, it's a it's a it's
Speaker 1: a good question. What do you think it will be
Speaker 1: fire suppression? I think we already kind of know that.
Speaker 1: One man. You don't have to answer. I got some ideas,
Speaker 1: you got some ideas of what we might later realize
Speaker 1: we're big mistakes. You don't have to give them to me.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go think about it and gonna go back
Speaker 1: into the thing on top of the dollar, the dollar,
Speaker 1: is that I find that people often want landscapes to
Speaker 1: justify themselves, um constantly financially, to be where people look
Speaker 1: at something like, well, what value is it bringing us
Speaker 1: or me right now? And that's inspired some some thinkers
Speaker 1: and some wilderness advocates to be like, Okay, um, let's
Speaker 1: play this game, and let's start as signing dollar values
Speaker 1: to clean air and clean water. Oh. It's an interesting
Speaker 1: concept and one thing that it makes me uneasy because
Speaker 1: I'm like, but I don't think everything in the world
Speaker 1: needs to justify itself financially all the time. Like when
Speaker 1: I wake up in the morning and and and my
Speaker 1: kids are my three kids are waking up and they
Speaker 1: climb into bed with me and my wife, I don't
Speaker 1: look at them and be like, how are you gonna
Speaker 1: justify your existence today financially to me? Right? Because like,
Speaker 1: some things are like bigger and better and more important
Speaker 1: than that. And so I do struggle a little bit
Speaker 1: with people feeling that it's necessary. But it is a
Speaker 1: really interesting idea that we would start looking in the
Speaker 1: West or across the country. At what dollar value is
Speaker 1: there to place on sources of clean air and clean water? Um.
Speaker 1: And I don't even think people have really even probably
Speaker 1: haven't made much progress. And it's it's such a huge
Speaker 1: idea and difficult to quantify. But I wonder if that
Speaker 1: in the end will some will in some way be
Speaker 1: something that helps people realize the hornets of wild landscapes
Speaker 1: in this country when we do have that more when
Speaker 1: we do take a more holistic approach looking at natural systems. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the whole ecosystem services conversation. I mean a quick example.
Speaker 1: You know, I was in southern California before coming out here,
Speaker 1: and um, growing population, changing climate stress on aquifers, so
Speaker 1: less water available in San Diego County is building a
Speaker 1: new deesel plan and you talk about the billions and
Speaker 1: billions of dollars um it's gonna take to build that
Speaker 1: thing and then operate it in the long term so
Speaker 1: that we can have fresh clean water, you know, out
Speaker 1: of the ocean. Um, were we to invest in uh,
Speaker 1: you know, protecting our lands or where we still have
Speaker 1: intact ecosystems that provide clean water. I mean, that's a
Speaker 1: that's a huge Um, you know, we're avoiding a huge
Speaker 1: economic cost. And so I think it's a I think
Speaker 1: it's a hugely relevant conversation, you know, And I get
Speaker 1: you that it's a you know, we're at a place
Speaker 1: where we've had to we've had to really craft these
Speaker 1: you know, complex uh analyses and arguments about the dollar
Speaker 1: worth of these these ecosystems serve is. But that's just
Speaker 1: where we're at, you know. But it wasn't part of
Speaker 1: the language in absolutely not, No, what did what did
Speaker 1: a hundred senators in nineteen s four? What we're a
Speaker 1: hundred senators voting from an emotional standpoint in some way?
Speaker 1: It had it been it couldn't have been a matter
Speaker 1: of like practicality, you don't know. Yeah, No, I mean,
Speaker 1: I I'm not I'm not able to get into their heads.
Speaker 1: I mean I think again, you know, folks saw the
Speaker 1: value and we were again look at the historical context, right,
Speaker 1: I mean we our natural resource economy and extraction was booming. Um,
Speaker 1: we had this also kind of parallel boom and tourism
Speaker 1: and an outdoor recreation. You look at the National Parks
Speaker 1: were building lodges and roads, and the Fourth Service was
Speaker 1: trying to you know, um, keep up with them in
Speaker 1: terms of you know, post World War two, people want
Speaker 1: to get out and enjoy their public lands, and so
Speaker 1: we're we're we were massively developing resources and lands a
Speaker 1: parallel from from the extract extraction of natural resources to
Speaker 1: grow our economy. And then they get people out of doors,
Speaker 1: and so I think again you get to this thinking
Speaker 1: about you know, this, this this the role of the
Speaker 1: frontier and taming the frontier in American history and as
Speaker 1: an American identity, I think, I mean, it's just this
Speaker 1: pace of um, all of a sudden booming pace of
Speaker 1: natural resource development I think was pretty alarming to folks.
Speaker 1: And that's what you know, really, I think galvanized by
Speaker 1: the middle of the twentieth century, galvanized the public, and
Speaker 1: they're elected representatives to do something about it. Where you
Speaker 1: can look at the time and be like, we're gonna
Speaker 1: we're rolling, We're gonna keep rolling, but let's sort of
Speaker 1: put a built in cap on how far this might go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. I think It's worth noting, though, that the
Speaker 1: economic arguments have been there all along, getting back to
Speaker 1: leopold stance that these were the landscapes that had very
Speaker 1: little value otherwise. And here's a Leopold quote that kind
Speaker 1: of agrees with you and kind of disagrees with you. Say, Man,
Speaker 1: I'm open to that our remnants of wilderness will yield
Speaker 1: bigger values to the nation's character and health than they
Speaker 1: will to its pocket book, and to destroy them will
Speaker 1: be to admit that the latter are the only values
Speaker 1: that interest us. So we're saying, these these landscapes aren't
Speaker 1: really that valuable financially anyway, and if we treat them
Speaker 1: as if they do, UH will be negating these other
Speaker 1: inherent intrinsic values. So the economics have been there all along.
Speaker 1: But I think there is utility, and I like the
Speaker 1: comparison to the kids greeting you in the morning. In
Speaker 1: terms of trying to weigh everything in dollars and cents,
Speaker 1: there's there's danger and attempting that, um, But I don't
Speaker 1: mean to say that. I mean there's danger in thinking
Speaker 1: that that. Just as a life philosophy, I think there's
Speaker 1: danger in thinking that every aspect of our lives and
Speaker 1: society and humanity is a dollar figure. To the contrary,
Speaker 1: I would submit to you that the things of the
Speaker 1: greatest value you cannot affect the dollar figure two, and
Speaker 1: I would include our nation's wildlife and public lands on
Speaker 1: that list, along with my family, along with my relationships
Speaker 1: with friends. I mean, you can't put dollar figures on
Speaker 1: that stuff, the stuff that we hold most dearly ish
Speaker 1: indescribable in terms of dollars and cents. And yet when
Speaker 1: we have to have conversations about the value of these places,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of ways to argue in terms
Speaker 1: of dollars and cents. So you feel like bringing on,
Speaker 1: I'll talk about So, yeah, the outdoor recreation. Let's chat
Speaker 1: about that for a second. Eighty seven billion dollars a year,
Speaker 1: seven point six million jobs in the USA from outdoor recreation. Um,
Speaker 1: you take away public lands. What does that mean in
Speaker 1: terms of jobs and in terms of the economic engine. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a powerful one. Think about the ecosystem services, clean air,
Speaker 1: clean water. Hard to put a dollar figure on, but
Speaker 1: there are people, there are professors who make six figures dollar.
Speaker 1: He is thinking about how to do that. So you
Speaker 1: can make those arguments. But I agree with the fundamental
Speaker 1: notion that there are some things of such great importance
Speaker 1: to us as individuals that they defy economics but bring
Speaker 1: it on if you want to chat in that language. No,
Speaker 1: I do notice that in that you see a high
Speaker 1: level of engagement with some businesses that are involved in
Speaker 1: the outdoor economy, where they hear some of the murmurings
Speaker 1: that we're dealing with politically and they're like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: you are fixing to be like infringing on my business here,
Speaker 1: because I am in the outdoor business. And if we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about business friendly to me, that means public
Speaker 1: access on land because that's my client base. So it
Speaker 1: is I do like, man, I welcome the input. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's one arena that we haven't touched on about
Speaker 1: wilderness that I think would be a particular interest to
Speaker 1: a man of your reading tendencies and and uh general
Speaker 1: conversation points, and that is the cast of characters that
Speaker 1: we have stemming from the southwestern wild country at the
Speaker 1: turn of the last century, some of the mountain men
Speaker 1: who came into their own in landscapes on the HeLa
Speaker 1: and there's some stories around the last few grizzly bears
Speaker 1: in the Southwest, and some of these mountain men of
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds in the landscapes
Speaker 1: we've been talking about, particularly around the HeLa that you
Speaker 1: need to add to your reading list. Characters like Ben Lily.
Speaker 1: I haven't heard of Nat Straw? Hear that guy? How
Speaker 1: about Bear More? Another dude, You gotta check out Ben Lily.
Speaker 1: This guy from the age of fifty five to seventy,
Speaker 1: so a fifteen year period. Ben Lily is claimed to
Speaker 1: have hunted every single day except for Sundays, for fifteen years.
Speaker 1: It's estimated that down in the HeLa Country he was
Speaker 1: responsible for killing somewhere between six hundred and a thousand
Speaker 1: mountain lions really with however, his lifetime with hounds and
Speaker 1: along the hounds front, there was a one one particular
Speaker 1: hound he had named Crook. And on the box in
Speaker 1: which Ben Lily buried his his treasured dog Crook, he wrote,
Speaker 1: here lies Crook, a bear and lion dog that helped
Speaker 1: kill two hundred ten bear and four d twenty six
Speaker 1: lion since nineteen fourteen, period of eleven years owned by
Speaker 1: b Van Lily. And that that bear, that that dog's
Speaker 1: buried somewhere in near Cupio Creek, down in Jerry's Neck
Speaker 1: of the woods in the HeLa Country. So this guy
Speaker 1: he literally lived outdoors and um man, some destructive fellows,
Speaker 1: So that that's it. Yeah, you could get away with
Speaker 1: That's That's exactly the point. It's like, in some ways,
Speaker 1: you can look back at at the woodcraft and the
Speaker 1: you know, you talk about having like the hunting bug
Speaker 1: to the point that it gets to be a disease
Speaker 1: that you're hunting, like, you know, six days out of
Speaker 1: the week for fifteen years. That's that's the hunting bug there.
Speaker 1: Like when you're talking about the figures that extra pated
Speaker 1: wildlife during the unregulated years. On one hand, like I
Speaker 1: always look at him in two ways. On one hand,
Speaker 1: I'm like, you know, sort of a like even at
Speaker 1: the time, would have been regarded by many people as
Speaker 1: a morally grotesque figure. But they also, I thought, is
Speaker 1: account for Like it's not easy to find that stuffy
Speaker 1: and the level of woodsmanship. Yeah, in the age years
Speaker 1: killed thirteen bears before he ate breakfast one day, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's like that's no easy feat for anyone, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it is. It is tempting to you know, like
Speaker 1: venerate the woodcraft that it takes to accomplish something like that.
Speaker 1: But if you start looking into the folks who are
Speaker 1: actively pursuing predators in southwest New Mexico eastern Arizona during
Speaker 1: that time frame that these species were extirpated by these species.
Speaker 1: I'm talking you know, the the last grizzlies being killed,
Speaker 1: Mexican wolves being eliminated. Um, you could probably narrow the
Speaker 1: bulk of that mortality down to like a handful of folks.
Speaker 1: And they approached their work with almost like a biblical
Speaker 1: uh fever in terms of how they hunted these species,
Speaker 1: and if you read some of their journals, you know
Speaker 1: they were it was very much like a good versus
Speaker 1: evil mindset that they were in to cleanse the landscape
Speaker 1: of these predators. UM. And thinking about grizzlies, one of
Speaker 1: the one of the quotes that I loved UM was
Speaker 1: along the lines of you'll hear people say that bears
Speaker 1: and men are inherently good and not looking to get
Speaker 1: in trouble. But you don't have to go far to
Speaker 1: find exceptions. When when did the when when of the
Speaker 1: last grizzly vantage out of New Mexico. I'm not shot
Speaker 1: in New Mexico, out of Arizona. So like this kind
Speaker 1: of chunk of wild country on the border of Arizona,
Speaker 1: New Mexico. The last one was on Escadia Mountain. And
Speaker 1: there's an essay in the Sand County Almanac by Leopold
Speaker 1: titled Escodia, And that was in the mid nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: that that bear was killed. Um, and that essay it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's a beautiful testament to the bear and one of
Speaker 1: the and to the mountain and one of the one
Speaker 1: of my favorite quotes. I'm grabbing my copy here right
Speaker 1: now because Leopold took issue with the fact that this
Speaker 1: bear was killed in June, right, and here here's what
Speaker 1: he said. Uh. The trapper had packed his mule and
Speaker 1: headed for Escodilla. In a month, he was back his meal,
Speaker 1: staggering under a heavy hide. There was only one barn
Speaker 1: in town big enough to dry it on. He had
Speaker 1: tried traps, poison and all his usual whiles to no avail.
Speaker 1: Then he had erected a set gun in a defile
Speaker 1: through which only the bear could pass, and waited. The
Speaker 1: last grizzly walked into the string and shot himself. It
Speaker 1: was June. The pelt was foul, patchy, and worthless. It
Speaker 1: seemed to us rather an insult to deny the last
Speaker 1: grizzly the chance to leave a good pelt as a
Speaker 1: memorial to his race. All he left was a skull
Speaker 1: in the National Museum and a quarrel among scientists over
Speaker 1: the Latin name of the skull. Really, man, you guys
Speaker 1: got any last thoughts besides that? I had to ask,
Speaker 1: is still I have last thought questions still about the
Speaker 1: wilderness thing? Just so that are are we can appease
Speaker 1: all my friends worries you you dig that you're gonna
Speaker 1: dig into the conspiracy theories again? Yeah, because the other
Speaker 1: question that comes up is that if it's all primitive
Speaker 1: and and uh, at what point are they're gonna say
Speaker 1: you can't use modern firearms anymore in the wilderness. I
Speaker 1: think that's maybe not even really like the question that
Speaker 1: needs to be answered, but just answered to me. You
Speaker 1: already said it that it would take an act of
Speaker 1: Congress like make any But what change? Right? That's ridiculous
Speaker 1: because the nineteen sixty four you're not it's not seventeen
Speaker 1: sixty four barrels shooting two seventies. No, I know, but
Speaker 1: it's like it's a mechanized piece of equipment. Right, let
Speaker 1: me go back, It's not motorized motorizing, wheeled conveyances. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I mean that's the Acting. This listing of prohibity
Speaker 1: uses talks about you know, landing of aircraft, motor vehicles,
Speaker 1: motorized equipment, and mechanized transportation. Mechanized transport, so these wheeled vehicles,
Speaker 1: um or you know, sailboats, anything that allows one to
Speaker 1: travel or to carry goods via mechanical advantage. So um,
Speaker 1: a firearm doesn't fall within any of those categories. So
Speaker 1: again you read, you go back to the the Act,
Speaker 1: and that's our guidance, as are the four Wilderness Managing Agencies,
Speaker 1: and and we have no legal basis to ever even
Speaker 1: entertain something like that. Excellent, That's exactly what I needed
Speaker 1: to hear your email with somebody right now about this.
Speaker 1: No no, no, no no. This is from a recent
Speaker 1: conversation I had, but that tooks actly what needed to
Speaker 1: be stated, like it's awesome, thank you. You know. In
Speaker 1: um and Joan Didion's book, uh, she wrote to two
Speaker 1: books about the sixties, almost called the White Album, and
Speaker 1: one was called Slouching towards Bethlehem. And I think it
Speaker 1: wasn't Slouching towards Bethlehem, Uh, which was written in the
Speaker 1: pre Internet age. Okay, so the Internet wasn't even here yet.
Speaker 1: But in Slouching towards Bethlehem, she talked, she's talking about
Speaker 1: people who who live in a in a in an
Speaker 1: intellectual fantasy land, and she describes it like that that
Speaker 1: we have so much and she again pre internet, which
Speaker 1: is something we have. There's so much information out there,
Speaker 1: and there's so much like factual information out there that
Speaker 1: people get overwhelmed by the duties that they would have
Speaker 1: to inform themselves about certain issues. And it's such an overwhelming,
Speaker 1: daunting task to really go out and find out the
Speaker 1: truth of a matter that you just kind of get
Speaker 1: to a place where you're like, screw it. It's a
Speaker 1: lot easier just to listen to what my buddy at
Speaker 1: the bar said, because that saves me. That gives me
Speaker 1: this thing where I feel like I know the real
Speaker 1: story without having to do any of the work of
Speaker 1: finding out like what actually is going on. And I
Speaker 1: think that that is only it's like only become worse
Speaker 1: as the amount of information has increased. People's tendency to
Speaker 1: retreat from information as increased because it's hard to go
Speaker 1: find out, like to get a nuanced perspective on things.
Speaker 1: It's just so much easy to be like, yeah, well
Speaker 1: what Bob told me that any what Bob said you
Speaker 1: so kind of along those lines that you guys are
Speaker 1: I mean still in the mode of closing thoughts. I mean,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to share that we dragged the closers on.
Speaker 1: Go ahead, Yeah, that's cool. I mean, you know, so
Speaker 1: I name everyone around this tape values, you know, fish, wildlife,
Speaker 1: wilderness and other wild lands and these experiences that you
Speaker 1: can have. UM. And you know, I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: a new hunter. We didn't talk about that. UM started
Speaker 1: last year in earnest UM grew up in Seattle, Like
Speaker 1: I said, run around public lands. I joke around that
Speaker 1: I'm like the long haired you know, for you guys
Speaker 1: can't see me on the podcast, I'm like a long
Speaker 1: haired granola eating you know, seattleleite wilderness guy. UM. But recently,
Speaker 1: I mean through my upbringing in in that context and
Speaker 1: value on local food where you know where it comes from,
Speaker 1: and you know, you have ethics about the well being
Speaker 1: of you know, any any kind of animal products that
Speaker 1: you eat, Hunting was a natural fit for me, and
Speaker 1: so I make friends with guys like Jerry and Carl,
Speaker 1: who I know value they span these kind of traditional
Speaker 1: communities like the hunters and anglers and the wilderness people.
Speaker 1: Um so I'm I'm pleased, and I know the two
Speaker 1: of you are the same pleased to have a company
Speaker 1: like that. But you know, there's still a ton of
Speaker 1: work to be done, you know where we share. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I look at my friends who are are
Speaker 1: you know, maybe who don't know as much as about wilderness,
Speaker 1: who who value hunting, my wilderness friends who are not
Speaker 1: hunters and anglers, and you look at their value systems
Speaker 1: and there's far more overlap in common value than difference.
Speaker 1: You know, they're gonna be some minor differences. And so
Speaker 1: my closing thought as a person who cares deeply about
Speaker 1: you know, wilderness, wild places, ecosystems, and biodiversity, is for
Speaker 1: folks to get out of their comfort zones, get out
Speaker 1: of their communities and where they don't have these established relationships,
Speaker 1: you know with the quote other side, you know, build
Speaker 1: those relationships, or get out and give back to your
Speaker 1: public lands, Volunteer for one of your your national forests,
Speaker 1: and in some kind of stewardship activity, get involved with
Speaker 1: you know, I'm gonna speak on on behalf of the
Speaker 1: wilderness community. You know, we have organizations like the New
Speaker 1: Mexico Wilderness Alliance, who do they do advocacy, which we
Speaker 1: don't do in the government, but they also have a
Speaker 1: stewardship program. They're helping us take care of these wild places,
Speaker 1: keeping them natural, keeping them wild, get engaged, and they've
Speaker 1: actually done a great job. I'm in working with the
Speaker 1: back country hunters and anglers and New Mexican Wildlife Federation
Speaker 1: to to find and sort of, you know, act upon
Speaker 1: that common value system. But I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: more really fruitful work to be done on behalf of
Speaker 1: public lands and acknowledging we all have a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of interest in common to continue building those relationships,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of outside of our traditional communities. So
Speaker 1: that's something that I you know, it strikes me as
Speaker 1: sort of a again a long term sort of a
Speaker 1: part of the willerness community that's newer to the hunting
Speaker 1: and angland community. Yeah, my allegiance, like my lifelong allegiance
Speaker 1: to hunting and fishing is what delivered me into wilderness advocacy.
Speaker 1: It wasn't the other way. Around. It was like my
Speaker 1: question all the time is like when faced with an issue,
Speaker 1: as you asked myself, um, what's best for hunters and
Speaker 1: fishermen and wildlife? You know, that's like my guiding principle
Speaker 1: on things that pertained to that space. And it was
Speaker 1: in asking myself that question all the time that I
Speaker 1: came to be a proponent and an advocate for wilderness.
Speaker 1: I would flip it around there and say, you know,
Speaker 1: what's best for a wilderness? And there are certainly multiple things,
Speaker 1: but hunters and english you know, people who get out
Speaker 1: enjoy take advantage of these these wild places, and we'll
Speaker 1: turn around and and advocate for their stewardship, you know.
Speaker 1: And so I'd say, I'd say it's a two way street. Yeah,
Speaker 1: anyone else. I got a couple of thoughts at you. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, I think, you know, these two guys,
Speaker 1: Born and Jerry are a really interesting kind of pair
Speaker 1: the direction that took them into this line of work.
Speaker 1: If you if you compare the process by which Jerry
Speaker 1: came aboard with Federal Land Management Agency to that a Born,
Speaker 1: you've got a rural guy an urban guy, but both
Speaker 1: of them very passionate about the public lands system and
Speaker 1: our agency and the folks who work for other agencies
Speaker 1: at the state level, other federal land management agencies, we
Speaker 1: all tend to have a very strong relationship to the
Speaker 1: resources that we manage. And I think there's a tendency
Speaker 1: when you're talking about a big organization like the Forest
Speaker 1: Service has more than thirty thousand employees, it becomes kind
Speaker 1: of faceless. It's just this big, mysterious organization. But I
Speaker 1: think it's important for people to realize that a lot
Speaker 1: of the folks working in this outfit and others again
Speaker 1: at the state and federal level, are coming into these
Speaker 1: jobs from a place of deep passion and reverence over
Speaker 1: the resources that we're managing on behalf of the public
Speaker 1: and we share a lot of the same motivations and passions,
Speaker 1: even though we come from a lot of different directions.
Speaker 1: Like Pyrn and Jerry and then the parting shot I'll
Speaker 1: take it gets back to this question you asked about
Speaker 1: the biggest the biggest threats that we face like in
Speaker 1: the in the long run here um and I'm just
Speaker 1: going to speak about this country because I think there's
Speaker 1: some challenges we face as a global community that are
Speaker 1: very pressing as well before Yeah, I want I want
Speaker 1: to back up, just clarify, because you can't. You're saying
Speaker 1: something that's kind of blowing my mind. Are you saying
Speaker 1: you guys didn't come to work for the force service
Speaker 1: for the money. Well, so let me let me respond
Speaker 1: to that. I will say I think a lot. You know,
Speaker 1: people who go into natural resource management UM tend to
Speaker 1: be motivated by motivated primarily by things other than making
Speaker 1: millions of dollars. Yeah, it's not like it's not like
Speaker 1: going to word for Goldman. That being set for folks
Speaker 1: out there listening who are contemplating career tracks in natural
Speaker 1: resources management, for the the young men and women who
Speaker 1: are in high school right now listening to this, there
Speaker 1: are jobs, there are career tracks available in these agencies
Speaker 1: where your quality of life can be phenomenal. And when
Speaker 1: you get up and go to work and you're doing
Speaker 1: a job that feels like important work and it resonates
Speaker 1: with you on a personal level, you have a form
Speaker 1: of wealth that few people on the face of this
Speaker 1: planet can lay claim to. To feel like the work
Speaker 1: that you're doing is important, and uh, you get up
Speaker 1: wanting to go in and contribute it's something very few
Speaker 1: people experience. So if you think that something you might
Speaker 1: want to do, not mean that as I did not
Speaker 1: mean that as a hack. I just meant that, And
Speaker 1: I'm talking about relatives of mine and my dearest friends.
Speaker 1: It's like like adventure, right, a sense of adventure, a
Speaker 1: sense of wine to see new things, a sense of
Speaker 1: wanting to do public service, a sense of wine to
Speaker 1: find a way to have a life that that has
Speaker 1: a strong outdoor element. These, more than other factors, seem
Speaker 1: to bring people to public service in land management agencies.
Speaker 1: I was not I don't mean you're not the wrong way.
Speaker 1: I just want people to know, like we we you
Speaker 1: know these agencies, state agencies, federal agencies. We need people
Speaker 1: coming into our doors, into public service careers who embody
Speaker 1: what we're talking about, that passion for the resource. And
Speaker 1: that being said, you know, the salaries are very competitive
Speaker 1: if you're in this line of work. I feel very
Speaker 1: thankful for every aspect of the job I'm in and
Speaker 1: have a comfortable lifestyle, very comfortable lifestyle. So along these lines,
Speaker 1: I've got a tr quote for you, Steve, far and away,
Speaker 1: the best prize that life has to offer is working hard.
Speaker 1: At work worth doing the best prize that life has
Speaker 1: to offer. And I feel like the work that Jerry
Speaker 1: bjorn I and thirties some thousand other people in this
Speaker 1: outfit are doing, we're working hard at work worth doing,
Speaker 1: and we're doing it for the public. And that's a
Speaker 1: really sweet thing to be doing as a professional. And
Speaker 1: then getting back to your question about the biggest challenges,
Speaker 1: like what what do I see as kind of existential
Speaker 1: threats to our culture and how it relates to wilderness.
Speaker 1: We talked a lot about the rugged individualism in this
Speaker 1: notion of self reliance and how wilderness has played into
Speaker 1: our history and our ethos as an American culture. And
Speaker 1: I I'm speaking personally right now, but I feel like
Speaker 1: our are increasingly tame existence as a species is inherently
Speaker 1: a threat to our well being. And I mean in
Speaker 1: terms of our our mental and physical well being, and
Speaker 1: I mean in terms of our ecological awareness and literacy.
Speaker 1: So if we have places where people can immerse themselves
Speaker 1: in a natural setting and become acutely attuned to our
Speaker 1: relationship with and dependence upon the natural world, that translates
Speaker 1: into a whole host of behaviors that I think are
Speaker 1: imperative for our persistence on a healthy planet. Yeah, just relevancy,
Speaker 1: an engagement. Yeah, so the big threat to summarize our
Speaker 1: lifestyles are becoming to tame wilderness in contrast to the
Speaker 1: normal routine of an Americans life now in this era,
Speaker 1: is an opportunity to escape that tameness, to be humbled,
Speaker 1: to experience humility, to be really uncomfortable sometimes, to be challenged.
Speaker 1: And you know, all the opportunities for recreation, hunting, fishing,
Speaker 1: et cetera feed right into that. But the key, the
Speaker 1: key ingredient is having those places on the map where
Speaker 1: you have an escape. And most countries around the world
Speaker 1: do not have that at their ready disposal way that
Speaker 1: we do. Yeah. I once heard wilderness described as the
Speaker 1: nation's proving grounds, and uh that that resonated with me
Speaker 1: because at the time that I discovered it, it served
Speaker 1: that purpose. I mean, it gave shape to my life
Speaker 1: that it. Honey, I was just gonna say out nice
Speaker 1: closing thought, but yeah, that willness is a set place
Speaker 1: where you can go and uh, you can really feel
Speaker 1: how small you are in the universe. You know, when
Speaker 1: you go there and you're humbled and you just realize
Speaker 1: that environment doesn't really care about you. And um that
Speaker 1: my brother always talked about how much he likes it
Speaker 1: because he likes how scared it makes him feel all
Speaker 1: the time. Here is an important emotion that I experienced
Speaker 1: for sure that I would add it to Carl's list.
Speaker 1: What's the what's the Leopold quote? Man? Um, poor is
Speaker 1: the life that achieves freedom from fear? Right? Yeah? Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: laying in bed at night, just waiting for that old
Speaker 1: bear to get you. That's good for you. I'm glad.
Speaker 1: I shall never be young without while places to be
Speaker 1: young in. Yeah, go on all day, all right, thank you,